User talk:OhKayeSierra/Archive 5

This is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page.

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March Madness 2020

G'day all, March Madness 2020 is about to get underway, and there is bling aplenty for those who want to get stuck into the backlog by way of tagging, assessing, updating, adding or improving resources and creating articles. If you haven't already signed up to participate, why not? The more the merrier! Peacemaker67 (click to talk to me) 08:19, 29 February 2020 (UTC) for the coord team

The Signpost: 1 March 2020

From the editor: The ball is in your court

News and notes: Alexa ranking down to 13th worldwide

Special report: More participation, more conversation, more pageviews

In the media: Mapping IP editors, Smithsonian open-access, and coronavirus disinformation

Discussion report: Do you prefer M or P?

Arbitration report: Two prominent administrators removed

By the numbers: How many actions by administrators does it take to clean up spam?

Community view: The Incredible Invisible Woman

In focus: History of The Signpost, 2015–2019

Recent research: Wikipedia generates $50 billion/year consumer surplus in the US alone

From the archives: Is Wikipedia for sale?

Traffic report: February articles, floating in the dark

Gallery: Feel the love

On the bright side: What's making you happy this month?

Op-Ed: What I learned as Wikimedia UK Communications Coordinator

Opinion: Wikipedia is another country

Humour: The Wilhelm scream

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 18:45, 1 March 2020 (UTC)

Administrators' newsletter – March 2020

News and updates for administrators from the past month (February 2020).

Administrator changes

Money emoji

Athaenara • DeltaQuad

Fishhead64 • Kudpung • Mikaey

Bureaucrat changes

DeltaQuad

CheckUser changes

DeltaQuad

Oversight changes

DeltaQuad

Guideline and policy news

Following an RfC, the blocking policy was changed to state that sysops must not undo or alter CheckUser or Oversight blocks, rather than should not.
A request for comment confirmed that sandboxes of established but inactive editors may not be blanked due solely to inactivity.

Technical news

Following a discussion, Twinkle's default CSD behavior will soon change, most likely this week. After the change, Twinkle will default to "tagging mode" if there is no CSD tag present, and default to "deletion mode" if there is a CSD tag present. You will be able to always default to "deletion mode" (the current behavior) using your Twinkle preferences.

Miscellaneous

Following the 2020 Steward Elections, the following editors have been appointed as stewards: BRPever, Krd, Martin Urbanec, MusikAnimal, Sakretsu, Sotiale, and Tks4Fish. There are a total of seven editors that have been appointed as stewards, the most since 2014.
The 2020 appointees for the Ombudsman commission are Ajraddatz and Uzoma Ozurumba; they will serve for one year.

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 11:20, 2 March 2020 (UTC)

Tech News: 2020-10

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

Readers who were not logged in briefly saw the interface in a language decided by their browser. It should normally be in the language of the wiki. This happened for a short period of time last week. This was because of a bug. [1]

Changes later this week

If you forget your password you can ask for a new one to be sent to your email address. You need to know your email address or your username. You will now be able to choose that you need to enter both your email address and your username. This will be a preference. This is to get fewer password reset emails someone else asked for. [2]
When you asked for a new password you could see if the username didn't exist on Special:PasswordReset. Now the page will show the username you entered and tell you an email has been sent if the username exists. This is for better security. [3]
On Special:WhatLinksHere you can see what other pages link to a page. You can see if the link is from a redirect. You can now see which section the redirect links to. [4]
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 3 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 4 March. It will be on all wikis from 5 March (calendar).

Future changes

The developers are working on a new interface to solve edit conflicts on talk pages. You can give feedback. [5]
There is a vote on the creation of a new user group called abuse filter manager. The vote runs from March 1 to March 31 on Meta.
wgMFSpecialCaseMainPage was used for the mobile site. It was deprecated in 2017. It will stop working in April. Wikis should see if they use it. If they do they should fix it. You can read more and ask for help. This affects 183 wikis. There is a list. [6]

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

00:36, 3 March 2020 (UTC)

Closure of Ninja

Can you please expand your closing statement at Talk:Ninja_(video_game_player)#Requested_move_12_January_2020 to explain how you found no consensus for the original proposal? In particular, please clarify whether you just counted !votes or whether you weighed the arguments, and, if the latter, summarize your understanding of the arguments supporting and opposing the proposal, and how you weighed them and why. Or, you can revert your close and allow someone else to evaluate the arguments accordingly. Thanks! --В²C ☎ 00:40, 3 March 2020 (UTC)

@Born2cycle: Gladly. I'll draft an expanded rationale up now. OhKayeSierra (talk) 00:45, 3 March 2020 (UTC)

@Born2cycle:

Done. OhKayeSierra (talk) 02:07, 3 March 2020 (UTC)

First, congratulations on your page movership. That should make closing RMs less of a pain (though, sometimes it's easier to pawn off the actual moves and associated corrections on someone else, so it's kind of a mixed blessing)!

So, thanks for explaining your close decision. Now I can see that you seem to have missed that there was no policy basis for the Oppose position, while Support had strong policy basis. Let's review how RM closers are supposed to determine consensus, per WP:RM/CI#Determining consensus:

Consensus is determined not just by considering the preferences of the participants in a given discussion, but also by evaluating their arguments, assigning due weight accordingly, and giving due consideration to the relevant consensus of the Wikipedia community in general as reflected in applicable policy, guidelines and naming conventions.

So while I agree the participants did prefer keeping the current title, their arguments were, frankly, totally lame. Consider:

Although oppose cited NCVG, you acknowledge NCVG is agnostic about the two choices. Just because someone cites policy does not mean their argument is supported by that policy. In this case it obviously did not.
You characterized the disagreement as "between whether WP:CONCISE should apply vs. WP:PRECISE", apparently without recognizing that PRECISE applies to the entire title, not to the disambiguator alone. That is, the proposed title, Ninja (gamer), meets PRECISE ("titles should unambiguously define the topical scope of the article, but should be no more precise than that") just as well as the current longer title. Since there is no other Ninja that is a "gamer", Ninja (gamer) "unambiguously define[s] the topical scope of the article". It doesn't matter that "gamer" is "vague" in determining whether the title meets WP:PRECISE, and this was explained (by yours truly) at length. If anything, the longer title violates PRECISE because it is "more precise than that".
As to the "too informal" point, there is no policy basis for that position either, not to mention that wide use of "gamer" in reliable sources annihilated that argument anyway.

But there can be no question, and none was cited in the discussion, about which title is preferred by WP:CONCISE, a key WP:CRITERIA listed at the WP:AT policy page, establishing the Support argument as grounded firmly in policy.

In short, the Oppose side was based entirely on WP:JDLI, while Support was firmly based in policy. I know it's hard to find against the obvious preference of participants, but when their arguments are as lame as they were in this case, I really think you have to. Otherwise, we're just encouraging weak JDLI arguments in future RM discussions. I urge you to reconsider your decision accordingly. Thanks again. --В²C ☎ 19:08, 3 March 2020 (UTC)

@Born2cycle: Thank you for sharing your input on this. While I do concur that there were a few baseless opposes for reasons that crossed into WP:JDLI territory, I also found that they were in the minority, and the majority couldn't fully hash out whether WP:CONCISE or WP:PRECISE prevailed. Even if I were to discount the JDLI opposes, I think that my rationale would still be the same and I still would've thought that there wasn't a consensus to move the pages. As I stated in my final paragraph, I encourage all interested editors to start an RfC to determine the proper naming conventions moving forward, as I firmly believe that mass RM's like this one shouldn't dictate the current consensus on naming in any way and needs to involve the broader editing community. And, of course, if you still disagree with my close, you're more than welcome to take it to WP:MR to ask uninvolved editors to determine if my close should be endorsed or overturned. OhKayeSierra (talk) 19:33, 3 March 2020 (UTC)

I will add that this was the most difficult close I've done to date. OhKayeSierra (talk) 19:36, 3 March 2020 (UTC)

I will consider going to WP:MR because I think we really need to discourage taking positions in discussions based entirely on JDLI, as I believe the Opposers did on this one (though not intentionally). However, I respect your decision and understand why you went the way you did; many if not most RM closers would probably have done the same (unfortunately, in my view). Regarding the RFC suggestion, that's good, but please don't dismiss the value of examining these broader issues in narrow RMs like this one. I've addressed this on my FAQ, here: User:Born2cycle/FAQ#Change_guideline_first. --В²C ☎ 19:50, 3 March 2020 (UTC)

Page mover granted

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

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

Useful links:

Wikipedia:Requested moves
Category:Articles to be moved, for article renaming requests awaiting action.

If you do not want the page mover right anymore, just let me know, and I'll remove it. Thank you, and happy editing! ~Swarm~ ^{sting} 07:15, 3 March 2020 (UTC)

Tech News: 2020-11

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

There is a new search word called articletopic. You can use it to search for articles on a specific topic. It is available on the Arabic, Czech, English and Vietnamese Wikipedias. It will come to more Wikipedias soon. [7][8][9]

Changes later this week

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

Future changes

There is a plan for new requirements for user signatures. You can give feedback.
The Wikipedia Android app will do push notifications if users want them. This could help you see for example when someone wrote on your talk page or your edit was reverted. This will come later this year. [10]

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

17:15, 9 March 2020 (UTC)

The Bugle: Issue CLXVII, March 2020

Your Military History Newsletter

Project news: From the editors; awards and honours; contest results
Articles: Last month's new featured and A-class content
Book review: Recent external reviews

The Bugle is published by the Military history WikiProject. To receive it on your talk page, please join the project or sign up here.
If you are a project member who does not want delivery, please remove your name from this page. Your editors, Ian Rose (talk) and Nick-D (talk) 01:51, 15 March 2020 (UTC)

Tech News: 2020-12

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

Recent changes

There is a new API module for changing the content model of existing pages. Use action=changecontentmodel to specify the new model. You can read the documentation on mediawiki.org. [11]

Changes later this week

The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 17 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 18 March. It will be on all wikis from 19 March (calendar).

Future changes

If you edit a page at the same time as someone else you can get an edit conflict. There is a new two-column interface to make it easier to solve this. It will soon be active by default on the German, Arabic, and Farsi Wikipedias. It will be on by default on more wikis within the next months. You will be able to opt out of the new interface. [12][13]
You can see a proposed design for replying to comments in an easier way.

