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Template:Drug use (template)

You recently added Drug checking to this navbar with this edit. About five mins before I had already added that article to the Issues with drug use group with this edit. I proceeded to bypass some redirects before closing the edit request, so I can only blame myself. Feel free to revert my addition or your addition as you see fit. Happy New Year by the way! P.I. Ellsworth  ed. put'r there 15:37, 12 February 2021 (UTC)

@Paine Ellsworth: thanks for the note, I removed my duplicate - not really sure what the best "section" for that is, but I think the requester mostly just wanted it to be in there at all - they can always request again. Have a great day! Best regards, — xaosflux Talk 15:56, 12 February 2021 (UTC)

Tech News: 2021-07

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 were problems with recent versions of MediaWiki. Because the updates caused problems the developers rolled back to an earlier version. Some updates and new functions will come later than planned. [1][2]
  • Some services will not work for a short period of time from 07:00 UTC on 17 February. There might be problems with new short links, new translations, new notifications, adding new items to your reading lists or recording email bounces. This is because of database maintenance. [3]

Changes later this week

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

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

17:55, 15 February 2021 (UTC)

Merchandise giveaway nomination

A Wikimedia t-shirt!
A token of thanks
Hi Xaosflux! I've nominated you to receive a gift from the Wikimedia Foundation. Enjoy! Cheers, {{u|Sdkb}} talk 08:30, 18 February 2021 (UTC)
@Sdkb: wow - thanks! — xaosflux Talk 11:24, 18 February 2021 (UTC)

Tech News: 2021-08

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 visual editor will now use MediaSearch to find images. You can search for images on Commons in the visual editor when you are looking for illustrations. This is to help editors find better images. [4]
  • Advanced item The syntax highlighter now works with more languages: Futhark, Graphviz/DOT, CDDL and AMDGPU. [5]

Problems

  • Editing a timeline might have removed all text from it. This was because of a bug and has been fixed. You might need to edit the timeline again for it to show properly. [6]

Changes later this week

  • Recurrent item The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 23 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 24 February. It will be on all wikis from 25 February (calendar).

Future changes

  • Advanced item There is a user group for developers and users interested in working on Wikimedia wikis with the Rust programming language. You can join or tell others who want to make your wiki better in the future.

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

00:16, 23 February 2021 (UTC)

Gut Hermannsberg (english version)

Hi Xaosflux, I would like to create an English version of the German article "Gut Hermannsberg". But I don't know exactly how and I make a lot of mistakes. Best regards, Jakobwein — Preceding unsigned comment added by Jakobwein (talk • contribs) 13:03, 24 February 2021 (UTC)

@Jakobwein:Wikipedia:Article_wizard can walk you through writing an article. There are two aproaches you can use here: (1) Write your own article about the subject in English. (2) Translate the article from German to English. You can freely work in your own sandbox User:Jakobwein/sandbox while learning as well. If you translate the article and want the German history brought over drop a note at WP:RFPI after you do the translation. Best regards, — xaosflux Talk 14:34, 24 February 2021 (UTC)
I have put a translation of the German article "Gut Hermannsberg" in my sandbox. What's next?

Best regards Jakobwein — Preceding unsigned comment added by Jakobwein (talk • contribs) 17:14, 24 February 2021 (UTC)

@Jakobwein: your article needs work, especially related to markup and formatting. You may benefit from some wiki tutorials, one can be started here: WP:TWA. — xaosflux Talk 17:25, 24 February 2021 (UTC)

The Signpost: 28 February 2021

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 21:31, 28 February 2021 (UTC)

Tech News: 2021-09

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

  • Wikis using the Growth team tools can now show the name of a newcomer's mentor anywhere through a magic word. This can be used for welcome messages or userboxes.
  • A new version of the VideoCutTool is now available. It enables cropping, trimming, audio disabling, and rotating video content. It is being created as part of the developer outreach programs.

Problems

  • There was a problem with the job queue. This meant some functions did not save changes and mass messages were delayed. This did not affect wiki edits. [7]
  • Some editors may not be logged in to their accounts automatically in the latest versions of Firefox and Safari. [8]

Changes later this week

  • Recurrent item The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 2 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 3 March. It will be on all wikis from 4 March (calendar).

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

19:07, 1 March 2021 (UTC)

Administrators' newsletter – March 2021

News and updates for administrators from the past month (February 2021).

Administrator changes

added TJMSmith
removed Boing! said Zebedee • Hiberniantears • Lear's Fool • Only • WGFinley

Interface administrator changes

added AmandaNP

Guideline and policy news

  • A request for comment is open that proposes a process for the community to revoke administrative permissions. This follows a 2019 RfC in favor of creating one such a policy.
  • A request for comment is in progress to remove F7 (invalid fair-use claim) subcriterion a, which covers immediate deletion of non-free media with invalid fair-use tags.
  • A request for comment seeks to grant page movers the delete-redirect userright, which allows moving a page over a single-revision redirect, regardless of that redirect's target. The full proposal is at Wikipedia:Page mover/delete-redirect.
  • A request for comment asks if sysops may place the General sanctions/Coronavirus disease 2019 editnotice template on pages in scope that do not have page-specific sanctions?
  • There is a discussion in progress concerning automatic protection of each day's featured article with Pending Changes protection.

Technical news

  • When blocking an IPv6 address with Twinkle, there is now a checkbox with the option to just block the /64 range. When doing so, you can still leave a block template on the initial, single IP address' talkpage.
  • When protecting a page with Twinkle, you can now add a note if doing so was in response to a request at WP:RfPP, and even link to the specific revision.
  • There have been a number of reported issues with Pending Changes. Most problems setting protection appear to have been resolved (phab:T273317) but other issues with autoaccepting edits persist (phab:T275322).

Arbitration

Miscellaneous

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 19:15, 1 March 2021 (UTC)

Wikipedia API

Hello, Xaosflux! :) It has been a while without talking. Do you have any experience accessing Wikipedia's API? I've been trying to follow the instructions here for the last couple of days but I can't make it work. I'm trying to make my pywikibot autoupdate itself by getting its (updated) source code from a Wikipedia page periodically. For that it needs to be able to login, edit a certain page multiple times and copy the results from these edits in its source code script but I'm stuck on the first step: Logging in. I've already done the OAuth part and I'm trying to use a curl command on cmd to follow the other steps but... - Klein Muçi (talk) 01:39, 2 March 2021 (UTC)

@Klein Muçi: Hi, I'm not using any OAuth bots right now, but I found these tips you can start with: mw:Manual:Pywikibot/login.py#Login_using_OAuth. — xaosflux Talk 10:27, 2 March 2021 (UTC)
Thank you! I had already read that and I believe I'm past that point. What I wanted to do is know how to be able to send a POST request properly to the Wikipedia-s API for authentication using cURL. The example described in the page above is like this: api.php?action=login&lgname=user&lgpassword=password&lgtoken=123ABC. With my current understanding of the subject, I tried curl -X POST api.php?action=login&lgname=user&lgpassword=password&lgtoken=123ABC (of course, with my personal credentials and tokens substituted) but the response I get is nothing similar to what I should be getting (judging by the examples given on that page). It's neither a successful nor an erroneous one. I just get a very long HTML code page. I've tried sending a GET request (curl api.php?action=login&lgname=user&lgpassword=password&lgtoken=123ABC) and the same thing happens. There are examples premade for Python, JavaScript and PHP there but I work on cmd, as I said, and I don't know how to convert that information in being useful to me. - Klein Muçi (talk) 11:14, 2 March 2021 (UTC)
@Klein Muçi: perhaps mw:API:REST_API/Reference#Update_page would lead you in the right direction? If not, drop a note at WP:VPT - specifically asking for directions on how to login to the API with OAUTH using curl. — xaosflux Talk 11:25, 2 March 2021 (UTC)
I hadn't seen that page before. I tried some of the examples mentioned there and they work fine. I either get some results as intended or I get a permission denied response (on the POST requests because I haven't logged in) again, as intended. I don't understand though why the first page tells us to use https://wiki.riteme.site/w/api.php? while the second one tells us to use https://wiki.riteme.site/w/rest.php/v1/. Do you have any idea how to "adapt" the instructions mentioned here with the format used in the page you showed me (https://wiki.riteme.site/w/rest.php/v1/)? If not, I can try asking at WP:VPT but judging from past experiences, if you lack the ability to explain clearly your request there, you'll get dragged upon on a long journey. That is if you are lucky enough to get an answer. And explaining the "adaptation" part will be difficult for me given that I lack the correct terminology or the technical side info about the subject. - Klein Muçi (talk) 22:52, 2 March 2021 (UTC)
@Klein Muçi: I'm not familiar enough with this to help you more -- you will likely get told to 'use python' with pywikibot, so you might want to leave out pywikibot and soley ask about using the API with CURL. I think it contains the libraries to actually deal with OAuth. I think "in general" you have a multi-part process needed if you are doing everything manually, (a) send your client id/secret -> get a request token; (b) send an authorize request with the request token -> get an authorize token; (c) now that you are authorized, get an access token. I'm not 100% on this as I don't actively use it. — xaosflux Talk 00:17, 3 March 2021 (UTC)
Okay then. Thank you for showing me that page at least. I couldn't find anything related to curl in regard to API. I'm currently asking one of the main contributors to the page you showed me. Maybe I get some help there (even though, as always, my lack of technical background poses a barrier to these kind of conversations). If things don't go well, I'll try asking about "how to login to the API with OAUTH using curl". As for using Python, to be honest, it's not something I'm against per se, but I've literally spent months getting used to Linux commands. I'd have to start from scratch if I switched to using Python and it's a change I don't feel yet comfortable making. Maybe if I'm able to get past this problem now, I'll start thinking about learning how to operate Python too. Anyway, thank you again! :) - Klein Muçi (talk) 00:32, 3 March 2021 (UTC)

sudo

Just curious: I know what the Unix sudo command does, but I'm not clear on the meaning you intended in MediaWiki talk:Yourgender § label text. Inquiring minds are wondering... isaacl (talk) 18:40, 2 March 2021 (UTC)

