This page 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.

News and updates for administrators from the past month (December 2020).

Guideline and policy news

• Speedy deletion criterion T3 (duplication and hardcoded instances) has been repealed following a request for comment.

Technical news

• You can now put pages on your watchlist for a limited period of time.

Arbitration

• By motion, standard discretionary sanctions have been temporarily authorized for all pages relating to the Horn of Africa (defined as including Ethiopia, Somalia, Eritrea, Djibouti, and adjoining areas if involved in related disputes). The effectiveness of the discretionary sanctions can be evaluated on the request by any editor after March 1, 2021 (or sooner if for a good reason).
• Following the 2020 Arbitration Committee elections, the following editors have been appointed to the Arbitration Committee: Barkeep49, BDD, Bradv, CaptainEek, L235, Maxim, Primefac.

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Thanks for trying to help with the IP editor on the Kelly Clarkson article. I think this guy/gal really doesn't like that serial comma, and I'm not gonna fight with them over it. I might write 'em up on WP:AN3, though, if they keep doing it. Happy New Year! —  UncleBubba ^{(  T  @  C )} 14:04, 10 January 2021 (UTC)

@ UncleBubba: The thing I'll never understand about such guys is that they completely ignore consistency. There are at least three other serial commas in that lead, but somehow that first one is all that matters. I've seen cases where someone has gone through an article and added or deleted serial commas in every series or changed every instance of "CE" to "AD"; such a person may be misguided but at least is trying to preserve a uniform style. Deor ( talk) 17:20, 10 January 2021 (UTC)

Lol. Our buddy from Middlesbrough, England figured out how to get a different IP address. He must be extremely bored. —  UncleBubba ^{(  T  @  C )} 02:14, 15 January 2021 (UTC)

Thanks for your work on adding those maps/co-ords - much appreciated. Lugnuts ^{Fire Walk with Me} 20:53, 15 January 2021 (UTC)

De nada. That's pretty much what I do around here. Deor ( talk) 20:56, 15 January 2021 (UTC)

Hi again. For info, I mentioned you by name in this AN thread. Nothing to worry about, infact prasing your good work. Thanks. Lugnuts ^{Fire Walk with Me} 07:35, 29 March 2021 (UTC)

Whack! You've been whacked with a wet trout. Don't take this too seriously. Someone just wants to let you know you did something silly.

Actually, I don't know you, and to my knowledge you haven't been doing anything silly. This is just for laughs. Benevolent human ( talk) 04:09, 31 January 2021 (UTC)

News and updates for administrators from the past month (January 2021).

Arbitration

• The standard discretionary sanctions authorized for American Politics were amended by motion to cover post-1992 politics of United States and closely related people, replacing the 1932 cutoff.

Miscellaneous

• Voting in the 2021 Steward elections will begin on 05 February 2021, 14:00 (UTC) and end on 26 February 2021, 13:59 (UTC). The confirmation process of current stewards is being held in parallel. You can automatically check your eligibility to vote.
• Wikipedia has now been around for 20 years, and recently saw its billionth edit!

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Just a heads up - in a reversal of the usual XfDcloser oddness, it appears this article managed to get deleted but the AfD wasn't closed. ♠ PMC♠ (talk) 20:49, 2 February 2021 (UTC)

@ Premeditated Chaos: Yeah, I did the deletion stuff before, rather than after, closing. My bad. Deor ( talk) 20:56, 2 February 2021 (UTC)

Oh all good, I assumed it was technical issues :) Cheers! ♠ PMC♠ (talk) 21:06, 2 February 2021 (UTC)

News and updates for administrators from the past month (February 2021).

Administrator changes

TJMSmith

Boing! said Zebedee • Hiberniantears • Lear's Fool • Only • WGFinley

Interface administrator changes

AmandaNP

Guideline and policy news

• A request for comment is open that proposes a process for the community to revoke administrative permissions. This follows a 2019 RfC in favor of creating one such a policy.
• A request for comment is in progress to remove F7 (invalid fair-use claim) subcriterion a, which covers immediate deletion of non-free media with invalid fair-use tags.
• A request for comment seeks to grant page movers the delete-redirect userright, which allows moving a page over a single-revision redirect, regardless of that redirect's target. The full proposal is at Wikipedia:Page mover/delete-redirect.
• A request for comment asks if sysops may place the General sanctions/Coronavirus disease 2019 editnotice template on pages in scope that do not have page-specific sanctions?
• There is a discussion in progress concerning automatic protection of each day's featured article with Pending Changes protection.

