Speedy deletion nomination of Julie Sussman

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A tag has been placed on Julie Sussman requesting that it be speedily deleted from Wikipedia. This has been done for the following reason:

This page used to be redirected to SICP. SICP is a book, not a person. She is an author of the book, hence it is misleading to redirect from a person's page to a book she has written. Since there is no content for this page, I am requesting a speedy deletion. Just in case, someone decides to write an article about her, it can be restored. This article seems unnecessary as of now (given that it has no content anyway).

Under the criteria for speedy deletion, pages that meet certain criteria may be deleted at any time.

If you think this page should not be deleted for this reason, you may contest the nomination by visiting the page and clicking the button labelled "Contest this speedy deletion". This will give you the opportunity to explain why you believe the page should not be deleted. However, be aware that once a page is tagged for speedy deletion, it may be deleted without delay. Please do not remove the speedy deletion tag from the page yourself, but do not hesitate to add information in line with Wikipedia's policies and guidelines. If the page is deleted, and you wish to retrieve the deleted material for future reference or improvement, then please contact the deleting administrator, or if you have already done so, you can place a request here. 2Dpedia (talk) 09:11, 30 March 2018 (UTC)Reply

404 error

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Hey Edward, just wanted to note I am getting a 404 error from Find Links :( Its one of my favourite tools, Sadads (talk) 23:36, 16 November 2015 (UTC)Reply

Sorry about that. I've fixed it. Thanks for letting me know. Edward (talk) 08:18, 17 November 2015 (UTC)Reply

ArbCom elections are now open!

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Hi,
You appear to be eligible to vote in the current Arbitration Committee election. The Arbitration Committee is the panel of editors responsible for conducting the Wikipedia arbitration process. It has the authority to enact binding solutions for disputes between editors, primarily related to serious behavioural issues that the community has been unable to resolve. This includes the ability 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, you are welcome to review the candidates' statements and submit your choices on the voting page. For the Election committee, MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 08:51, 23 November 2015 (UTC)Reply

Speedy deletion nomination of 123-reg

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Hello Edward,

I wanted to let you know that I just tagged 123-reg for deletion, because it doesn't appear to contain any encyclopedic content. Take a look at our suggestions for essential content in short articles to learn what should be included.

If you feel that the article shouldn't be deleted and want more time to work on it, you can contest this deletion, but please don't remove the speedy deletion tag from the top.

You can leave a note on my talk page if you have questions. AssortedLiquorice (talk) 10:22, 1 December 2015 (UTC)Reply

Nathanael Kapner

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I just undid a piping of a link you had put in at Nathanael Kapner. The existing Wikilink for War on Christmas was already being redirected to Christmas controversy, to which you piped it. For the reasons discussed at WP:NOTBROKEN, it's best to let such redirects do their work, rather than piping to the redirected page. Thanks for your efforts to improve Wikipedia! --Nat Gertler (talk) 19:49, 11 December 2015 (UTC)Reply

trafficking in Egypt

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Hi Edward,

Just curious if you have any contacts in Egypt that are working on or against trafficking or interacting with victims. Thanks! Bonita Bgparson (talk) 07:00, 18 December 2015 (UTC)Reply

Happy adminship day

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  Wishing Edward a very happy adminship anniversary on behalf of the Wikipedia Birthday Committee! Tito Dutta (talk) 17:36, 8 January 2016 (UTC)Reply
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Where has find links gone? I can't find it these days. Pkeets (talk) 02:32, 4 February 2016 (UTC)Reply

Nevermind. I found it with a search. Pkeets (talk) 02:36, 4 February 2016 (UTC)Reply

Admin help request

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I need some help, I need an administrator to stop a person with the IP 198.134.93.254 from undoing accurate data from the Steppenwolf Band Wiki page.... the person is married to a former band member and she has a vendetta out for other band members because her husband was fired from the band several times — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2601:601:C700:D3DE:65AB:E430:572B:1026 (talk) 15:50, 6 February 2016 (UTC)Reply

Category:24-hour television news channels has been nominated for discussion

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Category:24-hour television news channels, which you created, has been nominated for possible deletion, merging, or renaming. A discussion is taking place to see if it abides with the categorization guidelines. If you would like to participate in the discussion, you are invited to add your comments at the category's entry on the categories for discussion page. Thank you. PanchoS (talk) 16:08, 11 February 2016 (UTC)Reply

Impossibility theory listed at Redirects for discussion

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An editor has asked for a discussion to address the redirect Impossibility theory. Since you had some involvement with the Impossibility theory redirect, you might want to participate in the redirect discussion if you have not already done so. Ivanvector 🍁 (talk) 19:45, 17 February 2016 (UTC)Reply

Never mind, I decided to be bold instead. Comments welcome, though. Ivanvector 🍁 (talk) 19:50, 17 February 2016 (UTC)Reply

May 2016

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Mesoamerican region

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Hi Edward - I see you've been mass linking Mesoamerican articles to Mesoamerican region - however, that article is an article on the modern economic region, not the cultural region, and it is not relevant to the vast majority of the articles you have linked - please check the target article before performing mass links like this. Thanks, Simon Burchell (talk) 19:05, 31 May 2016 (UTC)Reply

Thanks for letting me know, much appreciated. Edward (talk) 19:30, 31 May 2016 (UTC)Reply

2016 Wikimedia Foundation Executive Director Search Community Survey

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The Board of Trustees of the Wikimedia Foundation has appointed a committee to lead the search for the foundation’s next Executive Director. One of our first tasks is to write the job description of the executive director position, and we are asking for input from the Wikimedia community. Please take a few minutes and complete this survey to help us better understand community and staff expectations for the Wikimedia Foundation Executive Director.

Thank you, The Wikimedia Foundation Executive Director Search Steering Committee via MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 21:50, 1 June 2016 (UTC)Reply

Big bonus culture listed at Redirects for discussion

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An editor has asked for a discussion to address the redirect Big bonus culture. Since you had some involvement with the Big bonus culture redirect, you might want to participate in the redirect discussion if you have not already done so. Steel1943 (talk) 22:46, 7 June 2016 (UTC)Reply

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Hi. Thank you for your recent edits. Wikipedia appreciates your help. We noticed though that when you edited Causes of Brexit, you added a link pointing to the disambiguation page Socially liberal. Such links are almost always unintended, since a disambiguation page is merely a list of "Did you mean..." article titles. Read the FAQ • Join us at the DPL WikiProject.

It's OK to remove this message. Also, to stop receiving these messages, follow these opt-out instructions. Thanks, DPL bot (talk) 09:10, 28 July 2016 (UTC)Reply

Extended confirmed protection

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Hello, Edward. This message is intended to notify administrators of important changes to the protection policy.

Extended confirmed protection (also known as "30/500 protection") is a new level of page protection that only allows edits from accounts at least 30 days old and with 500 edits. The automatically assigned "extended confirmed" user right was created for this purpose. The protection level was created following this community discussion with the primary intention of enforcing various arbitration remedies that prohibited editors under the "30 days/500 edits" threshold to edit certain topic areas.

In July and August 2016, a request for comment established consensus for community use of the new protection level. Administrators are authorized to apply extended confirmed protection to combat any form of disruption (e.g. vandalism, sock puppetry, edit warring, etc.) on any topic, subject to the following conditions:

  • Extended confirmed protection may only be used in cases where semi-protection has proven ineffective. It should not be used as a first resort.
  • A bot will post a notification at Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard of each use. MusikBot currently does this by updating a report, which is transcluded onto the noticeboard.

