User talk:Teblick/Archive 5

This is an archive of past discussions about User:Teblick. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page.

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thanks

Latest comment: 5 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion

Hi. I just figured out how to respond to your act of thanking me for my edit on Kenny Delmar's page. (I think I figured it out; I hope I am doing this right.)

It is my pleasure to improve any pages having to do with old-time radio.

Ferdinand Cesarano (talk) 15:58, 8 January 2019 (UTC)

Help with...

Latest comment: 5 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion

Teblick,

When you can, could you please help me update some references on Earl Holliman's wiki page. I seem to be having trouble and would appreciate your help when you are able. Thank you and Happy 2019!I'm Listening to 80s Music (talk) 21:05, 9 January 2019 (UTC)

Redirect stock theatre listed at Redirects for discussion

Latest comment: 5 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion

An editor has asked for a discussion to address the redirect Redirect stock theatre. Since you had some involvement with the Redirect stock theatre redirect, you might want to participate in the redirect discussion if you have not already done so. UnitedStatesian (talk) 03:49, 15 January 2019 (UTC)

Your thread has been archived

Latest comment: 5 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion

Hi Teblick! You created a thread called "Refimprove" vs. "more citations needed" at Wikipedia:Teahouse, but it has been archived because there was no discussion for a few days. You can still find the archived discussion here. If you have any additional questions that weren't answered then, please create a new thread.

Archival by Lowercase sigmabot III, notification delivery by Muninnbot, both automated accounts. You can opt out of future notifications by placing {{bots|deny=Muninnbot}} (ban this bot) or {{nobots}} (ban all bots) on your user talk page. Muninnbot (talk) 19:00, 26 January 2019 (UTC)

February 2019 at Women in Red

Latest comment: 5 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion

February 2019, Volume 5, Issue 2, Numbers 107-111

Happy February from Women in Red! Please join us for these virtual editathons.

February events: Social Workers Black Women

February geofocus: Ancient World

Continuing initiatives: Suffrage #1day1woman2019

Help us plan our future events: Ideas Cafe

Join the conversations on our talkpage:

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--Rosiestep (talk) 20:10, 26 January 2019 (UTC) via MassMessaging

Wikipedia:WikiProject Portals update #027, 28 Jan 2019

Latest comment: 5 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion

Portal styles

For a visually intensive portal, see Portal:Hummingbirds.

If you find any other portals that stand out, please send me the links so I can include them in the next issue. Thank you.

Conversion continues

There are about 1100 portals left in the old style, with subpages and static excerpts. As those are very labor intensive to maintain (because their maintenance is manual), all those except the ones with active maintainers (about 100) are slated for upgrade = approximately 1000. We started with 1500, and so over a quarter of them have been processed so far. That's good, but at this rate, conversion will take another 3 years. So, some automation (AWB?) is in order. We just need to keep at it, and push down on the gas pedal a bit harder.

You can find the old-style portals with an insource search of "box portal skeleton".

Flagship portals: the portals on the Main Page

Speaking of upgrades...

The following portals are listed in the header at the top of Wikipedia's Main Page, and get far more traffic than all other portals:

Of those, all but one have been revamped to an automated self-updating single-page design.

The remaining one, Portal:Mathematics has manual maintainers, and has been partially upgraded.

As these are our flagship fleet, they need to be kept in top-notch condition.

Check 'em out, and improve them if you can.

And be sure they are on your watchlist.

New portals since last issue

Keep 'em coming!

Deorphanizing the new portals

As you know, thousands of the new portals are orphans, that is, having no links to them from article space. For all practical purposes, that means they are not part of the encyclopedia yet, and readers will be unlikely to find them.

What is needed are links to these portals from the See also sections of the corresponding root articles.

Dreamy Jazz to the rescue...

Dreamy Jazz has created a bot to place the corresponding category link to the end of each portal (if it is missing), and place a link to each portal in the See also section of the corresponding root articles.

That bot, named User:Dreamy Jazz Bot, is currently in its trial period performing the above described edits!

To take a look at the edits it has made so far, see Special:Contributions/Dreamy_Jazz_Bot.

It shouldn't be long before the bot is processing the entire set of new portals.

Good news indeed.

Way to go, Dreamy Jazz!

And, that's a wrap

That's all I have to report this time around.

No doubt there will be more to tell soon.

Until then, — The Transhumanist 13:16, 28 January 2019 (UTC)

Facto Post – Issue 20 – 31 January 2019

Latest comment: 5 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion

Facto Post – Issue 20 – 31 January 2019

The Editor is Charles Matthews, for ContentMine. Please leave feedback for him, on his User talk page.

To subscribe to Facto Post go to Wikipedia:Facto Post mailing list. For the ways to unsubscribe, see the footer.

Back numbers are here.

Everything flows (and certainly data does)

Recently Jimmy Wales has made the point that computer home assistants take much of their data from Wikipedia, one way or another. So as well as getting Spotify to play Frosty the Snowman for you, they may be able to answer the question "is the Pope Catholic?" Possibly by asking for disambiguation (Coptic?).

Amazon Echo device using the Amazon Alexa service in voice search showdown with the Google rival on an Android phone

Headlines about data breaches are now familiar, but the unannounced circulation of information raises other issues. One of those is Gresham's law stated as "bad data drives out good". Wikipedia and now Wikidata have been criticised on related grounds: what if their content, unattributed, is taken to have a higher standing than Wikimedians themselves would grant it? See Wikiquote on a misattribution to Bismarck for the usual quip about "law and sausages", and why one shouldn't watch them in the making.

Wikipedia has now turned 18, so should act like as adult, as well as being treated like one. The Web itself turns 30 some time between March and November this year, per Tim Berners-Lee. If the Knowledge Graph by Google exemplifies Heraclitean Web technology gaining authority, contra GIGO, Wikimedians still have a role in its critique. But not just with the teenage skill of detecting phoniness.

There is more to beating Gresham than exposing the factoid and urban myth, where WP:V does do a great job. Placeholders must be detected, and working with Wikidata is a good way to understand how having one statement as data can blind us to replacing it by a more accurate one. An example that is important to open access is that, firstly, the term itself needs considerable unpacking, because just being able to read material online is a poor relation of "open"; and secondly, trying to get Creative Commons license information into Wikidata shows up issues with classes of license (such as CC-BY) standing for the actual license in major repositories. Detailed investigation shows that "everything flows" exacerbates the issue. But Wikidata can solve it.

Links

Wikipedia:Wikipedia Day for 18th birthday celebrations
WMUK video page, with "fake news", Jimmy Wales, Wikidata and more (health warning for those with tune allergy)
Why Wikipedia’s Medical Content Is Superior, Stephen Harrison, 28 January 2019, Slate
Olivia Colman reveals struggle with Wikipedia over age, Naomi Gordon, 28 January 2019, harpersbazaar.com
Making Wikidata visible, Martin Poulter blogpost, 24 January 2019, Bodleian Digital Library
Inventory, Magnus Manske blogpost, 24 January 2019, on Wikidata tech support for an image donation by Cleveland Museum of Art

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Wikipedia:WikiProject Portals update #028, 04 Feb 2019

Latest comment: 5 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion

Here's a quicky status report:

Old-style portals: 1,018

Single-page portals: 4,367

Total portals: 5,385

But of course, there has been more going on than just that...

