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 2021).

Guideline and policy news

• Following consensus at the 2021 RfA review, the autopatrolled user right has been removed from the administrators user group; admins can grant themselves the autopatrolled permission if they wish to remain autopatrolled.

• Additionally, consensus for proposal 6C of the 2021 RfA review has led to the creation of an administrative action review process. The purpose of this process will be to review individual administrator actions and individual actions taken by users holding advanced permissions.

Arbitration

• Following the 2021 Arbitration Committee elections, the following editors have been appointed to the Arbitration Committee: Beeblebrox, Cabayi, Donald Albury, Enterprisey, Izno, Opabinia regalis, Worm That Turned, Wugapodes.

Miscellaneous

• The functionaries email list (functionaries-enlists.wikimedia.org) will no longer accept incoming emails apart from those sent by list members and WMF staff. Private concerns, apart from those requiring oversight, should be directly sent to the Arbitration Committee.

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18:14, 4 January 2022 (UTC)

I appreciate you going in and fixing my malformed coordinates, but it caused an edit conflict which deleted the source code for the article I was about to create. So... Mebigrouxboy ( talk) 21:57, 9 January 2022 (UTC)

@ Mebigrouxboy: I apologize for that. I monitor Category:Pages with malformed coordinate tags, and when an entry there is easily fixable, I tend to fix it, even when it's not an article. (If the category becomes too cluttered, it can be difficult to pick out the actual articles that need fixing.) I had no way of knowing that you were actively editing the page. 18:00, 10 January 2022 (UTC)

Hi, can you explain to me why you have removed my three external links to publications academia.edu? These publications are by the way under the Creative Commons license and fit perfectly to the Wikipedia philosophy, I believe. Cheers, Uto ( talk) 17:06, 10 January 2022 (UTC)

@ Uto: As WP:EL says, "[I]t is not Wikipedia's purpose to include a lengthy or comprehensive list of external links related to each topic. ... Links in the 'External links' section should be kept to a minimum." There are obviously many Web sites that deal, in one way or another, with the Divine Comedy; but the "External links" section in the article was already rather overblown—note that I've removed a number of links other than the ones you added—and stuff like the "Ugolinomania" article or the text of the Comedy color-coded by speaker just aren't relevant enough to the general topic to justify inclusion (the Longfellow translation is already accessible via existing links). According to WP:ELBURDEN, "Disputed links should normally be excluded by default unless and until there is a consensus to include them," so if you think that particlular links should be included, the best procedure is to propose them on the article's talk page. If the consensus of other editors supports their inclusion, they will be added in the article. Deor ( talk) 17:47, 10 January 2022 (UTC)

Understood - thanks for the detailed explanation. Cheers, Uto ( talk) 17:17, 14 January 2022 (UTC)

Do you know the background of DMS vs. decimal coordinates display? Is there any reason why one or the other should be used in any particular article? WP:GEO COOR doesn't address this. Is this just another thing that is just not standardized because it's not standardized. I prefer decimal because it looks cleaner, but I have never changed them assuming MOS:VAR applied. There is an editor going through all US schools changing them to DMS. Should I tell them to stop? MB 03:37, 11 January 2022 (UTC)

@ MB: As far as I know, it's "just not standardized because it's not standardized". My own practice when correcting coordinates in articles is to go with the format used by the editor who added them; but when adding coordinates to articles, I'm pretty random, tending to use d/m/s for settlements and decimal for many other things. I don't like decimals with more than four decimal places, so when extraordinary precision is required (as for individual outdoor sculptures), I use as many decimal places as are necessary in the {{coord}} template but add a "display=dms" parameter so that what readers see is d/m/s coordinates rounded to the nearest second. Changing all schools' coordinates to d/m/s seems a weird thing to do, but I don't know of any guideline that would specifically discourage it. Unless the editor is making the coordinates less accurate with his or her changes, there's probably no justification for telling him or her to stop. Deor ( talk) 19:17, 11 January 2022 (UTC)

Hey, Care to offer an opinion at List of bays of the Shetland Islands. I went to this article to fix a coord syntax error, and found a list with 8-digit precision. I changed them all to 4-digits and was reverted twice. The article has been primarily edited by one person, who won't engage on the TP. MB 02:46, 19 January 2022 (UTC)