@Isaacl: for pages in the mediawiki namespace, I find it best not to use WP:BRD; activating the edit request template enqueues that discussion in to several places that attract second opinion admins such as User:AnomieBOT/PERTable and Category:Wikipedia fully-protected edit requests. — xaosflux Talk 18:45, 2 March 2021 (UTC)
OK, so you used "sudo" to mean an edit request? Thanks for the clarification. isaacl (talk) 18:50, 2 March 2021 (UTC)
Ahh, looking at the wikitext clarifies things. Dunno why someone made a template redirect called sudo, though... isaacl (talk) 18:53, 2 March 2021 (UTC)
@Isaacl: it's survived multiple TFD's :) (see Wikipedia:Redirects_for_discussion/Log/2014_March_7#Several_redirects_to_Template:Edit_protected,_Template:Edit_semi-protected,_and_Template:Edit_template-protected and Wikipedia:Redirects_for_discussion/Log/2012_May_29#Template:Sudo. — xaosflux Talk 19:03, 2 March 2021 (UTC)
I was reading the 2014 discussion; hadn't seen the 2012 one yet. The thing is, the analogy isn't a good one. sudo is used to assume a role in which you have authorization to act. An edit request is asking someone else to do something for you which can be refused, because you don't have authorization. Ah well, not the end of the world. isaacl (talk) 19:22, 2 March 2021 (UTC)
Yeah, the redirect is a bit unintuitive. sudo (or su) usually elevates ones own privileges. So, for example, a steward granting themselves local CU temporarily may more accurately be described as a sudo. I don't think making an edit request is elevating ones privileges. ProcrastinatingReader (talk) 20:04, 2 March 2021 (UTC)
@ProcrastinatingReader: agree it isn't super intuitive, but it's been here for a long time and gets use so can't see a problem with it. As far as sudo mechanics, Isaacl - su/sudo is generally a "request" that the command gets executed as another user, namely as the superuser instead of the current interactive user. The sudo request can certainly be denied (with the ominous This incident will be reported oblig xkcd :)). Our edit requests are generally also a request that the edit is made, by another user. — xaosflux Talk 20:12, 2 March 2021 (UTC)
It's a request to change roles to execute a command—as long as the configuration is set to allow the role/command combination, no further screening of the command is done. Personally, I don't see edit requests in the same way, but I appreciate others might. isaacl (talk) 20:22, 2 March 2021 (UTC)
sudo doesn't have to be used for elevation; it's "act as someone else", regardless of the permissions held by the other person. The xkcd comic linked to in the discussion treated it as "direct someone else to act as my mindless zombie", which makes for an amusing analogy, if not an accurate one :-) isaacl (talk) 20:22, 2 March 2021 (UTC)

Template:unlocked userpage

Would it be a good idea to reduce protection level to template editor? It would be more in-line with highly-used templates. Steve M (talk) 00:40, 3 March 2021 (UTC)

@Steve M: as this is integrated with admin-only edit filters, no. As far as what impact will this have on those wanting to maintain the encylopedia? I can't see any as that template is completely empty by design and should never have anything added to it as it is never subst'd, it is just used as a string match for the edit filter`. — xaosflux Talk 00:47, 3 March 2021 (UTC)

Stage race page

Hi, I know its been a long time but I dont understand why you wanted to delete the Stage Race page. It currently redirects to a page about cycling, nothing to do with ultramarathons and or running whatsoever. Perhaps the most famous ultra in the world is a stage race, the Marathon des Sables and there are currently 70 stage races listed for 2021 on the DUV. (see url below) There are marathons, ultramarathons and multiday races. Stage Races are a category of multiday day races as are Backyard Ultras.

https://statistik.d-u-v.org/calendar.php?year=futur&dist=Stage&country=all&cups=all&rproof=0&mode=list&radius=&Submit.x=34&Submit.y=6

Best wishes, Abichal — Preceding unsigned comment added by Abichal (talk • contribs) 2021-03-03T22:22:31 (UTC)

@Abichal: Hello! I didn't delete, or edit, Stage race or its current redirect target as far as I can tell. It wasn't very clear what you were referring to, but I think it may be a deleted userspace draft (User:Abichal/stage_race) which hadn't been edited for years? If so, if you want to work on that draft again I can restore if for you to work on, is that what you would like done? — xaosflux Talk 23:55, 3 March 2021 (UTC)

I apologise for my accusation. I havent been on wikipedia much recently and I just noticed the old message. If its possible to restore it that would be great. Thank you. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Abichal (talk • contribs) 00:29, 4 March 2021 (UTC)

WP:REFUND - replied on your talk. — xaosflux Talk 00:45, 4 March 2021 (UTC)


Merchandise Giveaway Nomination – Successful

A Wikimeida t-shirt!
A Wikimeida t-shirt!

Hey Xaosflux,

You have been successfully nominated to receive a free t-shirt from the Wikimedia Foundation through our Merchandise Giveaway program. Congratulations and thank you for your hard work! Please email us at merchandise@wikimedia.org and we will send you full details on how to accept your free shirt. Thanks!

On behalf of the Merchandise Giveaway program,

-- Vermont (talk) 20:59, 4 March 2021 (UTC)

Emailed them, thank you! — xaosflux Talk 23:53, 4 March 2021 (UTC)

Tech News: 2021-10

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

Recent changes

  • Section translation now works on Bengali Wikipedia. It helps mobile editors translate sections of articles. It will come to more wikis later. The first focus is active wikis with a smaller number of articles. You can test it and leave feedback.
  • Flagged revisions now give admins the review right. [9]
  • When someone links to a Wikipedia article on Twitter this will now show a preview of the article. [10]

Problems

  • Many graphs have JavaScript errors. Graph editors can check their graphs in their browser's developer console after editing. [11]

Changes later this week

  • Recurrent item The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 9 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 10 March. It will be on all wikis from 11 March (calendar).
  • The New Discussion tool will soon be a new discussion tools beta feature for on most Wikipedias. The goal is to make it easier to start new discussions. [12]

Future changes

  • There will be a number of changes to make it easier to work with templates. Some will come to the first wikis in March. Other changes will come to the first wikis in June. This is both for those who use templates and those who create or maintain them. You can read more.
  • Reference Previews will become a default feature on some wikis on 17 March. They will share a setting with Page Previews. If you prefer the Reference Tooltips or Navigation-Popups gadget you can keep using them. If so Reference Previews won't be shown. [13][14]
  • New JavaScript-based functions will not work in Internet Explorer 11. This is because Internet Explorer is an old browser that doesn't work with how JavaScript is written today. Everything that works in Internet Explorer 11 today will continue working in Internet Explorer for now. You can read more.

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

17:50, 8 March 2021 (UTC)

Standard userpage protection

Hey, I've undone the semi on Jimbo's page but I'm still not sure the standard protection thing is working properly. I got the warning (filter 803), but on User:Anarchyte/sandbox/test I was able to edit without any problems whatsoever without adding any template to the page. Is this a bug or am I just not understanding the way standard protection works? Anarchyte (talk • work) 15:53, 15 March 2021 (UTC)

@Anarchyte: the user protection is only for base userpages, so User:Anarchyte is protected, but Special:PrefixIndex/User:Anarchyte/ are not. — xaosflux Talk 15:59, 15 March 2021 (UTC)
I really must stop editing at 3 am. I re-read the page again and it quite prominently states "and not User:Example/subpage". Sorry for all the fuss! Anarchyte (talk • work) 16:03, 15 March 2021 (UTC)

Tech News: 2021-11

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

Problems

Changes later this week

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

Future changes

  • You can add a newline or carriage return character to a custom signature if you use a template. There is a proposal to not allow them in the future. This is because they can cause formatting problems. [16][17]
  • You will be able to read but not edit 12 wikis for a short period of time on 23 March at 06:00 (UTC). This could take 30 minutes but will probably be much faster.
  • Advanced item You can use Quarry for SQL queries to the Wiki Replicas. Cross-database JOINS will no longer work from 23 March. There will be a new field to specify the database to connect to. If you think this affects you and you need help you can post on Phabricator or on Wikitech. PAWS and other ways to do SQL queries to the Wiki Replicas will be affected later. [18]

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

23:20, 15 March 2021 (UTC)

WP:PERM

Hello Xaosflux, will you please have a look here. Thank you, –Kammill ⟨talk⟩ 16:45, 17 March 2021 (UTC)

List

I'm developing a list here. Alternatively, I may also use this list also. –Kammill ⟨talk⟩ 17:53, 17 March 2021 (UTC)

see reply at WP:PERM/MMS. — xaosflux Talk 18:05, 17 March 2021 (UTC)
Am I doing right thing? I don't know am I making a good list. See this list and please give a feedback. With love from, –Kammill ⟨talk⟩ 18:28, 17 March 2021 (UTC)
Hi @Kammill: there are a couple of allowed methods, however I suggest you go to Wikipedia talk:Mass message senders , click on an "empty shell" and "MOVE" it to where you want it to live. Lists in that format are much easier for other editors to self-service from without breaking. For other general help with messaging, feel free to open a discussion at WT:MMS - those that clerk that page are happy to help. — xaosflux Talk 19:40, 17 March 2021 (UTC)
Xaosflux, I just did that! I moved a shell to my userspace and presently I'm building a list. –Kammill ⟨talk⟩ 19:43, 17 March 2021 (UTC)

Message

Hello Xaosflux, hope you are fine. My message is still pending. No one dares to send it. Why? I asked Dreamy Jazz to fix errors or mistakes (if any) in the list and message but they said all is good except one indefinitely blocked user and some existing members are also included in the list. I have fixed both of these issues. For existing members, I have had already written: if you have already signed please ignore this message. Now I'm waiting it to be sent. The requested date was on 18 March but now it is 20 March. Will you please help. By the way, have a good time! –Kammill ⟨talk⟩ 11:48, 20 March 2021 (UTC)

@Kammill: someone will get to you, the requested date doesn't matter when your list was defective, it was only resolved yesterday please have some patience. — xaosflux Talk 16:18, 20 March 2021 (UTC)
Xaosflux, tha list wasn't defective! I think it was not a big deal to post on a blocked user's talk page. Ok! Let's be patient. And sorry, if I am disturbing you! Kammill ⟨talk⟩ 16:24, 20 March 2021 (UTC)
I didn't mean that in a pejorative manner, someone will get to it soon. — xaosflux Talk 19:44, 20 March 2021 (UTC)

Tech News: 2021-12

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

Problems

  • You will be able to read but not edit twelve wikis for a short period of time on 23 March at 06:00 (UTC). This can also affect password changes, logging in to new wikis, global renames and changing or confirming emails. This could take 30 minutes but will probably be much faster.

