This is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the
current talk page.
G'day all, March Madness 2020 is about to get underway, and there is bling aplenty for those who want to get stuck into the backlog by way of tagging, assessing, updating, adding or improving resources and creating articles. If you haven't already signed up to participate, why not? The more the merrier!
Peacemaker67 (
click to talk to me) 08:19, 29 February 2020 (UTC) for the coord team
Following an
RfC, the blocking policy was changed to state that sysops must not undo or alter CheckUser or Oversight blocks, rather than should not.
A
request for comment confirmed that sandboxes of established but inactive editors may not be blanked due solely to inactivity.
Technical news
Following a
discussion, Twinkle's default CSD behavior will soon change, most likely this week. After the change, Twinkle will default to "tagging mode" if there is no CSD tag present, and default to "deletion mode" if there is a CSD tag present. You will be able to always default to "deletion mode" (the current behavior) using your
Twinkle preferences.
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
Readers who were not logged in briefly saw the interface in a language decided by their browser. It should normally be in the language of the wiki. This happened for a short period of time last week. This was because of a bug.
[1]
Changes later this week
If you forget your password you can ask for a new one to be sent to your email address. You need to know your email address or your username. You will now be able to choose that you need to enter both your email address and your username. This will be a preference. This is to get fewer password reset emails someone else asked for.
[2]
When you asked for a new password you could see if the username didn't exist on
Special:PasswordReset. Now the page will show the username you entered and tell you an email has been sent if the username exists. This is for better security.
[3]
On
Special:WhatLinksHere you can see what other pages link to a page. You can see if the link is from a redirect. You can now see which section the redirect links to.
[4]
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 3 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 4 March. It will be on all wikis from 5 March (
calendar).
There is a
vote on the creation of a new user group called
abuse filter manager. The vote runs from March 1 to March 31 on Meta.
wgMFSpecialCaseMainPage was used for the mobile site. It was deprecated in 2017. It will stop working in April. Wikis should see if they use it. If they do they should fix it. You can
read more and ask for help. This affects 183 wikis. There is a
list.
[6]
Can you please expand your closing statement at
Talk:Ninja_(video_game_player)#Requested_move_12_January_2020 to explain how you found no consensus for the original proposal? In particular, please clarify whether you just counted !votes or whether you weighed the arguments, and, if the latter, summarize your understanding of the arguments supporting and opposing the proposal, and how you weighed them and why. Or, you can revert your close and allow someone else to evaluate the arguments accordingly. Thanks! --
В²C☎ 00:40, 3 March 2020 (UTC)
@
Born2cycle: Gladly. I'll draft an expanded rationale up now.
OhKayeSierra (
talk) 00:45, 3 March 2020 (UTC)
First, congratulations on your page movership. That should make closing RMs less of a pain (though, sometimes it's easier to pawn off the actual moves and associated corrections on someone else, so it's kind of a mixed blessing)!
So, thanks for explaining your close decision. Now I can see that you seem to have missed that there was no policy basis for the Oppose position, while Support had strong policy basis. Let's review how RM closers are supposed to determine consensus, per
WP:RM/CI#Determining consensus:
Consensus is determined not just by considering the preferences of the participants in a given discussion, but also by evaluating their arguments, assigning due weight accordingly, and giving due consideration to the relevant consensus of the Wikipedia community in general as reflected in applicable policy, guidelines and naming conventions.
So while I agree the participants did prefer keeping the current title, their arguments were, frankly, totally lame. Consider:
Although oppose cited NCVG, you acknowledge NCVG is agnostic about the two choices. Just because someone cites policy does not mean their argument is supported by that policy. In this case it obviously did not.
You characterized the disagreement as "between whether WP:CONCISE should apply vs. WP:PRECISE", apparently without recognizing that PRECISE applies to the entire title, not to the disambiguator alone. That is, the proposed title, Ninja (gamer), meets PRECISE ("titles should unambiguously define the topical scope of the article, but should be no more precise than that") just as well as the current longer title. Since there is no other Ninja that is a "gamer", Ninja (gamer) "unambiguously define[s] the topical scope of the article". It doesn't matter that "gamer" is "vague" in determining whether the title meets
WP:PRECISE, and this was explained (by yours truly) at length. If anything, the longer title violates PRECISE because it is "more precise than that".
As to the "too informal" point, there is no policy basis for that position either, not to mention that wide use of "gamer" in reliable sources annihilated that argument anyway.
But there can be no question, and none was cited in the discussion, about which title is preferred by
WP:CONCISE, a key
WP:CRITERIA listed at the
WP:AT policy page, establishing the Support argument as grounded firmly in policy.
In short, the Oppose side was based entirely on
WP:JDLI, while Support was firmly based in policy. I know it's hard to find against the obvious preference of participants, but when their arguments are as lame as they were in this case, I really think you have to. Otherwise, we're just encouraging weak JDLI arguments in future RM discussions. I urge you to reconsider your decision accordingly. Thanks again. --
В²C☎ 19:08, 3 March 2020 (UTC)
@
Born2cycle: Thank you for sharing your input on this. While I do concur that there were a few baseless opposes for reasons that crossed into
WP:JDLI territory, I also found that they were in the minority, and the majority couldn't fully hash out whether
WP:CONCISE or
WP:PRECISE prevailed. Even if I were to discount the JDLI opposes, I think that my rationale would still be the same and I still would've thought that there wasn't a consensus to move the pages. As I stated in my final paragraph, I encourage all interested editors to start an RfC to determine the proper naming conventions moving forward, as I firmly believe that mass RM's like this one shouldn't dictate the current consensus on naming in any way and needs to involve the broader editing community. And, of course, if you still disagree with my close, you're more than welcome to take it to
WP:MR to ask uninvolved editors to determine if my close should be endorsed or overturned.
OhKayeSierra (
talk) 19:33, 3 March 2020 (UTC)
I will add that this was the most difficult close I've done to date.
