User talk:Sphilbrick/Archive 97

Administrators' newsletter – December 2018

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

Administrator changes

Al Ameer son • Randykitty • Spartaz

Boson • Daniel J. Leivick • Efe • Esanchez7587 • Fred Bauder • Garzo • Martijn Hoekstra • Orangemike

Interface administrator changes

Deryck Chan

Guideline and policy news

• Following a request for comment, the Mediation Committee is now closed and will no longer be accepting case requests.
• A request for comment is in progress to determine whether members of the Bot Approvals Group should satisfy activity requirements in order to remain in that role.
• A request for comment is in progress regarding whether to change the administrator inactivity policy, such that administrators "who have made no logged administrative actions for at least 12 months may be desysopped". Currently, the policy states that administrators "who have made neither edits nor administrative actions for at least 12 months may be desysopped".
• A proposal has been made to temporarily restrict editing of the Main Page to interface administrators in order to mitigate the impact of compromised accounts.

Technical news

• Administrators and bureaucrats can no longer unblock themselves unless they placed the block initially. This change has been implemented globally. See also this ongoing village pump discussion (permalink).
• To complement the aforementioned change, blocked administrators will soon have the ability to block the administrator that placed their block to mitigate the possibility of a compromised administrator account blocking all other active administrators.
• Since deployment of Partial blocks on Test Wikipedia, several bugs were identified. Most of them are now fixed. Administrators are encouraged to test the new deployment and report new bugs on Phabricator or leave feedback on the Project's talk page. You can request administrator access on the Test Wiki here.

Arbitration

• Voting in the 2018 Arbitration Committee Elections is open to eligible editors until Monday 23:59, 3 December 2018. Please review the candidates and, if you wish to do so, submit your choices on the voting page.

Miscellaneous

• In late November, an attacker compromised multiple accounts, including at least four administrator accounts, and used them to vandalize Wikipedia. If you have ever used your current password on any other website, you should change it immediately. Sharing the same password across multiple websites makes your account vulnerable, especially if your password was used on a website that suffered a data breach. As these incidents have shown, these concerns are not pure fantasies.
• Wikipedia policy requires administrators to have strong passwords. To further reinforce security, administrators should also consider enabling two-factor authentication. A committed identity can be used to verify that you are the true account owner in the event that your account is compromised and/or you are unable to log in.

Obituaries

• Shock Brigade Harvester Boris (Raymond Arritt) passed away on 14 November 2018. Boris joined Wikipedia as Raymond arritt on 8 May 2006 and was an administrator from 30 July 2007 to 2 June 2008.

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Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 03:36, 3 December 2018 (UTC)

Nagsankar mandir

How did I miss that? My earwig report came up clean. Dang. Nice catch. Onel5969 ^{TT me} 14:41, 4 December 2018 (UTC)

hey, even a blind pig... (Thanks for your contributions to Copyright cleanup, I see your name a fair bit)--S Philbrick(Talk) 14:47, 4 December 2018 (UTC)

Reversion of edit to Chikungunya

I don't understand your reversion of my edit to Chikungunya which you describe as "Reverted good faith edits by Cohee (talk): Copyright issue re http://wordpress.gentlepromotion.be/artist/maya-jane-coles/." -- I did not reference "http://wordpress.gentlepromotion.be/artist/maya-jane-coles/" in my edit. I would be very appreciative of your explaining the reason for deletion of the information I added. Cohee (talk) 21:17, 5 December 2018 (UTC)

Cohee, The text in your edit closely matched text in the link I provided. It is not unusual to find a block of text at multiple websites, so perhaps you found it at some other site, but it seems unlikely you wrote it in your own words. If you did can you help explain why the similarity exists. This is a serious question, as it sometimes happens that other sites pick up material from Wikipedia, but we need to confirm that if that's what happened. S Philbrick(Talk) 21:32, 5 December 2018 (UTC)

I don't see anything in the article about a 29-year-old British-Japanese DJ/producer that even remotely resembles my block of text about evidence for sexual transmission of chikungunya virus through blood, urine, and semen. Can you please show me where the text I wrote occurs in the reference? Cohee (talk) 21:44, 5 December 2018 (UTC)

Cohee, I undid it. Not sure what happened, sorry S Philbrick(Talk) 02:10, 6 December 2018 (UTC)

Colors

Hi.