Please review the protection policy carefully before using this new level of protection on pages. Thank you.
This message was sent to the administrators' mass message list. To opt-out of future messages, please remove yourself from the list. 17:47, 23 September 2016 (UTC)

Category:Commerce has been nominated for discussion

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Category:Commerce, which you created, has been nominated for possible deletion, merging, or renaming. A discussion is taking place to see if it abides with the categorization guidelines. If you would like to participate in the discussion, you are invited to add your comments at the category's entry on the categories for discussion page. Thank you. Marcocapelle (talk) 01:45, 2 October 2016 (UTC)Reply

Elizabeth II Queen of Great Britain listed at Redirects for discussion

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An editor has asked for a discussion to address the redirect Elizabeth II Queen of Great Britain. Since you had some involvement with the Elizabeth II Queen of Great Britain redirect, you might want to participate in the redirect discussion if you have not already done so. --Nevéselbert 20:15, 14 October 2016 (UTC)Reply

Two-Factor Authentication now available for admins

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Hello,

Please note that TOTP based two-factor authentication is now available for all administrators. In light of the recent compromised accounts, you are encouraged to add this additional layer of security to your account. It may be enabled on your preferences page in the "User profile" tab under the "Basic information" section. For basic instructions on how to enable two-factor authentication, please see the developing help page for additional information. Important: Be sure to record the two-factor authentication key and the single use keys. If you lose your two factor authentication and do not have the keys, it's possible that your account will not be recoverable. Furthermore, you are encouraged to utilize a unique password and two-factor authentication for the email account associated with your Wikimedia account. This measure will assist in safeguarding your account from malicious password resets. Comments, questions, and concerns may be directed to the thread on the administrators' noticeboard. MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 20:33, 12 November 2016 (UTC)Reply

Mini-job listed at Redirects for discussion

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An editor has asked for a discussion to address the redirect Mini-job. Since you had some involvement with the Mini-job redirect, you might want to participate in the redirect discussion if you have not already done so. Si Trew (talk) 16:14, 13 November 2016 (UTC)Reply

Hi, my name is Regina and I'm native Spanish speaker. Recently I wrote an article about Café El Jarocho https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Thelmadatter/Café_El_Jarocho , and i would like to know if you could please check it out and give a general opinion or advice. I will be very thankful. Regina mabe (talk) 18:10, 14 November 2016 (UTC)Reply

A new user right for New Page Patrollers

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Hi Edward.

A new user group, New Page Reviewer, has been created in a move to greatly improve the standard of new page patrolling. The user right can be granted by any admin at PERM. It is highly recommended that admins look beyond the simple numerical threshold and satisfy themselves that the candidates have the required skills of communication and an advanced knowledge of notability and deletion. Admins are automatically included in this user right.

It is anticipated that this user right will significantly reduce the work load of admins who patrol the performance of the patrollers. However,due to the complexity of the rollout, some rights may have been accorded that may later need to be withdrawn, so some help will still be needed to some extent when discovering wrongly applied deletion tags or inappropriate pages that escape the attention of less experienced reviewers, and above all, hasty and bitey tagging for maintenance. User warnings are available here but very often a friendly custom message works best.

If you have any questions about this user right, don't hesitate to join us at WT:NPR. (Sent to all admins).MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 13:46, 15 November 2016 (UTC)Reply

ArbCom Elections 2016: Voting now open!

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Hello, Edward. Voting in the 2016 Arbitration Committee elections is open from Monday, 00:00, 21 November through Sunday, 23:59, 4 December to all unblocked users who have registered an account before Wednesday, 00:00, 28 October 2016 and have made at least 150 mainspace edits before Sunday, 00:00, 1 November 2016.

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 2016 election, please review the candidates' statements and submit your choices on the voting page. Mdann52 (talk) 22:08, 21 November 2016 (UTC)Reply

ArbCom Elections 2016: Voting now open!

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Hello, Edward. Voting in the 2016 Arbitration Committee elections is open from Monday, 00:00, 21 November through Sunday, 23:59, 4 December to all unblocked users who have registered an account before Wednesday, 00:00, 28 October 2016 and have made at least 150 mainspace edits before Sunday, 00:00, 1 November 2016.

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 2016 election, please review the candidates' statements and submit your choices on the voting page. MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 22:08, 21 November 2016 (UTC)Reply

Nomination of Financial econometrics for deletion

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A discussion is taking place as to whether the article Financial econometrics is suitable for inclusion in Wikipedia according to Wikipedia's policies and guidelines or whether it should be deleted.

The article will be discussed at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Financial econometrics until a consensus is reached, and anyone is welcome to contribute to the discussion. The nomination will explain the policies and guidelines which are of concern. The discussion focuses on high-quality evidence and our policies and guidelines.

Users may edit the article during the discussion, including to improve the article to address concerns raised in the discussion. However, do not remove the article-for-deletion notice from the top of the article. Marcocapelle (talk) 14:43, 3 December 2016 (UTC)Reply

Yo Ho Ho

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Happy New Year, Edward! I'm getting a 404 error on your great Find Link tool. Could you please ping me when it's up and running again? Thanks! GoingBatty (talk) 03:17, 7 January 2017 (UTC)Reply

Thanks for getting FindLink working again. Would you be able (and willing) to use your FindLink logic to go through Category:All orphaned articles and provide a report of articles that could possibly be manually deorphaned using FindLink? If it could be deorphaned, the user would manually remove {{orphan}}. If not, the user could att |att= to {{orphan}}, and the report could ignore those articles in future runs. Thanks! GoingBatty (talk) 16:36, 8 January 2017 (UTC)Reply
@GoingBatty: Good idea, I'll add this to my todo list. Edward (talk) 20:38, 9 January 2017 (UTC)Reply
Hi there! Any chance this ever made it to the top of your to do list? Thanks! GoingBatty (talk) 23:32, 6 May 2021 (UTC)Reply

Happy Adminship Anniversary!

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  Wishing Edward a very happy adminship anniversary on behalf of the Wikipedia Birthday Committee! Lepricavark (talk) 19:58, 8 January 2017 (UTC)Reply

Administrators' newsletter - February 2017

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News and updates for administrators from the past month (January 2017). This first issue is being sent out to all administrators, if you wish to keep receiving it please subscribe. Your feedback is welcomed.

  Administrator changes

  NinjaRobotPirateSchwede66K6kaEaldgythFerretCyberpower678Mz7PrimefacDodger67
  BriangottsJeremyABU Rob13

  Guideline and policy news

  Technical news

  • When performing some administrative actions the reason field briefly gave suggestions as text was typed. This change has since been reverted so that issues with the implementation can be addressed. (T34950)
  • Following the latest RfC concluding that Pending Changes 2 should not be used on the English Wikipedia, an RfC closed with consensus to remove the options for using it from the page protection interface, a change which has now been made. (T156448)
  • The Foundation has announced a new community health initiative to combat harassment. This should bring numerous improvements to tools for admins and CheckUsers in 2017.

  Arbitration

  Obituaries

  • JohnCD (John Cameron Deas) passed away on 30 December 2016. John began editing Wikipedia seriously during 2007 and became an administrator in November 2009.

13:36, 1 February 2017 (UTC)

Montreal

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Hi Edward, long time no speak. I've put a submission in for Montreal this year, and I was wondering if you'd have a chance to move the prototype on by then as it is still one of the best tools I use. ϢereSpielChequers 15:36, 3 March 2017 (UTC)Reply

Yes, I should do some more work on the prototype. I've too many ideas about how it should work. Do you have any requests, what should I change next? Edward (talk)
Thanks, yes in approximate order of priority:
batching it by fifty searches is a bit of a pain, especially on things like pubic that I'd like to patrol frequently because half the time it is vandalism not a typo. But there are over a thousand articles containing pubic so currently I'm paging through over twenty screens most of which are empty to find a handful of examples.
The safe pages feature currently seems to be interlinked, so if a safe page is safe for one query it can't be made safe for others. That prevents the tool from being scaled as the more queries the more often that will be an issue.
The user needs to be able to start new queries.
The user needs to be able to set the wiki that the search will run on and any alternative or additional name spaces. For example most of my current searches could run on portal and draft space as well as mainspace. In the past I've searched for certain high risk phrases in userspace and it would be good if we could build searches that just went there.
I'm now using AWB for some searches, especially the ones with only a handful of safe phrases and few or no "safe pages". It does have a big advantage though in that if it is just a typo you can just click save and it fixes it. Though I suppose adding such a feature would be a big complication.
Is the safe phrase feature case sensitive? Some searches really need to differentiate between IT manager and it manager.
Thanks ϢereSpielChequers 09:24, 5 March 2017 (UTC)Reply
I've uploaded the code to github and added each of these as issues: https://github.com/EdwardBetts/pagepatrol/issues?q=is%3Aissue Edward (talk) 09:46, 6 March 2017 (UTC)Reply
I'm down to two issues left. Edward (talk) 18:39, 6 March 2017 (UTC)Reply
That really makes a difference, I can go through those searches very quickly now. Lifting the 50 limit and having separate safe page lists for each search have really speeded things up. ϢereSpielChequers 18:40, 19 March 2017 (UTC)Reply

