Tollens

Question from Mdogv91 on Laura Slade Wiggins (22:40, 11 August 2024)

How do I create a citation --Mdogv91 (talk) 22:40, 11 August 2024 (UTC)

Hi Mdogv91! You might find this set of short tutorial pages helpful, it covers why references are important, what sorts of references are OK to use on Wikipedia, as well as how to actually add the reference to an article. If you've gone through that and still need help, please do let me know what exactly you're struggling with and I'll be happy to assist. Tollens (talk) 06:37, 12 August 2024 (UTC)

Tech News: 2024-33

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

Feature news

• AbuseFilter editors and maintainers can now make a CAPTCHA show if a filter matches an edit. This allows communities to quickly respond to spamming by automated bots. [1]
• Stewards can now specify if global blocks should prevent account creation. Before this change by the Trust and Safety Product Team, all global blocks would prevent account creation. This will allow stewards to reduce the unintended side-effects of global blocks on IP addresses.

Project updates

• Nominations are open on Wikitech for new members to refresh the Toolforge standards committee. The committee oversees the Toolforge Right to fork policy and Abandoned tool policy among other duties. Nominations will remain open until at least 2024-08-26.
• One new wiki has been created: a Wikipedia in West Coast Bajau (w:bdr:) [2]

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

MediaWiki message delivery 23:19, 12 August 2024 (UTC)

Question from Tshirelecokarabo (04:06, 13 August 2024)

Hello mentor , how do I make a biography of someone? --Tshirelecokarabo (talk) 04:06, 13 August 2024 (UTC)

(talk page watcher) Hello, Tshirelecokarabo, I'm Mathglot. Brand new users will find writing a biography a difficult task to tackle at this early stage. I would concentrate on learning how to make smaller edits in existing articles first; see your homepage for some ideas. Once you gain some experience, and Wikipedia terms like Notability, Reliable sources, and WP:BLP are familiar to you, then have a look at Help:Your first article for more details about how to go about writing a new article about someone. Good luck! Mathglot (talk) 05:52, 14 August 2024 (UTC)

Thanks for the help Tshirelecokarabo (talk) 19:00, 15 August 2024 (UTC)

Sandboxed changes to uw-v1 re contributions phrase

Hi, Tollens, and thanks for the ping at Talk header. Not sure if you are interested in the multilevel user-warning templates, but I made a proposal here about a proposed change to the text about user contributions, and sandboxed it in {{uw-vandalism1/sandbox}}, in case you feel like commenting. It's been pretty quiet so far, and that page has 1,007 watchers, so it may just be acquiescence by silence. Mathglot (talk) 07:19, 14 August 2024 (UTC)

I do use those templates quite frequently, not sure why I didn't have that talk page on my watchlist so thanks for the pointer! I've left some feedback there. Tollens (talk) 07:55, 14 August 2024 (UTC)

Tech News: 2024-34

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

Feature news

• Editors who want to re-use references but with different details such as page numbers, will be able to do so by the end of 2024, using a new sub-referencing feature. You can read more about the project and how to test the prototype.
• Editors using tracking categories to identify which pages use specific extensions may notice that six of the categories have been renamed to make them more easily understood and consistent. These categories are automatically added to pages that use specialized MediaWiki extensions. The affected names are for: DynamicPageList, Kartographer, Phonos, RSS, Score, WikiHiero. Wikis that have created the category locally should rename their local creation to match. Thanks to Pppery for these improvements. [3]
• Technical volunteers who edit modules and want to get a list of the categories used on a page, can now do so using the categories property of mw.title objects. This enables wikis to configure workflows such as category-specific edit notices. Thanks to SD001 for these improvements. [4][5]

Bugs status

• Your help is needed to check if any pages need to be moved or deleted. A maintenance script was run to clean up unreachable pages (due to Unicode issues or introduction of new namespaces/namespace aliases). The script tried to find appropriate names for the pages (e.g. by following the Unicode changes or by moving pages whose titles on Wikipedia start with Talk:WP: so that their titles start with Wikipedia talk:), but it may have failed for some pages, and moved them to Special:PrefixIndex/T195546/ instead. Your community should check if any pages are listed there, and move them to the correct titles, or delete them if they are no longer needed. A full log (including pages for which appropriate names could be found) is available in phab:P67388.
• Editors who volunteer as mentors to newcomers on their wiki are once again able to access lists of potential mentees who they can connect with to offer help and guidance. This functionality was restored thanks to a bug fix. Thank you to Mbch331 for filing the bug report. You can read about that, and 18 other community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.

