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.
Partial blocks is now available for testing on the
Test Wikipedia. The new functionality allows you to block users from editing specific pages. Bugs may exist and can be reported on the
local talk page or on
Meta. A discussion regarding deployment to English Wikipedia will be started by community liaisons sometime in the near future.
A
user script is now available to quickly review unblock requests.
The
2019 Community Wishlist Survey is now accepting new proposals until November 11, 2018. The results of this survey will determine what software the Wikimedia Foundation's Community Tech team will work on next year. Voting on the proposals will take place from November 16 to November 30, 2018. Specifically, there is a proposal category for
admins and stewards that may be of interest.
Arbitration
Eligible editors will be invited to nominate themselves as candidates in the
2018 Arbitration Committee Elections starting on November 4 until November 13. Voting will begin on November 19 and last until December 2.
The Arbitration Committee's email address
has changed to arbcom-enwikimedia.org. Other email lists, such as functionaries-en and clerks-l, remain unchanged.
Graphs are unavailable due to technical issues. There is more info on
Phabricator and on
MediaWiki.org.
Chart of the New Pages Patrol backlog for the past 6 months.
Hello Quiddity,
Community Wishlist Survey – NPP needs you – Vote
NOW
Community Wishlist Voting takes place 16 to 30 November for the
Page Curation and New Pages Feed improvements, and other software requests. The NPP community is hoping for a good turnout in support of the requests to Santa for the tools we need. This is very important as we have been asking the Foundation for these upgrades for 4 years.
If this proposal does not make it into the top ten, it is likely that the tools will be given no support at all for the foreseeable future. So please put in a vote today.
We are counting on significant support not only from our own ranks, but from everyone who is concerned with maintaining a Wikipedia that is free of vandalism, promotion, flagrant financial exploitation and other pollution.
Go
here to remove your name if you wish to opt-out of future mailings. — Insertcleverphrasehere(
or here)18:37, 16 November 2018 (UTC)
ArbCom 2018 election voter message
Hello, Quiddity. Voting in the 2018 Arbitration Committee elections is now open until 23.59 on Sunday, 3 December. All users who registered an account before Sunday, 28 October 2018, made at least 150 mainspace edits before Thursday, 1 November 2018 and are not currently blocked are eligible to vote. Users with alternate accounts may only vote once.
The
Arbitration Committee is the panel of editors responsible for conducting the
Wikipedia arbitration process. It has the authority to impose binding solutions to disputes between editors, primarily for serious conduct disputes the community has been unable to resolve. This includes the authority to impose
site bans,
topic bans, editing restrictions, and other measures needed to maintain our editing environment. The
arbitration policy describes the Committee's roles and responsibilities in greater detail.
A
request for comment is in progress to determine whether members of the
Bot Approvals Group should satisfy activity requirements in order to remain in that role.
A
request for comment is in progress regarding whether to change the administrator inactivity policy, such that administrators "who have made no logged administrative actions for at least 12 months may be desysopped". Currently, the policy states that administrators "who have made neither edits nor administrative actions for at least 12 months may be desysopped".
Administrators and bureaucrats can no longer unblock themselves unless they placed the block initially. This
change has been implemented globally. See also
this ongoing village pump discussion (
permalink).
To complement the aforementioned change, blocked administrators will soon have the ability to block the administrator that placed their block to mitigate the possibility of a compromised administrator account blocking all other active administrators.
In late November, an attacker compromised multiple accounts, including at least four administrator accounts, and used them to vandalize Wikipedia. If you have ever used your current password on any other website, you should change it immediately. Sharing the same password across multiple websites makes your account vulnerable, especially if your password was used on
a website that suffered a data breach. As these incidents have shown, these concerns are not pure fantasies.
Shock Brigade Harvester Boris (Raymond Arritt) passed away on 14 November 2018. Boris joined Wikipedia as Raymond arritt on 8 May 2006 and was an administrator from 30 July 2007 to 2 June 2008.
This year's award for the Reviewer of the Year goes to Onel5969. Around on Wikipedia since 2011, their staggering number of 26,554reviews over the past twelve months makes them, together with an additional total of 275,285edits, one of Wikipedia's most prolific users.