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

21:15, 16 March 2020 (UTC)

GOCE March newsletter

Guild of Copy Editors March 2020 Newsletter

Hello and welcome to the March newsletter, a brief update of Guild activities since December 2019. All being well, we're planning to issue these quarterly in 2020, balancing the need to communicate widely with the avoidance of filling up talk pages. Don't forget you can unsubscribe at any time; see below.

Election results: There was little changeover in the roster of Guild Coordinators, with Miniapolis stepping down with distinction as a coordinator emeritus while Jonesey95 returned as lead coordinator. The next election is scheduled for June 2020 and all Wikipedians in good standing may participate.

January Drive: Thanks to everyone for the splendid work, completing 215 copy edits including 56 articles from the Requests page and 116 backlog articles from the target months of June to August 2019. At the conclusion of the drive there was a record low of 323 articles in the copy editing backlog. Of the 27 editors who signed up for the drive, 21 copyedited at least one article. Final results, including barnstars awarded, are available here.

February Blitz: Of the 15 editors who signed up for this one-week blitz, 13 completed at least one copy edit. A total of 32 articles were copy edited, evenly split between the twin goals of requests and the oldest articles from the copy-editing backlog. Full results are here.

March Drive: Currently underway, this event is targeting requests and backlog articles from September to November 2019. As of 18 March, the backlog stands at a record low of 253 articles and is expected to drop further as the drive progresses. Awards will be given to everyone who copyedits at least one article from the backlog. Help set a new record and sign up now!

Progress report: As of 18 March, GOCE copyeditors have completed 161 requests in 2020 and there was a net reduction of 385 articles from the copy-editing backlog – a 60% decrease from the beginning of the year. Well done and thank you everyone!

Election reminder: It may only be March but don't forget our mid-year Election of Coordinators opens for nominations on 1 June. Coordinators normally serve a six-month term and are elected on an approval basis. Self-nominations are welcome. If you've thought of helping out at the Guild, or know of another editor who would make a good coordinator, please consider standing for election or nominating them here.

Thank you all again for your participation; we wouldn't be able to achieve what we have without you! Cheers from your GOCE coordinators Jonesey95, Baffle gab1978, Reidgreg, Tdslk and Twofingered Typist

To discontinue receiving GOCE newsletters, please remove your name from our mailing list.

MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 15:52, 18 March 2020 (UTC)

Tech News: 2020-13

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

Problems

Some development will be slower than planned. This is because of the current pandemic. You can see the new deployment guidelines. This is to avoid risks when some persons could be unavailable.
There was a problem when adding interwiki links. The tool you use to add interwiki links could suggest the wrong project to link to. This has now been fixed. [14][15]

Changes later this week

The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 24 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 25 March. It will be on all wikis from 26 March (calendar).

Future changes

There is a project to make editing easier for newcomers. The developers are trying to understand what initiatives different Wikipedias have to welcome newcomers. They also want to know which templates are often used for maintenance activities. You can help this project by checking if your wiki's pages are listed on Wikidata.

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

17:08, 23 March 2020 (UTC)

Thinking of you

... with best wishes for well-being for you and your daughter! --Gerda Arendt (talk) 07:05, 25 March 2020 (UTC)

@Gerda Arendt: Thank you so much for the well-wishes, and likewise! Unfortunately, I found out today that someone I'm close to tested positive for COVID-19 (we actually found out about it from the local health department), so I and my spouse are both self-quarantining as a precaution. So far, Clara, User:Mistbreeze, and I are all fine (thankfully). Unfortunately, it also means there's most likely going to be a lot more doctor's visits in my future!

OhKayeSierra (talk) 07:37, 25 March 2020 (UTC)

Good to here that you are all fine, hoping it may stay so, - and self-quarantine is more or less what we all have to live in Germany these days. I received a nice caricature, showing a man, a women and a dog in meditating lotus position, saying: "You can't go outside? Go inside ;) - I received it from one of the students of Willigis Jäger I know. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 08:27, 25 March 2020 (UTC)

Clara, what a great name, thinking of Clara Schumann! --Gerda Arendt (talk) 08:29, 25 March 2020 (UTC)

The Signpost: 29 March 2020

From the editors: The bad and the good

News and notes: 2018 Wikipedian of the year blocked

WikiProject report: WikiProject COVID-19: A WikiProject Report

Special report: Wikipedia on COVID-19: what we publish and why it matters

In the media: Blocked in Iran but still covering the big story

Discussion report: Rethinking draft space

Arbitration report: Unfinished business

In focus: "I have been asked by Jeffrey Epstein …"

Community view: Wikimedia community responds to COVID-19

Recent research: Disease outbreak uncertainties, AfD forecasting, auto-updating Wikipedia

From the archives: Text from Wikipedia good enough for Oxford University Press to claim as own

Traffic report: The only thing that matters in the world

Gallery: Visible Women on Wikipedia

News from the WMF: Amid COVID-19, Wikimedia Foundation offers full pay for reduced hours, mobilizes all staff to work remote, and waives sick time

On the bright side: What's making you happy this month?

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 17:42, 29 March 2020 (UTC)

Tech News: 2020-14

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

Recent changes

The beta version of the Wikipedia app for Android can now help users add tags on Commons. These tags are called depicts. [16]

Changes later this week

The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 31 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 1 April. It will be on all wikis from 2 April (calendar).

Future changes

The video player will change to be simpler and more modern. The current beta feature will become the video player for everyone. The old player will be removed. [17]
There is a project to make templates easier to use. The next few weeks the developers will present ideas on the project page. You can watch that page if you are interested in giving feedback. [18]

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

17:26, 30 March 2020 (UTC)

Administrators' newsletter – April 2020

News and updates for administrators from the past month (March 2020).

Administrator changes

Cabayi • Lee Vilenski

Boing! said Zebedee

Jonny-mt • MarkGallagher • PeaceNT

Money emoji → Moneytrees

Bureaucrat changes

SilkTork • WereSpielChequers

CheckUser changes

NativeForeigner

Oversight changes

Someguy1221

Daniel Case

Guideline and policy news

There is an ongoing request for comment to streamline the source deprecation and blacklisting process.

Technical news

There is a plan for new requirements for user signatures. You can give feedback.

Arbitration

Following the banning of an editor by the WMF last year, the Arbitration Committee resolved to hold a Arbcom RfC regarding on-wiki harassment. A draft RfC has been posted at Wikipedia:Arbitration Committee/Anti-harassment RfC (Draft) and not open to comments from the community yet. Interested editors can comment on the RfC itself on its talk page.

Miscellaneous

The WMF has begun a pilot report of the pages most visited through various social media platforms to help with anti-vandalism and anti-disinformation efforts. The report is updated daily and will be available through the end of May.

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 07:00, 1 April 2020 (UTC)

Wikimedians for Sustainable Development - March Newsletter

This is our fourth newsletter, covering March 2020. This issue has news related to SDGs 3 and 11.

Becoming a User Group

Wikimedians for Sustainable Development are recognized as a Wikimedia user Group [5]

In the news

Wikipedia is flooded with information — but it has a blind spot (SDG 11) [1]

New WikiProjects

Wikidata:WikiProject COVID-19 (SDG 3) [9]
(Arabic) ويكيبيديا:مشروع ويكي طب/فريق عمل كوفيد-19 (SDG 3) [10]
(Czech) Wikipedie:WikiProjekt SARS-CoV-2 (SDG 3) [11]
(English) Wikipedia:WikiProject COVID-19 (SDG 3) [12]

Academic studies

Uneven Coverage of Natural Disasters in Wikipedia: the Case of Floods (SDG 11) [2]

Events

The COVID-19 pandemic halts all in-person events funded through the Wikimedia Foundation (SDG 3) [6]
- Which lead to a renewed interest in remote events (SDG 17) [8]

Information from the Wikimedia Foundation

COVID-19 (SDG 3) [20]

The Sustainable Development Goals

The United Nations adopt changes to the Sustainable Development Goal Indicators (SDG-all) [7]

New Wikidata properties

GreatSchools ID (SDG 4) [4]
food energy (SDG 1) [14]
number of recoveries (SDG 3) [15]
number of clinical tests (SDG 3) [16]

New Wikidata example queries

Updated chart of the number of infections and deaths caused since the outbreak of SARS-CoV-2, as reported by the World Health Organisation (SDG 3) [3]
World map of hospitals (SDG 3) [13]
Notable people with COVID-19 by number of sitelinks (SDG 3) [17]
COVID-19 case statistics for India (SDG 3):
- State-level map [18]
- State-level line graph [19]

Links

This message was sent with Global message delivery by Ainali (talk) 20:57, 3 April 2020 (UTC) • Contribute • Unsubscribe

Tech News: 2020-15

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

Problems

There was a problem with user pages not being shown properly on desktop. This was because of a bug. It will soon be fixed. [19]

Changes later this week

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

Future changes

MediaWiki will use a newer version of Unicode. Some characters that did not have an upper case equivalent before do now. Titles beginning with one of these characters will be moved. A list of these titles can be seen on Phabricator. The titles will be renamed by the user Maintenance script. This will start on 13 April 2020. You can rename them before this if you wish and the new title can be different from the one the script would rename it to. [20]

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

19:03, 6 April 2020 (UTC)

US politicians known to have anti-Chinese views

Thanks for removing that entire section, which would have been my preference as well. my own contribution there was just to balance out what seemed to be a POV-based Republican-bashing section, but it is much better to just remove the whole thing. "yikes" is right. JungerMan Chips Ahoy! (talk) 17:43, 9 April 2020 (UTC)

@JungerMan Chips Ahoy!: Yeah, when I read it, it smacked of undue libel and a needless hatchet job that didn't really add anything of value to the article. OhKayeSierra (talk) 20:30, 9 April 2020 (UTC)

Happy Easter

or: the resurrection of loving-kindness - and thank you for the quote above. Hope you and yours are well? --Gerda Arendt (talk) 12:56, 12 April 2020 (UTC)

@Gerda Arendt: Thank you for the well wishes, and I hope you had a lovely Easter as well. By a miracle, I'm somehow the only one infected with COVID (most likely got it from volunteering to handle the grocery shopping and errands so that my husband didn't have to), so I've spent my time quarantined in the basement, to avoid getting Clara and Mistbreeze sick. Aside from a bit of a nasty cough and a fever, I'd say that I'm relatively ok, all things considered. I've spent far too much time getting rest throughout the day.