• I replaced the HTML comments in the color list articles with EditNotices, which transclude {{Color List EditNotice}} (in case you want to add to it, though I think the short/sweet approach is good for TLDR syndrome ).
• I copied the See Also section from the A–F list to the other two (should probably turn that into a template to be transcluded with a param to change which two lists to include, though I'm hoping we can find a way to put it all into one list some day instead so sorting becomes more useful, etc.).
• The section titles for two of the lists used hyphens instead of endashes, which I fixed (in case you have them linked somewhere, though they are near the top anyway).
• I saw a number of adds of perhaps-previously-removed colors in the last couple of weeks, but left it alone, since you have a better grasp of the whole thing currently.

Cheers! —[AlanM1(talk)]— 19:51, 6 December 2018 (UTC)

AlanM1, Thanks. I've been on a bit of a break from working on the color lists but this will spur me to get back to them S Philbrick(Talk) 20:00, 6 December 2018 (UTC)

Revert of Brocard (law)

Please restore my recent edits. The page you pointed to as being the source, namely https://www.latestlaws.com/library/legal-maxims, actually took the maxims from the Wikipedia entry List_of_Latin_legal_terms, which is where I had moved them from. You can tell the source is Wikipedia by looking at that entry's history and its genesis, and by comparing the layout between Wikipedia and the page you pointed to: some of the layout problems (random capitals), an enormous amount of empty pronunciation boxes, etc. can best be explained if the material was taken from Wikipedia. Anyway, I moved the maxims from the above entry, so by erasing the edits from existence rather than simply reverting them, only you can restore them. Torvalu4 (talk) 23:25, 14 December 2018 (UTC)

Torvalu4, The situation you described, where our copyright issue detection software identifies a match between a recent edit and some third-party site, but the third-party site actually copied from a Wikipedia article, is unfortunately, quite common. When editors follow the guideline Wikipedia:Copying within Wikipedia, and include the recommended wording in the edit summary, the edit will not be reverted but marked as acceptable. I have restored your edit but you still need to carry out the notification of copying for attribution reasons. It's not possible to modify the edit summary after the fact so the best option is to use a Dummy edit to make the notification. Let me know if you don't know how to do that. S Philbrick(Talk) 15:24, 15 December 2018 (UTC)

/* Toyota T-Connect issue done*/

Sphilbrick, I admitted that I am a good faith editor.King.montero (talk) 08:51, 15 December 2018 (UTC)

King.montero, OK. Is there something you are requesting be done? S Philbrick(Talk) 15:25, 15 December 2018 (UTC)

American Iron and Steel Institute Question

Hi, I recently edited the page for the American Iron and Steel Institute for a class that I am taking that is using wikiU. I edited some of the page and added a couple sections and you reverted all of my edits due to copyright. While I am new to Wikipedia I understand that I may have made mistakes but I think that I did fairly well citing and paraphrasing in general, but everything that I added was undone. I was just looking for some guidance about if the whole thing was considered a copyright infringement or it was just one part and everything was reverted as a result. There were some changes that I made that weren't even possible to be under copyright like just adding names to a list of medal winners that hadn't been updated. You cited the AISI website in your description saying that my consortia was from their partners page but I got the partnership descriptions from the separate partners websites. Also the partners page you listed would have nothing to do with the history and environmental sections I added which were also well sourced. I'm not saying that your edits were unwarranted, you clearly have more experience than me as this is my first set of edits, I am just looking for some guidance to fix my errors and wondering if everything I did was considered wrong or if just one part was wrong and all of my other edits were just reverted as a result. Thanks Dendoc01 (talk) 04:32, 17 December 2018 (UTC)

Dendoc01, Welcome to Wikipedia, and sorry that your first attempts are not going as well as you would like. We takes copyright very seriously. Unfortunately, which it thousands of reported incidents every week, and have a limited number of volunteers working on addressing these incidents. That means we take an approach that probably comes across as a little harsh. I'm sure you would be happier if we were to carefully review every single word in every one of your consecutive edits to determine which were problematic in which were fine and to remove or rewrite the problematic ones. Unfortunately, given the thousands of reports, that's not a viable option. In some cases, a process like that is done but in many cases, where a substantial portion of an edit is properly flagged as a copyright problem, we use a tool called rollback, which undoes all consecutive edits by a single editor. I have no doubt that you are correct when you say that some aspects of your edit were fine. You mentioned a list of medal winners. Lists can be tricky when it comes to copyright (sometimes lists are acceptable, sometimes not). it does seem likely that your list was fine but it got swept up in the rollback.