@ MB: As long as what's displayed to readers is rounded d/m/s coordinates rather than the underlying overprecise decimal coordinates, it's probably not something I'd choose to fight about (though I would use fewer decimal places if I were the one adding the coordinates). I must admit that I find the editor's edit summary "Restore to ordance [sic] survey precision" rather perplexing, since I would expect an Ordnance Survey source to use OS grid references rather than decimal coordinates. What really beats me, though, is why an editor would create such an obviously incomplete list in mainspace instead of working on it in a sandbox and moving it to mainspace only after completing it. Deor ( talk) 17:55, 19 January 2022 (UTC)

I don't like it, even if it the extra digits are not displayed, because very few editors find their way to WP:GEO COORD and having them in the article could lead to greater misunderstanding. I am not infrequently rounding 8 to 10 digit coords that are displayed. Since most of the bays in that list are redlinks, it is not implausible that the coords will be copied from the list if an article is created. I see no advantage to having them in the list (apparently just to match the precision of the source). I don't like the fact that the editor wouldn't even discuss either. But, I agree there are more important things to work on. Thanks. MB 22:28, 19 January 2022 (UTC)

Well, 10 days had gone by, and then today SC thanked me for my two edits that they reverted. That's strange!. They have not edited the article since, you have the last edits. Some things I will just never understand. MB 03:56, 30 January 2022 (UTC)

Thanks for the quick reply to my Help Desk inquiry. I'd love to work on expanding the article in question--> [1], if I had the chance...in fact, I was preparing to do exactly that a few days ago when I discovered to my horror that it was on death row. What are my options for staging a rescue? -- 2603:6081:8004:DD5:51C:8F86:ED2F:527E ( talk) 00:08, 24 January 2022 (UTC)

Well, the previous versions of the article still exist. If you click on the link in the heading of this thread, you'll be taken to the Amelia Courthouse article, under the title of which, in small type, is "Redirected from Scotts Fork, Virginia"; click on the link in that line and you'll be taken to where the article formerly was, where you can look at the article's history. I think the best procedure (if you don't want to create a Wikipedia account) would be to go to WP:Article wizard to create a draft article, copy/paste the content of the former article into the blank draft, and use it to write an expanded article. When you think it has enough sourced content, you can submit it for review, and if it's accepted, the reviewer will replace the redirect with your article. See Wikipedia:Articles for creation for details. Deor ( talk) 14:41, 24 January 2022 (UTC)

News and updates for administrators from the past month (January 2022).

Guideline and policy news

• The Universal Code of Conduct enforcement guidelines have been published for consideration. Voting to ratify this guideline is planned to take place 7 March to 21 March. Comments can be made on the talk page.

Technical news

• The user group oversight will be renamed suppress in around 3 weeks. This will not affect the name shown to users and is simply a change in the technical name of the user group. The change is being made for technical reasons. You can comment in Phabricator if you have objections.
• The Reply Tool feature, which is a part of Discussion Tools, will be opt-out for everyone logged in or logged out starting 7 February 2022. Editors wishing to comment on this can do so in the relevant Village Pump discussion.

Arbitration

• Community input is requested on several motions aimed at addressing discretionary sanctions that are no longer needed or overly broad.
• The Arbitration Committee has published a generalised comment regarding successful appeals of sanctions that it can review (such as checkuser blocks).
• A motion related to the Antisemitism in Poland case was passed following a declined case request.

Miscellaneous

• Voting in the 2022 Steward elections will begin on 07 February 2022, 14:00 (UTC) and end on 26 February 2022, 13:59 (UTC). The confirmation process of current stewards is being held in parallel. You can automatically check your eligibility to vote.
• Voting in the 2022 Community Wishlist Survey is open until 11 February 2022.

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Thank you for keeping things tidy. I have the numbers on screen to be copied in, but I got called away; I'm about to fill them in now. I will, in future, bear in mind that errors on a mere sandbox page can still have wider ripples. Sorry to have troubled you (and others).-- Verbarson  ^talk _edits 15:49, 5 February 2022 (UTC)

Thank you for reverting my bold edit. As a WP:NEWCOMER I am still trying to figure out where things belong. I tried to look for a section like: Ernest_Hemingway#Influence and legacy, Walt_Whitman#Legacy and influence, Robert_A._Heinlein#Influence and legacy to put it in, but could not find one for Robert Louis Stevenson. When I found the full poem "Requiem" in the article with mention of the grave in Samoa ^[1], it seemed the appropriate place (at the time).

