User talk:AntiCompositeNumber/Archive 7
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The Signpost: 30 August 2019
- News and notes: Documenting Wikimania and our beginnings
- In focus: Ryan Merkley joins WMF as Chief of Staff
- Discussion report: Meta proposals on partial bans and IP users
- Traffic report: Once upon a time in Greenland with Boris and cornflakes
- News from the WMF: Meet Emna Mizouni, the newly minted 2019 Wikimedian of the Year
- Recent research: Special issue on gender gap and gender bias research
- On the bright side: What's making you happy this month?
YGM
Hey, did you have a chance to look at my email? The DYK is ready to go, but I want one of those images in there. Thanks, Drmies (talk) 22:28, 29 August 2019 (UTC)
- Drmies, please have the copyright holder foreword the conversation to permissions-commons
wikimedia.org. Please have them include links to the files on Commons when doing so. --AntiCompositeNumber (talk) 21:00, 30 August 2019 (UTC)
Thanks
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The da Vinci Barnstar | |
| I've always appreciated your technical assistance and especially with the ways I was banging my head against the wall with my new template. It's sincerely appreciated. Best, Barkeep49 (talk) 22:09, 3 September 2019 (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 use the new termbox interface if you edit Wikidata on a mobile device. This is to edit labels, descriptions and aliases easier on the mobile pages. [1]
The new version of MediaWiki has been deployed during the last week.- The previously announced change of positions of the "Wikidata item" link on all wikis has been rollbacked due to unexpected cache issues. [2]
- The limit for rollbacks has been increased from 10 to 100 rollbacks per minute. [3]
- The advanced version of the edit review pages (Recent Changes, Watchlist, and Related Changes) now include two new filters. These filters are for "All contents" and "All discussions". They will filter the view to just those namespaces. However the "All discussions" filter does not include pseudo talk pages, like discussions that are in the Project: or Wikipedia: namespaces. But it will include changes happening on Project talk: or the Wikipedia talk:. [4]
Changes later this week
- The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 3 September. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 4 September. It will be on all wikis from 5 September (calendar).
- When you log in, the software checks your password to see if it follows the Password policy. From this week, it will also complain if your password is one of the most common passwords in the world. If your password is not strong enough, please consider to change your password for a stronger password. [5]
Meetings
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You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 4 September at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.
Future changes
- You will be able to read but not to edit Wikidata for up to 30 minutes on September 10 at 05:00 (UTC). [6]
- You will be able to read but not to edit some mid-sized wikis for up to 30 minutes September 17 at 05:00 (UTC). You can see which wikis. [7]
- You will be able to read but not to edit some mid-sized wikis for up to 30 minutes September 24 at 05:00 (UTC). You can see which wikis. [8]
- You will be able to read but not to edit Wikimedia Commons for up to 30 minutes on September 26 at 05:00 (UTC). [9]
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
09:07, 4 September 2019 (UTC)
Administrators' newsletter – September 2019
News and updates for administrators from the past month (August 2019).
Administrator changes
Bradv • Chetsford • Izno
Floquenbeam • Lectonar
DESiegel • Jake Wartenberg • Rjanag • Topbanana
CheckUser changes
Oversight changes
- Callanecc • Fox • HJ Mitchell • LFaraone • There'sNoTime
Technical news
- Editors using the mobile website on Wikipedia can opt-in to new advanced features via your settings page. This will give access to more interface links, special pages, and tools.
- The advanced version of the edit review pages (recent changes, watchlist, and related changes) now includes two new filters. These filters are for "All contents" and "All discussions". They will filter the view to just those namespaces.
Arbitration
- A request for comment is open to provide an opportunity to amend the structure, rules, and procedures of the 2019 English Wikipedia Arbitration Committee election and to resolve any issues not covered by existing rules.
Miscellaneous
- A global request for comment is in progress regarding whether a user group should be created that could modify edit filters across all public Wikimedia wikis.
A Dobos torte for you!
.jpg)
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7&6=thirteen (☎) has given you a Dobos torte to enjoy! Seven layers of fun because you deserve it.
To give a Dobos torte and spread the WikiLove, just place {{subst:Dobos Torte}} on someone else's talkpage, whether it be someone you have had disagreements with in the past or a good friend. |
7&6=thirteen (☎) 16:47, 14 September 2019 (UTC)
Woohooo!
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Hey, AntiCompositeNumber. I'd like to wish you a wonderful First Edit Day on behalf of the Wikipedia Birthday Committee! Have a great day! Mjs1991 (talk) 05:04, 21 September 2019 (UTC) |
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The Signpost: 30 September 2019
- From the editors: Where do we go from here?
- Special report: Post-Framgate wrapup
- Traffic report: Varied and intriguing entries, less Luck, and some retreads
- News from the WMF: How the Wikimedia Foundation is making efforts to go green
- Recent research: Wikipedia's role in assessing credibility of news sources; using wikis against procrastination; OpenSym 2019 report
- On the bright side: What's making you happy this month?
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
- Last week's Tech News had delivery problems. Some did not get the newsletter. Some got it more than one time. The problem where some pages got it three times should now be fixed. [10]
Changes later this week
- The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 1 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 2 October. It will be on all wikis from 3 October (calendar).
Meetings
- You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 2 October at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.
Future changes
- The Wikimedia Foundation Community Tech team is working on a watchlist expiry feature. This means you can put things on your watchlist for a period of time instead of forever. They are looking for feedback on the questions they have.
- Special:Contributions will get the standard OOUI look. This makes it easier to use on mobile and makes it look like other
Special:pages. There is a script you can use to make the form smaller if you want to. [11]
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
16:49, 30 September 2019 (UTC)
Administrators' newsletter – October 2019
News and updates for administrators from the past month (September 2019).
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Guideline and policy news
- Following a discussion, a new criterion for speedy category renaming was added: C2F: One eponymous article, which
applies if the category contains only an eponymous article or media file, provided that the category has not otherwise been emptied shortly before the nomination. The default outcome is an upmerge to the parent categories
.
