User talk:SHB2000/Archive 2024

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Currency conversion tables for Singapore

China and Japan are both major sources of tourism to Singapore, and there's also heavy business traffic to Singapore from China and Japan, so to me, it is not unreasonable to list their currencies in the Singapore article. In fact, I would argue that the Chinese yuan should be listed in the currency conversion tables for all Southeast Asian countries because China is the largest source of international tourists for most of them.

As for New Zealand, many New Zealanders change flights in Singapore on their way to Europe. Singapore Airlines in fact operates a direct flight to Christchurch (and Auckland too of course) to cater to this market. And by the way, the New Zealand dollar is not an obscure currency. It is a major world currency and one of the "big eight".

Hong Kong sees very heavy business traffic to Singapore, and there's more than 10 flights a day in each direction. So that's why I think it's not unreasonable to have the Hong Kong dollar in the currency table for Singapore.

I haven't added back the Thai baht and Vietnamese dong, but I think it's worth considering given that they're actually quite easy to exchange them in Singapore. Just go to any money changer and they will be readily accepted. And if you are heading to those countries, you can also obtain those currencies easily at any money changer.

I haven't added the Canadian dollar, but it is a major world currency. And Air Canada is starting a nonstop fight from Vancouver to Singapore in the spring, so I would presume there is substantial business traffic for Air Canada to start operating this route. The dog2 (talk) 15:14, 3 January 2024 (UTC)

The problem with adding more currencies is that it takes longer to update. Sincex2018, I've been updating more than 160 pages every January so that we don't have rates that are up to 7 years out of date anymore. That was just embarrassing. SHB2000 has been helping out thus year, which I very much appreciate. It's a big job.

The dog 2: adding more currencies to a page without updating the others, as you did on China, and perhaps other pages, leaves a mess -- some rates are from December 2022, and others from a year or more later. I will leave that for you to sort out. If I have to fix it, I'l just start fresh with a new table of the standard, internationally traded currencies. Ground Zero (talk) 17:49, 3 January 2024 (UTC)

Strictly speaking, the "big eight" internationally traded currencies are the U.S. dollar, Euro, pound Sterling, Japanese yen, Swiss franc, Canadian dollar, Australian dollar and New Zealand dollar. At least that's what people who invest in forex have told me. Of course, whether or not a currency is easy to exchange depends a lot on where you are. For instance, it is easier to exchange Singapore dollars than Thai baht in Japan, but the reverse is true in Canada. I think that it is warranted to include currencies that are regionally important in the exchange tables. Taking Singapore dollars for instance, including them in the exchange table for Malaysia would be warranted, but not in the one for Costa Rica. The dog2 (talk) 19:04, 3 January 2024 (UTC)

Since you have a keen interest in East Asia, and in expanding the list of currencies displayed there, I'll leave that region for you to update. Ground Zero (talk) 19:50, 3 January 2024 (UTC)

I was going to say what Ground Zero mentioned, but they beat me to it. Flights from CHC–SIN are still quite rare (I think only 1 per day) – I only remember seeing one for the entire day when I was at the airport last week. Far more travellers transit via SYD or AKL when getting to Europe from those who I talked to. AKL, sure, but how different is this from any other country? You could apply the same rationale for a lot of currencies and it becomes one giant chunky list. The reason we list AUD for SEA/Oceania articles, CAD for Caribbean articles, ZAR for Southern African articles, or SAR for Arabian/Gulf state articles, is because they are widely traded locally and have far, far, more visitors than people from NZ to Singapore. It does, however, make sense to add NZD to many Pacific countries for this very same reason – but not Singapore. The same goes for adding CAD in Singapore. A single flight isn't enough to justify it.

I'll leave you to the rest for East Asia and SEA articles, but it's worth considering this in mind – basically this and what GZ mentioned. Cheers, --SHB2000 (talk | contribs | meta) 02:36, 4 January 2024 (UTC)

Yeah, CHC-SIN is one flight a day. I think there are 3 flights a day for AKL-SIN, 2 on SQ and 1 on NZ. These flights are actually timed to connect to SQ's flights to Europe, but of course, both are premium airlines and charge accordingly. Even if you transit at SYD or AKL to connect on to Europe, you still need another stop somewhere in Asia, which would typically be in Singapore, Hong Kong, Bangkok or the Middle East. And of course, there's quite heavy business and diplomatic traffic between Singapore and NZ too.

But anyway, NZD is easily traded in Singapore too. Any bank or money changer will accept it. I can bet you will get a better rate for NZD in Singapore than in Australia. CAD is certainly more niche than NZD in the Singaporean context given that Canada is much farther away, but it too is easy to exchange at any bank or money changer. In fact, I can get better rates for CAD in Singapore than in the U.S. Travelex in both the U.S. and Australia is a rip off. The dog2 (talk) 04:21, 4 January 2024 (UTC)

Yeah, I can definitely concur with Travelex in the US and Aus – when I asked how much US$500 they were going to give me at SYD, it was something like NZ$600 (I wasn't actually intending to convert there since I'd already exchanged prior but asked them out of curiosity). Normally if I'm transiting through Singapore, then it'd exchange there but otherwise I've mostly just exchanged my currency at Flight Centre. SHB2000 (talk | contribs | meta) 06:10, 4 January 2024 (UTC)

Although the rates at Changi Airport are not very good. You'll get much better rates at a money changer in the city or in a neighbourhood shopping centre. Unlike in Western countries, in Singapore money changers usually give you better rates than banks. That's why for me, the idea of going to an ATM in a foreign country to withdraw the local currency was a completely foreign concept. I get a much better rate by exchanging cash at a money changer in Singapore before leaving on my trip. The dog2 (talk) 07:02, 4 January 2024 (UTC)

Airport rates in general are less than ideal, though. --SHB2000 (talk | contribs | meta) 07:34, 4 January 2024 (UTC)

By the way, do you know how to update the currency exchange table for Japan? I think there should be more currencies than what is listed. At the very least, we should also have Chinese yuan, South Korean won and Hong Kong dollar, and probably the Singapore dollar too since it appears to be the most widely accepted Asian currency at Japanese money changers. I'm a bit on the fence for Taiwan dollars though, because it is kind of obscure, but Japan is without a doubt the most popular holiday destination for the Taiwanese, and also the largest source of foreign tourists for Taiwan. But during my trips to Japan, I did not see any money changers displaying Taiwan dollars on their boards. The dog2 (talk) 15:59, 4 January 2024 (UTC)

For JP, you can edit it on Template:exchange rate JPY. I don't hold any strong opinions for JP so I'll leave you to update it :-). --SHB2000 (talk | contribs | meta) 20:50, 4 January 2024 (UTC)

Tech News: 2024-02

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent changes

• mediawiki2latex is a tool that converts wiki content into the formats of LaTeX, PDF, ODT, and EPUB. The code now runs many times faster due to recent improvements. There is also an optional Docker container you can install on your local machine.
• The way that Random pages are selected has been updated. This will slowly reduce the problem of some pages having a lower chance of appearing.

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 9 January. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 10 January. It will be on all wikis from 11 January (calendar).

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MediaWiki message delivery 01:20, 9 January 2024 (UTC)

The Signpost: 10 January 2024

News, reports and features from the English Wikipedia's newspaper

• From the editor: NINETEEN MORE YEARS! NINETEEN MORE YEARS!

• Special report: Public Domain Day 2024

• Technology report: Wikipedia: A Multigenerational Pursuit

• News and notes: In other news ... see ya in court!

• In focus: The long road of a featured article candidate

• In the media: What is plagiarism? Oklahoma Disneyland? Reaching a human being at Wikipedia?

• WikiProject report: WikiProjects Israel and Palestine

• Obituary: Anthony Bradbury

• Traffic report: The most viewed articles of 2023

• Crossword: everybody gangsta till the style sheets start cascading

• Comix: Conflict resolution

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This Month in GLAM: December 2023

This Month in GLAM – Volume XIII, Issue XII, December 2023 Headlines Albania report: Wiki Loves EuroPride in Albania 2023 Bosnia & Herzegovina report: A year in review ... Croatia report: 2023 in review Czech Republic report: Wiki-residents establishing meeting took place in December Germany report: Go-ahead for Wikidata Project of GLAM institutions from Baden-Württemberg Italy report: WLM Local winners and funds for 2024 GLAM projects New Zealand report: Auckland Museum summer updates Poland report: Intense end to a year of GLAM-Wiki activities in Poland Sweden report: Photo memories project concludes; Sörmlands museum passes 1000 uploads to Wikimedia Commons; Wikimedian in Residence supports an upload of music content; Subject terms from Queerlit; Wikidata for authority control: 3 years of work Switzerland report: Swiss GLAM Program UK report: 2023 in Review USA report: WikiConference North America 2023; TSU and USF; Philadelphia WikiSalon; Wikimedia DC Annual Membership Meeting; Wikipedia Editing 101 for All; NYC Hacking Night; Upstate NY workshop; Wikiquote She Said Project Wiki Loves Living Heritage report: Thank you for making Wiki Loves Living Heritage happen! WMF GLAM report: Updates and invitation to test the Commons Impact Metrics prototype Calendar: January's GLAM events Read this edition in full • Single-page To assist with preparing the newsletter, please visit the newsroom. Past editions may be viewed here.

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Tech News: 2024-03

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent changes

• Pages that use the JSON contentmodel will now use tabs instead of spaces for auto-indentation. This will significantly reduce the page size.
• Gadgets and personal user scripts may now use JavaScript syntax introduced in ES6 (also known as "ES2015") and ES7 ("ES2016"). MediaWiki validates the source code to protect other site functionality from syntax errors, and to ensure scripts are valid in all supported browsers. Previously, Gadgets could use the requiresES6 option. This option is no longer needed and will be removed in the future.
• Bot passwords and owner-only OAuth consumers can now be restricted to allow editing only specific pages.
• You can now thank edits made by bots.
• An update on the status of the Community Wishlist Survey for 2024 has been published. Please read and give your feedback.

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 16 January. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 17 January. It will be on all wikis from 18 January (calendar).
• Starting on January 17, it will not be possible to login to Wikimedia wikis from some specific old versions of the Chrome browser (versions 51–66, released between 2016 and 2018). Additionally, users of iOS 12, or Safari on Mac OS 10.14, may need to login to each wiki separately.
• The jquery.cookie module was deprecated and replaced with the mediawiki.cookie module last year. A script has now been run to replace any remaining uses, and this week the temporary alias will be removed.

Future changes

• Wikimedia Deutschland is working to make reusing references easier. They are looking for people who are interested in participating in individual video calls for user research in January and February.

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MediaWiki message delivery 00:13, 16 January 2024 (UTC)

Thanks for your help

with the New Jersey vandal. What a piece of work. Ground Zero (talk) 10:56, 17 January 2024 (UTC)

Hey, not a problem at all! Glad that user is blocked for good. --SHB2000 (talk | contribs | meta) 11:31, 17 January 2024 (UTC)

Reverts

FYI, 168.8.214.228 is reverting your previously reverted edits. OhanaUnited^{Talk page} 19:24, 19 January 2024 (UTC)

Thanks for letting me know :-). --SHB2000 (talk | contribs | meta) 20:40, 19 January 2024 (UTC)

I've put one-day blocks on the unregistered accounts. If it happens again, I think we should protect the articles for 7 days to start. That should be enough to get them to give up. Ground Zero (talk) 20:59, 19 January 2024 (UTC)

Given they are block evading (I blocked them for a month due to incivility), we may as well start protecting the articles. --SHB2000 (talk | contribs | meta) 21:21, 19 January 2024 (UTC)

Tech News: 2024-04

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Problems

• A bug in UploadWizard prevented linking to the userpage of the uploader when uploading. It has now been fixed.

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 23 January. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 24 January. It will be on all wikis from 25 January (calendar).

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MediaWiki message delivery 01:04, 23 January 2024 (UTC)

Just excited to inform you

That Microsoft Translator added Meitei language in both Meitei script and Latin script today. I hope all the Microsoft software services will get its usage. :-) Haoreima (talk) 16:45, 25 January 2024 (UTC)

Oh, that's great to hear! Another milestone for the Meitei language today. SHB2000 (talk | contribs | meta) 21:51, 25 January 2024 (UTC)

How to word the Taiwan lede

I'm going to steer clear of the debate on whether or not Taiwan should be an independent country, but I don't think we should take a stand on this here on WV. I know that it is de facto a separate country, and we have in fact stated that in the disclaimer box, but I think we should try to use more politically neutral wording in the lede. The dog2 (talk) 00:39, 29 January 2024 (UTC)

Same here; I just think we should write what's the reality on the ground for travellers whenever we can, though. We do this for Kosovo for similar reasons, too. --SHB2000 (talk | contribs | meta) 00:40, 29 January 2024 (UTC)

OK, I've made some minor changes, so see if it's fine. It's a bit different in the case of Taiwan because at it now stands, Taiwan has not declared independence, and the Taiwanese constitution considers Taiwan to be a province of China. Kinmen and Matsu are still legally part of Fujian, and the residents of those islands actually don't identify as Taiwanese. Someone from Kinmen will usually say "I am not from Taiwan. I am from Kinmen." if you ask. The dog2 (talk) 00:49, 29 January 2024 (UTC)

Hmm, that's also true; thanks for bringing that (I completely forgot). I'll leave it to you and others. --SHB2000 (talk | contribs | meta) 00:50, 29 January 2024 (UTC)

The first sentence of the current lede is problematic. We should say it's a set of islands that rules itself, I think, not a "de facto country." Ikan Kekek (talk) 00:53, 29 January 2024 (UTC)

What about a set of self-governing islands? --SHB2000 (talk | contribs | meta) 00:54, 29 January 2024 (UTC)

Yes, that's a better phrasing. Ikan Kekek (talk) 01:02, 29 January 2024 (UTC)

Yes, that works for me. The dog2 (talk) 01:13, 29 January 2024 (UTC)

Glad we were able to quickly resolve this one :-). --SHB2000 (talk | contribs | meta) 01:15, 29 January 2024 (UTC)

I think we should avoid legalistic terminology like "de facto" and "self-governing" in the first sentence of the article. —Granger (talk · contribs) 04:08, 29 January 2024 (UTC)

IMO self-governing isn't really a legalistic term given it's self-explanatory. I agree with you on de facto, though. --SHB2000 (talk | contribs | meta) 04:10, 29 January 2024 (UTC)

┌────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘ (edit conflict) But if we say that Taiwan is a country, then we are effectively taking sides in the political dispute. KMT supporters in Taiwan will say that the Republic of China is a country, and Taiwan is not a country but a province of the ROC. Of course DPP supporters will say that Taiwan is a country, but as of now they haven't amended the Taiwanese constitution to declare an independent "Republic of Taiwan", so it's the ROC constitution that is still in force. For that reason, I think we should stick to deliberately ambiguous wording that covers the situation on the ground accurately. The dog2 (talk) 04:15, 29 January 2024 (UTC)

What was wrong with "Taiwan is an island off the coast of China"? (Yes, there are other islands, but this is a normal way to introduce an entity that consists of one main island plus a bunch of much smaller associated islands.) The current first sentence with its focus on self-governance reads like the beginning of a geopolitical briefing rather than a travel guide. —Granger (talk · contribs) 04:21, 29 January 2024 (UTC)

If we just use the word "island" then I think it's probably fine. I'm just trying to avoid controversy here by steering clear of declaring Taiwan a country. The disclaimer box already says that it functions as a country in practice. The dog2 (talk) 04:30, 29 January 2024 (UTC)

I agree that "self-governing" is purely and clearly descriptive, not legalistic. Taiwan is one island. How do you think the other islands ruled by the same government should be described in the article? Ikan Kekek (talk) 19:47, 29 January 2024 (UTC)

Maybe island chain? --SHB2000 (talk | contribs | meta) 20:39, 29 January 2024 (UTC)

Island chain isn't exactly accurate. Kinmen and Matsu are located quite some distance from the main island of Taiwan. And Kinmen is in fact close enough to Xiamen for you to be able to see the Xiamen skyline. The dog2 (talk) 21:20, 29 January 2024 (UTC)

Fair enough. I always forget about Kinmen but in that case, I'd go with what Ikan mentioned. --SHB2000 (talk | contribs | meta) 08:00, 30 January 2024 (UTC)

CEE Newsletter - January 2024 Issue Now Available!

Good evening,

We're excited to announce the release of the January 2024 issue of the CEE Newsletter! This edition is filled with captivating stories, community highlights, and collaborative achievements from across Central and Eastern Europe region in the Wikimedia movement.

In This Issue:

• CEE Hub and WMF Updates: Explore the latest from the Wikimedia Foundation with the Talking 2024 series and insights into the impacts on children participating in Wikimedia projects. Additionally, discover CEE Hub's plans for 2024 as outlined in the recently approved grant proposal named Stronger CEE Hub
• Highlights from CEE Communities: From the Georgian Wikipedia's 20th birthday celebration to the Wiki Loves EuroPride event in Albania, delve into the vibrant activities of our diverse communities. Journey through time with the celebration of Czech Wikipedia's founder and the resilience of Ukrainian Wikipedia editors. Explore the outcomes of Wiki Loves Earth 2023 and Wikimedia Czech Republic's presence at the Archives, Libraries, Museums in the Digital World 2023 conference.
• Community Initiatives and Beyond: Read about the unique efforts of the CEE Youth Group and the unification of GLAM Macedonia and Shared Knowledge into Wikimedia MKD.
• Looking Ahead: Anticipate the 2024 Wikimedia Hackathon in Tallinn, Estonia, and gain insights from Marija Mihajlova's report on the Wikimedia CEE Meeting 2023.

You can read the full newsletter here. We hope you enjoy the inspiring stories and achievements showcased by our vibrant CEE communities.

Happy reading and here's to another year of Wikimedia excellence in the CEE region!

Best regards,

Jan Beránek
Editor-in-chief
Wikimedia CEE Newsletter

15:55, 29 January 2024 (UTC)

Tech News: 2024-05

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent changes

• Starting Monday January 29, all talk pages messages' timestamps will become a link. This link is a permanent link to the comment. It allows users to find the comment they are looking for, even if this comment was moved elsewhere. This will affect all wikis except for the English Wikipedia. You can read more about this change on Diff or on Mediawiki.org.
• There are some improvements to the CAPTCHA to make it harder for spam bots and scripts to bypass it. If you have feedback on this change, please comment on the task. Staff are monitoring metrics related to the CAPTCHA, as well as secondary metrics such as account creations and edit counts.

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 30 January. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 31 January. It will be on all wikis from 1 February (calendar).
• On February 1, a link will be added to the "Tools" menu to download a QR code that links to the page you are viewing. There will also be a new Special:QrKodu page to create QR codes for any Wikimedia URL. This addresses the #19 most-voted wish from the 2023 Community Wishlist Survey.
• Gadgets which only work in some skins have sometimes used the targets option to limit where you can use them. This will stop working this week. You should use the skins option instead.

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MediaWiki message delivery 19:31, 29 January 2024 (UTC)

Bureaucrat

You're a bureaucrat now. Don't add too much red tape to the site. :-)

Seriously, thanks for volunteering to do these tasks.

Best,

Ikan Kekek (talk) 08:11, 30 January 2024 (UTC) Ikan Kekek (talk) 08:11, 30 January 2024 (UTC)

Thanks for the swift response, Ikan Kekek! Glad I could help. One more thing: if I can't add too much red tape, can I add more sticky tape with a tint of red? You didn't say anything about that! /s --SHB2000 (talk | contribs | meta) 08:22, 30 January 2024 (UTC)

Be my guest. :-) Ikan Kekek (talk) 08:58, 30 January 2024 (UTC)

The Signpost: 31 January 2024

News, reports and features from the English Wikipedia's newspaper

• News and notes: Wikipedian Osama Khalid celebrated his 30th birthday in jail

• Opinion: Until it happens to you

• Disinformation report: How paid editors squeeze you dry

• In the media: Katherine Maher new NPR CEO, go check Wikipedia, race in the race

• In focus: The long road of a featured article candidate, part 2

• Recent research: Croatian takeover was enabled by "lack of bureaucratic openness and rules constraining [admins]"

• Comix: We've all got to start somewhere

• Traffic report: DJ, gonna burn this goddamn house right down

Read this Signpost in full · Single-page · Unsubscribe · Global message delivery 15:17, 31 January 2024 (UTC)

Thanks

I had never heard of Cormac McCarthy, but today I learned a new word, w:Polysyndeton, and I wanted to thank you for expanding my vocabulary, and for introducing me to this author, and his unusual style of writing, which, to be frank, will probably give me nightmares because I am fond of punctuation, as I find it to be an effective way of letting the reader know where they are in the exposition, and therefore conveys the writer's meaning more effectively. Ground Zero (talk) 11:53, 2 February 2024 (UTC)

I'm glad I was able to help as his style of writing is really something else which is rather unusual for today's age but it's really evident especially in The Road, a post-apocalyptic novel (okay, seriously, I suck at writing polysyndetons). But yeah, I fully agree with you. --SHB2000 (talk | contribs | meta) 20:02, 2 February 2024 (UTC)

Archive

Could you please archive the talk page on England? Thanks! 2A00:23C7:69B1:501:ACCD:5712:7C99:666F 00:37, 3 February 2024 (UTC)

Sure, I'll do so right in a moment. --SHB2000 (talk | contribs | meta) 00:42, 3 February 2024 (UTC)

Done. --SHB2000 (talk | contribs | meta) 00:43, 3 February 2024 (UTC)

Thank you very much! 2A00:23C7:69B1:501:ACCD:5712:7C99:666F 00:45, 3 February 2024 (UTC)

Glad I was able to help. --SHB2000 (talk | contribs | meta) 00:46, 3 February 2024 (UTC)

Tech News: 2024-06

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent changes

• The mobile site history pages now use the same HTML as the desktop history pages. If you hear of any problems relating to mobile history usage please point them to the phabricator task.
• On most wikis, admins can now block users from making specific actions. These actions are: uploading files, creating new pages, moving (renaming) pages, and sending thanks. The goal of this feature is to allow admins to apply blocks that are adequate to the blocked users' activity. Learn more about "action blocks".

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 6 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 7 February. It will be on all wikis from 8 February (calendar).
• Talk pages permalinks that included diacritics and non-Latin script were malfunctioning. This issue is fixed.

Future changes

• 24 Wikipedias with Reference Tooltips as a default gadget are encouraged to remove that default flag. This would make Reference Previews the new default for reference popups, leading to a more consistent experience across wikis. For 46 Wikipedias with less than 4 interface admins, the change is already scheduled for mid-February, unless there are concerns. The older Reference Tooltips gadget will still remain usable and will override this feature, if it is available on your wiki and you have enabled it in your settings.

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MediaWiki message delivery 19:22, 5 February 2024 (UTC)

This Month in GLAM: January 2024

This Month in GLAM – Volume XIV, Issue I, January 2024 Headlines Albania report: Wikipedia Day in Albania 2024 Belgium report: First international public domain day celebration in Europe coming up on March 7 Brazil report: A legal infrastructure for sharing public collections in Brazil: the case of Midiateca Capixaba Czech Republic report: January '24: Institute of Physics photos and Free culture discussion Finland report: Photographing at the second half of 2023 India report: Documenting ASI (Archaeological Survey of India) Museums in Bihar Netherlands report: Public Domain Day & Monumental Moments New Zealand report: Aotearoa Wikipedian at Large, and Auckland Museum updates Poland report: An update on the Wikimatejko editing action and an invitation to the international community to join the action Portugal report: Unveiling Catrapilha: A ReacTive approach to GLAM content import Sweden report: Freedom of Panorama in Sweden UK report: Indonesian praise for an Ottoman photograph of Arabia USA report: Wikipedia Day 2024; edit-a-thon; meetups AvoinGLAM report: Events! Events! Structured Data on Wikimedia Commons report: New OpenRefine documentation for Wikimedia Commons WMF GLAM report: WiLMa Updates, OpenRefine training, Biodiversity, and Librarians Calendar: February's GLAM events Read this edition in full • Single-page To assist with preparing the newsletter, please visit the newsroom. Past editions may be viewed here.