You may well have cited your sources but citing does not mean you don't have to write material in your own words (with the exception, which should be rare, of directly quoted material and putting it in quotes). It is my experience that many people think changing a few words queue is a copyright problem but that's not the case. See Close paraphrasing for more information. I checked and found large chunks of material that was a direct copy, so I invoked rollback. S Philbrick(Talk) 14:12, 17 December 2018 (UTC)

Page Protection Request

Hi Sphilbrick,

I noticed that you placed a short-term page protection on Greg Lansky's page on October 1st due to persistent vandalism from IP addresses. The vandalism persists and I have made a request for semi-protection on Wikipedia:Requests for page protection because I can't keep up with reverting the vandalism myself. Is there anything you could do to help?

Thank you, Mrunnerm (talk) 17:17, 17 December 2018 (UTC)

Mrunnerm, There are a number of admins who specialize in page protection issues (I am not one of them). Typically, such requests get handled fairly promptly. If no one takes care of it sooner, ping me back late this afternoon and I will try to look into it. S Philbrick(Talk) 17:59, 17 December 2018 (UTC)

Section delete or blockquote delete

Are you sure about the section delete you have done on the Bizot group from this week-end. There are multiple organizations which have republished the guidelines such as the Getty foundation [1] and others [2], with the protocols shown as representing useful public notices. An alternate form of the 'Green' protocols is also available from the Doerner Institute in Germany here [3] in a 15 point version rather than the shorter one which I had linked and shown as a blockquote. If there is some larger issue involved here about Wikipedia and "Green" environmentalism generally indicating a full section deletion then let me know and the material will stay fully deleted following your edit. CodexJustin (talk) 17:14, 17 December 2018 (UTC)

CodexJustin, The issue is narrowly copyright. I found that the contents matched text found on a page that asserted full copyright. the copyright holder would have to release them with an acceptable free license in order for us to incorporate them into an article. (Of course that's a necessary not a sufficient condition as other editorial considerations may apply.) perhaps the text is available at someplace with a free license. If so, please point it out. S Philbrick(Talk) 17:56, 17 December 2018 (UTC)

In this case I think there is a solution which I can point to which might work. The Doerner Institute did publish the 2014 technical letter, not copyrighted, leading up to the 2015 Bizot Green Protocol which you indicate has an explicit copyright notice. The author of the 2014 technical letter without copyright is Prof. Dr. Andreas Burmester who is a Professor at the Technical University in Munich and he has published his 2014 technical letter without copyright protection here [4]. If that works for you and if you can restore the deleted Bizot "Green" protocol section while excluding the problem Bizot blockquote, then I will offer to add the reference for the Doerner non-copyright page and do a blockquote for the first 2-3 items from the Doerner 15-point enumeration in its place promptly within the next day or two. Does that work? CodexJustin (talk) 19:56, 17 December 2018 (UTC)

CodexJustin, It's a common misconception that absence of a copyright notice means absence of copyright. It's an understandable misconception, because it used to be true. Under the Berne Convention, copyright is automatic, and exists even if no notice is provided. See more at Copyright#Copyright_notice. in theory, if you see a copyright notice, it definitively means full copyright applies (although there are some very annoying exceptions), but the absence of a copyright notice doesn't tell you anything unless it happens to be published prior to 1989. For more recent publications, you have to assume full copyright if you don't find a notice, but thorough checking sometimes will reveal a license other than full copyright. Not all such licenses are acceptable to Wikipedia. We can get into that more if such a license is located. in this particular case, I saw no such license so the presumption is full copyright. the fact that they failed to incorporate a copyright notice means they might be amenable to a free license but they have to affirmatively post it, or send in a permission statement to OTRS. Sorry. S Philbrick(Talk) 23:24, 17 December 2018 (UTC)

Merry Merry

		Happy Christmas!
		Hello Sphilbrick, Early in A Child's Christmas in Wales the young Dylan and his friend Jim Prothero witness smoke pouring from Jim's home. After the conflagration has been extinguished Dylan writes that Nobody could have had a noisier Christmas Eve. And when the firemen turned off the hose and were standing in the wet, smoky room, Jim's Aunt, Miss. Prothero, came downstairs and peered in at them. Jim and I waited, very quietly, to hear what she would say to them. She said the right thing, always. She looked at the three tall firemen in their shining helmets, standing among the smoke and cinders and dissolving snowballs, and she said, "Would you like anything to read?" My thanks to you for your efforts to keep the 'pedia readable in case the firemen chose one of our articles :-) Best wishes to you and yours and happy editing in 2019. MarnetteD|Talk 21:06, 19 December 2018 (UTC)