- Following a discussion, a new criterion for speedy category renaming was added: C2F: One eponymous article, which
Technical news
- As previously noted, tighter password requirements for Administrators were put in place last year. Wikipedia should now alert you if your password is less than 10 characters long and thus too short.
Arbitration
- The 2019 CheckUser and Oversight appointment process has begun. The community consultation period will take place October 4th to 10th.
- The arbitration case regarding Fram was closed. While there will be a local RfC
focus[ing] on how harassment and private complaints should be handled in the future
, there is currently a global community consultation on partial and temporary office actions in response to the incident. It will be open until October 30th.
Miscellaneous
- The Community Tech team has been working on a system for temporarily watching pages, and welcomes feedback.
Scripts++ Newsletter – Issue 9
News and updates associated with user scripts from the past two months (August and September, 2019).
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Hello everyone and welcome to the 9th issue of the Wikipedia Scripts++ Newsletter:
Sorry for falling behind a bit. Please let me know if I missed any new scripts. Thanks, --DannyS712 (talk) 01:55, 7 October 2019 (UTC) |
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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 abuse filter function now has a faster parser. This is to shorten the waiting time when you save an edit. [12]
Problems
- There is a problem in the visual editor when you copy or delete text with footnotes. It will be fixed soon. [13]
Changes later this week
- The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 8 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 9 October. It will be on all wikis from 10 October (calendar).
Meetings
- You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 9 October at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.
Future changes
- The Community Wishlist Survey has a new format. It will focus on wikis that typically get less support. It will probably go back to the normal format next year. It is not decided exactly how it will work this year. You can leave feedback.
- The URL of the Wikimedia wiki main pages could be changed. This is because the current URLs cause several problems. For example
https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Main_Pagewould behttps://www.wikidata.org/instead. You can tell the developers if this would cause problems for your wiki. - There is a new technical community newsletter. You can read more about the work of Wikimedia's technical community. Subscribe to get the information in the future.
- Outreachy is an internship program for groups who are underrepresented in free and open-source software. There are seven Wikimedia projects about coding, documentation and quality assurance in the next round. Persons who fit the criteria can apply. The last day to apply is 5 November.
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
15:35, 7 October 2019 (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 more advanced editing tools on the mobile web. You can turn them on and off in your preferences in the mobile version. [14]
Changes later this week
- The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 15 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 16 October. It will be on all wikis from 17 October (calendar).
Meetings
- You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 16 October at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.
Future changes
- Internet Explorer 6 and 7 are no longer supported. This means the browsers might start looking a bit weird. They will not get security support. You can't read Wikimedia wikis in Internet Explorer on Windows XP or Windows versions that are older than Windows XP. This is because almost no one uses the browsers anymore. Supporting them made the wikis less secure for everyone else. [15]
- In the future section headings might have a share link. This is to make it easier to link to the section. You can read more and discuss.
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
23:33, 14 October 2019 (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 API sandbox and help pages now show more clearly when API modules are marked as
internal. API modules marked as internal were probably internal before. It was easier to miss. You should look for non-internal alternatives. [16]
Problems
- There is a translation tool we use on wikis with more than one language. For a few days it did not create pages for new languages when someone translated a page. The languages did not show in the language bar. This has been fixed. [17]
- The history and diffs can show wrong content. This is because of a cache problem. It will soon be fixed. [18]
Changes later this week
- The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 22 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 23 October. It will be on all wikis from 24 October (calendar).
- Reference Previews will be a beta feature on all Wikipedias and some Wikivoyages. It shows you a preview of the footnote when you hover over or click on the number. It has been a beta feature on German and Arabic Wikipedia since April.
Meetings
- You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 23 October. See how to join.
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
14:27, 21 October 2019 (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 post proposals for the Community Wishlist Survey. The survey decides what the Community Tech team will work on. You can post proposals until 11 November. You can vote on proposals from 20 November to 2 December. This year the wishlist will focus on Wikibooks, Wiktionary, Wikiquote, Wikisource, Wikiversity, Wikispecies, Wikivoyage and Wikinews. You can read more about the format for this year.
- Mobile users now have a specific design for their Watchlist. [19][20]
- You can share feedback and ideas on the Desktop Improvements project. The goal is to make the interface easier to use for readers and editors without removing any functionality. The Foundation's Readers Web team will work on this over the next two years.
- OOUI now allows using
px(pixels) instead ofem(em) for some specific cases. [21][22]
Changes later this week
- The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 29 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 30 October. It will be on all wikis from 31 October (calendar).
Meetings
- You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 30 October at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.
Future changes
- There will be no software changes from 19 December to 2 January. The first MediaWiki version next year will come the week of 6 January. [23]
- Gadgets and user scripts can access variables about the current page in JavaScript. In 2015, this information was moved from global variables named
wg*tomw.config. The old global variables will be removed later this year. You can know more about it and tell the developers if you want to try this out on your wiki first.
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
16:11, 28 October 2019 (UTC)
The Signpost: 31 October 2019
- In the media: How to use or abuse Wikipedia for fun or profit
- Special report: “Catch and Kill” on Wikipedia: Paid editing and the suppression of material on alleged sexual abuse
- Interview: Carl Miller on Wikipedia Wars
- Community view: Observations from the mainland
- Arbitration report: October actions
- Gallery: Wiki Loves Broadcast
- Recent research: Research at Wikimania 2019: More communication doesn't make editors more productive; Tor users doing good work; harmful content rare on English Wikipedia
- News from the WMF: Welcome to Wikipedia! Here's what we're doing to help you stick around
- On the bright side: What's making you happy this month?
Administrators' newsletter – November 2019
News and updates for administrators from the past month (October 2019).
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Guideline and policy news
- An RfC was closed with the consensus that the resysop criteria should be made stricter.