About This Month in GLAM · Subscribe/Unsubscribe · Global message delivery · Romaine 02:00, 10 February 2024 (UTC)

This Month in Education: January 2024

This Month in Education

Volume 13 • Issue 1 • January 2024

Contents • Headlines • Subscribe

In This Issue

• Cross-Continental Wikimedia Activities: A Dialogue between Malaysia and Estonia
• Czech programme SWW in 2023 – how have we managed to engage students
• Extending Updates on Wikipedia in Education – Elbasan, Albania
• Reading Wikipedia in the Classroom Teacher’s guide – now available in Bulgarian language
• Summer students at Auckland Museum
• WikiDunong: EduWiki Initiatives in the Philippines Project
• Wikimedia Armenia's Educational Workshops
• Wikimedia Foundation publishes its first Child Rights Impact Assessment

About This Month in Education · Subscribe/Unsubscribe · Global message delivery · For the team: ZI Jony 10:02, 10 February 2024 (UTC)

The Signpost: 13 February 2024

News, reports and features from the English Wikipedia's newspaper

• News and notes: Wikimedia Russia director declared "foreign agent" by Russian gov; EU prepares to pile on the papers

• Disinformation report: How low can the scammers go?

• Gallery: Before and After: Why you don't need to touch grass to dramatically improve images of flora and fauna

• In the media: Speaking in tongues, toeing the line, and dressing the part

• Serendipity: Is this guy the same as the one who was a Nazi?

• Traffic report: Griselda, Nikki, Carl, Jannik and two types of football

• Crossword: Our crossword to bear

• Comix: Strongly

Read this Signpost in full · Single-page · Unsubscribe · Global message delivery 04:38, 13 February 2024 (UTC)

Tech News: 2024-07

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent changes

• The WDQS Graph Split experiment is working and loaded onto 3 test servers. The team in charge is testing the split's impact and requires feedback from WDQS users through the UI or programmatically in different channels. Users' feedback will validate the impact of various use cases and workflows around the Wikidata Query service.

Problems

• There was a bug that affected the appearance of visited links when using mobile device to access wiki sites. It made the links appear black; this issue is fixed.

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 13 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 14 February. It will be on all wikis from 15 February (calendar).
• As work continues on the grid engine deprecation, tools on the grid engine will be stopped starting on February 14th, 2024. If you have tools actively migrating you can ask for an extension so they are not stopped.

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MediaWiki message delivery 05:49, 13 February 2024 (UTC)

Reverting of Brycehughes WarningBox removals

Apologies - I did not mean to edit war. Can you please clarify where the right place to discuss @Brycehughes edits would be? It seems a little unreasonable that they can casually revert WarningBoxes on dozens of pages without meaningfully explaining their decisions but I would have to start a discussion for each individual page. I feel that there is a need to revisit what the actual WV guidance should be moving forward on WarningBoxes. I have tried to bring this up in Travellers'_pub#Proliferation_of_Warning_boxes and I even requested comment - to no avail. Cyali (talk) 08:40, 17 February 2024 (UTC)

Hey, you're all good. I think for a lot of these it should apply on a case-by-case basis since a one-size-fits-all policy rarely works – would be best to bring up the individual warningboxes on the relevant talk pages (e.g. Talk:Socotra, etc.). Hope that clarifies! (cc Brycehughes). --SHB2000 (talk | contribs | meta) 08:52, 17 February 2024 (UTC)

Thanks for the quick response. Also just want to clarify that my original edit to Venezuela was a mistake - I tried to revert it back to add a reason but you beat me to it. (small addition) Is it reasonable to ask that the other user provide their justification as well - or is the onus entirely on me to prove that the WarningBox is necessary? A lot of these edit summaries are not constructive. Is there a policy or set of guidelines to determine if an edit is constructive or useful? I have been relying on the Wikivoyage:The traveller comes first and assume good faith but it ultimately is quite ambiguous in these circumstances.

It would be helpful to have these edits explained on a case-by-case basis rather than me just echoing travel advisories and saying "travel bad". There's no way I can meaningfully address the below concerns without them meaningfully engaging.

• 01:11, 14 February 2024 diff hist −731‎ Socotra ‎ this is way too dramatic / missing your flight is not a threat to your life / moving to get in thank

13 February 2024

• 02:17, 13 February 2024 diff hist −133‎ Venezuela ‎ ah yes, don't visit this country, it's poor and its government disagreeable thank Tag: Reverted
• 02:09, 13 February 2024 diff hist −719‎ Russia ‎ Russia is stable, perhaps unfortunately / not accessing money is not a threat to your life / Russia is not a warzone / you are not going to get blown up if you visit Russia thank
• 02:05, 13 February 2024 diff hist −219‎ Belarus ‎ belarus is not a warzone, you are not going to get hit with a projectile in belarus thank Tag: Reverted

Cyali (talk) 08:58, 17 February 2024 (UTC)

I think they are reasonable reasons for removal which is why I mentioned they should be brought up on the talk page for further discussion. --SHB2000 (talk | contribs | meta) 09:23, 17 February 2024 (UTC)

I can appreciate that, and I'm aware that I'll have to write up reasons for disagreeing. I am not trying to put you on the spot (and thank you for responding - I know you certainly don't have to answer my questions), but it would be helpful to understand how you would suggest approaching this conversation constructively in your opinion, as I'm aware that you share a similar position to the user. What would it take to build a meaningful consensus? If there is not a one sized fits all policy, what points should I clearly address from the get-go - especially when the edit summaries appear very subjective? I guess I'm just finding it really difficult to understand how to build this consensus and try and find a neutral compromise when the issue is so charged and heavily influenced by one's experience traveling (I.e. my travel wisdom is contrary to a government travel advisory). I also am not really sure why the original travellers pub thread that led the user to remove these Warning boxes from many pages in WV in the first place isn't a relevant place to obtain consensus after the fact. Once I write up the issues on their respective talk pages, can I also ask you to provide input and to constructively contribute to the conversations as well? Cyali (talk) 09:41, 17 February 2024 (UTC)

I don't have answers to all the questions since I was overseas when the discussion happened and wasn't following it, but I'll be happy to provide input to the discussions on their respective talk pages. --SHB2000 (talk | contribs | meta) 09:48, 17 February 2024 (UTC)

I think the consensus was that some cautionboxes are too alarmist and that many stay long after the situation has improved. The other user tried to get some policy changes to address the issues, but did not get support for those exact measures.

Mostly their edits make sense (such as in the Venezuela case, they kept most of the info in a cautionbox in Stay safe), but they are sometimes too radical. Tweaking the edit to reinsert some important issues can work, as can reinstating the warningbox but removing some lesser issues from it, perhaps adding to the running text instead. Among established users, plain reverts should be rare and plain reverts with no edit summary should not be used, other than in special cases.

–LPfi (talk) 12:31, 17 February 2024 (UTC)

To add, plain reverts in general should be rare, not just among established users. --SHB2000 (talk | contribs | meta) 12:34, 17 February 2024 (UTC)

They can still be used on vandalism and graffiti, or repeated edits which were already reverted with an explanation, i.e. cases where it should be obvious to the other party why the edit was reverted (erring on the side of caution).

Established users should not do edits that obviously should be reverted, so admitting the possibility that the edit was actually good (and therefore explaining the revert) is good manners. The edit summary may be something like "mistake?" or "see talk". The cases should be rare enough that using some extra time on the summary is no burden.

–LPfi (talk) 12:50, 17 February 2024 (UTC)

But usually they are rollbacks which I consider different to a plain revert. --SHB2000 (talk | contribs | meta) 12:52, 17 February 2024 (UTC)

Kind of, but I don't see why you could rollback something that reverting without explanation would be wrong. I see the two as equivalent, only that rollback can be a convenient shorthand that more or less explicitly says that the revert isn't worth a comment. –LPfi (talk) 14:20, 17 February 2024 (UTC)

I think it's nonsense to say that Russia is not at war. Targets in Russia have been repeatedly hit by Ukrainian drones or Special Forces or others. You should be careful if you plan on walking past military-related factories, power plants, military induction offices, cars belonging to Russian online war propagandists, etc. Ikan Kekek (talk) 15:49, 17 February 2024 (UTC)

I'm not opposed to finding ways to reduce the alarmism and to keep them concise, factual and up to date. I just find it challenging to keep up when a user can casually revert my contributions with little explanation (a sarky edit summary), all with a similar goal in mind, without being held to the same standard of explaining their decisions individually. I have not opposed most of the other user's edits because they are so numerous and in some cases, I agreed with them. However, the inability to discuss a thematic grouping of edits, many of whom have limited context, puts other editors at a disadvantage in these conversations when trying to get to the root of an issue, and discourages newer editors like me to meaningfully engage and work towards consensus. I'm not saying that individual page discussions are out of the question - but it feels like there's a larger conversation to be had first.

I'd really either like to resolve this constructively with compromise or I'd like to see consensus that the community wants for it to be easier to remove WarningBox than it is to add them.

But I don't think it's ultimately reasonable to proclaim that traveling to Russia and Socotra is totally safe - everyone's just overblowing it, or to reject the assessments of national governments telling you not to go there as being hysterical. Cyali (talk) 16:34, 17 February 2024 (UTC)

Any edits done en masse are problematic, for the reason you bring up, unless they are obviously good, with no urgent need for checking or tweaking.

For Russia: yes Russia is at war and the government is cracking down on any critics, the latter an issue for anybody interested in politics. Regarding the war, a warning is needed, for those who may be interested in affected installations – but an average tourist is very unlikely to be hit by a drone in Moscow, let alone in some random other city. The mobilisation issue is severe for dual citizens, but it affects a limited group. Thus I would be fine with confining the warning box to Stay safe.

–LPfi (talk) 16:54, 17 February 2024 (UTC)

Tech News: 2024-08

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent changes

• If you have the "Email me when a page or a file on my watchlist is changed" option enabled, edits by bot accounts no longer trigger notification emails. Previously, only minor edits would not trigger the notification emails.
• There are changes to how user and site scripts load for Vector 2022 on specific wikis. The changes impacted the following Wikis: all projects with Vector legacy as the default skin, Wikivoyage, and Wikibooks. Other wikis will be affected over the course of the next three months. Gadgets are not impacted. If you have been affected or want to minimize the impact on your project, see this ticket. Please coordinate and take action proactively.
• Newly auto-created accounts (the accounts you get when you visit a new wiki) now have the same local notification preferences as users who freshly register on that wiki. It is effected in four notification types listed in the task's description.
• The maximum file size when using Upload Wizard is now 5 GiB.

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 20 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 21 February. It will be on all wikis from 22 February (calendar).

• Selected tools on the grid engine have been stopped as we prepare to shut down the grid on March 14th, 2024. The tool's code and data have not been deleted. If you are a maintainer and you want your tool re-enabled reach out to the team. Only tools that have asked for extension are still running on the grid.
• The CSS filter property can now be used in HTML style attributes in wikitext.

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MediaWiki message delivery 15:37, 19 February 2024 (UTC)

Reversion

Why this reversion? Text looks good to me.

Is it Brendan? Pashley (talk) 09:22, 24 February 2024 (UTC)

Yeah, sadly. Text resembles his, ISP is Telstra and IP geolocates to Brisbane. --SHB2000 (talk | contribs | meta) 09:38, 24 February 2024 (UTC)

Tech News: 2024-09

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent changes

• The mobile visual editor is now the default editor for users who never edited before, at a small group of wikis. Research shows that users using this editor are slightly more successful publishing the edits they started, and slightly less successful publishing non-reverted edits. Users who defined the wikitext editor as their default on desktop will get the wikitext editor on mobile for their first edit on mobile as well.
• The mw.config value wgGlobalGroups now only contains groups that are active in the wiki. Scripts no longer have to check whether the group is active on the wiki via an API request. A code example of the above is: if (/globalgroupname/.test(mw.config.get("wgGlobalGroups"))).

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 27 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 28 February. It will be on all wikis from 29 February (calendar).

Future changes

• The right to change edit tags (changetags) will be removed from users in Wikimedia sites, keeping it by default for admins and bots only. Your community can ask to retain the old configuration on your wiki before this change happens. Please indicate in this ticket to keep it for your community before the end of March 2024.

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MediaWiki message delivery 19:23, 26 February 2024 (UTC)

San Diego International Airport Page Banner

Hello, Its been about a week since there has been any progress on the talk page for the San Diego International Airport for a custom page banner. Do you think you can help achieve a consensus?

Hi, individual users hold no bearing over general consensus. --SHB2000 (talk | contribs | meta) 11:29, 2 March 2024 (UTC)

I know you dont just choose a conensus. But you think you can say which page banners you prefer? Someonehere12345 (talk) 17:02, 3 March 2024 (UTC)

The Signpost: 2 March 2024

News, reports and features from the English Wikipedia's newspaper

• News and notes: Wikimedia enters US Supreme court hearings as "the dolphin inadvertently caught in the net"

• Recent research: Images on Wikipedia "amplify gender bias"

• In the media: The Scottish Parliament gets involved, a wikirace on live TV, and the Foundation's CTO goes on record

• Obituary: Vami_IV

• Traffic report: Supervalentinefilmbowlday

• WikiCup report: High-scoring WikiCup first round comes to a close

Read this Signpost in full · Single-page · Unsubscribe · Global message delivery 11:04, 2 March 2024 (UTC)

Tech News: 2024-10

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent changes

• The Special:Book page (as well as the associated "Create a book" functionality) provided by the old Collection extension has been removed from all Wikisource wikis, as it was broken. This does not affect the ability to download normal books, which is provided by the Wikisource extension.
• Wikitech now uses the next-generation Parsoid wikitext parser by default to generate all pages in the Talk namespace. Report any problems on the Known Issues discussion page. You can use the ParserMigration extension to control the use of Parsoid; see the ParserMigration help documentation for more details.
• Maintenance on etherpad is completed. If you encounter any issues, please indicate in this ticket.
• Gadgets allow interface admins to create custom features with CSS and JavaScript. The Gadget and Gadget_definition namespaces and gadgets-definition-edit user right were reserved for an experiment in 2015, but were never used. These were visible on Special:Search and Special:ListGroupRights. The unused namespaces and user rights are now removed. No pages are moved, and no changes need to be made.
• A usability improvement to the "Add a citation" in Wikipedia workflow has been made, the insert button was moved to the popup header.

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 5 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 6 March. It will be on all wikis from 7 March (calendar).

Future changes

• All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes on March 20. This is planned at 14:00 UTC. More information will be published in Tech News and will also be posted on individual wikis in the coming weeks.
• The HTML markup of headings and section edit links will be changed later this year to improve accessibility. See Heading HTML changes for details. The new markup will be the same as in the new Parsoid wikitext parser. You can test your gadget or stylesheet with the new markup if you add ?useparsoid=1 to your URL (more info) or turn on Parsoid read views in your user options (more info).

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MediaWiki message delivery 19:47, 4 March 2024 (UTC)

This Month in GLAM: February 2024

This Month in GLAM – Volume XIV, Issue II, February 2024 Headlines Albania report: One village, One article in Albania and Kosovo Australia report: On tour Brazil report: News from Rio de Janeiro France report: Open Content Observatory letter Italy report: Antarctic Writing Month and GLAM call Kosovo report: One Village, One Article Campaign New Zealand report: WikiProject Te Papa Research Expeditions, wrapping up the Auckland / Tāmaki Makaurau local histories project, and the Aotearoa Wikipedian at Large Poland report: WikiMatejko editing action; The eighth European GLAM Wiki coordinators meet up Spain report: SMALL GLAM SLAM Pilot 1 Rapid Grant Sweden report: Working life museums UK report: National Trust, Leeds 2023, and Khalili Foundation USA report: Hacking Night; Seattle Meetups; Denver Huddle; Wikipedia Day LA; San Diego/February 2024; Supreme Court visit Biodiversity Heritage Library report: BHL-Wiki Working Group February Monthly Highlights Wikidata report: Working with catalogues: a Wikidata volunteer’s perspective WMF GLAM report: Updates on OpenRefine training and Wikisource Loves manuscripts Calendar: March's GLAM events Read this edition in full • Single-page To assist with preparing the newsletter, please visit the newsroom. Past editions may be viewed here.

About This Month in GLAM · Subscribe/Unsubscribe · Global message delivery · Romaine 13:50, 10 March 2024 (UTC)

Tech News: 2024-11

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 12 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 13 March. It will be on all wikis from 14 March (calendar).
• After consulting with various communities, the line height of the text on the Minerva skin will be increased to its previous value of 1.65. Different options for typography can also be set using the options in the menu, as needed.
• The active link color in Minerva will be changed to provide more consistency with our other platforms and best practices.
• Structured data on Commons will no longer ask whether you want to leave the page without saving. This will prevent the “information you’ve entered may not be saved” popups from appearing when no information have been entered. It will also make file pages on Commons load faster in certain cases. However, the popups will be hidden even if information has indeed been entered. If you accidentally close the page before saving the structured data you entered, that data will be lost.

Future changes

• All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes on March 20. This is planned at 14:00 UTC. More information will be published in Tech News and will also be posted on individual wikis in the coming weeks.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

MediaWiki message delivery 23:04, 11 March 2024 (UTC)

Hi

Hello @SHB2000, Can I have autopatroller rights? :) Lionel Cristiano (talk) 19:53, 14 March 2024 (UTC)

not yet. You must familiarize yourself with our policies and our Manual of Style, and demonstrate the acquired familiarity on your edits. Thanks for contributing to Wikivoyage. Ibaman (talk) 20:13, 14 March 2024 (UTC)

Hi, autopatroller on this rights are only given after a few months of constructive editing. Do read the links linked by Ibaman, though! --SHB2000 (talk | contribs | meta) 20:14, 14 March 2024 (UTC)

I understand, thank you, can I write to you again in a few months? Lionel Cristiano (talk) 20:16, 14 March 2024 (UTC)

Up to you. --SHB2000 (talk | contribs | meta) 20:17, 14 March 2024 (UTC)

See you in a few months, I will miss you, have a nice day :-) Lionel Cristiano (talk) 20:20, 14 March 2024 (UTC)

@Lionel Cristiano: Do note that it's also generally only given out to active editors too; taking a break and coming back after a few months with few to no edits won't change anything. --SHB2000 (talk | contribs | meta) 05:56, 15 March 2024 (UTC)

You are right, I will try to be active. Lionel Cristiano (talk) 08:23, 15 March 2024 (UTC)

Cool and happy editing! --SHB2000 (talk | contribs | meta) 08:24, 15 March 2024 (UTC)

User relations

Please leave Andrewssi2 alone. You can see that they don't appreciate your interaction, so anything you tell them won't help the situation. I don't know what's going on between you, but I sincerely hope you can get over it. Just try to let things calm down for now. –LPfi (talk) 11:02, 14 March 2024 (UTC)

Not when there are six instances of them misusing their admin tools in the last 50 minutes (as of this message's timestamp). Asking to be "left alone" is a snarky tactic to dodge the problem at-hand. On the other hand, I will respect this request once the admin tool misuse issues have been resolved; not before. --SHB2000 (talk | contribs | meta) 11:06, 14 March 2024 (UTC)

When somebody clearly shows that they have no intension to read or answer messages, adding more messages for them to read helps little. I am all for getting your complaints sorted out in due time, but them wanting a respite from this is reasonable (I don't know what reasons they have, but real-life troubles could be a good one, and overload with the issue here is quite enough). I might not think that rollbacks are a particularly elegant way of handling this, but in the situation where one doesn't want to handle the conflict, one might also not want to think hard about the best way to avoid it.

I left you this message before seeing the nomination page thread and hoped the situation would cool down enough to be handled amicably. There is no abuse that needs to be stopped now, so waiting a few days, several days if needed, would be no problem. I think you should ponder overnight about what is best for the project, and whether you personally need to walk the path to its end.

My impression is that you generally want rules to be followed. However, in most projects there are situations where it is better to ignore the rules in some situations. When a rule is broken, is the situation one that the rule on enforcement was written for, or one that could be better handled in some other way? If rules were broken, were they broken in unforgivable ways?

Enough here. If you still really feel treated badly, you have my compassion, but I hope you can get over it without this issue deteriorating.

–LPfi (talk) 12:42, 14 March 2024 (UTC)

Hi, LPfi, thank you for the detailed explanation. I'll consider this after a break tomorrow; I now agree with you about the urgentness given that Andrewssi2 / Asretired has retired (per their username). I'm sorry if my messages to you came out a bit hasty. --SHB2000 (talk | contribs | meta) 12:47, 14 March 2024 (UTC)

@LPfi: To minimise drama, I'll bring it up here and with you (since your stance mostly seems to be neutral), but we don't allow Special:Redirect/logid/3824876, right? I thought that user talk pages were to never be deleted (but maybe that is a Commons policy). --SHB2000 (talk | contribs | meta) 05:59, 15 March 2024 (UTC)

Could you also take a stab at "This individual is very unpleasant, unhinged and quite possibly a violent person in real life. This is now a safety issue." on their user page? Aren't attack statements on user pages explicitly banned? I'll leave it to you to interpret foundation:Wikimedia Foundation Universal Code of Conduct#3.1 – Harassment: "Threats: Explicitly or implicitly suggesting the possibility of physical violence, unfair embarrassment, unfair and unjustified reputational harm, or intimidation by suggesting gratuitous legal action to win an argument or force someone to behave the way you want." (I italicised possibility). --SHB2000 (talk | contribs | meta) 06:03, 15 March 2024 (UTC)

I am neutral in the original conflict and the question on who is responsible for the drama, but I didn't see any reason for desysoping him. I think the rollbacks and the action you cite above are non-aggressive self-defence (as I have explained above and elsewhere), possibly excess in self-defence, but as no real harm has been caused (you shouldn't contact him in this situation, and those who need to can reach him anyway), there is no hurry discussing, reverting or taking measures about them. –LPfi (talk) 08:14, 15 March 2024 (UTC)

@LPfi: That is fair; sorry for repeating this but users aren't allowed to delete their own talk pages, right (I thought user talk pages should never be deleted)? --SHB2000 (talk | contribs | meta) 08:17, 15 March 2024 (UTC)

I don't think we have such a policy here (we use common sense a lot more than en-wp). If deleting the talk page makes him feel more comfortable, I wouldn't interfere with it for a reasonable cool-down period. At some point it should be restored, probably as an archive, unless he does something along those lines himself. Also the talk page protection should be removed at the same time, if not before. –LPfi (talk) 08:49, 15 March 2024 (UTC)

Understandable (3+3 days as you suggested?) – though doesn't the protection automatically get removed once a page is deleted? --SHB2000 (talk | contribs | meta) 08:54, 15 March 2024 (UTC)

I don't know, but as page creation can be disabled, I guess the protection entries aren't affected by page deletion (deletion can easily be implemented with a flag in the database, and any action on the page could check or ignore that flag). –LPfi (talk) 09:15, 15 March 2024 (UTC)

(Thankfully) Asretired has not enabled page protection on their talk page, so I think that is one fewer thing to worry about. --SHB2000 (talk | contribs | meta) 09:17, 15 March 2024 (UTC)

To my understanding, people have the right to delete the contents of their user talk pages. I wouldn't support restoring content against his will. Ikan Kekek (talk) 09:50, 15 March 2024 (UTC)

OK. If there are neither guidelines nor consensus on this, we should let the user decide, unless there are reasons not to. –LPfi (talk) 09:52, 15 March 2024 (UTC)

@Ikan Kekek: Correct me if I'm wrong – I might be mixing this up with Commons policy – but I thought we let users blank content on their user talk pages because they can still be accessed via the page history. However, by deleting a user talk page, the page history will no longer be accessible hence why user talk pages aren't deleted. --SHB2000 (talk | contribs | meta) 10:51, 15 March 2024 (UTC)

The other issue I see with the page deleted is that oppose voters cannot see what exactly I posted on their user talk page which has (unfortunately) led to some users automatically assuming it is harassment. I presume a screenshot will do, but it is more ideal if all users can see what I wrote instead of being thrown frivolous accusations by 5 different individuals (though not all of it had to do with the talk page messages). --SHB2000 (talk | contribs | meta) 12:48, 15 March 2024 (UTC)

That could be a reason for undeleting, yes. However, the issue isn't really what you wrote, only that you wrote there after him having asked you to let him alone, and that he removed what you had written. I think that is well established, nobody has contested that part and nobody has suggested that you wrote something otherwise offensive. –LPfi (talk) 15:30, 15 March 2024 (UTC)

I see the point about deleting the entire page, yes. Ikan Kekek (talk) 18:12, 15 March 2024 (UTC)

Tomorrow will be 3 days (UTC+11) since the discussion was initiated, which I think is enough time for Asretired to cool down. --SHB2000 (talk | contribs | meta) 19:47, 15 March 2024 (UTC)

I'll mention it while I can, but I feel very uneasy about their userpage, but I trust that Ikan and LPfi are in a much better position to judge than I am, so apologies if I seem quite impatient with the userpage issue. SHB2000 (talk | contribs | meta) 19:53, 15 March 2024 (UTC)

The nature of Pashley's comment suggests that I did (keep in mind that this user is in denial of Asretired doing anything wrong, which tells a lot). --SHB2000 (talk | contribs | meta) 19:36, 15 March 2024 (UTC)

So I think you're right that the userpage should eventually be undeleted, but we shouldn't restore the content we know he wanted deleted. Ikan Kekek (talk) 21:48, 15 March 2024 (UTC)

I agree. It's fine for my messages to not be restored given that they can still be found using the page history. SHB2000 (talk | contribs | meta) 02:06, 16 March 2024 (UTC)

It can be restored as a blank page. Ikan Kekek (talk) 03:22, 16 March 2024 (UTC)

@Ikan Kekek, LPfi: Given it has been 3 days since the dispute, could one of you undelete the page and blank it? (and I presume we're giving 3 more days for Asretired to edit out the personal safety issues?) --SHB2000 (talk | contribs | meta) 21:57, 16 March 2024 (UTC)

I am sorry you think we don't care about you. My intension was to eventually take care of that bit, but I believe it needed to wait and I didn't see much harm in letting this take the time it needs. Perhaps I was wrong, but if I cannot – or you cannot – trust my judgement, then the best I can do is probably to keep away. I am sorry for that too and sincerely hope somebody else can make the best out of this. –LPfi (talk) 21:22, 17 March 2024 (UTC)

@LPfi: Don't feel the need to apologise; at this point Asretired has left Wikivoyage, so there's nothing much to be said. None of this was your fault, you're a separate individual and cannot control what Asretired/Andrewssi2 does. All I wanted is for all references about me, direct or indirect, to be removed from their page ASAP. None of this would have ever been a problem had they never written those statements in the first place (and the few users that enabled their behaviour). --SHB2000 (talk | contribs | meta) 05:45, 18 March 2024 (UTC)

Tech News: 2024-12

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent changes

• The notice "Language links are at the top of the page" that appears in the Vector 2022 skin main menu has been removed now that users have learned the new location of the Language switcher.
• IP info feature displays data from Spur, an IP addresses database. Previously, the only data source for this feature was MaxMind. Now, IP info is more useful for patrollers.
• The Toolforge Grid Engine services have been shut down after the final migration process from Grid Engine to Kubernetes.
• Communities can now customize the default reasons for undeleting a page by creating MediaWiki:Undelete-comment-dropdown.

