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.
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. [1]
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. [2]
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. [3][4]
Understood. Post was not written by someone with that intention. The page no longer gives the ability to post. Can you please provide instruction on how to re-submit with only fact based content? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 162.218.22.42 (talk) 17:02, 14 August 2020 (UTC)
Hi! Might you please help me, as an admin, with misleading and bias in Wiki?
To make a long story short, I tried to edit the page related to 'hate group' multiple time to make it more diverse & sources-conforming, but all the time moderators or another 'watchers' undid it to one previous version represented only selected by someone narrative that does not even stay in line with today's point of an authors research center. As a person who doesn't like the use of only one side of a complex problem, I can't stay with it but now try to solve the problem within Wiki, not within media and related public instruments.
More longer:
Does today's English Wikipedia provides support for biased views and only selected forms of hate?
> Welcomes everybody to the discussion below 'Hate group' paper. https://wiki.riteme.site/wiki/Talk:Hate_group#Our_#Wikipedia_is_not_one's_Political_Instrument.
Summary: today's version looks misleading, American-centrist (nothing mention phenomena of hate outside the USA and Southern Poverty Law Center) and moderators looks American chauvinist and supporting only nazi's or related old white supremacy symbols or flags, whereas even the major domain research center, SPLC as mentioned before, shows that have is more inclusive and diverse (in a negative way of this concepts). Moreover, the previous article authors misleading at FBI official state quotation to hate crimes to prove their own view. Hatred is not American or other today's rich country movements privilege, it has no borders or faces. Only people who do hate have these signs of division. And hate definitely has not only black/brown/multiracial/white/WASP/yellow or whatever you 'Americans' like to use to divisive yourself.
>> My heart is bleeding from English Wikipedia Censorship. I participated in the Wiki community of 3 languages (one from the beginning) for 10 years, but never saw this before. My ancestors, who were imprisoned to labor and concentration camps because of their nationality, ethnicity, and views, also would not approve your totalitarian informational policy of global source for the sake of polarization and mobilization of the population within one country before their local elections.
>> * Before: https://imgur.com/esXx8ja (misleading symbols with no sources, strange position of moderators that hate have the face and that is the only one (needed?) face)
>> * After: https://imgur.com/UrYMQQ0 (paraphrase misleading definition and unreasonable but conscious incorrect FBI citations, flags, and emblems with a source from a major source all other article formulated on)
This editor has posted the same, or virtually the same, message to 7 administrators' talk pages and to a number of other talk pages. They have received answers at at least two of those pages (I have better things to do with my time than check every one of them, so it may be more than two) and has been directed to Talk:Hate group. JBW (talk) 21:15, 22 August 2020 (UTC)
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).
I really liked your essay WP:THREE. Its really crisp and up to the point. Any reason why its not in the 'Wikipedia' namespace ? (I'm not familiar with what is the general process to create a Wikipedia Namespace Essay) Zoodino (talk) 07:39, 27 August 2020 (UTC)
Zoodino, Thanks for the kind words. I know we're not supposed to WP:OWN anything here, but I've always felt that this was a personal expression of how I felt things should work, which is why I left it in my user space. From time to time, people have pushed for changes, and I feel if it was in WP space, I'd have less justification for pushing back.