- The follow-up RfC to develop that change is now open at Wikipedia:Requests for comment/2019 Resysop Criteria (2).
- A related RfC is seeking the community's sentiment for a binding desysop procedure.
Arbitration
- Eligible editors may now nominate themselves as candidates for the 2019 Arbitration Committee Elections. The self-nomination period will close November 12, with voting running from November 19 through December 2.
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
- At Special:Contributions you could see up to 5000 edits at the same time if you edited the URL. This has been lowered to 500. This is to stop requests which break the sites. [24]
Changes later this week
MediaWiki:ipb-default-expirycan set the default length to block a user for your wiki. You will be able to useMediaWiki:ipb-default-expiry-ipto set a different default block length for IP editors. [25]- The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 5 November. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 6 November. It will be on all wikis from 7 November (calendar).
Meetings
- You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 6 November at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
16:47, 4 November 2019 (UTC)
Scripts++ Newsletter – Issue 10
News and updates associated with user scripts from the past month (October 2019).
Hello everyone and welcome to the 10th issue of the Wikipedia Scripts++ Newsletter:
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Have a great November, --DannyS712 (talk) 22:18, 7 November 2019 (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
- MediaWiki2LaTeX can put different pages from a Wikimedia wiki into a PDF. It can now make a PDF with around 5000 pages. Previously this was 800 pages.
Changes later this week
- There is no new MediaWiki version this week.
Meetings
- You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 13 November at 16:00 (UTC). See how to join.
Future changes
- Wikimedia will take part in Google Code-in. This is for young students who want to help with open source software. You can read more. Experienced technical Wikimedians can mentor students.
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
22:03, 11 November 2019 (UTC)
A survey to improve the community consultation outreach process
Hello!
The Wikimedia Foundation is seeking to improve the community consultation outreach process for Foundation policies, and we are interested in why you didn't participate in a recent consultation that followed a community discussion you’ve been part of.
Please fill out this short survey to help us improve our community consultation process for the future. It should only take about three minutes.
The privacy policy for this survey is here. This survey is a one-off request from us related to this unique topic.
Thank you for your participation, Kbrown (WMF) 10:44, 13 November 2019 (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
- You will be able to read but not to edit some wikis for up to 30 minutes on 26 November at 06:00 (UTC). You can see which wikis. It will probably last much shorter than 30 minutes. This will also affect the
centralauthdatabase. This could for example affect changing passwords, logging in to new wikis, changing emails or global renames. [26]
Changes later this week
- You can soon vote on proposals for the Community Wishlist Survey. The survey decides what the Community Tech team will work on. You can vote on proposals from 20 November to 2 December. This year the wishlist will focus on Wikibooks, Wiktionary, Wikiquote, Wikisource, Wikiversity, Wikispecies, Wikivoyage and Wikinews. You can read more about the format for this year.
- There is no new MediaWiki version this week.
Meetings
- You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 20 November at 16:00 (UTC). See how to join.
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
20:16, 18 November 2019 (UTC)
ArbCom 2019 election voter message
| | Hello! Voting in the 2019 Arbitration Committee elections is now open until 23:59 on Monday, 2 December 2019. All eligible users are allowed 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. If you wish to participate in the 2019 election, please review the candidates and submit your choices on the voting page. If you no longer wish to receive these messages, you may add |
Google Code-In 2019 is coming - please mentor some documentation tasks!
Hello,
Google Code-In, Google-organized contest in which the Wikimedia Foundation participates, starts in a few weeks. This contest is about taking high school students into the world of opensource. I'm sending you this message because you recently edited a documentation page at the English Wikipedia.
I would like to ask you to take part in Google Code-In as a mentor. That would mean to prepare at least one task (it can be documentation related, or something else - the other categories are Code, Design, Quality Assurance and Outreach) for the participants, and help the student to complete it. Please sign up at the contest page and send us your Google account address to google-code-in-admins@lists.wikimedia.org, so we can invite you in!
From my own experience, Google Code-In can be fun, you can make several new friends, attract new people to your wiki and make them part of your community.
If you have any questions, please let us know at google-code-in-admins@lists.wikimedia.org.
Thank you!
--User:Martin Urbanec (talk) 21:58, 23 November 2019 (UTC)
editToken
Hello AntiCompositeNumber,
Your script User:AntiCompositeNumber/quicktag.js is no longer functional because it attempts to get an editToken from mw.user.tokens. The script should instead get a csrfToken. editTokens were removed from mw.user.tokens on October 3, 2019 at Phabricator during this edit as they were redundant to csrfTokens.– BrandonXLF (talk) 00:06, 25 November 2019 (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.
Changes later this week
- The mobile beta mode will be disabled to have less maintenance. The developers will focus on the desktop improvements project. You can turn on advanced mobile contributions mode if you want to see the categories. You could also jump back to the top. This can instead be done with a gadget or user script. [27]
- Parsoid is software we use for the visual editor, content translation, Flow and the Android app. This has been rewritten. It will come to the wikis gradually over the next two weeks. It has been tested, but there could be some diffs or previews that don't look right. If you see any you can report them. [28]
- The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 26 November. It will be on the other wikis next week (calendar). This is because of holidays.
Meetings
- You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 27 November at 16:00 (UTC). See how to join.
Future changes
- You will switch between the article and the talk page in a new way in the mobile view in the future. It will use tabs. This is more like in the desktop view. [29]
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
16:51, 25 November 2019 (UTC)
Scripts++ Newsletter – Issue 11
News and updates associated with user scripts from the past month (November 2019).
Hello everyone and welcome to the 11th issue of the Wikipedia Scripts++ Newsletter:
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Enjoy your thanksgiving --DannyS712 (talk) 08:22, 28 November 2019 (UTC)
The Signpost: 29 November 2019
- From the editor: Put on your birthday best
- News and notes: How soon for the next million articles?
- In the media: You say you want a revolution
- On the bright side: What's making you happy this month?
