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

Guideline and policy news

• There is an ongoing request for comment to streamline the source deprecation and blacklisting process.

Technical news

• There is a plan for new requirements for user signatures. You can give feedback.

Arbitration

• 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.

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19:02, 6 April 2020 (UTC)

Thanks so much for the revision to the Chateau Musar page. Having watched the page for ages and drunk the wine, I had never noticed the lack of accent. Do enjoy the rest of Easter in these uncertain times. Regards, David, David J Johnson ( talk) 18:32, 12 April 2020 (UTC) reply

Happy Easter to you too, hope you and your family are doing OK. -- King of ♥ ♦ ♣ ♠ 22:03, 12 April 2020 (UTC) reply

15:30, 13 April 2020 (UTC)

Hi King of Hearts — I reverted your close at Talk:Ronald Reagan#How to handle Reagan's response to the AIDS crisis and apartheid in intro. Given the nature of that page, closes there most often require careful rationale statements, not a plain statement of result (and even then they don't always stick). In this case, even putting aside WP:NOTVOTE, the two-part question makes the consensus more nuanced than the !vote totals might appear. If you're not going to write out a rationale, I'd ask that you please leave the RfC for someone else to close. (It's listed at WP:ANRFC, so someone will come along eventually.) {{u| Sdkb}}  ^talk 07:31, 17 April 2020 (UTC) reply

I don't feel I had much to add by giving a rationale. Both sides had reasonable arguments, but neither presented a convincing enough case to sway the overall sentiment. But this is milquetoast boilerplate that could be said about any close, so I didn't bother. I am more likely to write a rationale if something unusual happened in the discussion (e.g. new evidence presented in the middle that caused a seismic shift), the discussion is especially long and complex, or the close result is unexpected relative to the raw !vote count. As an WP:INVOLVED editor you should not revert the close; you can bring it to WP:ANI if you disagree with it. -- King of ♥ ♦ ♣ ♠ 13:13, 17 April 2020 (UTC) reply

The file File:La Spezia - Cattedrale 2.jpg has been proposed for deletion because of the following concern:

orphaned image, no encyclopedic use

While all constructive contributions to Wikipedia are appreciated, pages may be deleted for any of several reasons.

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.

Please consider addressing the issues raised. Removing {{proposed deletion/dated files}} will stop the proposed deletion process, but other deletion processes exist. In particular, the speedy deletion process can result in deletion without discussion, and files for discussion allows discussion to reach consensus for deletion.

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, 19 April 2020 (UTC) reply

18:45, 20 April 2020 (UTC)

I was going to remove the single-page exclusion once the ed in question passed the threshold where it would no longer matter. Just an fyi since the topic has been archived. Thx! Crow ^Caw 21:19, 21 April 2020 (UTC) reply

April 22, 7pm: ONLINE WikiWednesday Salon NYC

You are invited to join the Wikimedia NYC community for our monthly "WikiWednesday" evening salon (7-8pm) and knowledge-sharing workshop. This month, as part of Wikimedia NYC's commitment to the well-being of members, we will hold WikiWednesday online via Zoom videoconferencing! To join the meeting from your computer or smartphone, just visit this link. More information about how to connect is available on the meetup page. We look forward to seeing local Wikimedians, but would also like to invite folks from the greater New York metropolitan area (and beyond!) who might not typically be able to join us in person! This month, we've invited Esther Jackson of the New York Botanical Garden to join us for an Earth Day focused conversation. Is there a project you'd like to share? A question you'd like answered? A Wiki* skill you'd like to learn? Let us know by adding it to the agenda. Wednesday April 22 WikiWednesday Salon and Skill-Share NYC ( optional RSVP on-wiki). 7:00pm - 8:00 pm online via Zoom (optional breakout rooms from 8:00-8:30) We especially encourage folks to add your 5-minute lightning talks to our roster, and otherwise join in the "open space" experience! Newcomers are very welcome! Bring your friends and colleagues! -- Wikimedia New York City Team 23:25, 21 April 2020 (UTC)

(You can subscribe/unsubscribe from future notifications for NYC-area events by adding or removing your name from this list.)

Because things are getting increasingly more weird off-wiki I just want to state what's happened. At this time I don't believe there is any need for action. The reason I'm telling you is because you performed the move I requested for the article in question.

Incnis Mrsi asked me to polish VGA text mode. As Incnis has done quite some good work on Commons, I considered this just a friend asking for a favor, and since it would be beneficial to the project I agreed. Incnis pointed out a missing period and an unfilled reference but for the most part, I just improved the article as I saw fit as the article is within my scope of interest. Otherwise I would have declined. I don't take orders, but when requested I can direct some of my attention to something.

Incnis is not happy with my efforts (it's.. strange, I'd rather not go into further details) and I won't be doing Incnis any more favors anytime soon. Again, no need for any action at this moment I believe. - Alexis Jazz 08:43, 23 April 2020 (UTC) reply

Hello. Thanks for closing Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Demographics of the Western Balkans. Could I suggest, though, that a better option than moving it to Draft:Demographics of the Western Balkans would be to take up Onetwothreeip's offer to keep the statistics in their user space? The expectation with a draft is that it will be submitted for review, which shouldn't be the intention here given the AfD outcome, and drafts that aren't edited for six months are deleted, which would defeat the point of saving the data. Cordless Larry ( talk) 20:40, 23 April 2020 (UTC) reply

@ Cordless Larry and Onetwothreeip:  Done King of ♥ ♦ ♣ ♠ 22:53, 23 April 2020 (UTC) reply