Problems

• RevisionSlider is an interface to interactively browse a page's history. Users in right-to-left languages reported RevisionSlider reacting wrong to mouse clicks. This should be fixed now.

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 19 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 20 March. It will be on all wikis from 21 March (calendar).
• All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes on March 20. This is planned at 14:00 UTC.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

MediaWiki message delivery 17:40, 18 March 2024 (UTC)

This Month in Education: February 2024

This Month in Education

Volume 13 • Issue 2 • February 2024

Contents • Headlines • Subscribe

In This Issue

• 2 new courses in Students Write Wikipedia Starting this February
• More two wiki-education partnerships
• Open Education Week 2024 in Mexico
• Reading Wikipedia in Bolivia, the community grows
• Wiki Education Philippines promotes OERs utilization
• Wiki Loves Librarians, Kaduna
• Wiki Workshop 2024 CfP – Call for Papers Research track

About This Month in Education · Subscribe/Unsubscribe · Global message delivery · For the team: ZI Jony 18:38, 20 March 2024 (UTC)

Tech News: 2024-13

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent changes

• An update was made on March 18th 2024 to how various projects load site, user JavaScript and CSS in Vector 2022 skin. A checklist is provided for site admins to follow.

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 26 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 27 March. It will be on all wikis from 28 March (calendar).

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

MediaWiki message delivery 18:57, 25 March 2024 (UTC)

The Signpost: 29 March 2024

News, reports and features from the English Wikipedia's newspaper

• Technology report: Millions of readers still seeing broken pages as "temporary" disabling of graph extension nears its second year

• Interview: Interview on Wikimedia Foundation fundraising and finance strategy

• Special report: 19-page PDF accuses Wikipedia of bias against Israel, suggests editors be forced to reveal their real names, and demands a new feature allowing people to view the history of Wikipedia articles

• Op-Ed: Wikipedia in the age of personality-driven knowledge

• Recent research: "Newcomer Homepage" feature mostly fails to boost new editors

• News and notes: Universal Code of Conduct Coordinating Committee Charter ratified

• In the media: "For me it’s the autism": AARoard editors on the fork more traveled

• Traffic report: He rules over everything, on the land called planet Dune

• Humour: Letters from the editors

• Comix: Layout issue

Read this Signpost in full · Single-page · Unsubscribe · Global message delivery 22:43, 29 March 2024 (UTC)

Tech News: 2024-14

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent changes

• Users of the reading accessibility beta feature will notice that the default line height for the standard and large text options has changed.

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 2 April. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 3 April. It will be on all wikis from 4 April (calendar).

Future changes

• The Wikimedia Foundation has an annual plan. The annual plan decides what the Wikimedia Foundation will work on. You can now read the draft key results for the Product and Technology department. They are suggestions for what results the Foundation wants from big technical changes from July 2024 to June 2025. You can comment on the talk page.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

MediaWiki message delivery 03:36, 2 April 2024 (UTC)

Edits on WP that need removal

First of all, thanks for everything you do! You’re doing great work by creating new page banners, and I do not oppose your efforts in that area at all even if I have some slight differences of opinion regarding what constitutes a good banner.

I contribute on WP but don’t know any administrators over there. Today I was editing and stumbled into some borderline defamatory edits on the history of a page. I was wondering if you know any administrators of that website who could delete some old revisions? I can link to the revisions in an email if you like, with further explanation of the background and why they should not be publicly viewable. --Comment by Selfie City (talk) (contributions) 03:54, 3 April 2024 (UTC)

@SelfieCity: Haha, no worries. Regarding enwiki admins, unfortunately I don't edit enwiki that frequently to interact with admins, but I do know that @Antandrus, Ground Zero, DaGizza: are also admins on enwiki. I'd give you a better answer if it were Commons, but I'm afraid I don't have a better answer. --SHB2000 (talk | contribs | meta) 06:07, 3 April 2024 (UTC)

Or you could get a response by contacting WP:OS. SHB2000 (talk | contribs | meta) 06:15, 3 April 2024 (UTC)

Awesome! Thank you. --Comment by Selfie City (talk) (contributions) 11:42, 3 April 2024 (UTC)

Hi @SelfieCity: - if you need help just let me know where and which revisions. Happy to help. Antandrus (talk) 14:36, 3 April 2024 (UTC)

Hello Antandrus, I greatly appreciate that. Another administrator covered most of the edits, but there are still four revisions by Rupertlover123 to the w:Jeff Rupert article that should probably be deleted. Three of these edits by that account in particular need to be deleted as they are identifying someone who was a minor at the time of the edit (and the statements made in the vandalism are false).

Let me know if you need more information or clarification, and I can email and also explain why I raised this in particular. Thanks again! --Comment by Selfie City (talk) (contributions) 20:12, 3 April 2024 (UTC)

Ok - I got rid of two more (there are no more un-revdelled edits by "Rupertlover123" now as far as I can see). Antandrus (talk) 21:20, 3 April 2024 (UTC)

@Antandrus: Hello, thanks! However there are still https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Jeff_Rupert&oldid=1063582809 and https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Jeff_Rupert&oldid=1063586679 which are viewable to me. Those are the main ones that were of concern to me. --Comment by Selfie City (talk) (contributions) 22:00, 3 April 2024 (UTC)

Hm, sorry about that. I have no idea why those didn't appear when I scrolled through. Anyway done now. :) (SHB2000, sorry about all the pings!) Antandrus (talk) 22:15, 3 April 2024 (UTC)

Haha, don't worry – I don't mind the pings the slightest. --SHB2000 (talk | contribs | meta) 22:16, 3 April 2024 (UTC)

User from IP #107.9.140.157

I noticed that this user at IP 107.9.140.157 had changed the I-90 article to indicate it begins/ends in Portland, Oregon in the west coast going through Pocatello, Idaho. Which is not true. It begins in Seattle and goes through Spokane and Missoula, towards Boston. At the same time he/she created an Interstate 33 article.That Interstate does NOT exist. I believe he/she may of created the I-90 article initially and I made multiple edits to get the information correct. You can always look it up to see who's right and who's wrong. My concern is what other additional articles has he/she created of places or roads that don't exist or which other existing articles may of been changed/edited with misinformation aka vandalism by this user? And to what extent? I am telling you this because based on your interaction with this user regarding the I-33 article, I presumed you are one of the moderators for the board. Anyone150 (talk) 16:56, 3 April 2024 (UTC)

Yes, I have blocked them for 3 days; will delete the I-33 article accordingly. --SHB2000 (talk | contribs | meta) 20:12, 3 April 2024 (UTC)

Summer of WikiVoyage 2024, Albania and Kosovo

Greetings SHB2000. I am Vyolltsa from the Wikimedians of Albanian Language User Group. Just wanted to give you heads-up about our Summer of Wikivoyage Edit-a-thon in 2024. This year, we are focusing on the North-Central Albania to write about different travel destinations of Albania and Kosovo in English.This is happening from May 3-rd to May 5-th. And, we are inviting everyone to join us online here Saturday from 10:00-17:00 (GMT+2) Time Zone. Could you please update the Albania and Kosovo Expedition pages for 2024? Thank you in advance. --Vyolltsa (talk) 12:13, 4 April 2024 (UTC)

@Vyolltsa: Done. --SHB2000 (talk | contribs | meta) 21:40, 4 April 2024 (UTC)

Thanks @SHB2000! Vyolltsa (talk) 06:50, 5 April 2024 (UTC)

Glad I could help! --SHB2000 (talk | contribs | meta) 06:54, 5 April 2024 (UTC)

https://en.m.wikivoyage.org/wiki/Wikivoyage:User_ban_nominations#70.68.168.129

(redacted)

Hey, thanks for your AI-generated complements. Have a lovely day! --SHB2000 (talk | contribs | meta) 06:49, 6 April 2024 (UTC)

Tech News: 2024-15

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent changes

• Web browsers can use tools called extensions. There is now a Chrome extension called Citation Needed which you can use to see if an online statement is supported by a Wikipedia article. This is a small experiment to see if Wikipedia can be used this way. Because it is a small experiment, it can only be used in Chrome in English.
• A new Edit Recovery feature has been added to all wikis, available as a user preference. Once you enable it, your in-progress edits will be stored in your web browser, and if you accidentally close an editing window or your browser or computer crashes, you will be prompted to recover the unpublished text. Please leave any feedback on the project talk page. This was the #8 wish in the 2023 Community Wishlist Survey.
• Initial results of Edit check experiments have been published. Edit Check is now deployed as a default feature at the wikis that tested it. Let us know if you want your wiki to be part of the next deployment of Edit check.
• Readers using the Minerva skin on mobile will notice there has been an improvement in the line height across all typography settings.

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 9 April. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 10 April. It will be on all wikis from 11 April (calendar).
• New accounts and logged-out users will get the visual editor as their default editor on mobile. This deployment is made at all wikis except for the English Wikipedia.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

MediaWiki message delivery 23:38, 8 April 2024 (UTC)

Taking liberties

I've taken liberties with your draft of a Jökulsárgljúfur article. Ground Zero (talk) 12:35, 9 April 2024 (UTC)

@Ground Zero: Hey, thanks for that! I was away on a camping trip (we were very rained out, unfortunately) so sorry for the late response. --SHB2000 (talk | contribs | meta) 07:21, 11 April 2024 (UTC)

Not to worry. I was very slow in responding to your request for comments on your draft.

While you were being rained out, I drove 2½ hours to get to the path of the eclipse totality so I could gaze up at the clouds. We saw the beginning of the eclipse, and the sudden darkening of the sky followed by an equally rapid brightening was really cool. And the temperature dropped about 5°C in a mater of minutes.

Also, I started writing a response to CW's ignorant comment, but decided against it as it would just inflame the culture war that I think we should avoid. The anti-non-binary mantra that they know better about non-binary people than non-binary people do is an obviously ridiculous claim. Ground Zero (talk) 11:57, 12 April 2024 (UTC)

Yeah, agreed about the culture war – honestly, I've given up on enforcing civility on this wiki (same goes for the comment claiming "anyone who announces 'My pronouns are ...' should be laughed at", which is ignorant of the many who suffer from gender dysphoria). The eclipse must've been cool to see! I've yet to see a full eclipse (only seen a partial before), but it's interesting (but not surprising) to hear about the temperature drop. If you don't mind me asking, where'd you to see the eclipse? --SHB2000 (talk | contribs | meta) 12:06, 12 April 2024 (UTC)

This is the closest point I can find to where we were standing. I did want to go to the beach, but even in this small town, there were hordes of people. Ground Zero (talk) 12:25, 12 April 2024 (UTC)

• 1 Wellingon, Prince Edward County. 

Yeah, I'm not surprised by the large swathes of people. After all, it's not a common occurrence that you see. --SHB2000 (talk | contribs | meta) 12:28, 12 April 2024 (UTC)

This Month in GLAM: March 2024

This Month in GLAM – Volume XIV, Issue III, March 2024 Headlines Albania report: WikiGap Tirana 2024 Australia report: Art+Feminism in Australia Belgium report: Belgian Public domain day and Wiki Loves Heritage awards on March 7 Brazil report: A GLAM focus on Rio de Janeiro; Archivos en vigília Colombia report: Making the public domain visible on Wikidata; In Colombia Women are historical Italy report: GLAM call winner projects Netherlands report: GLAMorousToHTML - a tool to list Wikipedia articles that include images from a given Commons category New Zealand report: Update on Wikidata:WikiProject Te Papa research expeditions and the Wikipedian at Large Poland report: What's up in GLAM-Wiki in Poland in March Sweden report: More photo memories – and the community is helping out; Yearly student project Switzerland report: Swiss GLAM Programme UK report: A small problem with the Ottoman Empire USA report: GLAM CSI and WikiPortraits launch and more meetups Biodiversity Heritage Library report: BHL-Wiki Working Group March monthly highlights Content Partnerships Hub report: GLAMorousToHTML - a tool to list Wikipedia articles that include images from a given Commons category Structured Data on Wikimedia Commons report: WikiLearn course for OpenRefine on Wikimedia Commons WMF GLAM report: Learn to upload to Commons with OpenRefine and get up to date on the International Museum Day, GLAM CSI, WiLMa Network, and WikiWorkshop Calendar: April's GLAM events Read this edition in full • Single-page To assist with preparing the newsletter, please visit the newsroom. Past editions may be viewed here.

About This Month in GLAM · Subscribe/Unsubscribe · Global message delivery · Romaine 01:55, 11 April 2024 (UTC)

Tech News: 2024-16

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Problems

• Between 2 April and 8 April, on wikis using Flagged Revisions, the "Reverted" tag was not applied to undone edits. In addition, page moves, protections and imports were not autoreviewed. This problem is now fixed.

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 16 April. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 17 April. It will be on all wikis from 18 April (calendar).
• Default category sort keys will now affect categories added by templates placed in footnotes. Previously footnotes used the page title as the default sort key even if a different default sort key was specified (category-specific sort keys already worked).
• A new variable page_last_edit_age will be added to abuse filters. It tells how many seconds ago the last edit to a page was made.

Future changes

• Volunteer developers are kindly asked to update the code of their tools and features to handle temporary accounts. Learn more.
• Four database fields will be removed from database replicas (including Quarry). This affects only the abuse_filter and abuse_filter_history tables. Some queries might need to be updated.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

MediaWiki message delivery 23:29, 15 April 2024 (UTC)

Tech News: 2024-17

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent changes

• Starting this week, newcomers editing Wikipedia will be encouraged to try structured tasks. Structured tasks have been shown to improve newcomer activation and retention.
• You can nominate your favorite tools for the fifth edition of the Coolest Tool Award. Nominations will be open until May 10.

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 23 April. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 24 April. It will be on all wikis from 25 April (calendar).

Future changes

• This is the last warning that by the end of May 2024 the Vector 2022 skin will no longer share site and user scripts/styles with old Vector. For user-scripts that you want to keep using on Vector 2022, copy the contents of Special:MyPage/vector.js to Special:MyPage/vector-2022.js. There are more technical details available. Interface administrators who foresee this leading to lots of technical support questions may wish to send a mass message to your community, as was done on French Wikipedia.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

MediaWiki message delivery 20:28, 22 April 2024 (UTC)

Growth News, April 2024

The Growth team will now send quarterly reports to keep you in the loop. Growth team weekly updates are available on wiki (in English) if you want to know more about our day-to-day work.

If you want to receive more general updates about technical activity happening across the Wikimedia movement (including Growth work), we encourage you to subscribe to Tech News.

Community Configuration

Growth features are currently configurable at Special:EditGrowthConfig. This quarter we are working on making Community Configuration accessible for other MediaWiki developers while also moving Growth feature configuration to the new CommunityConfiguration extension.

An early version of Community Configuration can be tested at Spanish Beta Wikipedia. We plan to release the new Community Configuration extension to pilot wikis (Arabic and Spanish Wikipedia) in early May, 2024. The first non-Growth team feature to utilize Community Configuration will be Automoderator.

In parallel with the development, the Growth team will propose Community Configuration usage guidelines, Community Configuration design guidelines, and provide technical documentation.

Experiment Results

Add a Image experiment analysis results

The Growth team conducted an experiment to assess the impact of the “Add an Image” structured task on the Newcomer Homepage's "Suggested Edits" module. This analysis finds that the Add an Image structured task leads to an increase in newcomer participation on the mobile web platform, particularly by making constructive (non-reverted) article edits:

• The likelihood that mobile web newcomers make their first article edit (+17.0% over baseline)
• The likelihood that they are retained as newcomers (+24.3% over baseline)
• The number of edits they make during their first two weeks on the wiki (+21.8% over baseline)
• A lower probability of the newcomers' edits will be reverted (-3.3% over baseline).

Personalized praise experiment results

This feature was developed for Mentors as part of the Growth team's Positive Reinforcement project. When A/B testing on Spanish Wikipedia, we found no significant impact on retention, but we found a significant positive impact on newcomer productivity. However, we concluded that the results weren’t positive enough to justify the time investment from Mentors. We plan to discuss this feature with our pilot wikis, and consider further improvements before scaling this feature further. Meanwhile, communities willing to test the feature can ask to have it deployed. (T361763)

English donors encouraged to try editing

As in previous years, donors were directed to a Thank you page after donation (example). However, this year we tested a new “Try editing Wikipedia,” call to action on the Thank You page. This call to action linked to a unique account creation page. From this account creation page we were able to track Registrations and Activation (editing for the first time). During the English banner campaign, the Donor Thank you page led to 4,398 new accounts, and 441 of those accounts went on to constructively edit within 24 hours. (T352900)

Future work

Annual Plan

The Growth team and the Editing team will work on the WE1.2 Key Result in the coming fiscal year. We will start initial discussions with communities soon to help finalize our plans. (T361657)

Newcomer Homepage Community Updates module

We plan to A/B test adding a new Community Configurable module to the Newcomer Homepage that will allow communities to highlight specific events, projects, campaigns, and initiatives. We are early in the planning phase of this project that will take place first at our pilot wikis and wikis volunteering. We welcome community feedback on initial designs and plans, in any language at our project talk page.

Growth team's newsletter prepared by the Growth team and posted by bot • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

18:55, 23 April 2024 (UTC)

The Signpost: 25 April 2024

News, reports and features from the English Wikipedia's newspaper

• In the media: Censorship and wikiwashing looming over RuWiki, edit wars over San Francisco politics and another wikirace on live TV

• News and notes: A sigh of relief for open access as Italy makes a slight U-turn on their cultural heritage reproduction law

• WikiConference report: WikiConference North America 2023 in Toronto recap

• WikiProject report: WikiProject Newspapers (Not WP:NOTNEWS)

• Recent research: New survey of over 100,000 Wikipedia users

• Traffic report: O.J., cricket and a three body problem

Read this Signpost in full · Single-page · Unsubscribe · Global message delivery 11:51, 25 April 2024 (UTC)

Newbie

This newbie seemed particularly slow to get the nessafe. I think that Ibaman made the case, but the heavier kept pushing. Then IK made the point indirectly, but the newbie still didn't get it. I agree with not biting newbies, but this one didn't seem to want to listen. Ground Zero (talk) 02:24, 28 April 2024 (UTC)

That's very true; some people are slower than others to learn, but at least we eventually got there. --SHB2000 (talk | contribs | meta) 02:26, 28 April 2024 (UTC)

I will say, though, if I were a newbie, having a bunch of links thrown at me isn't a very good approach for getting me to stay, at least per WP:IJME. SHB2000 (talk | contribs | meta) 02:56, 28 April 2024 (UTC)

This Month in Education: March 2024

This Month in Education

Volume 13 • Issue 3 • March 2024

Contents • Headlines • Subscribe

In This Issue

• Reading Wikipedia in the classroom, Kaduna
• Reading Wikipedia in Ukraine – the course for educators is now available on demand
• Wiki Movement Brazil will once again support the Brazilian Linguistics Olympiad
• Wikipedia within the Education Setting in Albania

About This Month in Education · Subscribe/Unsubscribe · Global message delivery · For the team: ZI Jony 07:28, 28 April 2024 (UTC)

Tech News: 2024-18

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent changes

Example of a talk page with the new design, in French.

• The appearance of talk pages changed for the following wikis: Azerbaijani Wikipedia, Bengali Wikipedia, German Wikipedia, Persian Wikipedia, Hebrew Wikipedia, Hindi Wikipedia, Indonesian Wikipedia, Korean Wikipedia, Dutch Wikipedia, Portuguese Wikipedia, Romanian Wikipedia, Thai Wikipedia, Turkish Wikipedia, Ukrainian Wikipedia, Vietnamese Wikipedia. These wikis participated to a test, where 50% of users got the new design, for one year. As this test gave positive results, the new design is deployed on these wikis as the default design. It is possible to opt-out these changes in user preferences ("Show discussion activity"). The deployment will happen at all wikis in the coming weeks.
• Seven new wikis have been created:
  • a Wikipedia in Betawi (w:bew:)
  • a Wikipedia in Kusaal (w:kus:)
  • a Wikipedia in Igala (w:igl:)
  • a Wiktionary in Karakalpak (wikt:kaa:)
  • a Wikisource in Burmese (s:my:)
  • a Wikisource in Malay (s:ms:)
  • a Wikisource in Georgian (s:ka:)
• You can now watch message groups/projects on Translatewiki.net. Initially, this feature will notify you of added or deleted messages in these groups.
• Dark mode is now available on all wikis, on mobile web for logged-in users who opt into the advanced mode. This is the early release of the feature. Technical editors are invited to check for accessibility issues on wikis. See more detailed guidelines.

Problems

• Kartographer maps can use an alternative visual style without labels, by using mapstyle="osm". This wasn't working in previews, creating the wrong impression that it wasn't supported. This has now been fixed.

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 30 April. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 1 May. It will be on all wikis from 2 May (calendar).

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

MediaWiki message delivery 03:34, 30 April 2024 (UTC)

French national parks

Thanks for creating articles on French national parks. However, I notice that several of them (by you or others) were marked as usable, although they lacked info on fees and permits and on getting around, and had no advice on getting in other than by private vehicle (mostly just mentioning what roads lead there).

In some other park articles:

• "As always with National or Regional Parks in France, there are no entrance fees, and in fact the entrance itself will not be easily located along the road. Only a small signpost generally marks it."
• "Permits can be found at the park administration website." – the link is to the department website, where I didn't find any mention of permits for the park, but my French is lacking, so something could be hiding there.
• "As with all other French national parks, going off a marked road or travel via your vehicle is prohibited in order to preserve the landscape."
• "The code of conduct, Code de Bonne Conduite, can be obtained at the tourist office" – might that be true also for other parks? Is there a general Code de Bonne Conduite covering them all?

If the fees and permits are mostly uniform across all parks, they could be handled in one place, linked from the park articles. I still assume that there are local peculiarities, and without checking for those we shouldn't think an article is usable.

Getting in by bus should be covered and, if bikes are mentioned, some characterisation of the entry route from the perspective of bikers. Also, if one cannot reach the sights by car/bus/bike, that should be mentioned either in Get around or the individual listings, with directions ("a 5-km hike along a marked trail from [bus stop]" or the like). Also, the Camping and Backcountry sections are mostly empty. Are there usually camping sites? Is backcountry camping allowed? I assume you should stay on marked trails, but whether or not should be covered.