Christian homeschooling listed at Redirects for discussion

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An editor has asked for a discussion to address the redirect Christian homeschooling. Since you had some involvement with the Christian homeschooling redirect, you might want to participate in the redirect discussion if you have not already done so. Si Trew (talk) 20:04, 3 April 2017 (UTC)Reply

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Hi, I wanted to let you know that I have removed the "Find links tool" in Template:Orphan, as I see there are Google Ads on the tools page. Pointing to a revenue generating page is not without controversy for Wikipedians, so I'd like to hear your rationale first. Thanks. -- Fuzheado | Talk 13:41, 14 April 2017 (UTC)Reply

Hi Fuzheado, I've removed the ads from find link. They'd been there since about 2010 and helped to fund the server where the tool is hosted. Thanks for getting in touch. Edward (talk) 14:16, 15 April 2017 (UTC)Reply

Security contractor listed at Redirects for discussion

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An editor has asked for a discussion to address the redirect Security contractor. Since you had some involvement with the Security contractor redirect, you might want to participate in the redirect discussion if you have not already done so. Prisencolin (talk) 19:15, 14 June 2017 (UTC)Reply

The Princess of Wales listed at Redirects for discussion

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An editor has asked for a discussion to address the redirect The Princess of Wales. Since you had some involvement with the The Princess of Wales redirect, you might want to participate in the redirect discussion if you have not already done so. --Nevéselbert 21:13, 29 July 2017 (UTC)Reply

Category:Critics of Brexit has been nominated for discussion

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Category:Critics of Brexit, which you created, has been nominated for possible deletion, merging, or renaming. A discussion is taking place to see if it abides with the categorization guidelines. If you would like to participate in the discussion, you are invited to add your comments at the category's entry on the categories for discussion page. Thank you. --Nevéselbert 11:55, 25 August 2017 (UTC)Reply

Breakfast milk listed at Redirects for discussion

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An editor has asked for a discussion to address the redirect Breakfast milk. Since you had some involvement with the Breakfast milk redirect, you might want to participate in the redirect discussion if you have not already done so. Steel1943 (talk) 05:46, 9 September 2017 (UTC)Reply

Invitation to Admin confidence survey

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Hello,

Beginning in September 2017, the Wikimedia Foundation Anti-harassment tool team will be conducting a survey to gauge how well tools, training, and information exists to assist English Wikipedia administrators in recognizing and mitigating things like sockpuppetry, vandalism, and harassment.

The survey should only take 5 minutes, and your individual response will not be made public. This survey will be integral for our team to determine how to better support administrators.

To take the survey sign up here and we will send you a link to the form.

We really appreciate your input!

Please let us know if you wish to opt-out of all massmessage mailings from the Anti-harassment tools team.

For the Anti-harassment tools team, SPoore (WMF), Community Advocate, Community health initiative (talk) 20:56, 14 September 2017 (UTC)Reply

Deletion of the page Alex Zhavoronkov

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Dear Edward, Recently the page Alex Zhavoronkov was nominated for deletion. Can you please take a look if you have a minute?

ArbCom 2017 election voter message

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Hello, Edward. Voting in the 2017 Arbitration Committee elections is now open until 23.59 on Sunday, 10 December. All users who registered an account before Saturday, 28 October 2017, made at least 150 mainspace edits before Wednesday, 1 November 2017 and are not currently blocked are eligible 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 2017 election, please review the candidates and submit your choices on the voting page. MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 18:42, 3 December 2017 (UTC)Reply

Yo Ho Ho

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ϢereSpielChequers 22:06, 21 December 2017 (UTC)Reply

Neutral notice

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There is an RfC at an article you have edited, to which you may wish to add your input: Talk:American Flagg!#Request for comment. --Tenebrae (talk) 17:58, 9 January 2018 (UTC)Reply

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Hello Edward, First of all I would like to thank you for developing the Find Link too which I have been using for English Wikipedia for quite some time. The tool works wonders! My main wiki project is Assamese Wikipedia (as.wikipedia.org namespace). Even though your tool supports many language, it is still missing Assamese language. We are a small Assamese wiki community and it would be a great help if you could add support for Assamese Wikipedia as well. I appreciate your work towards the Wiki community. Thank you and best regards, --SlowPhoton (talk) 04:26, 16 January 2018 (UTC)Reply

Thank for adding the support for Assamese. --SlowPhoton (talk) 10:10, 16 January 2018 (UTC)Reply

Guidance needed

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Is there a way to consult with an administrator for guidance on handling a user that is substantially editing multiple pages in a way that really should be discussed on the talk page first? W4chris (talk) 17:53, 21 January 2018 (UTC)Reply

Facto Post – Issue 9 – 5 February 2018

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Facto Post – Issue 9 – 5 February 2018
 

m:Grants:Project/ScienceSource is the new ContentMine proposal: please take a look.

Wikidata as Hub

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One way of looking at Wikidata relates it to the semantic web concept, around for about as long as Wikipedia, and realised in dozens of distributed Web institutions. It sees Wikidata as supplying central, encyclopedic coverage of linked structured data, and looks ahead to greater support for "federated queries" that draw together information from all parts of the emerging network of websites.

 

Another perspective might be likened to a photographic negative of that one: Wikidata as an already-functioning Web hub. Over half of its properties are identifiers on other websites. These are Wikidata's "external links", to use Wikipedia terminology: one type for the DOI of a publication, another for the VIAF page of an author, with thousands more such. Wikidata links out to sites that are not nominally part of the semantic web, effectively drawing them into a larger system. The crosswalk possibilities of the systematic construction of these links was covered in Issue 8.

Wikipedia:External links speaks of them as kept "minimal, meritable, and directly relevant to the article." Here Wikidata finds more of a function. On viaf.org one can type a VIAF author identifier into the search box, and find the author page. The Wikidata Resolver tool, these days including Open Street Map, Scholia etc., allows this kind of lookup. The hub tool by maxlath takes a major step further, allowing both lookup and crosswalk to be encoded in a single URL.

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To subscribe to Facto Post go to Wikipedia:Facto Post mailing list. For the ways to unsubscribe, see below.
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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.
Newsletter delivered by MediaWiki message delivery

MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 11:50, 5 February 2018 (UTC)Reply

Facto Post – Issue 10 – 12 March 2018

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Facto Post – Issue 10 – 12 March 2018
 

Milestone for mix'n'match

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Around the time in February when Wikidata clicked past item Q50000000, another milestone was reached: the mix'n'match tool uploaded its 1000th dataset. Concisely defined by its author, Magnus Manske, it works "to match entries in external catalogs to Wikidata". The total number of entries is now well into eight figures, and more are constantly being added: a couple of new catalogs each day is normal.

Since the end of 2013, mix'n'match has gradually come to play a significant part in adding statements to Wikidata. Particularly in areas with the flavour of digital humanities, but datasets can of course be about practically anything. There is a catalog on skyscrapers, and two on spiders.

These days mix'n'match can be used in numerous modes, from the relaxed gamified click through a catalog looking for matches, with prompts, to the fantastically useful and often demanding search across all catalogs. I'll type that again: you can search 1000+ datasets from the simple box at the top right. The drop-down menu top left offers "creation candidates", Magnus's personal favourite. m:Mix'n'match/Manual for more.

For the Wikidatan, a key point is that these matches, however carried out, add statements to Wikidata if, and naturally only if, there is a Wikidata property associated with the catalog. For everyone, however, the hands-on experience of deciding of what is a good match is an education, in a scholarly area, biographical catalogs being particularly fraught. Underpinning recent rapid progress is an open infrastructure for scraping and uploading.

