Archive 10Archive 12Archive 13Archive 14Archive 15

Script redirection request

Hi. You previously been willing to redirect unmaintained, widely used user scripts to maintained ones. Would you be willing to do so for User:Ucucha/duplinks.jsUser:Evad37/duplinks-alt.js? Ucucha's version hasn't been updated since 2011 (except for your fixes in 2017), and problems keep coming up at User talk:Ucucha/duplinks that have been fixed in my version. Many users are already using my version [1]. Cheers, - Evad37 [talk] 01:18, 24 January 2019 (UTC)

Ucucha is minimally/marginally active, so perhaps it'd be better to discuss with them directly? AFAICT they haven't been pinged in a while. ~ Amory (utc) 02:47, 24 January 2019 (UTC)
Oops, forgot to check their general activity level; I've now asked at User talk:Ucucha#duplinks. - Evad37 [talk] 03:12, 24 January 2019 (UTC)

Facto Post – Issue 20 – 31 January 2019

Facto Post – Issue 20 – 31 January 2019
 

The Editor is Charles Matthews, for ContentMine. Please leave feedback for him, on his User talk page.
To subscribe to Facto Post go to Wikipedia:Facto Post mailing list. For the ways to unsubscribe, see the footer.

Everything flows (and certainly data does)

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

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

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

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

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

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Administrators' newsletter – February 2019

News and updates for administrators from the past month (January 2019).

 

  Administrator changes

  EnterpriseyJJMC89
  BorgQueen
  Harro5Jenks24GraftR. Baley

  Interface administrator changes

 Enterprisey

  Guideline and policy news

  • A request for comment is currently open to reevaluate the activity requirements for administrators.
  • Administrators who are blocked have the technical ability to block the administrator who blocked their own account. A recent request for comment has amended the blocking policy to clarify that this ability should only be used in exceptional circumstances, such as account compromises, where there is a clear and immediate need.
  • A request for comment closed with a consensus in favor of deprecating The Sun as a permissible reference, and creating an edit filter to warn users who attempt to cite it.

  Technical news

  • A discussion regarding an overhaul of the format and appearance of Wikipedia:Requests for page protection is in progress (permalink). The proposed changes will make it easier to create requests for those who are not using Twinkle. The workflow for administrators at this venue will largely be unchanged. Additionally, there are plans to archive requests similar to how it is done at WP:PERM, where historical records are kept so that prior requests can more easily be searched for.

  Miscellaneous

  • Voting in the 2019 Steward elections will begin on 08 February 2019, 14:00 (UTC) and end on 28 February 2019, 13:59 (UTC). The confirmation process of current stewards is being held in parallel. You can automatically check your eligibility to vote.
  • A new IRC bot is available that allows you to subscribe to notifications when specific filters are tripped. This requires that your IRC handle be identified.

Talk page consult

[2] Yes, in fact I am watching #Parsoid-PHP on Phabricator, and I'm leaving an edit on this page having previewed it in WTE2017 ;). I mostly just did not want to get into the Javascript-PHP migration detail, since it was unimportant in context. --Izno (talk) 17:10, 26 February 2019 (UTC)

Facto Post – Issue 21 – 28 February 2019

Facto Post – Issue 21 – 28 February 2019
 

The Editor is Charles Matthews, for ContentMine. Please leave feedback for him, on his User talk page.
To subscribe to Facto Post go to Wikipedia:Facto Post mailing list. For the ways to unsubscribe, see the footer.

What is a systematic review?

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

 
PRISMA flow diagram for a systematic review

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

File:Schittny, Facing East, 2011, Legacy Projects.jpg
2011 photograph by Bernard Schittny of the "Legacy Projects" group

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

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

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Administrators' newsletter – March 2019

News and updates for administrators from the past month (February 2019).

  Guideline and policy news

  Technical news

  • A new tool is available to help determine if a given IP is an open proxy/VPN/webhost/compromised host.

  Arbitration

  • The Arbitration Committee announced two new OTRS queues. Both are meant solely for cases involving private information; other cases will continue to be handled at the appropriate venues (e.g., WP:COIN or WP:SPI).
    • paid-en-wp wikipedia.org has been set up to receive private evidence related to abusive paid editing.
    • checkuser-en-wp wikipedia.org has been set up to receive private requests for CheckUser. For instance, requests for IP block exemption for anonymous proxy editing should now be sent to this address instead of the functionaries-en list.