–LPfi (talk) 10:29, 30 April 2024 (UTC)

Agreed regarding the Fees and permits – I will slowly add them once I get the motivation to do so. About the accommodation, it isn't required for usable articles to have all of those filled in – only a minimum of one listing is required per Wikivoyage:Park article status (that page isn't clear, but it's naturally assumed from Wikivoyage:City article status – otherwise we'd be demoting hundreds of park articles if this weren't the case). --SHB2000 (talk | contribs | meta) 10:57, 30 April 2024 (UTC)

Anyway, I won't be very active on this site next month (draining in uni work :-(), but I'll try to slowly fix them. --SHB2000 (talk | contribs | meta) 11:51, 30 April 2024 (UTC)

No problem, this is long-term work and I just happened to notice that you had created some of them. Get around isn't needed for usable, but I think it should be there for high-quality usable articles, which should be aimed for. For Sleep, I think "information on accommodation" means general information rather than one listing.

For a Finnish national park, saying that there are wilderness huts mostly as needed along the marked or otherwise popular routes is much more useful than creating a listing for one of them – which I would think of as gaming the system.

If you can access most sites by car and there's a car-accessible lodging, that might suffice, but if you are supposed to do overnight hikes in other parts of the park, then it is woefully inadequate. Most of those park articles don't tell.

Good luck with the uni!

–LPfi (talk) 12:11, 30 April 2024 (UTC)

Thank you! I do agree we should aim for high-quality usable articles overall (and it's great that the number of high-quality usable substantially higher than it was in 2013 thanks to people like you). --SHB2000 (talk | contribs | meta) 12:24, 30 April 2024 (UTC)

Reminder to vote now to select members of the first U4C

You can find this message translated into additional languages on Meta-wiki. Please help translate to your language

Dear Wikimedian,

You are receiving this message because you previously participated in the UCoC process.

This is a reminder that the voting period for the Universal Code of Conduct Coordinating Committee (U4C) ends on May 9, 2024. Read the information on the voting page on Meta-wiki to learn more about voting and voter eligibility.

The Universal Code of Conduct Coordinating Committee (U4C) is a global group dedicated to providing an equitable and consistent implementation of the UCoC. Community members were invited to submit their applications for the U4C. For more information and the responsibilities of the U4C, please review the U4C Charter.

Please share this message with members of your community so they can participate as well.

On behalf of the UCoC project team,

RamzyM (WMF) 23:10, 2 May 2024 (UTC)

Green card

@SHB2000, i won a green card. Template:Smiley Lionel Cristiano (talk) 19:20, 4 May 2024 (UTC)

wait, what's a green card? To me, it's synonymous with a permanent residency card. (I'm genuinely confused haha) --SHB2000 (talk | contribs | meta) 22:42, 4 May 2024 (UTC)

Yes, a U.S. permanent residency card. Congratulations, Lionel! Ikan Kekek (talk) 23:39, 4 May 2024 (UTC)

Oh, righty. I second Ikan; congratulations! --SHB2000 (talk | contribs | meta) 00:36, 5 May 2024 (UTC)

Gender in the UCOC

Hi SHB2000, I've seen this section of the m:UCOC mentioned a few times here, and since it's off-topic for the Talk:Buddhism page where you were talking about this with @Ikan Kekek and @Pashley (apologies to anyone I've forgotten), I thought I'd borrow your talk page. Here's what it says:

---

Respect the way that contributors name and describe themselves. People may use specific terms to describe themselves. As a sign of respect, use these terms when communicating with or about these people, where linguistically or technically feasible. Examples include: [....]

• People who identify with a certain sexual orientation or gender identity using distinct names or pronouns;

---

What this means is:

• If someone directly tells you "I'm a man", then you should not show disrespect for that person by saying he's lying or by directly calling that person a woman.

What this does not mean is:

• If you accidentally guess wrong, don't see a gender disclosed, forgot that the person previously said what their gender is, didn't take the time check the userpage first to see whether a gender is disclosed, etc., then doing your best (e.g., guessing from the username) is either bad or sanctionable.

They're trying to stop the kinds of exchanges that sound like:

• "Actually, I'm a woman" – "No, you aren't, and I'm going to keep calling you he because I know you're a man", and
• "Actually, I'm trans" – "Our community doesn't accept people like you".

People living in western democracies may find it hard to believe, but pre-UCOC, we actually had at least one Wikipedia that banned gay editors in their policies. Disclosing on your user page was a blockable offense there, even if you never touched a related article.

The main thing to remember is that the UCOC isn't concerned with the kinds of mistakes that all humans make occasionally. That policy is primarily concerned with deliberately malicious behavior. WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:38, 5 May 2024 (UTC)

Oh, I see; that makes sense, WhatamIdoing. I'm actually quite shocked with the Wikipedia policy, but even the western world 15–20 years ago was a very different place than it is today. --SHB2000 (talk | contribs | meta) 21:26, 5 May 2024 (UTC)

Actually, I'm not surprised, thinking about it. swwiki recently blocked a user for reporting an admin's anti-queer style of editing. --SHB2000 (talk | contribs | meta) 03:32, 6 May 2024 (UTC)

It is shocking from our perspective, but as you say, it's not entirely surprising, after you think about it for a bit. If memory serves, that Wikipedia was for a language primarily spoken in a developing country where gay relationships are criminalized. If you want your language's Wikipedia to be respected (especially by teachers or others who might be sensitive to child safety issues), then someone might think it was a good idea to set up a policy to exclude those "criminals". Creating a global rule against this actually relieves some local groups from pressure. (The English Wikipedia is fond of saying that nobody asked for it, but multiple affiliates actually did ask for the UCOC, and enwiki says that about everything, even if you give them evidence of the request being made at enwiki's own Village pump as a community-initiated, CENT-listed RFC. Such claims are basically always wrong, and really mean "The individual complaining about this did not personally ask for it".) Now the affiliates can tell their local politicians and pressure groups "Sorry, I know about our anti-gay laws, and we're all very patriotic here, but Wikipedia is run by a US organization that requires non-discrimination, so there's just nothing we can do about it". WhatamIdoing (talk) 06:41, 6 May 2024 (UTC)

Figures out – I guess it really does put you in a difficult position if you lived in a country with anti-homosexuality laws, and I say this as someone who's ace, but at least the UCoC helps alleviate this issue. (also agreed on the enwiki bit – enwiki really likes to act as if it were in its own WMF world at times) --SHB2000 (talk | contribs | meta) 06:49, 6 May 2024 (UTC)

Tech News: 2024-19

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent changes

Example of a talk page with the new design, in French.

• The appearance of talk pages changed for all wikis, except for Commons, Wikidata and most Wikipedias (a few have already received this design change). You can read the detail of the changes on Diff. It is possible to opt-out these changes in user preferences ("Show discussion activity"). The deployment will happen at remaining wikis in the coming weeks.
• Interface admins now have greater control over the styling of article components on mobile with the introduction of the SiteAdminHelper. More information on how styles can be disabled can be found at the extension's page.
• Wikimedia Enterprise has added article body sections in JSON format and a curated short description field to the existing parsed Infobox. This expansion to the API is also available via Wikimedia Cloud Services.

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 7 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 8 May. It will be on all wikis from 9 May (calendar).
• When you look at the Special:Log page, the first view is labelled "All public logs", but it only shows some logs. This label will now say "Main public logs".

Future changes

• A new service will be built to replace Extension:Graph. Details can be found in the latest update regarding this extension.
• Starting May 21, English Wikipedia and German Wikipedia will get the possibility to activate "Add a link". This is part of the progressive deployment of this tool to all Wikipedias. These communities can activate and configure the feature locally.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

MediaWiki message delivery 16:45, 6 May 2024 (UTC)

This Month in GLAM: April 2024

This Month in GLAM – Volume XIV, Issue IV, April 2024 Headlines Albania report: International Roma Day Editathon in Albania and Kosovo, 2024 Australia report: New images from Central Australia on Wikimedia Commons, Library Science WikiProject students edit Wikipedia & 1Lib1Ref in Australia and New Zealand Brazil report: Wiki Library Month Czech Republic report: 2023 became a promissing year for wiki-residents and partnerships in CR Kosovo report: International Roma Day Editathon in Albania and Kosovo, 2024 Netherlands report: Informal GLAM hack session New Zealand report: Te Papa research expeditions and the Wikipedian at Large North Macedonia report: Climate Changes and GLAM Poland report: What's up in GLAM-Wiki in Poland in April Spain report: SMALL GLAM SLAM Sweden report: 100 000 bildminnen; Metabase Switzerland report: UK report: Swiss GLAM Programme USA report: Heaven on Earth at last? Biodiversity Heritage Library report: BHL-Wiki Working Group April monthly highlights AvoinGLAM report: AI Sauna quick reflection Structured Data on Wikimedia Commons report: OpenRefine online courses in more languages, and certified trainers WMF GLAM report: OpenRefine course in three more languages and International Museum Day challenges Calendar: May's GLAM events Read this edition in full • Single-page To assist with preparing the newsletter, please visit the newsroom. Past editions may be viewed here.

About This Month in GLAM · Subscribe/Unsubscribe · Global message delivery · Romaine 06:43, 11 May 2024 (UTC)

Tech News: 2024-20

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent changes

• On Wikisource there is a special page listing pages of works without corresponding scan images. Now you can use the new magic word to exclude certain pages (list of editions or translations of works) from that list.
• If you use the user-preference "Show preview without reloading the page", then the template-page feature "Preview page with this template" will now also work without reloading the page.
• Kartographer maps can now specify an alternative text via the alt= attribute. This is identical in usage to the alt= attribute in the image and gallery syntax. An exception for this feature is wikis like Wikivoyage where the miniature maps are interactive.
• The old Guided Tour for the "New Filters for Edit Review" feature has been removed. It was created in 2017 to show people with older accounts how the interface had changed, and has now been seen by most of the intended people.

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 14 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 15 May. It will be on all wikis from 16 May (calendar).
• The Special:Search results page will now use CSS flex attributes, for better accessibility, instead of a table. If you have a gadget or script that adjusts search results, you should update your script to the new HTML structure.

Future changes

• In the Vector 2022 skin, main pages will be displayed at full width (like special pages). The goal is to keep the number of characters per line large enough. This is related to the coming changes to typography in Vector 2022. Learn more.
• Two columns of the pagelinks database table (pl_namespace and pl_title) are being dropped soon. Users must use two columns of the new linktarget table instead (lt_namespace and lt_title). In your existing SQL queries:
  1. Replace JOIN pagelinks with JOIN linktarget and pl_ with lt_ in the ON statement
  2. Below that add JOIN pagelinks ON lt_id = pl_target_id
  • See phab:T222224 for technical reasoning.

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MediaWiki message delivery 23:59, 13 May 2024 (UTC)

This Month in Education: April 2024

This Month in Education

Volume 13 • Issue 4 • April 2024

Contents • Headlines • Subscribe

In This Issue

• EduWiki Updates From Uganda
• Good news from Bolivia: Reading Wikipedia Program continues in 2024
• Hearing Health Project: Impactful partnership with Wiki Movement Brazil
• Wikimedia Spain, Amical Wikimedia and the University of Valencia develop Wikipedia educational project

About This Month in Education · Subscribe/Unsubscribe · Global message delivery · For the team: ZI Jony 03:20, 14 May 2024 (UTC)

The Signpost: 16 May 2024

News, reports and features from the English Wikipedia's newspaper

• News and notes: Democracy in action: multiple elections

• Special report: Will the new RfA reform come to the rescue of administrators?

• Arbitration report: Ruined temples for posterity to ponder over – arbitration from '22 to '24

• In the media: Deadnames on the French Wikipedia, and a duel between Russian wikis

• Op-Ed: Wikidata to split as sheer volume of information overloads infrastructure

• Comix: Generations

• Traffic report: Crawl out through the fallout, baby

Read this Signpost in full · Single-page · Unsubscribe · Global message delivery 11:01, 16 May 2024 (UTC)

blocked ip address

i tried to edit a post today, but get the following message;

You do not have permission to edit this page, for the following reason: Your username or IP address is blocked from doing this. You may still be able to do other things on this site, such as editing certain pages. You can view the full block details at account contributions. The block was made by ‪SHB2000‬. The reason given is /32 range exclusively used by Brendan since late 2021. If you've been affected by this range block, please leave a message on User talk:SHB2000. Start of block: 08:54, 29 April 2024 Expiration of block: 08:54, 29 October 2024 Intended blockee: 2001:8004:0:0:0:0:0:0/32 Block ID #23146.

not sure who brendan is, but it looks like anyone in the region using 4g will be blocked. is that the desired outcome? 2001:8004:5170:6009:9063:BF69:95A1:87F 23:38, 16 May 2024 (UTC)

Hello, Brendan is an LTA based in SEQ (Maroochydore specifically) who used to routinely IP hop using different addresses from that range. I've unblocked that IP range so you can edit. Hope that clarifies things! --SHB2000 (t | c | m) 00:46, 17 May 2024 (UTC)

thank you, i'm in the northern rivers... certainly a baptism of fire here! 58.171.95.231 03:19, 17 May 2024 (UTC)

Yeah, when I usually block a /32 range, I make sure that innocent users affected by it can still contact me since it's a large range to block – it's also why it's only used in mainspace. What I was surprised was that it affected people south of the border too. --SHB2000 (t | c | m) 07:24, 17 May 2024 (UTC)

A /32 range covers 4 billion /64 blocks. I don't know how the IPv6 blocks are allocated, but such a range could easily be enough for much more than an Australian state. –LPfi (talk) 08:15, 17 May 2024 (UTC)

The /32 rangeblocks are usually very effective in tacking Brendan edits, as I've done several times before, but only use them in extreme circumstances (even more so than the criteria stewards use to global rangeblock /32 IPs). --SHB2000 (t | c | m) 08:58, 17 May 2024 (UTC)

Are those criteria public? It would be nice to know how these allocations work and how the reasoning about them goes. –LPfi (talk) 09:23, 17 May 2024 (UTC)

No, and even I don't know the full criteria, but often those blocks are mirrored on Meta-Wiki if disruption continues from those ranges and you can imply the reason on a case-by-case (we don't have an exact block policy on Meta, but I've just abstained from doing range blocks over there and letting the stewards do it). --SHB2000 (t | c | m) 09:28, 17 May 2024 (UTC)

OK. I wonder whether /48 blocks (or somesuch) could be used in some of the cases where one is tempted to use /32. That would be 64 thousand /64 blocks instead of the 4 billion. –LPfi (talk) 09:57, 17 May 2024 (UTC)

I believe I've used /48 blocks in the past, though I can't remember if they were full blocks or namespace-specific blocks (or a bit of both). --SHB2000 (t | c | m) 10:09, 17 May 2024 (UTC)

Though I do wonder if a /38 block would be better in this case. --SHB2000 (t | c | m) 10:12, 17 May 2024 (UTC)

Whatever covers the IPs you want to block and not too many others. /38 is still many million /64 blocks. –LPfi (talk) 18:06, 17 May 2024 (UTC)

Tech News: 2024-21

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent changes

• The Nuke feature, which enables administrators to mass delete pages, will now correctly delete pages which were moved to another title.
• New changes have been made to the UploadWizard in Wikimedia Commons: the overall layout has been improved, by following new styling and spacing for the form and its fields; the headers and helper text for each of the fields was changed; the Caption field is now a required field, and there is an option for users to copy their caption into the media description.

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 21 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 22 May. It will be on all wikis from 23 May (calendar).
• The HTML used to render all headings is being changed to improve accessibility. It will change on 22 May in some skins (Timeless, Modern, CologneBlue, Nostalgia, and Monobook). Please test gadgets on your wiki on these skins and report any related problems so that they can be resolved before this change is made in all other skins. The developers are also considering the introduction of a Gadget API for adding buttons to section titles if that would be helpful to tool creators, and would appreciate any input you have on that.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

MediaWiki message delivery 23:04, 20 May 2024 (UTC)

Tech News: 2024-22

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent changes

• Several bugs related to the latest updates to the UploadWizard on Wikimedia Commons have been fixed. For more information, see T365107 and T365119.
• In March 2024 a new addPortlet API was added to allow gadgets to create new portlets (menus) in the skin. In certain skins this can be used to create dropdowns. Gadget developers are invited to try it and give feedback.
• Some CSS in the Minerva skin has been removed to enable easier community configuration. Interface editors should check the rendering on mobile devices for aspects related to the classes: .collapsible, .multicol, .reflist, .coordinates, .topicon. Further details are available on replacement CSS if it is needed.

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 28 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 29 May. It will be on all wikis from 30 May (calendar).
• When you visit a wiki where you don't yet have a local account, local rules such as edit filters can sometimes prevent your account from being created. Starting this week, MediaWiki takes your global rights into account when evaluating whether you can override such local rules.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

MediaWiki message delivery 00:15, 28 May 2024 (UTC)

userpage

hey, i had been scratching my head trying to workout how to add linkable toc on my userpage banner, then stumbled across your userpage, which had exactly what i was trying to achieve. i do hope you don't take offense that i have used your tech on my page, but do thank you for this knowledge... Gecktrek (talk) 10:18, 24 May 2024 (UTC)

@Gecktrek: Not a problem – please do feel free to take anything from my userpage as you wish! --SHB2000 (t | c | m) 10:20, 24 May 2024 (UTC)

one more question if you don't mind, i've noticed that many of the indonesian cities don't have a climate template, given the weather is crucial to know, if i add them to a few places, where is the best place to put them? it appears to be in the 'understand' section, but in many pages, this is not in the usual place on the page. should i move the understand section to the correct position first, before adding the climate template? sorry for the long question. Gecktrek (talk) 13:03, 27 May 2024 (UTC)

Yes, under Understand would be good. --SHB2000 (t | c | m) 13:04, 27 May 2024 (UTC)

many thanks... Gecktrek (talk) 13:09, 27 May 2024 (UTC)

is there anyway of centering the the mapframe contents, so all the location places (coloured dots) appear in the map you see? ~~~ Gecktrek (talk) 07:57, 30 May 2024 (UTC)

Yes, add the latitude in the first parameter and the longitude in the second parameter. It'd look something like {{mapframe|-39.593|153.495}} if those are your center coordinates. Hope that helps! --SHB2000 (t | c | m) 10:08, 30 May 2024 (UTC)

ah, so i manually pick the central spot, and take those co-ords for the mapframe... will give it a try, thanks again!  g e c k t r e k (Talk) 10:40, 30 May 2024 (UTC)

Yes – though the URL of OSM is also a good way to get centered coordinates. --SHB2000 (t | c | m) 10:57, 30 May 2024 (UTC)

Tech News: 2024-23

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent changes

• It is now possible for local administrators to add new links to the bottom of the site Tools menu without JavaScript. Documentation is available.
• The message name for the definition of the tracking category of WikiHiero has changed from "MediaWiki:Wikhiero-usage-tracking-category" to "MediaWiki:Wikihiero-usage-tracking-category".
• One new wiki has been created: a Wikipedia in Kadazandusun (w:dtp:)

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 4 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 5 June. It will be on all wikis from 6 June (calendar).

Future changes

• Next week, on wikis with the Vector 2022 skin as the default, logged-out desktop users will be able to choose between different font sizes. The default font size will also be increased for them. This is to make Wikimedia projects easier to read. Learn more.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

MediaWiki message delivery 22:35, 3 June 2024 (UTC)

The Signpost: 8 June 2024

News, reports and features from the English Wikipedia's newspaper

• News and notes: Wikimedia Foundation publishes its Form 990 for fiscal year 2022-2023

• Technology report: New Page Patrol receives a much-needed software upgrade

• Deletion report: The lore of Kalloor

• In the media: National cable networks get in on the action arguing about what the first sentence of a Wikipedia article ought to say

• News from the WMF: Progress on the plan — how the Wikimedia Foundation advanced on its Annual Plan goals during the first half of fiscal year 2023-2024

• Opinion: Public response to the editors of Settler Colonial Studies

• Recent research: ChatGPT did not kill Wikipedia, but might have reduced its growth

• Featured content: We didn't start the wiki

• Essay: No queerphobia

• Special report: RetractionBot is back to life!

• Traffic report: Chimps, Eurovision, and the return of the Baby Reindeer

• Comix: The Wikipediholic Family

• Humour: Wikipedia rattled by sophisticated cyberattack of schoolboy typing "balls" in infobox

• Concept: Palimpsestuous

Read this Signpost in full · Single-page · Unsubscribe · Global message delivery 12:30, 8 June 2024 (UTC)

This Month in GLAM: May 2024

This Month in GLAM – Volume XIV, Issue V, May 2024 Headlines Albania report: Summer of Wikivoyage Edit-a-thon in Kruja; Traditional Albanian food photography competition Brazil report: Open licensing guide from Midiateca Capixaba; Activities in Rio de Janeiro; First batch from LabDOC; New batch from NeuroMat; Hercule Florence photowalk Czech Republic report: International discussion on the role of media and new GLAM partnership on the horizon India report: Digitization concludes for Behar Herald and a digitization workshop held for libraries in Maharashtra Italy report: Edit-a-thons Kosovo report: Summer of Wikivoyage Edit-a-thon in Kruja & Traditional Albanian food photography competition Netherlands report: WikiconNL 2024 New Zealand report: Women in Architecture Edit-a-thon, Wikidata Te Papa research expeditions project and 1Lib1Ref Poland report: What's up in GLAM-Wiki in Poland in May Portugal report: The Search for the Lost Manuscripts Switzerland report: Swiss GLAM Programme UK report: Our first Igbo language article Ukraine report: Article campaigns for Ukrainian librarians, partnership with a national library USA report: WikiPortraits & Edit-a-thons Biodiversity Heritage Library report: BHL-Wiki Working Group May monthly highlights GLAM Wiki Meta pages revamp: GLAM Wiki Meta pages kicking off the Working Group WMF GLAM report: Introducing Alice Kibombo, a new dataset, and more Calendar: June's GLAM events Read this edition in full • Single-page To assist with preparing the newsletter, please visit the newsroom. Past editions may be viewed here.

About This Month in GLAM · Subscribe/Unsubscribe · Global message delivery · Romaine 14:25, 9 June 2024 (UTC)

Tech News: 2024-24

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent changes

• The software used to render SVG files has been updated to a new version, fixing many longstanding bugs in SVG rendering.
• The HTML used to render all headings is being changed to improve accessibility. It was changed last week in some skins (Vector legacy and Minerva). Please test gadgets on your wiki on these skins and report any related problems so that they can be resolved before this change is made in Vector-2022. The developers are still considering the introduction of a Gadget API for adding buttons to section titles if that would be helpful to tool creators, and would appreciate any input you have on that.
• The HTML markup used for citations by Parsoid changed last week. In places where Parsoid previously added the mw-reference-text class, Parsoid now also adds the reference-text class for better compatibility with the legacy parser. More details are available.

Problems

• There was a bug with the Content Translation interface that caused the tools menus to appear in the wrong location. This has now been fixed.

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 11 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 12 June. It will be on all wikis from 13 June (calendar).
• The new version of MediaWiki includes another change to the HTML markup used for citations: Parsoid will now generate a <span class="mw-cite-backlink"> wrapper for both named and unnamed references for better compatibility with the legacy parser. Interface administrators should verify that gadgets that interact with citations are compatible with the new markup. More details are available.
• On multilingual wikis that use the <translate> system, there is a feature that shows potentially-outdated translations with a pink background until they are updated or confirmed. From this week, confirming translations will be logged, and there is a new user-right that can be required for confirming translations if the community requests it.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

MediaWiki message delivery 20:20, 10 June 2024 (UTC)

This Month in Education: May 2024

This Month in Education

Volume 13 • Issue 5 • May 2024

Contents • Headlines • Subscribe

In This Issue

• Albania - Georgia Wikimedia Cooperation 2024
• Aleksandër Xhuvani University Editathon in Elbasan
• Central Bicol State University of Agriculture LitFest features translation and article writing on Wikipedia
• Empowering Youth Council in Bulqiza through editathons
• We left a piece of our hearts at Arhavi
• Wiki Movimento Brasil at Tech Week and Education Speaker Series
• Wikimedia MKD trains new users in collaboration with MYLA

About This Month in Education · Subscribe/Unsubscribe · Global message delivery · For the team: ZI Jony 13:30, 15 June 2024 (UTC)

Tech News: 2024-25

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent changes

• People who attempt to add an external link in the visual editor will now receive immediate feedback if they attempt to link to a domain that a project has decided to block. Please see Edit check for more details.
• The new Community Configuration extension is available on Test Wikipedia. This extension allows communities to customize specific features to meet their local needs. Currently only Growth features are configurable, but the extension will support other Community Configuration use cases in the future.
• The dark mode beta feature is now available on category and help pages, as well as more special pages. There may be contrast issues. Please report bugs on the project talk page.