Congratulations to Magnus, our data Stakhanovite!

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3D printing

To subscribe to Facto Post go to Wikipedia:Facto Post mailing list. For the ways to unsubscribe, see below.
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MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 12:26, 12 March 2018 (UTC)Reply

reliable sources saved to Internet Archive

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69.181.23.220 (talk) 10:10, 16 March 2018 (UTC)Reply

Autolinking "street photography"

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I daresay this was well intended, but it wasn't beneficial. I can hardly believe that it was the work of an alert human; are you perhaps overreliant on automation? -- Hoary (talk) 02:40, 28 March 2018 (UTC)Reply

Thanks Hoary, you're right. I'll be more attentive with my editing in future. Edward (talk) 06:04, 28 March 2018 (UTC)Reply
These things happen. Certainly I've perpetrated all sorts of horrors while half-asleep at the keyboard. Happy editing! -- Hoary (talk) 09:13, 28 March 2018 (UTC)Reply

Facto Post – Issue 11 – 9 April 2018

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Facto Post – Issue 11 – 9 April 2018
 

The 100 Skins of the Onion

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Open Citations Month, with its eminently guessable hashtag, is upon us. We should be utterly grateful that in the past 12 months, so much data on which papers cite which other papers has been made open, and that Wikidata is playing its part in hosting it as "cites" statements. At the time of writing, there are 15.3M Wikidata items that can do that.

Pulling back to look at open access papers in the large, though, there is is less reason for celebration. Access in theory does not yet equate to practical access. A recent LSE IMPACT blogpost puts that issue down to "heterogeneity". A useful euphemism to save us from thinking that the whole concept doesn't fall into the realm of the oxymoron.

Some home truths: aggregation is not content management, if it falls short on reusability. The PDF file format is wedded to how humans read documents, not how machines ingest them. The salami-slicer is our friend in the current downloading of open access papers, but for a better metaphor, think about skinning an onion, laboriously, 100 times with diminishing returns. There are of the order of 100 major publisher sites hosting open access papers, and the predominant offer there is still a PDF.

 
Red onion cross section

From the discoverability angle, Wikidata's bibliographic resources combined with the SPARQL query are superior in principle, by far, to existing keyword searches run over papers. Open access content should be managed into consistent HTML, something that is currently strenuous. The good news, such as it is, would be that much of it is already in XML. The organisational problem of removing further skins from the onion, with sensible prioritisation, is certainly not insuperable. The CORE group (the bloggers in the LSE posting) has some answers, but actually not all that is needed for the text and data mining purposes they highlight. The long tail, or in other words the onion heart when it has become fiddly beyond patience to skin, does call for a pis aller. But the real knack is to do more between the XML and the heart.

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To subscribe to Facto Post go to Wikipedia:Facto Post mailing list. For the ways to unsubscribe, see below.
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Reminder: WikiFactMine pages on Wikidata are at WD:WFM.

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MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 16:25, 9 April 2018 (UTC)Reply

Wikidata + map question

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Hello! I hope this finds you well. I have just read your proposal on the GLAMWiki Conference submissions category, and I have realized you are savvy when it comes to maps and Wikidata. And I have been facing a real issue, which I hope you might help me to sort out. I have worked with students of mine and Wikimedia volunteers in Brazil to take pictures and create Wikidata items of monuments in São Paulo [1]. I'd love to be able to post this map with the query on pt.wikipedia --do you know if this is even possible? Thanks a lot and sorry for likely mistakes. Cheers. --Joalpe (talk) 00:50, 17 April 2018 (UTC)Reply

@Joalpe: I'm not sure if this is possible or how it could be done. I'll do some more research and get back to you. Edward (talk) 11:29, 25 April 2018 (UTC)Reply
Thanks for the reply, Edward. So far, I can easily create maps with local points on the frame (i.e. [2] or [3]), but they are of course not dynamically related to Wikidata. To some extent, what I am thinking of is not too different in principle to what the Listeria-bot does: the creation of a template (a table) fed dynamically with data from Wikidata. I have no idea on how to make this happen for maps, though. So thanks a lot for looking into this, as I believe this could lead to something really cool for the projects. --Joalpe (talk) 17:49, 25 April 2018 (UTC)Reply

Facto Post – Issue 12 – 28 May 2018

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Facto Post – Issue 12 – 28 May 2018
 

ScienceSource funded

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The Wikimedia Foundation announced full funding of the ScienceSource grant proposal from ContentMine on May 18. See the ScienceSource Twitter announcement and 60 second video.

A medical canon?

The proposal includes downloading 30,000 open access papers, aiming (roughly speaking) to create a baseline for medical referencing on Wikipedia. It leaves open the question of how these are to be chosen.

The basic criteria of WP:MEDRS include a concentration on secondary literature. Attention has to be given to the long tail of diseases that receive less current research. The MEDRS guideline supposes that edge cases will have to be handled, and the premature exclusion of publications that would be in those marginal positions would reduce the value of the collection. Prophylaxis misses the point that gate-keeping will be done by an algorithm.

Two well-known but rather different areas where such considerations apply are tropical diseases and alternative medicine. There are also a number of potential downloading troubles, and these were mentioned in Issue 11. There is likely to be a gap, even with the guideline, between conditions taken to be necessary but not sufficient, and conditions sufficient but not necessary, for candidate papers to be included. With around 10,000 recognised medical conditions in standard lists, being comprehensive is demanding. With all of these aspects of the task, ScienceSource will seek community help.

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OpenRefine logo, courtesy of Google

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MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 10:16, 28 May 2018 (UTC)Reply

Facto Post – Issue 13 – 29 May 2018

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Facto Post – Issue 13 – 29 May 2018
 

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

Facto Post enters its second year, with a Cambridge Blue (OK, Aquamarine) background, a new logo, but no Cambridge blues. On-topic for the ScienceSource project is a project page here. It contains some case studies on how the WP:MEDRS guideline, for the referencing of articles at all related to human health, is applied in typical discussions.

Close to home also, a template, called {{medrs}} for short, is used to express dissatisfaction with particular references. Technology can help with patrolling, and this Petscan query finds over 450 articles where there is at least one use of the template. Of course the template is merely suggesting there is a possible issue with the reliability of a reference. Deciding the truth of the allegation is another matter.

This maintenance issue is one example of where ScienceSource aims to help. Where the reference is to a scientific paper, its type of algorithm could give a pass/fail opinion on such references. It could assist patrollers of medical articles, therefore, with the templated references and more generally. There may be more to proper referencing than that, indeed: context, quite what the statement supported by the reference expresses, prominence and weight. For that kind of consideration, case studies can help. But an algorithm might help to clear the backlog.

 
Evidence pyramid leading up to clinical guidelines, from WP:MEDRS
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MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 18:19, 29 June 2018 (UTC)Reply

Facto Post – Issue 14 – 21 July 2018

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Facto Post – Issue 14 – 21 July 2018
 

The Editor is Charles Matthews, for ContentMine. Please leave feedback for him, on his User talk page.
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Plugging the gaps – Wikimania report

Officially it is "bridging the gaps in knowledge", with Wikimania 2018 in Cape Town paying tribute to the southern African concept of ubuntu to implement it. Besides face-to-face interactions, Wikimedians do need their power sources.

 
Hackathon mentoring table wiring

Facto Post interviewed Jdforrester, who has attended every Wikimania, and now works as Senior Product Manager for the Wikimedia Foundation. His take on tackling the gaps in the Wikimedia movement is that "if we were an army, we could march in a column and close up all the gaps". In his view though, that is a faulty metaphor, and it leads to a completely false misunderstanding of the movement, its diversity and different aspirations, and the nature of the work as "fighting" to be done in the open sector. There are many fronts, and as an eventualist he feels the gaps experienced both by editors and by users of Wikimedia content are inevitable. He would like to see a greater emphasis on reuse of content, not simply its volume.

If that may not sound like radicalism, the Decolonizing the Internet conference here organized jointly with Whose Knowledge? can redress the picture. It comes with the claim to be "the first ever conference about centering marginalized knowledge online".

