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Please comment on Wikipedia:Arbitration/Policy/Proposed amendment (April 2019)

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WP:REFUND request

Hello PBS: please restore all the Portal subpages you deleted via WP:CSD G6. Since there are now assessments in process as to whether the single-page or multi-page versions are better for the encyclopedia, the only way these assessments can proceed is if the subpages are restored. Thanks in advance, UnitedStatesian (talk) 18:08, 4 March 2019 (UTC)

UnitedStatesian, I have done the ones in my personal list. There are others, and I will look them up tomorrow, assuming I have the time. If you find them first, please leave me the links as it will save some time. Many of the subpages were blanked before being listed for deletion, but anyone can revert them to the last good page. Cheers, · · · Peter Southwood (talk): 21:01, 4 March 2019 (UTC)
PS, there is another admin with username PBS, but I assumed you were referring to me as this is my talk page. · · · Peter Southwood (talk): 21:01, 4 March 2019 (UTC)
Thanks so much, and yes, I normally abbreviate usernames on usertalk discussions: seems less formal. UnitedStatesian (talk) 21:04, 4 March 2019 (UTC)
UnitedStatesian, I have been and will be busy for a while yet on fairly urgent off-wiki work. If there are more portal subpages you need restored soon, please link me to a list, as I don't currently have time to search them out. Cheers, · · · Peter Southwood (talk): 05:09, 14 March 2019 (UTC)
I put the list at User:UnitedStatesian/Portal REFUND Pbsouthwood. Apologies for any dupes, but if a page was deleted twice, it is on the log twice. Thanks again. UnitedStatesian (talk) 12:03, 2 April 2019 (UTC)
UnitedStatesian, I will work my way through it. Can I rely on you to let me know if I have missed any talk pages, and to remove any deletion notices on anything you intend to keep? Make another page for anything you need redeleted. Cheers, · · · Peter Southwood (talk): 14:20, 2 April 2019 (UTC)
I added the talk pages at the bottom of the list. I think these were deleted without ever being tagged, so I don't think tag removal is needed. UnitedStatesian (talk) 14:48, 2 April 2019 (UTC)
Much obliged. I remove tags when I notice them, but sometimes I don't notice them. Most were batch deleted without individual tagging, and as you say, talk pages are not usually tagged. They just go with the article, but they don't appear to come back with the article, and a lot of portal sub-pages never had a talk page. Cheers. · · · Peter Southwood (talk): 14:53, 2 April 2019 (UTC)
Hey PBS, just checking on the status of this; saw you made it up through the P's, but Portals are now starting to be rolled back, and it would be great if we could get the Q-Z subpages/ subpage talk pages refunded soon. Thanks! UnitedStatesian (talk) 04:23, 11 April 2019 (UTC)
OK, will get back on it today. Unfortunately no batch refund, and my internet is a bit slow. Cheers, · · · Peter Southwood (talk): 06:15, 11 April 2019 (UTC)
Batch refund exists, but you have to copy the list to a user subpage; see Wikipedia:Twinkle/doc#Modules for administrators. Galobtter (pingó mió) 06:37, 11 April 2019 (UTC)
Galobtter. Thanks, that clears up a little mystery. I used batch refund previously from a user subpage, but it was very erratic so I reported problems. I did not realise that it needed to be from my subpage, so assumed it had been withdrawn due to the problems. I will try it again.
UnitedStatesian, If I speed it up I will probably miss more of the speedy delete notices. as I will not be able to check the history before undeleting. If it is better for your purposes to be quicker with a few missed speedy notices scattered around I can try to do it by batch. I will do a small test batch anyway. Cheers, · · · Peter Southwood (talk): 07:21, 11 April 2019 (UTC)
UnitedStatesian, That went a lot faster. I have checked for speedy tags and removed those I found, but may have missed some. Live and learn. Looks like it is done now. How is the review of old portals happening? Cheers, · · · Peter Southwood (talk): 10:26, 11 April 2019 (UTC)

Please comment on Talk:List of law clerks of the Supreme Court of the United States

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Please comment on Wikipedia talk:User access levels

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Please comment on Wikipedia talk:Requests for adminship

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Please comment on Wikipedia talk:Requests for adminship

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Please comment on Wikipedia talk:Requests for adminship

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Please comment on Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Ethnic groups

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MfD nomination of 15 related portals