In " Requiem (short story)" " Heinlein had Stevenson’s famous poem ' Requiem' inscribed over Harriman’s lunar grave:" ^[2] Harriman's grave in turn was an inspiration to Apollo Astronauts and NASA engineers like Wayne Hale who shortly before his retirement in 2010 at the age of 56 leveraged both Stevenson's and Heinlein's Requiems in his own Requiem for the NASA Space Shuttle program:

Robert A. Heinlein's Requiem (short story) became the name of the posthumous Requiem (book) published as a tribute to Heinlein himself which is another tribute both to Stevenson and to his grave.

The nesting and density of the links above - explicitly inspired by Stevenson's epitaph to himself - also refer to each other and to themselves. These sources and links demonstrate that the epitaph on the grave in Samoa has been amplified in the hearts of so many notable and influential people that Stevenson will always be remembered not just in Samoa, not just on Earth, but on the moon as well when the human race eventually gets there (sorry no WP:RS for this last paragraph - I made it up which makes it WP:OR).

When I made my bold edit, I had not realized there used to be a large Influences section that was removed because it was getting too big. I now see why you consider my edit to be tangential to Stevenson's death. I understand now that adding even a single sentence would be giving Heinlein WP:UNDUE weight.

Can you please suggest a more appropriate place or way to mention any of this instead? Annette Maon ( talk) 22:14, 12 February 2022 (UTC)

@ Annette Maon: I just don't think that Heinlein's use of Stevenson's epitaph is sufficiently related to the topic of Stevenson himself to merit mention in his article. If you disagree, you can always bring the matter up on Talk:Robert Louis Stevenson to get the opinions of other editors. I see that it's already mentioned in Requiem (short story), which seems proper and probably sufficient, though a more explicit mention of the indirect source of the book's name in Requiem (book) might also be justifiable. Sorry for the delayed response. Deor ( talk) 17:22, 13 February 2022 (UTC)

I do not disagree. When I saw that you reverted my edit, I looked deeper and I think I understand why you did it. It was a bold edit and what I learned from it means more to me than having a sentence added to an article. I still have much to learn about the processes that shapes Wikipedia and I appreciate your guidance. I would like to find out what happened to the Influences section, was it WP:Splitting or was it simply deleted? Can you help me figure it out? Pointing me to the tools or skills that will help me do it by myself would be more useful than just giving me the answer.

When I get the chance, I would like to add a section to Wayne Hale about his Requiem for the NASA Space Shuttle program and then mention both Stevenson and Hale at Requiem (book). I believe that as a "flight director and Space Shuttle program manager" Hale is a WP:RS on the program and that his requiem is notable not just for marking the end of US crew launch capabilities. Hale's requiem is also notable for his prediction of what it would take for the US to regain crew access to space. I do not think any WP:OR will be needed to make these two statements in Wayne Hale#Requiem of the Space Shuttle Program (which does not yet exist):

• Hale's requiem was written well before Elon Musk's fortune surpassed Bill Gate’s and his twitter notoriety rivaled that of Donald Trump (who in 2010 has not yet entered Politics).
• In Hale's Requiem " Heinlein had Stevenson’s famous poem ' Requiem' inscribed over Harriman’s lunar grave" for space pioneers Stevenson's and Heinlein's legacy/graves/Requiems are remembered not just in Samoa but on Luna, Mars and Mercury as well.

As a WP:NEWCOMER I can not be sure about my interpretation of WP policy. I would appreciate any guidance you can give me. Annette Maon ( talk) 19:31, 13 February 2022 (UTC)

I'm not sure, but Stevenson's and Heinlein's Requiems are remembered not just in Samoa but on Luna, Mars and Mercury as well looks an awful lot like OR to me. Is there any source that explicity connects Stevenson's poem or Heinlein's use of it with the naming of the craters in question? Lots of planetary and lunar features are named for people, without necessarily being references to specific works. I'm also not sure what you're referring to as "Hale's R/requiem"; is it the blog post you cited? Has anyone else called it a requiem? Deor ( talk) 14:38, 14 February 2022 (UTC)

@ Annette Maon: Forgot to ping, drat it. Deor ( talk) 15:44, 14 February 2022 (UTC)

You keep deleting links to Yorescape. This is a free app for virtual tourism developed by experts in archaeology and art history. Pease check out he website of the publisher at www.flyoverzone.com and relent. This is not spam Au contraire! 2601:801:480:18B0:58B8:A527:A90:3061 ( talk) 13:04, 15 February 2022 (UTC)

The Yorescape products are not "free apps"; the Roman Forum one, for example, costs $19.99. Please see WP:ELNO #5, and refrain from adding links to these products. Deor ( talk) 14:53, 15 February 2022 (UTC)

News and updates for administrators from the past month (February 2022).