- Arbitration report: Two requests for arbitration cases
- Traffic report: The queen and the princess meet the king and the joker
- Technology report: Reference things, sister things, stranger things
- Gallery: Winter and holidays
- Recent research: Bot census; discussions differ on Spanish and English Wikipedia; how nature's seasons affect pageviews
- Essay: Adminitis
- From the archives: WikiProject Spam, revisited
Administrators' newsletter – December 2019
News and updates for administrators from the past month (November 2019).
Administrator changes
- EvergreenFir • ToBeFree
- Akhilleus • Athaenara • John Vandenberg • Melchoir • MichaelQSchmidt • NeilN • Youngamerican • 😂
CheckUser changes
Interface administrator changes
Guideline and policy news
- An RfC on the administrator resysop criteria was closed. 18 proposals have been summarised with a variety of supported and opposed statements. The inactivity grace period within which a new request for adminship is not required has been reduced from three years to two. Additionally, Bureaucrats are permitted to use their discretion when returning administrator rights.
- Following a proposal, the edit filter mailing list has been opened up to users with the Edit Filter Helper right.
Technical news
- Wikimedia projects can set a default block length for users via MediaWiki:ipb-default-expiry. A new page, MediaWiki:ipb-default-expiry-ip, allows the setting of a different default block length for IP editors. Neither is currently used. (T219126)
Arbitration
- Voting in the 2019 Arbitration Committee Elections is open to eligible editors until Monday 23:59, 2 December 2018 UTC. Please review the candidates and, if you wish to do so, submit your choices on the voting page.
Miscellaneous
- The global consultation on partial and temporary office actions that ended in October received a closing statement from staff concluding, among other things, that the WMF
will no longer use partial or temporary Office Action bans... until and unless community consensus that they are of value or Board directive
.
- The global consultation on partial and temporary office actions that ended in October received a closing statement from staff concluding, among other things, that the WMF
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
- Mix'n'match is a tool to connect Wikidata items to information in other databases. It can be used to find subjects that are missing in a Wikipedia. It now has more than 3000 datasets. Before it was closer to 2000.
Changes later this week
- The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 3 December. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 4 December. It will be on all wikis from 5 December (calendar).
Meetings
- You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 4 December at 16:00 (UTC). See how to join.
Future changes
- There will be a new schema for XML dumps. Scripts and apps that use them will need to be updated. If they are not updated they will no longer work. [30]
- The
{{REVISIONID}}magic word will no longer work in the content namespaces. This is for performance reasons. When you preview a page it returns""(empty string). When you read a page it returns"-"(dash). In the future this will also affect other namespaces. The next ones are file and category namespaces. [31]
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
16:58, 2 December 2019 (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
- Wikimedia projects use Translatewiki to translate the wiki interface. You can now use WatchTranslations to watch projects there. You would get an email if there are missing translations to your language. [32]
- There is a new dataset you can use. It shows the number of editors per country per month for a number of countries. You can read the documentation and download the dataset.
Changes later this week
- The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 10 December. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 11 December. It will be on all wikis from 12 December (calendar).
Meetings
- You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 11 December at 16:00 (UTC). See how to join.
Future changes
- You can test a new reference tool. It makes it possible to reference different parts of a source without repeating all information. You can test it on the beta cluster. You can see an example article. [33]
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
16:37, 9 December 2019 (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
- The Linter extension helps you find technical errors in articles. It did not show new changes last week. This was because of an API problem. It is now working again. [34]
- Special:Watchlist can show the wrong information again. It does not always show which edits are read and which are unread. This is because of a database problem. The developers are working on solving the problem. [35]
Changes later this week
- You can get email notifications. You can get them immediately, a summary every day or a summary once every week. If you choose a summary you can soon choose not to get notifications you have already marked as read on the wiki. [36]
- The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 17 December. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 18 December. It will be on all wikis from 19 December (calendar).
Meetings
- You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 18 December at 16:00 (UTC). See how to join.
Future changes
- The partial blocks feature is now stable. It will come to most wikis on 6 January. Your wiki can ask to wait. Contact NKohli (WMF) if you don't want it now. [37]
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
00:15, 17 December 2019 (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.
Tech News
- Because of the holidays the next issue of Tech News will be sent out on 6 January 2020.
Recent changes
- All mobile site users now have new features. Features include: tabs for page/discussion; an expanded user-menu; direct access to history pages. These features were initially part of the "advanced mode".
Changes later this week
- There is no new MediaWiki version this week or next week.
Future changes
- You can use
setlangin the URL to change the user interface language. This will no longer happen automatically. When you open the link you will be asked to confirm the language change. This will not happen if Javascript is not working in your browser. [38]
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
20:04, 23 December 2019 (UTC)
Merry Christmas, AntiComposite!
|
TheSandDoctor Talk is wishing you a Merry Christmas!
This greeting (and season) promotes WikiLove and hopefully this note has made your day a little better. Spread the WikiLove by wishing another user a Merry Christmas, whether it be someone you have had disagreements with in the past, a good friend, or just some random person. Happy New Year! Spread the Christmas cheer by adding {{subst:Xmas3}} to their talk page with a friendly message. |
- From my family to yours, wishing you a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!
Here's to 2020! --TheSandDoctor Talk 08:39, 25 December 2019 (UTC)
On 22 September 2019 you tagged this image as being in the OTRS queue. No action has been taken since then, and it's been over 3 months. Can you clarify the status of this OTRS ticket? Thank you, --Hammersoft (talk) 00:37, 27 December 2019 (UTC)
- Hammersoft, Permission for the file could not be confirmed because the OTRS agent handling the ticket could not verify that the email was from the copyright holder. That agent did not update the OTRS received template after handling the ticket. The file should have been deleted on 23 October. --AntiCompositeNumber (talk) 00:45, 27 December 2019 (UTC)
The Signpost: 27 December 2019
- From the editors: Caught with their hands in the cookie jar, again
- News and notes: What's up (and down) with administrators, articles and languages
- In the media: "The fulfillment of the dream of humanity" or a nightmare of PR whitewashing on behalf of one-percenters?