Project updates

• The application deadline for the Product & Technology Advisory Council (PTAC) has been extended to September 16. Members will help by providing advice to Foundation Product and Technology leadership on short and long term plans, on complex strategic problems, and help to get feedback from more contributors and technical communities. Selected members should expect to spend roughly 5 hours per month for the Council, during the one year pilot. Please consider applying, and spread the word to volunteers you think would make a positive contribution to the committee.

Learn more

• The 2024 Coolest Tool Awards were awarded at Wikimania, in seven categories. For example, one award went to the ISA Tool, used for adding structured data to files on Commons, which was recently improved during the Wiki Mentor Africa Hackathon. You can see video demonstrations of each tool at the awards page. Congratulations to this year's recipients, and thank you to all tool creators and maintainers.
• The latest Wikimedia Foundation Bulletin is available, and includes some highlights from Wikimania, an upcoming Language community meeting, and other news from the movement.

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MediaWiki message delivery 00:51, 20 August 2024 (UTC)

Question from আকবরআলী356545 on Wikipedia:REGISTERED (11:14, 21 August 2024)

আমি এখানে যুক্ত হয়ে সাহায্য চাই --আকবরআলী356545 (talk) 11:14, 21 August 2024 (UTC)

Hello আকবরআলী356545, and welcome to Wikipedia! It seems you might be interested in contributing to the Bengali Wikipedia rather than here at the English Wikipedia; if you need help getting started consider asking there instead.

মেশিন অনুবাদ: হ্যালো আকবরআলী356545, এবং উইকিপিডিয়ায় স্বাগতম! মনে হচ্ছে আপনি এখানে ইংরেজি উইকিপিডিয়ার পরিবর্তে বাংলা উইকিপিডিয়া অবদান রাখতে আগ্রহী হতে পারেন; শুরু করার জন্য আপনার সাহায্যের প্রয়োজন হলে পরিবর্তে সেখানে জিজ্ঞাসা করার কথা বিবেচনা করুন। Tollens (talk) 18:55, 21 August 2024 (UTC)

Question from Chemrach on Wikipedia talk:Arbitration Committee (18:16, 25 August 2024)

first --Chemrach (talk) 18:16, 25 August 2024 (UTC)

Hello Chemrach – I'm not sure what you mean. Do you have a question about using or editing Wikipedia? Tollens (talk) 18:54, 25 August 2024 (UTC)

Highly irresponsible

Your move back to mainspace of List of kidnappings: 2020–present. BLP issues are not for AfD, they should be removed (in general, and from the mainspace in particular). Moving it back to the mainspace while being fully aware of the issues is really a very poor decision. Fram (talk) 07:59, 26 August 2024 (UTC)

@Fram: Sorry, you are absolutely correct, and for some reason I only realized this halfway through typing a response to this which would have disagreed. My original train of thought was that you had misidentified the page as being entirely new content, and so had moved it to draftspace as "this doesn't look ready yet" even though the content there had existed for multiple years. I realize now, and should have before, that you likely meant the move to be similar to WP:BLPDEL. Regardless of your rationale I agree that I shouldn't have restored it, and have literally zero idea why I thought restoring what I agreed were BLP violations was remotely appropriate even if you had made a mistake in moving the page to draftspace. I will give the article a look right away (again, what the hell was I thinking before to not do so previously) to address the BLP issues. I see some of them have been fixed with the most recent edit. If you would like to move it back to draftspace in the meantime please do. Tollens (talk) 08:31, 26 August 2024 (UTC)

Thank you! No, between the edit already done and the extra look you will now give it, I see no reason to redraftify it. Don't fret on it, we all make mistakes (I've got the block log to prove it), not repeating them too often is the best we can hope for :-) Fram (talk) 08:53, 26 August 2024 (UTC)

Absolutely – certainly not one I'll make again anytime soon. :-)

