User talk:TheSandDoctor

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Coming here to ask about a block or other admin action that I have issued on another WMF wiki where I am an admin? Please discuss on your talk page there (if you have Talk Page Access) and ping me as it has nothing to do with enwiki and is outside of its processes. Please also do not assume that that WMF wiki has the same blocking policy or processes as enwiki.

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RfA candidate	S	O	N	S%	Ending (UTC)	Time left	Dups?	Report
RfB candidate	S	O	N	S%	Ending (UTC)	Time left	Dups?	Report

No RfXs since 10:11, 20 November 2024 (UTC).—^{cyberbot I}_{Talk to my owner:Online}

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Article policies

This user talk page might be watched by friendly talk page stalkers, which means that someone other than me might reply to your query. Their input is welcome and their help with messages that I cannot reply to quickly is appreciated.

Archives

If you feel that I have reverted an edit or issued a warning in error, please let me know. I am human, and I do make mistakes. Please don't interpret an error on my part as a personal attack on you. It's not, I promise. I ask you to simply bring it to my attention; I am always open to civil discussion. Thank you. TheSandDoctor (talk) 04:52, 30 March 2017 (UTC)]][reply]

If I see something such as a box, template, image, etc., on another user/user talk page that catches my eye, I will "borrow" it. More than likely without asking. ;) TheSandDoctor (talk) 04:52, 30 March 2017 (UTC)]][reply]

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Notification of administrators without tools

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Feedback request: All RFCs request for comment

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Feedback request: All RFCs request for comment

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Administrators' newsletter – November 2024

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

Administrator changes

Crisco 1492

CheckUser changes

Maxim

Oversighter changes

Maxim

Guideline and policy news

Following a discussion, the discussion-only period proposal that went for a trial to refine the requests for adminship (RfA) process has been discontinued.
Following a request for comment, Administrator recall is adopted as a policy.

Technical news

Mass deletions done with the Nuke tool now have the 'Nuke' tag. This change will make reviewing and analyzing deletions performed with the tool easier. T366068

Arbitration

RoySmith, Barkeep49 and Cyberpower678 have been appointed to the Electoral Commission for the 2024 Arbitration Committee Elections. ThadeusOfNazereth and Dr vulpes are reserve commissioners.
Eligible editors are invited to self-nominate from 3 November 2024 until 12 November 2024 to stand in the 2024 Arbitration Committee elections.
The Arbitration Committee is seeking volunteers for roles such as clerks, access to the COI queue, checkuser, and oversight.

Miscellaneous

An unreferenced articles backlog drive is happening in November 2024 to reduce the backlog of articles tagged with {{Unreferenced}}. You can help reduce the backlog by adding citations to these articles. Sign up to participate!

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 10:21, 3 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Question from K31r2 (14:53, 4 November 2024)

Hi! I've looked around for rules on this and can't find them, I'd really like to create new simple English articles for existing wiki pages that don't have a simple one yet. Can you direct me to where there might be info about that and the rules page? --K31r2 (talk) 14:53, 4 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2024-45

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

Updates for editors

Stewards can now make global account blocks cause global autoblocks. This will assist stewards in preventing abuse from users who have been globally blocked. This includes preventing globally blocked temporary accounts from exiting their session or switching browsers to make subsequent edits for 24 hours. Previously, temporary accounts could exit their current session or switch browsers to continue editing. This is an anti-abuse tool improvement for the Temporary Accounts project. You can read more about the progress on key features for temporary accounts. [1]
Wikis that have the CampaignEvents extension enabled can now use the Collaboration List feature. This list provides a new, easy way for contributors to learn about WikiProjects on their wikis. Thanks to the Campaign team for this work that is part of the 2024/25 annual plan. If you are interested in bringing the CampaignEvents extension to your wiki, you can follow these steps or you can reach out to User:Udehb-WMF for help.
The text color for red links will be slightly changed later this week to improve their contrast in light mode. [2]
View all 32 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, on multilingual wikis, users can now hide translations from the WhatLinksHere special page.

