User talk:JPxG/Archive15

Your GA nomination of First Wikipedia edit

The article First Wikipedia edit you nominated as a good article has failed ; see Talk:First Wikipedia edit for reasons why the nomination failed. If or when these points have been taken care of, you may apply for a new nomination of the article. Message delivered by Legobot, on behalf of ProcrastinatingReader -- ProcrastinatingReader (talk) 10:41, 17 December 2021 (UTC)

Fair enough. jp×g 22:38, 21 June 2022 (UTC)

A barnstar for you!

	The Technical Barnstar
	Thank you for your report. 7&6=thirteen (☎) 12:23, 21 December 2021 (UTC)

A barnstar for you!

		The Signpost Barnstar
		Thanks for writing for the Signpost! Benjamin (talk) 08:09, 29 December 2021 (UTC)

A barnstar for you!

	The Barnstar of Good Humor
	I had previously never heard about freakin' politics — glad to have learned something today. JBchrch talk 14:12, 29 December 2021 (UTC)

DYK for Russ Island

On 9 January 2022, Did you know was updated with a fact from the article Russ Island, which you recently created, substantially expanded, or brought to good article status. The fact was ... that after many years of farming crops, Russ Island was deliberately flooded for salt farming? The nomination discussion and review may be seen at Template:Did you know nominations/Russ Island. You are welcome to check how many pageviews the nominated article or articles got while on the front page (here's how, Russ Island), and if they received a combined total of at least 416.7 views per hour (i.e., 5,000 views in 12 hours or 10,000 in 24), the hook may be added to the statistics page. Finally, if you know of an interesting fact from another recently created article, then please feel free to suggest it on the Did you know talk page.

Cwmhiraeth (talk) 00:03, 9 January 2022 (UTC)

Your GA nomination of Tinsley Island

The article Tinsley Island you nominated as a good article has passed ; see Talk:Tinsley Island for comments about the article. Well done! If the article has not already appeared on the main page as a "Did you know" item, or as a bold link under "In the News" or in the "On This Day" prose section, you can nominate it within the next seven days to appear in DYK. Bolded names with dates listed at the bottom of the "On This Day" column do not affect DYK eligibility. Message delivered by Legobot, on behalf of Etriusus -- Etriusus (talk) 01:21, 3 January 2022 (UTC)

Tech News: 2022-02

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent changes

• A oauth_consumer variable has been added to the AbuseFilter to enable identifying changes made by specific tools. [1]
• Gadgets are now able to directly include JSON pages. This means some gadgets can now be configured by administrators without needing the interface administrator permission, such as with the Geonotice gadget. [2]
• Gadgets can now specify page actions on which they are available. For example, |actions=edit,history will load a gadget only while editing and on history pages. [3]
• Gadgets can now be loaded on demand with the withgadget URL parameter. This can be used to replace an earlier snippet that typically looks like withJS or withCSS. [4]
• At wikis where the Mentorship system is configured, you can now use the Action API to get a list of a mentor's mentees. [5]
• The heading on the main page can now be configured using MediaWiki:Mainpage-title-loggedin for logged-in users and MediaWiki:Mainpage-title for logged-out users. Any CSS that was previously used to hide the heading should be removed. [6] [7]
• Four special pages (and their API counterparts) now have a maximum database query execution time of 30 seconds. These special pages are: RecentChanges, Watchlist, Contributions, and Log. This change will help with site performance and stability. You can read more details about this change including some possible solutions if this affects your workflows. [8]
• The sticky header has been deployed for 50% of logged-in users on more than 10 wikis. This is part of the Desktop Improvements. See how to take part in the project.

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 11 January. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 12 January. It will be on all wikis from 13 January (calendar).

Events

• Community Wishlist Survey 2022 begins. All contributors to the Wikimedia projects can propose for tools and platform improvements. The proposal phase takes place from 10 January 18:00 UTC to 23 January 18:00 UTC. Learn more.