OhKayeSierra (
talk) 19:36, 3 March 2020 (UTC)
I will consider going to
WP:MR because I think we really need to discourage taking positions in discussions based entirely on JDLI, as I believe the Opposers did on this one (though not intentionally). However, I respect your decision and understand why you went the way you did; many if not most RM closers would probably have done the same (unfortunately, in my view). Regarding the RFC suggestion, that's good, but please don't dismiss the value of examining these broader issues in narrow RMs like this one. I've addressed this on my FAQ, here:
User:Born2cycle/FAQ#Change_guideline_first. --
В²C☎ 19:50, 3 March 2020 (UTC)
Page mover granted
Hello, OhKayeSierra. Your account has been granted the "extendedmover" user right, either following a request for it or demonstrating familiarity with working with article names and
moving pages. You are now able to rename pages without leaving behind a
redirect, move
subpages when moving the parent page(s), and move category pages.
Please take a moment to review
Wikipedia:Page mover for more information on this user right, especially
the criteria for moving pages without leaving redirect. Please remember to follow
post-move cleanup procedures and make link corrections where necessary, including broken double-redirects when suppressredirect is used. This can be done using
Special:WhatLinksHere. It is also very important that no one else be allowed to access your account, so you should consider taking a few moments to
secure your password. As with all user rights, be aware that if abused, or used in controversial ways without consensus, your page mover status
can be revoked.
If you do not want the page mover right anymore, just let me know, and I'll remove it. Thank you, and happy editing!
~Swarm~{sting} 07:15, 3 March 2020 (UTC)
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
There is a new search word called articletopic. You can use it to search for articles on a specific topic. It is available on the Arabic, Czech, English and Vietnamese Wikipedias. It will come to more Wikipedias soon.
[7][8][9]
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 10 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 11 March. It will be on all wikis from 12 March (
calendar).
The
Wikipedia Android app will do
push notifications if users want them. This could help you see for example when someone wrote on your talk page or your edit was reverted. This will come later this year.
[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
There is a new
API module for changing the content model of existing pages. Use action=changecontentmodel to specify the new model. You can read the
documentation on mediawiki.org.
[11]
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 17 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 18 March. It will be on all wikis from 19 March (
calendar).
Future changes
If you edit a page at the same time as someone else you can get an edit conflict. There is
a new two-column interface to make it easier to solve this. It will soon be active by default on the German, Arabic, and Farsi Wikipedias. It will be on by default on more wikis within the next months. You will be able to opt out of the new interface.
[12][13]
You can see
a proposed design for replying to comments in an easier way.
Hello and welcome to the March newsletter, a brief update of Guild activities since December 2019. All being well, we're planning to issue these quarterly in 2020, balancing the need to communicate widely with the avoidance of filling up talk pages. Don't forget you can unsubscribe at any time; see below.
Election results: There was little changeover in the roster of Guild Coordinators, with Miniapolis stepping down with distinction as a coordinator emeritus while Jonesey95 returned as lead coordinator. The next election is scheduled for June 2020 and all Wikipedians in good standing may participate.
January Drive: Thanks to everyone for the splendid work, completing 215 copy edits including 56 articles from the
Requests page and 116 backlog articles from the target months of June to August 2019. At the conclusion of the drive there was a record low of 323 articles in the copy editing backlog. Of the 27 editors who signed up for the drive, 21 copyedited at least one article. Final results, including barnstars awarded, are available
here.
February Blitz: Of the 15 editors who signed up for this one-week blitz, 13 completed at least one copy edit. A total of 32 articles were copy edited, evenly split between the twin goals of requests and the oldest articles from the copy-editing backlog. Full results are
here.
March Drive: Currently underway, this event is targeting requests and backlog articles from September to November 2019. As of 18 March, the backlog stands at a record low of 253 articles and is expected to drop further as the drive progresses. Awards will be given to everyone who copyedits at least one article from the backlog. Help set a new record and sign up now!
Progress report: As of 18 March, GOCE copyeditors have completed 161 requests in 2020 and there was a net reduction of 385 articles from the copy-editing backlog – a 60% decrease from the beginning of the year. Well done and thank you everyone!
Election reminder: It may only be March but don't forget our mid-year Election of Coordinators opens for nominations on 1 June.
Coordinators normally serve a six-month term and are elected on an approval basis. Self-nominations are welcome. If you've thought of helping out at the Guild, or know of another editor who would make a good coordinator, please consider standing for election or nominating them
here.
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
Some development will be slower than planned. This is because of the
current pandemic. You can see
the new deployment guidelines. This is to avoid risks when some persons could be unavailable.
There was a problem when adding interwiki links. The tool you use to add interwiki links could suggest the wrong project to link to. This has now been fixed.
[14][15]
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 24 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 25 March. It will be on all wikis from 26 March (
calendar).
Future changes
There is
a project to make editing easier for newcomers. The developers are trying to understand what initiatives different Wikipedias have to welcome newcomers. They also want to know which templates are often used for maintenance activities. You can help this project by
checking if your wiki's pages are listed on Wikidata.
... with best wishes for well-being for you and your daughter! --
Gerda Arendt (
talk) 07:05, 25 March 2020 (UTC)
@
Gerda Arendt: Thank you so much for the well-wishes, and likewise! Unfortunately, I found out today that someone I'm close to tested positive for
COVID-19 (we actually found out about it from the local health department), so I and my spouse are both self-quarantining as a precaution. So far, Clara,
User:Mistbreeze, and I are all fine (thankfully). Unfortunately, it also means there's most likely going to be a lot more doctor's visits in my future! OhKayeSierra (
talk) 07:37, 25 March 2020 (UTC)
Good to here that you are all fine, hoping it may stay so, - and self-quarantine is more or less what we all have to live in Germany these days. I received a nice caricature, showing a man, a women and a dog in meditating lotus position, saying: "You can't go outside? Go inside ;) - I received it from one of the students of
Willigis Jäger I know. --
Gerda Arendt (
talk) 08:27, 25 March 2020 (UTC)
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 31 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 1 April. It will be on all wikis from 2 April (
calendar).
Future changes
The video player will change to be simpler and more modern. The current beta feature will become the video player for everyone. The old player will be removed.
[17]
There is a project to make templates easier to use. The next few weeks the developers will present ideas on the
project page. You can watch that page if you are interested in giving feedback.