I've gone through and removed all the names where I can't find a source for a conviction or where I am certain there has been no conviction yet, and added one missing source; far as I can tell that covers everything that was not resolved in the previous edit. Tollens (talk) 09:25, 26 August 2024 (UTC)

Thanks, much better now! Fram (talk) 10:42, 26 August 2024 (UTC)

Question from DPF429 (14:31, 26 August 2024)

Tollens I need help I tried to add a sourced genre to I wanna be your lover by prince and something bad just happened --DPF429 (talk) 14:31, 26 August 2024 (UTC)

Hi DPF429, I think I see what's happened and have made the edit I think you were trying to make. Does it look like what I've done is correct? Tollens (talk) 05:22, 27 August 2024 (UTC)

Thank you so much tollens you see I had a streak of adding unsourced info(some of them is sourced like a 2022 interview of bonnie raitt confirming prince sampled some of her slide on cream) so I finally decided to add something sourced like actually DPF429 (talk) 15:32, 27 August 2024 (UTC)

Tech News: 2024-35

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

Feature news

• Administrators can now test the temporary accounts feature on test2wiki. This was done to allow cross-wiki testing of temporary accounts, for when temporary accounts switch between projects. The feature was enabled on testwiki a few weeks ago. No further temporary account deployments are scheduled yet. Temporary Accounts is a project to create a new type of user account that replaces IP addresses of unregistered editors which are no longer made public. Please share your opinions and questions on the project talk page.
• Later this week, editors at wikis that use FlaggedRevs (also known as "Pending Changes") may notice that the indicators at the top of articles have changed. This change makes the system more consistent with the rest of the MediaWiki interface. [6]

Bugs status

• Editors who use the 2010 wikitext editor, and use the Character Insert buttons, will no longer experience problems with the buttons adding content into the edit-summary instead of the edit-window. You can read more about that, and 26 other community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.

Project updates

• Please review and vote on Focus Areas, which are groups of wishes that share a problem. Focus Areas were created for the newly reopened Community Wishlist, which is now open year-round for submissions. The first batch of focus areas are specific to moderator workflows, around welcoming newcomers, minimizing repetitive tasks, and prioritizing tasks. Once volunteers have reviewed and voted on focus areas, the Foundation will then review and select focus areas for prioritization.
• Do you have a project and are willing to provide a three (3) month mentorship for an intern? Outreachy is a twice a year program for people to participate in a paid internship that will start in December 2024 and end in early March 2025, and they need mentors and projects to work on. Projects can be focused on coding or non-coding (design, documentation, translation, research). See the Outreachy page for more details, and a list of past projects since 2013.

Learn more

• If you're curious about the product and technology improvements made by the Wikimedia Foundation last year, read this recent highlights summary on Diff.
• To learn more about the technology behind the Wikimedia projects, you can now watch sessions from the technology track at Wikimania 2024 on Commons. This week, check out:
  • Community Configuration - Shaping On-Wiki Functionality Together (55 mins) - about the Community Configuration project.
  • Future of MediaWiki. A sustainable platform to support a collaborative user base and billions of page views (30 mins) - an overview for both technical and non technical audiences, covering some of the challenges and open questions, related to the platform evolution, stewardship and developer experiences research.

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MediaWiki message delivery 20:30, 26 August 2024 (UTC)

Question from Zeusandrei on Wikipedia:New account (12:08, 27 August 2024)

H --Zeusandrei (talk) 12:08, 27 August 2024 (UTC)

Hi Zeusandrei, and welcome to Wikipedia! Did you have a question? Tollens (talk) 20:52, 28 August 2024 (UTC)

Question from Cblank2024 (15:54, 28 August 2024)

How do I edit my own chat message? It dealt with the Laurel Grove Cemetery in Savannah, GA. Need to resay my blurb was in error inre Capt. Peter Wilterberger association with that cemetery. His was Evergreen from Bonaventure. Thank you in advance. --Cblank2024 (talk) 15:54, 28 August 2024 (UTC)

Hi Cblank2024! There should be a small button that looks like [ edit ] at the end of the title of the section you created, like there is in this section with your question. If you click that button you can edit your comment and the section title, and when you are done, click "Publish changes" at the top of that edit window. This direct link should take you to the edit window for the section you created if you are having trouble finding the button. Tollens (talk) 20:56, 28 August 2024 (UTC)