Dreamy Jazz Bot is up and running!

Dreamy Jazz Bot has been approved and is now up and running.

What it does is places missing links to orphaned portals. It places a link in the See also section of the corresponding root article, and it puts one at the top of the corresponding category page.

We have thousands of new portals that have yet to be added to the encyclopedia proper, just waiting to go live.

When they do go live, over the coming days or weeks, due to Dreamy Jazz Bot, it will be like an explosion of new portals on the scene. We should expect an increase in awareness and interest in the portals project. Perhaps even new participants.

Get ready...

Get set...

Go!

Another sockpuppet infiltrator has been discovered

User:Emoteplump, a recent contributor to the portals project, was discovered to be a sockpuppet account of an indefinitely blocked user.

When that happens, admins endeavor to eradicate everything the editor contributed. This aftermath has left a wake of destruction throughout the portals department, again.

The following portals which have been speedy deleted, are in the process of being re-created. Please feel free to help to turn these blue again:

And the corresponding talk pages:

New portals since the last issue

Keep up the great work

Until next time, — The Transhumanist 09:05, 4 February 2019 (UTC)

Wikipedia:WikiProject Portals update #029, 13 Feb 2019

Latest comment: 5 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion

Where we are at:

Single-page portals: 4,704

Total portals: 5,705

The Ref desks survived the proposal to shut them down

You might be familiar with the Ref desks, by their link on every new portal. They are a place you can go to ask volunteers almost any knowledge-related question, and have been a feature of Wikipedia since August of 2005 (or perhaps earlier). They were linked to from portals in an effort to improve their visibility, and to provide a bridge from the encyclopedia proper to project space (the Wikipedia community).

Well, somebody proposed that we get rid of them, and the community decided that that was not going to happen. Thank you for defending the Ref desks!

Here's a link to the dramatic discussion:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(proposals)/Indefinitely_semiprotecting_the_refdesk#Proposal_II:_Shut_down_the_Ref_Desks

The cleanup after sockpuppet Emoteplump continues...

The wake of disruption left by Emoteplump and the admins who reverted many (but not all) of his/her edits is still undergoing cleanup. We could use all the help we can get on this task...

Almost all of the speedy deleted portals have been rebuilt from scratch.

For the portals he/she restarted (many of which were done mistakenly, overwriting restarts and further development that had already been done), and/or tagged as the maintainer, see https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:Emoteplump&oldid=881568794#Additional_Portals_under_my_watch

10,000 portals, here we come...

We're at 5,705 portals and counting.

New portals since issue #28

Prior to 2018, for the previous 14 years, portal creation was at about 80 portals per year on average. We did over 3 times that in just the past 9 days. At this rate, we'll hit the 10,000 portal mark in 5 months. But, I'm sure we can do it sooner than that.

What's next for portal pages?

There are 5 drives for portal development:

Create new portals
Expand existing portals, such as with new sections like Recognized content
Convert or restart old-style portals into automated single-page portals
Link to new portals from the encyclopedia
Pageless portals

Let's take a closer look at these...

1: Creating new portals

Portal creation, for subjects that happen to have the necessary support structures already in place, is down to about a minute per portal. The creation part, which is automated, takes about 10 seconds. The other 50 seconds is taken up by manual activities, such as finding candidate subjects, inspecting generated portals, and selecting the portal creation template to be used according to the resources available. Tools are under development to automate these activities as much as possible, to pare portal creation time down even more. Ten seconds each is the goal.

Eventually, we are going to run out of navigation templates to base portals off of. Though there are still thousands to go. But, when they do run out, we'll need an easy way to create more. A nav footer creation script.

Meanwhile, other resources are being explored and developed, such as categories, and methods to harvest the links they contain.

2: Expanding existing portals

The portal collection is growing, not only by the addition of new portals, but by further developing the ones we already have, by...

Improving and/or adding search parameters to better power the Did you know and In the news sections.
Adding more selected content sections, like Selected biographies.
Adding and maintaining Recognized content sections, via JL-Bot.
Adding pictures to the image slideshow.
Adding panoramic pics.
Categorizing portals.

More features will be added as we dream them up and design them. So, don't be shy, make a wish.

3: Converting old portals

By far the hardest and most time-consuming task we have been working on is updating the old portals, the very reason we revamped this WikiProject in the first place.

There are two approaches here:

A) Restart a portal from scratch, using our automated tools. For basic no-frills portals, that works find. But, for more elaborate portals, as that tends to lose content and features, the following approach is being tried...

B) Upgrade a portal section by section, so little to nothing is lost in the process.

4: Linking to new portals

Or "portal deorphanization"...

Dreamy Jazz Bot is purring along.

And a tool in the form of a script is under development for linking to portals at the time they are created, or shortly thereafter.

5...

See below...

New WikiProject for the post-saved-portal phase of operations...

Saved portals, are portals with a saved page.

What is the next stage in the evolutionary progression?

Quantum portals.

What are quantum portals?

Portals that come into existence when you click on the portal button, and which disappear when you leave the page.

Or, as Pbsouthwood put it:

...portals that exist only as a probability function (algorithm) until you collapse the wave form by observing through the portal button (run the script), and disappear again after use...

Introducing...

Wikipedia:WikiProject Quantum portals (see it's talk page).

Keep on keepin' on

...'til next time, — The Transhumanist 10:27, 14 February 2019 (UTC)

March 2019 at Women in Red

Latest comment: 5 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion

March 2019, Volume 5, Issue 3, Numbers 107, 108, 112, 113

Happy Women's History Month from Women in Red!

Please join us for these virtual events:
March: Art+Feminism & #VisibleWikiWomen
Geofocus: Francophone Women
Continuing initiatives: Suffrage #1day1woman

Other ways you can participate:
Help us plan our future events: Ideas Cafe
Join the conversations on our talkpage
Follow us on Twitter: @wikiwomeninred
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--Rosiestep (talk) 22:09, 18 February 2019 (UTC) via MassMessaging

Books & Bytes, Issue 32

Latest comment: 5 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion

The Wikipedia Library

Books & Bytes
Issue 32, January – February 2019

#1Lib1Ref
New and expanded partners
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) 03:30, 26 February 2019 (UTC)

Facto Post – Issue 21 – 28 February 2019

Latest comment: 5 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion

Facto Post – Issue 21 – 28 February 2019

The Editor is Charles Matthews, for ContentMine. Please leave feedback for him, on his User talk page.

To subscribe to Facto Post go to Wikipedia:Facto Post mailing list. For the ways to unsubscribe, see the footer.

Back numbers are here.

What is a systematic review?

Systematic reviews are basic building blocks of evidence-based medicine, surveys of existing literature devoted typically to a definite question that aim to bring out scientific conclusions. They are principled in a way Wikipedians can appreciate, taking a critical view of their sources.

PRISMA flow diagram for a systematic review

Ben Goldacre in 2014 wrote (link below) "[...] : the "information architecture" of evidence based medicine (if you can tolerate such a phrase) is a chaotic, ad hoc, poorly connected ecosystem of legacy projects. In some respects the whole show is still run on paper, like it's the 19th century." Is there a Wikidatan in the house? Wouldn't some machine-readable content that is structured data help?