As for the process to create an essay, it's really just be WP:BOLD. Anybody can write a WP:ESSAY, either in their own user space or in WP space. That I chose to do it in my user space was purely my personal preference. -- RoySmith(talk)13:22, 27 August 2020 (UTC)
Fyi, regarding Wikipedia:Sockpuppet investigations/Zorro544/Archive#09 August 2020, TonyBallioni wrote I'll hold off on tagging for now in case another CU knows who this is. He also didn't add a "SockBlock" template to the user's talk page, so they never got an explanation about the meaning of the block, nor how to appeal. You closed the case, but the tagging and block notification wasn't dealt with. I didn't ping TonyBallioni because it looks like he's very busy. I'll let you decide what to do. Thanks... --IamNotU (talk) 14:06, 25 August 2020 (UTC)
PS, they should probably be tagged as banned under WP:3X, as the other editor they've mainly been battling with was: [5]. --IamNotU (talk) 14:17, 25 August 2020 (UTC)
Ok, thanks. I only mentioned it because the user was pinging me with some edit requests from one of the sock's talk pages (user talk:Hommenoir91), and seemed to not really understand about how the block worked. When I looked on their main talk page there wasn't anything there about it. I tried to explain things a bit to them, but probably there should be something official there... --IamNotU (talk) 22:08, 25 August 2020 (UTC)
Hi, yeah, Berean Hunter had some theories as to who it is but I don’t think anything conclusive. It’s clearly someone who has been around for a while, but having a place for people to report is more important than getting the right original master. I typically don’t give block notices in cases like this: the {{checkuserblock-account}} template in the block notice provides the details anytime they try to edit, and someone with this many socks knows what’s going on anyway. The option to give the notice isn’t set by default in the SPI script, so part of its being lazy I suppose, but it’s also usually just not needed in these cases. TonyBallioni (talk) 23:58, 27 August 2020 (UTC)
Hey, do you ever upload photos? I've got a (what I think is) fascinating subject at Jenny Bui, who has salons in the Bronx and Harlem. I would LOVE to get photos of her and her work, which I understand is displayed at the shops. I'd think a photo of her nail art could make a great DYK image, too. —valereee (talk) 17:13, 30 August 2020 (UTC)
The Bronx location is 305 E Fordham Rd, 2nd floor. The Harlem location is 2449 Adam Clayton Powell Blvd. As far as I can tell the proprietor spends most of her time at the Bronx location. If you do happen by, thanks! If it weren't for COVID I'd be thinking about convincing the hubs it was time for a road trip lol (And wow, lots of uploads! Those are great!) —valereee (talk) 23:48, 30 August 2020 (UTC)
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.")[6]
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.
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. [7][8]
You wrote, On the surface, there is no agreement about whether the subject meets WP:SOLDIER or not.
I am wondering it that's a typo and you meant disagreement? No one disputed the claim that he passes NSOLDIER — that was uncontested (though people did dispute whether NSOLDIER was enough by itself but that's another thing). – SD0001 (talk) 06:19, 7 September 2020 (UTC)
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
Normally pages can be moved to a title that has no existing page yet or to a page that has only one revision, which is a redirect to the page to be moved. A new user right allows editors to move pages over one-revision pages that redirect to anywhere. [9]
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 8 September. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 9 September. It will be on all wikis from 10 September (calendar).
All MediaWiki API modules will now use watchlist instead of watch. This was inconsistent before. [10]
Future changes
The Wikipedia Android app team might work on patrolling tools in the future. You can let them know what tools would be useful for you or for less experienced patrollers. See the page on mediawiki.org.
OTRS will be updated to a new version. This will probably take around two days. OTRS agents will not have access to the system during these days. Emails that come in during the update will be delivered when the update is done. The plan is to start around 08:00 UTC on 14 September. This could change. [11]
The Wikipedia Android app will send 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 need Google Play Services to work. It will also be possible to get the app without Google Play Services but push notifications will not work. Google Play Services is also used to make the app work for Android 4.4 users. [12][13]
Wikimedia code review could move to GitLab. It would be hosted on Wikimedia servers. You can take part in the consultation.
Dropdown menus in the Vector skin use a .menu class. This will not work in the future. Scripts can use nav ul instead. .vectorTabs and .vectorMenu will also not work. Some scripts need to be updated. You can read more in Phabricator.
Regarding [14], I'm not sure whether to file future cases under the one SPI or the other. They kind of look the same to me. If you would like to share a discriminator, I have email enabled. Thanks ☆ Bri (talk) 16:23, 10 September 2020 (UTC)
On 13 September 2020, Did you know was updated with a fact from the article Zoo key, which you recently created, substantially expanded, or brought to good article status. The fact was ... that Trunkey the Elephant has been teaching kids about zoo animals for over 50 years? The nomination discussion and review may be seen at Template:Did you know nominations/Zoo key. You are welcome to check how many page hits the article got while on the front page (here's how, Zoo key), and it may be added to the statistics page if the total is over 5,000. Finally, if you know of an interesting fact from another recently created article, then please feel free to suggest it on the Did you know talk page.