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

01:22, 11 January 2022 (UTC)

Draft:Deaths of anti-vaccine advocates from COVID-19

I think this draft is ready for mainspace, and based on your objection to list articles on this subject (which this is not), I would like your opinion as to whether you would find this objectionable to have as an article. There was a list in a previous version of the draft, but I have moved it to the talk page for now, to develop a specific consensus as to its inclusion. BD2412 T 02:40, 11 January 2022 (UTC)

Feedback request: Wikipedia style and naming request for comment

Your feedback is requested at Talk:Cow Tools on a "Wikipedia style and naming" request for comment. Thank you for helping out!
You were randomly selected to receive this invitation from the list of Feedback Request Service subscribers. If you'd like not to receive these messages any more, you can opt out at any time by removing your name.

Message delivered to you with love by Yapperbot :) | Is this wrong? Contact my bot operator. | Sent at 16:30, 11 January 2022 (UTC)

Your GA nomination of Island No. 2

Hi there, I'm pleased to inform you that I've begun reviewing the article Island No. 2 you nominated for GA-status according to the criteria. This process may take up to 7 days. Feel free to contact me with any questions or comments you might have during this period. Message delivered by Legobot, on behalf of Cerebellum -- Cerebellum (talk) 12:21, 13 January 2022 (UTC)

Your GA nomination of Atlas Tract

Hi there, I'm pleased to inform you that I've begun reviewing the article Atlas Tract you nominated for GA-status according to the criteria. This process may take up to 7 days. Feel free to contact me with any questions or comments you might have during this period. Message delivered by Legobot, on behalf of Bryanrutherford0 -- Bryanrutherford0 (talk) 16:01, 13 January 2022 (UTC)

Your GA nomination of Island No. 2

The article Island No. 2 you nominated as a good article has passed ; see Talk:Island No. 2 for comments about the article. Well done! If the article has not already appeared on the main page as a "Did you know" item, or as a bold link under "In the News" or in the "On This Day" prose section, you can nominate it within the next seven days to appear in DYK. Bolded names with dates listed at the bottom of the "On This Day" column do not affect DYK eligibility. Message delivered by Legobot, on behalf of Cerebellum -- Cerebellum (talk) 16:41, 13 January 2022 (UTC)

Skepticism and coordinated editing arbitration case opened

You recently offered a statement in a request for arbitration. The Arbitration Committee has accepted that request for arbitration and an arbitration case has been opened at Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Skepticism and coordinated editing. Evidence that you wish the arbitrators to consider should be added to the evidence subpage, at Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Skepticism and coordinated editing/Evidence. Please note: per Arbitration Policy, ArbCom is accepting private evidence by email. If in doubt, please email and ArbCom can advise you whether evidence should be public or private. Please add your evidence by January 31, 2022, which is when the evidence phase closes. You can also contribute to the case workshop subpage, Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Skepticism and coordinated editing/Workshop. For a guide to the arbitration process, see Wikipedia:Arbitration/Guide to arbitration. You may unsubscribe from further updates by removing your name from the case notification list.

For the Arbitration Committee, MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 02:33, 17 January 2022 (UTC)

Your GA nomination of Bull Island (California)

Hi there, I'm pleased to inform you that I've begun reviewing the article Bull Island (California) you nominated for GA-status according to the criteria. This process may take up to 7 days. Feel free to contact me with any questions or comments you might have during this period. Message delivered by Legobot, on behalf of AryKun -- AryKun (talk) 12:41, 17 January 2022 (UTC)

Tech News: 2022-03

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent changes

• When using WikiEditor (also known as the 2010 wikitext editor), people will now see a warning if they link to disambiguation pages. If you click "Review link" in the warning, it will ask you to correct the link to a more specific term. You can read more information about this completed 2021 Community Wishlist item.
• You can automatically subscribe to all of the talk page discussions that you start or comment in using DiscussionTools. You will receive notifications when another editor replies. This is available at most wikis. Go to your Preferences and turn on "Automatically subscribe to topics". [9]
• When asked to create a new page or talk page section, input fields can be "preloaded" with some text. This feature is now limited to wikitext pages. This is so users can't be tricked into making malicious edits. There is a discussion about if this feature should be re-enabled for some content types.

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 18 January. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 19 January. It will be on all wikis from 20 January (calendar).