File:Schittny, Facing East, 2011, Legacy Projects.jpg

2011 photograph by Bernard Schittny of the "Legacy Projects" group

Most likely it would, but the arcana of systematic reviews and how they add value would still need formal handling. The PRISMA standard dates from 2009, with an update started in 2018. The concerns there include the corpus of papers used: how selected and filtered? Now that Wikidata has a 20.9 million item bibliography, one can at least pose questions. Each systematic review is a tagging opportunity for a bibliography. Could that tagging be reproduced by a query, in principle? Can it even be second-guessed by a query (i.e. simulated by a protocol which translates into SPARQL)? Homing in on the arcana, do the inclusion and filtering criteria translate into metadata? At some level they must, but are these metadata explicitly expressed in the articles themselves? The answer to that is surely "no" at this point, but can TDM find them? Again "no", right now. Automatic identification doesn't just happen.

Actually these questions lack originality. It should be noted though that WP:MEDRS, the reliable sources guideline used here for health information, hinges on the assumption that the usefully systematic reviews of biomedical literature can be recognised. Its nutshell summary, normally the part of a guideline with the highest density of common sense, allows literature reviews in general validity, but WP:MEDASSESS qualifies that indication heavily. Process wonkery about systematic reviews definitely has merit.

Links

Evidence-Based Practice: Appraise, resources page from Duke University Medical Library & Archives.
What should Cochrane do next?, Bad Science blogpost 5 November 2014, Ben Goldacre.
Cambridge (UK) Science Festival event, How do scientific discoveries become clinical medicine?, ScienceSource workshop for ContentMine 23 March 2019, with systematic review process diagram. Also on Eventbrite for tickets, taking place in Makespace, 16 Mill Lane.
PROSPERO database of PRISMA, for registration of systematic review protocols.
Process wonkery thread, wikien-l mailing list, September 2006.
Meta-Analysis, xkcd cartoon.

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NPR Newsletter No.17

Latest comment: 5 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion

Hello Teblick,

News

The WMF has announced that Google Translate is now available for translating articles through the content translation tool. This may result in an increase in machine translated articles in the New Pages Feed. Feel free to use the {{rough translation}} tag and gently remind (or inform) editors that translations from other language Wikipedia pages still require attribution per WP:TFOLWP.

Discussions of interest

Two elements of CSD G6 have been split into their own criteria: R4 for redirects in the "File:" namespace with the same name as a file or redirect at Wikimedia Commons (Discussion), and G14 for disambiguation pages which disambiguate zero pages, or have "(disambiguation)" in the title but disambiguate a single page (Discussion).
{{db-blankdraft}} was merged into G13 (Discussion)
A discussion recently closed with no consensus on whether to create a subject-specific notability guideline for theatrical plays.
There is an ongoing discussion on a proposal to create subject-specific notability guidelines for chemicals and organism taxa.

Reminders

NPR is not a binary keep / delete process. In many cases a redirect may be appropriate. The deletion policy and its associated guideline clearly emphasise that not all unsuitable articles must be deleted. Redirects are not contentious. See a classic example of the templates to use. More templates are listed at the R template index. Reviewers who are not aware, do please take this into consideration before PROD, CSD, and especially AfD because not even all admins are aware of such policies, and many NAC do not have a full knowledge of them.

NPP Tools Report

Superlinks – allows you to check an article's history, logs, talk page, NPP flowchart (on unpatrolled pages) and more without navigating away from the article itself.
copyvio-check – automatically checks the copyvio percentage of new pages in the background and displays this info with a link to the report in the 'info' panel of the Page curation toolbar.
The NPP flowchart now has clickable hyperlinks.

Six Month Queue Data: Today – Low – 2393 High – 4828
Looking for inspiration? There are approximately 1000 female biographies to review.
Stay up to date with even more news – subscribe to The Signpost.

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--MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 23:18, 15 March 2019 (UTC)

Wikipedia:WikiProject Portals update #030, 17 Mar 2019

Latest comment: 5 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion

Previous issue:

Single-page portals: 4,704

Total portals: 5,705

This issue:

Single-page portals: 4,562

Total portals: 5,578

The collection of portals has shrunk

All Portals closed at WP:MfD during 2019

Grouped Nominations total 127 Portals:

Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/US County Portals Deleted 64 portals
Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Districts of India Portals Deleted 30 Portals
Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portals for Portland, Oregon neighborhoods Deleted 23 Portals
Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Allen Park, Michigan Deleted 6 Portals
Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Cryptocurrency Deleted 2 Portals
Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:North Pole Deleted 2 Portals

Individual Nominations:

Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Circles Deleted
Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Fruits Deleted
Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:E (mathematical constant) Deleted
Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Burger King Deleted
Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Cotingas Deleted
Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Prostitution in Canada Deleted
Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Agoura Hills, California Deleted
Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Urinary system Deleted
Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:You Am I Deleted
Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Cannabis (2nd nomination) Reverted to non-Automated version
Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Intermodal containers Deleted
Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Adventure travel Deleted
Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Adam Ant Deleted
Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Benito Juárez, Mexico City Deleted
Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Spaghetti Deleted
Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Wikiatlas Deleted
Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Greek alphabet Deleted
Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Deleted
Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Accounting Deleted G7
Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Lents, Portland, Oregon Deleted P2
Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Ankaran Deleted
Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Jiu-jitsu Deleted G8
Portal:University of Nebraska Speedy Deleted P1/A10 exactly the same as Portal:University of Nebraska–Lincoln also created by the TTH

Related WikiProject:

Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Wikipedia:WikiProject Quantum portals Demoted

(Attribution: Copied from Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard#Portal MfD Results)

WikiProject Quantum portals

This was a spin-off from WikiProject Portals, for the purpose of developing zero-page portals (portals generated on-the-screen at the push of a button, with no stored pages).

It has been merged back into WikiProject Portals. In the MfD the vote was "demote". See Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Wikipedia:WikiProject Quantum portals.

Hiatus on mass creation of Portals

At WP:VPR, mass creation of Portals using semi-automated tools has been put on hold until clearer community consensus is established.

See Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)#Hiatus on mass creation of Portals.

The Transhumanist banned from creating new portals for 3 months

See Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard#Proposal 1: Interim Topic-Ban on New Portals.

Until next issue...

Keep on keepin' on. — The Transhumanist 10:26, 17 March 2019 (UTC)

April editathons at Women in Red

April 2019

Latest comment: 5 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion

April 2019, Volume 5, Issue 4, Numbers 107, 108, 114, 115, 116, 117

Hello and welcome to the April events of Women in Red!

Please join us for these virtual events:

New topics: Gender studies / United Nations / Dance
Geofocus: Portuguese-speakers
Continuing initiatives: Suffrage / #1day1woman

Other ways you can participate:

Help us plan our future events: Ideas Cafe
Join the conversations on our talkpage
Follow us on Twitter: @wikiwomeninred

Subscription options: Opt-in (EN-WP) / Opt-in (international) / Unsubscribe

--Megalibrarygirl (talk) 16:02, 25 March 2019 (UTC) via MassMessaging

(Please excuse this post if it is a duplicate!)

Facto Post – Issue 22 – 28 March 2019

Latest comment: 5 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion

Facto Post – Issue 22 – 28 March 2019

The Editor is Charles Matthews, for ContentMine. Please leave feedback for him, on his User talk page.

To subscribe to Facto Post go to Wikipedia:Facto Post mailing list. For the ways to unsubscribe, see the footer.