  15 Portals which you created or substantially contributed to, has been nominated for deletion. Your opinions on the matter are welcome; you may participate in the discussion by adding your comments at Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/15 related narrow-subject portals and please be sure to sign your comments with four tildes (~~~~). You are free to edit the content of the portals during the discussion but should not remove the miscellany for deletion template from the top of the page; such a removal will not end the deletion discussion. Thank you. UnitedStatesian (talk) 00:40, 21 April 2019 (UTC)

Please comment on Talk:Planned Parenthood 2015 undercover videos controversy

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Please comment on Wikipedia talk:Simplified ruleset

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Please comment on Talk:List of suicide crisis lines

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MfD nomination of Portal:Oceanography

  Portal:Oceanography, a page which you created or substantially contributed to, has been nominated for deletion. Your opinions on the matter are welcome; you may participate in the discussion by adding your comments at Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Oceanography and please be sure to sign your comments with four tildes (~~~~). You are free to edit the content of Portal:Oceanography during the discussion but should not remove the miscellany for deletion template from the top of the page; such a removal will not end the deletion discussion. Thank you. UnitedStatesian (talk) 16:19, 29 April 2019 (UTC)

Please comment on Wikipedia:Village pump (policy)

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MfD nomination of Portal:Occupational safety and health

  Portal:Occupational safety and health, a page which you created or substantially contributed to, has been nominated for deletion. Your opinions on the matter are welcome; you may participate in the discussion by adding your comments at Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Armadillos and please be sure to sign your comments with four tildes (~~~~). You are free to edit the content of Portal:Occupational safety and health during the discussion but should not remove the miscellany for deletion template from the top of the page; such a removal will not end the deletion discussion. Thank you. UnitedStatesian (talk) 15:20, 30 April 2019 (UTC)

Wikipedia:WikiProject Portals update #031, 01 May 2019

Back to the drawing board

Implementation of the new portal design has been culled back almost completely, and the cull is still ongoing. The cull has also affected portals that existed before the development of the automated design.

Some of the reasons for the purge are:

  • Portals receive insufficient traffic, making it a waste of editor resources to maintain them, especially for narrow-scope or "micro" portals
  • The default {{bpsp}} portals are redundant with the corresponding articles, being based primarily on the corresponding navigation footer displayed on each of those articles, and therefore not worth separate pages to do so
  • They were mass created

Most of the deletions have been made without prejudice to recreation of curated portals, so that approval does not need to be sought at Deletion Review in those cases.

In addition to new portals being deleted, most of the portals that were converted to an automated design have been reverted.

Which puts us back to portals with manually selected content, that need to be maintained by hand, for the most part, for the time being, and back facing some of the same problems we had when we were at this crossroads before:

  • Manually maintained portals are not scalable (they are labor intensive, and there aren't very many editors available to maintain them)
  • The builders/maintainers tend to eventually abandon them
  • Untended handcrafted portals go stale and fall into disrepair over time

These and other concepts require further discussion. See you at WT:POG.

However, after the purge/reversion is completed, some of the single-page portals might be left, due to having acceptable characteristics (their design varied some). If so, then those could possibly be used as a model to convert and/or build more, after the discussions on portal creation and design guidelines have reached a community consensus on what is and is not acceptable for a portal.

See you at WT:POG.

Curation

A major theme in the deletion discussions was the need for portals to be curated, that is, each one having a dedicated maintainer.

There are currently around 100 curated portals. Based on the predominant reasoning at MfD, it seems likely that all the other portals may be subject to deletion.

See you at WT:POG.

Traffic

An observation and argument that arose again and again during the WP:ENDPORTALS RfC and the ongoing deletion drive of {{bpsp}} default portals, was that portals simply do not get much traffic. Typically, they get a tiny fraction of what the corresponding like-titled articles get.

And while this isn't generally considered a good rationale for creation or deletion of articles, portals are not articles, and portal critics insist that traffic is a key factor in the utility of portals.

The implication is that portals won't be seen much, so wouldn't it be better to develop pages that are?

And since such development isn't limited to editing, almost anything is possible. If we can't bring readers to portals, we could bring portal features, or even better features, to the readers (i.e., to articles)...

Some potential future directions of development

Quantum portals?

An approach that has received some brainstorming is "quantum portals", meaning portals generated on-the-fly and presented directly on the view screen without any saved portal pages. This could be done by script or as a MediaWiki program feature, but would initially be done by script. The main benefits of this is that it would be opt-in (only those who wanted it would install it), and the resultant generated pages wouldn't be saved, so that there wouldn't be anything to maintain except the script itself.

