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Talk to us about talking

The Wikimedia Foundation is planning a global consultation about communication. The goal is to bring Wikimedians and wiki-minded people together to improve tools for communication.

We want all contributors to be able to talk to each other on the wikis, whatever their experience, their skills or their devices.

We are looking for input from as many different parts of the Wikimedia community as possible. It will come from multiple projects, in multiple languages, and with multiple perspectives.

We are currently planning the consultation. We need your help.

We need volunteers to help talk to their communities or user groups.

You can help by hosting a discussion at your wiki. Here's what to do:

1. First, sign up your group here.
2. Next, create a page (or a section on a Village pump, or an e-mail thread – whatever is natural for your group) to collect information from other people in your group. This is not a vote or decision-making discussion: we are just collecting feedback.
3. Then ask people what they think about communication processes. We want to hear stories and other information about how people communicate with each other on and off wiki. Please consider asking these five questions:
   1. When you want to discuss a topic with your community, what tools work for you, and what problems block you?
   2. What about talk pages works for newcomers, and what blocks them?
   3. What do others struggle with in your community about talk pages?
   4. What do you wish you could do on talk pages, but can't due to the technical limitations?
   5. What are the important aspects of a "wiki discussion"?
4. Finally, please go to Talk pages consultation 2019 on Mediawiki.org and report what you learned from your group. Please include links if the discussion is available to the public.

You can also help build the list of the many different ways people talk to each other.

Not all groups active on wikis or around wikis use the same way to discuss things: it can happen on wiki, on social networks, through external tools... Tell us how your group communicates.

You can read more about the overall process on mediawiki.org. If you have questions or ideas, you can leave feedback about the consultation process in the language you prefer.

Thank you! We're looking forward to talking with you.

Trizek (WMF) 15:08, 21 February 2019 (UTC)

Tech News: 2019-11

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

• Pages can use geocoordinates from Wikidata with the mw.wikibase.entity:formatStatements Lua function or the #statements parser function. If they do, they will now be shown using a Kartographer <maplink> if the wiki can use Kartographer. You can report bugs or ask questions on Phabricator.
• There is now an EventStream to see when links are added or removed on Wikimedia wikis. You can read the discussions and plans.

Problems

• Some wikis will not be able to edit for a short period of time on 19 March (UTC). This will start at 15:00 UTC. It will last up to 15 minutes but probably shorter. You can see the list of affected wikis. This is because of network maintenance. You can still read the wikis.
• Editors who use Firefox to edit with the visual editor had a problem with copying text. When they tried to select text that included footnotes, templates or block images in the middle they would often only get part of the text. This has now been fixed. [1]
• Some maps didn't work for a while on 8 March. This has been fixed. [2][3]

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 12 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 13 March. It will be on all wikis from 14 March (calendar).

Meetings

• You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 13 March at 16:00 (UTC). See how to join.

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

19:29, 11 March 2019 (UTC)

NPR Newsletter No.17

Hello PaleoNeonate,

News

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

Discussions of interest

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

Reminders

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

NPP Tools Report

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

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

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

Tech News: 2019-12

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

• When you use rollback you will be able to get a confirmation prompt on most wikis. It asks you if you wanted to do the rollback. This is to avoid misclicks. You will have to opt in to get it. On German Wikipedia it will be an opt-out feature from 28 March. [4][5]
• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 19 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 20 March. It will be on all wikis from 21 March (calendar).

Meetings

• You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 20 March at 16:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• Admins will be able to block someone from editing a page or a namespace. This already works on a few Wikimedia wikis. You can read more. If your wiki wants to be an early tester of this, you can tell the developers. [6]
• Toolforge will shut down the Ubuntu Trusty job grid. This will happen the week of 25 March. Tools that use this grid needs to be moved to the new Debian Stretch job grid. If they haven't, they will be taken offline. Maintainers can restart the tools later. Users may not be able to use them in the meanwhile. You can see a list of affected tools.

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

19:44, 18 March 2019 (UTC)

Tech News: 2019-13

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

• The new version of the content translation tool will be used for all new translations. The older version will still be used for translations that were started with it. Most users won’t see any change. More than 80% of the published translations are already using the new version. [7]

Problems

• There was a problem with editing with Safari on iOS. When you wrote an edit summary you couldn't save the edit. This has now been fixed. [8]
• The editing toolbar sometimes disappears when you scroll on iOS devices. This will be fixed soon. [9]
• Wikis can over-ride interface messages on-wiki. A problem meant that sometimes an old versions of any changed messages were shown instead. This included the sitenotice and other important parts of the interface. This was fixed at around 2019-03-22 16:00 (UTC). Logged-out users may still get the wrong message. Purging the page should fix it for them. [10]

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 26 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 27 March. It will be on all wikis from 28 March (calendar).

Meetings

• You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 27 March at 16:00 (UTC). See how to join.

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

18:05, 25 March 2019 (UTC)

Tech News: 2019-14

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

• Notifications tell you about things that happen on the wiki. You can turn on notifications about new links to pages you created. For performance reasons you can no longer get e-mails about this. [11]
• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 2 April. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 3 April. It will be on all wikis from 4 April (calendar).

Meetings

• You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 3 April at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.

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

16:29, 1 April 2019 (UTC)

Tech News: 2019-15

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

• More wikis are now testing visual editor section editing for mobile users. You can read more.
• Admins on French and Polish Wikipedia can block someone from editing a page or a namespace. If your wiki wants to get these blocks before they are available to all wikis, you can tell the developers. [12][13]

Problems

• You will be able read but not edit most wikis for 30 minutes on 11 April at 05:00 (UTC). This is because of a hardware problem. You can see a list of the affected wikis. [14]
• A map update caused some problems on 29 March and 30 March. It was rolled back. [15]
• Pages on some Wikivoyages had problems with the top headline. This has been fixed. [16]

Changes later this week

• When you add an edit summary the VisualEditor will search your recent edit summaries in case you want to re-use one. This works in both the visual and wikitext modes on desktop. It also works on the mobile site. [17]
• The Wikimedia wikis will get a URL shortener. This will work from 11 April. You can read more. [18]
• The {{REVISIONID}} magic word will no longer work. This is for performance reasons. When you preview a page it will return "" (empty string). When you read a page it will return "-" (dash). For now this will only affect content namespaces. [19]
• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 9 April. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 10 April. It will be on all wikis from 11 April (calendar).

Meetings

• You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 10 April at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• You will be able to preview references. This means that when you hover over the link you will get a popup that shows you a preview of the reference. It will work much like page previews. This is so you don't have to go to the bottom of the page to see a reference. This will now be available as a beta feature on German and Arabic Wikipedia. [20][21]
• The Wikidata JSON output will change. Empty containers will be serialised as empty objects. This is a breaking change that will affect tools that use JSON outputs and APIs. It will happen on 30 April. You can read more and see how to test your code.

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

18:24, 8 April 2019 (UTC)

Tech News: 2019-16

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

• All wikis now have the TemplateWizard for the wikitext editor.

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 16 April. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 17 April. It will be on all wikis from 18 April (calendar).

Meetings

• You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 17 April at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• Wikidata will get a new constraint status called suggestion. This will change how the WikibaseQualityConstraints constraint checking API works. [22][23]
• You can test the depicts property for structured data on Commons.

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

23:00, 15 April 2019 (UTC)

Tech News: 2019-17

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

• The advanced search function URL now shows which namespaces you search in. The namespace field is collapsed by default on the search page. You can also add new fields to the search interface through a hook. [24][25][26]
• The wikis now look slightly different in the mobile web version. [27]

Changes later this week

• There is no new MediaWiki version this week.

Meetings

• You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 23 April at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• Wikipedia articles will have the sameAs meta property. It adds structured data. This makes it easier for search engines to find Wikipedia articles. It also makes it easier to reuse content. There will an A/B test. [28][29]

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

19:08, 23 April 2019 (UTC)

Nomination for merging of Template:Deletion mention

Template:Deletion mention has been nominated for merging with Template:Notified. You are invited to comment on the discussion at the template's entry on the Templates for discussion page. Thank you.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  21:50, 23 April 2019 (UTC)

Tech News: 2019-18

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

• The Wikipedia app for Android now invites users to add Wikidata descriptions to Wikidata objects that have Wikipedia articles but no Wikidata descriptions. It will only invite users who have added a number of Wikidata descriptions in the app without being reverted. This is to avoid spam and bad edits. [30][31]

Problems

• Tech News was late last week because of a MassMessage bug. Other newsletters had the same problem. [32]

Changes later this week

• You will see when you last refreshed the recent changes page. This is so you can see how recent the changes are. [33]
• When you write a comment in Structured Discussions but have not posted it yet your web browser will save it in local storage instead of session storage. This means you do not lose them even if you close your web browser. Structured Discussions used to be called Flow. [34]
• You will be able to turn off milestone notifications. Milestone notifications congratulate you when you have made certain numbers of edits. [35]
• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 30 April. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 1 May. It will be on all wikis from 2 May (calendar).