[18]
Following the
banning of an editor by the WMF last year, the Arbitration Committee
resolved to hold a Arbcom RfC regarding on-wiki harassment. A draft RfC has been posted at
Wikipedia:Arbitration Committee/Anti-harassment RfC (Draft) and not open to comments from the community yet. Interested editors can comment on the RfC itself on its talk page.
Miscellaneous
The WMF has begun a
pilot report of the pages most visited through various social media platforms to help with anti-vandalism and anti-disinformation efforts. The
report is updated daily and will be available through the end of May.
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
There was a problem with user pages not being shown properly on desktop. This was because of a bug. It will soon be fixed.
[19]
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 7 April. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 8 April. It will be on all wikis from 9 April (
calendar).
Future changes
MediaWiki will use a newer version of
Unicode. Some characters that did not have an upper case equivalent before do now. Titles beginning with one of these characters will be moved. A list of these titles can be seen
on Phabricator. The titles will be renamed by the user Maintenance script. This will start on 13 April 2020. You can rename them before this if you wish and the new title can be different from the one the script would rename it to.
[20]
Thanks for removing that entire section, which would have been my preference as well. my own contribution there was just to balance out what seemed to be a POV-based Republican-bashing section, but it is much better to just remove the whole thing. "yikes" is right.
JungerMan Chips Ahoy! (
talk) 17:43, 9 April 2020 (UTC)
@
JungerMan Chips Ahoy!: Yeah, when I read it, it smacked of undue
libel and a needless hatchet job that didn't really add anything of value to the article.
OhKayeSierra (
talk) 20:30, 9 April 2020 (UTC)
@
Gerda Arendt: Thank you for the well wishes, and I hope you had a lovely Easter as well. By a miracle, I'm somehow the only one infected with COVID (most likely got it from volunteering to handle the grocery shopping and errands so that my husband didn't have to), so I've spent my time quarantined in the basement, to avoid getting Clara and
Mistbreeze sick. Aside from a bit of a nasty cough and a fever, I'd say that I'm relatively ok, all things considered. I've spent far too much time getting rest throughout the day. OhKayeSierra (
talk) 04:09, 13 April 2020 (UTC)
Thinking of you! --
Gerda Arendt (
talk) 07:09, 13 April 2020 (UTC)
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
You can now use the articletopic search word on all Wikipedias. It searches articles by topic.
[21]
There was a problem with the Wikidata database last week. Some wikis went down for twenty minutes. Wikidata and other projects showed error messages. Interwiki links were not shown, some tools did not work and other problems. Some of this was fixed quickly. The developers are working on fixing the rest.
[25][26][27]
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from April 14. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from April 15. It will be on all wikis from April 16 (
calendar).
Future changes
Some graphs have not worked on mobile. This will soon be fixed.
[28]
The article tab on talk pages of redirects links to the target of the redirect. It could link to the redirect page itself instead. You can
leave feedback on this.
For pages using
syntax highlighting, the use of the deprecated <source> tag, as well as the use of the deprecated enclose parameter, will add tracking categories.
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
The next issue of Tech News will be sent out on 4 May 2020.
Recent changes
The
small wiki toolkits is to help smaller wikis that need technical skills. They can learn and share technical skills.
[29]
Over-qualified CSS selectors in Wikimedia skins have been removed. div#content is now .mw-body. div.portal is now .portal. div#footer is now #footer. This is so the skins can use
HTML5 elements. If your gadgets or user styles used them you will have to update them.
[30]
Changes later this week
There is no new MediaWiki version this week.
Future changes
Some things on the wikis might look weird or not work in
Internet Explorer 8 in the future. Internet Explorer 8 was replaced in 2011.
[31]
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 28 April next week. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 29 April next week. It will be on all wikis from 30 April next week (
calendar).
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
Some wikis will be on read-only for a few minutes on 5 May. This will happen around
05:00 UTC. This is for database maintenance.
[33]
Some wikis will be on read-only for a few minutes on 7 May. This will also affect
CentralAuth. This can for example affect global renames, password changes, changing or confirming your email address and logging in to new wikis. This will happen around
05:00 UTC. This is for database maintenance.
[34]
Changes later this week
You can get a notification when someone links to a page you created. You can soon turn these notifications off for individual pages.
[35]
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 5 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 6 May. It will be on all wikis from 7 May (
calendar).
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
Everyone can now import photos from
Flickr to Commons with the
UploadWizard. Before this only autopatrollers on Commons could import photos from Flickr.
[36]
Problems
Commons will be on read-only for a few minutes on 12 May. This will happen around
05:00 UTC. This is for database maintenance.
[37]
Several wikis including Wikidata will be on read-only for a few minutes on 19 May. This will happen around
05:00 UTC. English Wikipedia will be on read-only for a few minutes on 21 May
05:00 UTC. This is for database maintenance.
[38][39]
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 12 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 13 May. It will be on all wikis from 14 May (
calendar).
Future changes
JavaScript scripts and gadgets can no longer check multiple keys at once via mw.config.exists() or mw.user.tokens.exists(). You can use exists() or get() to check one at a time instead.
[40]
Thank you for article improvements in May! - DYK our list of
people for whose life I'm thankful enough to improve their articles? - I have
a FAC open, one of Monteverdi's exceptional works, in memory of Brian who passed me his collected sources. - How are you, and yours? --
Gerda Arendt (
talk) 20:39, 17 May 2020 (UTC)
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 forget your password you can ask for a new one to be sent to your email address. You need to know your email address or your username. You can choose that you need to enter both your email address and your username. This is a preference. This is to get fewer password reset emails someone else asked for. This is now available on all Wikimedia wikis.
[41][42]
Problems
There is a bug that creates problems for iPhone users with
iOS 13 and
Safari. If you use an iPhone to read or edit Wikipedia and see bugs on the mobile site you can
report them.
[43]
Several wikis including Wikidata will be on read-only for a few minutes on 19 May. This will happen around
05:00 UTC. English Wikipedia will be on read-only for a few minutes on 21 May
05:00 UTC. This is for database maintenance.