 
Plugbar buildup at the Hackathon
Links

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MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 06:10, 21 July 2018 (UTC)Reply

Baby balloon listed at Redirects for discussion

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An editor has asked for a discussion to address the redirect Baby balloon. Since you had some involvement with the Baby balloon redirect, you might want to participate in the redirect discussion if you have not already done so. B dash (talk) 06:47, 5 August 2018 (UTC)Reply

Deletion discussion about Mainlining

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Hello, Edward,

I wanted to let you know that there's a discussion about whether Mainlining should be deleted. Your comments are welcome at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Mainlining .

If you're new to the process, articles for deletion is a group discussion (not a vote!) that usually lasts seven days. If you need it, there is a guide on how to contribute. Last but not least, you are highly encouraged to continue improving the article; just be sure not to remove the tag about the deletion nomination from the top.

Thanks,

~ Araratic | talk 00:45, 19 August 2018 (UTC)Reply

Facto Post – Issue 15 – 21 August 2018

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Facto Post – Issue 15 – 21 August 2018
 

The Editor is Charles Matthews, for ContentMine. Please leave feedback for him, on his User talk page.
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Neglected diseases
 
Anti-parasitic drugs being distributed in Côte d'Ivoire
What's a Neglected Disease?, ScienceSource video

To grasp the nettle, there are rare diseases, there are tropical diseases and then there are "neglected diseases". Evidently a rare enough disease is likely to be neglected, but neglected disease these days means a disease not rare, but tropical, and most often infectious or parasitic. Rare diseases as a group are dominated, in contrast, by genetic diseases.

A major aspect of neglect is found in tracking drug discovery. Orphan drugs are those developed to treat rare diseases (rare enough not to have market-driven research), but there is some overlap in practice with the WHO's neglected diseases, where snakebite, a "neglected public health issue", is on the list.

From an encyclopedic point of view, lack of research also may mean lack of high-quality references: the core medical literature differs from primary research, since it operates by aggregating trials. This bibliographic deficit clearly hinders Wikipedia's mission. The ScienceSource project is currently addressing this issue, on Wikidata. Its Wikidata focus list at WD:SSFL is trying to ensure that neglect does not turn into bias in its selection of science papers.

Links

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MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 13:23, 21 August 2018 (UTC)Reply

Facto Post – Issue 16 – 30 September 2018

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Facto Post – Issue 16 – 30 September 2018
 

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

In an ideal world ... no, bear with your editor for just a minute ... there would be a format for scientific publishing online that was as much a standard as SI units are for the content. Likewise cataloguing publications would not be onerous, because part of the process would be to generate uniform metadata. Without claiming it could be the mythical free lunch, it might be reasonably be argued that sandwiches can be packaged much alike and have barcodes, whatever the fillings.

The best on offer, to stretch the metaphor, is the meal kit option, in the form of XML. Where scientific papers are delivered as XML downloads, you get all the ingredients ready to cook. But have to prepare the actual meal of slow food yourself. See Scholarly HTML for a recent pass at heading off XML with HTML, in other words in the native language of the Web.

The argument from real life is a traditional mixture of frictional forces, vested interests, and the classic irony of the principle of unripe time. On the other hand, discoverability actually diminishes with the prolific progress of science publishing. No, it really doesn't scale. Wikimedia as movement can do something in such cases. We know from open access, we grok the Web, we have our own horse in the HTML race, we have Wikidata and WikiJournal, and we have the chops to act.

 
Links

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MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 17:57, 30 September 2018 (UTC)Reply

Cambridge Wikidata Workshop 20 October

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You might be interested. Charles Matthews (talk) 15:16, 6 October 2018 (UTC)Reply

Facto Post – Issue 17 – 29 October 2018

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Facto Post – Issue 17 – 29 October 2018
 

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

Around 2.7 million Wikidata items have an illustrative image. These files, you might say, are Wikimedia's stock images, and if the number is large, it is still only 5% or so of items that have one. All such images are taken from Wikimedia Commons, which has 50 million media files. One key issue is how to expand the stock.

Indeed, there is a tool. WD-FIST exploits the fact that each Wikipedia is differently illustrated, mostly with images from Commons but also with fair use images. An item that has sitelinks but no illustrative image can be tested to see if the linked wikis have a suitable one. This works well for a volunteer who wants to add images at a reasonable scale, and a small amount of SPARQL knowledge goes a long way in producing checklists.

 
Gran Teatro, Cáceres, Spain, at night

It should be noted, though, that there are currently 53 Wikidata properties that link to Commons, of which P18 for the basic image is just one. WD-FIST prompts the user to add signatures, plaques, pictures of graves and so on. There are a couple of hundred monograms, mostly of historical figures, and this query allows you to view all of them. commons:Category:Monograms and its subcategories provide rich scope for adding more.

And so it is generally. The list of properties linking to Commons does contain a few that concern video and audio files, and rather more for maps. But it contains gems such as P3451 for "nighttime view". Over 1000 of those on Wikidata, but as for so much else, there could be yet more.

Go on. Today is Wikidata's birthday. An illustrative image is always an acceptable gift, so why not add one? You can follow these easy steps: (i) log in at https://tools.wmflabs.org/widar/, (ii) paste the Petscan ID 6263583 into https://tools.wmflabs.org/fist/wdfist/ and click run, and (iii) just add cake.

 
Birthday logo
Links

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MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 15:01, 29 October 2018 (UTC)Reply

Reskin listed at Redirects for discussion

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An editor has asked for a discussion to address the redirect Reskin. Since you had some involvement with the Reskin redirect, you might want to participate in the redirect discussion if you have not already done so. Steel1943 (talk) 18:07, 16 November 2018 (UTC)Reply

ArbCom 2018 election voter message

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Hello, Edward. Voting in the 2018 Arbitration Committee elections is now open until 23.59 on Sunday, 3 December. All users who registered an account before Sunday, 28 October 2018, made at least 150 mainspace edits before Thursday, 1 November 2018 and are not currently blocked are eligible 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 2018 election, please review the candidates and submit your choices on the voting page. MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 18:42, 19 November 2018 (UTC)Reply

Facto Post – Issue 18 – 30 November 2018

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Facto Post – Issue 18 – 30 November 2018
 

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

GLAM ♥ data — what is a gallery, library, archive or museum without a catalogue? It follows that Wikidata must love librarians. Bibliography supports students and researchers in any topic, but open and machine-readable bibliographic data even more so, outside the silo. Cue the WikiCite initiative, which was meeting in conference this week, in the Bay Area of California.

 
Wikidata training for librarians at WikiCite 2018

In fact there is a broad scope: "Open Knowledge Maps via SPARQL" and the "Sum of All Welsh Literature", identification of research outputs, Library.Link Network and Bibframe 2.0, OSCAR and LUCINDA (who they?), OCLC and Scholia, all these co-exist on the agenda. Certainly more library science is coming Wikidata's way. That poses the question about the other direction: is more Wikimedia technology advancing on libraries? Good point.

Wikimedians generally are not aware of the tech background that can be assumed, unless they are close to current training for librarians. A baseline definition is useful here: "bash, git and OpenRefine". Compare and contrast with pywikibot, GitHub and mix'n'match. Translation: scripting for automation, version control, data set matching and wrangling in the large, are on the agenda also for contemporary library work. Certainly there is some possible common ground here. Time to understand rather more about the motivations that operate in the library sector.

Links

Account creation is now open on the ScienceSource wiki, where you can see SPARQL visualisations of text mining.

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MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 11:20, 30 November 2018 (UTC)Reply

Yo Ho Ho

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thanks for another year of running that page patrol routine, I have used it to fix thousands more typos. ϢereSpielChequers 00:06, 24 December 2018 (UTC)Reply

Facto Post – Issue 19 – 27 December 2018

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Facto Post – Issue 19 – 27 December 2018
 

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

Zotero is free software for reference management by the Center for History and New Media: see Wikipedia:Citing sources with Zotero. It is also an active user community, and has broad-based language support.