Updates for technical contributors

XML data dumps have been temporarily paused whilst a bug is investigated. [3]

In depth

Temporary Accounts have been deployed to six wikis; thanks to the Trust and Safety Product team for this work, you can read about the deployment plans. Beginning next week, Temporary Accounts will also be enabled on seven other projects. If you are active on these wikis and need help migrating your tools, please reach out to User:Udehb-WMF for assistance.
The latest quarterly Language and Internationalization newsletter is available. It includes: New languages supported in translatewiki or in MediaWiki; New keyboard input methods for some languages; details about recent and upcoming meetings, and more.

Meetings and events

MediaWiki Users and Developers Conference Fall 2024 is happening in Vienna, Austria and online from 4 to 6 November 2024. The conference will feature discussions around the usage of MediaWiki software by and within companies in different industries and will inspire and onboard new users.

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

MediaWiki message delivery 20:48, 4 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Feedback request: All RFCs request for comment

Your feedback is requested at Wikipedia:Reliable sources/Noticeboard on a "All RFCs" request for comment. Thank you for helping out!
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Question from Jplugz (04:01, 10 November 2024)

Hello SandDoctor, please I need help to get my article published. How do I go about it? --Jplugz (talk) 04:02, 10 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Question from MurrayGriffiths (23:37, 11 November 2024)

Hello, What do I do to find the "Preferences" button so that I can check if the Visual Editor is enabled for me? (For 2 days now, I don`t seem to be able to find ANY pages that have a simple edit button, - which makes me think I need to check that!) Hoping You Can Help, MG. --MurrayGriffiths (talk) 23:37, 11 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2024-46

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

Updates for editors

On wikis with the Translate extension enabled, users will notice that the FuzzyBot will now automatically create translated versions of categories used on translated pages. [4]
View all 29 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, the submitted task to use the SecurePoll extension for English Wikipedia's special administrator election was resolved on time. [5]

Updates for technical contributors

In 1.44.0-wmf-2, the logic of Wikibase function getAllStatements changed to behave like getBestStatements. Invoking the function now returns a copy of values which are immutable. [6]
Wikimedia REST API users, such as bot operators and tool maintainers, may be affected by ongoing upgrades. The API will be rerouting some page content endpoints from RESTbase to the newer MediaWiki REST API endpoints. The impacted endpoints include getting page/revision metadata and rendered HTML content. These changes will be available on testwiki later this week, with other projects to follow. This change should not affect existing functionality, but active users of the impacted endpoints should verify behavior on testwiki, and raise any concerns on the related Phabricator ticket.

In depth

Admins and users of the Wikimedia projects where Automoderator is enabled can now monitor and evaluate important metrics related to Automoderator's actions. This Superset dashboard calculates and aggregates metrics about Automoderator's behaviour on the projects in which it is deployed. Thanks to the Moderator Tools team for this Dashboard; you can visit the documentation page for more information about this work. [7]

Meetings and events

21 November 2024 (8:00 UTC & 16:00 UTC) - Community call with Wikimedia Commons volunteers and stakeholders to help prioritize support efforts for 2025-2026 Fiscal Year. The theme of this call is how content should be organised on Wikimedia Commons.

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

MediaWiki message delivery 00:04, 12 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Reminder to participate in Wikipedia research

Hello,

I recently invited you to take a survey about administration on Wikipedia. If you haven’t yet had a chance, there is still time to participate– we’d truly appreciate your feedback. The survey is anonymous and should take about 10-15 minutes to complete. You may read more about the study on its Meta page and view its privacy statement.

Take the survey here.