Meetings

• You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 1 May at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• The Wikidata wb_terms table will be dropped. This will affect some Wikidata tools. They need to be updated. The table has become too big which is causing problems. This will happen on 29 May. You can read more. You can ask for help if you need it.
• Wikimedia wikis will soon use a token when you log out. This changes how the API works. Some tools might need to be updated. [36]

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

22:27, 29 April 2019 (UTC)

Tech News: 2019-19

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

Problems

• Special:Watchlist can show the wrong information. It does not always show which edits are read and which are unread. The developers are working on solving the problem. [37]

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 7 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 8 May. It will be on all wikis from 9 May (calendar).

Meetings

• You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 8 May at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.

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

16:27, 6 May 2019 (UTC)

Tech News: 2019-20

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 14 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 15 May. It will be on all wikis from 16 May (calendar).

Meetings

• You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 15 May at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.

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

00:48, 14 May 2019 (UTC)

AfD - Names and Titles of God in the New Testament

Names and titles of God in the New Testament has been nominated for deletion. As this is an article you may have an interest in, you are invited to comment at [38]. PiCo (talk) 08:59, 16 May 2019 (UTC)

@PiCo: Thanks for the notice, this also allowed me to see two small technical issues with the AfD and correct them (Special:Diff/897334663 (using {{subst:afd2}} to produce the header) and Special:Diff/897334693 to fix the transclusion of the page). —PaleoNeonate – 10:37, 16 May 2019 (UTC)

Thanks. I'm not very familiar with this sort of thing :) PiCo (talk) 10:47, 16 May 2019 (UTC)

NPR Newsletter No.18

Hello PaleoNeonate,

WMF at work on NPP Improvements

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

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

Reliable Sources for NPP

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

Backlog drive coming soon

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

News

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

Discussions of interest

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

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

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Delivered by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) on behalf of DannyS712 (talk) at 19:17, 17 May 2019 (UTC)

Tech News: 2019-21

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

• The report for phase 1 of the talk pages consultation 2019 has been published. Communities are invited to start phase 2 of the consultation on their wikis.

Problems

• File descriptions for files from Commons were not shown properly on other Wikimedia wikis for a few days. For example the image descriptions and license information were missing. This has now been fixed. [39][40]
• Some diffs show an error message when you try to see them. The developers are working on fixing it. It could be because of some edit comments. [41][42]

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 21 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 22 May. It will be on all wikis from 23 May (calendar).

Meetings

• You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 22 May at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• The content translation tool on Wikipedia can use machine translations. There is a system to stop translations where the editors do not fix machine translation mistakes. This warns or stops them if they seem to just copy what the machine translation gives them. If this system is too strict or not strict enough you can tell the language team. [43]
• The Wikidata wbeditentity API endpoint will remove all aliases if the request includes an empty alias. This is how it supposed to work. It has not been working this way because of a bug. This will start on 12 June. [44]

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

13:04, 20 May 2019 (UTC)

Thanks

I still haven't found time and won't today, but I plan to edit Tall el-Hammam to somehow make it clear that the two Universities are inerrantist and that Collins works there. Right now I think that the article is not giving its readers the context they need. There's another issue - some peer reviewed journals simply get it wrong and let stuff through that they shouldn't. Case in point the recent so-called translation of the Voynich Manuscript. ~Off to a food festival in a few minutes in Sheffield where I shall consume too many calories while at the same time regretting not consuming more. Doug Weller talk 07:54, 25 May 2019 (UTC)

Good idea, I've not looked at all yet but there likely are decent sources about the school... Bon appetit, —PaleoNeonate – 09:41, 25 May 2019 (UTC)

Archives for Book of Joshua

Could you also add an archives for Book of Joshua? I'm not an admin and don't want to touch it. PiCo (talk) 12:10, 26 May 2019 (UTC)

@PiCo: good idea, the page is rather lengthy. I configured it for auto-archival, the bot should soon start archiving threads older than 90 days (I'm not an administrator either, BTW). —PaleoNeonate – 12:32, 26 May 2019 (UTC)

File:Artist impression of European Data Relay Satellite (EDRS) system.tif

Hi, I'm RonBot, a script that checks new non-free file uploads. I have found that the subject image that you recently uploaded was more than 5% in excess of the Non-free content guideline size of 100,000 pixels. I have tagged the image for a standard reduction, which (for jpg/gif/png/svg files) normally happens within a day. Please check the reduced image, and make sure that the image is not excessively corrupted. Other files will be added to Category:Wikipedia non-free file size reduction requests for manual processing. There is a full seven-day period before the original oversized image will be hidden; during that time you might want to consider editing the original image yourself (perhaps an initial crop to allow a smaller reduction or none at all). A formula for the calculation of the desired size can be found at WP:Image resolution, along with instructions on how to tag the image in the rare cases that it requires an oversized image (typically about 0.2% of non-free uploads are tagged as necessarily oversized). Please contact the bot owner if you have any questions, or you can ask them at Wikipedia talk:Non-free content. See User:RonBot for info on how to not get these messages. RonBot (talk) 17:59, 2 March 2019 (UTC)

Tech News: 2019-22

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

• Big changes to the replica database will happen on 3 June. Some tools on Cloud Services will stop working if the maintainers do not update them to use the new schema. This probably affects tools that query for revisions or log entries made by a user. [45][46]
• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 28 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 29 May. It will be on all wikis from 30 May (calendar).

Meetings

• You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 29 May at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.

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

15:33, 27 May 2019 (UTC)

LTA

Still thinking about this. I found one where they used normal citation style. I think it's a duck, not quite sure yet. Sorry. I forgot it about it and didn't have enough time, and I'm through doing the tricky stuff for the day. Doug Weller talk 18:02, 26 May 2019 (UTC)

True, also interesting were more typos or grammar issues than usual and some copy-pasting of some "hidden" template. The similarity is still striking... —PaleoNeonate – 21:11, 26 May 2019 (UTC)

Another plausible one may be ShortyTUdall (matching topic areas, resuming work of previous on some pages, and edit summaries) —PaleoNeonate – 00:55, 27 May 2019 (UTC)

Possibly, but I see the SPI blocked him and one other. I agree with Bbb23's comments. Now to revert! Doug Weller talk 10:03, 27 May 2019 (UTC)

Indeed. I could help with the reverts but probably not until tomorrow. —PaleoNeonate – 10:08, 27 May 2019 (UTC)

Actually ShortyTUdall's copyright violations would be unusual for this LTA. One useful thing in searching article history for socks is to use a script that shows you blocked editors. See Wikipedia:User scripts/List. Doug Weller talk 10:09, 27 May 2019 (UTC)

I used to use a script to see who was blocked, but a variety of bugs involving scripts with my custom software setup made me disable JS support completely in the browser instance I use for WP (but it's my problem, I admit). On the other hand, even relatively recently a serious Wikimedia vulnerability was fixed which could have allowed a malicious user to run custom scripts in user browsers, so that could not have affected me if it was exploited. —PaleoNeonate – 10:14, 27 May 2019 (UTC)

About the copyvios, that's possible, however I did see that as part of a pattern when going through the SPI history to learn more (but I didn't compare the sources that were copied). Maybe only in relation to old accounts... —PaleoNeonate – 10:18, 27 May 2019 (UTC)

I just noticed that I still had a busy template at the top that I now removed, I think I'll be around tomorrow and start helping with the reverts. Thanks for the support, —PaleoNeonate – 10:32, 27 May 2019 (UTC)

Done for both blocked socks but not for unconfirmed ShortyTUdall, except that I did remove what I found too obvious from one article. —PaleoNeonate – 08:00, 28 May 2019 (UTC)

Tech News: 2019-23

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

• You can now write all special letters in all African Wikipedia languages. This works in the desktop version. [47]
• There is now a field called depicts on Commons. This is a way to show what is in a picture with the help of Wikidata. It is still in development. [48]
• Some tools on Toolforge may break on or after 3 June because of database changes. Maintainers should update their tools to use the new schema. [49][50]

Problems

• You will be able to read but not to edit Wikimedia Commons for 30 minutes on 19 June at 05:00 (UTC). This is to fix a hardware problem. [51]

Changes later this week

• Some wikis have one tab for the visual editor and one tab for a wikitext editor. Others wikis just have one tab. If your wiki has two tabs, clicking a link to create a new page has always opened a wikitext editor. It will now open the editor you used the last time you edited. [52]
• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 4 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 5 May. It will be on all wikis from 6 May (calendar).