  Miscellaneous


Orphaned non-free image File:IISER-Pune logo.png

 

Thanks for uploading File:IISER-Pune logo.png. The image description page currently specifies that the image is non-free and may only be used on Wikipedia under a claim of fair use. However, the image is currently not used in any articles on Wikipedia. If the image was previously in an article, please go to the article and see why it was removed. You may add it back if you think that that will be useful. However, please note that images for which a replacement could be created are not acceptable for use on Wikipedia (see our policy for non-free media).

Note that any non-free images not used in any articles will be deleted after seven days, as described in section F5 of the criteria for speedy deletion. Thank you. --B-bot (talk) 17:28, 22 March 2019 (UTC)

citethispage-content

Hey Derk-Jan. A user has noticed that CiteThisPage has started failing to parse wikitext for BibTeX, see for example Special:CiteThisPage/Main Page. I looked into it and found you made a change to citethispage-content which may have caused this. I would test out undoing it and seeing if that fixes anything but my GEI flag was expired recently. --Krenair (talkcontribs) 01:40, 24 March 2019 (UTC)

Krenair, euh, that's weird... so a template transcluded pre takes the parsed variables and formats them inside pre, but a direct pre disables the wikitext parsing ??? —TheDJ (talkcontribs) 10:46, 24 March 2019 (UTC)
yuck, this is actually documented behavior.. We've created some messed up markup language..... —TheDJ (talkcontribs) 10:49, 24 March 2019 (UTC)
Don't use <pre>...</pre>, or attempt to play around with <nowiki>...</nowiki> and <code>...</code>. Just use <source lang=moin>...</source> and the whole lot is sent through unprocessed apart from syntax highlighting colours. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 15:04, 24 March 2019 (UTC)

Facto Post – Issue 22 – 28 March 2019

Facto Post – Issue 22 – 28 March 2019
 

The Editor is Charles Matthews, for ContentMine. Please leave feedback for him, on his User talk page.
To subscribe to Facto Post go to Wikipedia:Facto Post mailing list. For the ways to unsubscribe, see the footer.

When in the cloud, do as the APIs do

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

File:Cloud-API-Logo.svg
Logo of Cloud API on Google Cloud Platform

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

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

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

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Administrators' newsletter – April 2019

News and updates for administrators from the past month (March 2019).

  Technical news

  Arbitration

  Miscellaneous

  • Two more administrator accounts were compromised. Evidence has shown that these attacks, like previous incidents, were due to reusing a password that was used on another website that suffered a data breach. If you have ever used your current password on any other website, you should change it immediately. All admins are strongly encouraged to enable two-factor authentication, please consider doing so. Please always practice appropriate account security by ensuring your password is secure and unique to Wikimedia.
  • As a reminder, according to WP:NOQUORUM, administrators looking to close or relist an AfD should evaluate a nomination that has received few or no comments as if it were a proposed deletion (PROD) prior to determining whether it should be relisted.

The Signpost v2

From what I can tell, you were one the main architect of the -v2 look of The Signpost. So I'm going to give you a heads up / chance to comment on User:Headbomb/New at the Signpost before it's published. In particular, I want to make sure this doesn't come across as criticism of the old work since there was clearly a lot of thought put into these templates. So if you could share some thoughts and impressions on this piece (@Resident Mario: too, if you were involved with -v2), that would be great. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 03:42, 9 April 2019 (UTC)