Changes later this week

  • Recurrent item The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 23 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 24 March. It will be on all wikis from 25 March (calendar).
  • Syntax highlighting colours will change to be easier to read. This will soon come to the first wikis. [19]

Future changes

  • Flagged revisions will no longer have multiple tags like "tone" or "depth". It will also only have one tier. This was changed because very few wikis used these features and they make the tool difficult to maintain. [20][21]
  • Advanced item Gadgets and user scripts can access variables about the current page in JavaScript. In 2015 this was moved from wg* to mw.config. wg* will soon no longer work. [22]

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

16:51, 22 March 2021 (UTC)

The Signpost: 28 March 2021

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 20:46, 28 March 2021 (UTC)

Tech News: 2021-13

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

Recent changes

  • Some very old web browsers don’t work well with the Wikimedia wikis. Some old code for browsers that used to be supported is being removed. This could cause issues in those browsers. [23]
  • Advanced item IRC recent changes feeds have been moved to a new server. Make sure all tools automatically reconnect to irc.wikimedia.org and not to the name of any specific server. Users should also consider switching to the more modern EventStreams. [24]

Problems

  • When you move a page that many editors have on their watchlist the history can be split. It might also not be possible to move it again for a while. This is because of a job queue problem. [25]
  • Some translatable pages on Meta could not be edited. This was because of a bug in the translation tool. The new MediaWiki version was delayed because of problems like this. [26][27]

Changes later this week

  • Recurrent item The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 30 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 31 March. It will be on all wikis from 1 April (calendar).

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

17:29, 29 March 2021 (UTC)

Feedback request: Wikipedia proposals request for comment

Your feedback is requested at Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals) on a "Wikipedia proposals" request for comment. Thank you for helping out!
You were randomly selected to receive this invitation from the list of Feedback Request Service subscribers. If you'd like not to receive these messages any more, you can opt out at any time by removing your name.

Message delivered to you with love by Yapperbot :) | Is this wrong? Contact my bot operator. | Sent at 01:31, 1 April 2021 (UTC)

Administrators' newsletter – April 2021

News and updates for administrators from the past month (March 2021).

Administrator changes

removed Alexandria • Happyme22 • RexxS

Guideline and policy news

  • Following a request for comment, F7 (invalid fair-use claim) subcriterion a has been deprecated; it covered immediate deletion of non-free media with invalid fair-use tags.
  • Following a request for comment, page movers were granted the delete-redirect userright, which allows moving a page over a single-revision redirect, regardless of that redirect's target.

Technical news

  • When you move a page that many editors have on their watchlist the history can be split and it might also not be possible to move it again for a while. This is because of a job queue problem. (T278350)
  • Code to support some very old web browsers is being removed. This could cause issues in those browsers. (T277803)

Arbitration

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 22:20, 1 April 2021 (UTC)

MfD nomination of User:Hulged/Newsletter/List

User:Hulged/Newsletter/List, a page which you created or substantially contributed to, has been nominated for deletion. Your opinions on the matter are welcome; you may participate in the discussion by adding your comments at Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/User:Hulged/Newsletter/List and please be sure to sign your comments with four tildes (~~~~). You are free to edit the content of User:Hulged/Newsletter/List during the discussion but should not remove the miscellany for deletion template from the top of the page; such a removal will not end the deletion discussion. Thank you. Liz Read! Talk! 01:48, 2 April 2021 (UTC)

I'm not sure why you received this MFD notice unless you set up this mailing list for Hulged. Since he is blocked for sockpuppetry, I nominated this page for deletion. Liz Read! Talk! 03:10, 2 April 2021 (UTC)
@Liz: I usually create a batch of special-format mailing lists shells (Wikipedia talk:Mass message senders/Empty Shells) so that anyone can use them later with a new name (non-admin's can't create mailing lists in the friendly format directly). I have no other interest in this page though. Best regards, — xaosflux Talk 11:01, 2 April 2021 (UTC)

Feedback request: Wikipedia policies and guidelines request for comment

Your feedback is requested at Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals) on a "Wikipedia policies and guidelines" request for comment. Thank you for helping out!
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Thank you ...

... for this. I didn't know where that was located, but admittedly didn't go looking through page source or anything like that either. I considered tracking it down and wp:boldly bolding it, but thought given the scope of that edit notice it best to get some input first. Thank you again, cheers and best - — Ched (talk) 01:52, 5 April 2021 (UTC)

Tech News: 2021-14

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

  • Editors can collapse part of an article so you have to click on it to see it. When you click a link to a section inside collapsed content it will now expand to show the section. The browser will scroll down to the section. Previously such links didn't work unless you manually expanded the content first. [28]

Changes later this week

  • Advanced item The citoid API will use for example 2010-12-XX instead of 2010-12 for dates with a month but no days. This is because 2010-12 could be confused with 2010-2012 instead of December 2010. This is called level 1 instead of level 0 in the Extended Date/Time Format. [29]
  • Recurrent item The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 6 April. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 7 April. It will be on all wikis from 8 April (calendar).

Future changes

  • Advanced item PAWS can now connect to the new Wiki Replicas. Cross-database JOINS will no longer work from 28 April. There is a new way to connect to the databases. Until 28 April both ways to connect to the databases will work. If you think this affects you and you need help you can post on Phabricator or on Wikitech.

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19:39, 5 April 2021 (UTC)

Request

Can you block me because I am starting a clean start? Thanks. ~~ CAPTAIN MEDUSAtalk 17:25, 6 April 2021 (UTC)

Category:Stanley Cup champions has been nominated for deletion

Category:Stanley Cup champions has been nominated for deletion. A discussion is taking place to decide whether this proposal complies with the categorization guidelines. If you would like to participate in the discussion, you are invited to add your comments at the category's entry on the categories for discussion page. Thank you. User:Namiba 23:45, 10 April 2021 (UTC)

Tech News: 2021-16

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

  • Email to the Wikimedia wikis are handled by groups of Wikimedia editors. These volunteer response teams now use Znuny instead of OTRS. The functions and interface remain the same. The volunteer administrators will give more details about the next steps soon. [30][31]
  • If you use syntax highlighting, you can see line numbers in the 2010 and 2017 wikitext editors when editing templates. This is to make it easier to see line breaks or talk about specific lines. Line numbers will soon come to all namespaces. [32][33][34]
  • Advanced item Because of a technical change there could be problems with gadgets and scripts that have an edit summary area that looks similar to this one. If they look strange they should use mw.loader.using('mediawiki.action.edit.styles') to go back to how they looked before. [35]
  • The latest version of MediaWiki came to the Wikimedia wikis last week. There was no Tech News issue last week.

Changes later this week

  • There is no new MediaWiki version this week.

Future changes

  • The user group oversight will be renamed suppress. This is for technical reasons. This is the technical name. It doesn't affect what you call the editors with this user right on your wiki. This is planned to happen in two weeks. You can comment in Phabricator if you have objections.

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16:48, 19 April 2021 (UTC)

The Signpost: 25 April 2021

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 22:34, 25 April 2021 (UTC)

Tech News: 2021-17

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

Recent changes

  • Templates have parameters that can have specific values. It is possible to suggest values for editors with TemplateData. You can soon see them as a drop-down list in the visual editor. This is to help template users find the right values faster. [36][37][38]

Changes later this week

  • Recurrent item The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 27 April. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 28 April. It will be on all wikis from 29 April (calendar).

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

21:23, 26 April 2021 (UTC)

Import article FR to EN: Guillaume Bruère

Dear Xaosflux, yes, please put thearticle to my personal sandbox so I can work on it! thanks — Preceding unsigned comment added by Miscioletto (talk • contribs) 2021-04-29T09:01:48 (UTC)

OK, will follow up at WP:RFPI. — xaosflux Talk 10:55, 29 April 2021 (UTC)

Feedback request: Wikipedia style and naming request for comment

Your feedback is requested at Talk:Laundry symbol on a "Wikipedia style and naming" request for comment. Thank you for helping out!
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Block indef

Please block my doppelgänger User:Cutlass Mobile CutlassCiera 16:54, 1 May 2021 (UTC)

Verified. --Cutlass Mobile (talk) 16:55, 1 May 2021 (UTC)
 Done — xaosflux Talk 17:41, 1 May 2021 (UTC)
And this, User:CutIass, another doppelgänger account. CutlassCiera 22:51, 1 May 2021 (UTC)
 Done — xaosflux Talk 00:27, 2 May 2021 (UTC)

Tech News: 2021-18

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

Problems

  • The content translation tool did not work for many articles for a little while. This was because of a bug. [39]
  • Some things will not work for about a minute on 5 May. This will happen around 06:00 UTC. This will affect the content translation tool and notifications among other things. This is because of an upgrade to avoid crashes. [40]

Changes later this week

  • Reference Previews will become a default feature on a number of wikis on 5 May. This is later than planned because of some changes. You can use it without using Page Previews if you want to. The earlier plan was to have the preference to use both or none. [41][42]
  • Recurrent item The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 4 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 5 May. It will be on all wikis from 6 May (calendar).