Back numbers are here.

When in the cloud, do as the APIs do

Half a century ago, it was the era of the mainframe computer, with its air-conditioned room, twitching tape-drives, and appearance in the title of a spy novel Billion-Dollar Brain then made into a Hollywood film. Now we have the cloud, with server farms and the client–server model as quotidian: this text is being typed on a Chromebook.

File:Cloud-API-Logo.svg

Logo of Cloud API on Google Cloud Platform

The term Applications Programming Interface or API is 50 years old, and refers to a type of software library as well as the interface to its use. While a compiler is what you need to get high-level code executed by a mainframe, an API out in the cloud somewhere offers a chance to perform operations on a remote server. For example, the multifarious bots active on Wikipedia have owners who exploit the MediaWiki API.

APIs (called RESTful) that allow for the GET HTTP request are fundamental for what could colloquially be called "moving data around the Web"; from which Wikidata benefits 24/7. So the fact that the Wikidata SPARQL endpoint at query.wikidata.org has a RESTful API means that, in lay terms, Wikidata content can be GOT from it. The programming involved, besides the SPARQL language, could be in Python, younger by a few months than the Web.

Magic words, such as occur in fantasy stories, are wishful (rather than RESTful) solutions to gaining access. You may need to be a linguist to enter Ali Baba's cave or the western door of Moria (French in the case of "Open Sesame", in fact, and Sindarin being the respective languages). Talking to an API requires a bigger toolkit, which first means you have to recognise the tools in terms of what they can do. On the way to the wikt:impactful or polymathic modern handling of facts, one must perhaps take only tactful notice of tech's endemic problem with documentation, and absorb the insightful point that the code in APIs does articulate the customary procedures now in place on the cloud for getting information. As Owl explained to Winnie-the-Pooh, it tells you The Thing to Do.

Links

Wikidata as a semantic framework for the Gene Wiki initiative, 2016 paper by Andrawaag and others, commenting inter alia on the role of the API on Wikidata
Working With Wikibase From Go, Digital Flapjack blogpost 26 November 2018, Michael Dales, developer for ScienceSource using golang, with a software engineer's view on Wikibase and the MediaWiki API
Dealing with the Rust, Magnus Manske blogpost 12 March 2019, on the Rust language and the MediaWiki API
mw:API:RecentChanges, mediawiki.org page on the API for access to "recent changes" on a wiki
wikitech:Analytics/AQS/Pageviews, wikitech.wikimedia.org for the Pageview API, giving Wikimedia traffic information
xkcd cartoon, API Guide

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MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 11:46, 28 March 2019 (UTC)

Leonid Kinskey

Latest comment: 5 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion

Thanks, Teblick, for your thank-you. You do excellent work. Your recently added unreliable-sources notice was certainly appropriate, especially with regard to repeated IMDb citations. More and better sources are needed throughout this page. Strudjum (talk) 02:58, 25 April 2019 (UTC)

May you join this month's editathons from WiR!

Latest comment: 5 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion

May 2019, Volume 5, Issue 5, Numbers 107, 108, 118, 119, 120, 121

Hello and welcome to the May events of Women in Red!

Please join us for these virtual events:

New topics: "May" women / Mayors / Environentalists
Geofocus: CEE countries
Continuing initiatives: Suffrage / #1day1woman

Other ways you can participate:

Help us plan our future events: Ideas Cafe
Join the conversations on our talkpage
Follow us on Twitter: @wikiwomeninred

Subscription options: Opt-in/Opt-out

--Megalibrarygirl (talk) 16:17, 27 April 2019 (UTC) via MassMessaging

Facto Post – Issue 23 – 30 April 2019

Latest comment: 5 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion

Facto Post – Issue 23 – 30 April 2019

The Editor is Charles Matthews, for ContentMine. Please leave feedback for him, on his User talk page.

To subscribe to Facto Post go to Wikipedia:Facto Post mailing list. For the ways to unsubscribe, see the footer.

Back numbers are here.

Completely clouded?

Cloud computing logo

Talk of cloud computing draws a veil over hardware, but also, less obviously but more importantly, obscures such intellectual distinction as matters most in its use. Wikidata begins to allow tasks to be undertaken that were out of easy reach. The facility should not be taken as the real point.

Coming in from another angle, the "executive decision" is more glamorous; but the "administrative decision" should be admired for its command of facts. Think of the attitudes ad fontes, so prevalent here on Wikipedia as "can you give me a source for that?", and being prepared to deal with complicated analyses into specified subcases. Impatience expressed as a disdain for such pedantry is quite understandable, but neither dirty data nor false dichotomies are at all good to have around.

Issue 13 and Issue 21, respectively on WP:MEDRS and systematic reviews, talk about biomedical literature and computing tasks that would be of higher quality if they could be made more "administrative". For example, it is desirable that the decisions involved be consistent, explicable, and reproducible by non-experts from specified inputs.

What gets clouded out is not impossibly hard to understand. You do need to put together the insights of functional programming, which is a doctrinaire and purist but clearcut approach, with the practicality of office software. Loopless computation can be conceived of as a seamless forward march of spreadsheet columns, each determined by the content of previous ones. Very well: to do a backward audit, when now we are talking about Wikidata, we rely on integrity of data and its scrupulous sourcing: and clearcut case analyses. The MEDRS example forces attention on purge attempts such as Beall's list.

Links

Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2019-03-31/In focus#The_Wikipedia_SourceWatch by Headbomb.
Wikipedia:WikiProject Academic Journals/Journals cited by Wikipedia/Questionable1
d:Wikidata:ScienceSource project/Beall's list: Beall's list, final version, matched into Wikidata.
SPARQL query for Quackwatch: query to find items on Wikidata for articles subject to the Quackwatch blacklist of "Nonrecommended Periodicals", under "Journals (Fundamentally Flawed)".
SPARQL query to find retracted articles on Wikidata.
d:Wikidata:ScienceSource project/NCBI2wikidata dashboard, metadata for biomedical articles being built up, sourced from PubMed and PubMed Central.

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MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 11:27, 30 April 2019 (UTC)

Wikipedia:WikiProject Portals update #031, 01 May 2019

Latest comment: 5 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion

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 01:28, 2 May 2019 (UTC)

Help with URLS

Latest comment: 5 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion

Teblick,

I tried fixing some URLs for 3 pages I did edits on today:

But for whatever reason, I can't seem to get them to compute our properly. If able, could you help tweek them ASAP. It's just the 3 and it won't take long at all, thanks!I'm Listening to 80s Music (talk) 14:36, 5 May 2019 (UTC)

I'm Listening to 80s Music, I have corrected the citation in the Miles article. The other two look okay; perhaps you or someone else corrected them since you posted your message. My Internet service was restored today after a four-week outage, which is why I haven't been on Wikipedia recently. Eddie Blick (talk) 20:53, 23 May 2019 (UTC)

you back?

Latest comment: 5 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion

if you here, help edit for Richard O. Linke he was film producer that he died in Hawaii. Ryan Pikachu (talk) 01:50, 17 May 2019 (UTC)

Ryan Pikachu, I made a couple of minor corrections. I'm confused, however. The article says that Linke was a film producer, but the references mention Andy Griffith and Mayberry, which sounds like television. Eddie Blick (talk) 21:01, 23 May 2019 (UTC)

Facto Post – Issue 24 – 17 May 2019

Latest comment: 5 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion

Facto Post – Issue 24 – 17 May 2019

Text mining display of noun phrases from the US Presidential Election 2012

The Editor is Charles Matthews, for ContentMine. Please leave feedback for him, on his User talk page.