Technical news

• When blocking an IPv6 address with Twinkle, there is now a checkbox with the option to just block the /64 range. When doing so, you can still leave a block template on the initial, single IP address' talkpage.
• When protecting a page with Twinkle, you can now add a note if doing so was in response to a request at WP:RfPP, and even link to the specific revision.
• There have been a number of reported issues with Pending Changes. Most problems setting protection appear to have been resolved ( phab:T273317) but other issues with autoaccepting edits persist ( phab:T275322).

Arbitration

• By motion, the discretionary sanctions originally authorized under the GamerGate case are now authorized under a new Gender and sexuality case, with sanctions authorized for all edits about, and all pages related to, any gender-related dispute or controversy and associated people. Sanctions issued under GamerGate are now considered Gender and sexuality sanctions.
• The Kurds and Kurdistan case was closed, authorizing standard discretionary sanctions for the topics of Kurds and Kurdistan, broadly construed.

Miscellaneous

• Following the 2021 Steward Elections, the following editors have been appointed as stewards: AmandaNP, Operator873, Stanglavine, Teles, and Wiki13.

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Hi. I have a question on your edit in Tiny-house movement, especially of this edit on July 1, 2013. Please read my note here. Thank you. -- 直蔵 ( talk) 17:34, 17 March 2021 (UTC)

@ 直蔵: That edit was made so long ago that I have no memory of making it. The two preceding edits had messed up the syntax in the {{convert}} template, and I was clearly trying to fix that; but where I came up with the 925 sq. ft. figure is anybody's guess. Deor ( talk) 18:00, 17 March 2021 (UTC)

Appreciated your response. Ekem took care of it by removing, so there is no problem now. Thank you.-- 直蔵 ( talk) 00:24, 18 March 2021 (UTC)

My confusion here stems from the fact that Wikipedia:WikiProject Geographical coordinates#Precision guidelines doesn't quite match up with Decimal degrees#Precision. The coordinates on WikiData are sourced whenever possible to the data APIs from the various national railway operators; in the case of Switzerland this is maintained by SBB. The typical precision from SBB is 0.000001; SNCF (in France) tends to be less precise. Let me make sure I understand:

• large stations like Basel SBB should have a precision of 0.0001
• smaller stations (e.g. there's a shelter on a platform) should perhaps have a precision of 0.00001

I want to avoid local forking of the data and set the precision on WikiData, assuming that there's no downside to that approach. Best, Mackensen (talk) 22:36, 18 March 2021 (UTC)

@ Mackensen: Most of the Wikidata coordinates I've run across are in d/m/s rather than decimal format, and I think that in such cases precision to the nearest second, or in a few cases to the nearest tenth of a second, would be sufficient. I've found that in decimal format four decimal places is usually sufficient to pinpoint a station, though sometimes five are needed for smaller structures (in the latter cases I often use |format=dms, which preserves that underlying precision but rounds the displayed coordinates to the nearest second, to avoid the appearance of overprecision). I don't think "a shelter on a platform" counts as a station building, so if a station has no associated building, I usually use a location somewhere near the center of the platform(s).

In my experience, both overprecision and underprecision (among other problems) are rife in coordinates on Wikidata. I suppose you're aware of the en.wp discussions that have been conducted with regard to the importation of Wikidata information; my sense is that there's no consensus to require that en.wp import (or reflect) Wikidata properties over local editors' objections. I still think that coordinates expressed to the tenth of a second are too precise for the Basel station, but I'm not willing to edit war about it. Deor ( talk) 16:37, 19 March 2021 (UTC)