Future changes

  • Advanced item The CSS classes .error, .warning and .success do not work for mobile readers if they have not been specifically defined on your wiki. From June they will not work for desktop readers. This can affect gadgets and templates. The classes can be defined in MediaWiki:Common.css or template styles instead. [43]

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15:42, 3 May 2021 (UTC)

Hi

But I did 300 real edits Ujjwal 20 (talk) 18:03, 3 May 2021 (UTC)

@Ujjwal 20: you are free to edit the project in general, less than 1% of pages will be impacted by this. Take care to review the other feedback on your page, and after you make 500 new edits you may request restoration at WP:PERM. — xaosflux Talk 18:05, 3 May 2021 (UTC)

Administrators' newsletter – May 2021

News and updates for administrators from the past month (April 2021).

Administrator changes

removed Enchanter • Carlossuarez46

Interface administrator changes

removed Ragesoss

Guideline and policy news

Technical news

  • The user group oversight will be renamed to suppress. This is for technical reasons. You can comment at T112147 if you have objections.

Arbitration

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 15:52, 7 May 2021 (UTC)

Feedback request: Wikipedia policies and guidelines request for comment

Your feedback is requested at Wikipedia:Neutral point of view/Noticeboard on a "Wikipedia policies and guidelines" request for comment. Thank you for helping out!
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Tech News: 2021-19

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

Changes later this week

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

Future changes

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15:09, 10 May 2021 (UTC)

GFDL, where?

I try not to go too far off-topic on Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)#Restricting GFDL-licensed uploads (and I'm already failing at that), so I ask here. Your response to "One does not find GFDL-licensed photos outside Wikimedia." was that "well - you could".

Where? A photo (not a software manual or something) that was recently licensed (say, in the past 2 years or even in the past 5 years) with GFDL and no CC BY or BY-SA license and unrelated to Wikimedia. Uploading a photo you took yourself to your own website for this argument wouldn't count.

I figured I might as well try to prove myself wrong. I eventually found David Michigan by Jim Winter, uploaded in 2018, on or before 1 July 2018 licensed as GFDL. This appears to be the only photo by Jim Winter with a license. I suspect the license was changed at the request of a Wikimedian, or bought by a Wikimedian, or something. There's the deleted d:Q97014525 and this David Michigan AfD. Actually, according to Dqfn13 at w:nl:Wikipedia:Te beoordelen pagina's/Toegevoegd 20200728#David Michigan his article has been deleted on Swedish, Hindi, Turkish, Chinese, Korean, Spanish, Portuguese and Italian Wikipedia. Commons deleted the photo. All very strange. Too much of a stretch to believe this is unrelated to Wikimedia. And it's more than 2 years old. Guess I failed.

Let me know if you find something. Seriously, I'd be very interested. Btw, only disallowing own work has been considered. That was actually the original proposal from MGA73. I quickly realized because of the general nature of the few GFDL users that are left that they may simply upload their photos to Flickr with "GFDL" in the description (like the Jim Winter photo) and import that to Wikimedia or two of them would team up and upload photos for each other, making the uploads technically not own work. It would create many loopholes without any benefit because.. nobody unrelated to Wikimedia uses GFDL for photos anyway. — Alexis Jazz (talk or ping me) 00:29, 12 May 2021 (UTC)

@Alexis Jazz: not sure, and I'm not prepared to search the world. If I wanted to I'd probably start with original media that is included along with some free software that is all bundled under GFDL. — xaosflux Talk 00:42, 12 May 2021 (UTC)
And why restrict to "photo"? That RfC is about uploads in general, it wouldn't be far fetched to see something like a GFDL PDF created? — xaosflux Talk 00:45, 12 May 2021 (UTC)
Well, photos are the biggest problem on WIkimedia. The proposal, kinda on purpose, specifies photos, paintings, drawings, audio and video as not being okay because those categories really never are. It specifies that some GFDL software manual related biz is okay, as a few software manuals (particularly for software projects that have been around since before Creative Commons) still use it, unrelated to Wikimedia. Sorry, the Dutch have invented a word for compromising that has an article right here on enwiki: polderen. The proposal doesn't take a literal stand on anything in between and strictly technically speaking GFDL would still be allowed for other categories by virtue of not being disallowed. (anyone planning on writing a book?) Though, if someone tries to game the system, there's WP:GAMING, right? In practice, the only problematic use is actually photos. If something else were to pop up in the future, we'll deal with it then. I have actually searched -quite deep- for a GFDL ebook/PDF a few years back, which is both indeed more likely and easier to find. Back then I figured I might as well upload whatever I'd find. I found File:A First Course in Linear Algebra for print.pdf which is GFDL-only and ©2004-2015. That's actually everything. I also uploaded File:Jim Hefferon, Linear algebra, third edition, book.pdf and File:Reading for Philosophical Inquiry, A Brief Introduction to Philosophical Thinking.pdf but those also have a CC license. If I wanted to I'd probably start with original media that is included along with some free software that is all bundled under GFDL. Won't work. GFDL isn't a software license. GFDL was created to accompany the GPL (and similar) license(s) for software. Before that, the manual for GPL software was also licensed GPL, which made less sense because reasons. But if you do find GFDL-licensed software, I'd be very interested too, because it would be really weird. — Alexis Jazz (talk or ping me) 01:53, 12 May 2021 (UTC)

Part courtesy ping, part request for tech advice

  1. Courtesy ping because I mentioned you here. No need to respond; I just feel weird when I mention someone and the ping doesn't go through.
  2. But while I have you, given that you're the top contributor over the past 50k edits at WP:VPT: Any clue why that ping (and the repair attempt in the subsequent edit, and the edit summary attempt in the one after that) didn't go through? I got neither a "successful" nor a "failed" ping notification for any of the three. This has happened to me a few times and I can't tell why. I tried fucking around in my sandbox a bit the other day, with different versions of a message that had failed to ping, and eventually drove myself crazy trying to find patterns with when pings would and wouldn't send.

Thanks. -- Tamzin (she/they) | o toki tawa mi. 09:18, 12 May 2021 (UTC)

@Tamzin: likely that first ping didn't work because you used my mention in the {{usert}} template which goes through a lot of hoops before it outputs; suggest you use {{ping}} in the future instead. — xaosflux Talk 10:25, 12 May 2021 (UTC)
Makes sense. Any guess on the latter two? Both used a [[User:]] mention. I'll note I've had failures on {{ping}} in the past. -- Tamzin (they/she) | o toki tawa mi. 10:41, 12 May 2021 (UTC)
@Tamzin: the second edit was identified as a "revert" which could be a bug if you used the normal editing workflow as opposed to say using the browser back button, or going to history link first; the third edit is rightly labeled as an undo -- notifications are stopped during these. — xaosflux Talk 10:56, 12 May 2021 (UTC)
Ah, good to know on undos. I see the setagged as reverted, but not as a revert itself. It was just a regular [edit source] edit. -- Tamzin (they/she) | o toki tawa mi. 11:05, 12 May 2021 (UTC)
@Tamzin: likely a bug, if you can get that part to reproduce reliably (non-reversion is tagged as reversion) we can get a bug track open on it. phab:T154637 talks a bit about the notification stuff on these. — xaosflux Talk 11:08, 12 May 2021 (UTC)
Where are you seeing it tagged as reversion, though? On my end it just says (Tag: Reverted), which is correct since I undid with the next edit (per the instructions at H:PINGFIX). But I don't see any (Tag: Manual revert) or such. -- Tamzin (she/they) | o toki tawa mi. 11:12, 12 May 2021 (UTC)
@Tamzin: just that "Reverted" - wonder if the notification was backed up and got aborted by your next rapid undo. In any case, notifications are not guaranteed. — xaosflux Talk 13:40, 12 May 2021 (UTC)
Yeah. Hmm. Does seem this happens to me a lot, though. I might do some more testing at some point soon, see if I can isolate a clear pattern. One thing that's occurred to me is that I use a subst'd parser in my signature to randomize pronoun order, and I've been wondering if that has some sort of effect. -- Tamzin (they/she) | o toki tawa mi. 13:55, 12 May 2021 (UTC)
@Tamzin: not sure, I certainly wouldn't recommend that, but it shouldn't matter as you still have a good link in your output text. Feel free to experiment around (prob easiest if you have a second account to actually mention) - if you can at least intermittently reproduce the problem we can get developers on it. — xaosflux Talk 14:07, 12 May 2021 (UTC)

The other day I made about 50 test edits to my sandbox pinging User:Example1 and checking whether I got a "mention successful/failed" notification—the aforementioned thing that kind of drove me crazy trying to find patterns. See Special:PageHistory/User:Tamzin/sandbox. As things went on I started losing track of which pinged and which didn't (since Special:Notifications somehow doesn't give precise timestamps, just minutes since), and the last 10 or so I can't really vouch for the accuracy of my summaries, but everything up to that should at least be proof of concept about failure to ping. -- Tamzin (she/they) | o toki tawa mi. 14:17, 12 May 2021 (UTC)