Events

• Community Wishlist Survey 2022 continues. All contributors to the Wikimedia projects can propose for tools and platform improvements. The proposal phase takes place from 10 January 18:00 UTC to 23 January 18:00 UTC. Learn more.

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

19:53, 17 January 2022 (UTC)

Your GA nomination of Kimball Island

Hi there, I'm pleased to inform you that I've begun reviewing the article Kimball Island you nominated for GA-status according to the criteria. This process may take up to 7 days. Feel free to contact me with any questions or comments you might have during this period. Message delivered by Legobot, on behalf of Eviolite -- Eviolite (talk) 03:01, 18 January 2022 (UTC)

Your GA nomination of Joice Island

Hi there, I'm pleased to inform you that I've begun reviewing the article Joice Island you nominated for GA-status according to the criteria. This process may take up to 7 days. Feel free to contact me with any questions or comments you might have during this period. Message delivered by Legobot, on behalf of AryKun -- AryKun (talk) 14:21, 19 January 2022 (UTC)

"West Elm Caleb" listed at Redirects for discussion

An editor has identified a potential problem with the redirect West Elm Caleb and has thus listed it for discussion. This discussion will occur at Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion/Log/2022 January 24#West Elm Caleb until a consensus is reached, and anyone, including you, is welcome to contribute to the discussion. valereee (talk) 14:48, 24 January 2022 (UTC)

Tech News: 2022-04

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 25 January. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 26 January. It will be on all wikis from 27 January (calendar).
• The following languages can now be used with syntax highlighting: BDD, Elpi, LilyPond, Maxima, Rita, Savi, Sed, Sophia, Spice, .SRCINFO.
• You can now access your watchlist from outside of the user menu in the new Vector skin. The watchlist link appears next to the notification icons if you are at the top of the page. [10]

Events

• You can see the results of the Coolest Tool Award 2021 and learn more about 14 tools which were selected this year.
• You can translate, promote, or comment on the proposals in the Community Wishlist Survey. Voting will begin on 28 January.

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

21:37, 24 January 2022 (UTC)

Discretionary sanctions topic area changes

In a process that began last year with WP:DS2021, the Arbitration Committee is evaluating Discretionary Sanctions (DS) in order to improve it. A larger package of reforms is slated for sometime this year. From the work done so far, it became clear a number of areas may no longer need DS or that some DS areas may be overly broad.

The topics proposed for revocation are:

• Senkaku islands
• Waldorf education
• Ancient Egyptian race controversy
• Scientology
• Landmark worldwide

The topics proposed for a rewording of what is covered under DS are:

• India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan
• Armenia/Azerbaijan

Additionally any Article probation topics not already revoked are proposed for revocation.

Community feedback is invited and welcome at Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Motions. --Barkeep49 (talk) 16:59, 27 January 2022 (UTC)

No deletion report in the next issue of the Signpost?

Hi JPxG,

I was wondering if you were planning to publish another Deletion Report column in the Signpost in January. I really enjoy reading those, as an occasional contributor to AfD. Thank you for your great work on the Oracle by the way: I use it to comment on uncommented AfDs once in a while. Cheers, Pilaz (talk) 05:12, 29 January 2022 (UTC)

Yeah, I've learned to wait until the last day for those. Whenever I try to be diligent and get it done ahead of time, I end up having to re-write half of the feature anyway! I'm glad you are enjoying them -- you'll have something good this month. jp×g 05:35, 29 January 2022 (UTC)

The Signpost: 30 January 2022

• Special report: WikiEd course leads to Twitter harassment

• News and notes: Feedback for Board of Trustees election

• Interview: CEO Maryana Iskander "four weeks in"

• Black History Month: What are you doing for Black History Month?

• Deletion report: Ringing in the new year: Subject notability guideline under discussion

• WikiProject report: The Forgotten Featured

• Arbitration report: New arbitrators look at new case and antediluvian sanctions

• Traffic report: The most viewed articles of 2021

• Gallery: No Spanish municipality without a photograph

• Obituary: Twofingered Typist

• Op-Ed: Identifying and rooting out climate change denial

• Essay: The prime directive

• Opinion: Should the Wikimedia Foundation continue to accept cryptocurrency donations?