To subscribe to Facto Post go to Wikipedia:Facto Post mailing list. For the ways to unsubscribe, see the footer.

Back numbers are here.

Semantic Web and TDM – a ContentMine view

Two dozen issues, and this may be the last, a valediction at least for a while.

It's time for a two-year summation of ContentMine projects involving TDM (text and data mining).

Wikidata and now Structured Data on Commons represent the overlap of Wikimedia with the Semantic Web. This common ground is helping to convert an engineering concept into a movement. TDM generally has little enough connection with the Semantic Web, being instead in the orbit of machine learning which is no respecter of the semantic. Don't break a taboo by asking bots "and what do you mean by that?"

The ScienceSource project innovates in TDM, by storing its text mining results in a Wikibase site. It strives for compliance of its fact mining, on drug treatments of diseases, with an automated form of the relevant Wikipedia referencing guideline MEDRS. Where WikiFactMine set up an API for reuse of its results, ScienceSource has a SPARQL query service, with look-and-feel exactly that of Wikidata's at query.wikidata.org. It also now has a custom front end, and its content can be federated, in other words used in data mashups: it is one of over 50 sites that can federate with Wikidata.

The human factor comes to bear through the front end, which combines a link to the HTML version of a paper, text mining results organised in drug and disease columns, and a SPARQL display of nearby drug and disease terms. Much software to develop and explain, so little time! Rather than telling the tale, Facto Post brings you ScienceSource links, starting from the how-to video, lower right.

ScienceSourceReview, introductory video: but you need run it from the original upload file on Commons

Links for participation

http://sciencesource-review.wmflabs.org/, review tool link in the left-hand sidebar at http://sciencesource.wmflabs.org/wiki/Main_Page

The review tool requires a log in on sciencesource.wmflabs.org, and an OAuth permission (bottom of a review page) to operate. It can be used in simple and more advanced workflows. Examples of queries for the latter are at d:Wikidata_talk:ScienceSource project/Queries#SS_disease_list and d:Wikidata_talk:ScienceSource_project/Queries#NDF-RT issue.

Please be aware that this is a research project in development, and may have outages for planned maintenance. That will apply for the next few days, at least. The ScienceSource wiki main page carries information on practical matters. Email is not enabled on the wiki: use site mail here to Charles Matthews in case of difficulty, or if you need support. Further explanatory videos will be put into commons:Category:ContentMine videos.

If you wish to receive no further issues of Facto Post, please remove your name from our mailing list. Alternatively, to opt out of all massmessage mailings, you may add Category:Wikipedians who opt out of message delivery to your user talk page.
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MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 18:52, 17 May 2019 (UTC)

NPR Newsletter No.18

Latest comment: 5 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion

Hello Teblick,

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

Following a request for comment, the subject-specific notability guideline for pornographic actors and models (WP:PORNBIO) was removed; in its place, editors should consult WP:ENT and WP:GNG.

Discussions of interest

A request for bot approval for a bot to patrol two kinds of redirects
There has been a lot discussion about Notability of Academics
What, if anything, would a SNG for Softball look like

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

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Go here to remove your name if you wish to opt-out of future mailings.
Delivered by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) on behalf of DannyS712 (talk) at 19:17, 17 May 2019 (UTC)

Books & Bytes, Issue 33

Latest comment: 5 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion

The Wikipedia Library

Books & Bytes
Issue 33, March – April 2019

#1Lib1Ref
Wikimedia and Libraries User Group update
Global branches update
Bytes in brief

Read the full newsletter

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery on behalf of The Wikipedia Library team --MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 06:41, 21 May 2019 (UTC)

June events with WIR

Latest comment: 5 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion

June 2019, Volume 5, Issue 6, Numbers 107, 108, 122, 123, 124, 125

Check out what's happening in June at Women in Red:

Virtual events:

New topics: Pride / Royals / Space
Geofocus: Mediterranean
Continuing initiatives: Suffrage / #1day1woman

Other ways you can participate:

Help us plan our future events: Ideas Cafe
Join the conversations on our talkpage
Follow us on Twitter: @wikiwomeninred

Subscription options: Opt-in/Opt-out

--Megalibrarygirl (talk) 17:43, 22 May 2019 (UTC) via MassMessaging

Carol Raye

Latest comment: 5 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion

Teblick

See query in above talk page abut your recent edit.

Ta

Rod mcinnes (talk) 03:00, 9 June 2019 (UTC)

WikiProject X Newsletter • Issue 14

Latest comment: 5 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion

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)

Also I found references called Wallace Reid Jr. He died after the plane crash in the ocean Ryan Pikachu (talk) 16:49, 30 June 2019 (UTC)

July events from Women in Red!

Latest comment: 5 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion

July 2019, Volume 5, Issue 7, Numbers 107, 108, 126, 127, 128

Check out what's happening in July at Women in Red...

Virtual events:

New topics: Sports / Education
Geofocus: Microstates
Continuing initiatives: Suffrage / #1day1woman

Initiatives we support:

Editor feedback:

Check out the conversations regarding Sports, Sports, Sports!
Help us plan our future events at the Ideas Cafe
Join the conversations on our talkpage

Social media: Facebook / Instagram / Pinterest / Twitter

Subscription options: Opt-in/Opt-out

--Megalibrarygirl (talk) 16:41, 25 June 2019 (UTC) via MassMessaging

Your thread has been archived

Latest comment: 5 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion

Hi Teblick! You created a thread called How can a description in the "Link" function of the visual editor be changed? at Wikipedia:Teahouse, but it has been archived because there was no discussion for a few days. You can still find the archived discussion here. If you have any additional questions that weren't answered then, please create a new thread.

Archival by Lowercase sigmabot III, notification delivery by Muninnbot, both automated accounts. You can opt out of future notifications by placing {{bots|deny=Muninnbot}} (ban this bot) or {{nobots}} (ban all bots) on your user talk page. Muninnbot (talk) 19:02, 25 June 2019 (UTC)

New Page Review newsletter July-August 2019

Latest comment: 5 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion

Hello Teblick,

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.