Meetings

• You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 5 May at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.

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

15:24, 3 June 2019 (UTC)

Edit at Sources and parallels of the Exodus

Please excuse my deletion. It was a mistake. Editor2020 (talk) 03:24, 4 June 2019 (UTC)

@Editor2020: Yes, that was obvious, not a problem, thanks for the concern. —PaleoNeonate – 03:45, 4 June 2019 (UTC)

Tech News: 2019-24

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 you create a PDF from a page on the wiki this is now done by Proton. Before this we used Electron. It should look the same but work better. Both use Chromium. This is a different system from when you collect several articles into a book and make a PDF from them. [53][54]
• The Flagged Revisions extension now uses the standard OOUI icons. There will be additional minor fixes for positioning in the next deployment. [55]
• Bots and other scripts that do not set an identifiable User-Agent may find their requests strictly rate-limited until they identify themselves properly. [56]

Problems

• Please check if the Flagged Revisions configuration on your wiki is as you expect (or as it was a few weeks ago). If not, please report it. [57]

Changes later this week

• There is no new MediaWiki version this week.

Meetings

• You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 12 June at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.

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

17:06, 10 June 2019 (UTC)

Probably a basic Wiki question

I got a notice that my User:Squatch347 page had been reviewed. I haven't seen that kind of notice before, I'm just curious what it means. Is there a policy or process or something I should be aware of? Thanks Squatch347 (talk) 15:42, 11 June 2019 (UTC)

Hello Squatch347. If you look at "view user groups" in the left navigation bar, users have various "rights" (some are automatic after a certain number of edits, others can be added by administrators) (WP:PERM for more information). The New page reviewer one is what permits to mark new pages as patrolled. When new pages are created (except by users with the Autopatrolled right), they go in a queue for new page patrollers to review them. Just like new change patrolling, it's a task for which more volunteers are always needed (and maybe something you may want to try too eventually). I hope this answers your question, —PaleoNeonate – 15:55, 11 June 2019 (UTC)

Oh, that makes total sense. I knew that was the case for normal page creation, but it never occured to me that user pages fell into that category as well. It of course makes sense that they would given that the content is still searchable and we don't want user pages to turn into a weird version of geocities, presumably. Thanks for the info! Squatch347 (talk) 16:02, 11 June 2019 (UTC)

@Squatch347: You're welcome (I ping again since I don't know if you added this page to your watchlist). User-space pages are not indexed by search engines by default, however there's indeed the possibility that search engines not observing the robots.txt protocol could cache them. It's also possible to explicitly specify that a page can be indexed (something that some editors like me wish was not technically possible, but there was no consensus to prevent this). Other than for search engines, Wikipedia is also not a personal web hosting service but it's common for people or companies to use user pages for advertising, trolling or even for libel (and if they want, they can link to those pages from other websites), etc... —PaleoNeonate – 16:11, 11 June 2019 (UTC)

Don't worry about pinging me, doesn't bother me at all. Yeah, I think I can side with you about not letting editors decide if their pages are indexed, that seems a high risk, low reward feature (sorry I'm a product manager, so I tend to approach things in those terms). Squatch347 (talk) 16:22, 11 June 2019 (UTC)

Reflists on my talk page

Hi there. I saw that you decided to add reflists to sections of my talk page. Could you tell me why you decided to do that? I don't see how it's necessary. Thx bud😀 GOLDIEM J (talk) 16:47, 11 June 2019 (UTC)

@GOLDIEM J: It's possible that you don't see them, it could be due to your preferences. Without them, when looking at your talk page I saw a list of citations at the very bottom (with confusion about which belonged where). With {{reflist-talk}}, those can be shown on the thread where they belong and if you archive the threads they will also look fine. It's your user talk page and you can remove them (revert me) if for some reason you find them annoying. —PaleoNeonate – 16:54, 11 June 2019 (UTC)

Thx. Just don't see the point of them being there. GOLDIEM J (talk) 16:58, 11 June 2019 (UTC)

How I proposed delete living biography

Because this biography have many wrong information for people who live. I would create this article in soon, for right information, useful for people and my country, but I need time pick up and research.

Thank you very much — Preceding unsigned comment added by Yosakrai (talk • contribs) 17:54, 12 June 2019 (UTC)

@Yosakrai: The article is unlikely to get deleted, but the proper process would be via WP:AFD. If the subject is notable (and he appears to be well known), the consensus of the deletion discussion will most probably be to keep the article. —PaleoNeonate – 17:58, 12 June 2019 (UTC)

Tech News: 2019-25

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

Problems

• You will be able to read but not to edit Wikimedia Commons for 30 minutes on 19 June at 05:00 (UTC). This is to fix a hardware problem. [58]

Changes later this week

• MIDI files can soon be played without the Score extension. You can then add them with [[File:Filename.midi]]. Later override_midi and override_audio will stop working. Instead you will need to add the MIDI file below the music score. [59]
• A new video player will soon replace the old one. You will be able to enable it as a beta feature in your preferences. It will later be enabled for everyone if there are no big problems. [60]
• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 18 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 19 June. It will be on all wikis from 20 June (calendar).

Meetings

• You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 19 June at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• Some gadgets and user scripts still use the old wgEnableAPI and wgEnableWriteAPI values. These values are always true. They will soon be removed. This might break the gadgets and scripts. You should fix your gadgets to not use these values. [61]

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

20:37, 17 June 2019 (UTC)

History of Jews in Italy and related topics

I can add "looking up refs" to the long-term to-do list, I suppose, but the other reason I'm not rushing to revert the over-tagging back out again is the involved editor is picking fights indiscriminately, and has, at best, a loose grasp of WP:COPYVIO - so I don't anticipate they'll be a long-term contributor to the project. Simonm223 (talk) 12:45, 17 June 2019 (UTC)

I can't say that I've investigated but I had the impression of an interaction conflict between you two. But I also had to warn that user recently; I'm trying to deescalate conflict and to avoid proxying in between as possible. This may be apparent and I'm sorry not to be able to do more. I could have reverted the tags, but considering that those sentences did lack inline citations and thus may be rightfully challenged, I consider tags better than sentence pruning. An alternative could also have been a larger section or article-wide tag, of course. It's a topic I don't really edit, so what I currently have are only old books read long ago. Interactions at articles can and will happen even if there's no hounding intention; maybe keep note of those so that if needing to report, you'll have ready evidence... Thanks for the message, —PaleoNeonate – 13:06, 17 June 2019 (UTC)

Yeah, they popped up on like four different pages on my watchlist and it was a troubling pattern on all of them. Nothing I haven't seen a million times over with my watchlist being dominated, as it is, by articles about 20th century fringe political movements (I mean, I think I watch more pages on medieval Chinese history, but those pages are so anodyne they never go up on my watchlist. Except for that one time with the editor who got a bee in their bonnet about marriage practices in the Han banners in the early Qing...) Simonm223 (talk) 13:13, 17 June 2019 (UTC)

I might have to eat my hat on the comment about medieval Chinese history - Emperor Gaozu is getting attention today. LOL Simonm223 (talk) 19:21, 18 June 2019 (UTC)

Oh, of Tang (I also noticed of Han)... I know a young girl who knows more about that than I do (daughter of a colleague computer science professor); my knowledge about Chinese emperors is mostly restricted to the mythology in martial arts movies. —PaleoNeonate – 21:32, 18 June 2019 (UTC)

Thanks for the welcome.