Thanks are also extended for their work to JTtheOG (15,059 reviews), Boleyn (12,760reviews), Cwmhiraeth (9,001reviews), Semmendinger (8,440reviews), PRehse (8,092reviews), Arthistorian1977 (5,306reviews), Abishe (4,153 reviews), Barkeep49 (4,016reviews), and Elmidae (3,615reviews). Cwmhiraeth, Semmendinger, Barkeep49, and Elmidae have been New Page Reviewers for less than a year — Barkeep49 for only sevenmonths, while Boleyn, with an edit count of 250,000 since she joined Wikipedia in 2008, has been a bastion of New Page Patrol for many years.
The backlog is now approaching 5,000, and still rising. There are around 640holders of the NPR flag, most of whom appear to be inactive. The 10% of the reviewers who do 90% of the work could do with some support especially as some of them are now taking a well deserved break.
Really good news - NPR wins the Community Wishlist Survey 2019
At #1 position, the Community Wishlist poll closed on 3December with a resounding success for NPP, reminding the WMF and the volunteer communities just how critical NPP is to maintaining a clean encyclopedia and the need for improved tools to do it. A big 'thank you' to everyone who supported the NPP proposals.
See the results.
Training video
Due to a number of changes having been made to the feed since this three-minutevideo was created, we have been asked by the WMF for feedback on the video with a view to getting it brought up to date to reflect the new features of the system. Please leave your comments
here, particularly mentioning how helpful you find it for new reviewers.
If you wish to opt-out of future mailings, go
here.
Progress of the project has been generally delayed since September due to development issues (more bitrot than expected, some of the code just being genuinely confusing, etc) and personal injury (I suffered a concussion in October and was out of commission for almost two months as a result).
I currently expect to be putting out a proper call for CollaborationKit pilots in January/February, with estimated deployment in February/March if things don't go horribly wrong (they will, though, don't worry). As a part of that, I will properly update
the page and send out announcement and reach out to all projects
already signed up as pilots for WikiProject X in general, at which point those (still) interested can volunteer specifically to test the
CollaborationKit extension.
Wikipedia:WikiProject X/Pilots was originally created for the first WikiProject X prototype, and given this is where the project has since gone, it's only logical to continue to use it. While I haven't yet updated the page to properly reflect this:
If you want to add your project to this page now, feel free. Just bear in mind that more information what to actually expect will be added later/included in the announcement, because by then I will have a much better idea myself.
Until then, you can find me in my corner working on making the CollaborationKit code do what we want and not just what we told it, per
the workboard.
R4 (new): Redirects in the file namespace (and no
file links) that have the same name as a file or redirect at
Commons are now covered under the new R4 criterion (
discussion). This is {{db-redircom}}; the text is unchanged.
G13 (expanded): Userspace drafts containing only the default Article Wizard text are now covered under G13 along with other drafts (
discussion). Such blank drafts are now eligible after six months rather than one year, and taggers continue to use {{db-blankdraft}}.
Members of the
Bot Approvals Group (BAG) are
now subject to an activity requirement. After two years without any bot-related activity (e.g. operating a bot, posting on a bot-related talk page), BAG members will be retired from BAG following a one-week notice.
Technical news
Starting on December 13, the Wikimedia Foundation security team implemented new
password policy and requirements. Privileged accounts (administrators, bureaucrats, checkusers, oversighters, interface administrators, bots, edit filter managers/helpers, template editors,
et al.) must have a password at least 10 characters in length. All accounts must have a password:
User accounts not meeting these requirements will be prompted to update their password accordingly. More information is available
on MediaWiki.org.
Blocked administrators
may now block the administrator that blocked them. This was done to mitigate the possibility that a compromised administrator account would block all other active administrators, complementing the removal of the ability to unblock oneself outside of self-imposed blocks. A
request for comment is currently in progress to determine whether the blocking policy should be updated regarding this change.
{{Copyvio-revdel}} now has a link to open the history with the
RevDel checkboxes already filled in.
Accounts continue to be compromised on a regular basis. Evidence shows this is entirely due to the accounts having the same password that was used on another website that suffered a data breach. If you have ever used your current password on any other website, you should change it immediately.
