User talk:Matthewrb/Archive/2018/October

The Signpost: 1 October 2018

• From the editor: Is this the new normal?

• News and notes: European copyright law moves forward

• In the media: Knowledge under fire

• Discussion report: Interface Admin policy proposal, part 2

• Arbitration report: A quiet month for Arbcom

• Traffic report: John McCain's death generates over 7 million hits, followed by historical low

• Technology report: Paying attention to your mobile

• Gallery: A pat on the back

• Blog: After a catastrophic fire at the National Museum of Brazil, a drive to preserve what knowledge remains

• Recent research: How talk page use has changed since 2005; censorship shocks lead to centralization; is vandalism caused by workplace boredom?

• Humour: Signpost Crossword Puzzle

• Essay: Expressing thanks

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 00:44, 1 October 2018 (UTC)

Tech News: 2018-40

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

• Ordinary pages can no longer be loaded as javascript. You could do this using ?action=raw&ctype=text/javascript in the URL. Only fully protected pages in the MediaWiki: namespace or user javascript subpages can be loaded as javascript now. This is for better security. [1][2]

Problems

• New and updated translations from translatewiki.net will not reach the wikis for a while. You can still translate messages on translatewiki.net. The Wikimedia wikis will be updated with the new translations later. This is because of work on the translation system. [3][4]

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 2 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 3 October. It will be on all wikis from 4 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 3 October at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.
• You can join the meeting with the Wikimedia Foundation Search Platform team. The meeting will be on 3 October at 15:00 UTC. See how to join if you want to know how the search function works or have questions.

Future changes

• Because of a data centre test you will be able to read but not edit the wikis for up to an hour on 10 October. This will start at 14:00 (UTC). You might lose edits if you try to save during this time. The time when you can't edit might be shorter than an hour. You can read more about this.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

17:34, 1 October 2018 (UTC)

Welcome to the Months of African Cinema!

Greetings!

The AfroCine Project welcomes you to October, the first out of the two months which has been dedicated to improving contents that centre around the cinema of Africa, the Caribbean, and the diaspora.

This is a global online edit-a-thon, which is happening in at least 5 language editions of Wikipedia, including the English Wikipedia! Join us in this exciting venture, by helping to create or expand articles which are connected to this scope. Also remember to list your name under the participants section, if you haven't done so already.

On English Wikipedia, we would be recognizing Users who are able to achieve the following:

• Overall winner (1st, 2nd, 3rd places)
• Country Winners
• Diversity winner
• High quality contributors
• Gender-gap fillers
• Page improvers
• Wikidata Translators

For further information about the contest, the recognition categories and how to participate, please visit the contest page here. For further inquiries, please leave comments on the contest talkpage or on the main project talkpage. See you around :).--Jamie Tubers (talk) 22:50, 03 October 2018 (UTC)

Administrators' newsletter – October 2018

News and updates for administrators from the past month (September 2018).

Administrator changes

Justlettersandnumbers • L235

Bgwhite • HorsePunchKid • J Greb • KillerChihuahua • Rami R • Winhunter

Interface administrator changes

Cyberpower678 • Deryck Chan • Oshwah • Pharos • Ragesoss • Ritchie333

Oversight changes

Guerillero • NativeForeigner • Snowolf • Xeno

Guideline and policy news

• Following a request for comment, the process for appointing interface administrators has been established. Currently only existing admins can request these rights, while a new RfC has begun on whether it should be available to non-admins.
• There is an open request for comment on Meta regarding the creation a new user group for global edit filter management.

Technical news

• Partial blocks should be available for testing in October on the Test Wikipedia and the Beta-Cluster. This new feature allows admins to block users from editing specific pages and in the near-future, namespaces and uploading files. You can expect more updates and an invitation to help with testing once it is available.
• The Foundations' Anti-Harassment Tools team is currently looking for input on how to measure the effectiveness of blocks. This is in particular related to how they will measure the success of the aforementioned partial blocks.
• Because of a data centre test, you will be able to read but not edit the Wikimedia projects for up to an hour on 10 October. This will start at 14:00 (UTC). You might lose edits if you try to save during this time.

