User talk:Mike Christie

Hello Mike Christie, I hope all is well with you. I propose two minor (I hope) changes to the Good article nominations page:

1. At the top of the page, delete the overkill: "To add good article nominations to this page, please see the instructions." We have already said this, in a box above.
2. At the bottom of the page, Add a new Back button to help readers who have reached the bottom of the list. (This is similar to the Back buttons I have added to the Main GA pages.)

You can see how these changes would look, here:

• Wikipedia:Good article nominations (a sandbox)
• Here is a diff of the two proposed changes (a sandbox)

Let me know what you think. Thank you! Prhartcom (talk) 15:46, 26 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Could you post these suggestions at WT:GAN? I'd prefer to get consensus for even minor changes, to avoid having to make the edits multiple times in case of slight tweaks. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 11:21, 27 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Hello Mike Christie, just had a quick question that I don't seem to be finding the answer for in the documentation. How does ChristieBot determine the amount of GAs someone has successfully nominated? My description on the GAN page is correctly reflecting the amount of reviews I've done, but says that I've 0 GAs when I actually have 1. Thanks for any help you can provide. Grumpylawnchair (talk) 19:24, 29 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Let me know the name of the article you got promoted and I'll see if I can figure out what happened. One common cause is username changes; if you change your username, ChristieBot doesn't know about anything done under the earlier name. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 00:09, 30 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Elena Gorolová, my username has never changed. The article was only promoted yesterday, so maybe the bot didn't update yet. Thanks for your time, Grumpylawnchair (talk) 00:12, 30 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]

It can take up to a day to update it. Looks like it's caught up now; let me know if you see delays longer than a day in the future. Thanks. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 21:20, 30 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for your time. I thought it was because I don't keep a userspace GA log, so I wanted to double check. Grumpylawnchair (talk) 21:24, 30 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Hi!

I've been toying with the idea of creating an article about the historiographic concept of the pulp era of science fiction. The idea struck me when I realized that although numerous sources mention a "pulp era" in this sense (as opposed to the broader sense of the era of the pulp magazines regardless of genre; pulp era currently redirects to pulp magazine), it is rather difficult to find sources that define the term or specify when this era was. Most sources I have come across seem to take for granted that the reader knows roughly what they mean by "pulp era", and the few that comment further upon the concept as such don't really seem to agree about what is included and what is not.

By contrast, I have found it fairly easy to find sources discussing the Golden Age of Science Fiction as a historiographic concept (and it's probably not a coincidence that we have an article on the Golden Age), and even though they don't entirely agree in their definitions there is actually some discussion about those disagreements and the attempts to define the period. I see that you looked into this as well at Talk:Golden Age of Science Fiction#Sources for particular time periods back in 2016.

I figured I would ask you about this since you have written numerous high-quality articles about the various magazines and so on and are as far as I can tell very familiar with the relevant sources. Do you know if there are any sources that discuss the topic from the angle "what do we mean by the 'pulp era' of science fiction" or similar?

To be clear, I'm not talking about creating an article covering the history of science fiction in this era—we already have History of science fiction and History of US science fiction and fantasy magazines to 1950, and trying to cover the History of science fiction in the pulp era would likely result in overlap to the point of redundancy. Rather, I'm thinking about an article covering the notion that science fiction had a "pulp era" in its history (and what time period it encompasses).

What do you think, would creating such an article be a good idea or should I abandon it? TompaDompa (talk) 22:10, 6 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

It sounds like the topic you're considering is the intersection between definitions 2 and 3 here -- is that right? I wonder if perhaps definition 3 would be the way forward -- that would cover retro-sf, for example. Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow comes to mind; I don't think you could exclude that from a discussion of pulp sf even though it was made relatively recently -- unless the article became so long that you needed a subarticle to cover it, which is not impossible. There might be quite a bit of academic coverage to wade through -- I don't have much of that sort of source myself, other than historical or biographical material; I don't have many sources that cover the literary discussions. I do have Gary Westfahl's The Mechanics of Wonder which is probably relevant. I also just discovered that Foundation is online, here; there are other journals you'd have to look at but that's probably got something useful in it. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 22:34, 6 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I would rather say that I'm thinking about an article that would answer the question "when was the pulp era of science fiction?" Another way of putting it might be that I want it to serve mainly a glossary function for the reader who comes across a sentence like "this theme first appeared in the pulp era" or "it was common in the pulp era for [...]" and ends up wondering "when was that, exactly?" (as was the case for my the first time I encountered the term). TompaDompa (talk) 19:55, 7 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Found a source that I think illustrates what I mean fairly well: "Three Decades That Shook the World, Observed Through Two Distorting Lenses and Under One Microscope" by Gary Westfahl (in Science Fiction Studies, March 2004) spends the first paragraph briefly discussing possible definitions of the era in terms of starting and ending points. TompaDompa (talk) 22:14, 7 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I haven't worked on the history of science fiction article, but even though the pulp era refers to magazines, I think the glossary function you're considering would belong more naturally there than in the relevant sf magazine history article, and the importance of the pulp era lies largely in its relationship to the rest of sf. You might make a separate article out of it, as you suggest, but I don't see that it's necessary yet. As an aside, the concept is closely tied to that of genre science fiction, which doesn't have an article but probably could. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 02:47, 8 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Right. I'll see how I end up approaching it. Thanks for your input! TompaDompa (talk) 10:48, 8 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I took a stab at it: Pulp era of science fiction. Check it out if you are interested. TompaDompa (talk) 23:25, 17 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Looks good -- you did a better job on it than I would have thought possible, and I can see why you thought an independent article was worth it. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 10:15, 20 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Hi Mike, I've been looking at User talk:ChristieBot/GAN errors for a couple of days and I can't figure out what the problems it is finding are most of the time. Based on the page history, it seems to clear itself within 11/12 minutes very consistently as well, which seems odd. Any idea what is going on? CMD (talk) 05:32, 8 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