• In the media: Fuzzy-headed government editing

• Recent research: Articles with higher quality ratings have fewer "knowledge gaps"

• Serendipity: Pooh entered the Public Domain – but Tigger has to wait two more years

• Crossword: Cross swords with a crossword

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 20:20, 30 January 2022 (UTC)

Your GA nomination of Brewer Island

The article Brewer Island you nominated as a good article has passed ; see Talk:Brewer Island for comments about the article. Well done! If the article has not already appeared on the main page as a "Did you know" item, or as a bold link under "In the News" or in the "On This Day" prose section, you can nominate it within the next seven days to appear in DYK. Bolded names with dates listed at the bottom of the "On This Day" column do not affect DYK eligibility. Message delivered by Legobot, on behalf of Eviolite -- Eviolite (talk) 06:21, 16 January 2022 (UTC)

Tech News: 2022-05

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent changes

• If a gadget should support the new ?withgadget URL parameter that was announced 3 weeks ago, then it must now also specify supportsUrlLoad in the gadget definition (documentation). [11]

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 1 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 2 February. It will be on all wikis from 3 February (calendar).

Future changes

• A change that was announced last year was delayed. It is now ready to move ahead:
  • The user group oversight will be renamed suppress. This is for technical reasons. This is the technical name. It doesn't affect what you call the editors with this user right on your wiki. This is planned to happen in three weeks. You can comment in Phabricator if you have objections. As usual, these labels can be translated on translatewiki (direct links are available) or by administrators on your wiki.

Events

• You can vote on proposals in the Community Wishlist Survey between 28 January and 11 February. The survey decides what the Community Tech team will work on.

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

17:41, 31 January 2022 (UTC)

Page mover granted

Hello, JPxG. Your account has been granted the "extendedmover" user right, either following a request for it or demonstrating familiarity with working with article names and moving pages. You are now able to rename pages without leaving behind a redirect, move subpages when moving the parent page(s), and move category pages.

Please take a moment to review Wikipedia:Page mover for more information on this user right, especially the criteria for moving pages without leaving a redirect. Please remember to follow post-move cleanup procedures and make link corrections where necessary, including broken double-redirects when suppressredirect is used. This can be done using Special:WhatLinksHere. It is also very important that no one else be allowed to access your account, so you should consider taking a few moments to secure your password. As with all user rights, be aware that if abused, or used in controversial ways without consensus, your page mover status can be revoked.

Useful links:

• Wikipedia:Requested moves
• Category:Requested moves, for article renaming requests awaiting action.

If you do not want the page mover right anymore, just let me know, and I'll remove it. Thank you, and happy editing! Primefac (talk) 19:48, 31 January 2022 (UTC)

Your comment

Re systemic bias and what you said here. After some reflection, I could beef up that para into a contribution with a title like "Upstream and downstream: AfD and impact". For me downstream includes Wikidata and the machine audience, but that would be at most an aside about SNG. Charles Matthews (talk) 09:28, 1 February 2022 (UTC)

Bots Newsletter, January 2022

Bots Newsletter, January 2022

BRFA activity by month

Welcome to the ninth issue of the English Wikipedia's Bots Newsletter, your source for all things bot. Vicious bot-on-bot edit warring... superseded tasks... policy proposals... these stories, and more, are brought to you by Wikipedia's most distinguished newsletter about bots.

After a long hiatus between August 2019 and December 2021, there's quite a bit of ground to cover. Due to the vastness, I decided in December to split the coverage up into a few installments that covered six months each. Some people thought this was a good idea, since covering an entire year in a single issue would make it unmanageably large. Others thought this was stupid, since they were getting talk page messages about crap from almost three years ago. Ultimately, the question of whether each issue covers six months or a year is only relevant for a couple more of them, and then the problem will be behind us forever.

Of course, you can also look on the bright side – we are making progress, and this issue will only be about crap from almost two years ago. Today we will pick up where we left off in December, and go through the first half of 2020.