Problems

• Cloud Services tools were not available for 25 minutes last week. This was caused by a faulty hardware cable in the data center.
• Last week, styling updates were made to the Vector 2022 skin. This caused unforeseen issues with templates, hatnotes, and images. Changes to templates and hatnotes were reverted. Most issues with images were fixed. If you still see any, report them here.

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 18 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 19 June. It will be on all wikis from 20 June (calendar).
• Starting June 18, the Reference Edit Check will be deployed to a new set of Wikipedias. This feature is intended to help newcomers and to assist edit-patrollers by inviting people who are adding new content to a Wikipedia article to add a citation when they do not do so themselves. During a test at 11 wikis, the number of citations added more than doubled when Reference Check was shown to people. Reference Check is community configurable.
• Mailing lists will be unavailable for roughly two hours on Tuesday 10:00–12:00 UTC. This is to enable migration to a new server and upgrade its software.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

MediaWiki message delivery 23:49, 17 June 2024 (UTC)

Aussie oddities?

User:Daceyvillain recently blanked both User:Voyage2023/Sydney/Eastern Suburbs and User:Voyage2023/Sydney/South-Eastern Suburbs with the edit comment "User is tricking readers by spreading misinformation on a user page which is crafted to look like an official page". Both users have been around since late 2023 & have many contributions, most or all around Sydney.

I suspect something weird is going on here, but am not sure what & I lack local knowledge. Can you take a look? Pashley (talk) 01:52, 22 June 2024 (UTC)

@Pashley: I think that's because Voyage2023 on enwiki has a tendency to push a certain region boundary and I think they were banned for that? (don't quote me on that)

I've reverted Daceyvillain's edits, though – there isn't any policy (local or global) that prohibits this kind of material in userspace anyway. --SHB2000 (t | c | m) 02:00, 22 June 2024 (UTC)

FWIW, Voyage2023 was just banned from Wikipedia (yet again) for various reasons (vandalism, sockpuppetry, harrassment, etc)

My issue with their user pages here is that they are essentially putting misinformation on Wikivoyage in order to take advantage of Wikivoyage’s Google Search ranking. In particular, Google now shows the same misinformation and lists Wikivoyage as a source, but the source is actually just their user page and not a normal page on Wikivoyage. So this seems very broken.

Anyway, sorry for any controversy. Some more context here (at the bottom)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Daceyvillain Daceyvillain (talk) 10:29, 22 June 2024 (UTC)

In that case, I'd just NOINDEX it SHB2000 (t | c | m) 12:05, 22 June 2024 (UTC)

Thanks! Daceyvillain (talk) 10:32, 23 June 2024 (UTC)

Glad I could help :-) (and don't feel the need to apologise). --SHB2000 (t | c | m) 10:47, 23 June 2024 (UTC)

Tech News: 2024-26

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent changes

• Editors will notice that there have been some changes to the background color of text in the diff view, and the color of the byte-change numbers, last week. These changes are intended to make text more readable in both light mode and dark mode, and are part of a larger effort to increase accessibility. You can share your comments or questions on the project talkpage.
• The text colors that are used for visited-links, hovered-links, and active-links, were also slightly changed last week to improve their accessibility in both light mode and dark mode.

Problems

• You can copy permanent links to talk page comments by clicking on a comment's timestamp. This feature did not always work when the topic title was very long and the link was used as a wikitext link. This has been fixed. Thanks to Lofhi for submitting the bug.

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 25 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 26 June. It will be on all wikis from 27 June (calendar).
• Starting 26 June, all talk pages messages' timestamps will become a link at English Wikipedia, making this feature available for you to use at all wikis. This link is a permanent link to the comment. It allows users to find the comment they were linked to, even if this comment has since been moved elsewhere. You can read more about this feature on Diff or on Mediawiki.org.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

MediaWiki message delivery 22:33, 24 June 2024 (UTC)

Tech News: 2024-27

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent changes

• Over the next three weeks, dark mode will become available for all users, both logged-in and logged-out, starting with the mobile web version. This fulfils one of the top-requested community wishes, and improves low-contrast reading and usage in low-light settings. As part of these changes, dark mode will also work on User-pages and Portals. There is more information in the latest Web team update.
• Logged-in users can now set global preferences for the text-size and dark-mode, thanks to a combined effort across Foundation teams. This allows Wikimedians using multiple wikis to set up a consistent reading experience easily, for example by switching between light and dark mode only once for all wikis.
• If you use a very old web browser some features might not work on the Wikimedia wikis. This affects Internet Explorer 11 and versions of Chrome, Firefox and Safari older than 2016. This change makes it possible to use new CSS features and to send less code to all readers.
• Wikipedia Admins can customize local wiki configuration options easily using Community Configuration. Community Configuration was created to allow communities to customize how some features work, because each language wiki has unique needs. At the moment, admins can configure Growth features on their home wikis, in order to better recruit and retain new editors. More options will be provided in the coming months.
• Editors interested in language issues that are related to Unicode standards, can now discuss those topics at a new conversation space in MediaWiki.org. The Wikimedia Foundation is now a member of the Unicode Consortium, and the coordination group can collaboratively review the issues discussed and, where appropriate, bring them to the attention of the Unicode Consortium.
• One new wiki has been created: a Wikipedia in Mandailing (w:btm:)

Problems

• Editors can once again click on links within the visual editor's citation-preview, thanks to a bug fix by the Editing Team.

Future changes

• Please help us to improve Tech News by taking this short survey. The goal is to better meet the needs of the various types of people who read Tech News. The survey will be open for 2 weeks. The survey is covered by this privacy statement. Some translations are available.

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MediaWiki message delivery 23:59, 1 July 2024 (UTC)

The Signpost: 4 July 2024

News, reports and features from the English Wikipedia's newspaper

• News and notes: WMF board elections and fundraising updates

• Special report: Wikimedia Movement Charter ratification vote underway, new Council may surpass power of Board

• In focus: How the Russian Wikipedia keeps it clean despite having just a couple dozen administatrors

• Discussion report: Wikipedians are hung up on the meaning of Madonna

• In the media: War and information in war and politics

• Sister projects: On editing Wikisource

• Obituary: Hanif Al Husaini, Salazarov and Hyacinth

• Opinion: Etika: a Pop Culture Champion

• Gallery: Spokane Willy's photos

• Op-Ed: Why you should not vote in the 2024 WMF BoT elections

• Crossword: On a day of independence, beat crosswords into crossploughshares

• Humour: A joke

• Cobwebs: Counting to a billion — manuscripts don't burn

• Recent research: Is Wikipedia Politically Biased? Perhaps

• Traffic report: Talking about you and me, and the games people play

Read this Signpost in full · Single-page · Unsubscribe · Global message delivery 13:42, 4 July 2024 (UTC)

User ban nom

Thank you for getting that going. I was still poking around trying to figure out how to do one. —The preceding comment was added by Ground Zero (talk • contribs) 00:55, July 6, 2024

@Ground Zero: no worries – I will admit it's not as easy as creating a new thread on WP:ANI or COM:ANU (the instructions on both pages are far clearer than what we have here), but at least we've kicked the convo going. --SHB2000 (t | c | m) 01:31, 6 July 2024 (UTC)

False positives?

Please check these yesterday edits and apologise if that seems warranted. It seems there was a careless edit of filter 46 back in April. The edits by this user were also caught by m:Special:AbuseFilter/344, but I don't see why (I checked one of the edits, not the latter filter, which is quite complex). –LPfi (talk) 10:51, 7 July 2024 (UTC)

I left them a short note (it seems you can't get it to filter "fag" on its own). Regarding filter 344, it is primarily a tracking filter aimed to catch the edits of a certain pesky LTA (which makes it easier for x-wiki patrollers). --SHB2000 (t | c | m) 11:02, 7 July 2024 (UTC)

Thanks. See my last change of the filter. –LPfi (talk) 11:24, 7 July 2024 (UTC)

...and thank you for picking that up – that was fully my oversight and I do take full responsibility for that. In hindsight, I know a lot more about abuse filters now then I did back in April. --SHB2000 (t | c | m) 11:31, 7 July 2024 (UTC)

We have few admins who really know the ins and outs of the syntax, so we mostly have to live with it, but it may be worthwhile to call attention to any changes, so that the few of us do check them (I did a bit of w:Perl programming once). –LPfi (talk) 11:37, 7 July 2024 (UTC)

Agreed – I should try to learn proper regex sometime sooner or later. --SHB2000 (t | c | m) 11:46, 7 July 2024 (UTC)

Tech News: 2024-28

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent changes

• At the Wikimedia Foundation a new task force was formed to replace the disabled Graph with more secure, easy to use, and extensible Chart. You can subscribe to the newsletter to get notified about new project updates and other news about Chart.
• The CampaignEvents extension is now available on Meta-wiki, Igbo Wikipedia, and Swahili Wikipedia, and can be requested on your wiki. This extension helps in managing and making events more visible, giving Event organizers the ability to use tools like the Event registration tool. To learn more about the deployment status and how to request this extension for your wiki, visit the CampaignEvents page on Meta-wiki.
• Editors using the iOS Wikipedia app who have more than 50 edits can now use the Add an Image feature. This feature presents opportunities for small but useful contributions to Wikipedia.
• Thank you to all of the authors who have contributed to MediaWiki Core. As a result of these contributions, the percentage of authors contributing more than 5 patches has increased by 25% since last year, which helps ensure the sustainability of the platform for the Wikimedia projects.

Problems

• A problem with the color of the talkpage tabs always showing as blue, even for non-existent pages which should have been red, affecting the Vector 2022 skin, has been fixed.

Future changes

• The Trust and Safety Product team wants to introduce temporary accounts with as little disruption to tools and workflows as possible. Volunteer developers, including gadget and user-script maintainers, are kindly asked to update the code of their tools and features to handle temporary accounts. The team has created documentation explaining how to do the update. Learn more.

Tech News survey

• Please help us to improve Tech News by taking this short survey. The goal is to better meet the needs of the various types of people who read Tech News. The survey will be open for 1 more week. The survey is covered by this privacy statement. Some translations are available.

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MediaWiki message delivery 21:32, 8 July 2024 (UTC)

This Month in Education: June 2024

This Month in Education

Volume 13 • Issue 6 • June 2024

Contents • Headlines • Subscribe

In This Issue

• From a Language Teacher to a Library Support Staff: The Wikimedia Effect
• 5th WikiEducation 2024 Conference in Mexico
• Lviv hosted a spring wikischool for Ukrainian high school students
• First class of teachers graduated from Reading Wikipedia in the Classroom 2024
• Empowering Digital Citizenship: Unlocking the Power of Open Knowledge with Participants of the LIFE Legacy
• Wiki Movimento Brazil supports online and in-person courses and launches material to guide educators in using Wikimedia projects
• Where to find images for free? Webinar for librarians answered many questions
• Wikimedia MKD and University of Goce Delchev start a mutual collaboration

About This Month in Education · Subscribe/Unsubscribe · Global message delivery · For the team: ZI Jony 06:58, 9 July 2024 (UTC)

This Month in GLAM: June 2024

This Month in GLAM – Volume XIV, Issue VI, June 2024 Headlines Albania report: Wiki Loves Living Heritage in Albania Australia report: Partner Project between Wikimedia Australia, the Australian and New Zealand Society of Indexers (ANZSI) and the School of Information and Communication Studies at Charles Sturt University (CSU SICS) Brazil report: Wiki Loves Mato Grosso Germany report: GLAM digital with the August Bebel Institute - "Wiki Loves Democracy Part III" and new GLAM-on-Tour-Film released Indonesia report: 2024 Half-a-year in Review Italy report: Open science conference and Wikimedians in Sicily Kosovo report: Wiki Loves Earth in Albania & Kosovo, 2024 New Zealand report: WikiProject Te Papa Research Expeditions and WikiProject IBC 2024 North Macedonia report: Climate Changes Edit-a-thons by Wikimedia MKD Poland report: What's up in GLAM-Wiki in Poland in June Serbia report: News in GLAM Serbia Switzerland report: Swiss GLAM Programme UK report: Using Wikipedia in interfaith education USA report: GLAM CSI user stories feedback requested and US events Biodiversity Heritage Library report: BHL-Wiki Working Group June monthly highlights AvoinGLAM report: Bridging Digital Art Practices with Institutional Archives: professional knowledge exchange on digital art archiving Wikidata report: 20th Century Press Archives – history in newspaper clippings, made accessible by ZBW and Wikimedia Calendar: July's GLAM events Read this edition in full • Single-page To assist with preparing the newsletter, please visit the newsroom. Past editions may be viewed here.

About This Month in GLAM · Subscribe/Unsubscribe · Global message delivery · Romaine 02:29, 12 July 2024 (UTC)

Jollof rice

Please look that up. It's nothing to do with Jell-O! Ikan Kekek (talk) 00:43, 14 July 2024 (UTC)

See w:Jollof rice or just do a web search. Ikan Kekek (talk) 00:44, 14 July 2024 (UTC)

I see – guess we learn something new every day. --SHB2000 (t | c | m) 04:26, 14 July 2024 (UTC)

Tech News: 2024-29

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Tech News survey

• Please help us to improve Tech News by taking this short survey. The goal is to better meet the needs of the various types of people who read Tech News. The survey will be open for 3 more days. The survey is covered by this privacy statement. Some translations are available.

Recent changes

• Wikimedia developers can now officially continue to use both Gerrit and GitLab, due to a June 24 decision by the Wikimedia Foundation to support software development on both platforms. Gerrit and GitLab are both code repositories used by developers to write, review, and deploy the software code that supports the MediaWiki software that the wiki projects are built on, as well as the tools used by editors to create and improve content. This decision will safeguard the productivity of our developers and prevent problems in code review from affecting our users. More details are available in the Migration status page.
• The Wikimedia Foundation seeks applicants for the Product and Technology Advisory Council (PTAC). This group will bring technical contributors and Wikimedia Foundation together to co-define a more resilient, future-proof technological platform. Council members will evaluate and consult on the movement's product and technical activities, so that we develop multi-generational projects. We are looking for a range of technical contributors across the globe, from a variety of Wikimedia projects. Please apply here by August 10.
• Editors with rollback user-rights who use the Wikipedia App for Android can use the new Edit Patrol features. These features include a new feed of Recent Changes, related links such as Undo and Rollback, and the ability to create and save a personal library of user talk messages to use while patrolling. If your wiki wants to make these features available to users who do not have rollback rights but have reached a certain edit threshold, you can contact the team. You can read more about this project on Diff blog.
• Editors who have access to The Wikipedia Library can once again use non-open access content in SpringerLinks, after the Foundation contacted them to restore access. You can read more about this and 21 other community-submitted tasks that were completed last week.

Changes later this week

• This week, dark mode will be available on a number of Wikipedias, both desktop and mobile, for logged-in and logged-out users. Interface admins and user script maintainers are encouraged to check gadgets and user scripts in the dark mode, to find any hard-coded colors and fix them. There are some recommendations for dark mode compatibility to help.

Future changes

• Next week, functionaries, volunteers maintaining tools, and software development teams are invited to test the temporary accounts feature on testwiki. Temporary accounts is a feature that will help improve privacy on the wikis. No further temporary account deployments are scheduled yet. Please share your opinions and questions on the project talk page.
• Editors who upload files cross-wiki, or teach other people how to do so, may wish to join a Wikimedia Commons discussion. The Commons community is discussing limiting who can upload files through the cross-wiki upload/Upload dialog feature to users auto-confirmed on Wikimedia Commons. This is due to the large amount of copyright violations uploaded this way. There is a short summary at Commons:Cross-wiki upload and discussion at Commons:Village Pump.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe. You can also get other news from the Wikimedia Foundation Bulletin.

MediaWiki message delivery 01:31, 16 July 2024 (UTC)

The Signpost: 22 July 2024

News, reports and features from the English Wikipedia's newspaper

• Discussion report: Internet users flock to Wikipedia to debate its image policy over Trump raised-fist photo

• News and notes: Wikimedia community votes to ratify Movement Charter; Wikimedia Foundation opposes ratification

• News from the WMF: Wikimedia Foundation Board resolution and vote on the proposed Movement Charter

• Essay: Reflections on editing and obsession

• In the media: What's on Putin's fork, the court's docket, and in Harrison's book?

• Obituary: JamesR

• Crossword: Vaguely bird-shaped crossword

• Humour: Joe Biden withdraws RfA, Donald Trump selects co-nom

Read this Signpost in full · Single-page · Unsubscribe · Global message delivery 09:35, 22 July 2024 (UTC)

Tech News: 2024-30

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Feature News

• Stewards can now globally block accounts. Before the change only IP addresses and IP ranges could be blocked globally. Global account blocks are useful when the blocked user should not be logged out. Global locks (a similar tool logging the user out of their account) are unaffected by this change. The new global account block feature is related to the Temporary Accounts project, which is a new type of user account that replaces IP addresses of unregistered editors that are no longer made public.
• Later this week, Wikimedia site users will notice that the Interface of FlaggedRevs (also known as "Pending Changes") is improved and consistent with the rest of the MediaWiki interface and Wikimedia's design system. The FlaggedRevs interface experience on mobile and Minerva skin was inconsistent before it was fixed and ported to Codex by the WMF Growth team and some volunteers.
• Wikimedia site users can now submit account vanishing requests via GlobalVanishRequest. This feature is used when a contributor wishes to stop editing forever. It helps you hide your past association and edit to protect your privacy. Once processed, the account will be locked and renamed.
• Have you tried monitoring and addressing vandalism in Wikipedia using your phone? A Diff blog post on Patrolling features in the Mobile App highlights some of the new capabilities of the feature, including swiping through a feed of recent changes and a personal library of user talk messages for use when patrolling from your phone.
• Wikimedia contributors and GLAM (galleries, libraries, archives, and museums) organisations can now learn and measure the impact Wikimedia Commons is having towards creating quality encyclopedic content using the Commons Impact Metrics analytics dashboard. The dashboard offers organizations analytics on things like monthly edits in a category, the most viewed files, and which Wikimedia articles are using Commons images. As a result of these new data dumps, GLAM organisation can more reliably measure their return on investment for programs bringing content into the digital Commons.

Project Updates

• Come share your ideas for improving the wikis on the newly reopened Community Wishlist. The Community Wishlist is Wikimedia’s forum for volunteers to share ideas (called wishes) to improve how the wikis work. The new version of the wishlist is always open, works with both wikitext and Visual Editor, and allows wishes in any language.

Learn more

• Have you ever wondered how Wikimedia software works across over 300 languages? This is 253 languages more than the Google Chrome interface, and it's no accident. The Language and Product Localization Team at the Wikimedia Foundation supports your work by adapting all the tools and interfaces in the MediaWiki software so that contributors in our movement who translate pages and strings can translate them and have the sites in all languages. Read more about the team and their upcoming work on Diff.
• How can Wikimedia build innovative and experimental products while maintaining such heavily used websites? A recent blog post by WMF staff Johan Jönsson highlights the work of the WMF Future Audience initiative, where the goal is not to build polished products but test out new ideas, such as a ChatGPT plugin and Add a Fact, to help take Wikimedia into the future.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe. You can also get other news from the Wikimedia Foundation Bulletin.

MediaWiki message delivery 00:05, 23 July 2024 (UTC)

This looks legit to me.

See this Ground Zero (talk) 10:39, 27 July 2024 (UTC)

It was a Brendan edit :-( (IP geolocates to Brisbane, ISP is Telstra, text resembles exactly like his). --SHB2000 (t | c | m) 11:05, 27 July 2024 (UTC)

OK. Ground Zero (talk) 11:30, 27 July 2024 (UTC)

Tech News: 2024-31

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Feature news

• Editors using the Visual Editor in languages that use non-Latin characters for numbers, such as Hindi, Manipuri and Eastern Arabic, may notice some changes in the formatting of reference numbers. This is a side effect of preparing a new sub-referencing feature, and will also allow fixing some general numbering issues in Visual Editor. If you notice any related problems on your wiki, please share details at the project talkpage.

Bugs status

• Some logged-in editors were briefly unable to edit or load pages last week. These errors were mainly due to the addition of new linter rules which led to caching problems. Fixes have been applied and investigations are continuing.
• Editors can use the IP Information tool to get information about IP addresses. This tool is available as a Beta Feature in your preferences. The tool was not available for a few days last week, but is now working again. Thank you to Shizhao for filing the bug report. You can read about that, and 28 other community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.

Project updates

• There are new features and improvements to Phabricator from the Release Engineering and Collaboration Services teams, and some volunteers, including: the search systems, the new task creation system, the login systems, the translation setup which has resulted in support for more languages (thanks to Pppery), and fixes for many edge-case errors. You can read details about these and other improvements in this summary.
• There is an update on the Charts project. The team has decided which visualization library to use, which chart types to start focusing on, and where to store chart definitions.
• One new wiki has been created: a Wikivoyage in Czech (voy:cs:)

Learn more

• There is a new Wikimedia Foundation data center in São Paulo, Brazil which helps to reduce load times.
• There is new user research on problems with the process of uploading images.
• Commons Impact Metrics are now available via data dumps and API.
• The latest quarterly Technical Community Newsletter is now available.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

MediaWiki message delivery 23:11, 29 July 2024 (UTC)

CEE Newsletter - July 2024 Issue Now Available!

Good morning,

We're excited to announce the release of the July 2024 issue of the CEE Newsletter! Once again we have captivating stories, community highlights, and collaborative achievements from across the Central and Eastern Europe region in the Wikimedia movement.

In This Issue:

• International Updates: Stay informed with the "Wikimedia International Update Corner", covering key developments, events and initiatives in the international Wikimedia space for 2024.
• CEE in the News: Discover notable mentions of CEE region activities in "This month in Education" and "This month in GLAM" newsletters.
• Reader's Digest: Catch up on the latest insights and stories from around the globe with the "Reader’s Digest".
• Open calls and consultations: Voice your opinion! These topics are open to discussion. Also, please take a look at the open calls and apply!
• Updates from Communities: Learn about the successful second quarter of Wikimedia MKD and the first half of 2024 of Wikimedia Ukraine, read more about the Third Ionian Wikithon 2024, review activities in the past months of the Wikimedia Serbia, read the report from the event in the Buffer Zone on Cyprus, discover the new area of focus for Wikimedia Poland, and many more community updates.

We hope you enjoy this issue and find inspiration in the diverse stories and impactful work being done by our CEE communities. Thank you for being a part of our journey toward promoting free knowledge and collaboration.

You can read the full newsletter here. We hope you enjoy the inspiring stories and achievements showcased by our vibrant CEE communities.

Happy reading!

Toni Ristovski on behalf of the CEE Newsletter team --MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 08:30, 30 July 2024 (UTC)

Growth News, July 2024

Community Configuration

The Growth team released Community Configuration at all Wikipedias. You can access it at Special:CommunityConfiguration.

This new special page replaces Special:EditGrowthConfig. For now, all Growth features can be configured using Community Configuration. Configuration for AutoModerator (T365046) and other features will be available in the future.

You can help with translations. The interface translation is done at Translatewiki.net. You can also help translate the documentation.

If you attend Wikimania 2024, please join us for the session about Community configuration's future!

Current work

Newcomer Homepage Community Updates module

We will add a new Community Configurable module to the Newcomer Homepage that will allow communities to highlight specific events, projects, campaigns, and initiatives. We have released a simple version available to beta wikis. We will conduct an A/B test at our pilot wikis using the new Metrics Platform. We still welcome community feedback on initial designs and plans, in any language at our project talk page.

Future work

Increase constructive activation on mobile

As part of the Growth team 2024/2025 Annual Plan, the Growth team will explore various ways to increase the percentage of newcomers who successfully start editing.

Editing a Wikipedia page requires too much context and patience. It means many trial and error for newcomers to contribute, meaning a steeper learning curve and potential discouraging reverts. To support a new generation of volunteers, we will increase the number and availability of smaller, structured, and more task-specific editing workflows (E.g. Edit Check and Structured Tasks). The Growth team will primarily focus on Structured Tasks, while working closely with the Editing team to ensure our work integrates well with Edit Check.

Stay informed

Growth team weekly updates are available on wiki (in English) if you want to know more about our day-to-day work. If you want to receive more general updates about technical activity happening across the Wikimedia movement (including Growth work), we encourage you to subscribe to Tech News.