I've been editing Wikipedia since 2004. So I'm not really a newb. But thanks for making me feel welcome. 50.47.109.91 (talk) 00:26, 21 June 2019 (UTC)

My pleasure, happy editing, —PaleoNeonate – 00:44, 21 June 2019 (UTC)

Blanking

Hi! You posted a message at my talk page about blanking. I am confused. What did I allegedly blank? Thanks. Lars Frierson (talk) 05:34, 23 June 2019 (UTC)

Hello Lars Frierson. It was about a message you reposted at Grayfell's talk page, that they blanked. —PaleoNeonate – 05:39, 23 June 2019 (UTC)

Got it, thanks. It seems that I violated talk page etiquette. I am learning and apologize. Lars Frierson (talk) 05:48, 23 June 2019 (UTC)

@Lars Frierson: You're welcome; I see you're already in discussion at the article's talk page, which is excellent. Happy editing, —PaleoNeonate – 06:04, 23 June 2019 (UTC)

Sorry

One misclick turned into two. :( – Muboshgu (talk) 00:18, 24 June 2019 (UTC)

@Muboshgu: That happens. Thanks for patrolling, —PaleoNeonate – 01:04, 24 June 2019 (UTC)

Tech News: 2019-26

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

Problems

• The new version of MediaWiki for last week was not fully released due to issues. It was removed from most wikis on Tuesday and from test wikis on Thursday. [62]
• Most wikis were slow and then briefly read-only last week due to one of the database servers having a problem. It is now replaced. [63]

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 25 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 26 June. It will be on all wikis from 27 June (calendar).

Meetings

• You can watch or join the next Wikimedia Language showcase. It will be about the usage of Machine Translation in Wikimedia projects. The showcase will be on 26 June at 13:00 (UTC). A recording will be kept for later viewing
• You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 26 June at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.

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

17:29, 24 June 2019 (UTC)

sciencehook.com

This is regarding your message on my talk page. I have added only those links which were dead and the content in those dead links were almost same as the content in the links I have published. So, I thought this is adding value to Wikipedia as i am replacing dead links but you say that it is spamming, if lower domain authority is the only factor which made you undo my edits then this is bias, isn't it? So, if you agree with my point please verify content and get back all my edits to Wikipedia.Saibaadshah167 (talk) 15:20, 24 June 2019 (UTC)

@Saibaadshah167: Removing a dead link is one thing; substituting it by another link is usually WP:REFSPAM. As for the site itself, it is a blog without clear editorial oversight hence also a self-published source (WP:SPS). In some cases a blog post by a relevant notable expert may be kept. Moreover, pushing links to the site at multiple articles (even if to different pages of it) shows an interest to promote the site rather than improve the encyclopedia (WP:HERE). Wikipedia is not the place for WP:SEO. Of course, there may exist other links at those articles that may not be suitable (WP:OTHERSTUFFEXISTS), but the concern is about spamming this current site. It risks getting blacklisted if its promotion continues. Thanks, —PaleoNeonate – 16:07, 24 June 2019 (UTC)

OK, Understood, I am sorry for that, I will make sure that I refer to high quality websites and blogs written by experts from now and thank you for telling me about this. I hope to become a good Wikipedia editor.Saibaadshah167 (talk) 03:37, 25 June 2019 (UTC)

Regarding block on spiritualsadhana.com

Dear PaleoNeonate,

Am Sritulasi from spiritualsadhana. I see you are esteemed member in Wiki and I really consider your time and effort in maintaining this great site as volunteer.

I want to let you know that my site spiritualsadhana links are not Spam as they add value to wiki page in EN, TE and TA astrology pages. Being new to wiki me and my team doesn't know about rules of wiki so that we added our links here and there. Considering the mistakes and receiving notices from valuable volunteers like you we decided to not add unnecessary links any where. Meantime you kept the site in Blacklist and left note stating " Astrologers ad site, that was spammed persistently since 2015 on en-Wikipedia, but also sometimes on te and ta Wikipedias. Various users are blocked, others only warned."

I kindly request you to consider my site to unblock the site. If you can spare a minute please check these pages to be added to telugu panchangam page.

Sincerely, Sritulasi — Preceding unsigned comment added by Sritulasi1 (talk • contribs) 16:11, 26 June 2019 (UTC)

@Sritulasi1: As this automated report showed, the site was extensively promoted by various users at various articles and even to more than one wiki. It was reported on 18 October 2018 then added to the global blacklist by an administrator the 19th ([64], [65]). If there is a particular article where including a link to that site is vital (i.e. the article of that site), it is possible to request that specific links be whitelisted. You may also request that the whole domain be removed from the blacklist, but I doubt that list administrators would accept. The proper place to request it would be at the bottom of this section. Make sure to begin the message with a new subtitle like for the others, and to end the message with a signature (four tildes in a row, ~~~~). Thanks, —PaleoNeonate – 19:47, 26 June 2019 (UTC)

Dispute Protocol

In Wikipedia:Dispute_resolution_noticeboard#Fifth_Statements_by_Editors you stated "It seems that we were now told that we could reply to eachother before the next round?" . I think you misunderstood. The back and forth discussion is confined to the Wikipedia:Dispute_resolution_noticeboard#Back-and-Forth_by_Editors section. I think Wikipedia:Dispute_resolution_noticeboard#Fifth_Statements_by_Editors is supposed to be clear of it. If it turns into another back and forth, I'm betting the section will be closed and we'll have to start over. - GretLomborg (talk) 15:19, 28 June 2019 (UTC)

Yes there was indeed another section for this. Thanks, —PaleoNeonate – 21:58, 28 June 2019 (UTC)

New Page Review newsletter July-August 2019

Hello PaleoNeonate,

WMF at work on NPP Improvements

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

QUALITY of REVIEWING

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

Backlog

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

Move to draft

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

Notifying users

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

PERM

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

Other news

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

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

---

Stay up to date with even more news – subscribe to The Signpost.
Go here to remove your name if you wish to opt-out of future mailings.

MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 04:38, 30 June 2019 (UTC)

Tech News: 2019-27

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

• The development of Wikidata Bridge has started. The goal is to allow Wikidata edits from Wikipedia. [66]

Problems

• Sometimes pages load slowly for users routed to the Amsterdam data center. Investigation is in progress. [67]
• Wikidata query service was overloaded between 11:50 UTC until 13:15 UTC on June 24. It has been fixed. [68]

Changes later this week

• You will be able to read but not to edit all wikis for a short amount of time, on 3 July at 06:00 (UTC). This is to move a database. [69]
• There is no deployment of a new version of MediaWiki on the wikis this week (calendar).

Meetings

• You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 3 July at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.

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

21:23, 1 July 2019 (UTC)

A barnstar for you!

	The Random Acts of Kindness Barnstar
	I noticed that too! Ha ha! Thanks for the welcoming and your kindness! PaleoNeolitic (talk) 17:32, 2 July 2019 (UTC)

DRN thread

Hi there, I'm a volunteer at the Dispute Resolution Noticeboard (and a long time veteran of dispute resolution on Wikipedia generally) and I'll be re-opening the discussion there on William Lane Craig. Can you please leave a comment at the noticeboard (I have put a section there for you to do so) to note that you are happy to participate in the discussion. I'll take things from there. Cheers. Steven Crossin 16:05, 1 July 2019 (UTC)

Just sending you a follow up ping, as I see you’ve been active since I left this message. If you’d rather step away from this dispute and article that is of course fine, but if you could let me know either way I can then proceed with the discussion. Thanks. Steven Crossin 13:23, 2 July 2019 (UTC)

@Steven Crossin: Sorry for the delay, it was Canada Day here and I could barely keep up with watchlist patrol. I replied there, —PaleoNeonate – 17:17, 2 July 2019 (UTC)

No worries at all. I'm personally getting back into the swing of editing after an extended break, but old habits die hard and I'm back doing what I've been doing since 2008. Steven Crossin 17:52, 3 July 2019 (UTC)

Canvassing at Sukavich Rangsitpol

You have mentioned the possible canvassing effect at the subject's talk page, which is more than likely. I have discovered a previous incident concerning her daughter outside enwiki. While it's not really canvassing in English Wikipedia, it can be shown that the article concerning the subject and/or the daughter alike may be prone to canvassing.