 
Zotero logo

Besides the handiness of Zotero's warehousing of personal citation collections, the Zotero translator underlies the citoid service, at work behind the VisualEditor. Metadata from Wikidata can be imported into Zotero; and in the other direction the zotkat tool from the University of Mannheim allows Zotero bibliographies to be exported to Wikidata, by item creation. With an extra feature to add statements, that route could lead to much development of the focus list (P5008) tagging on Wikidata, by WikiProjects.

Zotero demo video

There is also a large-scale encyclopedic dimension here. The construction of Zotero translators is one facet of Web scraping that has a strong community and open source basis. In that it resembles the less formal mix'n'match import community, and growing networks around other approaches that can integrate datasets into Wikidata, such as the use of OpenRefine.

Looking ahead, the thirtieth birthday of the World Wide Web falls in 2019, and yet the ambition to make webpages routinely readable by machines can still seem an ever-retreating mirage. Wikidata should not only be helping Wikimedia integrate its projects, an ongoing process represented by Structured Data on Commons and lexemes. It should also be acting as a catalyst to bring scraping in from the cold, with institutional strengths as well as resourceful code.

Links

Diversitech, the latest ContentMine grant application to the Wikimedia Foundation, is in its community review stage until January 2.

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MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 19:08, 27 December 2018 (UTC)Reply

Adminship Anniversary!

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Wishing Edward a very happy adminship anniversary on behalf of the Wikipedia Birthday Committee! A 10 fireplane Imform me 17:28, 8 January 2019 (UTC)Reply

Facto Post – Issue 20 – 31 January 2019

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Facto Post – Issue 20 – 31 January 2019
 

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

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MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 10:53, 31 January 2019 (UTC)Reply

Do Over: Rescue Monday, Reinvent Your Work, and Never Get Stuck listed at Redirects for discussion

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An editor has asked for a discussion to address the redirect Do Over: Rescue Monday, Reinvent Your Work, and Never Get Stuck. Since you had some involvement with the Do Over: Rescue Monday, Reinvent Your Work, and Never Get Stuck redirect, you might want to participate in the redirect discussion if you wish to do so. UnitedStatesian (talk) 11:03, 17 February 2019 (UTC)Reply

Facto Post – Issue 21 – 28 February 2019

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Facto Post – Issue 21 – 28 February 2019
 

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

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MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 10:01, 28 February 2019 (UTC)Reply

Belated thanks

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I just noticed that nearly a year ago you sourced a suitably licensed Flickr image for Airlink (helicopter shuttle service) and added it to the infobox. Many thanks for doing that: I had hunted for a suitable photo for ages, ever since I wrote the article! It significantly enhances the article, as the story can only really be put it context with a photo of it "in action". Sadly I was just too young to encounter it, although I was a fairly regular visitor to the Gatwick viewing gallery when that was open. Cheers, Hassocks5489 (Floreat Hova!) 12:54, 6 March 2019 (UTC)Reply

Facto Post – Issue 22 – 28 March 2019

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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.

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

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MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 11:45, 28 March 2019 (UTC)Reply

Facto Post – Issue 23 – 30 April 2019

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Facto Post – Issue 23 – 30 April 2019
 

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

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

ArbCom 2019 special circular

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Administrators must secure their accounts

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

View additional information

This message was sent to all administrators following a recent motion. Thank you for your attention. For the Arbitration Committee, Cameron11598 02:18, 4 May 2019 (UTC)Reply

Administrator account security (Correction to Arbcom 2019 special circular)

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

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

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

For the Arbitration Committee, -Cameron11598 21:03, 4 May 2019 (UTC)Reply

Invitation to join the Fifteen Year Society

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Dear Edward,

I'd like to extend a cordial invitation to you to join the Fifteen Year Society, an informal group for editors who've been participating in the Wikipedia project for fifteen years or more. ​

Best regards, Urhixidur (talk) 19:15, 8 May 2019 (UTC)Reply


Facto Post – Issue 24 – 17 May 2019

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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.
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

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.


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Wikimania 2019

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Dear Edward, I would like to send you information about your talk in the Partnerships Space at Wikimania 2019, but I do not have your email address. Please get in touch with me at atarkowski@centrumcyfrowe.pl - thank you, Tarkowski (talk) 14:54, 12 August 2019 (UTC)Reply

Your OSM-Wikidata tool, a suggestion

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Hi Ed, I enjoyed your talk today about your OSM-Wikidata tool tremendously and plan to use the tool in the future. Discussing with a friend, we wondered if it would be possible to allow the user to edit Wikidata coordinates in cases of discrepancy. Presumably, OSM coordinates are more precise in most cases. Do you see any issues with this, or is it maybe already a planned feature? Cheers, AxelBoldt (talk) 17:36, 16 August 2019 (UTC)Reply

@AxelBoldt: I'm glad that you enjoyed the talk. Copying coordinates from OSM to Wikidata isn't allowed because the licenses aren't compatible. If we started copying coordinates from OSM then we'd be making a derived work. Edward (talk) 08:38, 17 August 2019 (UTC)Reply

OSM-Wikidata linking

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Hey. Thanks, you tool is really amazing. May you also add links to Wikipedia into OSM tags? 193.11.92.48 (talk) 16:05, 17 August 2019 (UTC)Reply

Category:Online auction websites has been nominated for discussion

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Category:Online auction websites, which you created, has been nominated for possible deletion, merging, or renaming. A discussion is taking place to decide whether this proposal complies with the categorization guidelines. If you would like to participate in the discussion, you are invited to add your comments at the category's entry on the categories for discussion page. Thank you. Rathfelder (talk) 19:20, 22 September 2019 (UTC)Reply

Category:Online service providers has been nominated for discussion

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Category:Online service providers, which you created, has been nominated for possible deletion, merging, or renaming. A discussion is taking place to decide whether this proposal complies with the categorization guidelines. If you would like to participate in the discussion, you are invited to add your comments at the category's entry on the categories for discussion page. Thank you. Rathfelder (talk) 09:59, 14 October 2019 (UTC)Reply

A barnstar for you!

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  The Technical Barnstar
This is for your tool. I have been making extensive use of it. It is a wonderful tool. Or weapon. Please add a "random article" button. ♠Vami_IV†♠ 08:37, 30 October 2019 (UTC)Reply
@Vami IV: Thanks, I really appreciate this. I've added a random article link. Edward (talk) 11:28, 30 October 2019 (UTC)Reply
Sweet, thank you. –♠Vami_IV†♠ 05:26, 31 October 2019 (UTC)Reply

Category:Radio has been nominated for discussion

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Category:Comic science fiction has been nominated for discussion

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ArbCom 2019 election voter message

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Happy First Edit Day!

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Category:Hostage dramas has been nominated for discussion

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Category:Hostage dramas, which you created, has been nominated for possible deletion, merging, or renaming. A discussion is taking place to decide whether this proposal complies with the categorization guidelines. If you would like to participate in the discussion, you are invited to add your comments at the category's entry on the categories for discussion page. Thank you. Marcocapelle (talk) 10:47, 11 January 2020 (UTC)Reply

ARTICLE REVIEW

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Hi Edward Betts,

Could you please help me review my new articles: O. A. Akinyeye Abosede George MBM Avoseh

Thanks.

WheelHelms WS — Preceding unsigned comment added by WheelHelms WS (talkcontribs) 17:39, 16 January 2020 (UTC)Reply

Humanitarian Wikidata

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Hi Edward, I just noticed your Wikimania 2019 session Linking OpenStreetMap and Wikidata and was wondering whether you had seen WikiProject Humanitarian Wikidata as well as Wikimedians for Disaster Response. -- Daniel Mietchen (talk) 17:58, 22 July 2020 (UTC)Reply

@Daniel Mietchen: This is interesting, I hadn't seen either of these. Thanks for sharing them with me. Edward (talk) 21:27, 22 July 2020 (UTC)Reply

"Ask why" listed at Redirects for discussion

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Category:Back to the Future has been nominated for renaming

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Category:Back to the Future has been nominated for renaming. A discussion is taking place to decide whether this proposal complies with the categorization guidelines. If you would like to participate in the discussion, you are invited to add your comments at the category's entry on the categories for discussion page. Thank you. Gonnym (talk) 20:27, 14 August 2020 (UTC)Reply

"The Columbia seven" listed at Redirects for discussion

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"Brains trust" listed at Redirects for discussion

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"Elmlea" listed at Redirects for discussion

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Proposed deletion of Box office disappointment

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The article Box office disappointment has been proposed for deletion because of the following concern:

Term goes to absolute extreme of definition without a middle ground; there's no incoming links to this any longer and is not a term used in the industry.