Overall
In the first half of 2020, there were 71 BRFAs. Of these, Y 59 were approved, and 12 were unsuccessful (with N2 8 denied, ? 2 withdrawn, and 2 expired).

January 2020

Yeah, you're not gonna be able to get away with this anymore.

• Y ST47Bot, Seppi333Bot, Qbugbot 4 · N2 PkbwcgsBot 25, PkbwcgsBot 26
• A new Pywikibot release dropped support for Python 3.4, and it was expected that support for Python 2.7 would be removed in coming updates. Toolforge itself planned to drop Python 2 support in 2022.
• Two new bots dropped in January 2020: ST47Bot, the successor to STBot, and Seppi333Bot, whose task was to perform a weekly update of four "massive" wikitables for WikiProject Molecular Biology.
• Cydebot, an adminbot operated by Cyde since 2006, was blocked after going berserk on categories that hadn't yet been CfD'd.

February 2020

Speaking of WikiProject Molecular Biology, Listeria went wild in February

• Y AnomieBOT 78, Cewbot 2, DannyS712 bot 67, DannyS712 bot III 63, PearBOT 6, DemonDays64 Bot 2 · N2 PearBOT
• On February 1, some concerns were raised about ListeriaBot performing "nonsense" edits. Semi-active operator Magnus Manske (who originally coded the Phase II software|precursor of MediaWiki) was pinged. Meanwhile, the bot was temporarily blocked for several hours until the issue was diagnosed and resolved.
• On February 18, ST47Bot got into a tussle with Amalthea (bot), and had to be partially-blocked from Wikipedia:Sockpuppet investigations/Cases/Overview.

March 2020

• Y MajavahBot, SDZeroBot, TheSandBot 6, TheSandBot 7, Bitbotje, FACBot 6, TheSandBot 8, Qbugbot 5, Cewbot 3, SDZeroBot 2, PrimeBOT 31, WikiCleanerBot 12 · AntiCompositeBot
• In March, a long discussion was started at Wikipedia talk:Bot policy by Skdb about the troubling trend of bots "expiring" without explanation after their owners became inactive. This can happen for a variety of reasons -- API changes break code, hosting providers' software updates break code, hosting accounts lapse, software changes make bots' edits unnecessary, and policy changes make bots' edits unwanted. The most promising solution seemed to be Toolforge hosting (although it has some problems of its own, like the occasional necessity of refactoring code).
• Some of the twelve bot tasks approved this month were TheSandBot 6 (removing blocked users from Category:Wikipedia usernames with possible policy issues), and TheSandBot 7 (removing unblocked users from Category:Wikipedians who are indefinitely blocked for promotional user names). SDZeroBot 2 was approved to refine geographic stub tags. New bots approved this month were MajavahBot (to patrol WP:EFFPR), SDZeroBot (to merge stub tags), and Bitbotje (fixing DISPLAYTITLE modifications, DEFAULTSORT errors and broken behavior switches in draftspace).

April 2020

Listeria being examined

• Y TheSandBot 9, BHGbot 5, DannyS712 bot 69, SDZeroBot 3, ST47ProxyBot, WugBot 4, SDZeroBot 4, DatBot 10, WikiCleanerBot 11, WikiCleanerBot 13, WikiCleanerBot 14, AntiCompositeBot 2, Cewbot 4 · N2 DaedanBot 1 · Creffbot
• A discussion on the bot noticeboard, "Re-examination of ListeriaBot", was started by Barkeep49, who pointed out repeated operation outside the scope of its BRFA (i.e. editing pages in mainspace, and adding non-free images to others). Some said it was doing good work, and others said it was operating beyond its remit. It was blocked on April 10; the next day it was unblocked, reblocked from article space, reblocked "for specified non-editing actions", unblocked, and indeffed. The next week, several safeguards were implemented in its code by Magnus; the bot was allowed to roam free once more on April 18.
• ST47ProxyBot joined the stable in April, after a BRFA started in December was finally completed. As an adminbot, it was authorized to block IP addresses belonging to open proxies, public VPN services, and web hosts. New tasks approved for existing bots included BHGbot 5 (diffusing categories), TheSandBot 9 (taking over some tasks from the inactive RonBot), and WugBot 4 (updating data at {{Interactive COVID-19 maps}}). Also, DatBot 10 was approved to scale down non-free SVGs — I didn't even know that was a thing.
• A discussion at Wikipedia talk:Bot policy was started by Thryduulf about whether WP:BOTCOMM should explicitly specify that bot operators must be responsive to concerns raised on English Wikipedia specifically (as opposed to Phabricator, SourceForge, Toolforge, et cetera). Eventually, the policy was amended to its current form:

Issues and enquiries are typically expected to be handled on the English Wikipedia. Pages reachable via unified login, like a talk page at Commons or at Italian Wikipedia could also be acceptable [...] External sites like Phabricator or GitHub (which require separate registration or do not allow for IP comments) and email (which can compromise anonymity) can supplement on-wiki communication, but do not replace it.

May 2020

We heard you like bots, so we made a bot that reports the status of your bots, so now you can use bots while you use bots

• Y MajavahBot 3, DannyS712 bot 70, CitationCleanerBot 5, Dreamy Jazz Bot 4, QEDKbot, William Avery Bot 2, DannyS712 bot 68, PrimeBOT 32, TheSandBot 10, Bot1058 7, BHGbot 6, EaglesBot 2, Cewbot 5, WikiCleanerBot 17 · N2 MDanielsBot, PhuzBot 3, Gedimon · ? PearBOT 7
• MajavahBot 3, an impressively meta bot task, was approved this month for maintaining a list of bots running on the English Wikipedia. The page, located at User:MajavahBot/Bot status report, is updated every 24 hours; it contains a list of all accounts with the bot flag, as well as their operator, edit count, last activity date, last edit date, last logged action date, user groups and block status.
• Other approvals for this month were William Avery Bot 2 (processing redirects in {{R from scientific name}}), DannyS712 bot 68 (allowing users to schedule bot reminders for themselves), TheSandBot 10 (removing blocked/locked users from Category:User talk pages with conflict of interest notices), Bot1058 7 (updating Wikipedia:Requested moves/Technical requests/Permalink), Dreamy Jazz Bot 4 (adding {{WikiProject Biography|living=no}} to talk pages where their associated article is in a year of death category), and QEDKbot (deleting and nominating empty categories).
• General syntax fixing tasks were approved for DannyS712 bot 70, CitationCleanerBot 5, PrimeBOT 32, BHGbot 6, Cewbot 5, and EaglesBot 2, as well as WikiCleanerBot 15, 16, and 17.
• Seven bots who fell below activity requirements (with neither the bots nor their operators having any edits or logged actions in two years) had their bot flags removed. They were NekoBot, Robert SkyBot, DASHBotAV, VoxelBot, JackieBot, ReferenceBot, and CensusBot.
• On May 12, EmausBot was blocked.

June 2020

A partial block averted at the eleventh hour for the robot that makes Legos

• Y QEDKbot 2, AnomieBOT 79, WOSlinkerBot 6, Yapperbot 2, Yapperbot, AnomieBOT 80, Dreamy Jazz Bot 5, WikiCleanerBot 18, HasteurBot 15, MusikBot II 4, NoSandboxesHere · N2 RedWarn · ? Seppi333Bot 2
• In July 2017, Headbomb made a proposal that a section of the Wikipedia:Dashboard be devoted to bots and technical issues. In November 2019, Lua code was written superseding Legobot's tasks on that page, and operator Legoktm was asked to stop them so that the new code could be deployed. After no response to pings, a partial-block of Legobot for the dashboard was proposed. Some months later, on June 16, Headbomb said: "A full block serves nothing. A partial block solves all current issues [...] Just fucking do it. It's been 3 years now." The next day, however, Legoktm disabled the task, and the dashboard was successfully refactored.
• On June 7, RexxS blocked Citation bot for disruptive editing, saying it was "still removing links after request to stop". A couple weeks later, a discussion on the bots noticeboard was opened, saying "it is a widely-used and useful bot, but it has one of the longest block logs for any recently-operating bot on Wikipedia". While its last BRFA approval was in 2011, its code and functionality had changed dramatically since then, and AntiCompositeNumber requested that BAG require a new BRFA. Maintainer AManWithNoPlan responded that most blocks were from years ago (when it lacked a proper test suite), and problems since then had mostly been one-off errors (like a June 2019 incident in which a LTA had "weaponized" the bot to harass editors).
• David Tornheim opened a discussion about whether bots based on closed-source code should be permitted, and proposed that they not. He cited a recent case in which a maintainer had said "I can only suppose that the code that is available on GitHub is not the actual code that was running on [the bot]". Some disagreed: Naypta said that "I like free software as much as the next person, and I strongly believe that bot operators should make their bot code public, but I don't think it should be that they must do so".
• Two new bots had their first BRFAs approved: Yapperbot, to replace Legobot for handling the Feedback Request Service, and NoSandboxesHere, to remove {{user sandbox}} from articles in draftspace using Category:Non-userspace pages using User sandbox.