Suggest the page's follower to file a report (can also be interpreted as "police report")

Someone pointed the link of Thitiya's page (Sukavich's daughter) to Sukavich's page for 6 months without problem

A follower created my profile for only 4 hours (at Thai Wikipedia) and it gets up flagged for deletion

Heard that the previous user named "Horus" (an administrator at Thai Wikipedia) deleted it

Now using the new sockpuppet (alternate account of Horus, but without administrator flag) to do so

I think the same group of person may be responsible for the derailment of the deletion request of the daughter's article at simplewiki such that the consensus cannot be reached, even though the established user there may have voted to delete or remove the questionable material. As the process in enwiki is much more complex, I therefore would like to give you a heads up and for you to exercise the discretion in dealing with them. Thanks.--G(x) (talk) 06:06, 8 July 2019 (UTC)

@G(x): Thanks or the notice. You're welcome to comment at WP:COIN#Sukavich Rangsitpol if wanted. That simple-wiki discussion was rather messy indeed; I've seen some messy deletion discussion on en-wiki with single-purpose-account disruption too (for other people). En-wiki has strict policies against outing so I don't personally use off-wiki investigations. But you're confirming that actual canvassing (meat-puppeting) may be taking place, which explains why some sockpuppet-investigation results are inconclusive. This probably also means that if disruption persists article protection and even talk page protection when necessary, may become the only solution, so thanks for that. —PaleoNeonate – 06:29, 8 July 2019 (UTC)

Tech News: 2019-28

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

• For event organizers, if you request a temporary lift of the IP cap for mass account creation, this will now also raise the edit rate limit for those new accounts at the event, which will prevent another bottleneck. [70]
• Administrators at all Wiktionary, Wikivoyage, and Wikisource wikis are now able to use the new partial blocks feature. [71]

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 9 July. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 10 July. It will be on all wikis from 11 July (calendar).
• The design of MediaWiki's software windows will change for desktop users. Layout will be simpler, buttons will be bolder and clearer, and close buttons will be just icons. This is like the mobile design. This will affect ContentTranslation, VisualEditor, TemplateWizard, and other tools. [72]

Meetings

• You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 10 July at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• Wikidata will be in read-only mode on 30 July from 05:00 to 05:30 UTC because of a server switch. [73]
• There will be a change in the name format of new Wikidata RDF dumps starting on 15 July. [74]

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

20:12, 8 July 2019 (UTC)

Peer reviewed papers as references in the Face on Mars page

I have added a reference to a paper in the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society. That paper was a reference in the page of the Face on Mars, but I removed it because it was bad placed. The figure 9 at that paper is an image similar to the diagram of symmetry that was present in the page for 3 months before being deleted as fringe with no other argumentation. Playing that game, I could wipe out half of the science articles in Wikipedia if the sources are not the level of Nature or Science journals or better impact. Thanks.@PaleoNeonate: Diagramofsymmetry (talk) 17:34, 8 July 2019 (UTC)

Hmm this effort failed it seems... Relevant may be WP:PARITY, but there also are plenty of sources and updated pictures showing that while the mound exists, it is only seen as a face under particular lighting conditions and because of human perception (someone could foment conspiracy theories of coverup and forgeries, but). This reminds me that lately I've been making custom microcontroller+RGB-LED based color-sweeping lamps and writing modulation software for them; one night there was an interesting coincidence with a pyramid-shaped one (covered with a 3D-printed diffuser). Its light reflected against the metallic parts of a ceiling fan and at a particular angle in the room, I could see a funny animated face against the fan's blades, the illusion of a grinning face, similar to villains in space invaders and early Nasir Gebelli's video games. —PaleoNeonate – 07:51, 9 July 2019 (UTC)

The Ishmael Article

I came here just to apologize for the Ishmael Article, I thought it would be nice to add a date category, since Moses had the [[Category:15th-century BC biblical rulers]] and Recently it was added the [[Category:21st-century BC people]] in the article about Abraham (Pseudo-Dionysius the areopagite (talk) 03:53, 10 July 2019 (UTC))

@Pseudo-Dionysius the areopagite: that's fine, it's how Wikipedia works, thanks for the concern. It's possible that I'm wrong too. However I remember of some relevant talk page discussions, an important one here, another one here. Of course, this is about the infobox, but it's similar for categories... —PaleoNeonate – 18:35, 10 July 2019 (UTC)

Tech News: 2019-29

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

• The mobile web will get more advanced editing tools. Seven more Wikipedias can use them now. This works for Arabic, Indonesian, Italian, Persian, Japanese, Spanish and Thai Wikipedia. You can try the tools on the mobile web and give feedback. [75]

Changes later this week

• The abuse filter system user will soon do maintenance edits on broken abuse filters. This user is called Edit filter and has administrator rights. This is meant to fix technical problems. It will not do any other changes. You can read more.
• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 16 July. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 17 July. It will be on all wikis from 18 July (calendar).

Meetings

• You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 17 July at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• The Wikipedia app for Android will invite users to add image captions to images on Commons. It will only invite users who have added a number of edits in the app without being reverted. This is to avoid spam and bad edits. You can read more and leave feedback. [76]

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

15:29, 15 July 2019 (UTC)

Reference on Fine Tuning page

Hi PaleoNeonate,

I received your note declining a new reference to UFTmachine.com on the Fine-Tuned Universe page.

You said it was "promotional". In what way? It is neutral regarding the why of fine tuning and not commercial in any way. The website was created for STEM students.

Thanks

Al — Preceding unsigned comment added by VideoCTO (talk • contribs) 07:32, 17 July 2019 (UTC)

@VideoCTO: external links typically grow into WP:LINKFARMs and new editors adding links often have a conflict of interest (WP:COI) in relation to them. If you think that the link is important, I recommend to suggest it at Talk:Fine-tuned Universe. Thanks, —PaleoNeonate – 19:09, 17 July 2019 (UTC)

About Greer

Hello. Why was my entry reverted ? I don't know much about how to operate this, but that information is highly necessary. That man is a charlatan and needs to be unmasked. Can you help me add that info? Thanks — Preceding unsigned comment added by Hackerculture1986 (talk • contribs) 12:59, 20 July 2019 (UTC)

@Hackerculture1986: the discussion should probably be at Talk:Steven M. Greer and Talk:Center for the Study of Extraterrestrial Intelligence where other interested editors can read/participate too. I'll post a message there for now, as I tried to look for updated sources without much success. —PaleoNeonate – 02:06, 21 July 2019 (UTC)

Tech News: 2019-30

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

• Communities interested by easing newcomers' first steps can now benefit from the Growth team experiments on their wikis. Check the conditions and the request process.
• The Coolest Tool Award 2019 is looking for nominations. You can recommend tools by July 29. The awarded tools will be presented at Wikimania. [77]

Problems

• The release of the last version of MediaWiki (1.34.0-wmf.14) has been blocked for groups 1 and 2. [78]

Changes later this week

• Phabricator database will be moved to a different server. Writes will be blocked on Thursday 25 July, between 05:30 and 06:00 AM UTC. Reads will remain unaffected. [79]
• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 23 July. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 24 July. It will be on all wikis from 25 July (calendar).

Meetings

• You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 24 July at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• Some items in the visual editor will change later this week. This will make it easier to edit links, citations, and templates on both desktop and mobile. [80][81]
• With advanced search turned on you will be able to choose the sorting order of the search results when you do a search. [82][83]
• Users who edit from IP addresses whitelisted on a request for temporary lift of the IP cap for mass account creation will bypass CAPTCHAs. This will happen in August. If you think this should not happen for some reason, please let us know.
• The variable user_wpzero will be removed from AbuseFilter. A list of filters needing a fix is provided.

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

13:07, 22 July 2019 (UTC)

Tech News: 2019-31

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

Problems

• Wikidata will be in read-only mode on 30 July from 05:00 to 05:30 UTC because of a server switch. [84]

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 30 July. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 31 July. It will be on all wikis from 1 August (calendar).

Meetings

• You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 31 July at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.

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

21:42, 29 July 2019 (UTC)

Tech News: 2019-32

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 6 August. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 7 August. It will be on all wikis from 8 August (calendar).

Problems

• A change in RelatedArticles extension accidentally enabled it for everyone, not just for mobile users. This has been fixed. [85][86]

Meetings

• You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 7 August at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• Today everyone can see IP addresses if someone edits without an account. In the future this could be more hidden. This is to protect unregistered editors so fewer can see their IP address. This would only happen after we make sure the tools for vandal fighting can still be effective. You can read more and comment.