- Discussion report: December discussions around the wiki
- Arbitration report: Announcement of 2020 Arbitration Committee
- Traffic report: Queens and aliens, exactly alike, once upon a December
- Technology report: User scripts and more
- Gallery: Holiday wishes
- Recent research: Acoustics and Wikipedia; Wiki Workshop 2019 summary
- From the archives: The 2002 Spanish fork and ads revisited (re-revisited?)
- On the bright side: What's making you happy this month?
- WikiProject report: Wikiproject Tree of Life: A Wikiproject report
Happy New Year!
 |
Happy New Year! | |
🏈May your new year go better than the 31 teams who passed up on this guy🏈
  Love, Action Jackson
|
Praxidicae (talk) 01:23, 31 December 2019 (UTC)
Happy New Year!
Sir,
I wish to thank you for your kind words, wishes, and congratulations of a moment ago. A very happy New Year to you & your loved ones as well!
Sincerely,
Twozenhauer (talk) 00:16, 1 January 2020 (UTC)
A barnstar for you!
|
The Technical Barnstar |
| For this. No idea how 'correct' the query is for a computer scientist, but it certainly was correct enough for me! Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 20:48, 2 January 2020 (UTC) |
Administrators' newsletter – January 2020
News and updates for administrators from the past month (December 2019).
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Guideline and policy news
- A request for comment asks whether partial blocks should be enabled on the English Wikipedia. If enabled, this functionality would allow administrators to block users from editing specific pages or namespaces, rather than the entire site.
- A proposal asks whether admins who don't use their tools for a significant period of time (e.g. five years) should have the toolset procedurally removed.
- Following a successful RfC, a whitelist is now available for users whose redirects will be autopatrolled by a bot, removing them from the new pages patrol queue. Admins can add such users to Wikipedia:New pages patrol/Redirect whitelist after a discussion following the guidelines at Wikipedia talk:New pages patrol/Redirect whitelist.
Arbitration
- The fourth case on Palestine-Israel articles was closed. The case consolidated all previous remedies under one heading, which should make them easier to understand, apply, and enforce. In particular, the distinction between "primary articles" and "related content" has been clarified, with the former being
the entire set of articles whose topic relates to the Arab-Israeli conflict, broadly interpreted
rather thanreasonably construed
. - Following the 2019 Arbitration Committee elections, the following editors have been appointed to the Arbitration Committee: Beeblebrox, Bradv, Casliber, David Fuchs, DGG, KrakatoaKatie, Maxim, Newyorkbrad, SoWhy, Worm That Turned, Xeno.
- The fourth case on Palestine-Israel articles was closed. The case consolidated all previous remedies under one heading, which should make them easier to understand, apply, and enforce. In particular, the distinction between "primary articles" and "related content" has been clarified, with the former being
Miscellaneous
- This issue marks three full years of the Admin newsletter. Thanks for reading!
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
- When trying to move a page, if the target title already exists then a warning message is shown. The warning message will now include a link to the target title. [39]
- The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 7 January. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 8 January. It will be on all wikis from 9 January (calendar).
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
21:19, 6 January 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 no longer read Wikimedia wikis if your browser use very old TLS. This is because it is a security problem for everyone. It can lead to downgrade attacks. Since 9 December you just see a warning. Soon the browser will not connect to the wikis at all. Most are users on Android systems older than 4.4. You can read the browser recommendations. [40]
- Special:LinkSearch has been moved from the "Redirecting special pages" section on Special:SpecialPages to the "Lists of pages" section. [41]
Changes later this week
- Wikis can protect pages so that only some users can edit them. The standard protection levels are Require autoconfirmed or confirmed access and Require administrator access. If your wiki use more protection levels the technical name might be renamed for standardisation. This doesn't affect what users see. [42]
- The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 14 January. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 15 January. It will be on all wikis from 16 January (calendar).
Future changes
- Deepcat and Catgraph will stop working. This will happen at the end of January. This is because you can now use the normal search function instead. [43]
- You can use
<ref follow="…">to merge footnotes that follow each other. It is meant to be used for digitised books on Wikisource. If the order of the footnotes is wrong no error was shown but the bad <ref> was shown outside the <references /> list. This will change and you will see an error message instead. [44]
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 18:39, 13 January 2020 (UTC)
Orphaned non-free image File:2014 Mountain West Conference Football Championship Game logo.png
Thanks for uploading File:2014 Mountain West Conference Football Championship Game logo.png. The image description page currently specifies that the image is non-free and may only be used on Wikipedia under a claim of fair use. However, the image is currently not used in any articles on Wikipedia. If the image was previously in an article, please go to the article and see why it was removed. You may add it back if you think that that will be useful. However, please note that images for which a replacement could be created are not acceptable for use on Wikipedia (see our policy for non-free media).
Note that any non-free images not used in any articles will be deleted after seven days, as described in section F5 of the criteria for speedy deletion. Thank you. --B-bot (talk) 03:22, 17 January 2020 (UTC)
Draft:Amal Kiran Jana
Hello User:AnticompositeNumber Thankyou for helping me before.I have looked over the promotional tone of the content and improved it.Can you please help in checking it,is it ohk?.Ans regarding references I have tried to improve it or kindly can you guide me how to go with these references as i have only these authentic and relevant? Thankyou Pigandraccoon (talk) 18:54, 20 January 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.
Changes later this week
- The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 21 January. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 22 January. It will be on all wikis from 23 January (calendar).
Future changes
- There is a new suggestion for what to show when someone edits without registering an account. This is to give unregistered editors better privacy and make some anti-vandalism work go faster. You can give feedback.