OhKayeSierra (talk) 04:09, 13 April 2020 (UTC)

Thinking of you! --Gerda Arendt (talk) 07:09, 13 April 2020 (UTC)

The Bugle: Issue CLXVIII, April 2020

Your Military History Newsletter

Project news: From the editors; awards and honours; contest results
Articles: Last month's new featured and A-class content
Book review: Hawkeye7 looks at the logistics behind the Crusades and the USAF's early Cold War nuclear deterrant

The Bugle is published by the Military history WikiProject. To receive it on your talk page, please join the project or sign up here.
If you are a project member who does not want delivery, please remove your name from this page. Your editors, Ian Rose (talk) and Nick-D (talk) 05:21, 13 April 2020 (UTC)

Tech News: 2020-16

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

You can now use the articletopic search word on all Wikipedias. It searches articles by topic. [21]
You can see wiki tools in the new Tools Gallery. [22]
You can see edits from the Wikimedia Cloud Services in a new dashboard.
When you use filters on a history page you sometimes don't see any edits. There is a text explaining this now. Before it was just empty. [23]
There is a new Wikimedia Technical Blog. [24]

Problems

There was a problem with the Wikidata database last week. Some wikis went down for twenty minutes. Wikidata and other projects showed error messages. Interwiki links were not shown, some tools did not work and other problems. Some of this was fixed quickly. The developers are working on fixing the rest. [25][26][27]

Changes later this week

The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from April 14. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from April 15. It will be on all wikis from April 16 (calendar).

Future changes

Some graphs have not worked on mobile. This will soon be fixed. [28]
The article tab on talk pages of redirects links to the target of the redirect. It could link to the redirect page itself instead. You can leave feedback on this.
For pages using syntax highlighting, the use of the deprecated <source> tag, as well as the use of the deprecated enclose parameter, will add tracking categories.

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

15:31, 13 April 2020 (UTC)

Tech News: 2020-17

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

Tech News

The next issue of Tech News will be sent out on 4 May 2020.

Recent changes

The small wiki toolkits is to help smaller wikis that need technical skills. They can learn and share technical skills. [29]
Over-qualified CSS selectors in Wikimedia skins have been removed. div#content is now .mw-body. div.portal is now .portal. div#footer is now #footer. This is so the skins can use HTML5 elements. If your gadgets or user styles used them you will have to update them. [30]

Changes later this week

There is no new MediaWiki version this week.

Future changes

Some things on the wikis might look weird or not work in Internet Explorer 8 in the future. Internet Explorer 8 was replaced in 2011. [31]
The font in the diffs will change. [32]
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 28 April next week. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 29 April next week. It will be on all wikis from 30 April next week (calendar).

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

18:45, 20 April 2020 (UTC)

The Signpost: 26 April 2020

News and notes: Unbiased information from Ukraine's government?

In the media: Coronavirus, again and again

Discussion report: Redesigning Wikipedia, bit by bit

Featured content: Featured content returns

Arbitration report: Two difficult cases

Traffic report: Disease the Rhythm of the Night

Gallery: Roy is doing fine and sending more photos

Recent research: Trending topics across languages; auto-detecting bias

Essay: Wikipedia:An article about yourself isn't necessarily a good thing

By the numbers: Open data and COVID-19: Wikipedia as an informational resource during the pandemic

Opinion: Trusting Everybody to Work Together

On the bright side: What's making you happy this month?

Interview: Health and RfA's: An interview with Guy Macon

In focus: Multilingual Wikipedia

WikiProject report: The Guild of Copy Editors

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Wikimedians for Sustainable Development - April Newsletter

This is our fifth newsletter, covering April 2020. This issue has news related to SDGs 3, 6, 9, 10, 11, 13, 14 and 15..

News

GLAM Newsletter Special report on COVID-19 (SDG 3) [1]
Wikidata and the bibliography of life in the time of coronavirus (SDG 3) [7]
Video: Wikidata Lab XXII - Wikiprojeto COVID-19 (SDG 3) [20]
How Wikipedia is Covering the Coronavirus Pandemic (SDG 3) [21]
Open data and COVID-19: Wikipedia as an informational resource during the pandemic (SDG 3) [23]
Using CC Licenses and Tools to Share and Preserve Cultural Heritage in the Face of Climate Change (SDG 11) [25]
Video: Mapping against COVID-19 (SDG 3) [26]
Student-created immunology content on Wikipedia receiving a lot of attention this month (SDG 3) [34]
How Wikipedia shows disability matters (SDG 10) [35]

Tools

COVID-19 dashboard (SDG 3) [2]
COVID-19 dashboard for Tunisia (SDG 3) [22]

In the news

Why Wikipedia Is Immune to Coronavirus (SDG 3) [3]

Research

Why and how medical schools, peer-reviewed journals, and research funders should promote Wikipedia editing (SDG 3) [4]
A protocol for adding knowledge to Wikidata, a case report (SDG 3) [5]
Multilingual enrichment of disease biomedical ontologies (SDG 3) [6]

New Wikidata properties

FHF establishment ID (SDG 3) [8]
FHF hospital group ID (SDG 3) [9]
Spanish National Catalog of Hospitals ID (SDG 3) [10]
Forest Stewardship Council Certificate Code (SDG 9) [24]
Forest Stewardship Council License Code (SDG 9) [27]
Psocodea Species File ID (SDG 15) [28]
Swedish Glaciers ID (SDG 13) [29]

New Wikidata query examples

Infectious diseases and their number of cases (SDG 3) [11]
The longest river that feeds into another river (SDG 6 & 14) [30]
Longest rivers that do not feed into a sea or ocean (SDG 6 & 14) [31]
Recently published works on COVID-19 (SDG 3) [32]
Welsh hospitals, health centres, doctors surgeries and temporary Covid19 hospitals (SDG 3) [33]

New Wikidata schema examples

pandemic (E184) (SDG 3) [12]
hospital (E187) (SDG 3) [13]
2020 coronavirus pandemic local outbreaks (E188) (SDG 3) [14]
clinical trial (E189) (SDG 3) [15]
Lockdown (E190) (SDG 3) [16]
lockdown part of the 2019-2020 coronavirus disease pandemic (E191) (SDG 3) [17]
virus taxon (E192) (SDG 3) [18]
contact tracing app (E195) (SDG 3) [19]

Links

This message was sent with Global message delivery by Ainali (talk) 18:58, 1 May 2020 (UTC) • Contribute • Unsubscribe

Administrators' newsletter – May 2020

News and updates for administrators from the past month (April 2020).

Administrator changes

Gnangarra • Kaisershatner • Malcolmxl5

CheckUser changes

Callanecc

Oversight changes

HJ Mitchell

Guideline and policy news

Discretionary sanctions have been authorized for all pages and edits related to COVID-19, to be logged at WP:GS/COVID19.
Following a recent discussion on Meta-Wiki, the edit filter maintainer global group has been created.
A request for comment has been proposed to create a new main page editor usergroup.
A request for comment has been proposed to make the bureaucrat activity requirements more strict.

Technical news

The Editing team has been working on the talk pages project. You can review the proposed design and share your thoughts on the talk page.
Enterprisey created a script that will show a link to the proper Special:Undelete page when viewing a since-deleted revision, see User:Enterprisey/link-deleted-revs.

Miscellaneous

A request for comment closed with consensus to create a Village Pump-style page for communication with the Wikimedia Foundation.

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 01:19, 2 May 2020 (UTC)

Tech News: 2020-19

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

Some wikis will be on read-only for a few minutes on 5 May. This will happen around 05:00 UTC. This is for database maintenance. [33]
Some wikis will be on read-only for a few minutes on 7 May. This will also affect CentralAuth. This can for example affect global renames, password changes, changing or confirming your email address and logging in to new wikis. This will happen around 05:00 UTC. This is for database maintenance. [34]

Changes later this week

You can get a notification when someone links to a page you created. You can soon turn these notifications off for individual pages. [35]
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 5 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 6 May. It will be on all wikis from 7 May (calendar).

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

16:59, 4 May 2020 (UTC)

Tech News: 2020-20

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

Recent changes

Everyone can now import photos from Flickr to Commons with the UploadWizard. Before this only autopatrollers on Commons could import photos from Flickr. [36]

Problems

Commons will be on read-only for a few minutes on 12 May. This will happen around 05:00 UTC. This is for database maintenance. [37]
Several wikis including Wikidata will be on read-only for a few minutes on 19 May. This will happen around 05:00 UTC. English Wikipedia will be on read-only for a few minutes on 21 May 05:00 UTC. This is for database maintenance. [38][39]

Changes later this week

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

Future changes

JavaScript scripts and gadgets can no longer check multiple keys at once via mw.config.exists() or mw.user.tokens.exists(). You can use exists() or get() to check one at a time instead. [40]

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

20:41, 11 May 2020 (UTC)

The Bugle: Issue CLXIX, May 2020

Your Military History Newsletter

Project news: From the editors; awards and honours; contest results
Articles: Last month's new featured and A-class content
Book review: Nick-D and Hawkeye7 look at fortifications, the German Army, and post-Cold War conflict

The Bugle is published by the Military history WikiProject. To receive it on your talk page, please join the project or sign up here.
If you are a project member who does not want delivery, please remove your name from this page. Your editors, Ian Rose (talk) and Nick-D (talk) 15:03, 15 May 2020 (UTC)

May

Thank you for article improvements in May! - DYK our list of people for whose life I'm thankful enough to improve their articles? - I have a FAC open, one of Monteverdi's exceptional works, in memory of Brian who passed me his collected sources. - How are you, and yours? --Gerda Arendt (talk) 20:39, 17 May 2020 (UTC)

Tech News: 2020-21

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

If you forget your password you can ask for a new one to be sent to your email address. You need to know your email address or your username. You can choose that you need to enter both your email address and your username. This is a preference. This is to get fewer password reset emails someone else asked for. This is now available on all Wikimedia wikis. [41][42]

Problems

There is a bug that creates problems for iPhone users with iOS 13 and Safari. If you use an iPhone to read or edit Wikipedia and see bugs on the mobile site you can report them. [43]
Several wikis including Wikidata will be on read-only for a few minutes on 19 May. This will happen around 05:00 UTC. English Wikipedia will be on read-only for a few minutes on 21 May 05:00 UTC. This is for database maintenance. [44][45]

Changes later this week

The Wikipedia app for Android can let users add depicts on Commons. The beta version used computer-aided tagging. This was removed to get more specific depicts. [46]
There is no new MediaWiki version this week.