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

13:24, 5 August 2019 (UTC)

Tech News: 2019-33

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

• Editors using the mobile website on Wikipedia can opt-in to new advanced features via your settings page. This will give access to more interface links, special pages, and tools. Feedback on the discussion page is appreciated. [87]
• Due to the absence of volunteer maintenance of Cologne Blue skin, the link to activate it will be hidden. The skin will still work, but editors using it are encouraged to switch to another skin. [88]

Changes later this week

• Due to Wikimania, there is no deployment this week. [89]

Meetings

• You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 13 August at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• The "Wikidata item" link will be moved from "Tools" to "In other projects" section on all Wikimedia projects, starting on August 21. Full announcement, Phabricator task.

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

18:19, 12 August 2019 (UTC)

Tech News: 2019-34

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

Tech News

• There will be no Tech News issue next week. The next issue of Tech News will be sent out on 2 September 2019.

Problems

• Some abuse filters stopped working because of a code change. Only variables for the current action will work. Variables defined inside a branch may not work outside of that branch. You can read more to see how to fix the filters.
• Only six accounts can be created from one IP address per day. Between 12 August and August 15 this was two accounts per day. This was because of a security issue. It is now six accounts per day again. [90]

Changes later this week

• Only a limited number of accounts can be created from one IP address. An IP address can be whitelisted so that it can create as many accounts as needed. This is useful at events where many new persons learn to edit. IP addresses that are whitelisted for this reason will also not show CAPTCHAs when you create accounts. This will happen on Wednesday. [91]
• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 20 August. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 21 August. It will be on all wikis from 22 August (calendar).

Meetings

• You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 21 August at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• There is an RFC about creating a new global user group with the right to edit abuse filters. This will be used to fix broken filters and make sure all filters will still work when software changes happen. You can read more and comment.
• Special:Contributions/newbies will no longer be working. This is because of performance reasons. It showed edits by new accounts. You can see this in the recent changes feed instead. [92]

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

15:21, 19 August 2019 (UTC)

adding link to Fine Tuned Universe

Hi PaleoNeonate,

Some time back, I added a URL to "External Links" on the page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fine-tuned_universe

You declined it stating COI and "link farm" conflicts. I appreciate your reasons and made several edits to the URL site uftmachine.com to remove the COI issue.

Regarding the link farm problem, the proposed link is purely educational and allows the user to simulate tuning in 6 "fundamental constants" and learn about each one. Looking at other similar wiki pages (with External Links), some link to tutorials, others offer interactive screens to experiment with the related concepts. Bottom line, I do believe that the following should be included in "External Links" for Fine-tuned_universe;

For more insights, simulate up to six constants of nature uftmachine.com

Thanks,

Cheers, Al VideoCTO (talk) 23:29, 14 August 2019 (UTC)

@VideoCTO: sorry for the late response. I suggest to post your proposed link at Talk:Fine-tuned universe. Thanks, —PaleoNeonate – 08:37, 17 August 2019 (UTC)

Hi PaleoNeonate,

Thanks for your suggestions. I looked intro "Talk:Fine-tuned universe". Frankly I am not sure about the process. Do I post a suggested change on TALK and just wait for editors to vote? What is the process for the "editorial board" to decide? Thanks for helping me on this.

Cheers

VideoCTO (talk) 15:05, 17 August 2019 (UTC)

User:VideoCTO and uftmachine.com spam. --Guy Macon (talk) 00:14, 24 August 2019 (UTC)

Thanks for the notice, I've also poked COIBot which report should help to determine if the domain needs blacklisting (unlikely if promotion stopped and was from a single account)... I'm currently much less active than usual so may temporarily miss various events (I rely on memory and my TODO list rather than on the watchlist at the moment). —PaleoNeonate – 04:32, 24 August 2019 (UTC)

Update: not worth blacklisting at this time. @VideoCTO: On the other hand, you risk eventually being blocked for disruptive editing or not being there to build the encyclopedia if insisting that it should be added against consensus. However, it is difficult to assess this if not posting at a public page such as the article's talk page (my previous suggestion). It does not help much to address specific editors (no editor has special privileges that can override consensus; although I am not an administrator, they too are normal editors except when uninvolved and acting by policy to effect a sanction). If blocked and creating another account to promote the same domain, this is where it risks being blacklisted. Let's see the result of the WP:ANI thread, I see that you also now know about the conflict of interest policy. As a software developer, I wouldn't edit Wikipedia myself about one of my employers (including previous), projects, or advertize one of my sites. Some articles exist about some open source popular software where I was one of the contributors or maintainer; I still try not to edit those, but may sometimes do so (minor uncontroversial facts supported by the primary project's source, or by a third party reliable source for anything else). As for general computer science articles where I have no conflict of interest but am knowledgeable, I still rarely edit them, because it feels like distasteful work rather than a hobby. I may as a casual reader if I see something worth correcting. —PaleoNeonate – 09:11, 24 August 2019 (UTC)

Tech News: 2019-36

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

• You can use the new termbox interface if you edit Wikidata on a mobile device. This is to edit labels, descriptions and aliases easier on the mobile pages. [93]
• The new version of MediaWiki has been deployed during the last week.
• The previously announced change of positions of the "Wikidata item" link on all wikis has been rollbacked due to unexpected cache issues. [94]
• The limit for rollbacks has been increased from 10 to 100 rollbacks per minute. [95]
• The advanced version of the edit review pages (Recent Changes, Watchlist, and Related Changes) now include two new filters. These filters are for "All contents" and "All discussions". They will filter the view to just those namespaces. However the "All discussions" filter does not include pseudo talk pages, like discussions that are in the Project: or Wikipedia: namespaces. But it will include changes happening on Project talk: or the Wikipedia talk:. [96]

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 3 September. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 4 September. It will be on all wikis from 5 September (calendar).
• When you log in, the software checks your password to see if it follows the Password policy. From this week, it will also complain if your password is one of the most common passwords in the world. If your password is not strong enough, please consider to change your password for a stronger password. [97]

Meetings

• You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 4 September at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• You will be able to read but not to edit Wikidata for up to 30 minutes on September 10 at 05:00 (UTC). [98]
• You will be able to read but not to edit some mid-sized wikis for up to 30 minutes September 17 at 05:00 (UTC). You can see which wikis. [99]
• You will be able to read but not to edit some mid-sized wikis for up to 30 minutes September 24 at 05:00 (UTC). You can see which wikis. [100]
• You will be able to read but not to edit Wikimedia Commons for up to 30 minutes on September 26 at 05:00 (UTC). [101]

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

09:07, 4 September 2019 (UTC)

Precious anniversary

A year ago ...

gnomish guidance
... you were recipient no. 2019 of Precious, a prize of QAI!

--Gerda Arendt (talk) 21:30, 7 September 2019 (UTC)

Thanks Gerda, already a year, it passed so quickly. —PaleoNeonate – 23:00, 7 September 2019 (UTC)

Nations and intelligence

Over the past five days, both I and another editor have been challenging Grayfell's removal of sources from the Nations and intelligence article on that article's talk page, and he has not attempted to justify his removals there (which is especially ironic, considering his demand for a consensus before the material can be restored). The other editor who challenged the removals is not AndewNguyen, so there are technically three people opposing the removals if you include the editor who originally added it. If you are going to start removing this material yourself now, could you please participate in that discussion, and respond to our arguments that it should not be removed? 2600:1004:B10B:FE76:B9F5:AA42:968:5A0D (talk) 14:27, 4 September 2019 (UTC)

Promotion of studies that ignore notable material such as the Flynn effect or the fact that IQ tests are subjective and will dramatically change for the same individual depending on their current health status are a long term issue on Wikipedia. Various sources are also not considered reputable for intelligence claims in relation to genetics. Primary papers and studies should also be avoided, as the encyclopedia should only summarize the current scientific consensus. If there's not enough talk page participation at the article's, I recommend opening a thread at the fringe theories noticeboard or at the reliable sources noticeboard. Thanks, —PaleoNeonate – 23:20, 7 September 2019 (UTC)

New Page Review newsletter September-October 2019

Hello PaleoNeonate,

Backlog

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

Coordinator

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

This month's refresher course

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

Deletion tags

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

Paid editing

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

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

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

Not English

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

Tools

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tech News: 2019-40

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

Problems

• Last week's Tech News had delivery problems. Some did not get the newsletter. Some got it more than one time. The problem where some pages got it three times should now be fixed. [102]

Changes later this week

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

Meetings

• You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 2 October at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• The Wikimedia Foundation Community Tech team is working on a watchlist expiry feature. This means you can put things on your watchlist for a period of time instead of forever. They are looking for feedback on the questions they have.
• Special:Contributions will get the standard OOUI look. This makes it easier to use on mobile and makes it look like other Special: pages. There is a script you can use to make the form smaller if you want to. [103]

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

16:50, 30 September 2019 (UTC)

Tech News: 2019-41

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

• The abuse filter function now has a faster parser. This is to shorten the waiting time when you save an edit. [104]

Problems

• There is a problem in the visual editor when you copy or delete text with footnotes. It will be fixed soon. [105]

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 8 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 9 October. It will be on all wikis from 10 October (calendar).