Kind Regards,

WMF Research Team

BGerdemann (WMF) (talk) 00:18, 13 November 2024 (UTC) [reply]

Nomination for deletion of Template:No references submission

Template:No references submission has been nominated for deletion. You are invited to comment on the discussion at the entry on the Templates for discussion page. – Jonesey95 (talk) 15:08, 13 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Feedback request: All RFCs request for comment

Your feedback is requested at Talk:San Francisco on a "All RFCs" request for comment. Thank you for helping out!
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Question from Cornovono (16:22, 14 November 2024)

Hi big guy, how do i flag a broken citation on a page? The link, title and everything is correct but the linked article has been deleted. --Cornovono (talk) 16:22, 14 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Nominations now open for the WikiProject Military history newcomer of the year and military historian of the year

Nominations now open for the WikiProject Military History newcomer of the year and military historian of the year awards for 2024! The the top editors will be awarded the coveted Gold Wiki. Nominations are open here and here respectively. The nomination period closes at 23:59 on 30 November 2024 when voting begins. On behalf of the coordinators, wishing you the very best for the festive season and the new year. MediaWiki message delivery via MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 04:21, 16 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Question from AbhishekSpaceBoy (09:56, 16 November 2024)

Hi, I recently submitted a page for review. However, I didn't see any option to edit the title. So, how would the reviewers know what's my title? Are they going to use my username as the title? If that happens, it will be very troublesome. --AbhishekSpaceBoy (talk) 09:56, 16 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Question from Mytwistednightmare (01:36, 18 November 2024)

How do I create a wiki page? --Mytwistednightmare (talk) 01:36, 18 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Notification of administrators without tools

	Greetings, TheSandDoctor. You are receiving this notification because you've agreed to consider endorsing prospective admin candidates identified by the process outlined at Administrators without tools. Recently, the following editor(s) received this distinction and the associated endearing title: Gerda Arendt
Thank you for supporting this effort. Your contributions are an integral part of overall success, and an example for others to follow. To stop receiving these notifications, remove your name from the list.

Tol Bot (talk) 21:00, 18 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

ArbCom 2024 Elections voter message

Hello! Voting in the 2024 Arbitration Committee elections is now open until 23:59 (UTC) on Monday, 2 December 2024. All eligible users are allowed to vote. Users with alternate accounts may only vote once.

The Arbitration Committee is the panel of editors responsible for conducting the Wikipedia arbitration process. It has the authority to impose binding solutions to disputes between editors, primarily for serious conduct disputes the community has been unable to resolve. This includes the authority to impose site bans, topic bans, editing restrictions, and other measures needed to maintain our editing environment. The arbitration policy describes the Committee's roles and responsibilities in greater detail.

If you wish to participate in the 2024 election, please review the candidates and submit your choices on the voting page. If you no longer wish to receive these messages, you may add {{NoACEMM}} to your user talk page. MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 00:35, 19 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2024-47

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

Updates for editors

Users of Wikimedia sites will now be warned when they create a redirect to a page that doesn't exist. This will reduce the number of broken redirects to red links in our projects. [8]
View all 42 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, Pywikibot, which automates work on MediaWiki sites, was upgraded to 9.5.0 on Toolforge. [9]

Updates for technical contributors

On wikis that use the FlaggedRevs extension, pages created or moved by users with the appropriate permissions are marked as flagged automatically. This feature has not been working recently, and changes fixing it should be deployed this week. Thanks to Daniel and Wargo for working on this. [10][11]

In depth

There is a new Diff post about Temporary Accounts, available in more than 15 languages. Read it to learn about what Temporary Accounts are, their impact on different groups of users, and the plan to introduce the change on all wikis.

Meetings and events

Technical volunteers can now register for the 2025 Wikimedia Hackathon, which will take place in Istanbul, Turkey. Application for travel and accommodation scholarships is open from November 12 to December 10 2024. The registration for the event will close in mid-April 2025. The Wikimedia Hackathon is an annual gathering that unites the global technical community to collaborate on existing projects and explore new ideas.
Join the Wikimedia Commons community calls this week to help prioritize support for Commons which will be planned for 2025–2026. The theme will be how content should be organised on Wikimedia Commons. This is an opportunity for volunteers who work on different things to come together and talk about what matters for the future of the project. The calls will take place November 21, 2024, 8:00 UTC and 16:00 UTC.
A Language community meeting will take place November 29, 16:00 UTC to discuss updates and technical problem-solving.