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 Wikipedia apps briefly showed pages without CSS last week. This meant they looked wrong. It was quickly fixed but cached pages without CSS were shown for a few hours. [15][16]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 15 September. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 16 September. It will be on all wikis from 17 September (calendar).
Hello, RoySmith. Thank you for your good works on Wikipedia.
Regarding subject matter, article has WP:RS even as it was not including in the deletion discussions. Kindly spare time to revisit the article references:
2dmaxo, Thanks for your note. My role in closing an AfD is largely clerical, that is to summarize the opinions of the people who participated. That being said, those references were already in the article and the people who evaluated them didn't find them sufficient. You'll want to read WP:NBIO to get a better understanding of what we require for biographies. -- RoySmith(talk)12:22, 13 September 2020 (UTC)
Dear RoySmith (talk)! I see you can benefit from a great experience throughout the English version of Wikipedia, for which you have my respect.
I was surprised to find that the article I had created had been removed. When it was published, I asked my colleagues in the community for help, as English is not my mother tongue, for which I am grateful to each of them for improving my work. In this case, we are talking about a broad-spectrum person: a writer, author of several books, producer, public figure, skydiving instructor, businessman. So this is not a sensation. There is just such a person and everything described about him is confirmed by authoritative sources. The sources I use are the Bulgarian National Television, the Bulgarian National Radio, publications in the local press.
That is why I am asking you for help in improving the article about Dobromir Slavchev and moving it to the main space, so that the users of the English version of Wikipedia can get acquainted with his personality.
You copy-paste the four lines from my common.js to your common.js. (everything after "// Add this to your common.js to use restore-a-lot (admins only, tested on a FFD page)")
In the bottom right corner a little yellow thingie can now be seen.
Uncollapse the discussion and file list so you can actually see the file names.
Hit the "Restore-a-lot" yellow thingie.
In this case, you could simply press "all" (next to "select") but to operate more precisely you select the top file, hold down shift and select the bottom file. Everything in between will get selected as well.
You probably want to enable the checkbox for "custom undeletion reason".
Press the undelete button. If you enabled the checkbox you'll be asked to enter the reason.
Sorry btw for the post-close comment on the discussion. I was looking at an outdated page and just hit edit, did not notice the closure in wikitext. — Alexis Jazz (talk or ping me) 21:57, 14 September 2020 (UTC)
Restoring the images isn't the really tedious part; there aren't enough of them to be a significant barrier to doing it manually.The really tedious part is identifying their articles and putting them back in. That's not really optional; otherwise, the images will just be speedied again in a week, with hardly any chance of having been looked at by a human. I don't see any such functionality in a skim of Restore-a-lot. (And I wouldn't expect there to be in a script written for Commons, which has no such time limit.) —Cryptic22:09, 14 September 2020 (UTC)
@Cryptic: I can't think of any realistic way to integrate such a thing into a script. It could be feasible if images would never be used outside infoboxes or we could somehow assume that articles would never be edited after removing the image, but since neither of those are true.. How about restoring, say, the first 20 and creating a discussion page and pinging everyone who participated in the discussion? When putting them back into articles, we'd automatically be reviewing them and what we don't put back probably doesn't have a good FU rationale. When those are done, restore the next 20. Does this sounds reasonable? — Alexis Jazz (talk or ping me) 15:46, 15 September 2020 (UTC)
Alexis Jazz, I could imagine some heuristics that would get you close. Assuming the actual removal was done by User:Filedelinkerbot, there's some tools there that give the history of what it unlinked. The log tool is currently broken, but you could certainly start with the date a file was deleted and search the bot's contribution history on that date. Doing that, I find:
(change visibility) 2020-08-22T01:41:49 diff hist -181 Chicago Blackhawks Bot: Removing File:Chicago Blackhawks logo (1937-1955).png . It was deleted by Fastily (Wikipedia:Files for discussion/2020 August 14#File:Chicago Blackhawks logo (1937-1955).png).
pretty quickly. It shouldn't be too hard to automate that.