Future changes

Graphs will be rendered in the reader's browser. This will use Javascript. Graphs will hopefully work better for everyone who uses Javascript. It will not work for users who don't use Javascript. This will not affect diagrams in image files. [47]
Some CSS for the skins has been simplified. This affects div#p-personal, div#p-navigation, div#p-interaction, div#p-tb, div#p-lang, div#p-namespaces, div#p-variants and div#footer. They will have to remove div. You will have to update your gadgets, scripts or user styles. This is so we can use HTML5. [48]
Some CSS for the Vector skin has been changed. This affects #p-variants, #p-namespaces, #p-personal, #p-views and #p-cactions. They can no longer use > ul. You might need to update your gadgets, scripts or user styles. See how.

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

17:19, 18 May 2020 (UTC)

Tech News: 2020-22

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

The visual editor will now work in the Modern skin. The changes that needed to happen for this to work could cause problems for some scripts or gadgets. [49]
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from May 26. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from May 27. It will be on all wikis from May 28 (calendar).

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

14:18, 25 May 2020 (UTC)

Page moves

Thanks for your work at WP:RMTR! I simply wanted to bring to your attention that you removed four listings in this edit, but only performed three sets of moves. Did you mean to reject the move of Chinese in New York City? Should the move of Chinese in New York City be re-proposed as an RM, or can the move be actioned after linking to the diff of the original proposal as seems standard for RMTRs? It seems uncontroversial, as the related article is located at Chinese people. I note that articles with similar titles exist, such as Chinese people in Korea, Chinese people in Myanmar, and Chinese people in Germany, but some related topics are distinct enough to warrant unique titles, see Chinese diaspora in France, Chinese immigration to Sydney. Vycl1994 (talk) 06:50, 26 May 2020 (UTC)

@Vycl1994: Thanks for bringing that to my attention! That was a mistake on my part. I’ll handle the move request shortly. OhKayeSierra (talk) 09:16, 26 May 2020 (UTC)

Anddd...

Done. OhKayeSierra (talk) 09:20, 26 May 2020 (UTC)

Administrators' newsletter – June 2020

News and updates for administrators from the past month (May 2020).

Administrator changes

CaptainEek • Creffett • Cwmhiraeth

Anna Frodesiak • Buckshot06 • Ronhjones • SQL

CheckUser changes

SQL

Guideline and policy news

A request for comment asks whether the Unblock Ticket Request System (UTRS) should allowed any unblock request or just private appeals.
The Wikimedia Foundation announced that they will develop a universal code of conduct for all WMF projects. There is an open local discussion regarding the same.

Arbitration

A motion was passed to enact a 500/30 restriction on articles related to the history of Jews and antisemitism in Poland during World War II (1933–45), including the Holocaust in Poland. Article talk pages where disruption occurs may also be managed with the stated restriction.

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 13:27, 1 June 2020 (UTC)

Wikimedians for Sustainable Development - May Newsletter

This is our sixth newsletter, covering May 2020. This issue has news related to SDGs 3, 4, 5, 15 and 16.

Meetings

Next meeting for Wikimedians for Sustainable Development is Sunday, 7 June 18.00-19.00 UTC (SDG-all) [17]

News

Wikimedia and COVID-19: April overview (SDG 3) [1]
Extract Knowledge from Wikidata to Wikipedia articles related to Coronavirus (SDG 3) [8]
How Wikipedia became a trusted source for COVID-19 information (SDG 3) [15]
Future Historians Will Rely on Wikipedia’s COVID-19 Coverage (SDG 3) [16]
Students document workplace health risks on Wikipedia amidst global pandemic (SDG 3) [18]

New Wikidata properties

COVIDWHO ID (SDG 3) [2]
DGHS facility code (SDG 3) [3]
DPVweb ID (SDG 15) [4]
RPPS ID (SDG 3) [5]
hardiness of plant (SDG 15) [9]
hardiness zone (SDG 15) [10]
voting system (SDG 16) [11]
DPE school code (SDG 4) [12]

New Wikidata query examples

Map of countries receiving the Nobel peace prize (SDG 16) [6]
Map of geolocated Argentine libraries (SDG 4) [7]
Map of hospitals (blue) and health centers (green) of Argentina (SDG 3) [13]
Map of National parks in Sweden (SDG 15) [14]
Universities ranked by PageRank on English Wikipedia (SDG 4) [19]

New Wiki projects

Wikidata:WikiProject Schools (SDG 4) [20]
Swedish Wikipedia: Projekt HBTQI (SDG 5) [21]

Links

This message was sent with Global message delivery by Ainali (talk) 16:39, 1 June 2020 (UTC) • Contribute • Unsubscribe

Tech News: 2020-23

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

There is a new beta version of the Wikimedia Commons app for Android. It has a new zoom function when you look at images. It can also suggest places when you upload geotagged photos. [50]

Problems

There was a problem with the Commons database on 27 May. Commons could not be edited for eight minutes. Because of this problem the database was moved. This caused another short read-only time on 29 May. [51][52][53]
The Vector skin had a problem where you couldn't add links to the article in other languages. You couldn't see the section if there were no links to other languages already. It also removed content translation links and links to language settings. This has now been fixed. [54]

Changes later this week

You can get a notification when someone links to a page you created. You can turn these notifications off for individual pages. You can soon turn them off also in the notifications you get. [55]
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 2 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 3 June. It will be on all wikis from 4 June (calendar).

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

22:31, 1 June 2020 (UTC)

GOCE June newsletter

Guild of Copy Editors June 2020 Newsletter

Hello and welcome to the June newsletter, a brief update of Guild activities since March 2020. You can unsubscribe from our mailings at any time; see below. All times and dates stated are in UTC.

Current events

Election time: Nomination of candidates in our mid-year Election of Coordinators opened on 1 June, and voting will take place from 00:01 on 16 June. GOCE coordinators normally serve a six-month term and are elected on an approval basis. Self-nominations are welcome. If you've thought about helping out at the Guild, or you know of another editor who would make a good coordinator, please consider standing for election or nominating them here.

June Blitz: This blitz begins at 00:01 on 14 June and ends at 23:59 on 20 June, with themes of articles tagged for copyedit in May 2020 and requests.

Drive and blitz reports

March Drive: Self-isolation from coronavirus may have played a hand in making this one of our most successful backlog elimination drives. The copy-editing backlog was reduced from 477 to a record low of 118 articles, a 75% reduction. The last four months of 2019 were cleared, reducing the backlog to three months. Fifty requests were also completed, and the total word count of copy-edited articles was 759,945. Of the 29 editors who signed up, 22 completed at least one copy edit. Final results, including barnstars awarded, are available here.

April Blitz: This blitz ran from 12 to 18 April with a theme of Indian military history. Of the 18 people who signed up, 14 copyedited at least one article. Participants claimed a total of 60 copyedits. Final results, including barnstars awarded, are available here.

May Drive: This event marked the 10th anniversary of the GOCE's copy-editing drives, and set a goal of diminishing the backlog to just one month of articles, as close to zero articles as possible. We achieved the goal of eliminating all articles that had been tagged prior to the start of the drive, for the first time in our history! Of the 51 editors who signed up, 43 copyedited at least one article. Final results, including barnstars awarded, are available here.

Other news

Progress report: as of 2 June, GOCE participants had processed 328 requests since 1 January, which puts us on pace to exceed any previous year's number of requests. As of the end of the May drive, the backlog stood at just 156 articles, all tagged in May 2020.

Outreach: To mark the 10th anniversary of our first Backlog Elimination Drive, The Signpost contributor and GOCE participant Puddleglum2.0 interviewed project coordinators and copy-editors for the journal's April WikiProject Report. The Drive and the current Election of Coordinators have also been covered in The Signpost's May News and Notes page.

Thank you all again for your participation; we wouldn't be able to achieve what we have without you! Cheers from your GOCE coordinators Jonesey95, Baffle gab1978, Reidgreg, Tdslk and Twofingered Typist.

To discontinue receiving GOCE newsletters, please remove your name from our mailing list.

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) at 15:46, 5 June 2020 (UTC).

Tech News: 2020-24

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

Some articles have tables that can be sorted in different ways. For example a list of countries can be sorted alphabetically but you can click on the size column to sort them by size. If you clicked on the column a second time it would sort the countries from the bottom to the top instead. A third click will now take you back to the original sorting. [56]
Self-closed tags now work as in the HTML5 specifications. This means you should stop using some of them. <b/> is an example of a self-closed tag that won't work. area, base, br, col, embed, hr, img, input, keygen, link, meta, param, source, track, wbr can be self-closed. Pages with tags that should not be self-closed have been listed in a tracking category since 2016. They will be listed in Special:LintErrors/self-closed-tag. This doesn't affect <references /> or <ref />. [57]
There is a banner called WikidataPageBanner. It is for example used by the Wikivoyages, Wikimedia Russia and the Catalan, Basque, Galician and Turkish Wikipedias. It will now been seen by mobile visitors too. Before this it was only seen on desktop. The wikis should update instructions on MediaWiki:Sitenotice so that editors know to test and style for mobile too. [58][59]

Changes later this week

You can now edit MassMessage descriptions through the API. This is useful for tools and gadgets. [60]
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 9 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 10 June. It will be on all wikis from 11 June (calendar).

Future changes

A temporary fix helped wikis make their main pages more mobile friendly. This was in 2012. It has not been recommended since 2017. It will not work after 13 July. Wikis should use TemplateStyles instead. 118 wikis need to fix this. You can read more and see if your wiki is affected. [61]

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

21:12, 8 June 2020 (UTC)

The Bugle: Issue CLXX, June 2020

Your Military History Newsletter

Project news: From the editors; awards and honours; contest results
Articles: Last month's new featured and A-class content
Book review: Nick-D looks at the naval siege of Japan in 1945

The Bugle is published by the Military history WikiProject. To receive it on your talk page, please join the project or sign up here.
If you are a project member who does not want delivery, please remove your name from this page. Your editors, Ian Rose (talk) and Nick-D (talk) 04:22, 14 June 2020 (UTC)

Editing news 2020 #2 – Quick updates

Read this in another language • Subscription list

Mockup of the new reply feature, showing new editing tools — The new features include a toolbar. What do you think should be in the toolbar?

This edition of the Editing newsletter includes information the Wikipedia:Talk pages project, an effort to help contributors communicate on wiki more easily. The central project page is on MediaWiki.org.