Arbitration

• The Arbitration Committee has, by motion, amended the procedure on functionary inactivity.
• The community consultation for 2018 CheckUser and Oversight appointments has concluded. Appointments will be made by October 11.
• Following a request for comment, the size of the Arbitration Committee will be decreased to 13 arbitrators, starting in 2019. Additionally, the minimum support percentage required to be appointed to a two-year term on ArbCom has been increased to 60%. ArbCom candidates who receive between 50% and 60% support will be appointed to one-year terms instead.
• Nominations for the 2018 Arbitration Committee Electoral Commission are being accepted until 12 October. These are the editors who help run the ArbCom election smoothly. If you are interested in volunteering for this role, please consider nominating yourself.

---

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Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 20:13, 5 October 2018 (UTC)

Tech News: 2018-41

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 Education Program extension was removed from all Wikimedia projects. You can use the Programs and Events Dashboard or the Fountain instead. [5]

Problems

• There was a problem when you copied and pasted from a table with the visual editor. It could add href where it shouldn't be. This has now been fixed. [6]

Changes later this week

• Because of a data centre test you will be able to read but not edit the wikis for up to an hour on 10 October. This will start at 14:00 (UTC). You might lose edits if you try to save during this time. The time when you can't edit might be shorter than an hour. You can read more about this.
• Because of the data centre test there will be no new version of MediaWiki this week. Changes for this week will come next week instead.

Meetings

• You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 10 October 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.

23:38, 8 October 2018 (UTC)

Articles you might like to edit, from SuggestBot

Note: All columns in this table are sortable, allowing you to rearrange the table so the articles most interesting to you are shown at the top. All images have mouse-over popups with more information. For more information about the columns and categories, please consult the documentation and please get in touch on SuggestBot's talk page with any questions you might have.

Views/Day	Quality	Title	Tagged with…
49		Puteri Indonesia (talk)	Add sources
146		Miss International Queen (talk)	Add sources
80		Cissy Jones (talk)	Add sources
18		Barbu Știrbey (talk)	Add sources
5		Miss Earth Malaysia (talk)	Add sources
212		Miss World 2015 (talk)	Add sources
5		Camille Guevarra (talk)	Cleanup
33		Hanover High School (New Hampshire) (talk)	Cleanup
210		Cypress Semiconductor (talk)	Cleanup
429		HP Pavilion (computer) (talk)	Expand
46		STS-3xx (talk)	Expand
42		Tanoan languages (talk)	Expand
14		Sullivan Central High School (talk)	Unencyclopaedic
6		Kudassanad (talk)	Unencyclopaedic
197		Betrayal (talk)	Unencyclopaedic
13		Kilbirnie Ladeside F.C. (talk)	Merge
100		International migration (talk)	Merge
18		Guido Brunetti (talk)	Merge
40		Boulder High School (talk)	Wikify
35		ProCurve (talk)	Wikify
145		Traian Băsescu (talk)	Wikify
3		Center for Child and Family Health (talk)	Orphan
2		Jacob Lomranz (talk)	Orphan
4		Neurological reparative therapy (talk)	Orphan
34		Miss Yugoslavia (talk)	Stub
52		Parul Shah (talk)	Stub
28		Josephine Tan (talk)	Stub
30		Compaq Portable series (talk)	Stub
13		Lupeni (talk)	Stub
49		Compaq Deskpro (talk)	Stub

SuggestBot picks articles in a number of ways based on other articles you've edited, including straight text similarity, following wikilinks, and matching your editing patterns against those of other Wikipedians. It tries to recommend only articles that other Wikipedians have marked as needing work. We appreciate that you have signed up to receive suggestions regularly; your contributions make Wikipedia better — thanks for helping!

If you have feedback on how to make SuggestBot better, please let us know on SuggestBot's talk page. -- SuggestBot (talk) 23:39, 12 October 2018 (UTC)

Tech News: 2018-42

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 pages, edits and users disappeared for a short while after the server switch. Missing content and users was fixed within a day. Some preferences and other things might take a few more days to fix. [7]
• Wikis are updated with new and updated translations from translatewiki.net again. This will happen once a week. The developers are working on fixing the problem so we can have translation updates more often again. [8]

Changes later this week

• When you create an abuse filter that prevents edits you can now write a specific error message for it. Before this all abuse filters that prevented edits had the same error message. [9]
• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 16 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 17 October. It will be on all wikis from 18 October (calendar).