- Pywikibot is a Python library to automate work on wikis. It will no longer support Python 2. Use the
python2tag if you need to continue running Python 2 scripts. The Pywikibot team strongly recommends to migrate to Python 3. You can get help to do so. [45] - The weekly MediaWiki branch cut will soon become automated. The timing for this cut may change. You can discuss in Phabricator if this affects you. [46]
- You can read about coming technical events and mentoring interns.
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
19:41, 20 January 2020 (UTC)
The Signpost: 27 January 2020
- From the editor: Reaching six million articles is great, but we need a moratorium
- News and notes: Six million articles on the English language Wikipedia
- Special report: The limits of volunteerism and the gatekeepers of Team Encarta
- Arbitration report: Three cases at ArbCom
- Traffic report: The most viewed articles of 2019
- News from the WMF: Capacity Building: Top 5 Themes from Community Conversations
- Community view: Our most important new article since November 1, 2015
- From the archives: A decade of The Signpost, 2005-2015
- On the bright side: What's making you happy this month?
- WikiProject report: WikiProject Japan: a wikiProject Report
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 mobile diffs have problems. A couple of buttons are not shown. Structured data diffs on Commons are confusing. The developers are working on fixing it. [47][48]
- Administrators on wikis that use Structured Discussions can't move discussion pages. This is a bug. The developers are working on fixing it. [49]
Changes later this week
- There is no new MediaWiki version this week.
Future changes
- There is JavaScript code on Special:Undelete for administrators that makes it possible to automatically select multiple checkboxes by holding the "Shift" key and clicking. This code is also loaded by accident on other special pages and on articles. This makes pages slower to load. This will be fixed. If you know of other special pages where this is useful please tell the developers at phab:T232688.
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
18:52, 27 January 2020 (UTC)
Administrators' newsletter – February 2020
News and updates for administrators from the past month (January 2020).
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Guideline and policy news
- Following a request for comment, partial blocks are now enabled on the English Wikipedia. This functionality allows administrators to block users from editing specific pages or namespaces rather than the entire site. A draft policy is being workshopped at Wikipedia:Partial blocks.
- The request for comment seeking the community's sentiment for a binding desysop procedure closed with
wide-spread support for an alternative desysoping procedure based on community input
. No proposed process received consensus.
Technical news
- Twinkle now supports partial blocking. There is a small checkbox that toggles the "partial" status for both blocks and templating. There is currently one template: {{uw-pblock}}.
- When trying to move a page, if the target title already exists then a warning message is shown. The warning message will now include a link to the target title. [50]
Arbitration
- Following a recent arbitration case, the Arbitration Committee reminded administrators
that checkuser and oversight blocks must not be reversed or modified without prior consultation with the checkuser or oversighter who placed the block, the respective functionary team, or the Arbitration Committee.
- Following a recent arbitration case, the Arbitration Committee reminded administrators
Miscellaneous
- Voting in the 2020 Steward elections will begin on 08 February 2020, 14:00 (UTC) and end on 28 February 2020, 13:59 (UTC). The confirmation process of current stewards is being held in parallel. You can automatically check your eligibility to vote.
- The English Wikipedia has reached six million articles. Thank you everyone for your contributions!
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 4 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 5 February. It will be on all wikis from 6 February (calendar).
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
20:04, 3 February 2020 (UTC)
reFill 2 Toolbox_link for Special:MyPage/common.js
Do you know what User:Zhaofeng_Li/reFill#Toolbox_link does ? It is not in Wikipedia:User scripts/List.
Also, for the defaults of reFill 2 ng :
- Add blank metadata fields when the information is unavailable
- Add access dates
- Use the base domain name as work when this information cannot be parsed
These seem to be a better default for reFill 2 ng since these make subsequent improvements easier.
Another thing, can reFill 2 ng send requests to the archive.org bot for saving of new references?
Are these better asked elsewhere?
T3g5JZ50GLq (talk) 10:19, 3 February 2020 (UTC)
- @T3g5JZ50GLq: The script appears to integrate reFill into the MediaWiki interface. More thanthat, I don't know, as I've never used it. Blank metadata fields are not added by default as they can clutter up the wikitext. Access dates should correspond to when the information supported by the source was last checked against the source, so it doesn't make sense to always add them when metadata is updated. Using the base domain as the work is a stylistic preference. In general, automated and semi-automated tools would rather do nothing than do something that will have to be removed or fixed later. And no, reFill doesn't connect to the Internet Archive, as that's not what the tool is built for. --AntiCompositeNumber (talk) 20:30, 3 February 2020 (UTC)
Scripts++ Newsletter – Issue 12
News and updates associated with user scripts from the past two months (December 2019 and January 2020).
Hello everyone and welcome to the 12th issue issue of the Wikipedia Scripts++ Newsletter:
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...and many more, all available at Wikipedia:User scripts/Requests
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Thanks, --DannyS712 (talk) 06:12, 5 February 2020 (UTC)
Orphaned non-free image File:WM3 Pro Cycling logo.png
Thanks for uploading File:WM3 Pro Cycling logo.png. The image description page currently specifies that the image is non-free and may only be used on Wikipedia under a claim of fair use. However, the image is currently not used in any articles on Wikipedia. If the image was previously in an article, please go to the article and see why it was removed. You may add it back if you think that that will be useful. However, please note that images for which a replacement could be created are not acceptable for use on Wikipedia (see our policy for non-free media).
Note that any non-free images not used in any articles will be deleted after seven days, as described in section F5 of the criteria for speedy deletion. Thank you. --B-bot (talk) 19:33, 5 February 2020 (UTC)
Reddit: a reliable source or not?