Headbomb, yes, i wrote them a while back, to make the page more responsive on mobile devices. Now that we have TemplateStyles a lot of this can probably be seriously improved btw.. I guess v3 at some point ;) Did you check backwards compatibility with the old published archive btw ? Lastly the Newsroom and some of those other admin pages never got the full rework of v2. For instance they still contain huge tables wrapping everything that aren't really needed any longer. You can clearly see this on /Newsroom, where the progress bar is again narrow, due to the wrapping and even unbalanced table. I took a look at it yesterday, but couldn't complete in time to finish that up. —TheDJ (talkcontribs) 08:26, 9 April 2019 (UTC)
A v3 would be nice at some point I suppose, but v2 works pretty good. At least with the recent polish. Some of the code update is on purpose pointless, just so it's a bit clearer for someone who uses it to understand what's going on. Can't say I'm 100% happy with fullwidth=yes/no. Maybe that's something that should be switched to style=fullwidth / style=twocolumns, but it's working well now.
I was mostly looking for commentary on the write up, more than ruminations on the design, but it's not wrong to discuss that either :p. From my understanding of the -v2 design, everything should be backward compatible (I did spot checks as well), except in cases where someone forgot to balance divs. I'm not sure what you mean by the progress bar in the newroom. It you mean the deadlines, they looks fine here, but I'm on desktop monobook, and they're not really a -v2 thing. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 09:51, 9 April 2019 (UTC)

Sort templates

Hey, I was browsing the deprecated template lists and noticed that you deprecated and edited most of the group of sort templates ({{Hidden sort key}}, {{Sort}}, {{Sortname}}, {{Hid}}). They still have a lot of transclusions and I couldn't understand what they were replaced with. Could you please explain this to me? --Gonnym (talk) 11:37, 14 April 2019 (UTC)

@Gonnym: data-sort-value where necessary; in many cases it's no longer necessary since the sortability Javascript does a better job sorting now than it did when all of those templates were written. See also Help:Sorting. --Izno (talk) 22:38, 14 April 2019 (UTC)
@Izno: but the templates already use data-sort-value, which is why I'm not sure what exactly is their replacement. --Gonnym (talk) 15:01, 15 April 2019 (UTC)
Gonnym, many of the templates were deprecated when the data-sort-value methodology they use right now (wrapping content, instead of marking the table cell) was not yet possible. Importantly all these templates, while no longer adding hidden sort keys, do still rely on textual sorting, while straight up data-sort-value and data-sort-type markers can use things like numerical sorting, which would make more sense. For that reason most are still deprecated. Templates like {{hidden sort key}}, {{hid}} and {{ntsh}} etc are deprecated because all sort keys are hidden now. As such a proper usage of {{sort}} or {{nts}} is preferable. I wouldn't object to removing the deprecation notice from sort and sortname, although I would suggest to keep a notice about using data-sort-value as the primary methodology. —TheDJ (talkcontribs) 09:21, 17 April 2019 (UTC)
Would a correct approach for TfD be to propose replacement of {{Hidden sort key}}, {{Sort}} and {{Hid}} with {{sort}}, and {{ntsh}} with {{Number table sorting}}? --Gonnym (talk) 10:06, 17 April 2019 (UTC)
Gonnym, seems about right. The issue is in replacing though. the hidden keys are usually a prefix to the value being 'masked' in sorting. Whereas the 'proper' templates need to 'wrap' the value being 'overridden'. That means some contextual interpretation of the intent of the author. As such an automated replacing of the templates might be difficult. —TheDJ (talkcontribs) 10:49, 17 April 2019 (UTC)

Facto Post – Issue 23 – 30 April 2019

Facto Post – Issue 23 – 30 April 2019
 

The Editor is Charles Matthews, for ContentMine. Please leave feedback for him, on his User talk page.
To subscribe to Facto Post go to Wikipedia:Facto Post mailing list. For the ways to unsubscribe, see the footer.

Completely clouded?
 
Cloud computing logo

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

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

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

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

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ArbCom 2019 special circular

 
Administrators must secure their accounts

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

View additional information

This message was sent to all administrators following a recent motion. Thank you for your attention. For the Arbitration Committee, Cameron11598 02:33, 4 May 2019 (UTC)

Administrator account security (Correction to Arbcom 2019 special circular)

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

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

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

For the Arbitration Committee, -Cameron11598 21:04, 4 May 2019 (UTC)

Administrators' newsletter – May 2019

News and updates for administrators from the past month (April 2019).

  Guideline and policy news

  Technical news

  • XTools Admin Stats, a tool to list admins by administrative actions, has been revamped to support more types of log entries such as AbuseFilter changes. Two additional tools have been integrated into it as well: Steward Stats and Patroller Stats.