Guideline and policy news

• A RfC is open to change the wording of revision deletion criterion 1 to remove the sentence relating to non-infringing contributions.
• A RfC is open to discuss prohibiting draftification of articles over 90 days old.

Technical news

• The deployment of the reply tool as an opt-out feature, as announced in last month's newsletter, has been delayed to 7 March. Feedback and comments are being welcomed at Wikipedia talk:Talk pages project. ( T296645)
• Special:Nuke will now allow the selection of standard deletion reasons to be used when mass-deleting pages. This was a Community Wishlist Survey request from 2022. ( T25020)
• The ability to undelete the talk page when undeleting a page using Special:Undelete or the API will be added soon. This change was requested in the 2021 Community Wishlist Survey. ( T295389)

Arbitration

• Several unused discretionary sanctions and article probation remedies have been rescinded. This follows the community feedback from the 2021 Discretionary Sanctions review.

Miscellaneous

• The 2022 appointees for the Ombuds commission are Érico, Faendalimas, Galahad, Infinite0694, Mykola7, Olugold, Udehb and Zabe as regular members and Ameisenigel and JJMC89 as advisory members.
• Following the 2022 Steward Elections, the following editors have been appointed as stewards: AntiCompositeNumber, BRPever, Hasley, TheresNoTime, and Vermont.
• The 2022 Community Wishlist Survey results have been published alongside the ranking of prioritized proposals.

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News and updates for administrators from the past month (March 2022).

Guideline and policy news

• An RfC is open proposing a change to the minimum activity requirements for administrators.

Technical news

• Access to Special:RevisionDelete has been expanded to include users who have the deletelogentry and deletedhistory rights. This means that those in the Researcher user group and Checkusers who are not administrators can now access Special:RevisionDelete. The users able to view the special page after this change are the 3 users in the Researcher group, as there are currently no checkusers who are not already administrators. ( T301928)
• When viewing deleted revisions or diffs on Special:Undelete a back link to the undelete page for the associated page is now present. ( T284114)

Arbitration

• Wikipedia:Arbitration Committee/Procedures § Opening of proceedings has been updated to reflect current practice following a motion.
• A arbitration case regarding Skepticism and coordinated editing has been closed.
• A arbitration case regarding WikiProject Tropical Cyclones has been opened.

Miscellaneous

• Voting for the Universal Code of Conduct Enforcement guidelines has closed, and the results were that 56.98% of voters supported the guidelines. The results of this vote mean the Wikimedia Foundation Board will now review the guidelines.

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22:52, 15 April 2022 (UTC)

[2]

Hi, thank you for this edit. I reverted myself because I didn't know what was proper Oxford spelling (I wondered if this were one of those places where Oxford disagreed with normal UK spelling), and figured it was better to return to the status quo ante bellum. I didn't notice "tyre" elsewhere in the article. 49.198.51.54 ( talk) 19:39, 20 April 2022 (UTC)

Why did you delete this talk page? There were review comments on it. It was not the talk page of a deleted page, but had been the talk page of a draft that I had then accepted. Robert McClenon ( talk) 21:56, 2 May 2022 (UTC)

My error. Talk page restored. Deor ( talk) 21:59, 2 May 2022 (UTC)

Hi, I noticed you reverted my change around making a link text include the 's as part of the link. The style guide you referenced mentions that links that end in an 's' or 'ing' will automatically be included in the link text, but doesn't mention apostrophes - and the 's in Merseytravel isnt included in the blue text. Not sure if I'm misunderstand something here. LicenceToCrenellate ( talk) 17:07, 7 May 2022 (UTC)