Good day from Pulilan, the Philippines, AntiCompositeNumber! :-D It's been a very long time since I talked to you hehe :-) I just have one question: is Reddit a reliable source? I planned to include a statement about Florentino Floro's activity on Wikimedia Commons in his biographical entry. I found one online source:
However, I am doubtful since the passage that mentions about it - [51] - was removed due to "WP:Original research" - [52]. So I'm seeking a second (or third?) opinion. Thanks for the response AntiCompositeNumber! :-) JWilz12345 (talk) 22:37, 4 February 2020 (UTC)
- JWilz12345, Reddit, like other social media sites, is a self-published source. In general, that means you shouldn't use it to support statements of fact. This is especially important in biographies, where self-published sources should never be used unless they're written by the article subject and are used for an uncontroversial fact. --AntiCompositeNumber (talk) 23:03, 4 February 2020 (UTC)
- @AntiCompositeNumber: thanks for your reply :-) JWilz12345 (talk) 09:44, 7 February 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 version of the Wikimedia Commons app for Android. It should fix the failed uploads problem. [53]
Problems
- There was a problem with the new MediaWiki version last week. It deleted some messages by accident. The new version was late because it was stopped to fix things. [54]
Changes later this week
- The MediaWiki action API is used by various tools like bots and gadgets. Some error codes will change. Some parameter values that do not follow the standard will no longer work. [55]
- The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 11 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 12 February. It will be on all wikis from 13 February (calendar).
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
19:10, 10 February 2020 (UTC)
Another barnstar for you! ... ;-)) ...
|
The Guidance Barnstar | |
Dear colleague,  Thank you very much, once again, for coming to my rescue via the Help desk; your helpful assistance is very much appreciated! Thank you also for all your other contributions to our encyclopedia. With kind regards; Patrick. ツ Pdebee.(talk)(become old-fashioned!) 18:16, 13 February 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
- Pages on Wikidata and Commons now load faster. You can read more about page load performance. [56][57]
Changes later this week
- The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 18 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 19 February. It will be on all wikis from 20 February (calendar).
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
16:17, 17 February 2020 (UTC)
SQL query
Hi AntiCompositeNumber, you wrote the following SQL query for the Census project, thank you! I am trying to adapt it to another task for link discovery.
USE frwiki_p; SELECT el_to, count(el_from) as pages FROM externallinks WHERE el_index LIKE "https://com.sports-reference.www.%" OR el_index LIKE "http://com.sports-reference.www.%" GROUP BY el_to ORDER BY pages DESC
Current it outputs starting with the first line:
el_to pages http://www.sports-reference.com/olympics/athletes/va/attie-van-heerden-1.html 2 http://www.sports-reference.com/olympics/athletes/an/an-jae-hyeong-1.html 1 http://www.sports-reference.com/olympics/athletes/an/nils-andersen-1.html 1 http://www.sports-reference.com/olympics/athletes/at/sid-atkinson-1.html 1 http://www.sports-reference.com/olympics/athletes/ay/jacinto-ayala-1.html 1 ...
I'd like to print the wiki site as the first line (eg. "frwiki") instead of "el_to pages". For each URL, print the URL and the article name it appears in. If the URL appears in more than article it would be 1 line per article. Or if easier, one line per URL with multiple articles listed somehow. If there are duplicate URLs in the same article it doesn't matter either way, only need to know if there is 1 or more URLs for any given article. Is this possible? -- GreenC 22:28, 20 February 2020 (UTC)
- @GreenC:The first part, no, that's not super nice to do in raw SQL, as it would be a seperate SELECT statement and would be returned on it's own, not with the results. https://quarry.wmflabs.org/query/42321 should do everything else though. It is, unfortunately, not a very fast query. --AntiCompositeNumber (talk) 23:06, 20 February 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.
Changes later this week
- The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 25 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 26 February. It will be on all wikis from 27 February (calendar).
Future changes
- There will be a reply button after each post on a talk page if you want one. This will soon be a beta feature on the Arabic, French, Dutch and Hungarian Wikipedias. You will have to turn it on if you want to use it. It will come to more wikis later. You can test the reply button. It was briefly shown earlier than planned by mistake on the four first wikis last week.
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
20:59, 24 February 2020 (UTC)
User: Jackson3423123
Sorry, that was a friend who got onto my account. He had purposely done that and it was not in my power to stop him since he had done it whilst I was not looking. This an apology and a misunderstanding I'll take the warning, but just regard the situation first before something like that happens. Please leave a notice not just necessarily a warning next time and take it into precautions. Jerry Steinfield (talk) 18:36, 25 February 2020 (UTC)
Scripts++ Newsletter – Issue 13
News and updates associated with user scripts from the past month (February 2019).
Hello everyone and welcome to the 13th issue of the Wikipedia Scripts++ Newsletter:
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I hope everyone is having a great year so far! --DannyS712 (talk) 15:53, 1 March 2020 (UTC)
The Signpost: 1 March 2020
- From the editor: The ball is in your court
- News and notes: Alexa ranking down to 13th worldwide
- Special report: More participation, more conversation, more pageviews
- Discussion report: Do you prefer M or P?
- Arbitration report: Two prominent administrators removed
- Community view: The Incredible Invisible Woman
- In focus: History of The Signpost, 2015–2019
- From the archives: Is Wikipedia for sale?
- Traffic report: February articles, floating in the dark
- Gallery: Feel the love
- On the bright side: What's making you happy this month?
- Opinion: Wikipedia is another country
- Humour: The Wilhelm scream
Administrators' newsletter – March 2020
News and updates for administrators from the past month (February 2020).
|
|
|
Guideline and policy news
- Following an RfC, the blocking policy was changed to state that sysops
must not
undo or alter CheckUser or Oversight blocks, rather thanshould not
. - A request for comment confirmed that sandboxes of established but inactive editors may not be blanked due solely to inactivity.
- Following an RfC, the blocking policy was changed to state that sysops
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.
Miscellaneous
- Following the 2020 Steward Elections, the following editors have been appointed as stewards: BRPever, Krd, Martin Urbanec, MusikAnimal, Sakretsu, Sotiale, and Tks4Fish. There are a total of seven editors that have been appointed as stewards, the most since 2014.