Around 22% of admins have enabled
two-factor authentication, up from 20% in June 2018. If you haven't already enabled it, please consider
doing so. Regardless of whether you use 2FA, please practice appropriate
account security by ensuring your password is
secure and unique to Wikimedia.
Administrators who are blocked have the technical ability to block the administrator who blocked their own account. A recent
request for comment has amended the
blocking policy to clarify that this ability should only be used in exceptional circumstances, such as account compromises, where there is a clear and immediate need.
A
request for comment closed with a consensus in favor of deprecating The Sun as a permissible reference, and creating an edit filter to warn users who attempt to cite it.
Technical news
A
discussion regarding an overhaul of the format and appearance of
Wikipedia:Requests for page protection is in progress (
permalink). The proposed changes will make it easier to create requests for those who are not using Twinkle. The workflow for administrators at this venue will largely be unchanged. Additionally, there are plans to archive requests similar to how it is done at
WP:PERM, where historical records are kept so that prior requests can more easily be searched for.
A new
IRC bot is available that allows you to subscribe to notifications when specific filters are tripped. This requires that your IRC handle be
identified.
Following discussions at
the Bureaucrats' noticeboard and
Wikipedia talk:Administrators, an earlier change to the
restoration of adminship policy was
reverted. If requested, bureaucrats will not restore administrator permissions removed due to inactivity if there have been five years without a logged administrator action; this "five year rule" does not apply to permissions removed voluntarily.
Technical news
A
new tool is available to help determine if a given IP is an open proxy/VPN/webhost/compromised host.
Arbitration
The Arbitration Committee announced
two new OTRS queues. Both are meant solely for cases involving private information; other cases will continue to be handled at the appropriate venues (e.g.,
WP:COIN or
WP:SPI).
paid-en-wpwikipedia.org has been set up to receive private evidence related to abusive
paid editing.
checkuser-en-wpwikipedia.org has been set up to receive private requests for CheckUser. For instance, requests for IP block exemption for anonymous proxy editing should now be sent to this address instead of the functionaries-en list.
The WMF
has announced that Google Translate is now available for translating articles through the
content translation tool. This may result in an increase in
machine translated articles in the New Pages Feed. Feel free to use the {{rough translation}} tag and gently remind (or inform) editors that translations from other language Wikipedia pages still require attribution per
WP:TFOLWP.
Discussions of interest
Two elements of
CSD G6 have been split into their own criteria:
R4 for redirects in the "File:" namespace with the same name as a file or redirect at Wikimedia Commons (
Discussion), and
G14 for disambiguation pages which disambiguate zero pages, or have "(disambiguation)" in the title but disambiguate a single page (
Discussion).
NPR is not a binary keep / delete process. In many cases a redirect may be appropriate. The
deletion policy and its associated
guideline clearly emphasise that not all unsuitable articles must be deleted. Redirects are not contentious. See
a classic example of the templates to use. More templates are listed at the
R template index. Reviewers who are not aware, do please take this into consideration before PROD, CSD, and especially AfD because not even all admins are aware of such policies, and many NAC do not have a full knowledge of them.
NPP Tools Report
Superlinks – allows you to check an article's history, logs, talk page, NPP flowchart (on unpatrolled pages) and more without navigating away from the article itself.
copyvio-check – automatically checks the copyvio percentage of new pages in the background and displays this info with a link to the report in the 'info' panel of the Page curation toolbar.
Six Month Queue Data: Today – Low – 2393 High – 4828 Looking for inspiration? There are approximately
1000 female biographies to review.
Stay up to date with even more news –
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Hello, Quiddity. Please check your email; you've got mail! Message added 14:46, 18 March 2019 (UTC). It may take a few minutes from the time the email is sent for it to show up in your inbox. You can remove this notice at any time by removing the {{You've got mail}} or {{ygm}} template.
Good day, this message is to inform you that
Wikimedia Canada has created a new mailing list operated by Mailman. This mailing list is for all discussions related to the Wikimedia movement in Canada, in both English and French. Announcements from Wikimedia Canada will always be bilingual, but you are welcomed to discuss in any language of your choice. The old google group will be abandoned. To join this mailing list, please go to
[1]. To send messages to the list, write to general(at)discussions.wikimedia.ca. Also, please forward this message to anybody who may be interested. Thank you and do not hesitate to contact me if you have any questions.