My only justification is that, as far as I know, possessives are usually treated like other inflectional endings when linking. You're correct that the apostrophe and s aren't included in the blue link, but what's being linked is, after all, "Merseytravel", not "Merseytravel's". Deor ( talk) 17:16, 7 May 2022 (UTC)

You restored the 10 year old cleanup tag which still doesn't have a reason field. Could you please add a reason field since you feel the article still needs further cleanup? Thank you. RJFJR ( talk) 14:16, 8 May 2022 (UTC)

I don't know what happened there. My only intention was to add two line breaks above the stub tag. If you think that the cleanup tag is not necessary, you're quite free to delete it. Deor ( talk) 14:34, 8 May 2022 (UTC)

Thank you. RJFJR ( talk) 15:16, 8 May 2022 (UTC)

News and updates for administrators from the past month (April 2022).

Guideline and policy news

• Following an RfC, a change has been made to the administrators inactivity policy. Under the new policy, if an administrator has not made at least 100 edits over a period of 5 years they may be desysopped for inactivity.
• Following a discussion on the bureaucrat's noticeboard, a change has been made to the bureaucrats inactivity policy.

Technical news

• The ability to undelete the associated talk page when undeleting a page has been added. This was the 11th wish of the 2021 Community Wishlist Survey.
• A public status system for WMF wikis has been created. It is located at https://www.wikimediastatus.net/ and is hosted separately to WMF wikis so in the case of an outage it will remain viewable.

Arbitration

• Remedy 2 of the St Christopher case has been rescinded following a motion. The remedy previously authorised administrators to place a ban on single-purpose accounts who were disruptively editing on the article St Christopher Iba Mar Diop College of Medicine or related pages from those pages.

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News and updates for administrators from the past month (May 2022).

Guideline and policy news

• Several areas of improvement collated from community member votes have been identified in the Universal Code of Conduct Enforcement guidelines. The areas of improvement have been sent back for review and you are invited to provide input on these areas.

Technical news

• Administrators using the mobile web interface can now access Special:Block directly from user pages. ( T307341)
• The IP Info feature has been deployed to all wikis as a Beta Feature. Any autoconfirmed user may enable the feature using the "IP info" checkbox under Preferences → Beta features. Autoconfirmed users will be able to access basic information about an IP address that includes the country and connection method. Those with advanced privileges (admin, bureaucrat, checkuser) will have access to extra information that includes the Internet Service Provider and more specific location.

Arbitration

• Remedy 2 of the Rachel Marsden case has been rescinded following a motion. The remedy previously authorised administrators to delete or reduce to a stub, together with their talk pages, articles related to Rachel Marsden when they violate Wikipedia's biographies of living persons policy.
• An arbitration case regarding WikiProject Tropical Cyclones has been closed.

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You might be interested in Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Geographical coordinates#Progress!, showing the progress of the geodata project over the last eight years, a great deal of which has been through your efforts. Many thanks, and congratulations, for all your hard work on this. — The Anome ( talk) 18:25, 8 June 2022 (UTC)

@ The Anome: Yes, I saw that, since I have WT:GEO watchlisted. I was surprised to see that over 90% of the eligible articles actually have coordinates. I fear, however, that we'll never hit 100%, since there will always be things like ancient settlements whose exact locations are unknown, and so forth. Deor ( talk) 18:34, 8 June 2022 (UTC)

Yes, that's what makes the linear progress so remarkable; I was expecting progress to become asymptotic well before this, and not to remain so close to a straight line. And with the continuing growth of Wikipedia, that actually means that article tagging is growing even faster than linearly. I suspect that we will eventually have to start tagging articles about those ancient settlements with a tag like {{ coord unknown}} or {{ coord lost to history}}, which is at least a resolution for the time being until either a historical or archaeological discovery is made to change that. — The Anome ( talk) 18:39, 8 June 2022 (UTC)

Would you explain why did you revert multiple edits? 1 We were mostly doing good faith edits. How though? -- 2601:205:C001:EA0:D464:34C8:9427:4F90 ( talk) 16:52, 17 June 2022 (UTC)

This edit was unsourced (and syntactically and logically problematic); this edit was unnecessary; this edit, though not by you, was vandalism; and these two edits were unnecessary. There's no point in creating an empty section and then tagging it as empty. If anyone wants to add any events of 2022, he or she can create the section when adding the information. Deor ( talk) 17:31, 17 June 2022 (UTC)