Stay up to date with even more news – subscribe to The Signpost.
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MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 04:38, 30 June 2019 (UTC)

Request for peer review

Latest comment: 5 years ago8 comments2 people in discussion

Hi Teblick, since you are a volunteer, I was wondering if you could give John Denver's page a look. He is one of the most notable country singers, so it would be nice to nominate him for GA. I know he was active primarily in the 70s, but your and Laser brain's description were the closest to the article (sorry for the grammar), I can understand if you decline. Thanks for your help, NightBag10 (talk) 13:36, 9 July 2019 (UTC)

NightBag10, I appreciate your asking, but I am going to decline. I prefer to edit and create articles rather than to move into reviewing articles for GA or other status. Eddie Blick (talk) 15:25, 9 July 2019 (UTC)

@Teblick: Ok, it seems weird to me to add your name to the volunteer list if you don't want to review articles. But thanks for replying anyway. NightBag10 (talk) 15:30, 9 July 2019 (UTC)

NightBag10, where did you see my name in that context? I need to remove it from the list. I apologize for having unintentionally misled you. Eddie Blick (talk) 15:45, 9 July 2019 (UTC)

@Teblick: No worries, sorry for interrupting. NightBag10 (talk) 15:51, 9 July 2019 (UTC)

NightBag10, I still need to know the page where you saw that list so that I can remove my name from it. I have, at times, signed up for tasks that I later realized I was not suited for. If you point me to the page, I will be glad to take my name off. Thanks, Eddie Blick (talk) 15:58, 9 July 2019 (UTC)

@Teblick: here, I didn't notice that you wanted the link. Happy editing, NightBag10 (talk) 18:40, 9 July 2019 (UTC)

NightBag10, Thanks! I have removed my name from the list. Eddie Blick (talk) 18:47, 9 July 2019 (UTC)

Books & Bytes Issue 34, May – June 2019

Latest comment: 5 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion

The Wikipedia Library

Books & Bytes
Issue 34, May – June 2019

Partnerships
#1Lib1Ref
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) 14:21, 12 July 2019 (UTC)

August 2019 at Women in Red

Latest comment: 5 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion

August 2019, Volume 5, Issue 7, Numbers 107, 108, 126, 129, 130, 131

Check out what's happening in August at Women in Red...

Virtual events:

New: Film+Stage / Indigenous women / Millennial countries
Continuing: Sports (through August 31st) / Suffrage / #1day1woman

Editor feedback:

Check out the conversation regarding:
August's Indigenous Women event and the REDress Project
Help us plan our future events at the Ideas Cafe
Join the conversations on our talkpage

Social media: Facebook / Instagram / Pinterest / Twitter

Subscription options: Opt-in/Opt-out

--Rosiestep (talk) 06:46, 29 July 2019 (UTC) via MassMessaging

Invitation to participate in a discussion about publicly disclosing subscribers of TWL resources

Hi Teblick, I have started a discussion over our Village pump with the aim of maintaining a public list of all editors who are granted access to any TWL resource. Your thoughts and opinions on the proposal are welcome:-) Regards, ∯WBG^converse

Portal maintainer

Latest comment: 5 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion

You are named a portal maintence for 1949s portal. What does that mean? How would I beceme maintainer for Jersey?--Dthomsen8 (talk) 21:35, 18 August 2019 (UTC)

Portal maintainer

Latest comment: 5 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion

You are named a portal maintence for 1949s portal. What does that mean? How would I beceme maintainer for Jersey?--Dthomsen8 (talk) 21:39, 18 August 2019 (UTC)

Dthomsen8, I must apologize, because I cannot help you in that regard. I vaguely remember attempting to create a portal some time ago, but I found that it was more than I wanted to undertake. I had forgotten about that until I read your message. Perhaps you could find some help by posting your question on Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Portals. Eddie Blick (talk) 02:09, 19 August 2019 (UTC)

Your thread has been archived

Latest comment: 5 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion

Hi Teblick! You created a thread called Size of caption in infobox at Wikipedia:Teahouse, but it has been archived because there was no discussion for a few days. You can still find the archived discussion here. If you have any additional questions that weren't answered then, please create a new thread.

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September 2019 at Women in Red

Latest comment: 5 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion

September 2019, Volume 5, Issue 9, Numbers 107, 108, 132, 133, 134, 135

Check out what's happening in September at Women in Red...

Online events:

New: Law / Military history / Writers / Geofocus: defunct countries
Continuing: Suffrage / #1day1woman

Editor feedback:

Check out the conversation regarding:
Missing articles about notable women by "nationality" vs. "country of citizenship"
Help us plan our future events at the Ideas Cafe
Join the conversations on our talkpage

Social media: Facebook / Instagram / Pinterest / Twitter

Stay in touch: Join WikiProject Women in Red / Opt-out of notifications

--Rosiestep (talk) 16:25, 27 August 2019 (UTC) via MassMessaging

Your thread has been archived

Latest comment: 5 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion

Hi Teblick! You created a thread called Redirect for only a citation? at Wikipedia:Teahouse, but it has been archived because there was no discussion for a few days. You can still find the archived discussion here. If you have any additional questions that weren't answered then, please create a new thread.

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New Page Review newsletter September-October 2019

Latest comment: 5 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion

Hello Teblick,

Backlog

Instead of reaching a magic 300 as it once did last year, the backlog approaching 6,000 is still far too high. An effort is also needed to ensure that older unsuitable older pages at the back of the queue do not get automatically indexed for Google.

Coordinator

A proposal is taking place here to confirm a nominated user as Coordinator of NPR.

This month's refresher course

Why I Hate Speedy Deleters, a 2008 essay by long since retired Ballonman, is still as valid today. Those of us who patrol large numbers of new pages can be forgiven for making the occasional mistake while others can learn from their 'beginner' errors. Worth reading.

Deletion tags

Do bear in mind that articles in the feed showing the trash can icon (you will need to have 'Nominated for deletion' enabled for this in your filters) may have been tagged by inexperienced or non NPR rights holders using Twinkle. They require your further verification.

Paid editing

Please be sure to look for the tell-tale signs of undisclosed paid editing. Contact the creator if appropriate, and submit the issue to WP:COIN if necessary. WMF policy requires paid editors to connect to their adverts.

Subject-specific notability guidelines' (SNG). Alternatives to deletion

Reviewers are requested to familiarise themselves once more with notability guidelines for organisations and companies.
Blank-and-Redirect is a solution anchored in policy. Please consider this alternative before PRODing or CSD. Note however, that users will often revert or usurp redirects to re-create deleted articles. Do regularly patrol the redirects in the feed.

Not English

A common issue: Pages not in English or poor, unattributed machine translations should not reside in main space even if they are stubs. Please ensure you are familiar with WP:NPPNE. Check in Google for the language and content, and if they do have potential, tag as required, then move to draft. Modify the text of the template as appropriate before sending it.

Tools

Regular reviewers will appreciate the most recent enhancements to the New Pages Feed and features in the Curation tool, and there are still more to come. Due to the wealth of information now displayed by ORES, reviewers are strongly encouraged to use the system now rather than Twinkle; it will also correctly populate the logs.

Stub sorting, by SD0001: A new script is available for adding/removing stub tags. See User:SD0001/StubSorter.js, It features a simple HotCat-style dynamic search field. Many of the reviewers who are using it are finding it an improvement upon other available tools.

Assessment: The script at User:Evad37/rater makes the addition of Wikiproject templates extremely easy. New page creators rarely do this. Reviewers are not obliged to make these edits but they only take a few seconds. They can use the Curation message system to let the creator know what they have done.

DannyS712 bot III is now patrolling certain categories of uncontroversial redirects. Curious? Check out its patrol log.

Go here to remove your name if you wish to opt-out of future mailings.

MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 22:15, 11 September 2019 (UTC)

October Events from Women in Red

Latest comment: 5 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion

October 2019, Volume 5, Issue 10, Numbers 107, 108, 137, 138, 139, 140

Check out what's happening in October at Women in Red...