Question from DiarrhoeaDemon (16:29, 28 August 2024)

How do I create a Life section in a page? --DiarrhoeaDemon (talk) 16:29, 28 August 2024 (UTC)

Hello DiarrhoeaDemon – you should look for reliable sources which talk about the person's life, then summarize what those sources say in your own words, with citations to the sources you are using (there is a good tutorial on how to add citations at WP:INTREFVE). If you know a lot about the person already, it may be tempting to just write what you already know, but this isn't allowed because readers of the article have no way to verify that what the article says is true without citations. If you are asking how to create the section heading itself, you can do this by typing the section title on a new line of the article, then selecting the text, clicking the button that says "Paragraph" in the top bar of the editing window, then choosing "Heading" in the menu. Tollens (talk) 21:06, 28 August 2024 (UTC)

Thx DiarrhoeaDemon (talk) 16:31, 29 August 2024 (UTC)

Question from Timothy Mncube2019 (12:55, 30 August 2024)

How do I upload an article --Timothy Mncube2019 (talk) 12:55, 30 August 2024 (UTC)

Hi Timothy Mncube2019! Based on your user page it seems like you might be trying to publish an article about yourself. This is strongly discouraged – if you meet Wikipedia's criteria for inclusion somebody else will probably write about you eventually.

Even if you are not looking to write about yourself, new editors often find writing new articles from scratch difficult; I would recommend working on existing articles first to become more familiar with what is expected in Wikipedia articles. Once you are ready, there is a useful help page at Help:Your first article that will guide you through the process. Note especially the order of the steps in that help page: you should gather your sources first, then write the article by summarizing those sources. It is a common mistake to write the article first, then try to find sources to support it afterward; this is almost always far more difficult than writing the article from the sources to begin with.

If you need any help, please do ask and I'll do my best! Tollens (talk) 23:34, 31 August 2024 (UTC)

Help me Timothy Mncube2019 (talk) 07:03, 9 September 2024 (UTC)

Question from DiarrhoeaDemon (11:25, 1 September 2024)

Hello, how do I create an article. When I tried, it turned into a draft. --DiarrhoeaDemon (talk) 11:25, 1 September 2024 (UTC)

@DiarrhoeaDemon: Submitting a draft for review is how you should publish an article – I see you did this already and have received some feedback. As I recommended earlier, I would strongly suggest finding your sources first, then writing the content by summarizing those sources. Right now, much of the content of your draft does not appear to be supported by any of the sources currently cited. Tollens (talk) 18:33, 1 September 2024 (UTC)

I'm still working on it. So it is incomplete. :) DiarrhoeaDemon (talk) 16:35, 3 September 2024 (UTC)

Administrators' newsletter – September 2024

News and updates for administrators from the past month (August 2024).

Administrator changes

Pppery

Interface administrator changes

Pppery

Oversighter changes

Wugapodes

CheckUser changes

• Courcelles
• GeneralNotability

Guideline and policy news

• Following an RfC, there is a new criterion for speedy deletion: C4, which applies to unused maintenance categories, such as empty dated maintenance categories for dates in the past.
• A request for comment is open to discuss whether Notability (species) should be adopted as a subject-specific notability guideline.

Arbitration

• Following a motion, remedies 5.1 and 5.2 of World War II and the history of Jews in Poland (the topic and interaction bans on My very best wishes, respectively) were repealed.
• Remedy 3C of the German war effort case ("Cinderella157 German history topic ban") was suspended for a period of six months.
• The arbitration case Historical Elections is currently open. Proposed decision is expected by 3 September 2024 for this case.

Miscellaneous

• Editors can now enter into good article review circles, an alternative for informal quid pro quo arrangements, to have a GAN reviewed in return for reviewing a different editor's nomination.
• A New Pages Patrol backlog drive is happening in September 2024 to reduce the number of unreviewed articles and redirects in the new pages feed. Currently, there is a backlog of over 13,900 articles and 26,200 redirects awaiting review. Sign up here to participate!

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• Discuss this newsletter
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Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 18:45, 2 September 2024 (UTC)

Tech News: 2024-36

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

Weekly highlight

• Editors and volunteer developers interested in data visualisation can now test the new software for charts. Its early version is available on beta Commons and beta Wikipedia. This is an important milestone before making charts available on regular wikis. You can read more about this project update and help to test the charts.