[44][45]
Graphs will be
rendered in the reader's browser. This will use
Javascript. Graphs will hopefully work better for everyone who uses Javascript. It will not work for users who don't use Javascript. This will not affect diagrams in image files.
[47]
Some CSS for the skins has been simplified. This affects div#p-personal, div#p-navigation, div#p-interaction, div#p-tb, div#p-lang, div#p-namespaces, div#p-variants and div#footer. They will have to remove div. You will have to update your gadgets, scripts or user styles. This is so we can use
HTML5.
[48]
Some CSS for
the Vector skin has been changed. This affects #p-variants, #p-namespaces, #p-personal, #p-views and #p-cactions. They can no longer use > ul. You might need to update your gadgets, scripts or user styles.
See how.
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 visual editor will now work in the
Modern skin. The changes that needed to happen for this to work could cause problems for some scripts or gadgets.
[49]
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from May 26. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from May 27. It will be on all wikis from May 28 (
calendar).
@
Vycl1994: Thanks for bringing that to my attention! That was a mistake on my part. I’ll handle the move request shortly.
OhKayeSierra (
talk) 09:16, 26 May 2020 (UTC)
The Wikimedia Foundation announced that they will develop a universal code of conduct for all WMF projects. There is an open
local discussion regarding the same.
Arbitration
A
motion was passed to enact a
500/30 restriction on articles related to the history of Jews and antisemitism in Poland during World War II (1933–45), including the Holocaust in Poland. Article talk pages where disruption occurs may also be managed with the stated restriction.
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
There is a new beta version of the
Wikimedia Commons app for Android. It has a new zoom function when you look at images. It can also suggest places when you upload geotagged photos.
[50]
Problems
There was a problem with the Commons database on 27 May. Commons could not be edited for eight minutes. Because of this problem the database was moved. This caused another short read-only time on 29 May.
[51][52][53]
The
Vector skin had a problem where you couldn't add links to the article in other languages. You couldn't see the section if there were no links to other languages already. It also removed
content translation links and links to language settings. This has now been fixed.
[54]
Changes later this week
You can get a notification when someone links to a page you created. You can turn these notifications off for individual pages. You can soon turn them off also in the notifications you get.
[55]
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 2 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 3 June. It will be on all wikis from 4 June (
calendar).
Hello and welcome to the June newsletter, a brief update of Guild activities since
March 2020. You can unsubscribe from our mailings at any time; see below. All times and dates stated are in
UTC.
Current events
Election time: Nomination of candidates in our
mid-year Election of Coordinators opened on 1 June, and voting will take place from 00:01 on 16 June.
GOCE coordinators normally serve a six-month term and are elected on an approval basis. Self-nominations are welcome. If you've thought about helping out at the Guild, or you know of another editor who would make a good coordinator, please consider standing for election or nominating them
here.
March Drive:
Self-isolation from
coronavirus may have played a hand in making this one of our most successful backlog elimination drives. The copy-editing backlog was reduced from 477 to a record low of 118 articles, a 75% reduction. The last four months of 2019 were cleared, reducing the backlog to three months. Fifty requests were also completed, and the total word count of copy-edited articles was 759,945. Of the 29 editors who signed up, 22 completed at least one copy edit. Final results, including barnstars awarded, are available
here.
April Blitz: This blitz ran from 12 to 18 April with a theme of
Indian military history. Of the 18 people who signed up, 14 copyedited at least one article. Participants claimed a total of 60 copyedits. Final results, including barnstars awarded, are available
here.
May Drive: This event marked the 10th anniversary of the GOCE's copy-editing drives, and set a goal of diminishing the backlog to just one month of articles, as close to zero articles as possible. We achieved the goal of eliminating all articles that had been tagged prior to the start of the drive, for the first time in our history! Of the 51 editors who signed up, 43 copyedited at least one article. Final results, including barnstars awarded, are available
here.
Other news
Progress report: as of 2 June, GOCE participants had processed 328 requests since 1 January, which puts us on pace to exceed any previous year's number of requests. As of the end of the May drive, the backlog stood at just 156 articles, all tagged in May 2020.
Outreach: To mark the 10th anniversary of our first Backlog Elimination Drive,
The Signpost contributor and GOCE participant Puddleglum2.0 interviewed project coordinators and copy-editors for the journal's
April WikiProject Report. The Drive and the current Election of Coordinators have also been covered in The Signpost'sMay News and Notes page.
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
Some articles have tables that can be sorted in different ways. For example a list of countries can be sorted alphabetically but you can click on the size column to sort them by size. If you clicked on the column a second time it would sort the countries from the bottom to the top instead. A third click will now take you back to the original sorting.
[56]
Self-closed tags now work as in the
HTML5 specifications. This means you should stop using some of them. <b/> is an example of a self-closed tag that won't work. area, base, br, col, embed, hr, img, input, keygen, link, meta, param, source, track, wbr can be self-closed. Pages with tags that should not be self-closed have been listed in
a tracking category since 2016. They will be listed in
Special:LintErrors/self-closed-tag. This doesn't affect <references /> or <ref />.
[57]
There is a banner called WikidataPageBanner. It is for example used by the Wikivoyages, Wikimedia Russia and the Catalan, Basque, Galician and Turkish Wikipedias. It will now been seen by mobile visitors too. Before this it was only seen on desktop. The wikis should update instructions on MediaWiki:Sitenotice so that editors know to test and style for mobile too.
[58][59]
Changes later this week
You can now edit
MassMessage descriptions through the
API. This is useful for tools and gadgets.
[60]
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 9 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 10 June. It will be on all wikis from 11 June (
calendar).
Future changes
A temporary fix helped wikis make their main pages more mobile friendly. This was in 2012. It has not been recommended since 2017. It will not work after 13 July. Wikis should use
TemplateStyles instead. 118 wikis need to fix this. You can
read more and see if your wiki is affected.
[61]
Reply tool: This is available as a Beta Feature at the four partner wikis (Arabic, Dutch, French, and Hungarian Wikipedias). The Beta Feature will get
new features soon. The new features include writing comments in a new visual editing mode and pinging other users by typing @. You can
test the new features on the
Beta Cluster. Some other wikis will have a chance to try the Beta Feature in the coming months.