JP Béland (WMCA) (
talk) 13:37, 22 March 2019 (UTC)
The Signpost: 31 March 2019
News, reports and features from the English Wikipedia's weekly journal about Wikipedia and Wikimedia
The Wikimedia Foundation's Community health initiative plans to design and build a new user reporting system to make it easier for people experiencing harassment and other forms of abuse to provide accurate information to the appropriate channel for action to be taken. Please see
meta:Community health initiative/User reporting system consultation 2019 to provide your input on this idea.
Two more administrator accounts were compromised. Evidence has shown that these attacks, like previous incidents, were due to reusing a password that was used on another website that suffered a data breach. If you have ever used your current password on any other website, you should change it immediately. All admins are strongly encouraged to enable
two-factor authentication, please consider doing so. Please always practice appropriate
account security by ensuring your password is
secure and unique to Wikimedia.
As a reminder, according to
WP:NOQUORUM, administrators looking to close or relist an AfD should evaluate a nomination that has received few or no comments as if it were a
proposed deletion (PROD) prior to determining whether it should be relisted.
XTools Admin Stats, a tool to list admins by administrative actions, has been revamped to support more types of log entries such as AbuseFilter changes. Two additional tools have been integrated into it as well:
Steward Stats and
Patroller Stats.
Arbitration
In response to the continuing compromise of administrator accounts, the Arbitration Committee
passed a motion amending the
procedures for return of permissions (
diff). In such cases, the committee will review all available information to determine whether the administrator followed "appropriate personal security practices" before restoring permissions; administrators found failing to have adequately done so will not be resysopped automatically. All current administrators have been notified of this change.
Following a
formal ratification process, the
arbitration policy has been amended (
diff). Specifically, the two-thirds majority required to remove or suspend an arbitrator now excludes (1) the arbitrator facing suspension or removal, and (2) any inactive arbitrator who does not respond within 30 days to attempts to solicit their feedback on the resolution through all known methods of communication.
Niharika Kohli, a product manager for the growth team,
announced that work is underway in implementing improvements to New Page Patrol as part of the 2019 Community Wishlist and suggests all who are interested watch the
project page on meta. Two requested improvements have already been completed. These are:
Allow filtering by no citations in page curation
Not having CSD and PRODs automatically marked as reviewed, reflecting current consensus among reviewers and current Twinkle functionality.
Reliable Sources for NPP
Rosguill has been
compiling a list of reliable sources across countries and industries that can be used by new page patrollers to help judge whether an article topic is notable or not. At this point further discussion is needed about if and how this list should be used. Please consider joining the
discussion about how this potentially valuable resource should be developed and used.
Backlog drive coming soon
Look for information on the an upcoming backlog drive in our next newsletter. If you'd like to help plan this drive, join in the discussion on the
New Page Patrol talk page.
What, if anything, would a SNG for
Softball look like
Six Month Queue Data: Today – 7242 Low – 2393 High – 7250
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here to remove your name if you wish to opt-out of future mailings.
Delivered by
MediaWiki message delivery (
talk) on behalf of
DannyS712 (
talk) at 19:17, 17 May 2019 (UTC)
The CSD feature of
Twinkle now allows admins to notify page creators of deletion if the page had not been tagged. The default behavior matches that of tagging notifications, and replaces the ability to open the user talk page upon deletion. You can customize which criteria receive notifications in your
Twinkle preferences: look for Notify page creator when deleting under these criteria.
Twinkle's d-batch (batch delete) feature now supports deleting subpages (and related redirects and talk pages) of each page. The pages will be listed first but use with caution! The und-batch (batch undelete) option can now also restore talk pages.
Miscellaneous
The
previously discussed unblocking of IP addresses indefinitely-blocked before 2009 was
approved and has taken place.
Discussion of link language wrapper templates (June 2019)
A discussion has started about wrapper templates of {{Link language}}. You may be interested in participating because you participated in a related previous discussion.
E^pi*i batch (
talk) 03:08, 10 June 2019 (UTC) (
Retro is my main account.)