Meetings

• You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 9 October at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• The Community Wishlist Survey has a new format. It will focus on wikis that typically get less support. It will probably go back to the normal format next year. It is not decided exactly how it will work this year. You can leave feedback.
• The URL of the Wikimedia wiki main pages could be changed. This is because the current URLs cause several problems. For example https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Main_Page would be https://www.wikidata.org/ instead. You can tell the developers if this would cause problems for your wiki.
• There is a new technical community newsletter. You can read more about the work of Wikimedia's technical community. Subscribe to get the information in the future.
• Outreachy is an internship program for groups who are underrepresented in free and open-source software. There are seven Wikimedia projects about coding, documentation and quality assurance in the next round. Persons who fit the criteria can apply. The last day to apply is 5 November.

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

15:35, 7 October 2019 (UTC)

Tech News: 2019-42

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

• You can now use more advanced editing tools on the mobile web. You can turn them on and off in your preferences in the mobile version. [106]

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 15 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 16 October. It will be on all wikis from 17 October (calendar).

Meetings

• You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 16 October at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• Internet Explorer 6 and 7 are no longer supported. This means the browsers might start looking a bit weird. They will not get security support. You can't read Wikimedia wikis in Internet Explorer on Windows XP or Windows versions that are older than Windows XP. This is because almost no one uses the browsers anymore. Supporting them made the wikis less secure for everyone else. [107]
• In the future section headings might have a share link. This is to make it easier to link to the section. You can read more and discuss.

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

23:55, 14 October 2019 (UTC)

Tech News: 2019-43

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

• The API sandbox and help pages now show more clearly when API modules are marked as internal. API modules marked as internal were probably internal before. It was easier to miss. You should look for non-internal alternatives. [108]

Problems

• There is a translation tool we use on wikis with more than one language. For a few days it did not create pages for new languages when someone translated a page. The languages did not show in the language bar. This has been fixed. [109]
• The history and diffs can show wrong content. This is because of a cache problem. It will soon be fixed. [110]

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 22 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 23 October. It will be on all wikis from 24 October (calendar).
• Reference Previews will be a beta feature on all Wikipedias and some Wikivoyages. It shows you a preview of the footnote when you hover over or click on the number. It has been a beta feature on German and Arabic Wikipedia since April.

Meetings

• You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 23 October. See how to join.

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

14:38, 21 October 2019 (UTC)

Tech News: 2019-44

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

• You can post proposals for the Community Wishlist Survey. The survey decides what the Community Tech team will work on. You can post proposals until 11 November. You can vote on proposals from 20 November to 2 December. This year the wishlist will focus on Wikibooks, Wiktionary, Wikiquote, Wikisource, Wikiversity, Wikispecies, Wikivoyage and Wikinews. You can read more about the format for this year.
• Mobile users now have a specific design for their Watchlist. [111][112]
• You can share feedback and ideas on the Desktop Improvements project. The goal is to make the interface easier to use for readers and editors without removing any functionality. The Foundation's Readers Web team will work on this over the next two years.
• OOUI now allows using px (pixels) instead of em (em) for some specific cases. [113][114]

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 29 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 30 October. It will be on all wikis from 31 October (calendar).

Meetings

• You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 30 October at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• There will be no software changes from 19 December to 2 January. The first MediaWiki version next year will come the week of 6 January. [115]
• Gadgets and user scripts can access variables about the current page in JavaScript. In 2015, this information was moved from global variables named wg* to mw.config. The old global variables will be removed later this year. You can know more about it and tell the developers if you want to try this out on your wiki first.

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

16:16, 28 October 2019 (UTC)

New Page Review newsletter November 2019

Hello PaleoNeonate,

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

Getting the queue to 0

There are now 806 holders of the New Page Reviewer flag! Most of you requested the user right to be able to do something about the huge backlog but it's still roughly less than 10% doing 90% of the work. Now it's time for action.
Exactly one year ago there were 'only' 3,650 unreviewed articles, now we will soon be approaching 7,000 despite the growing number of requests for the NPR user right. If each reviewer soon does only 2 reviews a day over five days, the backlog will be down to zero and the daily input can then be processed by every reviewer doing only 1 review every 2 days - that's only a few minutes work on the bus on the way to the office or to class! Let's get this over and done with in time to relax for the holidays.
Want to join? Consider adding the NPP Pledge userbox.
Our next newsletter will announce the winners of some really cool awards.

Coordinator

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

This month's refresher course

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

Tools

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

Reviewer Feedback

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

Second set of eyes

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

Arbitration Committee

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

Community Wish list

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

---

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

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

Tech News: 2019-45

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

• At Special:Contributions you could see up to 5000 edits at the same time if you edited the URL. This has been lowered to 500. This is to stop requests which break the sites. [116]

Changes later this week

• MediaWiki:ipb-default-expiry can set the default length to block a user for your wiki. You will be able to use MediaWiki:ipb-default-expiry-ip to set a different default block length for IP editors. [117]
• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 5 November. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 6 November. It will be on all wikis from 7 November (calendar).

Meetings

• You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 6 November at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.

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

16:48, 4 November 2019 (UTC)

Tech News: 2019-46

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

• MediaWiki2LaTeX can put different pages from a Wikimedia wiki into a PDF. It can now make a PDF with around 5000 pages. Previously this was 800 pages.

Changes later this week

• There is no new MediaWiki version this week.

Meetings

• You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 13 November at 16:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• Wikimedia will take part in Google Code-in. This is for young students who want to help with open source software. You can read more. Experienced technical Wikimedians can mentor students.

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

22:03, 11 November 2019 (UTC)

A survey to improve the community consultation outreach process

Hello!

The Wikimedia Foundation is seeking to improve the community consultation outreach process for Foundation policies, and we are interested in why you didn't participate in a recent consultation that followed a community discussion you’ve been part of.

Please fill out this short survey to help us improve our community consultation process for the future. It should only take about three minutes.

The privacy policy for this survey is here. This survey is a one-off request from us related to this unique topic.

Thank you for your participation, Kbrown (WMF) 10:45, 13 November 2019 (UTC)

I suspect that this was a general invitation and am avoiding to ping, but I respectfully decline from further participation on this topic at current time, thanking you for the invitation. Out of lack of time, I rarely patrol changes on my watchlist and as such I lost track of the recent developments. I may be more active again eventually when time permits. I am also surprised that a Google service is used for this. —PaleoNeonate – 21:10, 14 November 2019 (UTC)

Tech News: 2019-47

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

Problems

• You will be able to read but not to edit some wikis for up to 30 minutes on 26 November at 06:00 (UTC). You can see which wikis. It will probably last much shorter than 30 minutes. This will also affect the centralauth database. This could for example affect changing passwords, logging in to new wikis, changing emails or global renames. [118]

Changes later this week

• You can soon vote on proposals for the Community Wishlist Survey. The survey decides what the Community Tech team will work on. You can vote on proposals from 20 November to 2 December. This year the wishlist will focus on Wikibooks, Wiktionary, Wikiquote, Wikisource, Wikiversity, Wikispecies, Wikivoyage and Wikinews. You can read more about the format for this year.
• There is no new MediaWiki version this week.

Meetings

• You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 20 November at 16:00 (UTC). See how to join.