New requirements for user signatures: Soon, users will not be able to save invalid custom signatures in
Special:Preferences. This will reduce signature spoofing, prevent page corruption, and make new talk page tools more reliable. Most editors will not be affected.
Research on the use of talk pages: The Editing team worked with the
Wikimedia research team to study how talk pages help editors improve articles. We learned that new editors who use talk pages make more edits to the main namespace than new editors who don't use talk pages.
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
Toolforge hosts several tools created by the Wikimedia community like edit counters or enhanced editors. It is changing the domain from tools.wmflabs.org to toolforge.org. The routing scheme is moving from tools.wmflabs.org/toolname to toolname.toolforge.org. You can
read the details. Tools that use OAuth will have to be updated to keep working. You can
ask for help.
Problems
There is a Wikidata item link in the sidebar on many pages. This disappeared for a couple of days for users who have the
Monobook skin. This was because of a bug. It has now been fixed.
[62]
Editing, logging in and logging out didn't work properly for a short period of time last week. It was soon fixed.
[63]
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 16 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 17 June. It will be on all wikis from 18 June (
calendar).
Future changes
Pywikibot is a Python
library to automate work on wikis. It will not support
Python 2 after the new version in July. Support for Python 3.4 and MediaWiki below 1.19 will also be dropped. You should migrate to Python 3. You can
ask for help.
[64]
The selectors .menu and .vectorMenu will no longer work in the
Vector skin. This can affect gadgets and user scripts. .menu should be replaced by ul. .vectorMenu should be replaced by .vector-menu.
[65]
Here's wishing you a belated welcome to Wikipedia, OhKayeSierra! I see that you've already been around a while and wanted to thank you for
your contributions. Though you seem to have been successful in finding your way around, you may still benefit from following some of the links below, which help editors get the most out of Wikipedia:
If you don't already know, you should sign your posts on
talk pages by using four tildes (~~~~) to insert your username and the date.
I hope you enjoy editing here and being a
Wikipedian! Again, welcome!
Sm8900 (
talk) 20:34, 19 June 2020 (UTC)
Hi! I happened to notice some of your recent comments, and your listing at
WP:Teahouse. If I am not mistaken, it seems like you have not been welcomed here yet. hard to believe!! anyway, if I am mistaken, please forgive my error. thanks for all your great work here, either way! cheers!!
--
Sm8900 (
talk) 20:36, 19 June 2020 (UTC)
@
Sm8900: Haha, thanks for the warm welcome! Much appreciated! I still can't believe I've been with the project for over two years now! Definitely wish I had more time for content creation than I have had lately, but... y'know, time constraints with being a mom now,
grad school and whatnot. OhKayeSierra (
talk) 22:38, 19 June 2020 (UTC)
Thank you for improving articles in June. I can proudly present a FA, quite a gift after a year without, and
a FL is in the making, comments welcome. --
Gerda Arendt (
talk) 12:56, 21 June 2020 (UTC)
@
Gerda Arendt: Sorry, just noticed the message today. Congratulations on the FA and FL!
OhKayeSierra (
talk) 01:02, 24 June 2020 (UTC)
Thank you, - that's in memory of
Brian. - Now in memory of
a friend who died, -
sad list growing, - it was her husband whose death started it, - my wake-up call to write their article. --
Gerda Arendt (
talk) 05:29, 24 June 2020 (UTC)
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
There are some
new tools to make it easier for newcomers to start editing. They are available on
some wikis. These wikis had a problem with the visual editor for a short period of time last week. This was because of a bug in the new tools. It was soon fixed.
[66]
Some user scripts and gadgets stopped working because of a change to
CSS selectors. .vectorTabs should be replaced with .vector-menu-tabs to fix this.
[67]
Changes later this week
The developers are working on a
new interface to solve edit conflicts on talk pages. This will be released on 24 June. You can
give feedback.
[68]
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 23 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 24 June. It will be on all wikis from 25 June (
calendar).
Future changes
A temporary fix helped wikis make their main pages more mobile friendly. This was in 2012. It has not been recommended since 2017. It will not work after 13 July. Wikis should use
TemplateStyles instead. 91 wikis still need to fix this. You can
read more and see if your wiki is affected.
[69]
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
Everyone was logged out. This was because a few users saw the wikis as if they were logged in to someone else's account. The problem should be fixed now.
[70]
Some readers didn't see new edits to pages. If the page had been recently changed they saw an older version of the page instead. This only affected readers who were logged out. It lasted for ten days. It has been fixed.
[71]
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 30 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 1 July. It will be on all wikis from 1 July (
calendar).
Future changes
The
Modern and
Monobook skins use the ID searchGoButton for the go button. This is searchButton for
Vector. To have the same ID for all skins it will change to searchButton in Monobook and Modern too. This will affect gadgets and user scripts. It will happen on 23 July. They should be updated to use searchButton. You can
read more and see a list of affected scripts.
I hope this finds you well. I’m a graduate student researcher undertaking a study on how women learn to participate in Wikipedia and factors that enable them to persist as contributors. I’m currently seeking individuals who self-identify as women and actively participate in Wikipedia authorship, and you seem to fit this criteria. I'm asking potential participants to sit down with me for an hour long Zoom, Skype, or phone call. Would you be interested in interviewing for this project? Thank you for considering.
Feel-flourish (
talk) 16:35, 29 June 2020 (UTC)
@
Feel-flourish: Wow. Thank you for considering me for your research project. Unfortunately, I'm more or less semi-retired at the moment and don't think that I would be an ideal candidate for your study. After having a daughter earlier in the year and adjusting to motherhood while simultaneously trying to juggle my course load towards earning my M.A. in English, my editing on the project has been sporadic at best since approximately last year. Also, have you tried reaching out with a message on the
Village Pump or the
Administrator's noticeboard? They're both well-watched pages on the project, and I'm sure you'd get the attention of other editors that might be interested in assisting you with your research.
OhKayeSierra (
talk) 18:09, 30 June 2020 (UTC)
@
OhKayeSierra: I understand and very much appreciate your response. Your life sounds incredibly busy right now. Congrats on your new daughter! Best of luck with your MA coursework and thank you so much for the leads. Take care!