Membership renewal
You have been a member of
Wiki Project Med Foundation (WPMEDF) in the past. Your membership, however, appears to have expired. As such this is a friendly reminder encouraging you to officially rejoin WPMEDF. There are no associated costs. Membership gives you the right to vote in elections for the board. The current membership round ends in 2020.
You may prevent the proposed deletion by removing the {{proposed deletion/dated files}} notice, but please explain why in your
edit summary or on
the file's talk page.
This bot DID NOT nominate any file(s) for deletion; please refer to the
page history of each individual file for details. Thanks,
FastilyBot (
talk) 01:00, 14 June 2019 (UTC)
Hello Quiddity! I am
Euan from the BETA Wikis for MAD and I have to leave the Wikis in your capable hands for a while to prevent Madison from getting her MediaWiki team into our database for MAD hq.
51.52.45.222 (
talk) 15:03, 15 June 2019 (UTC).
Updates: I've been focusing largely on the development side of things, so we are a lot closer now to being ready to actually start discussing deploying it and testing it out here.
There's just a few things left that need to be resolved:
A bunch of language support issues in particular, plus some
other release blockers, such as the fact that currently there's no good way to find any hubs people do create.
We also probably need some proper documentation and examples up to even reference if we want a meaningful discussion. We have
the extension documentation and
some test projects, but we probably need a bit more. Also I need to be able to even find the test projects! How can I possibly write reports about this stuff if I can't find any of it?!
Some other stuff that's happened in the meantime:
Midpoint report is out for this round of the project, if you want to read in too much detail about all the problems I've been running into.
WikiProject Molecular Biology have successfully set up using the
old module system that CollaborationKit is intended to replace (eventually), and it even seems to work, so go them. Based on the issues they ran into, it looks like the members signup thing on that system has some of the same problems as we've been unable to resolve in CK, though, which is... interesting. (Need to
change the content model to the right thing for the formwizard config to take. Ugh, content models.)
You may prevent the proposed deletion by removing the {{proposed deletion/dated files}} notice, but please explain why in your
edit summary or on
the file's talk page.
This bot DID NOT nominate any file(s) for deletion; please refer to the
page history of each individual file for details. Thanks,
FastilyBot (
talk) 01:01, 22 June 2019 (UTC)
New Page Review newsletter July-August 2019
Hello Quiddity,
WMF at work on NPP Improvements
More new features are being added to the feed, including the important red alert for previously deleted pages. This will only work if it is selected in your filters. Best is to 'select all'. Do take a moment to check out all the new features if you have not already done so. If anything is not working as it should, please let us know at
NPR. There is now also a live queue of
AfC submissions in the New Pages Feed. Feel free to review AfCs, but bear in mind that NPP is an official process and policy and is more important.
QUALITY of REVIEWING
Articles are still not always being checked thoroughly enough. If you are not sure what to do, leave the article for a more experienced reviewer. Please
be on the alert for any incongruities in patrolling and help your colleagues where possible; report patrollers and autopatrolled article creators who are ostensibly undeclared paid editors.
The displayed ORES alerts offer a greater 'at-a-glance' overview, but the new challenges in detecting unwanted new content and sub-standard reviewing do not necessarily make patrolling any easier, nevertheless the work may have a renewed interest factor of a different kind. A vibrant community of reviewers is always ready to help at
NPR.
Backlog
The backlog is still far too high at between 7,000 and 8,000. Of around 700 user rights holders, 80% of the reviewing is being done by just TWO users. In the light of more and more subtle advertising and undeclared paid editing, New Page Reviewing is becoming more critical than ever.
Move to draft
NPR is
triage, it is not a clean up clinic. This move feature is not limited to bios so you may have to slightly re-edit the text in the template before you save the move. Anything that is not fit for mainspace but which might have some promise can be draftified - particularly very poor English and machine and other low quality translations.
Notifying users
Remember to use the message feature if you are just tagging an article for maintenance rather than deletion. Otherwise articles are likely to remain perma-tagged. Many creators are
SPA and have no intention of returning to Wikipedia. Use the feature too for leaving a friendly note note for the author of a first article you found well made or interesting. Many have told us they find such comments particularly welcoming and encouraging.