- The 2020 appointees for the Ombudsman commission are Ajraddatz and Uzoma Ozurumba; they will serve for one year.
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. [58]
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. [59]
- 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. [60]
- 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. [61]
- 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).
Future changes
- The developers are working on a new interface to solve edit conflicts on talk pages. You can give feedback. [62]
- 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.
-
wgMFSpecialCaseMainPagewas 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. [63]
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
00:35, 3 March 2020 (UTC)
Quarry query
Thanks again for helping me out with https://quarry.wmflabs.org/query/42737 :) I am wondering if it is possible to change the query to go back further to get articles older than the ones in that query? After finding a review database online for novels, I want to go back over my creations to make sure that I can connect up all the reviews that I can find. :) BOZ (talk) 05:34, 6 March 2020 (UTC)
- @BOZ: Hmm...it looks like the page creation log database never got backfilled with old articles when it was created. I've adjusted the query, and it's found 179 articles going back to 2008. --AntiComposite (talk) 15:31, 6 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. [64][65][66]
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).
Future changes
- There is a plan for new requirements for user signatures. You can give feedback.
- 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. [67]
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
17:14, 9 March 2020 (UTC)
US Census
Hi ACN,
Thanks so much for the program that is amazing given the complexity and exceptions. Now, the problem is my lack of experience with Python in particular getting the dependencies working. The program will need to run on my local server since that is where WaybackMedic lives which will be doing the final edits. I see two possibilities: tell me what to do to get it working; or, provide you a shell account and you can ssh in - Linux Mint. Either way is fine whichever you think is easier. -- GreenC 14:05, 10 March 2020 (UTC)
- GreenC, If you're running Linux Mint, you've got Python installed already.
transform.pydoes not require any external dependencies, outside oftransform_data.json. Both are included in the git repo. Stick both of them in the same directory, then call transform.py like you would any other script. If the executable bit is set (chmod +x transform.py) you can call it directly (./transform.py), otherwise you have to have python call it (python3 transform.py). The script will take input as command line arguments or via STDIN by default, and can read from a file passed with -i. A successfully transformed URL will be output to STDOUT. If transformation fails, an error is written to STDERR. There are some low-confidence transformations that I couldn't find an example to test with, in those cases a url will be written to STDOUT and a warning to STDERR. You can make those warnings errors with a command line flag. --AntiComposite (talk) 18:20, 10 March 2020 (UTC)
Oh great, saw the dependencies file and thought it required those. It is installed! Now, I may be doing something wrong:
mintbox:[/home/adminuser/factfinder-migration] ./transform.py 'http://factfinder.census.gov/servlet/SAFFPopulation?_event=Search&_name=McKinney&_state=04000US48&_county=McKinney&_cityTown=McKinney&_zip=&_sse=on&_lang=en&pctxt=fph' https://data.census.gov/cedsci/profile?q=McKinney%2C+Texas
https://data.census.gov/cedsci/profile?q=McKinney%2C+Texas is a blank page. This is the first one I tried as the transformation table indicates a green "yes" for factfinder.census.gov/servlet/SAFFPopulation?* and a search here picking one at random. The header returns "HTTP/1.1 200 OK". It does include a bunch of HTML stuff so how to determine when the page is valid. I tried a plain-text rendering of the page:
mintbox:[/home/adminuser/wmnim/wm2] w3m -dump 'https://data.census.gov/cedsci/profile?q=McKinney%2C+Texas' We're sorry but this website doesn't work properly without JavaScript enabled. Please enable it to continue.
JS ok. Ran a headless browser with same error "We're sorry..". Hmm.. confident the headless Chrome has JS enabled because it is used elsewhere for that purpose. But now it included something different in the HTML:
People and Population
</h2><p data-v-542f70e0="" tabindex="0" class="section-desc">
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Quisque
turpis est, venenatis vitae est vel, lobortis auctor nunc. Cras eu
lacus at nulla convallis nsectetur sed a risus. Cras feugiat vel
lectus eget semper. In non dolor dolor. Mauris eleifend elit non
quam auctor malesuada. Duis ut efficitur tellus.
The pseudo-Latin suggests this a boilerplate unconfigured page still waiting to be set up. However it returns the same result even with a nonsense URL eg. https://data.census.gov/cedsci/profile?q=Wikipedia%2C+Texas .. so this looks like what they return when a page is not available (instead of a 404 status).
Let's try from the endpoint factfinder.census.gov/bkmk/table/* randomly chosen:
mintbox:[/home/adminuser/factfinder-migration] ./transform.py 'http://factfinder.census.gov/bkmk/table/1.0/en/ACS/10_5YR/DP03/0600000US3400512940' https://data.census.gov/cedsci/table?g=0600000US3400512940&tid=ACSDT5Y2010.DP03&y=2010
This works! I guess determining when a page is working or not will take some thinking about since they do not send a proper 404 and running a headless browser on this many links gives pause. -- GreenC 15:12, 11 March 2020 (UTC)
- @GreenC: Yeah, it seems like the Census Bureau couldn't get away from messy piles of javascript even with the new tool. It looks like the original page load just sends an otherwise-empty HTML page with a bunch of cryptically-named script tags, which pulls down a bunch of JavaScript. Those scripts then call a few APIs to actually get the data. (Some of this JavaScript is clearly insane, as it's making the same request for the same data 2-3 times, expecting different results I guess). One could probably reverse-engineer the API calls the page is making, but... The other issue is that AFF Community Facts links (usually) use the place name as the unique identifier, but CEDSCI Profiles use the GEOID. To solve this, I put the place name in the search query field so that CEDSCI could handle the GEOID lookup. This means that CEDSCI will try to always return something related to the search query, unless it's an unsupported place type. Of course, as I also found out in testing, CEDSCI doesn't send useful HTTP status codes, ever. It could be displaying a giant error message and everything (including the request that caused the error) comes back 200 OK. --AntiComposite (talk) 19:37, 11 March 2020 (UTC)