Meetings

• There will be no more meetings with the Editing team. This is because not enough Wikimedians were interested. To tell developers which bugs you think are the most important you can use Phabricator as normal. [10]
• You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 17 October 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.

22:40, 15 October 2018 (UTC)

Articles you might like to edit, from SuggestBot

Note: All columns in this table are sortable, allowing you to rearrange the table so the articles most interesting to you are shown at the top. All images have mouse-over popups with more information. For more information about the columns and categories, please consult the documentation and please get in touch on SuggestBot's talk page with any questions you might have.

Views/Day	Quality	Title	Tagged with…
218		Binibining Pilipinas 2017 (talk)	Add sources
35		Sorin Grindeanu (talk)	Add sources
8		Gheorghe Argeșanu (talk)	Add sources
52		Binibining Pilipinas 2014 (talk)	Add sources
381		Miss Colombia (talk)	Add sources
146		Ariella Arida (talk)	Add sources
14		2015 Romanian protests (talk)	Cleanup
26		Lake Orion High School (talk)	Cleanup
148		Caregiver stress (talk)	Cleanup
3		2015 in Romanian politics (talk)	Expand
4		Mutya ng Pilipinas 2007 (talk)	Expand
26		Akron Racers (talk)	Expand
200		Miss Mongolia (talk)	Unencyclopaedic
25		Ambalappuzha (talk)	Unencyclopaedic
146		As a service (talk)	Unencyclopaedic
2		Ministry of European Integration (Romania) (talk)	Merge
7		Ministry of Regional Development and Public Administration (Romania) (talk)	Merge
7		Morning Musume auditions (talk)	Merge
6		Alexandru Lapedatu (talk)	Wikify
79		International Standard Link Identifier (talk)	Wikify
478		Carol II of Romania (talk)	Wikify
24		Ulysses syndrome (talk)	Orphan
12		Anxiety buffer disruption theory (talk)	Orphan
4		Thalia Thin (talk)	Orphan
21		Sorin Cîmpeanu (talk)	Stub
4		Muhammad Qadeer (talk)	Stub
19		Constantin Dăscălescu (talk)	Stub
3		Constantin A. Crețulescu (talk)	Stub
2		Grace Chapella (talk)	Stub
5		Pallathuruthy (talk)	Stub

SuggestBot picks articles in a number of ways based on other articles you've edited, including straight text similarity, following wikilinks, and matching your editing patterns against those of other Wikipedians. It tries to recommend only articles that other Wikipedians have marked as needing work. We appreciate that you have signed up to receive suggestions regularly; your contributions make Wikipedia better — thanks for helping!

If you have feedback on how to make SuggestBot better, please let us know on SuggestBot's talk page. -- SuggestBot (talk) 23:34, 19 October 2018 (UTC)

Tech News: 2018-43

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 23 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 24 October. It will be on all wikis from 25 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 24 October at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• The Community Wishlist Survey begins on 29 October. The survey decides what the Community Tech team will work on. You can post proposals from 29 October to 11 November. You can vote on proposals from 16 November to 30 November.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

23:11, 22 October 2018 (UTC)

Articles you might like to edit, from SuggestBot

Note: All columns in this table are sortable, allowing you to rearrange the table so the articles most interesting to you are shown at the top. All images have mouse-over popups with more information. For more information about the columns and categories, please consult the documentation and please get in touch on SuggestBot's talk page with any questions you might have.