  Arbitration

  • In response to the continuing compromise of administrator accounts, the Arbitration Committee passed a motion amending the procedures for return of permissions (diff). In such cases, the committee will review all available information to determine whether the administrator followed "appropriate personal security practices" before restoring permissions; administrators found failing to have adequately done so will not be resysopped automatically. All current administrators have been notified of this change.
  • Following a formal ratification process, the arbitration policy has been amended (diff). Specifically, the two-thirds majority required to remove or suspend an arbitrator now excludes (1) the arbitrator facing suspension or removal, and (2) any inactive arbitrator who does not respond within 30 days to attempts to solicit their feedback on the resolution through all known methods of communication.

  Miscellaneous


Facto Post – Issue 24 – 17 May 2019

Facto Post – Issue 24 – 17 May 2019
 
Text mining display of noun phrases from the US Presidential Election 2012
 

The Editor is Charles Matthews, for ContentMine. Please leave feedback for him, on his User talk page.
To subscribe to Facto Post go to Wikipedia:Facto Post mailing list. For the ways to unsubscribe, see the footer.
Semantic Web and TDM – a ContentMine view

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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Administrators' newsletter – June 2019

News and updates for administrators from the past month (May 2019).

 

  Administrator changes

  AndonicConsumed CrustaceanEnigmamanEuryalusEWS23HereToHelpNv8200paPeripitusStringTheory11Vejvančický

  CheckUser changes

  Ivanvector

  Guideline and policy news

  • An RfC seeks to clarify whether WP:OUTING should include information on just the English Wikipedia or any Wikimedia project.
  • An RfC on WT:RfA concluded that Requests for adminship and bureaucratship are discussions seeking to build consensus.
  • An RfC proposal to make the templates for discussion (TfD) process more like the requested moves (RM) process, i.e. "as a clearinghouse of template discussions", was closed as successful.

  Technical news

  • The CSD feature of Twinkle now allows admins to notify page creators of deletion if the page had not been tagged. The default behavior matches that of tagging notifications, and replaces the ability to open the user talk page upon deletion. You can customize which criteria receive notifications in your Twinkle preferences: look for Notify page creator when deleting under these criteria.
  • Twinkle's d-batch (batch delete) feature now supports deleting subpages (and related redirects and talk pages) of each page. The pages will be listed first but use with caution! The und-batch (batch undelete) option can now also restore talk pages.

  Miscellaneous


Re the Fram thread at BN

Thank you for your statement in opposition to the knee-jerk response to the WMF. There is much I would like to say in response regarding Fram's previous actions, but I'm unsure how much is private so will refrain from saying anything just in case. The right to work without harassment is something that should not be overlooked. Thryduulf (talk) 12:28, 11 June 2019 (UTC)

What protection do Wikipedia editors have in the area where they volunteer? There is a conflict here between the rights (ethical and moral) of volunteers versus the rights (legal) of paid employees of the WMF. There are a number of issues here that deserve scrutiny regarding actions of WMF employees, but how can a complaint be made, and how can those complaining have any confidence that their complaints will be listened to and not just hand-waved away with an anodyne response citing the TOS? I know that people say that volunteer editors can just leave if they don't like the conditions, but would you say that to a paid employee, that they can just opt to leave? It is not good that those from both areas are having to choose between leaving or staying and demanding/lobbying to improve working conditions. Effectively, the Board will have to sort out a breakdown in trust between the paid and volunteer workforce (one of the key aims of the WMF should be to maintain and nurture that relationship and not have it deteriorate). Thryduulf in the current climate, would complaints about the conduct and behaviour of WMF employees be taken seriously? If you got an email from Trust and Safety saying that your actions were under scrutiny, what would your response be? Would you think twice before speaking up in future? Carcharoth (talk) 12:41, 12 June 2019 (UTC)
I would certainly hope that all complaints to T&S would be taken seriously, whether they were about staff, volunteers or anything else. I've never had cause to make a complaint to them so I have no experience to go on about how they respond in practice. As for receiving a message saying my actions were being scrutinised, I don't know how I'd react. It really depends what I'd been saying things about, how I'd been saying them and what the message from T&S said. I'd hope that any communication would be as specific as possible about what was being scruitinsed and why. A message saying "We've received one or more complaints about the way you address other users when you disagree with them, we are investigating this is there anything you'd like to say?" is very different from "Your criticism of products like VisualEditor is significantly out of line. This is a formal warning to improve your behaviour." From my own knowledge and comments others have left, I am not convinced that Fram's response is the whole story (even from his side of things), but even assuming it isn't we have no way of knowing if we're seeing 90% or 10%. Thryduulf (talk) 12:53, 12 June 2019 (UTC)
Thank you for making those points. Carcharoth (talk) 13:02, 12 June 2019 (UTC)