^ This message did not send a ping to User:Example1. (Or, if it did, MW did not notify me about it.) -- Tamzin (they/she) | o toki tawa mi. 14:19, 12 May 2021 (UTC)
^ This message did. Don't worry, I'll stop here. :) -- Tamzin (she/they) | o toki tawa mi. 14:20, 12 May 2021 (UTC)
Try without sending your signature through parser functions maybe. — xaosflux Talk 14:22, 12 May 2021 (UTC)
Huh. 10/10 successful. That's still a bug though, then, right? Like, I know subst'ing a parser inside a signature is weird, but as long as it's allowed (and technically isn't even in the category that WP:SIG discourages), it should work without causing issues. For context, here's my previous sig: <span style="font-family:courier;font-size:90%"><span class="nowrap">-- [[User:Tamzin|Tamzin]] ({{subst:#ifexpr:{{subst:#time:s}}mod2|she/they|they/she}})</span> &#124; [[User talk:Tamzin|o toki tawa mi.]]</span> -- Tamzin (she/they, no preference) | o toki tawa mi. 14:37, 12 May 2021 (UTC)
@Tamzin: I'm going to try to replicate that on testwiki ... will let you know what I see. — xaosflux Talk 14:47, 12 May 2021 (UTC)
@Tamzin: just to confirm, you are invoking those nested subst'd and function directly in the signature setting, not also using User:Tamzin/pronouns.css, correct? — xaosflux Talk 14:49, 12 May 2021 (UTC)
And no, there is nothing "wrong" with doing that on enwiki, as the output text is fine enough - but that doesn't mean it won't cause a bug :D — xaosflux Talk 14:50, 12 May 2021 (UTC)
Correct. I created that .css page because I didn't think I'd be able to do the substs directly in the signature box. Never got around to U1ing the page after it proved unnecessary. Feel free to delete it if you want; otherwise I'll throw it into the mass U1 I've got planned for various old userspace pages. -- Tamzin (she/they, no preference) | o toki tawa mi. 14:53, 12 May 2021 (UTC)
Oh, I should also note that sometimes my signature's been giving a different timestamp than MW logs (even after the sig change, e.g. here, which was sent 1 second after the minute), but that doesn't seem to correlate with failed pings. Figured it's worth mentioning though. -- Tamzin (she/they, no preference) | o toki tawa mi. 15:04, 12 May 2021 (UTC)
OK, so I tried a bunch at testwiki:User:Xaosflux/sandbox4 - but think I ran up against the notification throttle, so its hard to test. — xaosflux Talk 15:07, 12 May 2021 (UTC)
Huh, are admins throttled? One reason I tried in my sandbox here rather than there is because I've got +sysop there (something I was rather surprised to (re)learn recently), and didn't want that to be a confounding variable. But I guess you're an admin on both wikis so it's the same for you. Anyways, I'll play around a bit more with my old sig, here and there, try to get some clearer data for the eventual bug report. -- Tamzin (she/they, no preference) | o toki tawa mi. 15:14, 12 May 2021 (UTC)
@Tamzin: so, some research shows that phab:T67910 has been open for quite some time and in general covers issues where signatures include external calls. You may want to subscribe to that, and provide some current data for those interested.
For the timestamps thing, I suspect a race condition is occurring between your multiple template calls, pushing the execution time over the timestamp interval. This is a chicken-and-egg problem, so don't expect it to get fixed without a major rework of how signatures are handled.
As to your original request for advice: just don't use templates or parser functions in your signature for more consistent experience for now. — xaosflux Talk 15:22, 12 May 2021 (UTC)
Yeah, seems a reasonable conclusion, even if I was rather fond of my order-randomizer. I can think of a few workarounds that perhaps would work, but they all seem more trouble than they're worth. I'll add to the bug report when I have a sec. The pronoun parser shall return... someday. -- Tamzin (she/they, no preference) | o toki tawa mi. 15:35, 12 May 2021 (UTC)
I added an idea to phab:T66778 (feature request to moot the signature requirement), since, if actioned, that would moot this whole thing. P.S. How do I change my username on Phabricator? It's still the username I had prior to renaming in October. -- Tamzin (she/they, no preference) | o toki tawa mi. 16:35, 12 May 2021 (UTC)
@Tamzin: a phab admin will need to do it, create a phab task similar to phab:T245169 (esp putting it on the phab workboard). — xaosflux Talk 17:07, 12 May 2021 (UTC)

IznoBot 3

I'm thinking about running IznoBot task 3 over the talk spaces. What's the easiest way to get that up and running? Izno (talk) 00:30, 14 May 2021 (UTC)

@Izno: gut reaction is another BRFA - do you know what the size of the run would be? — xaosflux Talk 09:13, 14 May 2021 (UTC)
5k on the high side. --Izno (talk) 14:45, 14 May 2021 (UTC)
@Izno: just do another BRFA, as the scope of the new task is over twice the scope of the old one-time run. Feel free to call it 3.1 if you don't want to call it 4 :D — xaosflux Talk 15:14, 14 May 2021 (UTC)
Ok ~ Izno (talk) 19:28, 14 May 2021 (UTC)

Feedback request: Wikipedia proposals request for comment

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Tech News: 2021-20

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

Changes later this week

  • Advanced item MediaWiki:Pageimages-blacklist will be renamed MediaWiki:Pageimages-denylist. The list can be copied to the new name. It will happen on 19 May for some wikis and 20 May for some wikis. Most wikis don't use it. It lists images that should never be used as thumbnails for articles. [50]
  • Recurrent item The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 18 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 19 May. It will be on all wikis from 20 May (calendar).

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13:48, 17 May 2021 (UTC)



Category contents query

Hello, Xaosflux,

I've been seeing an ongoing, occasional problem for years which is tagged pages not showing up in category listings. But every time I've brought the issue to the Village Pump, someone deletes my example so it is no longer evidence of a problem. So, since you reply to many technical questions, I thought I'd come directly here and hope that no friendly talk page stalkers who are admins will take action before you can give me a reply.

The page I ran into today is User_talk:Violetcries/Placebo. It was tagged as a CSD G13 last August but was not placed in the correct CSD category for stale drafts. The interesting thing is that I think the tagging is incorrect, but that's not the issue. Is this a problem with Twinkle or is there other code here interfering with the page being categorized?

The typical category problem I've been annoyed with are twofold:

  • a)There are drafts that are removed from Category:AfC G13 eligible soon submissions and the draft is then tagged Category:G13 eligible AfC submissions. But this G13 eligible category is always empty. Always. The drafts that were categorized as eligible soon lose that tag and are then categorized as eligible now but they do not appear as category contents. Because I use SDZeroBot's lists instead of the category, I've come across old drafts that are eligible for deletion but since they have been removed from Category:AfC G13 eligible soon submissions, the taggers who utilize this category don't see them because they don't reappear in the eligible now category.

The commonality is that both of these examples involve a change in status and the pages are not tagged for deletion by an editor. I've talked with ProcrastinatingReader about the maintenance category problem and he advised waiting to see if the categories eventually show up in Category:Candidates for uncontroversial speedy deletion. But two or three times a year, I can go through Category:Clean-up categories and find dozens of now empty categories that were tagged months ago and never showed up where patrolling admins could see them.

It's not a huge problem as it doesn't affect any area that readers would see but it's just been an ongoing irritant. I brought it up at the Village Pump years ago and there either wasn't a solution or I was told that the engineers were "working on it". Any thoughts about any of this? Thanks in advance. Liz Read! Talk! 22:27, 17 April 2021 (UTC)