Conclusion

• What's next for our intrepid band of coders, maintainers and approvers?

• Will Citation bot ever be set free to roam the project?
• What's the deal with all those book links that InternetArchiveBot is adding to articles?
• Should we keep using Gerrit for MediaWiki?
• What if we had a day for bots to make cosmetic edits?

These questions will be answered — and new questions raised — by the February 2022 Bots Newsletter. Tune in, or miss out!

Signing off... jp×g 23:22, 31 January 2022 (UTC)

---

(You can subscribe or unsubscribe from future newsletters by adding or removing your name from this list.)

I hate to break it to you, but lots of these dates say 2020? :D ·addshore· ^{talk to me!} 23:30, 31 January 2022 (UTC)

Oh my, wait, this is intended! this is indeed news from 2020! Wow! :) ·addshore· ^{talk to me!} 23:32, 31 January 2022 (UTC)

@Addshore: Yeah, there wasn't a newsletter for a few years. There should only be a couple more of these before we're up to the present day, and then it'll be back to breaking news ;) jp×g 23:35, 31 January 2022 (UTC)

I just saw the bot newsletter on another user talk page and wanted to come over to say it certainly caught my attention! I can't say whether the idea of doing several historical installments of the "news"letter is a great idea or a dumb idea but it's definitely got spunk :). Cheers! KevinL (aka L235 · t · c) 07:45, 1 February 2022 (UTC)

I quite enjoyed this entry "Cydebot, an adminbot operated by Cyde since 2006, was blocked after going berserk on categories" ·addshore· ^{talk to me!} 15:50, 1 February 2022 (UTC)

Barnstar for you!

		The Barnstar of Good Humor
		" I'm a bizarre nerd now, and I was also a bizarre nerd when I was 15." - Not only did your post crack me up, but I can totally relate. (And you sprinkle good humour about Wikipedia, not just this one comment.) Mark D Worthen PsyD (talk) [he/him] 17:31, 1 February 2022 (UTC)

Mark D Worthen PsyD (talk) [he/him] 17:31, 1 February 2022 (UTC)

Mass message sender granted

Hello. Your account has been granted the "massmessage-sender" user right, allowing you to send messages to multiple users at once. A few important things to note:

• Messages should only be sent to groups of users who are likely to be interested in the topic.
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Books & Bytes – Issue 48

The Wikipedia Library

Books & Bytes
Issue 48, November – December 2021

• 1Lib1Ref 2022
• Wikipedia Library notifications deployed

Read the full newsletter

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery on behalf of The Wikipedia Library team --15:12, 2 February 2022 (UTC)

Comment measurement tool for The Signpost

You made this

• User:JPxG/Largest Signpost comment sections

These are great metrics for understanding The Signpost. Do you have ideas for where and how in documentation for The Signpost we can share this link? Is it already there somewhere? If you have no ideas, I will try to find a place. Thanks. Bluerasberry (talk) 17:40, 2 February 2022 (UTC)

@Bluerasberry: No, but I think it would be good to link to from somewhere. Or the Quarry query itself, which will stay up-to-date better than a page which has to be updated manually. jp×g 22:40, 21 June 2022 (UTC)