Feel-flourish (
talk) 18:43, 30 June 2020 (UTC)
The
Medicine case was
closed, with a
remedy authorizing
standard discretionary sanctions for all discussions about pharmaceutical drug prices and pricing and for edits adding, changing, or removing pharmaceutical drug prices or pricing from articles.
Seven years ago this week, the
Editing team made the visual editor available by default to all logged-in editors using the desktop site at the English Wikipedia. Here's what happened since its introduction:
The 50 millionth edit using the visual editor on desktop was made this year. More than 10 million edits have been made here at the English Wikipedia.
More than 2 million new articles have been created in the visual editor. More than 600,000 of these new articles were created during 2019.
Almost 5 million edits on the mobile site have been made with the visual editor. Most of these edits have been made since the Editing team started improving the
mobile visual editor in 2018.
The proportion of all edits made using the visual editor has been increasing every year.
Editors have made more than 7 million edits in the 2017 wikitext editor, including starting 600,000 new articles in it. The
2017 wikitext editor is VisualEditor's built-in wikitext mode. You can
enable it in your preferences.
In 2019, 35% of the edits by newcomers, and half of their first edits, were made using the visual editor. This percentage has been increasing every year since the tool became available.
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
The
Score extension has been disabled for now. This is because of a security issue. It will work again as soon as the security issue has been fixed.
[72]
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 7 July. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 8 July. It will be on all wikis from 9 July (
calendar).
Future changes
Abstract Wikipedia is a new Wikimedia project. It will collect language-independent information that can be easily read in different languages. It builds on Wikidata. The name is preliminary. You can
read more.
[73]
Some
rules for user signatures will soon be enforced.
Lint errors and invalid HTML will no longer be allowed in user signatures. Nested substitution will not be allowed. A link to your user page, user talk page or user contributions will be required. You can
check if your signature works with the new rules. This is because the signatures can cause problems for tools or other text on the page.
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 can
thank others for their edits.
Checkusers can now see user data related to that action. This can help identify
sock puppets who harass others using thanks.
[74]
Problems
Everyone was logged out a couple of weeks ago to fix a security problem. The problem was not entirely fixed. Because of this everyone was logged out once again last week.
[75][76]
Changes later this week
Wikis that are not for one specific language can
translate pages. Sometimes parts of translations are outdated or missing. Outdated translations are marked with a pink background. Missing translations will also be marked in the future. This markup can sometimes break things. It can soon be disabled by using <translate nowrap></translate> on the source page.
[77]
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 14 July. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 15 July. It will be on all wikis from 16 July (
calendar).
Future changes
Wikimedia code review plans to use
GitLab. It would be hosted on Wikimedia servers.
[78][79][80][81]
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
A temporary fix helped wikis make their main pages more mobile friendly. This was in 2012. It has not been recommended since 2017. The mobile main page special casing stopped working 14 July. 60 wikis now have main pages that don't work well on mobile. You can see which ones, how to fix it and how to get help
in Phabricator. This is the same problem that was reported in Tech News
2020/24 and
2020/26.
Problems
There is a problem with the interlanguage links. The interlanguage links are the links that help you find a specific page in a different language. The sorting is broken. The developers are working on a solution.
[82]
Some users keep getting the notifications for the same event. Some of these are old events.
[83]
Some users have trouble logging in. This is probably a
browser cookie problem. The developers are working on understanding the problem. If you have trouble logging in you can see the details
on Phabricator.
[84]
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 21 July. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 22 July. It will be on all wikis from 23 July (
calendar).
Future changes
There is a Printable version link. This will disappear. That is because web browsers today can create a printable version or show how it will look in print anyway.
[85]
Thank you for improving articles in July! Now a
FTN is open. --
Gerda Arendt (
talk) 21:47, 20 July 2020 (UTC)
2020 Open Championship
Hi, you just closed
this move discussion as "no consensus" without any explanation. Please could you elaborate? Given 3 "supports", 1 "oppose" and 2 "comments" (the last one not directly related to the move itself, but seemingly seeing consensus for the move), and the arguments that were put forward, it seems like consensus clearly supported the move to me. Regards. wjematherplease leave a message... 07:55, 27 July 2020 (UTC)
@
Wjemather: Done I left a note with my rationale on the RM.
OhKayeSierra (
talk) 08:11, 27 July 2020 (UTC)
@
Wjemather: After reconsidering my initial impression on the RM's consensus, I decided that it would be better to self-revert my closure and relist the RM. I hope that this is an acceptable solution.
OhKayeSierra (
talk) 08:26, 27 July 2020 (UTC)
Thanks. When I proposed the move, I thought it could possibly fail due to being considered "too soon". I would normally have preferred to leave it for a while, but was mostly trying to avoid creation of a duplicative
2021 Open Championship article by one of our friends with a crystal ball (
which happened anyway). wjematherplease leave a message... 08:34, 27 July 2020 (UTC)
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
Starter kit is now available for wiki communities. This page lists technical resources, tools, and recommendations. These are essential to operate a wiki project. This is mostly useful for smaller wikis where the community has limited experience with this.
[86]
The first features of the
Desktop Improvements project are available for logged-in users on all wikis. In order to use them, uncheck Use Legacy Vector in your
local or
global preferences in section Skin preferences. More improvements are planned.
Feedback is welcome.
The deployment train for MediaWiki has been blocked this week.
[87][88]
Translation Notification Bot was sending the same message multiple times to every translator. This has been fixed.
[89]
Some users were receiving the same notification multiple times. This has been fixed.
[90]
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from July 28. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from July 29. It will be on all wikis from JUly 30 (
calendar).
Greetings, FYI I filed a request at
WP:ANI titled
"CIR-based community-imposed site ban re: RTG". In providing a basis for my request I mentioned you and your prior dealings with this editor. Your input at ANI is optional, i.e., invited but not specifically requested. Thanks for reading.