While all constructive contributions to Wikipedia are appreciated, pages may be deleted for any of several reasons.

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"Big Head" listed at Redirects for discussion

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"Twitter crash" listed at Redirects for discussion

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"Maritime trade" listed at Redirects for discussion

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"Sickie" listed at Redirects for discussion

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"Shopping parade" listed at Redirects for discussion

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Category:Shopping malls has been nominated for splitting

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Category:Shopping malls has been nominated for splitting. A discussion is taking place to decide whether this proposal complies with the categorization guidelines. If you would like to participate in the discussion, you are invited to add your comments at the category's entry on the categories for discussion page. Thank you. Paul_012 (talk) 15:54, 17 September 2021 (UTC)Reply

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Administrators will no longer be autopatrolled

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A recently closed Request for Comment (RFC) reached consensus to remove Autopatrolled from the administrator user group. You may, similarly as with Edit Filter Manager, choose to self-assign this permission to yourself. This will be implemented the week of December 13th, but if you wish to self-assign you may do so now. To find out when the change has gone live or if you have any questions please visit the Administrator's Noticeboard. 20:05, 7 December 2021 (UTC)

Yo Ho Ho

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Hello, most of the pages at https://edwardbetts.com/find_link/Ribbon_diagram right now, such as Tyrosine aminotransferase or Isopenicillin N synthase, are not properly processed by Find link. It seems that the tool is removing parts of the file syntax. ~~~~
User:1234qwer1234qwer4 (talk)
22:50, 29 December 2021 (UTC)Reply

Happy First Edit Day!

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  Happy First Edit Day, Edward, from the Wikipedia Birthday Committee! Have a great day! Bobherry Talk Edits 18:32, 2 January 2022 (UTC)Reply

Happy First Edit Day!

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How we will see unregistered users

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Happy Adminship Anniversary!

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Happy Adminship Anniversary!

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"Londongrad" listed at Redirects for discussion

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  An editor has identified a potential problem with the redirect Londongrad and has thus listed it for discussion. This discussion will occur at Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion/Log/2022 April 2#Londongrad until a consensus is reached, and anyone, including you, is welcome to contribute to the discussion. MB 21:22, 2 April 2022 (UTC)Reply

New administrator activity requirement

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The administrator policy has been updated with new activity requirements following a successful Request for Comment.

Beginning January 1, 2023, administrators who meet one or both of the following criteria may be desysopped for inactivity if they have:

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Administrators at risk for being desysopped under these criteria will continue to be notified ahead of time. Thank you for your continued work.

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"Globalists worldview" listed at Redirects for discussion

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  An editor has identified a potential problem with the redirect Globalists worldview and has thus listed it for discussion. This discussion will occur at Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion/Log/2022 April 25#Globalists worldview until a consensus is reached, and anyone, including you, is welcome to contribute to the discussion. QueenofBithynia (talk) 20:40, 25 April 2022 (UTC)Reply

Category:Solitude in fiction has been nominated for deletion

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Category:Solitude in fiction has been nominated for deletion. A discussion is taking place to decide whether this proposal complies with the categorization guidelines. If you would like to participate in the discussion, you are invited to add your comments at the category's entry on the categories for discussion page. Thank you. ᴢxᴄᴠʙɴᴍ () 10:48, 6 July 2022 (UTC)Reply

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After your great work last week at Newspeak House, I was wondering if the dablinks like tool was ready for any testing?— Rod talk 20:03, 18 August 2022 (UTC)Reply

This is what I have so far, it isn't finished yet. https://dab.edwardbetts.com/ Edward (talk) 07:51, 19 August 2022 (UTC)Reply
Thanks - let me know when it is up & running & I am happy to do any testing.— Rod talk 07:56, 19 August 2022 (UTC)Reply
@Rodw: I've finally implemented save. It is very rough, but it is usable. I need to write some documentation. Edward (talk) 21:17, 28 August 2022 (UTC)Reply
Thanks, but it currently will not load for me.— Rod talk 07:22, 29 August 2022 (UTC)Reply
Try now. Edward (talk) 08:24, 29 August 2022 (UTC)Reply
The list now loads but if I click on one I get the same "Software error: KeyError" as I did before (Error in function "__getitem__": Arguments(args=['self', 'key'], varargs=None, varkw=None)).— Rod talk 09:06, 29 August 2022 (UTC)Reply
I've fixed that bug. Edward (talk) 13:46, 29 August 2022 (UTC)Reply
Thanks - having got past OAuth, I now can see the highlighted links on an article. It would be nice if a right click from the list on the left took you to the link listed rather than another version of the highlighted entry. I tried to make my first edit using the dab mechanic tool - on Herbie Crichlow changing "De De" to [[Denise Lopez (Swedish singer)|De De]] & I get "Software error: KeyError" including "Error in function "edit_page": Arguments(args=['title', 'text', 'summary', 'baserevid', 'token'], varargs=None, varkw=None)" followed by a load of code.— Rod talk 15:29, 29 August 2022 (UTC)Reply

I am going to be away for the next month & unable to do much in the way of testing. If you manage to sort the save bug, I would suggest posting a note at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Disambiguation and ask others to try it out.— Rod talk 13:23, 2 September 2022 (UTC)Reply

I don't know if you have had a chance to work on this while I have been away, but yesterday at a wikimeet I went to show your new tool to User:RexxS & User:The wub. The link now just says "Service Unavailable, The server is temporarily unable to service your request due to maintenance downtime or capacity problems. Please try again later." Any idea why?— Rod talk 11:28, 17 October 2022 (UTC)Reply

I mentioned your work at Wikipedia talk:Disambiguation#WP:INTDABLINK being used crudely where there was a discussion about the need for new tools - hope that is OK?— Rod talk 15:57, 28 November 2022 (UTC)Reply

Proposed deletion of Dimbleby family

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The article Dimbleby family has been proposed for deletion because of the following concern:

Probably a work of WP:OR, completely unsourced which is particularly worrying for the living people listed here. Not suitable for Wikipedia, time for it to go.

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Proposed deletion of Mixed reality game

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The article Mixed reality game has been proposed for deletion because of the following concern:

Article seems to be about esoteric and isolated research from a single person.

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Category:Boxers has been nominated for renaming

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Good morning and thank you for creating and maintaining Find Link! Women in Red is now running monthly tips in its newsletters. I suggested saying something like "Use the Find Link tool to de-orphan your articles" which they liked...but I was wondering if it's ok with you to link to Find Link in the first place, and if so, what is the right URL to use? Would it be User:Edward/Find link ? Cielquiparle (talk) 07:24, 22 December 2022 (UTC)Reply

Hi, sorry for not replying sooner. Yes, fine to link to it. User:Edward/Find link is a good one to use for now. I should make a page for it in the Wikipedia namespace. Edward (talk) 19:30, 23 December 2022 (UTC)Reply
Thanks @Edward! I suggested Wikipedia:FINDLINK instead which obviously points to your User page now but then could be re-directed to another target in the future. Seems cleaner. But please do let me know if that's not ok. Cielquiparle (talk) 13:40, 24 December 2022 (UTC)Reply

Happy New Year, Edward!

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   Send New Year cheer by adding {{subst:Happy New Year fireworks}} to user talk pages.

Moops T 05:18, 2 January 2023 (UTC)Reply

Happy First Edit Day!

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Happy Eighteenth Adminship Anniversary!