Non-portal integrated components

Another approach would be to focus on implementing specific features independently, and provide them somewhere highly visible in a non-portal presentation context (that is, on a page that wasn't a portal that has lots of traffic, i.e., articles). Such as inserted directly into an article's HTML, as a pop-up there, or as a temporary page. There are scripts that use these approaches (providing unrelated features), and so these approaches have been proven to be feasible.

What kind of features could this be done with?

The various components of the automated portal design are transcluded excerpts, news, did you know, image slideshows, excerpt slideshows, and so on.

Some of the features, such as navigation footers and links to sister projects are already included on article pages. And some already have interface counterparts (such as image slideshows). Some of the rest may be able to be integrated directly via script, but may need further development before they are perfected. Fortunately, scripts are used on an opt-in basis, and therefore wouldn't affect readers-in-general and editors-at-large during the development process (except for those who wanted to be beta testers and installed the scripts).

The development of such scripts falls under the scope of the Javascript-WikiProject/Userscript-department, and will likely be listed on Wikipedia:User scripts/List when completed enough for beta-testing. Be sure to watchlist that page.

Where would that leave curated portals?

Being curated. At least for the time being.

New encyclopedia program features will likely eventually render most portals obsolete. For example, the pop-up feature of MediaWiki provides much the same functionality as excerpts in portals already, and there is also a slideshow feature to view all the images on the current page (just click on any image, and that activates the slideshow). Future features could also overlap portal features, until there is nothing that portals provide that isn't provided elsewhere or as part of Wikipedia's interface.

But, that may be a ways off. Perhaps months or years. It depends on how rapidly programmers develop them.

Keep on keepin' on

The features of Wikipedia and its articles will continue to evolve, even if Portals go by the wayside. Most, if not all of portals' functionality, or functions very similar, will likely be made available in some form or other.

And who knows what else?

No worries.

Until next issue...    — The Transhumanist   00:41, 2 May 2019 (UTC)

Please comment on Talk:Planned Parenthood 2015 undercover videos controversy

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ArbCom 2019 special circular

 
Administrators must secure their accounts

The Arbitration Committee may require a new RfA if your account is compromised.

View additional information

This message was sent to all administrators following a recent motion. Thank you for your attention. For the Arbitration Committee, Cameron11598 02:54, 4 May 2019 (UTC)

Administrator account security (Correction to Arbcom 2019 special circular)

ArbCom would like to apologise and correct our previous mass message in light of the response from the community.

Since November 2018, six administrator accounts have been compromised and temporarily desysopped. In an effort to help improve account security, our intention was to remind administrators of existing policies on account security — that they are required to "have strong passwords and follow appropriate personal security practices." We have updated our procedures to ensure that we enforce these policies more strictly in the future. The policies themselves have not changed. In particular, two-factor authentication remains an optional means of adding extra security to your account. The choice not to enable 2FA will not be considered when deciding to restore sysop privileges to administrator accounts that were compromised.

We are sorry for the wording of our previous message, which did not accurately convey this, and deeply regret the tone in which it was delivered.

For the Arbitration Committee, -Cameron11598 21:04, 4 May 2019 (UTC)

Administrators' newsletter – May 2019

News and updates for administrators from the past month (April 2019).

  Guideline and policy news

  Technical news

  • XTools Admin Stats, a tool to list admins by administrative actions, has been revamped to support more types of log entries such as AbuseFilter changes. Two additional tools have been integrated into it as well: Steward Stats and Patroller Stats.

  Arbitration

  • In response to the continuing compromise of administrator accounts, the Arbitration Committee passed a motion amending the procedures for return of permissions (diff). In such cases, the committee will review all available information to determine whether the administrator followed "appropriate personal security practices" before restoring permissions; administrators found failing to have adequately done so will not be resysopped automatically. All current administrators have been notified of this change.
  • Following a formal ratification process, the arbitration policy has been amended (diff). Specifically, the two-thirds majority required to remove or suspend an arbitrator now excludes (1) the arbitrator facing suspension or removal, and (2) any inactive arbitrator who does not respond within 30 days to attempts to solicit their feedback on the resolution through all known methods of communication.