The other alternative is that the file was unlinked using Wikipedia:XFDcloser, in which case the edits show up as being performed by the person who closed the discussion, and you could do the same thing on their personal contribution history.
Only about a 50% hit rate among the handful I've done so far. Most of the manual removals, apparently, were because someone noticed the redlink before the bot got around to removing it. One was shown through a file redirect; I don't know if the bot deals with that itself or just looks for the deletion of the redirect, but this algorithm wouldn't have found it. The Commons case is actually easier, since the delinker keeps a handily-searchable log. I've been relying on the image description page to name the article it was used on - as it must to be a valid nonfree image - and looking for removals in mid-to-late August.XFDcloser is rarely used at FFD, and hardly ever for deletes - there's a bot that closes FFD discussions if the file no longer exists, so standard practice is to just delete, mention the ffd in the log, and let the bots close and remove. —Cryptic17:07, 15 September 2020 (UTC)
Vinmont Veteran Park
Having moved your DYK hook for Vinmont Veteran Park into the Queue, I checked on the article. Seeing the photograph in the infobox and the name of the park, I thought, what a wonderful idea to build a park for elderly people, who just because they are old, cannot be presumed to have lost all their sense of fun! On further inspection, I found that my first impression was wrong, but I thought you might be amused to hear of my thoughts (I laughed at myself anyway). Cwmhiraeth (talk) 06:30, 18 September 2020 (UTC)
Hi there, I could not make comments on the sockpuppet investigation case [17] due to a filter.
But I find it suspicious that this user removed the speedy deletion template and even uploaded a new version of a picture previously uploaded by a sockpuppet. Here: [18].
156.205.171.19 (talk) 18:53, 19 September 2020 (UTC)
Thank you for your response. Much appreciated. The topic has few editors, but unfortunately most of the new editors either soon quit editing or choose paths that lead to blocks and other sanctions. Hopefully, Peervala will reflect on the problem. Cheers, Ktrimi991 (talk) 21:25, 20 September 2020 (UTC)
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 tag for reverted edits. For example you can see it in the recent changes feed or in the article history. It is added to edits when they have been undone, rollbacked or manually reverted to an older version of the page. [19][20]
Changes later this week
The number of times you can do something in a period of time on wiki is limited. This could be the number of edits per minute or the number of users you email in a day. Some users are not affected by all limits because of their user rights. They could soon see the limit even if it does not affect them. [21]
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 22 September. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 23 September. It will be on all wikis from 24 September (calendar).
This is a follow-up to last year's successful MetFashion 2019, and will follow a similar theme optimized for a remote online experience.
We will be partially coordinating with the international Wiki Loves Fashion campaign.
Watch and join the livestream! The Metropolitan Museum of Art event on Saturday Sep 26 will host a tutorial and question-and-answer session live on YouTube and other social media platforms.
12:30 pm - 1:30 pm - Presentation
1:30 pm - 2:30 pm - Guidance and Q&A
Chat about improving articles! Support will be provided to help guide new editors in this area at Wikimedia Fashion Chat for the duration of the campaign.
The other concerns about the content of the article are probably best resolved through article talk page discussion. I'm not familiar with the subject matter and the content that was removed was supported by a source, but I decided not to add it back for now. Obviously, if you or someone else feels it's OK, it can be added back; however, it might be a good idea to then clarify why on the talk page just to avoid any possibility of edit warring. Her son is a new editor who probably isn't familiar with how things work and they might not quite understand things like OWN, VNT and LUC, etc. Perhaps there's a way to tweaked the wording a bit so that it still reflects the source, but also addresses the son's concerns a bit? -- Marchjuly (talk) 22:05, 24 September 2020 (UTC)
Marchjuly, Thanks for looking into this. As far as the material removed from the article (the bit about violating regulations), I really can't see making a big fuss over that. The source I used for that, while it meets our strict definition of a WP:RS, isn't the strongest source in the world. Edit-warring with a family member over it doesn't make sense to me. This sounds like one of those "We're in a legally defensible situation, but is that really a battle we need to win?" situations. I'd be inclined to let it go.