Deor, understood, and thanks for the detailed explanation. I've been working for a while now to source all the coordinates (and some other data) for Swiss railway stations to the official sources, get that into Wikidata, and then bring it downstream. This has cleared up any number of accuracy problems. I don't have a strong opinion on precision and will happily defer to best practices. My main concern now is that I've set over-precise coordinates on a couple of hundred objects and unfortunately I don't think they can be changed in bulk. I'll certainly adjust them as I encounter them. I've knocked Basel SBB down one more to 0.001; I think that level of precision is fine for a large station like that (note that the marker moved from the station entrance to the middle of the structure), but wouldn't be appropriate for the single platform and track variety. Mackensen (talk) 17:35, 19 March 2021 (UTC)

	The Original Barnstar
	thanks JABBAR BAGHI ( talk) 23:04, 21 March 2021 (UTC)

May I ask what the source is for these coordinates [1] [2]? Maybe I'm missing something, but I didn't see a reference so I thought I'd ask. – dlthewave ☎ 16:48, 29 March 2021 (UTC)

@ Dlthewave: I didn't originally add coordinates to those articles; The Anomebot2 did, and I have no idea what source the bot was drawing on—you might try asking the bot's owner, The Anome. What I did was refine the coordinates a bit to more accurately pinpoint the locations of the villages (which are identified both on Google Maps and on the OpenStreetMap) and to move the {{coord}} template into the appropriate infobox field so that the location map would appear.

On the general subject of sources for coordinates, the consensus of WP:GEO participants has been that, whereas sourcing is preferable, WP coordinates that are clearly verifiable by clicking through the GeoHack page to labeled features on Google Maps and other online maps are acceptable in most cases. See, for instance, Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Geographical coordinates/Archive 28#Thoughts?. Deor ( talk) 17:26, 29 March 2021 (UTC)

@ Dlthewave and Deor: The wikitext for the bot-generated template contains the tag "source:GNS-enwiki". What this means is that the bot cross-correlated information from the English-language Wikipedia with the NGA GNS database (which you can find here) found a sufficiently well-fitting match for that article, and took the latitude/longitude data from the matching feature in the GNS database. The matching is a multi-stage process, with checks both before and after the database matching, and it's generally pretty reliable, but limited in resolution to degrees and minutes, due to the original source data. I should also note that the NGA GNS data is in the public domain, as a work of the U.S. federal government. -- The Anome ( talk) 18:03, 29 March 2021 (UTC)

@ The Anome: Just for your information, in going through the recent spate of mass-created articles for Turkish villages, like those linked by the OP, I've found a very few instances (like this) in which your bot incorrectly added coordinates for an identically named village in a different district of Turkey. Perhaps these reflect misidentifications in the NGA GNS database? Deor ( talk) 18:20, 29 March 2021 (UTC)

They might be. The test is (same feature type) + (same placename, once disambiguators are trimmed) + (same country) + (only one of these on enwiki) + (only one of these in the GNS) + (passes all the various article exclusion heuristics, of which there are many). But many places of the same name usually results in non-matches, not mismatches, unless we are particularly unlucky in having both enwiki and the GNS having only one from a given set, and for the those two to be different. Turkey and Poland are particularly bad for having many places of the same name, including, in the case of Poland, even one case of two villages of the same name in the same parish. I ended up having to deal with the Polish locations with a specially coded solution, and I think I might eventually have to do the same for Turkey. -- The Anome ( talk) 19:39, 29 March 2021 (UTC)

Thank you both for the explanation, I wasn't familiar with the process but I see now that there's a source parameter in the template. Cheers! – dlthewave ☎ 18:50, 29 March 2021 (UTC)

News and updates for administrators from the past month (March 2021).

Administrator changes

Alexandria • Happyme22 • RexxS

Guideline and policy news

• Following a request for comment, F7 (invalid fair-use claim) subcriterion a has been deprecated; it covered immediate deletion of non-free media with invalid fair-use tags.
• Following a request for comment, page movers were granted the delete-redirect userright, which allows moving a page over a single-revision redirect, regardless of that redirect's target.

Technical news

• When you move a page that many editors have on their watchlist the history can be split and it might also not be possible to move it again for a while. This is because of a job queue problem. ( T278350)
• Code to support some very old web browsers is being removed. This could cause issues in those browsers. ( T277803)

Arbitration

• A community consultation on the Arbitration Committee discretionary sanctions procedure is open until April 25.