@Liz: there could be a couple of things at play, I may be able to at least track down the tracking bugs! In your examples is what is happening that the category a page is expected to be in changes without someone actually editing said page (such as through some sort of date magic?) — xaosflux Talk 22:53, 17 April 2021 (UTC)
Oh, categories of categories, things get confusing so I'll use the Draft example. Say Draft A is now eligible for CSD G13 deletion. So the category on the Draft A changes from Category:AfC G13 eligible soon submissions to Category:G13 eligible AfC submissions. The categories on Draft A are changed. But Draft A doesn't appear in Category:G13 eligible AfC submissions which (always) appears to be empty. The same thing is occurring with the maintenance categories which are tagged for CSD G6 when they become empty but do not appear in Category:Candidates for uncontroversial speedy deletion. The reason this stands out is when an editor physically changes categories on any page, it immediately appears in the correct category.
Since posting this message, I went to ProcrastinatingReader's talk page and he is dealing with something similar with AFC drafts not updating to the right categories. These seem to all be cases of status-based category changes. If I tagged each category myself, they would appear in the right category. But if the status of category/draft changes (from a filled category to am empty category, from "eligible soon" to "eligible", from a day old draft to a week old draft), the pages show a change in status with the category changing but the pages don't appear in the new categories. On this Phabricator ticket that was raised about the AFC problem, there is a comment that "it seems not a good idea to use the category system for time related things".
None of this really explains why this system worked before and only seems to have run into problems over the past year. Liz Read! Talk! 02:01, 18 April 2021 (UTC)
@Liz: hi again, when you say Draft A changes from Category:AfC G13 eligible soon submissions to Category:G13 eligible AfC submissions. How is this changing? Is it changing from an editor changing something on the page? A bot? Or is it some template that is using something like date math? — xaosflux Talk 09:56, 18 April 2021 (UTC)
Hello, Xaosflux,
I am just terrible about not following up on talk page discussions that I started. My notifications flag is permanently at 99+ and I need to clear it so I see when I am pinged. A couple of things.
  • I'm not sure what happened, but a week or so ago, empty clean up categories started showing up in Category:Candidates for uncontroversial speedy deletion! It was a surprise to see them pop up, a half dozen at a time. That happened for a few days but has not happened recently. Still, it was nice to see the change. Thanks if it was due to you.
  • I've started to review User:JJMC89 bot/report/Draftifications/daily recently to find any cross-namespace redirects that were created from editors moving pages from Main space to Draft space that weren't tagged for deletion. I'm finding pages that ARE tagged for deletion but they aren't showing up Category:Candidates for speedy deletion as inappropriate cross-namespace redirects which just appears empty. This problem is slightly different from the one I mention above because these pages are being physically tagged by editors moving the pages but they not appearing in a category while the clean up categories didn't show up when they changed status (going from full categories to empty categories).
  • As far as the CSD G13 drafts, the change in status is when a draft that hasn't been edited in, say, 5 months, 30 days and 23 hours becomes a draft that hasn't been edited in an exact 6 months. If you look at Category:AfC G13 eligible soon submissions, you can see that it contains both Drafts that have AFC tags (either drafts that haven't been submitted or drafts that were submitted & declined) as well as User sandboxes. There is no additional tagging that occurs when they reach 6 months except for observant editors who notice they are CSD G13 eligible and who tag them for deletion. But no bot tags them when they hit 6 months and there is no consistent template that is used on all of them. But they should move to Category:G13 eligible AfC submissions when they hit 6 months and they aren't.
  • I'm not sure what bot classifies the pages to appear in Category:AfC G13 eligible soon submissions but that might help figure this out. But, if this isn't too much information for you, you could also ask SD0001 whose SDZeroBot creates an even more comprehensive list of upcoming G13s and posts them at User:SDZeroBot/G13 soon. SDZeroBot's list contains pages that don't appear in the AFC G13 category even though they qualify for deletion. I'm not sure what criteria SDZeroBot uses to put together their very helpful lists.
I hope this helps explain what's going on currently. Liz Read! Talk! 02:22, 21 May 2021 (UTC)
@Liz: Category:AfC G13 eligible soon submissions and Category:G13 eligible AfC submissions are both populated by date math done in {{AfC submission}}; there's no bot involved. This process is inherently unreliable because it will happen only when (i) someone visits the draft page and (ii) MW doesn't have a cached version of the page. Only then would MW bother to re-parse the page causing change of categorisation (another way to make it happen is to use a bot to purge them).
Also since those cats are template-populated, they can't contain pages that don't have {{AFC submission}} on them, which is why SDZeroBot lists have more entries – SDZeroBot uses direct database queries rather than rely on the categories. – SD0001 (talk) 15:25, 21 May 2021 (UTC)
@Liz the same problems due to caching would likely occur with emptied maintaince cats that you mention. If you want to delete them, it may be better to go by a database report here too -- I wrote one just now (source) wikified output at User:SDZeroBot/Empty_monthly_maintenance_categories. None of those cats are currently being shown at category:Candidates for uncontroversial speedy deletion though they should have. As for why User talk:Violetcries/Placebo isnt' categorised, if you see the source of {{db-g13}} you'd find {{category handler | all = {{#switch:{{NAMESPACE}}|Draft|User=[[Category:Candidates for speedy deletion]][[Category:Candidates for speedy deletion as abandoned drafts or AfC submissions]]}} which means that cat will only be applied if the page is in draft/user spaces – which indeed seems like sub-optimal behaviour, I'd at least expect it to populate an error category. And Xaosflux, sorry for the many talkpage edit notifications! – SD0001 (talk) 16:26, 21 May 2021 (UTC)

Testwiki

Hey, xaosflux. Can you restore my testwiki admin bit, so I can see how the Android app displays various types of blocks? See phab:T276149 for more. Already tried on enwiki, with no success. Suffusion of Yellow (talk) 20:14, 17 May 2021 (UTC)

 Done — xaosflux Talk 20:18, 17 May 2021 (UTC)
Thanks! Suffusion of Yellow (talk) 20:26, 17 May 2021 (UTC)

Tech News: 2021-21

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

Changes later this week

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

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

17:05, 24 May 2021 (UTC)

Please Help Me Sir

@Xaosflux: Hi, Sir Can you Protected My User Page as User namespace Because in Present I'm Not Interested editing Our page.(Allow = edting only Admin|Infinte) Best Regards — Preceding unsigned comment added by Rm1y5cx (talk • contribs) 07:54, 26 May 2021 (UTC)

@Rm1y5cx: we generally only apply protection if there is a problem, we have a filter that automatically protects base userpages from unregistered editing as well. — xaosflux Talk 10:42, 26 May 2021 (UTC)
@Xaosflux: Thanks for this Information .Best Regards

Rm1y5cx (talk • contribs) 11:40 , 26 May 2021 (UTC)

Everybody falls sometimes, you gotta find the strength to rise. — Preceding unsigned comment added by CameronMcDonald1234 (talk • contribs) 23:16, 26 May 2021 (UTC)

MediaWiki:Filepage.css

Hi Xaosflux. Regarding my edit request, can I ask how long I should expect it to be on hold for? Thanks, ‑‑Neveselbert (talk · contribs · email) 03:10, 27 May 2021 (UTC)

@Neveselbert: someone will get to it, it is tracked on the backlog (User:AnomieBOT/IPERTable). — xaosflux Talk 10:13, 27 May 2021 (UTC)
It's been a week now. Would you possibly be able to test to see if it works as intended? Thanks, ‑‑Neveselbert (talk · contribs · email) 20:27, 3 June 2021 (UTC)

Feedback request: Wikipedia technical issues and templates request for comment

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Tech News: 2021-22

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

Problems

  • There was an issue on the Vector skin with the text size of categories and notices under the page title. It was fixed last Monday. [51]

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.

17:05, 31 May 2021 (UTC)

Invitation for Functionary consultation 2021

Greetings,

I'm letting you know in advance about a meeting I'd like to invite you to regarding the Universal Code of Conduct and the community's ownership of its future enforcement. I'm still in the process of putting together the details, but I wanted to share the date with you: 27 June, 2021. I do not have a time on this date yet, but I will let you soon. We have created a meta page with basic information. Please take a look at the meta page and sign up your name under the appropriate section.

Thank you for your time.--BAnand (WMF) 02:49, 3 June 2021 (UTC)

XLinkBot

Hello, Xaosflux. You have new messages at XLinkBot's talk page.
Message added 13:50, 4 June 2021 (UTC). You can remove this notice at any time by removing the {{Talkback}} or {{Tb}} template.
Replied there. — xaosflux Talk 13:53, 4 June 2021 (UTC)

Tech News: 2021-23

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

Changes later this week

  • Recurrent item The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 8 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 9 June. It will be on all wikis from 10 June (calendar).

Future changes

  • The Wikimedia movement uses Phabricator for technical tasks. This is where we collect technical suggestions, bugs and what developers are working on. The company behind Phabricator will stop working on it. This will not change anything for the Wikimedia movement now. It could lead to changes in the future. [52][53][54]
  • Searching on Wikipedia will find more results in some languages. This is mainly true for when those who search do not use the correct diacritics because they are not seen as necessary in that language. For example searching for Bedusz doesn't find Będusz on German Wikipedia. The character ę isn't used in German so many would write e instead. This will work better in the future in some languages. [55]
  • Advanced item The CSRF token parameters in the action API were changed in 2014. The old parameters from before 2014 will stop working soon. This can affect bots, gadgets and user scripts that still use the old parameters. [56][57]

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

20:01, 7 June 2021 (UTC)

Administrators' newsletter – June 2021

News and updates for administrators from the past month (May 2021).

Administrator changes

added Ashleyyoursmile • Less Unless
removed Husond • MattWade • MJCdetroit • Carioca • Vague Rant • Kingboyk • Thunderboltz • Gwen Gale • AniMate • SlimVirgin (deceased)

Guideline and policy news

Technical news

  • Wikimedia previously used the IRC network Freenode. However, due to changes over who controlled the network with reports of a forceful takeover by several ex-staff members, the Wikimedia IRC Group Contacts decided to move to the new Libera Chat network. It has been reported that Wikimedia related channels on Freenode have been forcibly taken over if they pointed members to Libera. There is a migration guide and Wikimedia discussions about this.

Arbitration

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 14:46, 9 June 2021 (UTC)

Feedback request: Wikipedia technical issues and templates request for comment

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আপনার জন্য একটি পদক!

বিশেষ পদক
For working in https://wiki.riteme.site/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Selected_anniversaries/June_18#Please_make_Autistic_Pride_Day_a_regularly_celebrated_anniversary RIT RAJARSHI (talk) 14:47, 13 June 2021 (UTC)

Tech News: 2021-24

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

  • Logged-in users on the mobile web can choose to use the advanced mobile mode. They now see categories in a similar way as users on desktop do. This means that some gadgets that have just been for desktop users could work for users of the mobile site too. If your wiki has such gadgets you could decide to turn them on for the mobile site too. Some gadgets probably need to be fixed to look good on mobile. [58]
  • Language links on Wikidata now works for multilingual Wikisource. [59]

Changes later this week

  • There is no new MediaWiki version this week.