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

MediaWiki message delivery 01:58, 19 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Notification of administrators without tools

	Greetings, TheSandDoctor. You are receiving this notification because you've agreed to consider endorsing prospective admin candidates identified by the process outlined at Administrators without tools. Recently, the following editor(s) received this distinction and the associated endearing title: Usernamekiran
Thank you for supporting this effort. Your contributions are an integral part of overall success, and an example for others to follow. To stop receiving these notifications, remove your name from the list.

Tol Bot (talk) 21:01, 23 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2024-48

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

Updates for editors

A new version of the standard wikitext editor-mode syntax highlighter will be available as a beta feature later this week. This brings many new features and bug fixes, including right-to-left support, template folding, autocompletion, and an improved search panel. You can learn more on the help page.
The 2010 wikitext editor now supports common keyboard shortcuts such Ctrl+B for bold and Ctrl+I for italics. A full list of all six shortcuts is available. Thanks to SD0001 for this improvement. [12]
Starting November 28, Flow/Structured Discussions pages will be automatically archived and set to read-only at the following wikis: bswiki, elwiki, euwiki, fawiki, fiwiki, frwikiquote, frwikisource, frwikiversity, frwikivoyage, idwiki, lvwiki, plwiki, ptwiki, urwiki, viwikisource, zhwikisource. This is done as part of StructuredDiscussions deprecation work. If you need any assistance to archive your page in advance, please contact Trizek (WMF).
View all 25 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, a user creating a new AbuseFilter can now only set the filter to "protected" if it includes a protected variable.

Updates for technical contributors

The CodeEditor, which can be used in JavaScript, CSS, JSON, and Lua pages, now offers live autocompletion. Thanks to SD0001 for this improvement. The feature can be temporarily disabled on a page by pressing Ctrl+, and un-selecting "Live Autocompletion".
Tool-maintainers who use the Graphite system for tracking metrics, need to migrate to the newer Prometheus system. They can check this dashboard and the list in the Description of the task T350592 to see if their tools are listed, and they should claim metrics and dashboards connected to their tools. They can then disable or migrate all existing metrics by following the instructions in the task. The Graphite service will become read-only in April. [13]
The New PreProcessor parser performance report has been fixed to give an accurate count for the number of Wikibase entities accessed. It had previously been resetting after 400 entities. [14]

Meetings and events

A Language community meeting will take place November 29 at 16:00 UTC. There will be presentations on topics like developing language keyboards, the creation of the Mooré Wikipedia, the language support track at Wiki Indaba, and a report from the Wayuunaiki community on their experiences with the Incubator and as a new community over the last 3 years. This meeting will be in English and will also have Spanish interpretation.

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

MediaWiki message delivery 22:39, 25 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Voting is now open for the WikiProject Military History newcomer of the year and military historian of the year awards

Voting is now open for the WikiProject Military History newcomer of the year and military historian of the year awards for 2024! The top editors will be awarded the coveted Gold Wiki. Cast your votes here and here respectively. Voting closes at 23:59 on 30 December 2024. On behalf of the coordinators, wishing you the very best for the festive season and the new year. MediaWiki message delivery via MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 00:00, 30 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

SPI Thanks

Thanks for this. I thought closing was clerks only as well. Will do so going forward. Star Mississippi 14:10, 1 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

@Star Mississippi: You're welcome! I admin patrolled for quite a while before becoming a clerk. Admins do have fairly wide latitude and their help is greatly appreciated. The only things really that you can't do are archive, endorse, or CU/clerk decline cases I would say...at least that I can think of off hand. Clerks can't close and archive the same case entries and there aren't many of us, so having an admin close ones they've otherwise completed frees us up to review and archive. TheSandDoctor ^Talk 18:00, 1 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Oh that's super helpful to know, thank you. Definitely happy to pitch in and take load off clerks as CU/Clerk beyond my tech skill set so not anything I could ever apply for and help with in that front. Have a good evening. Star Mississippi 23:11, 1 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Question from Ali.kazimiA (18:36, 2 December 2024)