Reply tool: This is available as a Beta Feature at the four partner wikis (Arabic, Dutch, French, and Hungarian Wikipedias). The Beta Feature will get new features soon. The new features include writing comments in a new visual editing mode and pinging other users by typing @. You can test the new features on the Beta Cluster. Some other wikis will have a chance to try the Beta Feature in the coming months.
New requirements for user signatures: Soon, users will not be able to save invalid custom signatures in Special:Preferences. This will reduce signature spoofing, prevent page corruption, and make new talk page tools more reliable. Most editors will not be affected.
New discussion tool: The Editing team is beginning work on a simpler process for starting new discussions. You can see the initial design on the project page.
Research on the use of talk pages: The Editing team worked with the Wikimedia research team to study how talk pages help editors improve articles. We learned that new editors who use talk pages make more edits to the main namespace than new editors who don't use talk pages.

– Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 18:11, 15 June 2020 (UTC)

Tech News: 2020-25

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

Recent changes

Toolforge hosts several tools created by the Wikimedia community like edit counters or enhanced editors. It is changing the domain from tools.wmflabs.org to toolforge.org. The routing scheme is moving from tools.wmflabs.org/toolname to toolname.toolforge.org. You can read the details. Tools that use OAuth will have to be updated to keep working. You can ask for help.

Problems

There is a Wikidata item link in the sidebar on many pages. This disappeared for a couple of days for users who have the Monobook skin. This was because of a bug. It has now been fixed. [62]
Editing, logging in and logging out didn't work properly for a short period of time last week. It was soon fixed. [63]

Changes later this week

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

Future changes

Pywikibot is a Python library to automate work on wikis. It will not support Python 2 after the new version in July. Support for Python 3.4 and MediaWiki below 1.19 will also be dropped. You should migrate to Python 3. You can ask for help. [64]
The selectors .menu and .vectorMenu will no longer work in the Vector skin. This can affect gadgets and user scripts. .menu should be replaced by ul. .vectorMenu should be replaced by .vector-menu. [65]

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

21:38, 15 June 2020 (UTC)

A belated welcome!

Here's wishing you a belated welcome to Wikipedia, OhKayeSierra! I see that you've already been around a while and wanted to thank you for your contributions. Though you seem to have been successful in finding your way around, you may still benefit from following some of the links below, which help editors get the most out of Wikipedia:

If you don't already know, you should sign your posts on talk pages by using four tildes (~~~~) to insert your username and the date.

I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wikipedian! Again, welcome! Sm8900 (talk) 20:34, 19 June 2020 (UTC)

Hi! I happened to notice some of your recent comments, and your listing at WP:Teahouse. If I am not mistaken, it seems like you have not been welcomed here yet. hard to believe!! anyway, if I am mistaken, please forgive my error. thanks for all your great work here, either way! cheers!!

--Sm8900 (talk) 20:36, 19 June 2020 (UTC)

@Sm8900: Haha, thanks for the warm welcome! Much appreciated! I still can't believe I've been with the project for over two years now! Definitely wish I had more time for content creation than I have had lately, but... y'know, time constraints with being a mom now, grad school and whatnot.

OhKayeSierra (talk) 22:38, 19 June 2020 (UTC)

June

June

Vespro della Beata Vergine

Thank you for improving articles in June. I can proudly present a FA, quite a gift after a year without, and a FL is in the making, comments welcome. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 12:56, 21 June 2020 (UTC)

@Gerda Arendt: Sorry, just noticed the message today. Congratulations on the FA and FL! OhKayeSierra (talk) 01:02, 24 June 2020 (UTC)

Thank you, - that's in memory of Brian. - Now in memory of a friend who died, - sad list growing, - it was her husband whose death started it, - my wake-up call to write their article. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 05:29, 24 June 2020 (UTC)

Tech News: 2020-26

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

There are some new tools to make it easier for newcomers to start editing. They are available on some wikis. These wikis had a problem with the visual editor for a short period of time last week. This was because of a bug in the new tools. It was soon fixed. [66]
Some user scripts and gadgets stopped working because of a change to CSS selectors. .vectorTabs should be replaced with .vector-menu-tabs to fix this. [67]

Changes later this week

The developers are working on a new interface to solve edit conflicts on talk pages. This will be released on 24 June. You can give feedback. [68]
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 23 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 24 June. It will be on all wikis from 25 June (calendar).

Future changes

A temporary fix helped wikis make their main pages more mobile friendly. This was in 2012. It has not been recommended since 2017. It will not work after 13 July. Wikis should use TemplateStyles instead. 91 wikis still need to fix this. You can read more and see if your wiki is affected. [69]

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

18:49, 22 June 2020 (UTC)

Tech News: 2020-27

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

Problems

Everyone was logged out. This was because a few users saw the wikis as if they were logged in to someone else's account. The problem should be fixed now. [70]
Some readers didn't see new edits to pages. If the page had been recently changed they saw an older version of the page instead. This only affected readers who were logged out. It lasted for ten days. It has been fixed. [71]

Changes later this week

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

Future changes

The Modern and Monobook skins use the ID searchGoButton for the go button. This is searchButton for Vector. To have the same ID for all skins it will change to searchButton in Monobook and Modern too. This will affect gadgets and user scripts. It will happen on 23 July. They should be updated to use searchButton. You can read more and see a list of affected scripts.

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

16:31, 29 June 2020 (UTC)

recruiting for a research project

Hi OhKayeSierra,

I hope this finds you well. I’m a graduate student researcher undertaking a study on how women learn to participate in Wikipedia and factors that enable them to persist as contributors. I’m currently seeking individuals who self-identify as women and actively participate in Wikipedia authorship, and you seem to fit this criteria. I'm asking potential participants to sit down with me for an hour long Zoom, Skype, or phone call. Would you be interested in interviewing for this project? Thank you for considering. Feel-flourish (talk) 16:35, 29 June 2020 (UTC)

@Feel-flourish: Wow. Thank you for considering me for your research project. Unfortunately, I'm more or less semi-retired at the moment and don't think that I would be an ideal candidate for your study. After having a daughter earlier in the year and adjusting to motherhood while simultaneously trying to juggle my course load towards earning my M.A. in English, my editing on the project has been sporadic at best since approximately last year. Also, have you tried reaching out with a message on the Village Pump or the Administrator's noticeboard? They're both well-watched pages on the project, and I'm sure you'd get the attention of other editors that might be interested in assisting you with your research. OhKayeSierra (talk) 18:09, 30 June 2020 (UTC)

@OhKayeSierra: I understand and very much appreciate your response. Your life sounds incredibly busy right now. Congrats on your new daughter! Best of luck with your MA coursework and thank you so much for the leads. Take care! Feel-flourish (talk) 18:43, 30 June 2020 (UTC)

Administrators' newsletter – July 2020

News and updates for administrators from the past month (June 2020).

Administrator changes

Malcolmxl5

John • TheCoffee • Tim!

Creffett → GeneralNotability

DeltaQuad → AmandaNP

CheckUser changes

Bbb23

Interface administrator changes

TonyBallioni

Guideline and policy news

A request for comment is in progress to remove the T2 (template that misrepresents established policy) speedy deletion criterion.

Technical news

Protection templates on mainspace pages are now automatically added by User:MusikBot II (BRFA).

Arbitration

Following the banning of an editor by the WMF last year, the Arbitration Committee resolved to hold an RfC regarding on-wiki harassment. The RfC has been posted at Wikipedia:Arbitration Committee/Anti-harassment RfC and is open to comments from the community.
The Medicine case was closed, with a remedy authorizing standard discretionary sanctions for all discussions about pharmaceutical drug prices and pricing and for edits adding, changing, or removing pharmaceutical drug prices or pricing from articles.

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 10:25, 1 July 2020 (UTC)

Wikimedians for Sustainable Development - June Newsletter

This is our seventh newsletter, covering June 2020. This issue has news related to SDGs 3, 4, 5, 8, 10, 16 and 17.

Meetings

Upcoming: 5 July, Wikimedians for Sustainable Development online meeting (SDG 17) [12]
Upcoming: 18 July, Wikimedians for Sustainable Development online meeting (SDG 17) [12]
Past: 7 June, Wikimedians for Sustainable Development online meeting (SDG 17) [13]

News

Webinar: COVID-19 and human rights: How to share the facts on Wikipedia (SDG 3) [1]
Vad menas egentligen med öppenhet? (Swedish) (SDG 4) [2]
How Wikipedia Has Responded to the George Floyd Protests (SDG 10) [3]
50 000 kvinnor på svenskspråkiga Wikipedia! (Swedish) (SDG 5) [4]

Videos

COVID & health topics on Wikidata (SDG 3) [9]

New Wikidata properties

curriculum topics (SDG 4) [5]
ISCO-08 occupation code (SDG 8) [6]
FEMA number (SDG 2) [7]
Democracy Index (SDG 16) [10]

New Wikidata query examples

Species of birds (SDG 15) [8]
Wikidata Queries around the SARS-CoV-2 virus and pandemic (SDG 3) [11]

Links

This message was sent with Global message delivery by Ainali (talk) 20:50, 2 July 2020 (UTC) • Contribute • Unsubscribe

Editing news 2020 #3

Seven years ago this week, the Editing team made the visual editor available by default to all logged-in editors using the desktop site at the English Wikipedia. Here's what happened since its introduction:

The 50 millionth edit using the visual editor on desktop was made this year. More than 10 million edits have been made here at the English Wikipedia.
More than 2 million new articles have been created in the visual editor. More than 600,000 of these new articles were created during 2019.
Almost 5 million edits on the mobile site have been made with the visual editor. Most of these edits have been made since the Editing team started improving the mobile visual editor in 2018.
The proportion of all edits made using the visual editor has been increasing every year.
Editors have made more than 7 million edits in the 2017 wikitext editor, including starting 600,000 new articles in it. The 2017 wikitext editor is VisualEditor's built-in wikitext mode. You can enable it in your preferences.
On 17 November 2019, the first edit from outer space was made in the mobile visual editor.
In 2019, 35% of the edits by newcomers, and half of their first edits, were made using the visual editor. This percentage has been increasing every year since the tool became available.

Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 02:06, 3 July 2020 (UTC)

Tech News: 2020-28

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

Problems

The Score extension has been disabled for now. This is because of a security issue. It will work again as soon as the security issue has been fixed. [72]

Changes later this week

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

Future changes

Abstract Wikipedia is a new Wikimedia project. It will collect language-independent information that can be easily read in different languages. It builds on Wikidata. The name is preliminary. You can read more. [73]
The iOS Wikipedia app developers are thinking about new experimental tools. If you use an iPhone you can help them by answering the survey.
Some rules for user signatures will soon be enforced. Lint errors and invalid HTML will no longer be allowed in user signatures. Nested substitution will not be allowed. A link to your user page, user talk page or user contributions will be required. You can check if your signature works with the new rules. This is because the signatures can cause problems for tools or other text on the page.