  Miscellaneous


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Please comment on Wikipedia:Village pump (policy)

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Please comment on Wikipedia talk:Notability (academics)

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Precious anniversary

A year ago ...
 
underwater diving
... you were recipient
no. 1921 of Precious,
a prize of QAI!

--Gerda Arendt (talk) 05:47, 8 May 2019 (UTC)

Thank you Gerda, your kindness is inspirational. · · · Peter Southwood (talk): 06:12, 8 May 2019 (UTC)
Thank you, blushing. Didn't you know that I'm one of the most disruptive warriors? --Gerda Arendt (talk) 06:16, 8 May 2019 (UTC)
In a word, no. What do you disrupt? Squabbles? · · · Peter Southwood (talk): 06:23, 8 May 2019 (UTC)
Infoboxes, allegedly. Needless to say, I believe I never did. The discussion to which it related recently was this, and the label comes under oh joy. I also said one word no.--Gerda Arendt (talk) 07:03, 8 May 2019 (UTC)

Please comment on Wikipedia talk:Notability (academics)

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NPR Newsletter No.18

 

Hello Pbsouthwood,

WMF at work on NPP Improvements

Niharika Kohli, a product manager for the growth team, announced that work is underway in implementing improvements to New Page Patrol as part of the 2019 Community Wishlist and suggests all who are interested watch the project page on meta. Two requested improvements have already been completed. These are:

  • Allow filtering by no citations in page curation
  • Not having CSD and PRODs automatically marked as reviewed, reflecting current consensus among reviewers and current Twinkle functionality.
Reliable Sources for NPP

Rosguill has been compiling a list of reliable sources across countries and industries that can be used by new page patrollers to help judge whether an article topic is notable or not. At this point further discussion is needed about if and how this list should be used. Please consider joining the discussion about how this potentially valuable resource should be developed and used.

Backlog drive coming soon

Look for information on the an upcoming backlog drive in our next newsletter. If you'd like to help plan this drive, join in the discussion on the New Page Patrol talk page.

News
Discussions of interest

Six Month Queue Data: Today – 7242 Low – 2393 High – 7250


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Administrators' newsletter – June 2019

News and updates for administrators from the past month (May 2019).

 

  Administrator changes

  AndonicConsumed CrustaceanEnigmamanEuryalusEWS23HereToHelpNv8200paPeripitusStringTheory11Vejvančický

  CheckUser changes

  Ivanvector

  Guideline and policy news

  • An RfC seeks to clarify whether WP:OUTING should include information on just the English Wikipedia or any Wikimedia project.
  • An RfC on WT:RfA concluded that Requests for adminship and bureaucratship are discussions seeking to build consensus.
  • An RfC proposal to make the templates for discussion (TfD) process more like the requested moves (RM) process, i.e. "as a clearinghouse of template discussions", was closed as successful.

  Technical news

  • The CSD feature of Twinkle now allows admins to notify page creators of deletion if the page had not been tagged. The default behavior matches that of tagging notifications, and replaces the ability to open the user talk page upon deletion. You can customize which criteria receive notifications in your Twinkle preferences: look for Notify page creator when deleting under these criteria.
  • Twinkle's d-batch (batch delete) feature now supports deleting subpages (and related redirects and talk pages) of each page. The pages will be listed first but use with caution! The und-batch (batch undelete) option can now also restore talk pages.

  Miscellaneous


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Please comment on Wikipedia talk:Today's featured article

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Wikimedia & Education Greenhouse - Confirmation for Online Course

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WikiProject X Newsletter • Issue 14

Newsletter • June 2019

Updates: I've been focusing largely on the development side of things, so we are a lot closer now to being ready to actually start discussing deploying it and testing it out here.

There's just a few things left that need to be resolved:

  • A bunch of language support issues in particular, plus some other release blockers, such as the fact that currently there's no good way to find any hubs people do create.
  • We also probably need some proper documentation and examples up to even reference if we want a meaningful discussion. We have the extension documentation and some test projects, but we probably need a bit more. Also I need to be able to even find the test projects! How can I possibly write reports about this stuff if I can't find any of it?!

Some other stuff that's happened in the meantime:

  • Midpoint report is out for this round of the project, if you want to read in too much detail about all the problems I've been running into.
  • WikiProject Molecular Biology have successfully set up using the old module system that CollaborationKit is intended to replace (eventually), and it even seems to work, so go them. Based on the issues they ran into, it looks like the members signup thing on that system has some of the same problems as we've been unable to resolve in CK, though, which is... interesting. (Need to change the content model to the right thing for the formwizard config to take. Ugh, content models.)