Online events:

New: STEM / Fashion / Geofocus: landlocked countries / Stub Contest
Continuing: Suffrage / #1day1woman

Editor feedback:

Check out the conversation regarding:
Women vice Chancellors in Top 200 universities
Help us plan our future events at the Ideas Cafe
Join the conversations on our talkpage

Social media: Facebook / Instagram / Pinterest / Twitter

Stay in touch: Join WikiProject Women in Red / Opt-out of notifications

--Megalibrarygirl (talk) 17:36, 23 September 2019 (UTC) via MassMessaging

Books & Bytes – Issue 35, July – August 2019

Latest comment: 5 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion

The Wikipedia Library

Books & Bytes
Issue 35, July – August 2019

Wikimania
We're building something great, but..
Wikimedia and Libraries User Group update
A Wikibrarian's story
Bytes in brief

Read the full newsletter

On behalf of The Wikipedia Library team --MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 06:58, 27 September 2019 (UTC)

Disambiguation link notification for September 27

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WikiProject X Newsletter • Issue 15

Latest comment: 5 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion

Newsletter • September 2019

A final update, for now:

The third grant-funded round of WikiProject X has been completed. Unfortunately, while this round has not resulted in a deployed product, I am not planning to resume working on the project for the foreseeable future. Please see the final report for more information.

Regards,

-— Isarra ༆ 19:24, 29 September 2019 (UTC)

Lee Wiley article: Thanked, but also reverted

Latest comment: 5 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion

Greetings. I see that you both thanked me for the additions made for the article on Lee Wiley, but also rolled them back. I am a little confused by this. Thanks.

TeemPlayer (talk) 15:46, 30 September 2019 (UTC)

Thanks for clearing up the Lee Wiley article situation

Latest comment: 5 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion

I suspected that the rollback was unintentional, but I wanted to make sure. Thanks for confirming it.

TeemPlayer (talk) 17:34, 30 September 2019 (UTC)

TeemPlayer, You're welcome! And thanks again for showing me how to link to a specific page in a PDF. I have wondered if some technique existed for doing that, but I had no idea how to do it. I have made a note of the technique as a reminder for future use. Eddie Blick (talk) 18:26, 30 September 2019 (UTC)

MfD nomination of Portal:1940s

Latest comment: 5 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion

Portal:1940s, 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:1940s and please be sure to sign your comments with four tildes (~~~~). You are free to edit the content of Portal:1940s 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. BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 19:04, 2 October 2019 (UTC)

Peter Bard

Latest comment: 5 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion

Article: Peter Bard

I have noticed you have assessed the above article as "Start". Consider while assessing the WP:MILHIST that in order to have Start class and above that the "B-Class 5-criteria checklist" needs to be done correctly. You have failed miserably in this task. If you are not confident in assessing this part then please stop as it makes more work for others in the WP:MILHIST. Adamdaley (talk) 07:00, 17 October 2019 (UTC)

Akane Yamaguchi

Latest comment: 5 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion

Hello. This article is too long, need to omit some unnecessary paragraphs, help summarize this article (copy edit and add source). Thanks you. 117.4.107.199 (talk) 02:15, 20 October 2019 (UTC)

117.4.107.199, I don't know why you brought this matter to my attention. I know nothing about badminton or the person who is the subject of the article. You might delete content yourself. Eddie Blick (talk) 02:25, 20 October 2019 (UTC)

a cupcake for you

Latest comment: 5 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion

Thank you for fixing the "listas" values in two of my recent articles. WomenArtistUpdates (talk) 14:40, 25 October 2019 (UTC)

WomenArtistUpdates, You're welcome! I'm glad that I could help. Eddie Blick (talk) 14:58, 25 October 2019 (UTC)

November 2019 at Women in Red

Latest comment: 5 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion

November 2019, Volume 5, Issue 11, Numbers 107, 108, 140, 141, 142, 143

Check out what's happening in November at Women in Red...

Online events:

New: Librarians / Leaders / Geofocus: Asian Women Month
Continuing: Suffrage / #1day1woman / Stub Contest

Editor feedback:

Check out the conversation regarding: Disappearing articles
Help us plan our future events at the Ideas Cafe
Join the conversations on our talkpage

Social media: Facebook / Instagram / Pinterest / Twitter

Stay in touch: Join WikiProject Women in Red / Opt-out of notifications

--Rosiestep (talk) 22:59, 29 October 2019 (UTC) via MassMessaging

New Page Review newsletter November 2019

Latest comment: 5 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion

Hello Teblick,

This newsletter comes a little earlier than usual because the backlog is rising again and the holidays are coming very soon.

Getting the queue to 0

There are now 809 holders of the New Page Reviewer flag! Most of you requested the user right to be able to do something about the huge backlog but it's still roughly less than 10% doing 90% of the work. Now it's time for action.
Exactly one year ago there were 'only' 3,650 unreviewed articles, now we will soon be approaching 7,000 despite the growing number of requests for the NPR user right. If each reviewer soon does only 2 reviews a day over five days, the backlog will be down to zero and the daily input can then be processed by every reviewer doing only 1 review every 2 days - that's only a few minutes work on the bus on the way to the office or to class! Let's get this over and done with in time to relax for the holidays.
Want to join? Consider adding the NPP Pledge userbox.
Our next newsletter will announce the winners of some really cool awards.

Coordinator

Admin Barkeep49 has been officially invested as NPP/NPR coordinator by a unanimous consensus of the community. This is a complex role and he will need all the help he can get from other experienced reviewers.

This month's refresher course

Paid editing is still causing headaches for even our most experienced reviewers: This official Wikipedia article will be an eye-opener to anyone who joined Wikipedia or obtained the NPR right since 2015. See The Hallmarks to know exactly what to look for and take time to examine all the sources.

Tools

It is now possible to select new pages by date range. This was requested by reviewers who want to patrol from the middle of the list.
It is now also possible for accredited reviewers to put any article back into the New Pages Feed for re-review. The link is under 'Tools' in the side bar.

Reviewer Feedback

Would you like feedback on your reviews? Are you an experienced reviewer who can give feedback to other reviewers? If so there are two new feedback pilot programs. New Reviewer mentorship will match newer reviewers with an experienced reviewer with a new reviewer. The other program will be an occasional peer review cohort for moderate or experienced reviewers to give feedback to each other. The first cohort will launch November 13.

Second set of eyes

Not only are New Page Reviewers the guardians of quality of new articles, they are also in a position to ensure that pages are being correctly tagged for deletion and maintenance and that new authors are not being bitten. This is an important feature of your work, especially while some routine tagging for deletion can still be carried out by non NPR holders and inexperienced users. Read about it at the Monitoring the system section in the tutorial. If you come across such editors doing good work, don't hesitate to encourage them to apply for NPR.
Do be sure to have our talk page on your watchlist. There are often items that require reviewers' special attention, such as to watch out for pages by known socks or disruptive editors, technical issues and new developments, and of course to provide advice for other reviewers.

Arbitration Committee

The annual ArbCom election will be coming up soon. All eligible users will be invited to vote. While not directly concerned with NPR, Arbcom cases often lead back to notability and deletion issues and/or actions by holders of advanced user rights.

Community Wish list

There is to be no wish list for WMF encyclopedias this year. We thank Community Tech for their hard work addressing our long list of requirements which somewhat overwhelmed them last year, and we look forward to a successful completion.