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

20:17, 18 November 2019 (UTC)

ArbCom 2019 election voter message

Hello! Voting in the 2019 Arbitration Committee elections is now open until 23:59 on Monday, 2 December 2019. All eligible users are allowed to vote. Users with alternate accounts may only vote once. The Arbitration Committee is the panel of editors responsible for conducting the Wikipedia arbitration process. It has the authority to impose binding solutions to disputes between editors, primarily for serious conduct disputes the community has been unable to resolve. This includes the authority to impose site bans, topic bans, editing restrictions, and other measures needed to maintain our editing environment. The arbitration policy describes the Committee's roles and responsibilities in greater detail. If you wish to participate in the 2019 election, please review the candidates and submit your choices on the voting page. If you no longer wish to receive these messages, you may add {{NoACEMM}} to your user talk page. MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 00:21, 19 November 2019 (UTC)

Google Code-In 2019 is coming - please mentor some documentation tasks!

Hello,

Google Code-In, Google-organized contest in which the Wikimedia Foundation participates, starts in a few weeks. This contest is about taking high school students into the world of opensource. I'm sending you this message because you recently edited a documentation page at the English Wikipedia.

I would like to ask you to take part in Google Code-In as a mentor. That would mean to prepare at least one task (it can be documentation related, or something else - the other categories are Code, Design, Quality Assurance and Outreach) for the participants, and help the student to complete it. Please sign up at the contest page and send us your Google account address to google-code-in-admins@lists.wikimedia.org, so we can invite you in!

From my own experience, Google Code-In can be fun, you can make several new friends, attract new people to your wiki and make them part of your community.

If you have any questions, please let us know at google-code-in-admins@lists.wikimedia.org.

Thank you!

--User:Martin Urbanec (talk) 21:58, 23 November 2019 (UTC)

E-mail

Hi - I came here to send you an email, but it looks like you have that switched off. Nothing urgent, but if you are open to a quick chat, please drop me an email. Cheers GirthSummit _(blether) 22:52, 23 November 2019 (UTC)

@Girth Summit: Hello again. Indeed, from my user page: I prefer that all my Wikipedia-related communications remain on relevant talk pages and have also disabled the "email me" feature. But thank you for your message, I'm glad to receive the offer. I'll think about it. —PaleoNeonate – 18:50, 24 November 2019 (UTC)

Sorry, I missed that! In my defense, your userpage is kinda long, I don't think I ever made it down that far... I am happy to respect your preference - I dropped by to ask whether anyone had ever asked whether you had considered adminship. You've always struck me as one of the most helpful and welcoming editors out there, and you are consistently cool-headed and civil even in heated situations. I think you'd be an asset to the admin team, but you may have been approached about this before now, in which case apologies. Feel free to reply by email, or here, or not at all of course! Cheers GirthSummit _(blether) 19:18, 24 November 2019 (UTC)

@Girth Summit: Congratulations for your adminship, I unfortunately missed your RfA. Although I've of course interacted with some users who believed that I was an administrator, I think that you are the first to approach me about it. The restricted time I can put on Wikipedia, the same reason I missed the RfA, makes me doubt about my usefulness as an administrator at current time. When I created this account (also my first one), I had the time and was quite active for a while. Availability then varied and I've been hoping to return to more active editing but without much success. My content and AfD contributions are also modest, something I may need to work on to increase my chances at RfA. In any case, your confidence that I could serve as an administrator is encouraging, thank you for the thought. —PaleoNeonate – 04:11, 25 November 2019 (UTC)

PaleoNeonate, understood. I wanted to find out from you whether it was something you were interested in before snooping around too deeply in your contribs, so I haven't evaluated your content work, but if you feel you can't commit the time to it at present I won't try to persuade you. I meant what I said above though, in terms of your approach to interaction and ability to deal with difficult circumstances gracefully, so if your situation ever changes, I'd be delighted to help any way I can. Cheers GirthSummit _(blether) 07:36, 25 November 2019 (UTC)

Tech News: 2019-48

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 mobile beta mode will be disabled to have less maintenance. The developers will focus on the desktop improvements project. You can turn on advanced mobile contributions mode if you want to see the categories. You could also jump back to the top. This can instead be done with a gadget or user script. [119]
• Parsoid is software we use for the visual editor, content translation, Flow and the Android app. This has been rewritten. It will come to the wikis gradually over the next two weeks. It has been tested, but there could be some diffs or previews that don't look right. If you see any you can report them. [120]
• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 26 November. It will be on the other wikis next week (calendar). This is because of holidays.

Meetings

• You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 27 November at 16:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• You will switch between the article and the talk page in a new way in the mobile view in the future. It will use tabs. This is more like in the desktop view. [121]

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

16:52, 25 November 2019 (UTC)

Tech News: 2019-49

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

• Mix'n'match is a tool to connect Wikidata items to information in other databases. It can be used to find subjects that are missing in a Wikipedia. It now has more than 3000 datasets. Before it was closer to 2000.

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 3 December. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 4 December. It will be on all wikis from 5 December (calendar).

Meetings

• You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 4 December at 16:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• There will be a new schema for XML dumps. Scripts and apps that use them will need to be updated. If they are not updated they will no longer work. [122]
• The {{REVISIONID}} magic word will no longer work in the content namespaces. This is for performance reasons. When you preview a page it returns "" (empty string). When you read a page it returns "-" (dash). In the future this will also affect other namespaces. The next ones are file and category namespaces. [123]

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

16:58, 2 December 2019 (UTC)

Tech News: 2019-50

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

• Wikimedia projects use Translatewiki to translate the wiki interface. You can now use WatchTranslations to watch projects there. You would get an email if there are missing translations to your language. [124]
• There is a new dataset you can use. It shows the number of editors per country per month for a number of countries. You can read the documentation and download the dataset.

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 10 December. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 11 December. It will be on all wikis from 12 December (calendar).

Meetings

• You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 11 December at 16:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• You can test a new reference tool. It makes it possible to reference different parts of a source without repeating all information. You can test it on the beta cluster. You can see an example article. [125]

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

16:38, 9 December 2019 (UTC)

Tech News: 2019-51

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

Problems

• The Linter extension helps you find technical errors in articles. It did not show new changes last week. This was because of an API problem. It is now working again. [126]
• Special:Watchlist can show the wrong information again. It does not always show which edits are read and which are unread. This is because of a database problem. The developers are working on solving the problem. [127]

Changes later this week

• You can get email notifications. You can get them immediately, a summary every day or a summary once every week. If you choose a summary you can soon choose not to get notifications you have already marked as read on the wiki. [128]
• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 17 December. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 18 December. It will be on all wikis from 19 December (calendar).

Meetings

• You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 18 December at 16:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• The partial blocks feature is now stable. It will come to most wikis on 6 January. Your wiki can ask to wait. Contact NKohli (WMF) if you don't want it now. [129]

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

00:16, 17 December 2019 (UTC)

New Page Review newsletter December 2019

Reviewer of the Year

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

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

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

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

Top 10 Reviewers over the last 365 days

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

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

Redirect autopatrol

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

Source Guide Discussion

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

This month's refresher course

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

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

Tech News: 2019-52

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

Tech News

• Because of the holidays the next issue of Tech News will be sent out on 6 January 2020.

Recent changes

• All mobile site users now have new features. Features include: tabs for page/discussion; an expanded user-menu; direct access to history pages. These features were initially part of the "advanced mode".

Changes later this week

• There is no new MediaWiki version this week or next week.

Future changes

• You can use setlang in the URL to change the user interface language. This will no longer happen automatically. When you open the link you will be asked to confirm the language change. This will not happen if Javascript is not working in your browser. [130]

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

20:06, 23 December 2019 (UTC)

Happy Holidays!

Merry Christmas and a Prosperous 2020!

Hello PaleoNeonate, may you be surrounded by peace, success and happiness on this seasonal occasion. Spread the WikiLove by wishing another user a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year, whether it be someone you have had disagreements with in the past, a good friend, or just some random person. Sending you heartfelt and warm greetings for Christmas and New Year 2020. Happy editing, Noah Kastin (talk) (🖋) 17:06, 21 December 2019 (UTC) Spread the love by adding {{subst:Seasonal Greetings}} to other user talk pages.

Many thanks, Noah Kastin, best wishes to you too and happy new year, —PaleoNeonate – 07:28, 24 December 2019 (UTC)

Thanks

I appreciate the welcome message. Though I’ve been registered for years I have contributed rarely, and I will certainly benefit from the links you sent on how to do so properly.

The cookies may well be warm, but my browser doesn’t let me access third party cookies, so I will have to pass.

Best,

Tangiblethree (talk) 16:45, 29 December 2019 (UTC)