Disagreements and community attitudes to TOS

We have disagreed at times recently, but I was sorry to see that things reached the point that you handed in your tools. I did not like at all what Swarm said in that discussion, and commented here. I apologise if my comments above contributed to your decision to hand in the bit, and reinforced your feelings about the community here (was trying to think of a better way to put that, but couldn't come up with anything better). Hopefully it will be possible for the community to have a sensible discussion about the TOS when things have calmed down. Carcharoth (talk) 11:32, 13 June 2019 (UTC)

Carcharoth, you mean like with the person that thanked me for handing in my mob ? ;) —TheDJ (talkcontribs) 12:23, 13 June 2019 (UTC)
Heh. Mop, mob - nice Freudian slip! :-) Carcharoth (talk) 12:28, 13 June 2019 (UTC)
Carcharoth, yeah non-native speaker... —TheDJ (talkcontribs) 12:31, 13 June 2019 (UTC)
(edit conflict) I've only just become aware of your handing in your bits, and I am very sorry that you felt the need to do that and apologise unreservedly if I contributed to it. I do fully support your principles and fully agree with your view about the action taken by WJBscribe. Thryduulf (talk) 12:25, 13 June 2019 (UTC)
  • I'm saddened to see this, and I'd like to make just one point concerning the people who are involved in all of this storm. They/we represent only a very small proportion of all the people who edit here, and those in the turn count for a tiny fraction of all the people who read and learn from Wikipedia - and those latter people are the ones you have been serving so well for so long. I hope you might think on that, and hopefully consider returning. Boing! said Zebedee (talk) 17:56, 13 June 2019 (UTC)
    Seconded. –xenotalk 18:07, 13 June 2019 (UTC)

A brownie for you!

  Hi TheDJ, I hope this whole wheeling situation resolves soon and you will return, you will be missed! Best regards, — xaosflux Talk 12:04, 13 June 2019 (UTC)

G7

I'm saddened to see this. Consider redirecting to meta instead? Simpler to change your mind in the future, should you change your mind at a later date. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 12:04, 14 June 2019 (UTC)

Same here :-( (Boing! said Zebedee (talk) 12:09, 14 June 2019 (UTC))
Headbomb, I have made careful consideration of this and I think it is the best way forward. It is a better match to how I want to identify myself within the Wikimedia movement going forward. —TheDJ (talkcontribs) 12:51, 14 June 2019 (UTC)
Well, that's certainly within your rights, it's just a bummer, and unfortunate to not be able to see the old version through [3]. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 13:01, 14 June 2019 (UTC)
Headbomb, well if you are really nostalgic, you can grab your own personal copy from Internet Archive, until that time their indexer notices my page has fallen back to the en.wp default of NOINDEX and they remove everything from public view as well ;) —TheDJ (talkcontribs) 13:10, 14 June 2019 (UTC)
I'll live. It's just sad/annoying to lose good user pages, from a Wikihistory perspective. I wish there was a way to have 'soft' deletions, where you still see a redlink/the page is considered deleted by the software, but where its history is still publicly available. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 13:17, 14 June 2019 (UTC)
IA ignores the directive now anyway. --Izno (talk) 16:41, 14 June 2019 (UTC)

A barnstar for you!

  The Barnstar of Integrity
Thank you for your service, and for defending Wikipedia's policies and guidelines, even when it was unpopular to do so. — Newslinger talk 22:13, 15 June 2019 (UTC)
  • Yes. Its a storm in a teacup. Come back soon DJ. Govindaharihari (talk) 14:16, 16 June 2019 (UTC)
  • +1 Sometimes center is a better place to roost - from there, arguments can be seen with 20-20 vision. I'm having trouble adjusting to the fast food society - spaghetti sauce is supposed to take hours when it's made right, rather than being ready in 10 minutes after opening a jar. Atsme Talk 📧 20:00, 23 June 2019 (UTC)