Until next time,

-— Isarra 21:43, 21 June 2019 (UTC)

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New Page Review newsletter July-August 2019

 

Hello Pbsouthwood,

WMF at work on NPP Improvements

More new features are being added to the feed, including the important red alert for previously deleted pages. This will only work if it is selected in your filters. Best is to 'select all'. Do take a moment to check out all the new features if you have not already done so. If anything is not working as it should, please let us know at NPR. There is now also a live queue of AfC submissions in the New Pages Feed. Feel free to review AfCs, but bear in mind that NPP is an official process and policy and is more important.

QUALITY of REVIEWING

Articles are still not always being checked thoroughly enough. If you are not sure what to do, leave the article for a more experienced reviewer. Please be on the alert for any incongruities in patrolling and help your colleagues where possible; report patrollers and autopatrolled article creators who are ostensibly undeclared paid editors. The displayed ORES alerts offer a greater 'at-a-glance' overview, but the new challenges in detecting unwanted new content and sub-standard reviewing do not necessarily make patrolling any easier, nevertheless the work may have a renewed interest factor of a different kind. A vibrant community of reviewers is always ready to help at NPR.

Backlog

The backlog is still far too high at between 7,000 and 8,000. Of around 700 user rights holders, 80% of the reviewing is being done by just TWO users. In the light of more and more subtle advertising and undeclared paid editing, New Page Reviewing is becoming more critical than ever.

Move to draft

NPR is triage, it is not a clean up clinic. This move feature is not limited to bios so you may have to slightly re-edit the text in the template before you save the move. Anything that is not fit for mainspace but which might have some promise can be draftified - particularly very poor English and machine and other low quality translations.

Notifying users

Remember to use the message feature if you are just tagging an article for maintenance rather than deletion. Otherwise articles are likely to remain perma-tagged. Many creators are SPA and have no intention of returning to Wikipedia. Use the feature too for leaving a friendly note note for the author of a first article you found well made or interesting. Many have told us they find such comments particularly welcoming and encouraging.

PERM

Admins are now taking advantage of the new time-limited user rights feature. If you have recently been accorded NPR, do check your user rights to see if this affects you. Depending on your user account preferences, you may receive automated notifications of your rights changes. Requests for permissions are not mini-RfAs. Helpful comments are welcome if absolutely necessary, but the bot does a lot of the work and the final decision is reserved for admins who do thorough research anyway.

Other news

School and academic holidays will begin soon in various places around the Western world. Be on the lookout for the usual increase in hoax, attack, and other junk pages.

Our next newsletter might be announcing details of a possible election for co-ordinators of NPR. If you think you have what it takes to micro manage NPR, take a look at New Page Review Coordinators - it's a job that requires a lot of time and dedication.


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Administrators' newsletter – July 2019

News and updates for administrators from the past month (June 2019).

 

  Administrator changes

  28bytesAd OrientemAnsh666BeeblebroxBoing! said ZebedeeBU Rob13Dennis BrownDeorDoRDFloquenbeam1Flyguy649Fram2GadfiumGB fanJonathunderKusmaLectonarMoinkMSGJNickOd MishehuRamaSpartazSyrthissTheDJWJBscribe
1Floquenbeam's access was removed, then restored, then removed again.
2Fram's access was removed, then restored, then removed again.

  Guideline and policy news

  • In a related matter, the account throttle has been restored to six creations per day as the mitigation activity completed.

  Technical news

  • The Wikimedia Foundation's Community health initiative plans to design and build a new user reporting system to make it easier for people experiencing harassment and other forms of abuse to provide accurate information to the appropriate channel for action to be taken. Community feedback is invited.

  Miscellaneous


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PDIC founding

PDIC was founded in 1969 as the "Professional Diving Instructors College" by Ed and Ruth Brawley in Monterey, California. It is listed on their official website here PDIC. (talk): User:Ldavid1985 13:09, 18 July 2019 (UTC)

Thanks Ldavid1985, that will be useful as a reference. Cheers, · · · Peter Southwood (talk): 17:36, 18 July 2019 (UTC)

Please comment on Wikipedia:Village pump (policy)

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Please comment on Wikipedia:Village pump (policy)

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