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

20:18, 6 July 2020 (UTC)

The Bugle: Issue CLXXI, July 2020

Your Military History Newsletter

Project news: From the editors; awards and honours; contest results
Articles: Last month's new featured and A-class content
Book review: Nick-D on Hadrian's Wall and Hawkeye7 on the British military
Op-ed: Nick-D on diversity and military history

The Bugle is published by the Military history WikiProject. To receive it on your talk page, please join the project or sign up here.
If you are a project member who does not want delivery, please remove your name from this page. Your editors, Ian Rose (talk) and Nick-D (talk) 11:45, 13 July 2020 (UTC)

Tech News: 2020-29

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

Users can thank others for their edits. Checkusers can now see user data related to that action. This can help identify sock puppets who harass others using thanks. [74]

Problems

Everyone was logged out a couple of weeks ago to fix a security problem. The problem was not entirely fixed. Because of this everyone was logged out once again last week. [75][76]

Changes later this week

Wikis that are not for one specific language can translate pages. Sometimes parts of translations are outdated or missing. Outdated translations are marked with a pink background. Missing translations will also be marked in the future. This markup can sometimes break things. It can soon be disabled by using <translate nowrap></translate> on the source page. [77]
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 14 July. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 15 July. It will be on all wikis from 16 July (calendar).

Future changes

Wikimedia code review plans to use GitLab. It would be hosted on Wikimedia servers. [78][79][80][81]

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

16:30, 13 July 2020 (UTC)

Tech News: 2020-30

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

A temporary fix helped wikis make their main pages more mobile friendly. This was in 2012. It has not been recommended since 2017. The mobile main page special casing stopped working 14 July. 60 wikis now have main pages that don't work well on mobile. You can see which ones, how to fix it and how to get help in Phabricator. This is the same problem that was reported in Tech News 2020/24 and 2020/26.

Problems

There is a problem with the interlanguage links. The interlanguage links are the links that help you find a specific page in a different language. The sorting is broken. The developers are working on a solution. [82]
Some users keep getting the notifications for the same event. Some of these are old events. [83]
Some users have trouble logging in. This is probably a browser cookie problem. The developers are working on understanding the problem. If you have trouble logging in you can see the details on Phabricator. [84]

Changes later this week

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

Future changes

There is a Printable version link. This will disappear. That is because web browsers today can create a printable version or show how it will look in print anyway. [85]

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

19:11, 20 July 2020 (UTC)

Thank you in July

July

pale globe-thistle above the Rhine

Thank you for improving articles in July! Now a FTN is open. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 21:47, 20 July 2020 (UTC)

2020 Open Championship

Hi, you just closed this move discussion as "no consensus" without any explanation. Please could you elaborate? Given 3 "supports", 1 "oppose" and 2 "comments" (the last one not directly related to the move itself, but seemingly seeing consensus for the move), and the arguments that were put forward, it seems like consensus clearly supported the move to me. Regards. _wjemather^{please leave a message...} 07:55, 27 July 2020 (UTC)

~~@Wjemather: Done I left a note with my rationale on the RM. OhKayeSierra (talk) 08:11, 27 July 2020 (UTC)~~

@Wjemather: After reconsidering my initial impression on the RM's consensus, I decided that it would be better to self-revert my closure and relist the RM. I hope that this is an acceptable solution. OhKayeSierra (talk) 08:26, 27 July 2020 (UTC)

Thanks. When I proposed the move, I thought it could possibly fail due to being considered "too soon". I would normally have preferred to leave it for a while, but was mostly trying to avoid creation of a duplicative 2021 Open Championship article by one of our friends with a crystal ball (which happened anyway). _wjemather^{please leave a message...} 08:34, 27 July 2020 (UTC)

Tech News: 2020-31

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

Recent changes

The Starter kit is now available for wiki communities. This page lists technical resources, tools, and recommendations. These are essential to operate a wiki project. This is mostly useful for smaller wikis where the community has limited experience with this. [86]
The first features of the Desktop Improvements project are available for logged-in users on all wikis. In order to use them, uncheck Use Legacy Vector in your local or global preferences in section Skin preferences. More improvements are planned. Feedback is welcome.
On multiple wikis, a UTCLiveClock gadget is available. For wikis that import the gadget directly from mediawiki.org, end users can now choose a different timezone to show instead of UTC.

Problems

The deployment train for MediaWiki has been blocked this week. [87][88]
Translation Notification Bot was sending the same message multiple times to every translator. This has been fixed. [89]
Some users were receiving the same notification multiple times. This has been fixed. [90]

Changes later this week

The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from July 28. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from July 29. It will be on all wikis from JUly 30 (calendar).

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

13:53, 27 July 2020 (UTC)

Administrators' newsletter – August 2020

News and updates for administrators from the past month (July 2020).

Administrator changes

Red Phoenix

Euryalus • SQL

Jujutacular • Monty845 • Rettetast • Madchester

Oversight changes

GB fan

Keegan • Opabinia regalis • Premeditated Chaos

Guideline and policy news

There is an open request for comment to decide whether to increase the minimum duration a sanction discussion has to remain open (currently 24 hours).
Speedy deletion criterion T2 (template that misrepresents established policy) has been repealed following a request for comment.
Speedy deletion criterion X2 (pages created by the content translation tool) has been repealed following a discussion.
There is a proposal to restrict proposed deletion to confirmed users.

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 08:21, 1 August 2020 (UTC)

Wikimedians for Sustainable Development - July Newsletter

This is our seventh newsletter, covering June 2020. This issue has news related to SDGs 3, 5, 7, 10, 11, 15 and 16.

Meetings

Upcoming: Wikimedians for Sustainable Development online meeting August 2 (SDG all) [19]
Upcoming: Wikimedians for Sustainable Development online meeting August 16 (SDG all) [20]
Past: Wikimedians for Sustainable Development online meeting July 5 (SDG all) [18]

News

Another Wikipedian is cultivated (SDG 3) [1]
Wikijournal of Medicine to be indexed in SCOPUS (SDG 3) [2]
How Wikipedia Became a Battleground for Racial Justice (SDG 10) [3]
Sask. doctor keeps COVID-19 Wikipedia info accurate with encyclopedic dedication (SDG 3) [4]
We stand for racial justice (SDG 10) [10]
Edit Loud, Edit Proud: LGBTIQ+ Wikimedians and Global Information Activism (SDG 10) [15]
WikiProject Black Lives Matter (SDG 10) [16]
The Power of Knowledge: A Look at the AfroCROWD Juneteenth Conference on Civil Rights (SDG 10) [24]
#WikiHerStory: a month-long initiative to amplify gender equity work on Wikimedia projects (SDG 5) [25]
How the internet will change our coronavirus memories (SDG 3) [26]
How volunteers created Wikipedia’s world-beating Covid-19 coverage (SDG 3) [30]
COVIWD - A Covid-19 Wikidata dashboard (SDG 3) [31]

Research

COVID-19 research in Wikipedia (SDG 3) [11]
A Quantitative Portrait of Wikipedia's High-Tempo Collaborations during the 2020 Coronavirus Pandemic (SDG 3) [12]
COVID-19 mobility restrictions increased interest in health and entertainment topics on Wikipedia (SDG 3) [13]
A protocol for adding knowledge to Wikidata, a case report (SDG 3) [14]

Videos

Wikimedia Research: Medical knowledge on Wikipedia (SDG 3) [23]
More black stories need to be told -- and more black contributors need to tell them! (SDG 10) [29]

New WikiProjects

Wikipedia:WikiProject Black Lives Matter (SDG 10) [17]

Featured content

Alpine newt (SDG 15) [5]
Dementia with Lewy bodies (SDG 3) [6]
Secretarybird (SDG 15) [7]
List of procyonids (SDG 15) [8]
List of Sites of Special Scientific Interest in Berkshire (SDG 15) [8]

New Wikidata properties

thefreedictionary medical term ID (SDG 3) [21]
Naturvårdsverket Anordningar OBJECTID (SDG 15) [22]
public transport stop (SDG 11) [27]
energy consumption per transaction (SDG 7) [28]
BTI Governance Index (SDG 16) [32]
BTI Status Index (SDG 16) [32]
distribution map of taxon (SDG 15) [34]
Queensland Biota ID (SDG 15) [35]
Australian Weed ID (SDG 15) [36]

Links

This message was sent with Global message delivery by Ainali (talk) 17:37, 1 August 2020 (UTC) • Contribute • Unsubscribe

Notice of ANI that mentions you in passing

Greetings, FYI I filed a request at WP:ANI titled "CIR-based community-imposed site ban re: RTG". In providing a basis for my request I mentioned you and your prior dealings with this editor. Your input at ANI is optional, i.e., invited but not specifically requested. Thanks for reading. NewsAndEventsGuy (talk) 13:02, 3 August 2020 (UTC)

@NewsAndEventsGuy: Thanks for the heads-up. It's unfortunate that RTG didn't take my advice to avoid editing with a battleground mentality, but not unexpected. I'm currently reading through the ANI thread to get myself up to speed on the issues since then. OhKayeSierra (talk) 19:48, 3 August 2020 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #427

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

Discussions
- Open request for adminship: Wiki13

Events
- Upcoming: Search Platform Office Hours—August 5th, 2020. This event will be an occasion to talk about the Query Service.
- Upcoming: Video: Wikipedia Weekly Network - LIVE Wikidata editing #15, August 8 Facebook, YouTube
- Upcoming: Online Wikidata editathon in Swedish #24, August 9

Press, articles, blog posts, videos
- Wikidata track at the 2020 LD4 Conference on Linked Data in Libraries:
- Video: Wikipedia Weekly Network - LIVE Wikidata editing #14 Facebook YouTube
- Video: Lexemes in Wikidata - structured lexicographical data for everyone (by Lydia Pintscher), YouTube
- Video: Wikidata presentation (in Turkish), YouTube
- Why You Should Do NLP Beyond English - Nice article giving some context about why it matters to have Lexemes in Wikidata in many different languages

Tool of the week
- SQID allows you to analyse, browse and query Wikidata. SQID is inspired by Magnus Manske's Reasonator, but focuses on prominently featuring information about Wikidata classes and properties.