Dark mode gadget

Hey, as part of a WMF community tech project I wrote a bit of CSS that, when enabled, results in a "dark mode" for Wikipedia. There are still a bunch of stray elements to style, but it's getting close. I also worked a little on some UI elements for enabling/disabling the mode. It's looking like the foundation is going to pause on development for now so I was wondering if you'd be interested in collaborating on this and creating a gadget? My thinking is that by releasing it as a gadget a) some people might get enjoyment from it, and b) we could start collecting feedback that would be valuable once WMF (or someone else) decides to build this in a more robust way. AHollender (WMF) (talk) 17:44, 25 June 2019 (UTC)

AHollender (WMF), im not sure when I have time to look at this right now, but i'll keep it on my radar ;) —TheDJ (talkcontribs) 09:51, 29 June 2019 (UTC)
TheDJ Thanks for your reply. Do you know of any other folks who might be interested in helping out (in the meantime)? Or where an appropriate place to post a request for collaboration might be? Cheers AHollender (WMF) (talk) 16:19, 3 July 2019 (UTC)
(talk page stalker) @AHollender (WMF): you could try WP:IANB and/or WP:VPT. — xaosflux Talk 16:27, 3 July 2019 (UTC)

FYI

Hi DJ. Just FYI, I added a brief description of your sysop resignation here: Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/List of Fram related strikes, so that it wouldn't be mixed up with the resignations that had very different motives. Take care, Clayoquot (talk | contribs) 02:30, 29 June 2019 (UTC)

Administrators' newsletter – July 2019

News and updates for administrators from the past month (June 2019).

 

  Administrator changes

  28bytesAd OrientemAnsh666BeeblebroxBoing! said ZebedeeBU Rob13Dennis BrownDeorDoRDFloquenbeam1Flyguy649Fram2GadfiumGB fanJonathunderKusmaLectonarMoinkMSGJNickOd MishehuRamaSpartazSyrthissTheDJWJBscribe
1Floquenbeam's access was removed, then restored, then removed again.
2Fram's access was removed, then restored, then removed again.

  Guideline and policy news

  • In a related matter, the account throttle has been restored to six creations per day as the mitigation activity completed.

  Technical news

  • The Wikimedia Foundation's Community health initiative plans to design and build a new user reporting system to make it easier for people experiencing harassment and other forms of abuse to provide accurate information to the appropriate channel for action to be taken. Community feedback is invited.

  Miscellaneous


responsiveContent bug

Hey, I've found a bug with your responsive content gadget. As shown in this screenshot the top banner is much too long on wide screens (or when zoomed out) when the gadget is enabled. It did not work when I copied the main page to my sandbox so maybe it has something to do with how the main page doesn't have a level 1 header while basically all other pages do which is the only difference I see between the pages. Trialpears (talk) 12:42, 7 July 2019 (UTC)

Trialpears, has nothing to do with the gadget. The main page is broken and ppl keep holding back any and all changes to the main page. Not touching the thing with a 10ft pole. —TheDJ (talkcontribs) 21:19, 7 July 2019 (UTC)
I've been testing this some more and from my very limited css knowledge I believe that it is from the gadget. I've never experienced the bug with the gadget disabled, but see it everytime it is enabled. I have also been trying to track down the cause of it and believe I've found it.
My theory is that the selector in this piece of code doesn't select for the topmost element which usually is the page title which it shouldn't select, but in the case of the mainpage, that doesn't have a level 1 header, it ignores mp-topbanner which it should select causing this problem.
.ns-0 .mw-body-content .mw-parser-output > table,
.ns-0 .mw-body-content .mw-parser-output > .center,
.ns-0 .mw-body-content .mw-parser-output > .navbox {
    	max-width: -webkit-calc(100% - 350px);
    	max-width: -moz-calc(100% - 350px);
    	max-width: calc(100% - 350px);
}
It looks to me like it's solved by adding the following code, but I'm just an amateur pretending that I know something about CSS so it could very well break something somewhere else.
@media (min-width:1500px) {
	#mp-topbanner{
		max-width: -webkit-calc(100% - 350px);
    	max-width: -moz-calc(100% - 350px);
    	max-width: calc(100% - 350px);
	}
}
@media (min-width:1900px) {
	#mp-topbanner{
		max-width: -webkit-calc(100% - 700px);
    	max-width: -moz-calc(100% - 700px);
    	max-width: calc(100% - 700px);
	}
}
Please don't feel obliged to work on this if you believe you wouldn't enjoy it! Trialpears (talk) 22:40, 7 July 2019 (UTC)
I've done some more testing and dusted off some of my old css and can't find any reason why this would cause any problems. I've been using my bug fix for a few days now and have experienced absolutley no issues with it. Do you believe an edit request to MediaWiki:Gadget-responsiveContentBase.css would be appropriate? Trialpears (talk) 20:31, 10 July 2019 (UTC)