@MarnetteD: Thanks and same to you. Delightful story. S Philbrick(Talk) 22:05, 19 December 2018 (UTC)

YGM

YGM. — xaosflux ^Talk 03:29, 19 December 2018 (UTC)

Xaosflux, Thanks, I started to respond to you, then decided to post at VPT. S Philbrick(Talk) 22:06, 19 December 2018 (UTC)

Undo Folk dance of Mizoram

Dear Philbrick, thanks for the notice, the photos and pictures are mine and it would have been nice if you had given some time to make the correct changes, I would appreciate if you revert Folk dance of Mizoram so that I can work on it. Moreover, regarding copyright, it's likely that the source of information is from http://mizoram.nic.in/about/dances.htm, the offical government website and not https://www.tourmyindia.com/states/mizoram/dances.html which may itself has just copied it from the Government website mizoram.nic.in coolcolney|(Talk)

@Coolcolney:Sorry about that, if in fact the material is properly licensed. Generally, the approach is to remove material that appears to be a copyright issue because it's relatively easy to restore if it turns out not to be a problem. Our copyright issue detector found the comparison to thetourmyindia site — you might be correct that they improperly copied it from the government website. However, we are not yet done.

Regarding photos — obviously if you took them, you can provide a free license for them. I did not look at the photos but have you arranged for a free license for the photos?

I took a quick glance at the official government website. It might be that they material is properly licensed for reuse, but after a brief glance I did not see evidence of that. Can you point me to it? even if it is freely licensed, if it is copied and not written in your own words, you must provide the templates indicating that freely licensed or public domain material has been incorporated in the article. I may have missed it but I didn't see those templates. If you don't know what I'm talking about, but me know and I'll give you more information.

Material must be properly referenced. I saw some references but I saw some material that did not appear to be appropriately referenced.

You made a comment about not being "given some time to make the correct changes". That's not the way Wikipedia works. While it might seem plausible that you can start a draft article with some unreferenced material and clean it up, every time you click publish, the material should be compliant with guidelines. If that can't be done in a single edit, it's best to do it off line and get it cleaned up before adding it to a Wikipedia article. I fully understand that many editors to not follow this rule but that's the way it's supposed to be done. Let me know if you need any help.--S Philbrick(Talk) 21:48, 11 December 2018 (UTC)

Dear Philbrick, I appreciate your support in removing the unreference material and clean up. It took me almost a whole day to make that article, it will take a lot of time to start all over again.If possible, can you email me the template @tluangacolney@gmail.com so that I can work it over again. coolcolney|(Talk)

@Coolcolney: I can do that. However, I am not at home, and the computer I am using has some issues. It may quit at any time. Can you turn on your email? It is in your user preferences? That's the best way to send in any event, but at the moment, I don't have access to an email client. I also urge you to fix your signature. I haven't sorted out the problem, but it seems to be non-compliant. You can ask for help at wp:teahouseS Philbrick(Talk) 13:22, 13 December 2018 (UTC)

Now home, and happy to send you the info if you turn on your email. S Philbrick(Talk) 22:24, 19 December 2018 (UTC)

Books & Bytes, Issue 31

The Wikipedia Library

Books & Bytes
Issue 31, October – Novemeber 2018

• OAWiki
• Wikimedia and Libraries User Group update
• Global branches update
• Bytes in brief

French version of Books & Bytes is now available on meta!
Read the full newsletter

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery on behalf of The Wikipedia Library team --MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 14:34, 21 December 2018 (UTC)

January 2019 at Women in Red

January 2019, Volume 5, Issue 1, Numbers 104-108 Happy New Year from Women in Red! Please join us for these virtual editathons. January events: Women of War and Peace Play! January geofocus: Caucasus New, year-long initiative: Suffrage Continuing global initiative: #1day1woman2019 Help us plan our future events: Ideas Cafe To subscribe: Women in Red/English language mailing list and Women in Red/international list Unsubscribe: Women in Red/Opt-out list Image attribution: Nevit Dilmen (CC BY-SA 3.0) --Rosiestep (talk) 17:40, 21 December 2018 (UTC) via MassMessaging