NewsAndEventsGuy (
talk) 13:02, 3 August 2020 (UTC)
@
NewsAndEventsGuy: Thanks for the heads-up. It's unfortunate that RTG didn't take my advice to avoid editing with a
battleground mentality, but not unexpected. I'm currently reading through the ANI thread to get myself up to speed on the issues since then.
OhKayeSierra (
talk) 19:48, 3 August 2020 (UTC)
Wikidata weekly summary #427
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
SQID allows you to analyse, browse and query Wikidata. SQID is inspired by Magnus Manske's Reasonator, but focuses on prominently featuring information about Wikidata classes and properties.
a
graph of MPs and parties in the Swedish Parliament and with whom they worked together with to create motions 2018
SPOILER: >95% is just with people in the same party
The last week was our quarterly prototyping week. We worked on the following projects. None of them are ready for prime-time yet but we'll continue with them.
Slices: We've had a lot of requests for accessing dumps of a smaller part of Wikidata's data since rarely anyone needs the complete data in Wikidata. The tricky part is figuring out which part is needed and if any of that can be generalized. We looked into for example how to make dump generation faster so we could potentially produce more smaller dumps that only cover a part of Wikidata's data, either thematically (e.g. humans) or by type of data (e.g. only statements and English labels and aliases but not sitelinks or descriptions).
REST API: As part of our effort to make it easier to access Wikidata's data for programmers we looked into a REST API. We tried to see if we could cover the existing action API modules in a REST API. We could. We'll take this as input for our ongoing API work now.
Improving quality ratings through ORES: ORES can judge the quality of an Item automatically. It is currently not very good at it however. We tried a few things to make it more accurate and found some easy wins we'll probably make happen in the next weeks.
Query manipulator: One of the ways we could potentially improve the load situation of the Wikidata Query Service is by automatically analyzing and then redirecting a bunch of queries to other systems that are more suitable for that particular type of query. The nice thing about that would be that the person/program sending the query wouldn't have to care about it but it'd be done automagically for them. We tried to build such a system and the results look very promising but more work/experimenting is needed, especially together with the WMF Search team.
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
All queries to the
Wikidata Query Service failed between 17:50 and 17:59 UTC on Thursday 23 July. Some queries failed during a longer period.
[91]
Interlanguage links were ordered incorrectly for the past few weeks. This problem was also mentioned in
Tech News two weeks ago. The problem is now fixed.
[92]
There is a problem with the
global preferences for the "Use Legacy Vector" option. Developers are working on fixing it.
[93]
A bug in the Wikibase extension had disabled the "move" and "create" types of protection in the main (Gallery) namespace on Wikimedia Commons. New protections could not be added, and existing protections were not enforced, allowing some page moves and page creations that should not have been possible. This has now been fixed.
[94]
Changes later this week
The
video player will change to be simpler and more modern. This week, the current beta feature will become the video player for everyone on most non-Wikipedia wikis. The old player will be removed.
[95]
Users' global.js and global.css pages will now also be loaded on the mobile site. You can read
documentation for how to avoid applying styles to the mobile skin.
[96]
In the
MonoBook skin, the searchGoButton identifier is now searchButton. This may affect CSS and JS gadgets. Migration instructions can be found in
T255953. This was previously mentioned in
issue 27.
Bot operators can use Pywikibot to regularly archive discussions. The behavior when the bot uses counter to prevent large archives was changed.
[97]
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from August 4. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from August 5. It will be on all wikis from August 6 (
calendar).
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
FileImporter and FileExporter became standard features on all Wikis during the first week of August. They help you transfer files from local wikis to Wikimedia Commons with the original file information and history intact.
[98]
Problems
The mobile skin displays a message at the bottom of the page about who edited last. This message showed raw wikitext. This has now been fixed. Some messages in
Structured Discussions and
content translation may still appear as raw wikitext. Developers are working on it.
[99]
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from August 11. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from August 12. It will be on all wikis from August 13 (
calendar).
Future changes
All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes on September 1. This is planned between 13:30 and 15:30 UTC. More information will be published in Tech News and will also be posted on individual wikis in the coming weeks.
[100][101]
Greetings, re 'global wawrming', As you may have seen, I am proposing an article move, but to a different target than the opening RM request. What is the prefered manner to offer an alternative idea, but in a way that facilitates discussion and not-voting? Thanks for format suggestions (if any).
NewsAndEventsGuy (
talk) 22:23, 12 August 2020 (UTC)
@
NewsAndEventsGuy: I took a crack at editing the formatting to include a discussion section (basically incorporating the text from the RM survey format at
Template:Requested move/talk). Here's the diff. I hope that will help with moving the RM more towards a discussion as other editors notice the relist.
OhKayeSierra (
talk) 22:53, 12 August 2020 (UTC)
I just realized that I didn't really answer your question. I think that the way that you've handled the RM so far has been the ideal approach for your proposal. Unfortunately, this is a contentious topic in and of itself, so naturally, judging consensus has been difficult, to put it mildly. I dare say it has even bordered on
WP:NOGOODOPTIONS territory. If I were to close it right now, I would probably err on no consensus and encourage an RM to be reopened. I'm hoping that the relist will help attract more editors to the RM to get a clearer consensus on what the title should be.
OhKayeSierra (
talk) 23:04, 12 August 2020 (UTC)
Thanks for paying attention; I've been deep in the climate pages for years, and compiled much of the history of article name/scope debates for pages
Global warming (title/scope status quo unchanged since pre WP:ARBCC) and
(former) 'Climate change' (title/scope tweaked over the past year for first time since split with Global warming)... scope is the same but title went to 'climate change (general concept) and then changed again to the current
Climate variability and change
I expect the GW RM may succeed this time around, especially if real life gives me time and mental powers to finish the advocacy for the atlernative so it can sink or swim. If I can't get around to it, I'll get out of the way before the relisting is up.
NewsAndEventsGuy (
talk) 23:24, 12 August 2020 (UTC)
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 revert an edit using the undo link your edit is marked with an undo tag. This will now only happen if you don't change anything in the edit window before publishing the undo. This is to keep users from marking edits as undos when they actually do something else.
[102]
The new
OOUI version will not work with
Internet Explorer 8. This means the wikis will look strange and not work well in Internet Explorer 8. This was reported in
Tech/News/2020/17. This is because keeping the wikis working with very old browsers creates other problems.