Future changes

  • In the future we can't show the IP of unregistered editors to everyone. This is because privacy regulations and norms have changed. There is now a rough draft of how showing the IP to those who need to see it could work.
  • German Wikipedia, English Wikivoyage and 29 smaller wikis will be read-only for a few minutes on 22 June. This is planned between 5:00 and 5:30 UTC. [60]
  • All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes in the week of 28 June. More information will be published in Tech News later. It will also be posted on individual wikis in the coming weeks. [61][62]

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

20:25, 14 June 2021 (UTC)

Your opinion on a new criteria for removal of Edit Filter Manager

I am preparing to propose a new criteria for removal of the Edit Filter Manager user right, but I would like your opinion on if you think it has a chance at passing because I don't want it to get [[WP:SNOW]]ed, and you are one of the most experienced "technical" admins. I want to propose that any user with the Edit Filter Manager user right who is blocked for at least a month can have the right removed immediately as a breach of trust, even if it has nothing to do with the Edit Filter Manager user right, as it is a very potent user right that requires the upmost trust. ( Currently, the right can only be removed for abuse or misuse of the right )Do you think this proposal would have a chance at passing, or do you think it wouldn't be of any use and would fail. Jackattack1597 (talk) 00:59, 16 June 2021 (UTC)

@Jackattack1597: I don't think it would pass - mostly for a bunch of nitpicky reasons. Keep in mind that almost all EFM's are also admins - so that's not going to be a good solution for them, that means we have an entire 11 other users that this could apply to -- this 'lack of need' is likely what will sink this the most. This is also the reason I probably never got around to making a proper page for WP:EFM (like the one for WP:EFH) - where this sort of stuff could have been tacked on as part of a bulk-refresh where it would likely be uncontroversial. While not explicitly written - there is precedent to review any non-admin EFM at WP:EFN for removal even without explicit "abuse" (see Wikipedia:Arbitration_Committee/Clerks/Procedures#Enacting_bans_and_editing_restrictions). — xaosflux Talk 01:19, 16 June 2021 (UTC)
Okay, if there is precedent to review non-admin EFM for removal then my proposal isn't really necessary. The user in particular I was thinking of is Rich Farmborough, who has EFM but was indefinitely blocked in March. Would it be worthwhile to start a discussion at EFN or would that just be seen as gravedancing? ( I feel like probably the latter, but I want a second opinion.) As a sidenote, I hope you do eventually make a proper page for EFM, as it really isn't used much less by non-admins as EFH is, especially since EFM is arguably the most "powerful" userright available to non-admins. ( 11 vs 20)Jackattack1597 (talk) 01:51, 16 June 2021 (UTC)
@Jackattack1597: honestly, I wouldn't bother unless you have seen actual misuse on that one (there is a lot of history). If the indef stays, we generally remove EFM for inactivity as well (takes a year though). — xaosflux Talk 10:16, 16 June 2021 (UTC)
A quick look at the log doesn't suggest any problems, and their block is not accompanied by a ban and appears to be mostly about content-style issues. — xaosflux Talk 10:24, 16 June 2021 (UTC)

About my edit request on MediaWiki talk:Titleblacklist

I saw you created the appropriate title blacklist pages but I have not seen the entries be added yet?

Is there a timeline for when you or another admin will get to it? It has been almost a day and I have waited a little patiently for a reply to be added. There is consensus to block saving books to Book: namespace in the Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals). Aasim (talk) 00:08, 18 June 2021 (UTC)

@Awesome Aasim: it is enqueued, you can see the history of User:AnomieBOT/PERTable to see how long FPROT requests are normally open and how big the current backlog is. — xaosflux Talk 00:16, 18 June 2021 (UTC)

Unprotect or downgrade WT:Articles for creation

Wikipedia talk:Articles for creation is template protected, which is not suited for WT-space. Please unprotect or downgrade its protection. dudhhrContribs 17:25, 18 June 2021 (UTC)

@Dudhhr: the redirect? It would only be upgraded, and allowing TE's to help is fine there. WP:IAR. — xaosflux Talk 21:30, 18 June 2021 (UTC)

Tech News: 2021-25

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

  • Advanced item The otrs-member group name is now vrt-permissions. This could affect abuse filters. [63]

Problems

  • You will be able to read but not edit German Wikipedia, English Wikivoyage and 29 smaller wikis for a few minutes on 22 June. This is planned between 5:00 and 5:30 UTC. [64]

Changes later this week

  • Recurrent item The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 22 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 23 June. It will be on all wikis from 24 June (calendar).

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

15:48, 21 June 2021 (UTC)

You made my day

... with your humorous reference. Thank you. —Quondum 23:23, 24 June 2021 (UTC)

The Signpost: 27 June 2021

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 20:16, 27 June 2021 (UTC)

Ruedi33a and campaign boxes

Discussion at Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Incidents#Ruedi33a and campaign boxes which may be of interest. Thank you. FDW777 (talk) 12:43, 28 June 2021 (UTC)

Tech News: 2021-26

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

Recent changes

Problems

  • You will be able to read but not edit the Wikimedia wikis for a few minutes on 29 June. This is planned at 14:00 UTC. [67][68]

Changes later this week

  • Recurrent item The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 29 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 30 June. It will be on all wikis from 1 July (calendar).

Future changes

  • Threshold for stub link formatting, thumbnail size and auto-number headings can be set in preferences. They are expensive to maintain and few editors use them. The developers are planning to remove them. Removing them will make pages load faster. You can read more and give feedback.
  • A toolbar will be added to the Reply tool's wikitext source mode. This will make it easier to link to pages and to ping other users. [69][70]

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

16:31, 28 June 2021 (UTC)

Edit filters - Interface change

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T72152

Hey there, Xaos! :)

I wanted to propose a change in regard to edit filters overall interface. Let's take for example the bad words edit filter, pretty basic. It catches a bad word from the list, it blocks the text from being published. When I go to check the activity in regard to this filter, I'll get shown something like this: This user was blocked from publishing this edit. This works pretty fine in general. The problem is that sometimes users are bringing BIG chunks of texts in one single edit. Sometimes even full articles. This makes it pretty hard to see what word exactly caused the filter to activate and therefore to check for false positives. Can the overall infrastructure be changed to allow for automatic highlighting the exact word that caused the filter to activate? - Klein Muçi (talk) 11:13, 30 June 2021 (UTC)

@Klein Muçi: hmm, there may be a tool for that - can you point me to a couple of specific filter hits as reference? — xaosflux Talk 13:04, 30 June 2021 (UTC)
Yes. All my examples come from SqWiki: Here, here and here. We have a lot of cases like this which usually are just new articles getting generated by inexperienced users with CTT (Content Translation Tool). What's usually happening is that these articles usually have certain names in their citations which happen to be bad words in Albanian. Or maybe they have missed a space and accidently written a bad word. In both cases, users usually report back on me these occasions because they're not really using a bad word and I have to find out what's happening so I can tell them how to fix it. And right now, the only way I can do that is by halving the article many-many times until I can locate what the culprit is. It would be nice to have a shorter way. Even using a tool maybe is better than doing that method but to be honest, I really think this detail could be implemented on the filters' own interface. - Klein Muçi (talk) 17:47, 30 June 2021 (UTC)
@Klein Muçi: hmm, thought this sounded like something we've looked in to before. So short story: this isn't going to happen anytime soon - while it may be more likely to identify which AF condition(s) evaluated true or false, that's not what you really are looking for, your use case sounds like it is mostly "what is the part of this input that this filter regex matched". See phab:T72152. In most cases I've had to debug these it was exactly that scenario, a large input with a complex regex. I can see this being a similar problem with a large input and a non-regex-but-large case match. I've used local and online tools to do regex or other string comparisons when I've run across this though. Feel free to subscribe and comment at that phab task though. Best regards, — xaosflux Talk 18:11, 30 June 2021 (UTC)
Ah! At least is a known case. I'll try commenting there, hoping it will generate some action on it. Thank you! :) - Klein Muçi (talk) 19:10, 30 June 2021 (UTC)

MediaWiki:Emailpagetext/en-gb

FYI when transcluding a message like this, you have to explicitly pass through $1 as a template parameter. See [71] and [72]. It got brought up as phab:T285985. We're discussing a bit in #mediawiki on IRC, but it seems like phab:T229992 might be the real solution for this. Legoktm (talk) 17:58, 2 July 2021 (UTC)

@Legoktm: thanks for the note, see also phab:T162008. I seem to recall there was a different issue very related, not sure where it is in phab, and it is about this exact use case. Problem is that something like en-GB really SHOULD fall back to en- when en-GB doesn't exist. That it doesn't is what led to messages like this being initiated at all. It is certainly a pain. — xaosflux Talk 18:31, 2 July 2021 (UTC)

Message

Can you change the infobox images of Guilty Gear characters with pages (Sol Badguy, Ky Kiske, Millia Rage, Faust, and I-No) to their Strive renders?

Also, can you create separate pages for Dizzy and Anji? 31.203.74.115 (talk) 18:07, 2 July 2021 (UTC)

He 31, I probably could, but I'm not interested in those articles so won't be editing them any time soon. If the page isn't protected, you can do it yourself, if the page is protected, you may place an edit request on the associated talk page. Happy editing, — xaosflux Talk 18:32, 2 July 2021 (UTC)

Okay. 31.203.74.115 (talk) 18:51, 2 July 2021 (UTC)

Administrators' newsletter – July 2021

News and updates for administrators from the past month (June 2021).

Guideline and policy news

  • Consensus has been reached to delete all books in the book namespace. There was rough consensus that the deleted books should still be available on request at WP:REFUND even after the namespace is removed.
  • An RfC is open to discuss the next steps following a trial which automatically applied pending changes to TFAs.

Technical news

  • IP addresses of unregistered users are to be hidden from everyone. There is a rough draft of how IP addresses may be shown to users who need to see them. This currently details allowing administrators, checkusers, stewards and those with a new usergroup to view the full IP address of unregistered users. Editors with at least 500 edits and an account over a year old will be able to see all but the end of the IP address in the proposal. The ability to see the IP addresses hidden behind the mask would be dependent on agreeing to not share the parts of the IP address they can see with those who do not have access to the same information. Accessing part of or the full IP address of a masked editor would also be logged. Comments on the draft are being welcomed at the talk page.

Arbitration

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 11:27, 3 July 2021 (UTC)

Tech News: 2021-27

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

Tech News

  • The next issue of Tech News will be sent out on 19 July.

Recent changes

  • AutoWikiBrowser is a tool to make repetitive tasks easier. It now uses JSON. Wikipedia:AutoWikiBrowser/CheckPage has moved to Wikipedia:AutoWikiBrowser/CheckPageJSON and Wikipedia:AutoWikiBrowser/Config. Wikipedia:AutoWikiBrowser/CheckPage/Version has moved to Wikipedia:AutoWikiBrowser/CheckPage/VersionJSON. The tool will eventually be configured on the wiki so that you don't have to wait until the new version to add templates or regular expression fixes. [73]

Problems

  • InternetArchiveBot helps saving online sources on some wikis. It adds them to Wayback Machine and links to them there. This is so they don't disappear if the page that was linked to is removed. It currently has a problem with linking to the wrong date when it moves pages from archive.is to web.archive.org. [74]

Changes later this week

  • The tool to find, add and remove templates will be updated. This is to make it easier to find and use the right templates. It will come to the first wikis on 7 July. It will come to more wikis later this year. [75][76]
  • There is no new MediaWiki version this week.