As for the photos, I'm entirely sympathetic. If they really are family photos which were lent to the Air Force and they put them up on their web site without proper provenance, that's something that needs to get fixed. But, the folks over at Commons know this stuff a lot better than I do, so letting them handle it makes sense. -- RoySmith(talk)22:57, 24 September 2020 (UTC)
Thank you for doing so. I think it's quite encouraging that Olsen's son actually went straight to engaging on the article's talk page after being advised about COI. Many others simply refuse to do any such thing and insist they have the right to do as they please. Your response will only further show that there actually are Wikipedians who will try to help COI editors sort things out when they ask for it. -- Marchjuly (talk) 00:26, 25 September 2020 (UTC)
Hello, on that page you link to an "earwig report" but when I click on the link I only get a message "The given revision ID doesn't seem to exist: 955819948." Could you explain me what this is all about? Is it kind of a check of the overlap of texts? I also don't understand why reusing a short phrase from a reliable source, in this case "launched by Germany and France in April 2019" should be anything like a copyright violation. A copyright violation to my understanding would involve copying anything substantial, and the phrase is in no way particularly original or product of deep research or anything. Supsudelu (talk) 01:45, 24 September 2020 (UTC)
Supsudelu, Yeah, the revision(s) in question don't exist any more becuase they were deleted due to copyright infringement. Looking at the current version, I see the big quote you have from The Guardian. If you're going to include a direct quote, you need to cite the source. See Wikipedia:Quotations for details. -- RoySmith(talk)15:04, 24 September 2020 (UTC)
The Guardian just quotes the official aims of the Alliance. As the Alliance itself is not a reliable source I took it from the Guardian. The source is acknowledged and the quote is in quotation marks. What do you want? Supsudelu (talk) 22:19, 24 September 2020 (UTC)
Supsudelu, I took a closer look at this. I'm not actually sure what to suggest here, since the Guardian article is difficult to follow. As far as I can tell, that quote is attributed to (in the previous paragraph), "a diplomatic source". From that, you've extrapolated these to be the alliance's initiatives. You would do better to find a direct statement of what the alliance's initiatives are, tracable to something more concrete than an unnamed "diplomatic source". -- RoySmith(talk)18:25, 25 September 2020 (UTC)
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Editors are automatically added to some user groups. For example editors are added to autoconfirmed users when they have edited enough times and long enough. Abuse filters can hinder users from automatically getting user rights for a period of time. They can also remove rights user have. Wikis can now ask to change how long this period of time is for their wiki in Phabricator. It is currently five days. [23]
Problems
Last year some abuse filters stopped working because of a new change. If they tried to use variables that were unavailable for that action they would fail. This has now been fixed. [24]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 29 September. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 30 September. It will be on all wikis from 1 October (calendar).
Future changes
You can't see the language links to other language versions from the talk page or history page. They are also not shown when you edit an article. This could change. It is not decided if for example the history page should link to another history page or to the article. You can take part in the discussion in Phabricator.
The link colours could change. This is to make the difference between links and other text more clear. You can read more in Phabricator.
In your preferences you can choose to get different notifications on the web or by email. You will see Apps as one of the alternatives later this week. This is because the Android and iOS Wikipedia apps will use push notifications for those who want them. You can see the preferences on the test wiki. The goal is to have push notifications on Android in October and on iOS in early 2021. [25]
You can soon put pages on your watchlist for a limited time. This could be useful if you want to watch something for a shorter time but don't want it on your watchlist forever. It now works on mediawiki.org and will come to more wikis later. You can read more and see when it will come to other wikis.