[103]
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 18 August. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 19 August. It will be on all wikis from 20 August (
calendar).
Future changes
All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes on September 1. This is planned between 13:30 and 15:30 UTC. More information will be published in Tech News and will also be posted on individual wikis next week. This is a reminder. You can help by
translating the announcement message.
[104][105]
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 25 August. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 26 August. It will be on all wikis from 27 August (
calendar).
More than 300 editors used the Reply tool at these four Wikipedias. They posted more than 7,400 replies during the study period.
Of the people who posted a comment with the Reply tool, about 70% of them used the tool multiple times. About 60% of them used it on multiple days.
Comments from Wikipedia editors are positive. One said, أعتقد أن الأداة تقدم فائدة ملحوظة؛ فهي تختصر الوقت لتقديم رد بدلًا من التنقل بالفأرة إلى وصلة تعديل القسم أو الصفحة، التي تكون بعيدة عن التعليق الأخير في الغالب، ويصل المساهم لصندوق التعديل بسرعة باستخدام الأداة. ("I think the tool has a significant impact; it saves time to reply while the classic way is to move with a mouse to the Edit link to edit the section or the page which is generally far away from the comment. And the user reaches to the edit box so quickly to use the Reply tool.")
[106]
The Editing team released the Reply tool as a Beta Feature at eight other Wikipedias in early August. Those Wikipedias are in the Chinese, Czech, Georgian, Serbian, Sorani Kurdish, Swedish, Catalan, and Korean languages. If you would like to use the Reply tool at your wiki, please tell
User talk:Whatamidoing (WMF).
The Reply tool is still in active development. Per request from the Dutch Wikipedia and other editors, you will be able to
customize the edit summary. (The default edit summary is "Reply".) A "ping" feature is available in the Reply tool's visual editing mode. This feature searches for usernames. Per request from the Arabic Wikipedia, each wiki will be able to
set its own preferred symbol for pinging editors. Per request from editors at the Japanese and Hungarian Wikipedias, each wiki can
define a preferred signature prefix in the page
MediaWiki:Discussiontools-signature-prefix. For example, some languages omit spaces before signatures. Other communities want to add a dash or a non-breaking space.
New requirements for user signatures
The
new requirements for custom user signatures began on 6 July 2020. If you try to create a custom signature that does not meet the requirements, you will get an error message.
Existing custom signatures that do not meet the new requirements will be unaffected temporarily. Eventually, all custom signatures will need to meet the new requirements. You can
check your signature and see lists of active editors whose custom signatures need to be corrected. Volunteers have been contacting editors who need to change their custom signatures. If you need to change your custom signature, then please
read the help page.
Next: New discussion tool
Next, the team will be working on a tool for quickly and easily starting a new discussion section to a talk page. To follow the development of this new tool, please put the
New Discussion Tool project page on your watchlist.
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
This is a reminder. All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes on September 1. This is planned between 14:00 and 15:00 UTC. Please check on the details on
the announcement message.
[107][108]
Wikiproject Military history coordinator election nominations open
Nominations for the upcoming project coordinator election are now open. A team of up to ten coordinators will be elected for the next year. The project coordinators are the designated points of contact for issues concerning the project, and are responsible for maintaining our internal structure and processes. They do not, however, have any authority over article content or editor conduct, or any other special powers. More information on being a coordinator is available
here. If you are interested in running, please sign up here by 23:59 UTC on 14 September! Voting doesn't commence until 15 September. If you have any questions, you can contact any member of the
coord team.
Peacemaker67 (
click to talk to me) 02:06, 1 September 2020 (UTC)
Ongoing: The 'Climate Translation Project' celebrated its first published translation: 'Réchauffement climatique en Afrique', a French translation of the English Wikipedia article 'Climate change in Africa' by User:J. N. Squire in French (SDGs 4, 13) [20]
Past: World Water Week ISA campaign (SDG 6) [21]
Past: Editathon about Covid-19 in Swedish (SDG 3) [22]
Past: Editathon about water in Swedish (SDG 6) [23]
News
Covid-19 is one of Wikipedia’s biggest challenges ever. Here’s how the site is handling it. (SDG 3) [12]
Adding biographies of female oceanographers (SDG 14) [13]
Wiki Education participants improve COVID-19 local response articles (SDG 3) [14]
Wikimedia Policy Brief - COVID-19 - How Wikipedia helps us through uncertain times (SDG 3) [15]
Personal perspective on the forming of the user group (SDG all) [19]
Research
Wikipedia, The Free Online Medical Encyclopedia Anyone Can Plagiarize: Time to Address Wiki-Plagiarism (SDG 3) [3]
[16] Sarasua, Cristina, & Mietchen, Daniel. (2020, August). Multilingual Structured Climate Research Data in Wikidata - The Community Perspective. Zenodo.
http://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3994272
[17] Mietchen, Daniel, & Sarasua, Cristina. (2020, August). Multilingual Structured Climate Research Data in Wikidata - The Data Perspective. Zenodo.
http://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3994266
Upcoming: Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call: Rob Fernandez (Wikimedia District of Columbia) on Listeria, a tool that uses SPARQL queries to define a list, and provides a bot that will update a wiki page containing that list if the results of that SPARQL query change, all based on Wikidata, 08 September.
Agenda
Upcoming:
live SPARQL queries on Twitch and in French by Vigneron, September 8 at 18:00 CEST
Upcoming video: Wikipedia Weekly Network - LIVE Wikidata editing #19
Facebook,
YouTube, September 10
Added Wikidata support to Japanese Wikivoyage.
phab:T261451
Investigating the nature of our training outliers to improve the way ORES automatically scores the quality of an Item.
Working on error that sometimes causes Wikidata UI to report 2 error messages when saving a sitelink in an item.
phab:T260869
Completed various investigations to make an informed decision on the output format of WikibaseManifest files (automated configuration detection for toolbuilders)
phab:T261285
Completed various bug fixes and wrap-up tasks to conclude the major engineering work on the
Federated Properties project
More work on Item Quality Scoring and Federated Properties