Views/Day	Quality	Title	Tagged with…
17		Radu Vasile (talk)	Add sources
213		Romanian identity card (talk)	Add sources
38		Democratic Liberal Party (Romania) (talk)	Add sources
735		Visa requirements for Ukrainian citizens (talk)	Add sources
9		Vintilă Brătianu (talk)	Add sources
5		Ion Emanuel Florescu (talk)	Add sources
2		1997 WPF Draft (talk)	Cleanup
86		Woodrow Wilson High School (Washington, D.C.) (talk)	Cleanup
20		Titu Maiorescu (talk)	Cleanup
3,261		John R. Bolton (talk)	Expand
9		Mutya ng Pilipinas 2011 (talk)	Expand
4		Constantin Bosianu (talk)	Expand
139		Miss Malaysia (talk)	Unencyclopaedic
115		Kollam district (talk)	Unencyclopaedic
20		Miss Belize (talk)	Unencyclopaedic
8		The Vanguard School (Colorado) (talk)	Merge
676		Racial policy of Nazi Germany (talk)	Merge
33		Spin model (talk)	Merge
19		Miss Belarus (talk)	Wikify
202		Zilog (talk)	Wikify
72		Business service management (talk)	Wikify
3		Parayakad, Alappuzha (talk)	Orphan
6		Corelis (talk)	Orphan
5		Mental health among female offenders in the United States (talk)	Orphan
7		Constantin Angelescu (talk)	Stub
6		Glennifer Perido (talk)	Stub
7		Eugen Bejinariu (talk)	Stub
5		Vicksburg, Colorado (talk)	Stub
191		Steve Harvey (talk show) (talk)	Stub
15		Lulu City, Colorado (talk)	Stub

SuggestBot picks articles in a number of ways based on other articles you've edited, including straight text similarity, following wikilinks, and matching your editing patterns against those of other Wikipedians. It tries to recommend only articles that other Wikipedians have marked as needing work. We appreciate that you have signed up to receive suggestions regularly; your contributions make Wikipedia better — thanks for helping!

If you have feedback on how to make SuggestBot better, please let us know on SuggestBot's talk page. -- SuggestBot (talk) 23:35, 26 October 2018 (UTC)

The Signpost: 28 October 2018

• From the editors: The Signpost is still afloat, just barely

• Op-ed: Wikipedia's Strickland affair

• News and notes: WMF gets a million bucks

• In the media: Bans, celebs, and bias

• Discussion report: Mediation Committee and proposed deletion reform

• Traffic report: Unsurprisingly, sport leads the field – or the ring

• Technology report: Bots galore!

• Special report: NPP needs you

• Special report 2: Now Wikidata is six

• In focus: Alexa

• Gallery: Out of this world!

• Recent research: Wikimedia Commons worth $28.9 billion

• Humour: Talk page humour

• Opinion: Strickland incident

• From the archives: The Gardner Interview

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 19:10, 28 October 2018 (UTC)

Electronic Dead Drops

I first came across the idea of using a public i.e. Yahoo.com email box as a dead drop in a novel, A Desert Called Peace, by Tom Kratman. The terrorist in the beginning of the novel use this technique to pass on data without sending emails. Messages are put into and read from the Draft folder. Nothing to intercept. Didn't think about it much and read the rest of the novel.

Recently however I've seen the idea in a movie and a TV show. So since the idea seems to be working its way into popular entertainment I went in search of online information. What I found was two sentences out of about 1,000 sentence analysis of the 9/11 attacks. Kind of a "Drive By" reference. So I thought here's another chance to contribute to WikiPedia - NOT. The last and only time I tried to contribute to WikiPedia. The Guardian of the Page gave me the back of their hand and erased what I thought.

That's why I'm an IP address.

Thanks for you attention Spencer Burgess

PS I am not a pastor a scotsman or an inventor, but for the Stirling Engine I hold the Reverend Doctor Robert Stirling in high regard.

— Preceding unsigned comment added by 2601:545:4401:a01a:fcd6:6ac3:1cb8:b3cb (talk • contribs) 15:32, October 29, 2018 (UTC)

Tech News: 2018-44

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 16 November to 30 November.
• The wikis now have a content security policy report. This means that you might get a warning in your javascript console when you load external resources in your user scripts. For security reasons it is recommended that you don't do this. It might not be possible to load external resources in your scripts in the future. [11]

Problems

• Your watchlist can show which changes you have already seen. This did not work for a few days. It has been fixed. [12]

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 30 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 31 October. It will be on all wikis from 1 November (calendar).
• The 2006 wikitext editor is no longer available. It will be removed from Special:Preferences. It has not been the standard editor for a long time. It was replaced by the 2010 wikitext editor. [13][14]

Meetings

• You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 31 October 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.

20:08, 29 October 2018 (UTC)