Hi, the TheSandDoctor, How do you make a whole new paragraph not made from the actual article? --Ali.kazimiA (talk) 18:36, 2 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2024-49

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

Updates for editors

Two new parser functions were added this week. The {{#interwikilink}} function adds an interwiki link and the {{#interlanguagelink}} function adds an interlanguage link. These parser functions are useful on wikis where namespaces conflict with interwiki prefixes. For example, links beginning with MOS: on English Wikipedia conflict with the mos language code prefix of Mooré Wikipedia.
Starting this week, Wikimedia wikis no longer support connections using old RSA-based HTTPS certificates, specifically rsa-2048. This change is to improve security for all users. Some older, unsupported browser or smartphone devices will be unable to connect; Instead, they will display a connectivity error. See the HTTPS Browser Recommendations page for more-detailed information. All modern operating systems and browsers are always able to reach Wikimedia projects. [15]
Starting December 16, Flow/Structured Discussions pages will be automatically archived and set to read-only at the following wikis: arwiki, cawiki, frwiki, mediawikiwiki, orwiki, wawiki, wawiktionary, wikidatawiki, zhwiki. This is done as part of StructuredDiscussions deprecation work. If you need any assistance to archive your page in advance, please contact Trizek (WMF). [16]
This month the Chart extension was deployed to production and is now available on Commons and Testwiki. With the security review complete, pilot wiki deployment is expected to start in the first week of December. You can see a working version on Testwiki and read the November project update for more details.
View all 23 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, a bug with the "Download as PDF" system was fixed. [17]

Updates for technical contributors

In late February, temporary accounts will be rolled out on at least 10 large wikis. This deployment will have a significant effect on the community-maintained code. This is about Toolforge tools, bots, gadgets, and user scripts that use IP address data or that are available for logged-out users. The Trust and Safety Product team wants to identify this code, monitor it, and assist in updating it ahead of the deployment to minimize disruption to workflows. The team asks technical editors and volunteer developers to help identify such tools by adding them to this list. In addition, review the updated documentation to learn how to adjust the tools. Join the discussions on the project talk page or in the dedicated thread on the Wikimedia Community Discord server (in English) for support and to share feedback.

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

MediaWiki message delivery 22:20, 2 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Administrators' newsletter – December 2024

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

Administrator changes

Interface administrator changes

Pppery

CheckUser changes

Guideline and policy news

Following an RFC, the policy on restoration of adminship has been updated. All former administrators may now only regain the tools following a request at the Wikipedia:Bureaucrats' noticeboard within 5 years of their most recent admin action. Previously this applied only to administrators deysopped for inactivity.
Following a request for comment, a new speedy deletion criterion, T5, has been enacted. This applies to template subpages that are no longer used.

Technical news

Technical volunteers can now register for the 2025 Wikimedia Hackathon, which will take place in Istanbul, Turkey. Application for travel and accommodation scholarships is open from November 12 to December 10, 2024.

Arbitration

The arbitration case Yasuke (formerly titled Backlash to diversity and inclusion) has been closed.
An arbitration case titled Palestine-Israel articles 5 has been opened. Evidence submissions in this case will close on 14 December.

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 16:20, 3 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Notification of administrators without tools

	Greetings, TheSandDoctor. You are receiving this notification because you've agreed to consider endorsing prospective admin candidates identified by the process outlined at Administrators without tools. Recently, the following editor(s) received this distinction and the associated endearing title: Sahaib
Thank you for supporting this effort. Your contributions are an integral part of overall success, and an example for others to follow. To stop receiving these notifications, remove your name from the list.

Tol Bot (talk) 21:00, 3 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]