Did you know?
- Newest properties:
  - General datatypes: height of center of mass, road number formatter, Vietnamese middle name, heraldic attitude, traffic sign template image
  - External identifiers: Tree of Public Interest ID, Denkmaldatenbank Thurgau ID, DSSTOX compound identifier, South Africa EMIS code, Archive Site Trinity College Cambridge ID, WISAARD resource ID, Gateway to Research organisation ID, SÚKL code, Science Fiction Awards Database author ID, Power plant operating licence (Turkey)
- New property proposals to review:
  - General datatypes: certified as, number of stages, convergence rate, step count, Alternative form, view, version type for works, advertisement copy
  - External identifiers: LibraryThing series identifier, Swiss Industrial Heritage ID, TOPCMB ID, Library of Congress Medium of Performance Thesaurus ID, Sports-Reference.com college basketball school ID, SAT-matrikulo, Signal number, BHF author ID, BHF magazine ID, SPLC Group ID, SPLC Individual ID, Open Civic Data Division Identifiers, RKD thesaurus ID, TCLF ID, Presence compositrices ID of composer, Presence compositrices ID of work
- Query examples:
  - Properties and the number of constraint definition statements on them - there are quite a few with 0 constraint definitions
  - a graph of MPs and parties in the Swedish Parliament and with whom they worked together with to create motions 2018 SPOILER: >95% is just with people in the same party
  - Wealthiest queer people on Wikidata (Source)
  - Bubble chart showing the winners of the FA Cup (Source)
  - Map of parks in Oslo missing images on Wikidata (Source)
- Commons queries:
  - Orienteerers: tinyurl.com/y25qa8ef (source, at 53:45)
  - Animal hugs: tinyurl.com/yykvj26y (source)

Development
- The last week was our quarterly prototyping week. We worked on the following projects. None of them are ready for prime-time yet but we'll continue with them.
  - Slices: We've had a lot of requests for accessing dumps of a smaller part of Wikidata's data since rarely anyone needs the complete data in Wikidata. The tricky part is figuring out which part is needed and if any of that can be generalized. We looked into for example how to make dump generation faster so we could potentially produce more smaller dumps that only cover a part of Wikidata's data, either thematically (e.g. humans) or by type of data (e.g. only statements and English labels and aliases but not sitelinks or descriptions).
  - REST API: As part of our effort to make it easier to access Wikidata's data for programmers we looked into a REST API. We tried to see if we could cover the existing action API modules in a REST API. We could. We'll take this as input for our ongoing API work now.
  - Improving quality ratings through ORES: ORES can judge the quality of an Item automatically. It is currently not very good at it however. We tried a few things to make it more accurate and found some easy wins we'll probably make happen in the next weeks.
  - Query manipulator: One of the ways we could potentially improve the load situation of the Wikidata Query Service is by automatically analyzing and then redirecting a bunch of queries to other systems that are more suitable for that particular type of query. The nice thing about that would be that the person/program sending the query wouldn't have to care about it but it'd be done automagically for them. We tried to build such a system and the results look very promising but more work/experimenting is needed, especially together with the WMF Search team.

You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here. If you want to help, you can also have a look at the tasks needing a volunteer.

Monthly Tasks
- Add labels, in your own language(s), for the new properties listed above.
- Comment on property proposals: all open proposals
- Contribute to a Showcase item.
- Help translate or proofread the interface and documentation pages, in your own language!
- Help merge identical items across Wikimedia projects.
- Help write the next summary!

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Mohammed Sadat (WMDE) 15:37, 3 August 2020 (UTC)

Tech News: 2020-32

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

Problems

All queries to the Wikidata Query Service failed between 17:50 and 17:59 UTC on Thursday 23 July. Some queries failed during a longer period. [91]
Interlanguage links were ordered incorrectly for the past few weeks. This problem was also mentioned in Tech News two weeks ago. The problem is now fixed. [92]
There is a problem with the global preferences for the "Use Legacy Vector" option. Developers are working on fixing it. [93]
A bug in the Wikibase extension had disabled the "move" and "create" types of protection in the main (Gallery) namespace on Wikimedia Commons. New protections could not be added, and existing protections were not enforced, allowing some page moves and page creations that should not have been possible. This has now been fixed. [94]

Changes later this week

The video player will change to be simpler and more modern. This week, the current beta feature will become the video player for everyone on most non-Wikipedia wikis. The old player will be removed. [95]
Users' global.js and global.css pages will now also be loaded on the mobile site. You can read documentation for how to avoid applying styles to the mobile skin. [96]
In the MonoBook skin, the searchGoButton identifier is now searchButton. This may affect CSS and JS gadgets. Migration instructions can be found in T255953. This was previously mentioned in issue 27.
Bot operators can use Pywikibot to regularly archive discussions. The behavior when the bot uses counter to prevent large archives was changed. [97]
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from August 4. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from August 5. It will be on all wikis from August 6 (calendar).

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

15:43, 3 August 2020 (UTC)

The Bugle: Issue CLXXII, August 2020

Your Military History Newsletter

Project news: From the editors; awards and honours; contest results
Articles: Last month's new featured and A-class content
Book review: Recent external reviews
Op-ed: Nick-D on 1945

The Bugle is published by the Military history WikiProject. To receive it on your talk page, please join the project or sign up here.
If you are a project member who does not want delivery, please remove your name from this page. Your editors, Ian Rose (talk) and Nick-D (talk) 14:30, 8 August 2020 (UTC)

Tech News: 2020-33

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

FileImporter and FileExporter became standard features on all Wikis during the first week of August. They help you transfer files from local wikis to Wikimedia Commons with the original file information and history intact. [98]

Problems

The mobile skin displays a message at the bottom of the page about who edited last. This message showed raw wikitext. This has now been fixed. Some messages in Structured Discussions and content translation may still appear as raw wikitext. Developers are working on it. [99]

Changes later this week

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

Future changes

All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes on September 1. This is planned between 13:30 and 15:30 UTC. More information will be published in Tech News and will also be posted on individual wikis in the coming weeks. [100][101]

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

16:06, 10 August 2020 (UTC)

RM procedure question

Greetings, re 'global wawrming', As you may have seen, I am proposing an article move, but to a different target than the opening RM request. What is the prefered manner to offer an alternative idea, but in a way that facilitates discussion and not-voting? Thanks for format suggestions (if any). NewsAndEventsGuy (talk) 22:23, 12 August 2020 (UTC)

@NewsAndEventsGuy: I took a crack at editing the formatting to include a discussion section (basically incorporating the text from the RM survey format at Template:Requested move/talk). Here's the diff. I hope that will help with moving the RM more towards a discussion as other editors notice the relist. OhKayeSierra (talk) 22:53, 12 August 2020 (UTC)

I just realized that I didn't really answer your question. I think that the way that you've handled the RM so far has been the ideal approach for your proposal. Unfortunately, this is a contentious topic in and of itself, so naturally, judging consensus has been difficult, to put it mildly. I dare say it has even bordered on WP:NOGOODOPTIONS territory. If I were to close it right now, I would probably err on no consensus and encourage an RM to be reopened. I'm hoping that the relist will help attract more editors to the RM to get a clearer consensus on what the title should be. OhKayeSierra (talk) 23:04, 12 August 2020 (UTC)

Thanks for paying attention; I've been deep in the climate pages for years, and compiled much of the history of article name/scope debates for pages

Global warming (title/scope status quo unchanged since pre WP:ARBCC) and
(former) 'Climate change' (title/scope tweaked over the past year for first time since split with Global warming)... scope is the same but title went to 'climate change (general concept) and then changed again to the current Climate variability and change

I expect the GW RM may succeed this time around, especially if real life gives me time and mental powers to finish the advocacy for the atlernative so it can sink or swim. If I can't get around to it, I'll get out of the way before the relisting is up. NewsAndEventsGuy (talk) 23:24, 12 August 2020 (UTC)

Tech News: 2020-34

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

Recent changes

If you revert an edit using the undo link your edit is marked with an undo tag. This will now only happen if you don't change anything in the edit window before publishing the undo. This is to keep users from marking edits as undos when they actually do something else. [102]
The new OOUI version will not work with Internet Explorer 8. This means the wikis will look strange and not work well in Internet Explorer 8. This was reported in Tech/News/2020/17. This is because keeping the wikis working with very old browsers creates other problems. [103]

Changes later this week

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

Future changes

All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes on September 1. This is planned between 13:30 and 15:30 UTC. More information will be published in Tech News and will also be posted on individual wikis next week. This is a reminder. You can help by translating the announcement message. [104][105]

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

20:41, 17 August 2020 (UTC)

Tech News: 2020-35

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

Changes later this week

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

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

17:59, 24 August 2020 (UTC)

Editing news 2020 #4

Read this in another language • Subscription list for this newsletter

Reply tool

The Reply tool has been available as a Beta Feature at the Arabic, Dutch, French and Hungarian Wikipedias since 31 March 2020. The first analysis showed positive results.

More than 300 editors used the Reply tool at these four Wikipedias. They posted more than 7,400 replies during the study period.
Of the people who posted a comment with the Reply tool, about 70% of them used the tool multiple times. About 60% of them used it on multiple days.
Comments from Wikipedia editors are positive. One said, أعتقد أن الأداة تقدم فائدة ملحوظة؛ فهي تختصر الوقت لتقديم رد بدلًا من التنقل بالفأرة إلى وصلة تعديل القسم أو الصفحة، التي تكون بعيدة عن التعليق الأخير في الغالب، ويصل المساهم لصندوق التعديل بسرعة باستخدام الأداة. ("I think the tool has a significant impact; it saves time to reply while the classic way is to move with a mouse to the Edit link to edit the section or the page which is generally far away from the comment. And the user reaches to the edit box so quickly to use the Reply tool.")[106]

The Editing team released the Reply tool as a Beta Feature at eight other Wikipedias in early August. Those Wikipedias are in the Chinese, Czech, Georgian, Serbian, Sorani Kurdish, Swedish, Catalan, and Korean languages. If you would like to use the Reply tool at your wiki, please tell User talk:Whatamidoing (WMF).

The Reply tool is still in active development. Per request from the Dutch Wikipedia and other editors, you will be able to customize the edit summary. (The default edit summary is "Reply".) A "ping" feature is available in the Reply tool's visual editing mode. This feature searches for usernames. Per request from the Arabic Wikipedia, each wiki will be able to set its own preferred symbol for pinging editors. Per request from editors at the Japanese and Hungarian Wikipedias, each wiki can define a preferred signature prefix in the page MediaWiki:Discussiontools-signature-prefix. For example, some languages omit spaces before signatures. Other communities want to add a dash or a non-breaking space.