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I assume you have access to the NY Times but if you don't, I found 4 substantive articles about him. He seems to live in the Boston are so I would assume he'd have better coverage in the local papers. Should you not have NY Times access, I have the articles - you can email me and I'll send them to you. - kosboot ( talk) 23:38, 2 May 2021 (UTC)

@ Kosboot: E-mail sent; sorry it took so long. Deor ( talk) 20:11, 4 May 2021 (UTC)

News and updates for administrators from the past month (April 2021).

Administrator changes

Enchanter • Carlossuarez46

Interface administrator changes

Ragesoss

Guideline and policy news

• Following an RfC, consensus was found that third party appeals are allowed but discouraged.
• The 2021 Desysop Policy RfC was closed with no consensus. Consensus was found in a previous RfC for a community based desysop procedure, though the procedure proposed in the 2021 RfC did not gain consensus.

Technical news

• The user group oversight will be renamed to suppress. This is for technical reasons. You can comment at T112147 if you have objections.

Arbitration

• The community consultation on the Arbitration Committee discretionary sanctions procedure was closed, and an initial draft based on feedback from the now closed consultation is expected to be released in early June to early July for community review.

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An automated process has detected that when you recently edited Achilles, you added a link pointing to the disambiguation page Arthur Wellesley.

( Opt-out instructions.) -- DPL bot ( talk) 05:58, 26 May 2021 (UTC)

News and updates for administrators from the past month (May 2021).

Administrator changes

Ashleyyoursmile • Less Unless

Husond • MattWade • MJCdetroit • Carioca • Vague Rant • Kingboyk • Thunderboltz • Gwen Gale • AniMate • SlimVirgin (deceased)

Guideline and policy news

• Consensus was reached to deprecate Wikipedia:Editor assistance.
• Following a Request for Comment the Book namespace was deprecated.

Technical news

• Wikimedia previously used the IRC network Freenode. However, due to changes over who controlled the network with reports of a forceful takeover by several ex-staff members, the Wikimedia IRC Group Contacts decided to move to the new Libera Chat network. It has been reported that Wikimedia related channels on Freenode have been forcibly taken over if they pointed members to Libera. There is a migration guide and Wikimedia discussions about this.

Arbitration

• After a Clarification request, the Arbitration Committee modified Remedy 5 of the Antisemitism in Poland case. This means sourcing expectations are a discretionary sanction instead of being present on all articles. It also details using the talk page or the Reliable Sources Noticeboard to discuss disputed sources.

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Hi, I've started going through Category:Turkey articles missing geocoordinate data and adding geocoordinates to all the settlement articles Lugnuts created. Someone on WP Turkey told me to check with you whether my approach was up to the standard previously set. I've currently only used google maps' search bar that directed me to the labelled settlements the article was referring too, and except a few standalone cases, had geosat pictures confirming the presence of a populated place. Is this sufficient or am I required to take a different approach? Sadenar40000 ( talk) 18:07, 12 June 2021 (UTC)

@ Sadenar40000: I've looked at a few of your additions, and they seem fine to me. I suppose you're aware of this discussion, this discussion, and this AfD, which call into question the very existence of those as separate articles. Presumably, most or all of them will eventually be merged to the articles about the settlements' districts, and I have no problem with that as long as the work of editors like you is preserved by carrying the coordinates over into the districts' articles. (One word of caution: When I was adding coordinates to some of Lugnuts's substubs, I noticed that Google Maps' labels for the villages were occasionally a little off. My practice was to double-check with the OpenStreetMap, which, although it's crowdsourced, I found to be almost always reliable about the locations of the villages.) Deor ( talk) 15:40, 13 June 2021 (UTC)

I've brought your valid concern to the project's attention. A couple of us have taken soft swings at the issue bit as you've already noted, this is a strange and unexplainable effect. There are much smarter people than me to figure this out but thanks for making it known. BusterD ( talk) 02:19, 14 June 2021 (UTC)

Yes, I took several "soft swings" at the problem myself before just giving up and deleting the template. It didn't help that my template-fu is approximately nil. Deor ( talk) 17:12, 14 June 2021 (UTC)