Yizkor books

Kindly explain your blanket revert and deletion of all the edits I made to Yizkor Books. You removed categories, summaries to the lead and material referenced to a reference work and the New York Public Library website. Surely not all of that is a copyvio, and if some of it is, please point out the problematic parts and I can work to rewrite them. Thanks, --Chefallen (talk) 15:07, 27 December 2018 (UTC)

Chefallen, I fully agree that the reversion may well have picked up more than just the copyright issue. That's because it is our practice, when reviewing an edit which has been tagged as a potential copyright issue, to do what's called a rollback. That process undoes all consecutive edits by the same editor. The reason for this is that it is quite common when someone at some material that violates our copyright policy that they may make subsequent edits to that text, or may have removed some of the text preparation for adding new text or made other changes that interrelate with the copyrighted text. While in theory, a careful review of the edit could uncover all of those issues, that's extremely time-consuming, and we literally have many hundreds of reports every week. For that reason, with some exceptions, we use rollback, and request that you add back in or redo edits that are not in violation of copyright policy. S Philbrick(Talk) 15:18, 27 December 2018 (UTC)

OK, thanks for the explanation. It's a bit frustrating that perfectly fine content was also deleted, but I'll look over all the material again and make sure that none of it follows the reference text closely before I add it back. --Chefallen (talk) 15:49, 27 December 2018 (UTC)

Administrators' newsletter – January 2019

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

Administrator changes

Galobtter

Orangemike

BorgQueen • Davidruben • Ocee • Revolving Bugbear • Theda • There'sNoTime • Timc • Tijuana Brass • Tristessa de St Ange

Bureaucrat changes

Addshore

CheckUser changes

Joe Roe • SilkTork

Euryalus • Newyorkbrad • There'sNoTime

Oversight changes

AGK • Joe Roe • SilkTork

Euryalus • Newyorkbrad • There'sNoTime

Guideline and policy news

• There are a number of new or changed speedy deletion criteria, each previously part of WP:CSD#G6:

1. G14 (new): Disambiguation pages that disambiguate only zero or one existing pages are now covered under the new G14 criterion (discussion). This is {{db-disambig}}; the text is unchanged and candidates may be found in Category:Candidates for speedy deletion as unnecessary disambiguation pages.
2. R4 (new): Redirects in the file namespace (and no file links) that have the same name as a file or redirect at Commons are now covered under the new R4 criterion (discussion). This is {{db-redircom}}; the text is unchanged.
3. G13 (expanded): Userspace drafts containing only the default Article Wizard text are now covered under G13 along with other drafts (discussion). Such blank drafts are now eligible after six months rather than one year, and taggers continue to use {{db-blankdraft}}.

• The Wikimedia Foundation now requires all interface administrators to enable two-factor authentication.
• Members of the Bot Approvals Group (BAG) are now subject to an activity requirement. After two years without any bot-related activity (e.g. operating a bot, posting on a bot-related talk page), BAG members will be retired from BAG following a one-week notice.

Technical news

• Starting on December 13, the Wikimedia Foundation security team implemented new password policy and requirements. Privileged accounts (administrators, bureaucrats, checkusers, oversighters, interface administrators, bots, edit filter managers/helpers, template editors, et al.) must have a password at least 10 characters in length. All accounts must have a password:

1. At least 8 characters in length
2. Not in the 100,000 most popular passwords (defined by the Password Blacklist library)
3. Different from their username

User accounts not meeting these requirements will be prompted to update their password accordingly. More information is available on MediaWiki.org.

• Blocked administrators may now block the administrator that blocked them. This was done to mitigate the possibility that a compromised administrator account would block all other active administrators, complementing the removal of the ability to unblock oneself outside of self-imposed blocks. A request for comment is currently in progress to determine whether the blocking policy should be updated regarding this change.
• {{Copyvio-revdel}} now has a link to open the history with the RevDel checkboxes already filled in.

Arbitration

• Following the 2018 Arbitration Committee elections, the following editors have been appointed to the Arbitration Committee: AGK, Courcelles, GorillaWarfare, Joe Roe, Mkdw, SilkTork.

Miscellaneous

• Accounts continue to be compromised on a regular basis. Evidence shows this is entirely due to the accounts having the same password that was used on another website that suffered a data breach. If you have ever used your current password on any other website, you should change it immediately.
• Around 22% of admins have enabled two-factor authentication, up from 20% in June 2018. If you haven't already enabled it, please consider doing so. Regardless of whether you use 2FA, please practice appropriate account security by ensuring your password is secure and unique to Wikimedia.

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Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 21:39, 1 January 2019 (UTC)