PERM
Admins are now taking advantage of the new time-limited user rights feature. If you have recently been accorded NPR, do check your user rights to see if this affects you. Depending on your user account preferences, you may receive automated notifications of your rights changes. Requests for permissions are not mini-RfAs. Helpful comments are welcome if absolutely necessary, but the bot does a lot of the work and the final decision is reserved for admins who do thorough research anyway.
Other news
School and academic holidays will begin soon in various places around the Western world. Be on the lookout for the usual increase in hoax, attack, and other junk pages.
Our next newsletter might be announcing details of a possible election for co-ordinators of NPR. If you think you have what it takes to micro manage NPR, take a look at
New Page Review Coordinators - it's a job that requires a lot of time and dedication.
Stay up to date with even more news –
subscribe to The Signpost.
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here to remove your name if you wish to opt-out of future mailings.
In a related matter, the account throttle has been restored to six creations per day as the
mitigation activity completed.
The scope of
CSD criterion G8 has
been tightened such that the only redirects that it now applies to are those which target non-existent pages.
The scope of
CSD criterion G14 has
been expanded slightly to include orphan "Foo (disambiguation)" redirects that target pages that are not disambiguation pages or pages that perform a disambiguation-like function (such as set index articles or lists).
The Wikimedia Foundation's
Community health initiative plans to design and build a
new user reporting system to make it easier for people experiencing harassment and other forms of abuse to provide accurate information to the appropriate channel for action to be taken. Community feedback is invited.
Miscellaneous
In February 2019, the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF)
changed its office actions policy to include temporary and project-specific bans. The WMF exercised this new ability for the first time on the English Wikipedia on 10 June 2019 to temporarily ban and desysop Fram. This action has resulted in
significant community discussion, a
request for arbitration (
permalink), and, either directly or indirectly, the resignations of numerous administrators and functionaries. The WMF Board of Trustees is aware of the situation, and discussions continue on a statement and a way forward. The Arbitration Committee has sent an
open letter to the WMF Board.
The mobile visual editor is a simpler editing tool, for smartphones and tablets using the
mobile site. The Editing team has recently launched two new features to improve the mobile visual editor:
The purpose is to help contributors focus on their edits.
The team studied this with an A/B test.
This test showed that contributors who could use section editing were 1% more likely to publish the edits they started than people with only full-page editing.
The purpose is to smooth the transition between reading and editing.
Section editing and the new loading overlay are now available to everyone using the mobile visual editor.
New and active projects
This is a list of our most active projects.
Watch these pages to learn about project updates and to share your input on new designs, prototypes and research findings.
Edit cards: This is a clearer way to add and edit links, citations, images, templates, etc. in articles. You can try this feature now. Go here to see how:📲Try Edit Cards.
Mobile toolbar refresh: This project will learn if contributors are more successful when the editing tools are easier to recognize.
Mobile visual editor availability: This A/B test asks: Are newer contributors more successful if they use the mobile visual editor? We are collaborating with
20 Wikipedias to answer this question.
Usability improvements: This project will make the mobile visual editor easier to use. The goal is to let contributors stay focused on editing and to feel more confident in the editing tools.
Looking ahead
Wikimania: Several members of the Editing Team will be attending
Wikimania in August 2019. They will lead a session about mobile editing in the
Community Growth space. Talk to them about how editing can be improved.
Talk Pages: In the coming months, the Editing Team will begin
improving talk pages and communication on the wikis.
Learning more
The
VisualEditor on mobile is a good place to learn more about the projects we are working on. The team wants to talk with you about anything related to editing. If you have something to say or ask, please leave a message at
Talk:VisualEditor on mobile.
Following a
research project on masking IP addresses, the Foundation is starting a new project to
improve the privacy of IP editors. The result of this project may significantly change administrative and counter-vandalism workflows. The project is in the very early stages of discussions and there is no concrete plan yet. Admins and the broader community are encouraged to leave feedback on the
talk page.
Since the introduction of temporary user rights, it is becoming more usual to accord the New Page Reviewer right on a probationary period of 3 to 6 months in the first instance. This avoids rights
removal for inactivity at a later stage and enables a review of their work before according the right on a permanent basis.