Feature news

• Editors who use the Special:UnusedTemplates page can now filter out pages which are expected to be there permanently, such as sandboxes, test-cases, and templates that are always substituted. Editors can add the new magic word __EXPECTUNUSEDTEMPLATE__ to a template page to hide it from the listing. Thanks to Sophivorus and DannyS712 for these improvements. [7]
• Editors who use the New Topic tool on discussion pages, will now be reminded to add a section header, which should help reduce the quantity of newcomers who add sections without a header. You can read more about that, and 28 other community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.
• Last week, some Toolforge tools had occasional connection problems. The cause is still being investigated, but the problems have been resolved for now. [8]
• Translation administrators at multilingual wikis, when editing multiple translation units, can now easily mark which changes require updates to the translation. This is possible with the new dropdown menu.

Project updates

• A new draft text of a policy discussing the use of Wikimedia's APIs has been published on Meta-Wiki. The draft text does not reflect a change in policy around the APIs; instead, it is an attempt to codify existing API rules. Comments, questions, and suggestions are welcome on the proposed update’s talk page until September 13 or until those discussions have concluded.

Learn more

• To learn more about the technology behind the Wikimedia projects, you can now watch sessions from the technology track at Wikimania 2024 on Commons. This week, check out:
  • Charts, the successor of Graphs - A secure and extensible tool for data visualization (25 mins) – about the above-mentioned Charts project.
  • State of Language Technology and Onboarding at Wikimedia (90 mins) – about some of the language tools that support Wikimedia sites, such as Content/Section Translation, MinT, and LanguageConverter; also the current state and future of languages onboarding. [9]

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

MediaWiki message delivery 01:04, 3 September 2024 (UTC)

Question from Jjkboi4462389 on List of best-selling comic series (16:54, 7 September 2024)

How do I add a series to the list? I noticed My Hero Academia is missing, and it recently just reached the 100 million mark --Jjkboi4462389 (talk) 16:54, 7 September 2024 (UTC)

Question from SHWETASURBHI (06:21, 8 September 2024)

हेलो how to write an artical and how to uplod in wikipediya --SHWETASURBHI (talk) 06:21, 8 September 2024 (UTC)

Tech News: 2024-37

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

Feature news

• Starting this week, the standard syntax highlighter will receive new colors that make them compatible in dark mode. This is the first of many changes to come as part of a major upgrade to syntax highlighting. You can learn more about what's to come on the help page. [10][11]
• Editors of wikis using Wikidata will now be notified of only relevant Wikidata changes in their watchlist. This is because the Lua functions entity:getSitelink() and mw.wikibase.getSitelink(qid) will have their logic unified for tracking different aspects of sitelinks to reduce junk notifications from inconsistent sitelinks tracking. [12]

Project updates

• Users of all Wikis will have access to Wikimedia sites as read-only for a few minutes on September 25, starting at 15:00 UTC. This is a planned datacenter switchover for maintenance purposes. More information will be published in Tech News and will also be posted on individual wikis in the coming weeks. [13]
• Contributors of 11 Wikipedias, including English will have a new MOS namespace added to their Wikipedias. This improvement ensures that links beginning with MOS: (usually shortcuts to the Manual of Style) are not broken by Mooré Wikipedia (language code mos). [14]

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

MediaWiki message delivery 18:49, 9 September 2024 (UTC)

Question from I have a great knowledge (16:25, 10 September 2024)

Can you please check what i typed on my draft so far and what improvements must be made? --I have a great knowledge (talk) 16:25, 10 September 2024 (UTC)

Btw its the new one called Draft: James Dokhuma I have a great knowledge (talk) 16:40, 10 September 2024 (UTC)

the link https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Draft:James_Dokhuma I have a great knowledge (talk) 16:41, 10 September 2024 (UTC)

Question from DPF429 (00:20, 13 September 2024)

Hey in the morning papers and space by Prince in la times 85 prince singles ranked morning papers is noted as soul rock and space is noted as trip hop and if there’s other song with sourced genres add those too --DPF429 (talk) 00:20, 13 September 2024 (UTC)