New requirements for user signatures

The new requirements for custom user signatures began on 6 July 2020. If you try to create a custom signature that does not meet the requirements, you will get an error message.
Existing custom signatures that do not meet the new requirements will be unaffected temporarily. Eventually, all custom signatures will need to meet the new requirements. You can check your signature and see lists of active editors whose custom signatures need to be corrected. Volunteers have been contacting editors who need to change their custom signatures. If you need to change your custom signature, then please read the help page.

Next: New discussion tool

Next, the team will be working on a tool for quickly and easily starting a new discussion section to a talk page. To follow the development of this new tool, please put the New Discussion Tool project page on your watchlist.

Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 18:48, 31 August 2020 (UTC)

Tech News: 2020-36

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

Problems

This is a reminder. All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes on September 1. This is planned between 14:00 and 15:00 UTC. Please check on the details on the announcement message. [107][108]

Changes later this week

There is no new MediaWiki version this week.

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

20:08, 31 August 2020 (UTC)

Wikiproject Military history coordinator election nominations open

Nominations for the upcoming project coordinator election are now open. A team of up to ten coordinators will be elected for the next year. The project coordinators are the designated points of contact for issues concerning the project, and are responsible for maintaining our internal structure and processes. They do not, however, have any authority over article content or editor conduct, or any other special powers. More information on being a coordinator is available here. If you are interested in running, please sign up here by 23:59 UTC on 14 September! Voting doesn't commence until 15 September. If you have any questions, you can contact any member of the coord team. Peacemaker67 (click to talk to me) 02:06, 1 September 2020 (UTC)

Administrators' newsletter – September 2020

News and updates for administrators from the past month (August 2020).

Administrator changes

Eddie891

Angela • Jcw69 • Just Chilling • Philg88 • Viajero

CheckUser changes

SQL

Guideline and policy news

Following a request for comment, the minimum length for site ban discussions was increased to 72 hours, up from 24.
A request for comment is ongoing to determine whether paid editors must or should use the articles for creation process.
A request for comment is open to resolve inconsistencies between the draftification and alternative to deletion processes.

Arbitration

A request for comment is open to provide an opportunity to amend the structure, rules, and procedures of the 2020 English Wikipedia Arbitration Committee election and to resolve any issues not covered by existing rules.
An open request for comment asks whether active Arbitrators may serve on the Trust and Safety Case Review Committee or Ombudsman commission.

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 09:56, 2 September 2020 (UTC)

Wikimedians for Sustainable Development - August Newsletter

This is our ninth newsletter, covering August 2020. This issue has news related to SDGs 3, 4, 6, 11, 13, 14, 15 and 17.

Meetings

Upcoming: Online meeting - 2020-09-06 (SDG all) [1]
Upcoming: Online meeting - 2020-09-20 (SDG all) [1]
Past: Online meeting - 2020-08-02 (SDG all) [2]

Activities

Ongoing: The 'Climate Translation Project' celebrated its first published translation: 'Réchauffement climatique en Afrique', a French translation of the English Wikipedia article 'Climate change in Africa' by User:J. N. Squire in French (SDGs 4, 13) [20]
Past: World Water Week ISA campaign (SDG 6) [21]
Past: Editathon about Covid-19 in Swedish (SDG 3) [22]
Past: Editathon about water in Swedish (SDG 6) [23]

News

Covid-19 is one of Wikipedia’s biggest challenges ever. Here’s how the site is handling it. (SDG 3) [12]
Adding biographies of female oceanographers (SDG 14) [13]
Wiki Education participants improve COVID-19 local response articles (SDG 3) [14]
Wikimedia Policy Brief - COVID-19 - How Wikipedia helps us through uncertain times (SDG 3) [15]
Personal perspective on the forming of the user group (SDG all) [19]

Research

Wikipedia, The Free Online Medical Encyclopedia Anyone Can Plagiarize: Time to Address Wiki-Plagiarism (SDG 3) [3]
Wikidata-focused presentations at the Workshop "Data Science in Climate and Climate Impact Research" taking place on 20-21 August 2020 in Zurich and online. (SDGs 4, 13, 17) [16] [17]

Videos

Multilingual Structured Climate Research Data in Wikidata - The Data Perspective (SDGs 4, 13, 17) [18]
Video: Wikipedia Weekly Network - LIVE Wikidata editing about water #17 (SDG 6) [24], [25]

Featured content

Vermilion flycatcher (SDG 15) [4]
Canada lynx (SDG 15) [5]
Meteorological history of Hurricane Dorian (SDG 11) [6]
Leeches (SDG 15) [7]
Gigantorhynchus (SDG 15) [8]
List of World Heritage Sites in Iceland (SDG 11) [9]
Ursidae (SDG 15) [10]
Mephitidae (SDG 15) [11]
Orangutan (SDG 15) [32]
Horseshoe bat (SDG 15) [33]
Hurricane Willa (SDG 11) [34]
List of World Heritage Sites in Lithuania (SDG 11) [35]

New Wikidata properties

extinction date (SDG 15) [26]
Monumentbrowser ID (SDG 11) [27]
Nasjonalt skoleregister ID (SDG 4) [28]
American Folklore Society Ethnographic Thesaurus ID (SDG 11) [29]
Sculptures and cities database ID for sculptures (SDG 11) [31]

New Wikidata query examples

Bar chart showing the number of research output (articles, etc) annotated with a SARSCoV2 proteins as 'main subject' (SDG 3) [30]

Links

[1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedians_for_Sustainable_Development/Next_meeting
[2] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedians_for_Sustainable_Development/Meeting_minutes_20200802
[3] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12109-020-09750-0
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vermilion_flycatcher
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canada_lynx
[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meteorological_history_of_Hurricane_Dorian
[7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leech
[8] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gigantorhynchus
[9] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_World_Heritage_Sites_in_Iceland
[10] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ursidae
[11] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mephitidae
[12] https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/08/07/wikipedia-covid-coronavirus
[13] https://wikiedu.org/blog/2020/08/06/adding-biographies-of-female-oceanographers/
[14] https://wikiedu.org/blog/2020/08/04/wiki-education-participants-improve-covid-19-local-response-articles/
[15] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wikimedia_Policy_Brief_-_COVID-19_-_How_Wikipedia_helps_us_through_uncertain_times.pdf
[16] Sarasua, Cristina, & Mietchen, Daniel. (2020, August). Multilingual Structured Climate Research Data in Wikidata - The Community Perspective. Zenodo. http://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3994272
[17] Mietchen, Daniel, & Sarasua, Cristina. (2020, August). Multilingual Structured Climate Research Data in Wikidata - The Data Perspective. Zenodo. http://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3994266
[18] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ntI6hmT-rRc
[19] https://wikimedia.se/2020/08/19/wikimedians-for-sustainable-development/
[20] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedians_for_Sustainable_Development/Climate_translation_project
[21] https://isa.toolforge.org/campaigns/77
[22] https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wik-e-meet/6_augusti_2020
[23] https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wik-e-meet_27_augusti
[24] https://www.facebook.com/groups/WikidataCommunity/permalink/2744955582456268/
[25] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QDxz652CgwY
[26] https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Property:P8556
[27] https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Property:P8543
[28] https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Property:P8545
[29] https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Property:P8540
[30] https://w.wiki/a5X
[31] https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Property:P8521
[32] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orangutan
[33] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horseshoe_bat
[34] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurricane_Willa
[35] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_World_Heritage_Sites_in_Lithuania

This message was sent with Global message delivery by Ainali (talk) 10:50, 4 September 2020 (UTC) • Contribute • Unsubscribe

Wikidata weekly summary #432

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

Events
- Upcoming: Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call: Rob Fernandez (Wikimedia District of Columbia) on Listeria, a tool that uses SPARQL queries to define a list, and provides a bot that will update a wiki page containing that list if the results of that SPARQL query change, all based on Wikidata, 08 September. Agenda
- Upcoming: live SPARQL queries on Twitch and in French by Vigneron, September 8 at 18:00 CEST
- Upcoming video: Wikipedia Weekly Network - LIVE Wikidata editing #19 Facebook, YouTube, September 10
- Upcoming: Online Wikidata editathon in Swedish #29, September 13

Press, articles, blog posts, videos
- Semantic Wikibase has been released by Professional.Wiki (Demo video)
- Video: Wikipedia Weekly Network - LIVE Wikidata editing #18, workflows for SPARQL queries and QuickStatements Facebook, YouTube
- OpenRefine 3.4 was released
- How can I get data on all the dams in the world? Use Wikidata. By Addshore
- Wikidata Training Workshop 2, by Canadian Arts Presenting Association - YouTube
  - Contributing to Wikidata - (Parts 1, 2, 3 & 4)
  - Contributing to Wikidata (in French) - (Parts 1, 2, 3 & 4)
- Video: How to use QuickStatements - a tool to bulk upload data onto Wikidata. By Dr Sara Thomas

Tool of the week
- wmdeanalytics.wmflabs.org/WD_percentUsageDashboard is a dashboard that measures Wikidata's usage and coverage on Wikimedia Foundation projects.

Other Noteworthy Stuff
- Entity Explosion, the browser add-on for Chrome is now also available for Firefox. When the user visits a web page, it displays data from Wikidata, about the subject of that page.

Did you know?

Development
- Added Wikidata support to Japanese Wikivoyage. phab:T261451
- Investigating the nature of our training outliers to improve the way ORES automatically scores the quality of an Item.
- Working on error that sometimes causes Wikidata UI to report 2 error messages when saving a sitelink in an item. phab:T260869
- Completed various investigations to make an informed decision on the output format of WikibaseManifest files (automated configuration detection for toolbuilders) phab:T261285
- Completed various bug fixes and wrap-up tasks to conclude the major engineering work on the Federated Properties project
- More work on Item Quality Scoring and Federated Properties

You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here. If you want to help, you can also have a look at the tasks needing a volunteer.

Monthly Tasks
- Add labels, in your own language(s), for the new properties listed above.
- Comment on property proposals: all open proposals
- Contribute to a Showcase item.
- Help translate or proofread the interface and documentation pages, in your own language!
- Help merge identical items across Wikimedia projects.
- Help write the next summary!

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Mohammed Sadat (WMDE) 14:43, 7 September 2020 (UTC)