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Hi @Edward, I've created a user script to help with using Find Link. Hope that's alright with you. 1AmNobody24 (talk) 06:45, 29 March 2023 (UTC)Reply

@1AmNobody24: This is great! I love it. Good work. Edward (talk) 20:44, 30 March 2023 (UTC)Reply

"Loose horse" listed at Redirects for discussion

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  The redirect Loose horse has been listed at redirects for discussion to determine whether its use and function meets the redirect guidelines. Anyone, including you, is welcome to comment on this redirect at Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion/Log/2023 April 18 § Loose horse until a consensus is reached. TartarTorte 18:07, 18 April 2023 (UTC)Reply

Category:Cryonics in fiction has been nominated for renaming

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Category:Cryonics in fiction has been nominated for renaming. A discussion is taking place to decide whether this proposal complies with the categorization guidelines. If you would like to participate in the discussion, you are invited to add your comments at the category's entry on the categories for discussion page. Thank you. DonIago (talk) 13:27, 15 May 2023 (UTC)Reply

And again: please see Wikipedia:Categories_for_discussion/Log/2023_August_11#Suspended_animation. – Fayenatic London 10:39, 11 August 2023 (UTC)Reply

"Sickie" listed at Redirects for discussion

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  The redirect Sickie has been listed at redirects for discussion to determine whether its use and function meets the redirect guidelines. Anyone, including you, is welcome to comment on this redirect at Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion/Log/2023 June 23 § Sickie until a consensus is reached. Steel1943 (talk) 20:20, 23 June 2023 (UTC)Reply

"Disinformation campaign" listed at Redirects for discussion

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  The redirect Disinformation campaign has been listed at redirects for discussion to determine whether its use and function meets the redirect guidelines. Anyone, including you, is welcome to comment on this redirect at Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion/Log/2023 October 15 § Disinformation campaign until a consensus is reached. fgnievinski (talk) 05:44, 15 October 2023 (UTC)Reply

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A category or categories you have created have been nominated for possible deletion, merging, or renaming. A discussion is taking place to decide whether this proposal complies with the categorization guidelines. If you would like to participate in the discussion, you are invited to add your comments at Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Log/2023 December 13 § Road accidents and incidents on the categories for discussion page. Thank you. –LaundryPizza03 (d) 06:36, 13 December 2023 (UTC)Reply

CfD nomination at Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Log/2023 December 19 § X in fiction VI

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A category or categories you have created have been nominated for possible deletion, merging, or renaming. A discussion is taking place to decide whether this proposal complies with the categorization guidelines. If you would like to participate in the discussion, you are invited to add your comments at Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Log/2023 December 19 § X in fiction VI on the categories for discussion page. Thank you. –LaundryPizza03 (d) 18:22, 19 December 2023 (UTC)Reply

CfD nomination at Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Log/2023 December 21 § X in fiction IX

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A category or categories you have created have been nominated for possible deletion, merging, or renaming. A discussion is taking place to decide whether this proposal complies with the categorization guidelines. If you would like to participate in the discussion, you are invited to add your comments at Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Log/2023 December 21 § X in fiction IX on the categories for discussion page. Thank you. –LaundryPizza03 (d) 04:15, 21 December 2023 (UTC)Reply

Happy First Edit Day!

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Happy First Edit Day!

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Happy Adminship Anniversary!

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Hi Edward,

I want to check if you have had time to look into the issue with WP:FINDLINK? I posted a comment here in the talk page but not sure if you were notified of it. - Imcdc Contact 05:25, 23 March 2024 (UTC)Reply

Category:Fictional coffeehouses and cafés has been nominated for merging

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Category:Fictional coffeehouses and cafés has been nominated for merging. A discussion is taking place to decide whether it complies with the categorization guidelines. If you would like to participate in the discussion, you are invited to add your comments at the category's entry on the categories for discussion page. Thank you. (Oinkers42) (talk) 16:53, 24 March 2024 (UTC)Reply

Category:Mountaineering films has been nominated for merging

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Category:Mountaineering films has been nominated for merging. A discussion is taking place to decide whether it complies with the categorization guidelines. If you would like to participate in the discussion, you are invited to add your comments at the category's entry on the categories for discussion page. Thank you. Aszx5000 (talk) 19:52, 18 May 2024 (UTC)Reply

Poop patrol

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Hi Wdward, hope all is well, I've been getting a lot of

"sqlalchemy.exc.OperationalError: (psycopg2.OperationalError) connection to server at "localhost" (127.0.0.1), port 5432 failed: server closed the connection unexpectedly This probably means the server terminated abnormally before or while processing the request.
SSL SYSCALL error: Connection reset by peer
connection to server at "localhost" (127.0.0.1), port 5432 failed: FATAL:  the database system is in recovery mode
(Background on this error at: https://sqlalche.me/e/14/e3q8)

Errors recently, and was wondering whether this was at my end or yours? ϢereSpielChequers 09:09, 31 May 2024 (UTC)Reply

You're right. The database is unhappy. I'll try and fix it. Edward (talk) 08:38, 1 June 2024 (UTC)Reply
This is fixed. Edward (talk) 12:49, 1 June 2024 (UTC)Reply
Thankyou very much. ϢereSpielChequers 11:32, 5 June 2024 (UTC)Reply

"Factory owner" listed at Redirects for discussion

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  The redirect Factory owner has been listed at redirects for discussion to determine whether its use and function meets the redirect guidelines. Anyone, including you, is welcome to comment on this redirect at Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion/Log/2024 June 10 § Factory owner until a consensus is reached. Steel1943 (talk) 23:54, 10 June 2024 (UTC)Reply

Speedy deletion nomination of Category:InBev brands

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A tag has been placed on Category:InBev brands indicating that it is currently empty, and is not a disambiguation category, a category redirect, under discussion at Categories for discussion, or a project category that by its nature may become empty on occasion. If it remains empty for seven days or more, it may be deleted under section C1 of the criteria for speedy deletion.

If you think this page should not be deleted for this reason you may contest the nomination by visiting the page and removing the speedy deletion tag. plicit 14:53, 19 October 2024 (UTC)Reply

October 2024

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  Hello, I'm Danners430. I noticed that you added or changed content in an article, British Rail Class 158, but you didn't provide a reliable source. It's been removed and archived in the page history for now, but if you'd like to include a citation and re-add it, please do so. You can have a look at referencing for beginners. If you think I made a mistake, you can leave me a message on my talk page. Thank you. Danners430 (talk) 22:11, 21 October 2024 (UTC)Reply

Talerddig rail accident moved to draftspace

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Thanks for your contributions to Talerddig rail accident. Unfortunately, I do not think it is ready for publishing at this time because it needs more sources to establish notability. I have converted your article to a draft which you can improve, undisturbed for a while.

Please see more information at Help:Unreviewed new page. When the article is ready for publication, please click on the "Submit your draft for review!" button at the top of the page OR move the page back. ... discospinster talk 04:39, 22 October 2024 (UTC)Reply

I've redirected the draft to the article which I created on the accident - 2024 Talerddig collision. I was unaware of the draft when I created the article. Given the moving of the article you created to draft space, as a rough guide any new article needs structure, and at least three references from reliable sources. Resist the temptation to include correct, but unverified information in the article. There is WP:NORUSH to be as up to date as possible when creating an article. Facts do come out with the passage of time and can be added later. Mjroots (talk) 08:11, 22 October 2024 (UTC)Reply

Invitation to participate in a research

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Hello,

The Wikimedia Foundation is conducting a survey of Wikipedians to better understand what draws administrators to contribute to Wikipedia, and what affects administrator retention. We will use this research to improve experiences for Wikipedians, and address common problems and needs. We have identified you as a good candidate for this research, and would greatly appreciate your participation in this anonymous survey.

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BGerdemann (WMF) (talk) 19:21, 23 October 2024 (UTC) Reply

Reminder to participate in Wikipedia research

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Hello,

I recently invited you to take a survey about administration on Wikipedia. If you haven’t yet had a chance, there is still time to participate– we’d truly appreciate your feedback. The survey is anonymous and should take about 10-15 minutes to complete. You may read more about the study on its Meta page and view its privacy statement.

Take the survey here.

Kind Regards,

WMF Research Team

BGerdemann (WMF) (talk) 00:17, 13 November 2024 (UTC) Reply

ArbCom 2024 Elections voter message

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Hello! Voting in the 2024 Arbitration Committee elections is now open until 23:59 (UTC) on Monday, 2 December 2024. 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.

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