Reflist question

Hello, I'm one of the users on stationery.wiki. Since we updated to the latest mediawiki version our Reflist template doesn't seem to work anymore and we can't figure out why. You have worked on Wikipedia's Reflist template in the past, so we were wondering whether you could have a very quick look, I bet you'd see what the problem is immediately. I'm happy to give you more information, but I also understand if you don't want to have a look.... --Memm (talk) 08:19, 9 July 2019 (UTC)

Memm, your Cite and Parserfunctions extensions aren't loading (See your Special:Version page). Since they provide critical functionality for those templates, it is logically that it's not working. —TheDJ (talkcontribs) 08:29, 9 July 2019 (UTC)
Thank you so much for having a look! It all works now. --Memm (talk) 08:30, 9 July 2019 (UTC)

If you have a moment, could you weight in on the conversation. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:West_Los_Angeles#Map ) You have weighed in here before, but user BeenAroundAwhile doesn't seem to understand. There is also a conversation going on here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(miscellaneous)#Maps where he is a "strong support" for getting rid of Open Street Maps because of his "pin point" issue. You assistance would be appreciated. Phatblackmama (talk) 19:03, 4 August 2019 (UTC)

OneClickArchiver script

Hello TheDJ. Your name was mentioned in a thread at WT:AN. The latest from that thread is that there may be an updated version at User:Evad37/OneClickArchiver. Thanks, EdJohnston (talk) 01:44, 14 August 2019 (UTC)

EdJohnston thx. I see no need to contribute here. —TheDJ (talkcontribs) 07:36, 14 August 2019 (UTC)

Template:Quote box

Hi - I think your recent edit to Template:Quote box may have caused some bugs, seen here and here. I found a workaround, but it should be fixed also. ɱ (talk) 16:22, 14 August 2019 (UTC)

, no that already happened before. There is even a report about it on its talkpage: [[4]]. Just adding an extra line break should work around it too. If you want to fix this, you should check what the effect of adding the line break from the template would be. (i think adding an extra <p> for most quotes, which means more spacing above and below the quote. —TheDJ (talkcontribs) 13:17, 20 August 2019 (UTC)

Today's Wikipedian 10 years ago

Awesome
 
Ten years!

--Gerda Arendt (talk) 06:05, 11 September 2019 (UTC)

Onwiki tooling in Atlanta

Hi,

I was happy to see that you'll be at the Tech Conf in Atlanta.

I think that this topic may interest you: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T234661 . The title is "Developer Productivity & onwiki tooling", and in practice it's about templates, modules, and gadgets.

If it indeed interests you, can you please leave a comment there?

Thanks! --Amir E. Aharoni (talk) 22:12, 9 October 2019 (UTC)

A discussion

There is a discussion at WP:IANB in which you may probably be interested in: Wikipedia:Interface_administrators'_noticeboard#editToken_-->_csrfToken_migration. Regards. SD0001 (talk) 17:24, 15 October 2019 (UTC)

A discussion

Your userpage says you have notifications turned off, so wanted to let you know that you were pinged at Wikipedia:Interface_administrators'_noticeboard#.refbegin_and_.reflist. Wug·a·po·des00:45, 4 November 2019 (UTC)

Ping

FYI Template_talk:Horizontal_TOC#Bug_in_CSS GhostInTheMachine (talk) 09:29, 17 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) 00:04, 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)

Nomination for merging of Template:WikiProject 24

 Template:WikiProject 24 has been nominated for merging with Template:WikiProject Television. You are invited to comment on the discussion at the template's entry on the Templates for discussion page. Thank you. Gonnym (talk) 13:12, 20 December 2019 (UTC)