To opt-out of future mailings, you can remove yourself here

MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 08:33, 3 November 2019 (UTC)

ArbCom 2019 election voter message

Latest comment: 4 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion

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 {{NoACEMM}} to your user talk page. MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 00:16, 19 November 2019 (UTC)

Books & Bytes – Issue 36

Latest comment: 4 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion

The Wikipedia Library

Books & Bytes
Issue 36, September – October 2019

#1Lib1Ref January 2020
#1Lib1Ref 2019 stories and learnings

Read the full newsletter

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery on behalf of The Wikipedia Library team --MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 05:21, 21 November 2019 (UTC)

December events with WIR

Latest comment: 4 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion

December 2019, Volume 5, Issue 12, Numbers 107, 108, 144, 145, 146, 147

Check out what's happening in December at Women in Red...

Online events:

New: Parliamentarians / Classical musicians / 2019 deaths / Geofocus: Arab world
Continuing: Suffrage / #1day1woman / Stub Contest

Editor feedback:

Check out the conversation regarding: Disappearing articles
Help us plan our future events at the Ideas Cafe
Join the conversations on our talkpage

Social media: Facebook / Instagram / Pinterest / Twitter

Stay in touch: Join WikiProject Women in Red / Opt-out of notifications

--Megalibrarygirl (talk) 18:44, 25 November 2019 (UTC) via MassMessaging

Differences on Stuart Whitman's page

Latest comment: 4 years ago9 comments2 people in discussion

Hi Teblick,

You have deleted my contribution to Stuart Whitman's page. However when I consult featured articles about media bios. When it comes to a role, in most case (not all) it explains who he plays and the character's implication to the plot, which I did.

I understand why you decided to delete it because Whitman's hasn't reached a point where all his film are listed in his chronological order and so forth.

I restored it, and trimmed it.Filmman3000 (talk) 21:13, 4 December 2019 (UTC)

Oh and to show my good faith I will gladly provide you with Newspapers article from the database for any articles you may want. Also we could collaborate on Whitman'sFilmman3000 (talk) 21:44, 4 December 2019 (UTC)

Filmman3000, Thanks for your message. I won't pursue the topic, so your restoration will remain in place. I appreciate your conscientious approach to editing. Eddie Blick (talk) 21:56, 4 December 2019 (UTC)

Thank you as well you replied exactly when I added the previous film in which he acted, that I know nothing about. So it wouldn't be too focused on the Norris film.Filmman3000 (talk) 22:40, 4 December 2019 (UTC)

Oh Teblick my offer regarding articles wasn't strictly on Whitman but anything you choose. The invitation remains opens.Filmman3000 (talk) 20:34, 5 December 2019 (UTC)

Filmman3000, I appreciate your offer, but I tend to work better on my own. My work on Wikipedia goes sporadically; I might go several days only editing existing articles, then switch to doing research on and creating new articles over the next several days. Having said that, however, if you have a question about something, feel free to send me a note. I will respond as soon as possible.

By the way, you might want to take a look at the Awards searches section of this page that I created. I find the sources useful at times for documenting information about entertainers. The rest of the page is more oriented to old-time radio, but I have expanded this section to a broader scope. I'm sure that many sites will be familiar to you, but you may find one or two that you can use. Eddie Blick (talk) 01:54, 6 December 2019 (UTC)

Nice touch. I'll use that Award database one day. In your opinion what page in media bios is classified important but lacks of citations?Filmman3000 (talk) 23:31, 8 December 2019 (UTC)

Filmman3000, I'm afraid that I can't answer your question, because I seldom pay attention to higher-classifed articles. I prefer to edit lower-status articles, either adding information or adding citations for previously uncited content. Eddie Blick (talk) 00:47, 9 December 2019 (UTC)

Ok thanks, let me know if there is an article in particular that catches your eyes. And if you have a minute have a look at the Brandon Lee article I've cited his whole short lived career, and send me your thoughts. Obviously if you have the timeFilmman3000 (talk) 02:55, 11 December 2019 (UTC)

New Page Review newsletter December 2019

Latest comment: 4 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion

Reviewer of the Year

This year's Reviewer of the Year is Rosguill. Having gotten the reviewer PERM in August 2018, they have been a regular reviewer of articles and redirects, been an active participant in the NPP community, and has been the driving force for the emerging NPP Source Guide that will help reviewers better evaluate sourcing and notability in many countries for which it has historically been difficult.

Special commendation again goes to Onel5969 who ends the year as one of our most prolific reviewers for the second consecutive year. Thanks also to Boleyn and JTtheOG who have been in the top 5 for the last two years as well.

Several newer editors have done a lot of work with CAPTAIN MEDUSA and DannyS712 (who has also written bots which have patrolled thousands of redirects) being new reviewers since this time last year.

Thanks to them and to everyone reading this who has participated in New Page Patrol this year.

Top 10 Reviewers over the last 365 days
Rank	Username	Num reviews	Log
1	Rosguill (talk)	47,395	Patrol Page Curation
2	Onel5969 (talk)	41,883	Patrol Page Curation
3	JTtheOG (talk)	11,493	Patrol Page Curation
4	Arthistorian1977 (talk)	5,562	Patrol Page Curation
5	DannyS712 (talk)	4,866	Patrol Page Curation
6	CAPTAIN MEDUSA (talk)	3,995	Patrol Page Curation
7	DragonflySixtyseven (talk)	3,812	Patrol Page Curation
8	Boleyn (talk)	3,655	Patrol Page Curation
9	Ymblanter (talk)	3,553	Patrol Page Curation
10	Cwmhiraeth (talk)	3,522	Patrol Page Curation

(The top 100 reviewers of the year can be found here)

Redirect autopatrol

A recent Request for Comment on creating a new redirect autopatrol pseduo-permission was closed early. New Page Reviewers are now able to nominate editors who have an established track record creating uncontroversial redirects. At the individual discretion of any administrator or after 24 hours and a consensus of at least 3 New Page Reviewers an editor may be added to a list of users whose redirects will be patrolled automatically by DannyS712 bot III.

Source Guide Discussion

Set to launch early in the new year is our first New Page Patrol Source Guide discussion. These discussions are designed to solicit input on sources in places and topic areas that might otherwise be harder for reviewers to evaluate. The hope is that this will allow us to improve the accuracy of our patrols for articles using these sources (and/or give us places to perform a WP:BEFORE prior to nominating for deletion). Please watch the New Page Patrol talk page for more information.

This month's refresher course

While New Page Reviewers are an experienced set of editors, we all benefit from an occasional review. This month consider refreshing yourself on Wikipedia:Notability (geographic features). Also consider how we can take the time for quality in this area. For instance, sources to verify human settlements, which are presumed notable, can often be found in seconds. This lets us avoid the (ugly) 'Needs more refs' tag.

Delivered by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) at 16:11, 20 December 2019 (UTC)

January 2020 at Women in Red

January 2020, Volume 6, Issue 1, Numbers 146, 148, 149, 150, 151, 153

Happy Holidays from all of us at Women in Red, and thank you for your support in 2019. We look forward to working with you in 2020!

Online events:

New: Activists / Public domain / Geofocus: Central America / Year-long campaign: Sports!
Continuing: 2019 deaths / #1day1woman

Editor feedback:

Help us plan our future events at the Ideas Cafe
Join the conversations on our talkpage

Social media: Facebook / Instagram / Pinterest / Twitter

Stay in touch: Join WikiProject Women in Red / Opt-out of notifications