Growth team's newsletter prepared by the Growth team and posted by bot • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

15:08, 30 July 2024 (UTC)

Tech News: 2024-32

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Feature news

• Two new parser functions will be available this week: {{#dir}} and {{#bcp47}}. These will reduce the need for Template:Dir and Template:BCP47 on Commons and allow us to drop 100 million rows from the "what links here" database. Editors at any wiki that use these templates, can help by replacing the templates with these new functions. The templates at Commons will be updated during the Hackathon at Wikimania.
• Communities can request the activation of the visual editor on entire namespaces where discussions sometimes happen (for instance Wikipedia: or Wikisource: namespaces) if they understand the known limitations. For discussions, users can already use DiscussionTools in these namespaces.
• The tracking category "Pages using Timeline" has been renamed to "Pages using the EasyTimeline extension" in TranslateWiki. Wikis that have created the category locally should rename their local creation to match.

Project updates

• Editors who help to organize WikiProjects and similar on-wiki collaborations, are invited to share ideas and examples of successful collaborations with the Campaigns and Programs teams. You can fill out a brief survey or share your thoughts on the talkpage. The teams are particularly looking for details about successful collaborations on non-English wikis.
• The new parser is being rolled out on Wikivoyage wikis over the next few months. The English Wikivoyage and Hebrew Wikivoyage were switched to Parsoid last week. For more information, see Parsoid/Parser Unification.

Learn more

• There will be more than 200 sessions at Wikimania this week. Here is a summary of some of the key sessions related to the product and technology area.
• The latest Wikimedia Foundation Bulletin is available.
• The latest quarterly Language and Internationalization newsletter is available. It includes: New design previews for Translatable pages; Updates about MinT for Wiki Readers; the release of Translation dumps; and more.
• The latest quarterly Growth newsletter is available.
• The latest monthly MediaWiki Product Insights newsletter is available.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

MediaWiki message delivery 20:44, 5 August 2024 (UTC)

Rollback

Hey, what does it take to get rollback rights around here? Undo button is so clunky. Brycehughes (talk) 19:29, 9 August 2024 (UTC)

Nothing, just a user request haha. I've given you patroller perms. --SHB2000 (t | c | m) 21:23, 9 August 2024 (UTC)

Thank you! Brycehughes (talk) 00:56, 10 August 2024 (UTC)

This Month in GLAM: July 2024

This Month in GLAM – Volume XIV, Issue VII, July 2024 Headlines Albania report: For what matters most for your community Argentina report: Mid-term digitization update Brazil report: Structuring Wiki Loves Monuments through a Wikidata portal Canada report: CCA Hosts Inaugural Wiki Edit-a-Thon Germany report: The flight over the "Rosinenbomber" - drone deployment for Free Knowledge; Kicking off a German-language community of practice for building cultural heritage linked open data with the wikimedia projects India report: GLAM partner ventures into 'Digitisation Plus' programs with Wikimedians Kosovo report: Prompting what's most important - our community in Albania and Kosovo New Zealand report: WikiProject International Botanical Congress 2024, a presentation to the Natural History Museum, London & Kew Gardens staff and a Research expeditions edit-a-thon Switzerland report: Swiss GLAM Programme UK report: Translations galore USA report: Wikicurious WikiNYC Civic Hall; San Diego 111; #5WomenArtists campaign Biodiversity Heritage Library report: BHL-Wiki Working Group July monthly highlights Special story: GLAM GLobal meetup & GLAM Global Calls Calendar: August's GLAM events Read this edition in full • Single-page To assist with preparing the newsletter, please visit the newsroom. Past editions may be viewed here.

About This Month in GLAM · Subscribe/Unsubscribe · Global message delivery · Romaine 02:58, 12 August 2024 (UTC)

Tech News: 2024-33

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Feature news

• AbuseFilter editors and maintainers can now make a CAPTCHA show if a filter matches an edit. This allows communities to quickly respond to spamming by automated bots.
• Stewards can now specify if global blocks should prevent account creation. Before this change by the Trust and Safety Product Team, all global blocks would prevent account creation. This will allow stewards to reduce the unintended side-effects of global blocks on IP addresses.

Project updates

• Nominations are open on Wikitech for new members to refresh the Toolforge standards committee. The committee oversees the Toolforge Right to fork policy and Abandoned tool policy among other duties. Nominations will remain open until at least 2024-08-26.
• One new wiki has been created: a Wikipedia in West Coast Bajau (w:bdr:)

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

MediaWiki message delivery 23:22, 12 August 2024 (UTC)

The Signpost: 14 August 2024

News, reports and features from the English Wikipedia's newspaper

• In the media: Portland pol profile paid for from public purse

• Recent research: STORM: AI agents role-play as "Wikipedia editors" and "experts" to create Wikipedia-like articles, a more sophisticated effort than previous auto-generation systems

• Discussion report: Twitter marks the spot

• News and notes: Another Wikimania has concluded

• Special report: Nano or just nothing: Will nano go nuclear?

• Opinion: HouseBlaster's RfA debriefing

• Traffic report: Ball games, movies, elections, but nothing really weird

• Humour: I'm proud to be a template

Read this Signpost in full · Single-page · Unsubscribe · Global message delivery 22:52, 14 August 2024 (UTC)

Tech News: 2024-34

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Feature news

• Editors who want to re-use references but with different details such as page numbers, will be able to do so by the end of 2024, using a new sub-referencing feature. You can read more about the project and how to test the prototype.
• Editors using tracking categories to identify which pages use specific extensions may notice that six of the categories have been renamed to make them more easily understood and consistent. These categories are automatically added to pages that use specialized MediaWiki extensions. The affected names are for: DynamicPageList, Kartographer, Phonos, RSS, Score, WikiHiero. Wikis that have created the category locally should rename their local creation to match. Thanks to Pppery for these improvements.
• Technical volunteers who edit modules and want to get a list of the categories used on a page, can now do so using the categories property of mw.title objects. This enables wikis to configure workflows such as category-specific edit notices. Thanks to SD001 for these improvements.

Bugs status

• Your help is needed to check if any pages need to be moved or deleted. A maintenance script was run to clean up unreachable pages (due to Unicode issues or introduction of new namespaces/namespace aliases). The script tried to find appropriate names for the pages (e.g. by following the Unicode changes or by moving pages whose titles on Wikipedia start with Talk:WP: so that their titles start with Wikipedia talk:), but it may have failed for some pages, and moved them to Special:PrefixIndex/T195546/ instead. Your community should check if any pages are listed there, and move them to the correct titles, or delete them if they are no longer needed. A full log (including pages for which appropriate names could be found) is available in phab:P67388.
• Editors who volunteer as mentors to newcomers on their wiki are once again able to access lists of potential mentees who they can connect with to offer help and guidance. This functionality was restored thanks to a bug fix. Thank you to Mbch331 for filing the bug report. You can read about that, and 18 other community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.

Project updates

• The application deadline for the Product & Technology Advisory Council (PTAC) has been extended to September 16. Members will help by providing advice to Foundation Product and Technology leadership on short and long term plans, on complex strategic problems, and help to get feedback from more contributors and technical communities. Selected members should expect to spend roughly 5 hours per month for the Council, during the one year pilot. Please consider applying, and spread the word to volunteers you think would make a positive contribution to the committee.

Learn more

• The 2024 Coolest Tool Awards were awarded at Wikimania, in seven categories. For example, one award went to the ISA Tool, used for adding structured data to files on Commons, which was recently improved during the Wiki Mentor Africa Hackathon. You can see video demonstrations of each tool at the awards page. Congratulations to this year's recipients, and thank you to all tool creators and maintainers.
• The latest Wikimedia Foundation Bulletin is available, and includes some highlights from Wikimania, an upcoming Language community meeting, and other news from the movement.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

MediaWiki message delivery 00:54, 20 August 2024 (UTC)

Tech News: 2024-35

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Feature news

• Administrators can now test the temporary accounts feature on test2wiki. This was done to allow cross-wiki testing of temporary accounts, for when temporary accounts switch between projects. The feature was enabled on testwiki a few weeks ago. No further temporary account deployments are scheduled yet. Temporary Accounts is a project to create a new type of user account that replaces IP addresses of unregistered editors which are no longer made public. Please share your opinions and questions on the project talk page.
• Later this week, editors at wikis that use FlaggedRevs (also known as "Pending Changes") may notice that the indicators at the top of articles have changed. This change makes the system more consistent with the rest of the MediaWiki interface.

Bugs status

• Editors who use the 2010 wikitext editor, and use the Character Insert buttons, will no longer experience problems with the buttons adding content into the edit-summary instead of the edit-window. You can read more about that, and 26 other community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.

Project updates

• Please review and vote on Focus Areas, which are groups of wishes that share a problem. Focus Areas were created for the newly reopened Community Wishlist, which is now open year-round for submissions. The first batch of focus areas are specific to moderator workflows, around welcoming newcomers, minimizing repetitive tasks, and prioritizing tasks. Once volunteers have reviewed and voted on focus areas, the Foundation will then review and select focus areas for prioritization.
• Do you have a project and are willing to provide a three (3) month mentorship for an intern? Outreachy is a twice a year program for people to participate in a paid internship that will start in December 2024 and end in early March 2025, and they need mentors and projects to work on. Projects can be focused on coding or non-coding (design, documentation, translation, research). See the Outreachy page for more details, and a list of past projects since 2013.

Learn more

• If you're curious about the product and technology improvements made by the Wikimedia Foundation last year, read this recent highlights summary on Diff.
• To learn more about the technology behind the Wikimedia projects, you can now watch sessions from the technology track at Wikimania 2024 on Commons. This week, check out:
  • Community Configuration - Shaping On-Wiki Functionality Together (55 mins) - about the Community Configuration project.
  • Future of MediaWiki. A sustainable platform to support a collaborative user base and billions of page views (30 mins) - an overview for both technical and non technical audiences, covering some of the challenges and open questions, related to the platform evolution, stewardship and developer experiences research.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

MediaWiki message delivery 20:34, 26 August 2024 (UTC)

File:Partial block test.png

Hi! This test file is unused. Is it still needed? MGA73 (talk) 12:18, 2 September 2024 (UTC)

Deleted. --SHB2000 (t | c | m) 12:28, 2 September 2024 (UTC)

Tech News: 2024-36

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Weekly highlight

• Editors and volunteer developers interested in data visualisation can now test the new software for charts. Its early version is available on beta Commons and beta Wikipedia. This is an important milestone before making charts available on regular wikis. You can read more about this project update and help to test the charts.

Feature news

• Editors who use the Special:UnusedTemplates page can now filter out pages which are expected to be there permanently, such as sandboxes, test-cases, and templates that are always substituted. Editors can add the new magic word __EXPECTUNUSEDTEMPLATE__ to a template page to hide it from the listing. Thanks to Sophivorus and DannyS712 for these improvements.
• Editors who use the New Topic tool on discussion pages, will now be reminded to add a section header, which should help reduce the quantity of newcomers who add sections without a header. You can read more about that, and 28 other community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.
• Last week, some Toolforge tools had occasional connection problems. The cause is still being investigated, but the problems have been resolved for now.
• Translation administrators at multilingual wikis, when editing multiple translation units, can now easily mark which changes require updates to the translation. This is possible with the new dropdown menu.

Project updates

• A new draft text of a policy discussing the use of Wikimedia's APIs has been published on Meta-Wiki. The draft text does not reflect a change in policy around the APIs; instead, it is an attempt to codify existing API rules. Comments, questions, and suggestions are welcome on the proposed update’s talk page until September 13 or until those discussions have concluded.

Learn more

• To learn more about the technology behind the Wikimedia projects, you can now watch sessions from the technology track at Wikimania 2024 on Commons. This week, check out:
  • Charts, the successor of Graphs - A secure and extensible tool for data visualization (25 mins) – about the above-mentioned Charts project.
  • State of Language Technology and Onboarding at Wikimedia (90 mins) – about some of the language tools that support Wikimedia sites, such as Content/Section Translation, MinT, and LanguageConverter; also the current state and future of languages onboarding.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

MediaWiki message delivery 01:08, 3 September 2024 (UTC)

The Signpost: 4 September 2024

News, reports and features from the English Wikipedia's newspaper

• News and notes: WikiCup enters final round, MCDC wraps up activities, 17-year-old hoax article unmasked

• In the media: AI is not playing games anymore. Is Wikipedia ready?

• Recent research: Simulated Wikipedia seen as less credible than ChatGPT and Alexa in experiment

• News from the WMF: Meet the 12 candidates running in the WMF Board of Trustees election

• Wikimania: A month after Wikimania 2024

• Serendipity: What it's like to be Wikimedian of the Year

• Traffic report: After the gold rush

• Humour: Local man halfway through rude reply no longer able to recall why he hates other editor

Read this Signpost in full · Single-page · Unsubscribe · Global message delivery 13:32, 4 September 2024 (UTC)

Tech News: 2024-37

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Feature news

• Starting this week, the standard syntax highlighter will receive new colors that make them compatible in dark mode. This is the first of many changes to come as part of a major upgrade to syntax highlighting. You can learn more about what's to come on the help page.
• Editors of wikis using Wikidata will now be notified of only relevant Wikidata changes in their watchlist. This is because the Lua functions entity:getSitelink() and mw.wikibase.getSitelink(qid) will have their logic unified for tracking different aspects of sitelinks to reduce junk notifications from inconsistent sitelinks tracking.

Project updates

• Users of all Wikis will have access to Wikimedia sites as read-only for a few minutes on September 25, starting at 15:00 UTC. This is a planned datacenter switchover for maintenance purposes. More information will be published in Tech News and will also be posted on individual wikis in the coming weeks.
• Contributors of 11 Wikipedias, including English will have a new MOS namespace added to their Wikipedias. This improvement ensures that links beginning with MOS: (usually shortcuts to the Manual of Style) are not broken by Mooré Wikipedia (language code mos).

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

MediaWiki message delivery 18:53, 9 September 2024 (UTC)

Request

Hello! I have a request, and thought you might be the best person to ask here on Wikivoyage for either information on where to make this sort of request, or if you could assist me directly with it.

I know you're aware of syntax errors collectively called as Lint, and that I've been clearing these up here on Wikivoyage this past month. I've cleared about 75% of this site's 30k total errors so far, and have found there's a small set of pages (128; mostly talk pages/user pages) that have full page protection that I won't be able to clean without a little assistance. I wondered if you would be willing to lower these pages' protection levels temporarily (determination reserved by you on a page by page basis) to allow me temporary access to address their errors in an edit or two per page and then notify you when I'm done (less than 24hrs) so you can re-protect as needed/desired?

If there's any hesitation on my intentions or skill, I have had a similar arrangement with Primefac on the English Wikipedia where they allowed me to clear a few thousand Tidy Font (link color) errors in full protected Admin talk archives last fall, and I've been delinting on en.wiki for about two years.

I don't wish to request and edit all 128 pages in one go, so I thought I'd start my request with the 22 pages of most interest (highest quantity of lint, or are the last page or two of an error type sitewide):

User talk:Ikan Kekek/archive
User talk:ThunderingTyphoons!/Archive 3 (2019-2021)
User talk:ThunderingTyphoons!/Archive 2 (2016-2018)
User talk:SHB2000/Archive 2021
Talk:China/Archive 2013-2018
User talk:ArticCynda
User talk:Ibaman/Archive 2020
User talk:Libertarianmoderate
User:(WT-en) Admrboltz
User:(WT-en) ForestH2
User:(WT-en) Ksauerman
Wikivoyage talk:Main Page Old
User talk:Ibaman/Archive 2019
User:(WT-en) Edmontonenthusiast
Wikivoyage talk:Wikitravel Press
User:(WT-en) DCetina
Talk:Asia/Archive 2003-2012
User talk:Peterfitzgerald/Archives (wts-old) 2007-2010
User:Sertmann
User:(WT-en) HappyV
User:(WT-en) Sibiryak
User:(WT-en) Moroccoexplored

Would these be fine? Happy to discuss any concerns or clarify any details, Zinnober9 (talk) 17:47, 8 September 2024 (UTC)

Most of these pages really don't need to be read. I'm willing to let you edit my archive if you like, though, for whatever it's worth. Do I have to temporarily allow auto-confirmed users to edit it? Ikan Kekek (talk) 22:08, 8 September 2024 (UTC)

@Ikan Kekek, Zinnober9: I assume this is because all of the pages are admin/template editor protected – I think the best port of call is for you to obtain temporary adminship (via WV:URN) and then fix all of those lint errors, while I've given you temp editor perms to edit some of them. Thanks again for all the work you've put in :-). --SHB2000 (t | c | m) 03:52, 9 September 2024 (UTC)

That makes sense. Ikan Kekek (talk) 04:07, 9 September 2024 (UTC)

That is correct, admin/template editor protection levels and these pages are/were beyond my editing clearance. That's an interesting reply, not the direction I was expecting based on my en.wiki experiences, but each wiki is a little bit different with procedural things. I've been used to en.wiki's RFPP (Request For Page Protection) page for requesting protection adjustments +/- to various levels of protected pages, and been used to Primefac temporarily reducing/removing protection from pages I was interested in fixing (similar to how Ikan was thinking above I think?). Temporary Adminship wasn't on my radar, but if this is a standard sort of case, I'll look into that. Zinnober9 (talk) 06:43, 9 September 2024 (UTC)

In your case I'm almost certain that a 3-month-long temp adminship will almost pass – Ikan Kekek can probably attest to this that most of us here are far more relaxed about granting permissions to those have a valid use for them, unlike at enwiki (we're more like Commons in this regard, though even more so). --SHB2000 (t | c | m) 09:24, 9 September 2024 (UTC)

I've made the nomination at WV:URN. This seems like a good idea. Ground Zero (talk) 11:41, 9 September 2024 (UTC)

Sweet; I've given my word of support. --SHB2000 (t | c | m) 11:52, 9 September 2024 (UTC)

I'm honored, thank you. Do I need to make any introductory sort of statement there, or just watch that page and answer any questions that arise? Zinnober9 (talk) 06:53, 10 September 2024 (UTC)

The lattter, haha; we're super chill here so no need for any of that intro statements that you see on enwiki. --SHB2000 (t | c | m) 07:00, 10 September 2024 (UTC)

Some people have made a brief introductory statement, though. Since many people probably don't know you, it certainly wouldn't be out of line. Ikan Kekek (talk) 07:35, 10 September 2024 (UTC)

I mean GZ's already made the brief intro statement anyway. --SHB2000 (t | c | m) 08:39, 10 September 2024 (UTC)

True. Ikan Kekek (talk) 08:57, 10 September 2024 (UTC)

This Month in GLAM: August 2024

This Month in GLAM – Volume XIV, Issue VIII, August 2024 Headlines Aruba report: Vacancy Wikimedian in Residence for Wikipedia on Aruba - Aruba on Wikipedia project Brazil report: Technology and biodiversity: “Amazonian Knowledge on Wiki” Colombia report: Colombia in Wikimania Mood Czech Republic report: Cooperation between National Library and Wikimedia CR was presented at Wikimania 2024 India report: Wikimedians-in-residence assigned to add lexicographical data of 5 endangered languages of West Bengal Netherlands report: 10 reasons why the National Library of the Netherlands moved its Wikimedia-related publications from SlideShare to Zenodo, and keeps them on Wikimedia Commons New Zealand report: Looking for Aotearoa's next roving Wikipedian, a Wikidata Te Papa research expeditions publication & the Wikidata WikiProject IBC follow-up workshop North Macedonia report: An insight of Wkikimedia MKD's 2024 GLAM Programme Poland report: What's up in GLAM-Wiki in Poland Switzerland report: Swiss GLAM Programme UK report: Indonesian Featured Article award USA report: Wikimania report and meetups Biodiversity Heritage Library report: BHL-Wiki Working Group August monthly highlights Special story: Global GLAM Wiki Meetup - Future meetings and outcomes AvoinGLAM report: AvoinGLAM at Wikimania Content Partnerships Hub report: Content Partnerships Hub at Wikimania; The Helpdesk; Metabase; UN collaboration day WMF GLAM report: Commons Impact Metrics, WikiLibCon25, and WikiConference North America Calendar: September's GLAM events Read this edition in full • Single-page To assist with preparing the newsletter, please visit the newsroom. Past editions may be viewed here.

About This Month in GLAM · Subscribe/Unsubscribe · Global message delivery · Romaine 10:47, 11 September 2024 (UTC)

This Month in Education: August 2024

This Month in Education

Volume 13 • Issue 7 • August 2024

Contents • Headlines • Subscribe

In This Issue

• Cross-Cultural Knowledge Sharing: Wikipedia's New Frontier at University of Tehran
• Let's Read Wikipedia in Bolivia reaches teachers in Cochabamba
• Results of the 2023 “Wikipedia for School” Contest in Ukraine
• Edu Wiki Camp in Serbia, 2024
• Wikimedia Human Rights Month this year engaged schools in large amount
• Strengthening Education Programs at Wikimania 2024: A Global Leap in Collaborative Learning
• Wiki Education programs are featured in a scientific outreach magazine, and Wiki Movimento Brasil offers training for researchers in the Amazon
• Wiki Movimento Brasil aims to adapt a game about Wikipedia, organize an academic event for scientific dissemination, and host the XXXIII Wiki-Education Workshop

About This Month in Education · Subscribe/Unsubscribe · Global message delivery · For the team: ZI Jony 13:22, 11 September 2024 (UTC)

Tech News: 2024-38

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Improvements and Maintenance

• Editors interested in templates can help by reading the latest Wishlist focus area, Template recall and discovery, and share your feedback on the talkpage. This input helps the Community Tech team to decide the right technical approach to build. Everyone is also encouraged to continue adding new wishes.
• The new automated Special:NamespaceInfo page helps editors understand which namespaces exist on each wiki, and some details about how they are configured. Thanks to DannyS712 for these improvements.
• References Check is a feature that encourages editors to add a citation when they add a new paragraph to a Wikipedia article. For a short time, the corresponding tag "Edit Check (references) activated" was erroneously being applied to some edits outside of the main namespace. This has been fixed.
• It is now possible for a wiki community to change the order in which a page’s categories are displayed on their wiki. By default, categories are displayed in the order they appear in the wikitext. Now, wikis with a consensus to do so can request a configuration change to display them in alphabetical order.
• Tool authors can now access ToolsDB's public databases from both Quarry and Superset. Those databases have always been accessible to every Toolforge user, but they are now more broadly accessible, as Quarry can be accessed by anyone with a Wikimedia account. In addition, Quarry's internal database can now be queried from Quarry itself. This database contains information about all queries that are being run and starred by users in Quarry. This information was already public through the web interface, but you can now query it using SQL. You can read more about that, and 20 other community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.
• Any pages or tools that still use the very old CSS classes mw-message-box need to be updated. These old classes will be removed next week or soon afterwards. Editors can use a global-search to determine what needs to be changed. It is possible to use the newer cdx-message group of classes as a replacement (see the relevant Codex documentation, and an example update), but using locally defined onwiki classes would be best.

Technical project updates

• Next week, all Wikimedia wikis will be read-only for a few minutes. This will start on September 25 at 15:00 UTC. This is a planned datacenter switchover for maintenance purposes. This maintenance process also targets other services. The previous switchover took 3 minutes, and the Site Reliability Engineering teams use many tools to make sure that this essential maintenance work happens as quickly as possible.