Hi, while the blurb currently posted is good, can the words 'power-sharing agreement' be changed for something that sounds a little less like the two men are dictators ruling a country according to their whims? How about just those words be changed to say that the two men reach a 'unity-government agreement'? Let me know what you think, thanks. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Mrclapper1 ( talk • contribs) 22:25, 23 April 2020 (UTC) reply

@ Mrclapper1: I see there's a discussion at WP:ERRORS already, feel free to join in. A new wording will be posted if consensus for it is reached. -- King of ♥ ♦ ♣ ♠ 22:55, 23 April 2020 (UTC) reply

Hey there, King of Hearts! :)

I'm an admin at SqWiki and SqQuote. I wanted to get an anti-emoji filter for our communities and I saw the Adding emoji unicode characters filter here created by you. I'm not that good with regex syntax so I wanted to ask you how exactly does the filter work so I know what I'm dealing with. Can you give me a general idea of the function of each line and maaaybe a bit of help to tweak it for our needs? Although I believe there will be no need for that as it will be all right as it is. Thank you in advance! :) - Klein Muçi ( talk) 02:09, 28 April 2020 (UTC) reply

The first line exempts autoconfirmed and confirmed users from the filter entirely. Then we have a series of range definitions: if a Unicode character falls within this range, then it's an emoji. The purpose of emojiref is to exempt emojis inside of <ref></ref> tags, because it's possible for random website titles (which you might want to use as a reference) to contain emojis. (The regex is actually a bit more complicated, allowing for things like ref name, but you should be able to copy it verbatim.) Next up are several page IDs which get exempted, corresponding to the articles on Emoji, Principia Mathematica, List of Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy launches, and List of Falcon 9 first-stage boosters. You definitely want to exempt your local version of the Emoji article. Then it exempts changes which add the word "unicode" or "nihongo" (Japan-related articles are more prone to using emojis). Finally, it exempts articles in Category:Unicode blocks as well as astronomy articles because those could contain weird physics symbols. -- King of ♥ ♦ ♣ ♠ 03:00, 28 April 2020 (UTC) reply

Thank you for the detailed explanation! :) Can you help me make the following tweaks then:

1. Make the filter work in all namespaces;
2. Exclude only our local version of the emoji article which doesn't exist yet;
3. Work with the words "category" and "kategoria" and also exclude different categories, not only 1; - Klein Muçi ( talk) 11:31, 28 April 2020 (UTC) reply

Oh, and how do I find a page ID in general so I know for futures cases? - Klein Muçi ( talk) 11:35, 28 April 2020 (UTC) reply

Since you'll be the maintainer on that wiki, I think it's better for you to learn the intricacies yourself. Filters can be very dangerous, and you should not put anything in a filter just because you saw it elsewhere, without understanding what it does. Regarding your questions:

1. Just remove the page_namespace == 0 bit. See WP:NS for a mapping between namespace name and ID.
2. If it doesn't exist yet, feel free to create it yourself! Otherwise, I don't see a need to exclude any articles then.
3. Use the pipe symbol | to do an "or" statement in regex so you can include multiple things.

Page ID can be found here; just adapt the title to what you need. To learn about regex you can visit https://www.regular-expressions.info. -- King of ♥ ♦ ♣ ♠ 14:27, 28 April 2020 (UTC) reply

Yes, I understand and I thank you for your advice but I've already taken care of that. Filters pass some tests first and are only applied when a need for them comes. I've been checking the recent edit lately and we noticed some vandalism regarding repeating emojis. Fortunately they were all taken care by the repeating characters filter but since that trend was on the rise, this too would be needed. I just saved you from the "side info" because I didn't want to tire you with those extra details. As for the non existing article, I thought maybe it would be good to find a way for the creation of that article by the filter, acting as a sort of whitelist, if you understand what I mean, because at least that article is sure to need emojis on it but, since the filter only acts on IPs, that would make it a very edge case so I don't think that it would be a problem. Regarding the categories, I meant using something like this u!(lcase(new_wikitext) rlike "(category|kategoria):.*(këngë|kenge|muzikë|muzike|Personazhe në Bleach)") & (a line we use in another code) but I didn't wanna lose the "astro detail" so I was wondering how do I fuse the two lines together correctly. Thank you for showing me the way to find the page ID though. I didn't know that. :) - Klein Muçi ( talk) 16:02, 28 April 2020 (UTC) reply

You can do something like !(lcase(new_wikitext) rlike "astro|(category|kategoria):.*(këngë|kenge|muzikë|muzike|Personazhe në Bleach|unicode)") &. Of course, tweak it as you need, e.g. move any of the terms to the front to make it more general, or move it into the parentheses to make it apply to the category section of an article only. -- King of ♥ ♦ ♣ ♠ 16:23, 28 April 2020 (UTC) reply

Thank you! That's exactly what I needed! :) - Klein Muçi ( talk) 16:45, 28 April 2020 (UTC) reply

I saw that you renewed the protection on the article, but Finispro1 was able to edit the page (and added "date of death") so I think maybe some switch got overlooked? Schazjmd  (talk) 21:27, 28 April 2020 (UTC) reply

NM...I just saw it was set for confirmed, which they are, my mistake. Schazjmd  (talk) 21:30, 28 April 2020 (UTC) reply

An image created by you has been promoted to featured picture status Your image, File:Pudong Shanghai November 2017 panorama.jpg, was nominated on Wikipedia:Featured picture candidates, gained a consensus of support, and has been promoted. If you would like to nominate an image, please do so at Wikipedia:Featured picture candidates. Thank you for your contribution! Armbrust The Homunculus 16:09, 29 April 2020 (UTC) reply