The short answer is that the Wikimedia system sometimes forces the bot to crash for reasons independent of the bot's tasks, and those will not usually repeat. If you see the same error over and over again, that's a problem; if the error disappears (or is perhaps replaced by a different error) ten or fifteen minutes later, then you can ignore it.

The long answer is that there are several things that can cause unpredictable errors. If the Wikimedia systems are backed up or running slowly, they will respond to the bot's requests for data with an error message -- the most common are pywikibot errors and SQL errors. The bot usually just moves on to the next task, but it will record the error message on the GAN errors page, though sometimes even trying to do that will fail. The pywikibot errors can happen at any point in the code, so what you've been seeing recently are errors that appear to refer to different articles -- that just tells you what the bot was trying to do when the error happened, and isn't caused by any problem with that nomination. The bot can't tell whether the error is real or not so it lists it in the Errors section at the end of the GAN page as well. The eleven minute delay to fixing it is because it takes about eight or nine minutes to run, and it runs every twenty minutes, so when it writes the error page it's only eleven minutes till the next time it runs, and it starts by clearing out the error page.

The most recent real error (as opposed to ones caused by the Wikimedia system) was a few days ago -- the editor who nominated This is Gavin Newsom had redirected their user page to article space. The bot looks up some user statistics such as date of last edit, and it follow redirects in order to account for renamed users. When it tries to look up user statistics on an article it gets an error message. That's an enhancement request I'll get to at some point (not to cause an error when that happens) but it's rare so I haven't done it yet. The user fixed it themselves so the bot quit complaining about it. The last day or two has been all system errors as far as I can see -- we've had a couple of months with almost no errors, so the system is apparently running a bit more slowly than usual at the moment.

When I see these on my watchlist I usually ignore them unless I see them repeating, and then I'll take a look to see if they're real. The hardest ones to spot are when there's a real error mixed in with the system errors, but often a real error causes something strange to happen on the GAN page and someone will complain about that. I'm glad you're keeping an eye on it. If you see something real I try to make it clear in the message what the problem is, so it can be fixed by anyone without waiting for me to wake up or come back from vacation or whatever. Usually it's either something with the nominator or reviewer's user page, or something strange about the nomination template on the article talk page. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 09:15, 8 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for the very detailed explanation, clear and makes sense. I'll ignore them unless they persists then, which should allow any random system errors to fix themselves. CMD (talk) 10:01, 8 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Happy First Edit Day, Mike Christie, from the Wikipedia Birthday Committee! Have a great day! Randompersonediting (✍️•📚) 02:42, 12 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

The FAC statistics for the user Keivan.f [1] appear to be inaccurate. He and I were co-nominators for the archived nomination of the article Catherine, Princess of Wales. However, the statistics page lists him as a "Content" reviewer rather than a nominator. Could you please look into this? MSincccc (talk) 06:54, 15 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Fixed; data entry error on my part. Thanks for spotting that. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 09:57, 15 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you today for Fantastic Novels, introduced (in 2014) as "a minor science fiction and fantasy pulp magazine of the 1940s, a companion to Famous Fantastic Mysteries, which was promoted to FA last year and which reviewers may find useful as a comparison. Fantastic Novels had a shorter run, and was less well-known"! - My story is about music that Bach and Picander gave the world 300 years (and 19 days) ago. Listen ;) -- Gerda Arendt (talk) 06:57, 20 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Just wanted to stop by and say congratulations on the TFA. Aoba47 (talk) 02:13, 21 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I hope that you will excuse an inexperienced editor. As the information this article that was in addition to that in Abingdon-on-Thames was small, I have incorporated it in the latter article, rendering the small article, in my view, redundant. TedColes (talk) 10:10, 23 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Hi -- I think that was a reasonable thing to do, but I think the article on the causewayed enclosure could be expanded quite a bit, and so deserves to be separate, though at the moment it wouldn't be unreasonable to suggest a merge. I've long meant to expand the article and perhaps this will prompt me to do so. Thanks for the note. 10:14, 23 April 2025 (UTC)