Tech in depth

• The latest monthly MediaWiki Product Insights newsletter is available. This edition includes details about: research about hook handlers to help simplify development, research about performance improvements, work to improve the REST API for end-users, and more.
• To learn more about the technology behind the Wikimedia projects, you can now watch sessions from the technology track at Wikimania 2024 on Commons. This week, check out:
  • Hackathon Showcase (45 mins) - 19 short presentations by some of the Hackathon participants, describing some of the projects they worked on, such as automated testing of maintenance scripts, a video-cutting command line tool, and interface improvements for various tools. There are more details and links available in the Phabricator task.
  • Co-Creating a Sustainable Future for the Toolforge Ecosystem (40 mins) - a roundtable discussion for tool-maintainers, users, and supporters of Toolforge about how to make the platform sustainable and how to evaluate the tools available there.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

MediaWiki message delivery 00:03, 17 September 2024 (UTC)

Deleting spam

Regarding Srgholiday(s515/.com): Isn't it overkill to revision delete spam? Deleting it increases the number of admin actions that are opaque to the general community (admin activity should be as transparent as possible) and hides the actions of the spammer (raising the bar for blocking or blacklisting them). What's the harm of leaving that spam visible in the revision history? If you think this needs doing, I think a discussion in the Pub is warranted. –LPfi (talk) 13:11, 17 September 2024 (UTC)

The nature of this spammer is no different to userpage spammers. I don't mind if you unrevdel it, but leaving the mass spam up only gives the spammer exactly what they want. --SHB2000 (t | c | m) 13:32, 17 September 2024 (UTC)

I don't understand. Our readers won't see the spam in old revisions. For user pages, the issue is about user pages for non-users, which we often delete as out of scope, which is another thing. If the user page is otherwise legitimate, we just remove the spam, with no deleting or hiding. –LPfi (talk) 14:29, 17 September 2024 (UTC)

As I said you're free to undelete it as you wish – we simply disagree on something where there isn't a clear policy on. --SHB2000 (t | c | m) 21:31, 17 September 2024 (UTC)

I self-reverted for now; not worth having a discussion on something where there is no clear policy on. --SHB2000 (t | c | m) 23:20, 17 September 2024 (UTC)

I agree with LPfi here. Revdel should be used only when the text itself is highly objectionable -- racist, obscene, over-the-top agenda pushing, etc. -- not for mere spamming or even for denying recognition to vandals. Pashley (talk) 14:13, 17 September 2024 (UTC)

Pashley, if you want to argue to not use revdel per WV:DENY for LTAs, start a discussion on Wikivoyage talk:Deny recognition instead of commenting on policies you clearly don't understand properly. --SHB2000 (t | c | m) 21:30, 17 September 2024 (UTC)

Link still spam blocked

Very (very!) belatedly, I've just tried to add the link discussed here, but it it still blocked. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 12:28, 18 September 2024 (UTC)

That is very odd – I'll try to take a look into it sometime soon. --SHB2000 (t | c | m) SHB2000 (t | c | m) 13:38, 18 September 2024 (UTC)

Tech News: 2024-39

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Weekly highlight

• All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes on Wednesday September 25 at 15:00 UTC. Reading the wikis will not be interrupted, but editing will be paused. These twice-yearly processes allow WMF's site reliability engineering teams to remain prepared to keep the wikis functioning even in the event of a major interruption to one of our data centers.

Updates for editors

A screenshot of the interface for the Alt Text suggested-edit feature

• Editors who use the iOS Wikipedia app in Spanish, Portuguese, French, or Chinese, may see the Alt Text suggested-edit experiment after editing an article, or completing a suggested edit using "Add an image". Alt-text helps people with visual impairments to read Wikipedia articles. The team aims to learn if adding alt-text to images is a task that editors can be successful with. Please share any feedback on the discussion page.
• The Codex color palette has been updated with new and revised colors for the MediaWiki user interfaces. The most noticeable changes for editors include updates for: dark mode colors for Links and for quiet Buttons (progressive and destructive), visited Link colors for both light and dark modes, and background colors for system-messages in both light and dark modes.
• It is now possible to include clickable wikilinks and external links inside code blocks. This includes links that are used within <syntaxhighlight> tags and on code pages (JavaScript, CSS, Scribunto and Sanitized CSS). Uses of template syntax {{…}} are also linked to the template page. Thanks to SD0001 for these improvements.
• Two bugs were fixed in the GlobalVanishRequest system by improving the logging and by removing an incorrect placeholder message.
• View all 25 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.

Updates for technical contributors

• From Wikimedia Enterprise:
  • The API now enables 5,000 on-demand API requests per month and twice-monthly HTML snapshots freely (gratis and libre). More information on the updates and also improvements to the software development kits (SDK) are explained on the project's blog post. While Wikimedia Enterprise APIs are designed for high-volume commercial reusers, this change enables many more community use-cases to be built on the service too.
  • The Snapshot API (html dumps) have added beta Structured Contents endpoints (blog post on that) as well as released two beta datasets (English and French Wikipedia) from that endpoint to Hugging Face for public use and feedback (blog post on that). These pre-parsed data sets enable new options for researchers, developers, and data scientists to use and study the content.

In depth

• The Wikidata Query Service (WDQS) is used to get answers to questions using the Wikidata data set. As Wikidata grows, we had to make a major architectural change so that WDQS could remain performant. As part of the WDQS Graph Split project, we have new SPARQL endpoints available for serving the "scholarly" and "main" subgraphs of Wikidata. The query.wikidata.org endpoint will continue to serve the full Wikidata graph until March 2025. After this date, it will only serve the main graph. For more information, please see the announcement on Wikidata.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

MediaWiki message delivery 23:37, 23 September 2024 (UTC)

Tout issue?

Is User:(WT-en) Fpatrick a WV:TOUT issue? It's got two lint issues, but if it's going to be blanked or revdel'd due to the content, I'll skip the delinting. Zinnober9 (talk) 09:32, 23 September 2024 (UTC)

Yep, I've deleted it as spam. Nice catch. --SHB2000 (t | c | m) 09:41, 23 September 2024 (UTC)

Great, thanks! Zinnober9 (talk) 16:55, 23 September 2024 (UTC)

Another on User:(WT-en) منتديات البيان البورسعيدى talking about their linked forum/newspaper. Zinnober9 (talk) 19:26, 23 September 2024 (UTC)

Others:

Tourism agency on User:(WT-en) Le desert vit

Restaurant on User:(WT-en) Restaurantkashmir

Cell phone spam on User:(WT-en) Kalinka

Tours on User:(WT-en) Tour Old Wilmington

Tours on User:(WT-en) Bhutan2009

.

User:(WT-en) Hemraj is not very promotional, but does has work contact info, so less sure on this one. Zinnober9 (talk) 19:49, 23 September 2024 (UTC)

User:(WT-en) Hemraj doesn't have any contributions but their user page, so I think it can be deleted as user page of non-user. The contact info is probably out of date. –LPfi (talk) 20:00, 23 September 2024 (UTC)

I removed the number since the rest without it could be read as a user bio rather than a personal ad. If anyone has a stronger opinion, have at it, I don't have a strong opinion beyond my edit. Zinnober9 (talk) 16:41, 25 September 2024 (UTC)

I suppose it is OK like that. –LPfi (talk) 18:17, 25 September 2024 (UTC)

The Signpost: 26 September 2024

News, reports and features from the English Wikipedia's newspaper

• In the media: Indian courts order Wikipedia to take down name of crime victim, and give up names of editors

• Serendipity: A Wikipedian at the 2024 Paralympics

• Opinion: asilvering's RfA debriefing

• News and notes: Are you ready for admin elections?

• Gallery: Are Luddaites defending the English Wikipedia?

• Recent research: Article-writing AI is less "prone to reasoning errors (or hallucinations)" than human Wikipedia editors

• Traffic report: Jump in the line, rock your body in time

Read this Signpost in full · Single-page · Unsubscribe · Global message delivery 20:16, 26 September 2024 (UTC)

Wikivoyage is Lint-free! (mostly)

I've addressed all existing Lint errors that I can. The remaining 57 errors* are all due to one single issue relating to Template:Listing being surrounded by BDI tags when Listing contains multilined content. BDI doesn't like multilined content, so when someone uses a manual line break within a parameter (most commonly in the content parameter) in the eat/sleep/etc templates that use Listing, BDI gets stripped and reports a misnested/stripped error. I've cleared some cases this occurred by replacing the manual line breaks with break tags, but the remaining pages have bulleted lists, which is incompatible with that solution. I've asked WOSLinker and Jonesey95, two editors who deal with templates far more than I, and we haven't come up with a perfect solution for this issue so far so probably going to let these sit for now and I'll continue to handle any popup issues that occur. I'll still be around, just not as omnipresent as I have been the last few weeks.

* I am ignoring Duplicate IDs and Background colors, as both are newly tracked and actions (if any) for addressing them have not been clearly defined as of yet.

Thanks for everything so far! Zinnober9 (talk) 21:26, 30 September 2024 (UTC)

Hey, congratulations Zinnober9. Your work is invaluable and you've made Wikivoyage a far better place over the months; thanks again for fixing all the lint errors. :-) --SHB2000 (t | c | m) 21:34, 30 September 2024 (UTC)

Tech News: 2024-40

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Updates for editors

• Readers of 42 more wikis can now use Dark Mode. If the option is not yet available for logged-out users of your wiki, this is likely because many templates do not yet display well in Dark Mode. Please use the night-mode-checker tool if you are interested in helping to reduce the number of issues. The recommendations page provides guidance on this. Dark Mode is enabled on additional wikis once per month.
• Editors using the 2010 wikitext editor as their default can access features from the 2017 wikitext editor by adding ?veaction=editsource to the URL. If you would like to enable the 2017 wikitext editor as your default, it can be set in your preferences.
• For logged-out readers using the Vector 2022 skin, the "donate" link has been moved from a collapsible menu next to the content area into a more prominent top menu, next to "Create an account". This restores the link to the level of prominence it had in the Vector 2010 skin. Learn more about the changes related to donor experiences.
• The CampaignEvents extension provides tools for organizers to more easily manage events, communicate with participants, and promote their events on the wikis. The extension has been enabled on Arabic Wikipedia, Igbo Wikipedia, Swahili Wikipedia, and Meta-Wiki. Chinese Wikipedia has decided to enable the extension, and discussions on the extension are in progress on Spanish Wikipedia and on Wikidata. To learn how to enable the extension on your wiki, you can visit the CampaignEvents page on Meta-Wiki.
• View all 22 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.

Updates for technical contributors

• Developers with an account on Wikitech-wiki should check if any action is required for their accounts. The wiki is being changed to use the single-user-login (SUL) system, and other configuration changes. This change will help reduce the overall complexity for the weekly software updates across all our wikis.

In depth

• The server switch was completed successfully last week with a read-only time of only 2 minutes 46 seconds. This periodic process makes sure that engineers can switch data centers and keep all of the wikis available for readers, even if there are major technical issues. It also gives engineers a chance to do maintenance and upgrades on systems that normally run 24 hours a day, and often helps to reveal weaknesses in the infrastructure. The process involves dozens of software services and hundreds of hardware servers, and requires multiple teams working together. Work over the past few years has reduced the time from 17 minutes down to 2–3 minutes.

Meetings and events

• October 4–6: WikiIndaba Conference's Hackathon in Johannesburg, South Africa
• November 4–6: MediaWiki Users and Developers Conference Fall 2024 in Vienna, Austria

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

MediaWiki message delivery 22:21, 30 September 2024 (UTC)

Tech News: 2024-41

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Weekly highlight

• Communities can now request installation of Automoderator on their wiki. Automoderator is an automated anti-vandalism tool that reverts bad edits based on scores from the new "Revert Risk" machine learning model. You can read details about the necessary steps for installation and configuration.

Updates for editors

• Translators in wikis where the mobile experience of Content Translation is available, can now customize their articles suggestion list from 41 filtering options when using the tool. This topic-based article suggestion feature makes it easy for translators to self-discover relevant articles based on their area of interest and translate them. You can try it with your mobile device.
• View all 12 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.

Updates for technical contributors

• It is now possible for <syntaxhighlight> code blocks to offer readers a "Copy" button if the copy=1 attribute is set on the tag. Thanks to SD0001 for these improvements.
• Customized copyright footer messages on all wikis will be updated. The new versions will use wikitext markup instead of requiring editing raw HTML.
• Later this month, temporary accounts will be rolled out on several pilot wikis. The final list of the wikis will be published in the second half of the month. If you maintain any tools, bots, or gadgets on these 11 wikis, and your software is using data about IP addresses or is available for logged-out users, please check if it needs to be updated to work with temporary accounts. Guidance on how to update the code is available.
• Rate limiting has been enabled for the code review tools Gerrit and GitLab to address ongoing issues caused by malicious traffic and scraping. Clients that open too many concurrent connections will be restricted for a few minutes. This rate limiting is managed through nftables firewall rules. For more details, see Wikitech's pages on Firewall, GitLab limits and Gerrit operations.
• Five new wikis have been created:
  • a Wikipedia in Komering (w:kge:)
  • a Wikipedia in Mooré (m:mos:)
  • a Wiktionary in Madurese (wikt:mad:)
  • a Wikiquote in Gorontalo (q:gor:)
  • a Wikinews in Shan (n:shn:)

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MediaWiki message delivery 23:43, 7 October 2024 (UTC)

This Month in GLAM: September 2024

This Month in GLAM – Volume XIV, Issue IX, September 2024 Headlines Albania report: Wikimedian in Residence at Elbasan’s Ethnographic Museum in Albania Argentina report: GLAM and communities Australia report: Artbank's edit-a-thon for gender equity in Australian visual arts Belgium report: Project 'Belgian distilleries as Linked Open Data' completed Brazil report: Photowalks for Wiki Loves Monuments 2024 at five corners of Brazil France report: 4th edition of the Label Culture Libre India report: Digitization at the Museum of Santal Culture, Federation Hall Society Library and Cultural Heritage and Literature in Meghalaya New Zealand report: Report on the Wikidata WikiProject International Botanical 2024, Conference report for SPNHC-TDWG 2024 and the upcoming New Zealand species edit-a-thon Poland report: What's up in GLAM-Wiki in Poland Spain report: Wiki Takes Rural Archaeology Switzerland report: Swiss GLAM Programme UK report: Wiki content in interfaith education USA report: Banned books and more Biodiversity Heritage Library report: BHL-Wiki Working Group September monthly highlights Special story: Global GLAM calls from November: short survey, and register! Calendar: October's GLAM events Read this edition in full • Single-page To assist with preparing the newsletter, please visit the newsroom. Past editions may be viewed here.

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Accusations

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made elsewhere.

Nothing else be said when OP chooses to play rules for thee but not for me. --SHB2000 (t | c | m) 11:36, 29 October 2024 (UTC)

---

I was going to drop this, but as you didn't ("It's your responsibility to check"), I think I must tell you that you owe the two of us an apology.

You accused me and Granger for "[bringing up] deliberately incorrect information". There was no reason not to trust good faith. I apologised for the error and explained how it happened. You answered by accepting my apology but not really providing any of your own (I was quite upset for that). When Granger told you that your assumption of bad faith was wrong also about him, you responded by accusing him for not checking carefully enough.

So making a mistake is equivalent to bringing up deliberately incorrect information in your world? I hope not. I wouldn't have minded your first mistake. You were under stress and such mistakes happen even if they shouldn't. But still attacking Granger a day later, when they ask you to keep Wikivoyage fun, that is gross. If you felt that your still were under attack (although you never were), the least you should have done would have been to have a good night's sleep before responding.

–LPfi (talk) 15:07, 21 October 2024 (UTC)

There is a difference in what you and Mx Granger did:

• You accepted the tad carelessness. I'm sorry for being harsh on you, but we cleared things up in the air.
• Mx Granger, however, did not. Rather when I called them out, they could have apologised and cleared things in the air, instead of putting the blame on me. Had they apologised for carelessness or even taken responsibility for it, that's an entirely different argument. I never directly attacked them for it, so I also don't know where you're getting that from. So no, I don't actually "owe" Granger an apology if they don't have the basic courtesy to even admit what they wrote was based of incorrect information. Keep Wikivoyage fun requires cooperation from all parties involved – that includes Granger.

Either way, this is really not worth our time debating about. --SHB2000 (t | c | m) 22:39, 21 October 2024 (UTC)

I thought it isn't until your attack on them.

• For me, your defence didn't clear the air, as it wasn't an apology, but I can live with that.
• Accusing them for deliberately bringing up incorrect information was a faux pas, which needs an apology regardless of anything else, especially now that you didn't respect their wish to keep Wikivoyage fun. Only after that apology, you have any right to criticise them for any mistake they did.

You wrote:

"I don't think it's worth my time arguing when the two of you bring up deliberately incorrect information because you have an issue with the protections."

That's indeed an accusation, a grave and false one. Don't call it an attack if you don't want to, but it needs an apology. For keeping Wikivoyage fun and for common decency.

(I still don't really see what Granger should apologise for; excessive vandalism and excessive spam are both problems that may require locking a page, and some carelessness in the distinction is common. The argument would arguably have been valid using either word.)

I am seriously concerned about your not understanding how serious it is to accuse fellow editors of bad faith, and maintaining the view that you have the right to do that unless they apologise first. Keeping a good spirit in the community needs cooperation from everybody, yes, but there is no reason for you not to take the first step – requiring others to move first is poison.

–LPfi (talk) 11:06, 22 October 2024 (UTC)

There's possibly a more important issue than keeping Wikivoyage fun, which is to maintain collegiality. SHB2000, I observed the problem edits of the Graffiti wall in real time, as I stated in the Travellers' pub thread, and I definitely understand being upset at dealing with them and then getting second-guessed, but staying so seemingly prickly about this is bad. It's not likely to provoke a de-sysop nomination because it's in no way a security issue, but it's not good behavior. It was legitimate for other admins (or indeed any other good-faith user) to question the semi-protection of the Graffiti wall and also to state that such a step should have required a discussion, and if it happens again, we might consider semi-protecting it for a day or two and starting a thread on Wikivoyage talk:Graffiti wall. I will say that repeated instances of apparent temper and grudge-holding, especially about minor issues like this, might lead to discussions about your status, so to sum up: I'd advise you to chill, recognize that your colleagues deserve respect and consideration, and act accordingly. Ikan Kekek (talk) 11:23, 22 October 2024 (UTC)

I will admit my use of the word "deliberate" was not the best choice of words and I'll apologise for that. However, my point stands, that it is still incorrect. Keeping Wikivoyage fun also means Granger accepts that they take greater care before questioning admin actions; it's not engraved in policy, but common courtesy to do so. Vandalism and spam are handled similarly in many ways, except on the graffiti wall it's not; discussions that centre on the premise of incorrect information never end well, meaning it is not unreasonable for me to claim it's incorrect.

Also I'm not sure why you're accusing me of attacking Granger a day later? I can't see how Wikivoyage:Travellers'_pub#c-SHB2000-20241021024500-Mx._Granger-20241020221500 is an attack?

All in all and to respond to Ikan Kekek, in the future I'll try to be less prickly about this (and I fully recognise I could have handled this better), but I hope you also recognise my side of things and why I'm not too pleased with Granger when they chose to not have the basic courtesy to recognise that better care from their end could have been taken? --SHB2000 (t | c | m) 11:42, 22 October 2024 (UTC)

Not only not the best of words, but what made that a false statement and an accusation of bad faith. Pointing out that something is incorrect or might be a misunderstanding is no problem.

Admins should be open for their actions being questioned – blind trust is never good, and asking is better than silently questioning admin trustworthiness. As you probably understood, I asked myself the same question and didn't see the answer in the page history. I could have been more careful, but when I think about it, I shouldn't – already checking as carefully as I did took too much time from other work.

–LPfi (talk) 15:49, 22 October 2024 (UTC)

SHB2000, the reason I felt it was important to comment was that you continued to act like you were holding a grudge about this. As for recognizing why you were annoyed, I already did, and if you don't see that, what did you think you read in my comment above? Ikan Kekek (talk) 16:50, 22 October 2024 (UTC)

I do recognise you see my position on this, for the record. And no, I don't hold a grudge against this but what I do care about is basic courtesy (checking carefully does not take too much time and if it does, so be it; it is better than starting a discussion on the premise of incorrect information), which Granger did not give to me. Had Granger at least acknowledged (which they still haven't done so) they could have done better from the get-go, this entire discussion would have gone very differently.

Other than that, nothing else needs to be said from me. --SHB2000 (t | c | m) 20:50, 22 October 2024 (UTC)

Also I love how I still haven't gotten a response for "Also I'm not sure why you're accusing me of attacking Granger a day later?" – I'm not budging for a response but all I've got to say is don't play rules for thee and not for me in the future. --SHB2000 (t | c | m) 00:06, 25 October 2024 (UTC)

Still no response... --SHB2000 (t | c | m)

What are you trying to get a response on? Ikan Kekek (talk) 06:17, 29 October 2024 (UTC)

LPfi claimed I attacked Granger – I would like to know how hence why I said "Also I'm not sure why you're accusing me of attacking Granger a day later?" (note the question mark). I don't expect an answer, but find it rather hypocritical and reflects poorly on LPfi by not answering and would rather LPfi clear things up now. SHB2000 (t | c | m) 06:25, 29 October 2024 (UTC)

I think you know how I feel about this, which is that you are in the wrong, and since you refused to apologize for claiming that colleagues were deliberately acting in bad faith, you had ample opportunity to take the next best course of action - dropping the discussion. You should still do that. Ikan Kekek (talk) 07:26, 29 October 2024 (UTC)

I'm sorry, but I did apologise for that? See "I will admit my use of the word "deliberate" was not the best choice of words and I'll apologise for that." SHB2000 (t | c | m) 07:35, 29 October 2024 (UTC)

That's not merely a problematic choice of words, but I will drop my participation in this discussion. Ikan Kekek (talk) 08:43, 29 October 2024 (UTC)

Good – because I did apologise and that's objective (despite you claiming that I "refused to apologize"). Maybe it's better for both of us for you to cease conversation on this topic. --SHB2000 (t | c | m) 08:48, 29 October 2024 (UTC)

I though I had said what I needed to say, and kept away not to be provoked by posts that I'd better leave alone, so I didn't see your question. But as you insist. Here's your exchange:

• I did not "bring up deliberately incorrect information" and would appreciate not being accused of it. Thanks for the answer to my question, but I would prefer if we can keep Wikivoyage fun and tone down the hostility. —Granger 22:15, 20 October 2024 (UTC)
• It's your responsibility to check what you add is in fact correct in discussion (spam and vandalism are handled very differently); if you can't take responsibility for that, that's frankly your issue, not anyone else's. --SHB2000 02:45, 21 October 2024 (UTC)

I indeed read the answer, which doesn't recognise that Granger may have acted in good faith, but instead criticises them – in this context – as an attack. Call it what you will, but I maintain that you owe him an apology for the original accusation of deliberately bringing up incorrect information (and no, it's not about your word choice, but about your false accusation). It may be too late to do anything about it and I have no interest in continuing this discussion.

–LPfi (talk) 11:28, 29 October 2024 (UTC)

I'm sorry, but that's not what an attack is (despite what you may think). You may have no interest in continuing this discussion, but that doesn't change the fact that you also falsely accused me of attacking Granger. I maintain that you owe me an apology for making false accusations (if you want to go down that path of apologising again; if you want to treat me that way, I will treat the way you treat me. --SHB2000 (t | c | m) 11:34, 29 October 2024 (UTC)

Tech News: 2024-42

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Updates for editors

• The Structured Discussion extension (also known as Flow) is starting to be removed. This extension is unmaintained and causes issues. It will be replaced by DiscussionTools, which is used on any regular talk page. A first set of wikis are being contacted. These wikis are invited to stop using Flow, and to move all Flow boards to sub-pages, as archives. At these wikis, a script will move all Flow pages that aren't a sub-page to a sub-page automatically, starting on 22 October 2024. On 28 October 2024, all Flow boards at these wikis will be set in read-only mode.
• WMF's Search Platform team is working on making it easier for readers to perform text searches in their language. A change last week on over 30 languages makes it easier to find words with accents and other diacritics. This applies to both full-text search and to types of advanced search such as the hastemplate and incategory keywords. More technical details (including a few other minor search upgrades) are available.
• View all 20 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, EditCheck was installed at Russian Wikipedia, and fixes were made for some missing user interface styles.

Updates for technical contributors

• Editors who use the Toolforge tool Earwig's Copyright Violation Detector will now be required to log in with their Wikimedia account before running checks using the "search engine" option. This change is needed to help prevent external bots from misusing the system. Thanks to Chlod for these improvements.
• Phabricator users can create tickets and add comments on existing tickets via Email again. Sending email to Phabricator has been fixed.
• Some HTML elements in the interface are now wrapped with a <bdi> element, to make our HTML output more aligned with Web standards. More changes like this will be coming in future weeks. This change might break some tools that rely on the previous HTML structure of the interface. Note that relying on the HTML structure of the interface is not recommended and might break at any time.

In depth

• The latest monthly MediaWiki Product Insights newsletter is available. This edition includes: updates on Wikimedia's authentication system, research to simplify feature development in the MediaWiki platform, updates on Parser Unification and MathML rollout, and more.
• The latest quarterly Technical Community Newsletter is now available. This edition include: research about improving topic suggestions related to countries, improvements to PHPUnit tests, and more.

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MediaWiki message delivery 21:22, 14 October 2024 (UTC)

New Jersey county articles

Can you unprotect all of the New Jersey county articles please? 73.49.185.194 14:35, 15 October 2024 (UTC)

• so you will stamp all of the first paragraphs with an obvious and unneeded section "this is northern", "this is southern"? We have a policy on obvious additions, and prefer our articles cleaner, without this stamp. Ibaman (talk) 14:51, 15 October 2024 (UTC)

  Cheers for the protections, Ibaman! --SHB2000 (t | c | m) 20:25, 15 October 2024 (UTC)

Long-term abuse isn't welcome. --SHB2000 (t | c | m) 20:20, 15 October 2024 (UTC)

What is "long-term abuse"? 175.214.236.208 20:57, 15 October 2024 (UTC)

These edits have been rejected repeatedly as not being improvements, but you keep coming back to try to make them. That is abuse of Wikivoyage, and you have been doing it for a long time. Ground Zero (talk) 21:14, 15 October 2024 (UTC)

Then shouldn't it be "longtime abuse" instead of "long-term abuse"? 46.48.110.187 01:00, 16 October 2024 (UTC)

Don't play dumb; since you're banned from editing Wikivoyage you shouldn't even be editing this talk page. --SHB2000 (t | c | m) 01:28, 16 October 2024 (UTC)

Helping you out

Did some work on PEI topics I see you have also, cheers. BigKrow (talk) 00:08, 18 October 2024 (UTC)

Hey cheers for the updates, BigKrow – I figured since there's no article for the park might as well create one pre-emptively and add known information and expand upon it when more info becomes available (I did the same for Nilpena Ediacara National Park a few years back). --SHB2000 (t | c | m) 00:11, 18 October 2024 (UTC)

The Signpost: 19 October 2024

News, reports and features from the English Wikipedia's newspaper

• News and notes: One election's end, another election's beginning

• Recent research: "As many as 5%" of new English Wikipedia articles "contain significant AI-generated content", says paper

• In the media: Off to the races! Wikipedia wins!

• Contest: A WikiCup for the underdeveloped world

• Traffic report: A scream breaks the still of the night

• Book review: The Editors

• Humour: The Newspaper Editors

• Crossword: Spilled Coffee Mug

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Tech News: 2024-43

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Weekly highlight

• The Mobile Apps team has released an update to the iOS app's navigation, and it is now available in the latest App store version. The team added a new Profile menu that allows for easy access to editor features like Notifications and Watchlist from the Article view, and brings the "Donate" button into a more accessible place for users who are reading an article. This is the first phase of a larger planned navigation refresh to help the iOS app transition from a primarily reader-focused app, to an app that fully supports reading and editing. The Wikimedia Foundation has added more editing features and support for on-wiki communication based on volunteer requests in recent years.

iOS Wikipedia App's profile menu and contents

Updates for editors

• Wikipedia readers can now download a browser extension to experiment with some early ideas on potential features that recommend articles for further reading, automatically summarize articles, and improve search functionality. For more details and to stay updated, check out the Web team's Content Discovery Experiments page and subscribe to their newsletter.
• Later this month, logged-out editors of these 12 wikis will start to have temporary accounts created. The list may slightly change - some wikis may be removed but none will be added. Temporary account is a new type of user account. It enhances the logged-out editors' privacy and makes it easier for community members to communicate with them. If you maintain any tools, bots, or gadgets on these 12 wikis, and your software is using data about IP addresses or is available for logged-out users, please check if it needs to be updated to work with temporary accounts. Guidance on how to update the code is available. Read more about the deployment plan across all wikis.
• View all 33 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, the South Ndebele, Pannonian Rusyn, Obolo, Iban and Tai Nüa Wikipedia languages were created last week.
• It is now possible to create functions on Wikifunctions using Wikidata lexemes, through the new Wikidata lexeme type launched last week. When you go to one of these functions, the user interface provides a lexeme selector that helps you pick a lexeme from Wikidata that matches the word you type. After hitting run, your selected lexeme is retrieved from Wikidata, transformed into a Wikidata lexeme type, and passed into the selected function. Read more about this in the latest Wikifunctions newsletter.

Updates for technical contributors

• Users of the Wikimedia sites can now format dates more easily in different languages with the new {{#timef:…}} parser function. For example, {{#timef:now|date|en}} will show as "18 December 2024". Previously, {{#time:…}} could be used to format dates, but this required knowledge of the order of the time and date components and their intervening punctuation. #timef (or #timefl for local time) provides access to the standard date formats that MediaWiki uses in its user interface. This may help to simplify some templates on multi-lingual wikis like Commons and Meta.
• Commons and Meta users can now efficiently retrieve the user's language using {{USERLANGUAGE}} instead of using {{int:lang}}.
• The Product and Tech Advisory Council (PTAC) now has its pilot members with representation across Africa, Asia, Europe, North America and South America. They will work to address the Movement Strategy's Technology Council initiative of having a co-defined and more resilient technological platform.

In depth

• The latest quarterly Growth newsletter is available. It includes: an upcoming Newcomer Homepage Community Updates module, new Community Configuration options, and details on new projects.
• The Wikimedia Foundation is now an official partner of the CVE program, which is an international effort to catalog publicly disclosed cybersecurity vulnerabilities. This partnership will allow the Security Team to instantly publish common vulnerabilities and exposures (CVE) records that are affecting MediaWiki core, extensions, and skins, along with any other code the Foundation is a steward of.
• The Community Wishlist is now testing machine translations for Wishlist content. Volunteers can now read machine-translated versions of wishes and dive into discussions even before translators arrive to translate content.

Meetings and events

• 24 October - Wiki Education Speaker Series Webinar - Open Source Tech: Building the Wiki Education Dashboard, featuring Wikimedia interns and a Web developer in the panel.
• 20–22 December 2024 - Indic Wikimedia Hackathon Bhubaneswar 2024 in Odisha, India. A hackathon for community members, including developers, designers and content editors, to build technical solutions that improve contributors' experiences.

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MediaWiki message delivery 20:53, 21 October 2024 (UTC)

Growth News, October 2024

Current work

Newcomer Homepage Community Updates module

We will add a new module to the Newcomer Homepage that will allow communities to highlight specific events, projects, campaigns, and initiatives. We have released a simple version on beta wikis and we will soon start an A/B test on our pilot wikis. This module will only display on the Newcomer Homepage if communities decide to utilize it, so learn how to configure the Community Updates module, or share your thoughts on the project's talk page.

One design concept aimed to increase constructive activation

Constructive activation experimentation

After showcasing early design ideas at Wikimania, we conducted user testing of design prototypes. We now aim to engage communities in further discussions and plan to run a targeted experiment, presenting a structured task within the reading view to logged-in new account holders with zero edits.

Community Configuration

This Community Configuration extension was developed to help communities customize wiki features to meet their unique needs. The Growth team is now helping other Wikimedia Foundation teams make their products configurable:

• The Moderation Tools team now provides Community Configuration for Automoderator. (T365046)
• Certain Babel extension settings will be configurable soon. (T328171)

Future work

As part of the Growth team annual plan, we will continue to investigate ways to increase constructive activation on mobile, while also working with Data Products to move forward A/B testing functionality via the Metrics Platform.

Community events

• Growth team members presented Community Configuration: Shaping On-Wiki Functionality Together at Wikimania (slides). The session recording is available to watch on YouTube. This session provided an update on the Community Configuration project and introduced details about the upcoming features that communities will soon be able to configure. Representatives from the Moderator Tools, Editing, Web, and Campaigns teams shared their plans for utilizing Community Configuration in the future. Following these presentations, the WMF Growth team's Benoît Evellin and Martin Urbanec answered audience questions.
• Habib Mhenni gave a presentation of how mentorship works at WikiIndaba 2024. The recording is available.

Stay informed

Growth team weekly updates are available on wiki (in English) if you want to know more about our day-to-day work. If you want to receive more general updates about technical activity happening across the Wikimedia movement (including Growth work), we encourage you to subscribe to Tech News.

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Trizek_(WMF), 15:44, 22 October 2024 (UTC)

Tech News: 2024-44

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Updates for editors

• Later in November, the Charts extension will be deployed to the test wikis in order to help identify and fix any issue. A security review is underway to then enable deployment to pilot wikis for broader testing. You can read the October project update and see the latest documentation and examples on Beta Wikipedia.
• View all 32 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, Pediapress.com, an external service that creates books from Wikipedia, can now use Wikimedia Maps to include existing pre-rendered infobox map images in their printed books on Wikipedia.

Updates for technical contributors

• Wikis can use the Guided Tour extension to help newcomers understand how to edit. The Guided Tours extension now works with dark mode. Guided Tour maintainers can check their tours to see that nothing looks odd. They can also set emitTransitionOnStep to true to fix an old bug. They can use the new flag allowAutomaticBack to avoid back-buttons they don't want.
• Administrators in the Wikimedia projects who use the Nuke Extension will notice that mass deletions done with this tool have the "Nuke" tag. This change will make reviewing and analyzing deletions performed with the tool easier.

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MediaWiki message delivery 20:56, 28 October 2024 (UTC)

WikiSP Board of Directors Elections 2024

Board of Directors Elections 2024 Dear valued member of our group, we are pleased to extend an invitation for you to consider presenting your candidacy for one of the three available seats on the Board of Directors. This board plays a vital role in overseeing the group’s work and administration, making it one of the three key components of our organization. If you would like to register as a candidate, please use the following link. We kindly suggest that candidates consider being available for Board of Directors activities for approximately six to twenty-four hours each year. We would be delighted to welcome volunteers from other Wikimedia projects, such as Wikivoyage, Wikiquote, Wiktionary, and Wikisource, to consider applying as candidates. While proficiency in Spanish is not required, we can arrange for interpreters to assist if needed. We are pleased to inform you that receiving this message confirms your eligibility to offer your candidacy to the Board of Directors. If you currently hold other leadership positions, such as serving on the boards of directors of chapters or thematic organizations, or as one of the three leaders of user groups, we kindly request that a declaration of conflict of interest be provided. Cheers, -sasha-, Igallards7, LuchoCR, Galahad, Hasley Commissioners for the 2024 Board of Directors election

02:09, 29 October 2024 (UTC)

Wondabyne

Wondabyne wasn’t trolling on his meta talk page, he was gaming autoconfirmed. Many other RichardHornsby socks also game permissions. Maybe add gaming of permissions to your meta wiki lta Lol1024 (talk) 07:07, 1 November 2024 (UTC)

As requested, Richard. --SHB2000 (t | c | m) 07:13, 1 November 2024 (UTC)

Tech News: 2024-45

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Updates for editors

• Stewards can now make global account blocks cause global autoblocks. This will assist stewards in preventing abuse from users who have been globally blocked. This includes preventing globally blocked temporary accounts from exiting their session or switching browsers to make subsequent edits for 24 hours. Previously, temporary accounts could exit their current session or switch browsers to continue editing. This is an anti-abuse tool improvement for the Temporary Accounts project. You can read more about the progress on key features for temporary accounts.
• Wikis that have the CampaignEvents extension enabled can now use the Collaboration List feature. This list provides a new, easy way for contributors to learn about WikiProjects on their wikis. Thanks to the Campaign team for this work that is part of the 2024/25 annual plan. If you are interested in bringing the CampaignEvents extension to your wiki, you can follow these steps or you can reach out to User:Udehb-WMF for help.
• The text color for red links will be slightly changed later this week to improve their contrast in light mode.
• View all 32 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, on multilingual wikis, users can now hide translations from the WhatLinksHere special page.

Updates for technical contributors

• XML data dumps have been temporarily paused whilst a bug is investigated.

In depth

• Temporary Accounts have been deployed to six wikis; thanks to the Trust and Safety Product team for this work, you can read about the deployment plans. Beginning next week, Temporary Accounts will also be enabled on seven other projects. If you are active on these wikis and need help migrating your tools, please reach out to User:Udehb-WMF for assistance.
• The latest quarterly Language and Internationalization newsletter is available. It includes: New languages supported in translatewiki or in MediaWiki; New keyboard input methods for some languages; details about recent and upcoming meetings, and more.

Meetings and events

• MediaWiki Users and Developers Conference Fall 2024 is happening in Vienna, Austria and online from 4 to 6 November 2024. The conference will feature discussions around the usage of MediaWiki software by and within companies in different industries and will inspire and onboard new users.

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MediaWiki message delivery 20:50, 4 November 2024 (UTC)

The Signpost: 6 November 2024

News, reports and features from the English Wikipedia's newspaper

• From the editors: Editing Wikipedia should not be a crime

• News and notes: Wikimedia Foundation shares ANI lawsuit updates; first admin elections appoint eleven sysops; first admin recalls opened; temporary accounts coming soon?

• In the media: An old scrimmage, politics and purported libel

• Special report: Wikipedia editors face litigation, censorship

• Gallery: Why you should take more photos and upload them

• In focus: Questions and answers about the court case

• Traffic report: Twisted tricks or tempting treats?

• Technology report: Wikimedia tech, the Asian News International case, and the ultra-rare BLACKLOCK

• Humour: Man quietly slinks away from talk page argument after realizing his argument dumb, wrong

Read this Signpost in full · Single-page · Unsubscribe · Global message delivery 08:09, 6 November 2024 (UTC)

This Month in GLAM: October 2024

This Month in GLAM – Volume XIV, Issue X, October 2024 Headlines Albania report: Wiki Loves Monuments in Albania and Kosovo, 2024 Brazil report: Amazon holotypes: how the species were discovered Canada report: FIMS Graduate Library Wiki Club Lunch & Learn Colombia report: ¿Por qué y para qué usar Wikidata en Colombia? / Why and for what purpose should Wikidata be used in Colombia? Italy report: Empowering Italian GLAMs Kosovo report: Edit-a-thon at the City Museum of Mitrovica Latvia report: Wikidata Workshop 2024: National Library of Latvia Netherlands report: Highlights from the Third Wiki Loves Fashion Campaign in the Netherlands New Zealand report: Auckland Museum Wikimedian in Residence, Te Maori edit-a-thons & NZ Species edit-a-thons North Macedonia report: WIKIMEDIA MKD's successful GLAM programme! Poland report: What's up in GLAM-Wiki in Poland Spain report: General Archive of the Palace UK report: Memory of the World baseline USA report: October meetups Biodiversity Heritage Library report: BHL-Wiki Working Group October monthly highlights AvoinGLAM report: European encounters Memory of the World report: Baseline report Wikidata report: Wikidata's 12th birthday celebration Calendar: November's GLAM events Read this edition in full • Single-page To assist with preparing the newsletter, please visit the newsroom. Past editions may be viewed here.

About This Month in GLAM · Subscribe/Unsubscribe · Global message delivery · Romaine 15:18, 10 November 2024 (UTC)

Tech News: 2024-46

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Updates for editors

• On wikis with the Translate extension enabled, users will notice that the FuzzyBot will now automatically create translated versions of categories used on translated pages.
• View all 29 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, the submitted task to use the SecurePoll extension for English Wikipedia's special administrator election was resolved on time.

Updates for technical contributors

• In 1.44.0-wmf-2, the logic of Wikibase function getAllStatements changed to behave like getBestStatements. Invoking the function now returns a copy of values which are immutable.
• Wikimedia REST API users, such as bot operators and tool maintainers, may be affected by ongoing upgrades. The API will be rerouting some page content endpoints from RESTbase to the newer MediaWiki REST API endpoints. The impacted endpoints include getting page/revision metadata and rendered HTML content. These changes will be available on testwiki later this week, with other projects to follow. This change should not affect existing functionality, but active users of the impacted endpoints should verify behavior on testwiki, and raise any concerns on the related Phabricator ticket.

In depth

• Admins and users of the Wikimedia projects where Automoderator is enabled can now monitor and evaluate important metrics related to Automoderator's actions. This Superset dashboard calculates and aggregates metrics about Automoderator's behaviour on the projects in which it is deployed. Thanks to the Moderator Tools team for this Dashboard; you can visit the documentation page for more information about this work.

Meetings and events

• 21 November 2024 (8:00 UTC & 16:00 UTC) - Community call with Wikimedia Commons volunteers and stakeholders to help prioritize support efforts for 2025-2026 Fiscal Year. The theme of this call is how content should be organised on Wikimedia Commons.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

MediaWiki message delivery 00:07, 12 November 2024 (UTC)

This Month in Education: October 2024

This Month in Education

Volume 13 • Issue 8 • October 2024

Contents • Headlines • Subscribe

In This Issue

• CBSUA Wiki Education turns 1 year
• 7th Senior WikiTown took place in Becov nad Teplou, Czech Republic
• Edit-a-thon about Modern Architecture in Kosovo
• Empowering Digital Literacy through Wikimedia in South Sudan
• Many new articles and contributions in September and October for Wikimedia MKD
• New Record: 5 Events in Municipal Library within a Month
• Wiki-Education programs in Brazil are centered around the Wikidata and Wikisource platforms
• WikiChallenge African Schools wins the “Open Pedagogy” Award 2024 from OE Global
• Wikipedia helps in improving cognitive skills
• Wikipedia in Graduate Studies: Expanding Research Impact
• WiLMa PH establishes a Wiki Club

About This Month in Education · Subscribe/Unsubscribe · Global message delivery · For the team: ZI Jony 14:57, 12 November 2024 (UTC)

The Signpost: 18 November 2024

News, reports and features from the English Wikipedia's newspaper

• News and notes: Open letter to WMF about court case breaks one thousand signatures, big arb case declined, U4C begins accepting cases

• In the media: Summons issued for Wikipedia editors by Indian court, "Gaza genocide" RfC close in news, old admin Gwern now big AI guy, and a "spectrum of reluctance" over Australian place names

• Recent research: SPINACH: AI help for asking Wikidata "challenging real-world questions"

• News from the WMF: Wikimedia Foundation and Wikimedia Endowment audit reports: FY 2023–2024

• Traffic report: Well, let us share with you our knowledge, about the electoral college

Read this Signpost in full · Single-page · Unsubscribe · Global message delivery 23:47, 18 November 2024 (UTC)

Tech News: 2024-47

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Updates for editors

• Users of Wikimedia sites will now be warned when they create a redirect to a page that doesn't exist. This will reduce the number of broken redirects to red links in our projects.
• View all 42 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, Pywikibot, which automates work on MediaWiki sites, was upgraded to 9.5.0 on Toolforge.

Updates for technical contributors

• On wikis that use the FlaggedRevs extension, pages created or moved by users with the appropriate permissions are marked as flagged automatically. This feature has not been working recently, and changes fixing it should be deployed this week. Thanks to Daniel and Wargo for working on this.

In depth

• There is a new Diff post about Temporary Accounts, available in more than 15 languages. Read it to learn about what Temporary Accounts are, their impact on different groups of users, and the plan to introduce the change on all wikis.

Meetings and events

• Technical volunteers can now register for the 2025 Wikimedia Hackathon, which will take place in Istanbul, Turkey. Application for travel and accommodation scholarships is open from November 12 to December 10 2024. The registration for the event will close in mid-April 2025. The Wikimedia Hackathon is an annual gathering that unites the global technical community to collaborate on existing projects and explore new ideas.
• Join the Wikimedia Commons community calls this week to help prioritize support for Commons which will be planned for 2025–2026. The theme will be how content should be organised on Wikimedia Commons. This is an opportunity for volunteers who work on different things to come together and talk about what matters for the future of the project. The calls will take place November 21, 2024, 8:00 UTC and 16:00 UTC.
• A Language community meeting will take place November 29, 16:00 UTC to discuss updates and technical problem-solving.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

MediaWiki message delivery 02:01, 19 November 2024 (UTC)

Talk page spam

Hey, thanks for removing all the weird "plz unblock" spam on my Talk page, but do you have any context for what's up with this? Particularly curious why randos are reaching out to me in particular. Jpatokal (talk) 02:55, 19 November 2024 (UTC)

@Jpatokal: The short story of why MidAtlanticBaby is targeting enwikivoyage in particular is because I protected all the pages they targeted on Meta and because I mostly edit here, they seem to be pasting the same spam here on enwikivoyage, initially targeting Meta admins but now seem to be targeting local admins too.

Long story of MAB is they were initially banned from enwiki, but could not take that very lightly so they resorted to threats of physical violence or death threats. And so they resorted to every other platform available, too – Reddit, Discord, Quora, IRC – and they keep moving onto whatever platform or wiki is next – which unfortunately happens to be us right now. WMF is aware, but there isn't a whole lot they can do about this either. --SHB2000 (t | c | m) 03:02, 19 November 2024 (UTC)

Tech News: 2024-48

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Updates for editors

• A new version of the standard wikitext editor-mode syntax highlighter will be available as a beta feature later this week. This brings many new features and bug fixes, including right-to-left support, template folding, autocompletion, and an improved search panel. You can learn more on the help page.
• The 2010 wikitext editor now supports common keyboard shortcuts such Ctrl+B for bold and Ctrl+I for italics. A full list of all six shortcuts is available. Thanks to SD0001 for this improvement.
• Starting November 28, Flow/Structured Discussions pages will be automatically archived and set to read-only at the following wikis: bswiki, elwiki, euwiki, fawiki, fiwiki, frwikiquote, frwikisource, frwikiversity, frwikivoyage, idwiki, lvwiki, plwiki, ptwiki, urwiki, viwikisource, zhwikisource. This is done as part of StructuredDiscussions deprecation work. If you need any assistance to archive your page in advance, please contact Trizek (WMF).
• View all 25 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, a user creating a new AbuseFilter can now only set the filter to "protected" if it includes a protected variable.

Updates for technical contributors

• The CodeEditor, which can be used in JavaScript, CSS, JSON, and Lua pages, now offers live autocompletion. Thanks to SD0001 for this improvement. The feature can be temporarily disabled on a page by pressing Ctrl+, and un-selecting "Live Autocompletion".
• Tool-maintainers who use the Graphite system for tracking metrics, need to migrate to the newer Prometheus system. They can check this dashboard and the list in the Description of the task T350592 to see if their tools are listed, and they should claim metrics and dashboards connected to their tools. They can then disable or migrate all existing metrics by following the instructions in the task. The Graphite service will become read-only in April.
• The New PreProcessor parser performance report has been fixed to give an accurate count for the number of Wikibase entities accessed. It had previously been resetting after 400 entities.

Meetings and events

• A Language community meeting will take place November 29 at 16:00 UTC. There will be presentations on topics like developing language keyboards, the creation of the Mooré Wikipedia, the language support track at Wiki Indaba, and a report from the Wayuunaiki community on their experiences with the Incubator and as a new community over the last 3 years. This meeting will be in English and will also have Spanish interpretation.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

MediaWiki message delivery 22:42, 25 November 2024 (UTC)

CEE Newsletter - November 2024 Issue Now Available!

We're excited to announce the release of the November 2024 issue of the CEE Newsletter! This edition is particularly special, with 23 updates from affiliates and communities in the CEE region — a record high for this newsletter!

We hope you enjoy the inspiring stories and achievements showcased by our vibrant CEE communities.

Happy reading! --MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 15:11, 28 November 2024 (UTC)

Tech News: 2024-49

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Updates for editors

• Two new parser functions were added this week. The {{#interwikilink}} function adds an interwiki link and the {{#interlanguagelink}} function adds an interlanguage link. These parser functions are useful on wikis where namespaces conflict with interwiki prefixes. For example, links beginning with MOS: on English Wikipedia conflict with the mos language code prefix of Mooré Wikipedia.
• Starting this week, Wikimedia wikis no longer support connections using old RSA-based HTTPS certificates, specifically rsa-2048. This change is to improve security for all users. Some older, unsupported browser or smartphone devices will be unable to connect; Instead, they will display a connectivity error. See the HTTPS Browser Recommendations page for more-detailed information. All modern operating systems and browsers are always able to reach Wikimedia projects.
• Starting December 16, Flow/Structured Discussions pages will be automatically archived and set to read-only at the following wikis: arwiki, cawiki, frwiki, mediawikiwiki, orwiki, wawiki, wawiktionary, wikidatawiki, zhwiki. This is done as part of StructuredDiscussions deprecation work. If you need any assistance to archive your page in advance, please contact Trizek (WMF).
• This month the Chart extension was deployed to production and is now available on Commons and Testwiki. With the security review complete, pilot wiki deployment is expected to start in the first week of December. You can see a working version on Testwiki and read the November project update for more details.
• View all 23 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, a bug with the "Download as PDF" system was fixed.

Updates for technical contributors

• In late February, temporary accounts will be rolled out on at least 10 large wikis. This deployment will have a significant effect on the community-maintained code. This is about Toolforge tools, bots, gadgets, and user scripts that use IP address data or that are available for logged-out users. The Trust and Safety Product team wants to identify this code, monitor it, and assist in updating it ahead of the deployment to minimize disruption to workflows. The team asks technical editors and volunteer developers to help identify such tools by adding them to this list. In addition, review the updated documentation to learn how to adjust the tools. Join the discussions on the project talk page or in the dedicated thread on the Wikimedia Community Discord server (in English) for support and to share feedback.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

MediaWiki message delivery 22:23, 2 December 2024 (UTC)