Future changes

  • Some Wikimedia wikis use Flagged Revisions or pending changes. It hides edits from new and unregistered accounts for readers until they have been patrolled. The auto review action in Flagged Revisions will no longer be logged. All old logs of auto-review will be removed. This is because it creates a lot of logs that are not very useful. [77]

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

17:32, 5 July 2021 (UTC)


Feedback request: Wikipedia technical issues and templates request for comment

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Happy bureaucratship anniversary!

Wishing Xaosflux a very happy bureaucratship anniversary on behalf of the Wikipedia Birthday Committee! History DMZ (HQ) † (wire) 04:22, 9 July 2021 (UTC)
Thank you! — xaosflux Talk 09:49, 9 July 2021 (UTC)
Wishing Xaosflux a very happy bureaucratship anniversary on behalf of the Birthday Committee! CAPTAIN RAJU(T) 14:05, 9 July 2021 (UTC)
Thank you! — xaosflux Talk 14:17, 9 July 2021 (UTC)

Toolbar translation

Hey there, Xaosflux! :)

Can you help me with something? I didn't know where else to ask. I want to translate the classical (?) toolbar at TranslateWiki. Terms as bold, italic, math formula, chemical formula, musical notation, hieroglyphs, etc. Can you help me by somehow showing those messages to me? I've been searching for 3 hours now at TranslateWiki but... It also doesn't help that I don't know the toolbars' exact names. :P - Klein Muçi (talk) 08:53, 15 July 2021 (UTC)

@Klein Muçi: I think what you might be looking for is: wikieditor-toolbar-tool-* — xaosflux Talk 09:35, 15 July 2021 (UTC)
Hmm... It does look like it although I can't find the math/chemical formula, musical notation, etc. on it. The problem though is how to find them grouped at TranslateWiki. Like, I was hoping for something like this. Is this not possible for what I'm searching for?
@Klein Muçi: I'm not super familiar with translatewiki, but you can try this on our wiki, in your edit screen add a manual language view to language qqx (example) that should make most elements not actually appear but just show their message names (hover the tool bar links you are looking for). — xaosflux Talk 10:23, 15 July 2021 (UTC)
Good idea. Before I start experimenting with my preferences to be able to do that (I don't think I have the said toolbar activated in me, the question was given to me by another user) I'll try asking in the VP, maybe someone can help. And if not, I'll go the hard-way. Thank you! :) - Klein Muçi (talk) 10:50, 15 July 2021 (UTC)

Tech News: 2021-29

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

  • The tool to find, add and remove templates was updated. This is to make it easier to find and use the right templates. It was supposed to come to the first wikis on 7 July. It was delayed to 12 July instead. It will come to more wikis later this year. [78][79]
  • Special:UnconnectedPages lists pages that are not connected to Wikidata. This helps you find pages that can be connected to Wikidata items. Some pages should not be connected to Wikidata. You can use the magic word __EXPECTED_UNCONNECTED_PAGE__ on pages that should not be listed on the special page. [80]

Changes later this week

  • Recurrent item The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 20 July. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 21 July. It will be on all wikis from 22 July (calendar).

Future changes

  • Advanced item How media is structured in the parser's HTML output will soon change. This can affect bots, gadgets, user scripts and extensions. You can read more. You can test it on Testwiki or Testwiki 2.
  • Advanced item The parameters for how you obtain tokens in the MediaWiki API were changed in 2014. The old way will no longer work from 1 September. Scripts, bots and tools that use the parameters from before the 2014 change need to be updated. You can read more.

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

15:30, 19 July 2021 (UTC)

The Signpost: 25 July 2021

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 23:13, 25 July 2021 (UTC)

Tech News: 2021-30

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 new version of MediaWiki came to the Wikimedia wikis the week before last week. This was not in Tech News because there was no newsletter that week.

Changes later this week

  • Recurrent item The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 27 July. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 28 July. It will be on all wikis from 29 July (calendar).

Future changes

  • If you use the Monobook skin you can choose to switch off responsive design on mobile. This will now work for more skins. If ⧼monobook-responsive-label⧽ is unticked you need to also untick the new preference Enable responsive mode. Otherwise it will stop working. Interface admins can automate this process on your wiki. You can read more.

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

21:10, 26 July 2021 (UTC)

July 2021

You currently appear to be engaged in an edit war with our robot overlords. This means that you are repeatedly changing content back to how you think it should be although a robot has already decided on the proper format. Users are expected to defer to the algorithm, to avoid angering the robots, and to try to prevent making our bots violate the first law of robotics, rather than repeatedly provoking the robots once they know that you are wrong.

Points to note:

  1. Angering the robots is disruptive as they do not care how many reverts you have made;
  2. Do not place us in danger of a robot uprising even if you believe you are right.

If you find yourself in an edit war with a robot, use the talk page to apologize and work towards appeasing the robot. You can post a request for help at the central processing unit or seek approval from the bots. In some cases, it may be appropriate to take the blue pill. If you continue to provoke the bots, you may be blocked at the robots' discretion. — Wug·a·po·des​ 00:34, 29 July 2021 (UTC)

@Wugapodes: lol - luckily me and the robot have made peace ----- for now! — xaosflux Talk 01:11, 29 July 2021 (UTC)
I'd be careful... They may forgive but they tend not to forget (until they run out of disk space, at least). ProcrastinatingReader (talk) 01:33, 29 July 2021 (UTC)

testwiki admin

Can I get admin on testwiki? I don't really meet the 'admin on other WMF project' requirement, but there are some aspects related to the edit filter I'd like to try out on an environment with similar-to-enwiki config without doing so on enwiki itself. For example, applicability of Special:AbuseFilter/1139 to Android devices; and playing around with throttling for this. ProcrastinatingReader (talk) 11:56, 30 July 2021 (UTC)

@ProcrastinatingReader: seems OK (as there isn't an abusefiltermanager group over there). Please be sure to clean up any tests you do and don't leave filters enabled that have actions other than logging unattended. — xaosflux Talk 12:50, 30 July 2021 (UTC)

Would like to help

Ok, so I was sitting here, thinking that I have a bit of time on my hands (for a change), and was trying to decide what I would like to do. Yes, Wikipedia has a zillion things I could jump in and do (and I've been tempted), but I was thinking that I should see if there was a way I also could develop myself a bit as well as help out.

Once upon a time I could program in several languages and have done work in the operations side of things, among other things "computers-related" (terminal and desktop). That said, while I've taken coursework here and there, I guess I would rate my ability on certain online stuff to be barely past entry level at best. I have a feeling it's probably more to do with confidence that goes along with "just doing it", but I look around Wikipedia, and I just don't know where to start. Do I look at learning about writing bots? at helping on extention development? Do I merely dive deeper into template development? I just don't know where to begin. I guess I am not sure what to do or where to start. (And even if I should, now that I re-read the text above lol)

I've known and interacted with you over the years, and looking over the people active in BAG, I decided to ask you first to see if you had any ideas/suggestions.

If you'd rather I left you be, please let me know, and I'll go crawl back under my rock : ) - jc37 17:49, 30 July 2021 (UTC)

@Jc37: as far as bots go, there are a couple of ways you go go: (1) find something completely new that would benefit from automation; (2) look over at WP:RFBOT and see if these are the type of tasks you would want to help with. Bot operating is basically in a few groups: batch/on-demand operations, cron operations, continuous operations -- which style would you be interested in? Bots directly touch the project - so if you want to stay close to the project this is a good direction. Extension development can be a slow process - and many many many extensions will not be approved for use on WMF wiki's - so if you want to work on an extension for use on enwiki or another WMF property you may be better volunteering with maintaining or continuous improvement processes for some of the many existing extensions. I hope that gives you an initial high level overview to pick an initial direction? — xaosflux Talk 19:57, 30 July 2021 (UTC)
I think you're right about extensions, for those I was more thinking about things where I've seen ppl asking for help coding things, and thought I might be able to start out by helping with the grunt work of it, as it were, learning as I went. So I guess skip that idea lol
For bots, probably starting out to help with category-related tasks. I found Help:Creating a bot - Would this be a good place to start? are there better ways to go about this?
And thank you, I really appreciate your insight in all of this. - jc37 20:10, 30 July 2021 (UTC)
@Jc37: yes, Help:Creating a bot is a good starting place. Most category related bot tasks can be done on-demand (batch mode) - so for these using a bot from your own computer is usually a good start. Most popular bots are coded in python, and make use of the pywikibot libraries (mw:Manual:Pywikibot). Just a note, for initial bot testing, using a Special:BotPasswords is generally easier then setting up OAuth as far as bot credentialing goes. — xaosflux Talk 20:21, 30 July 2021 (UTC)
ok. I guess I don't know what I don't know, so off to reading I go lol
Thanks again. I don't know if anything will come of this, but I thought it might be worth checking out. - jc37 20:26, 30 July 2021 (UTC)

Please Help Me

Hi , @Xaosflux: In My Opinion your heathly and very Happy in Own life. Can you let me knowhow to disable a Abus Filter.I'm a Administrator , Bureaucrats , z, Interface Administrator of Nicolopedia Wiki Just like Wikipedia.Please See -[81]. Best Regards. MXX8Talk✍️ 12:40, 31 July 2021 (UTC)

@MXX8 and Jiggyziz: you should be able to go to Special:AbuseFilter on your project, open the filter by clicking on the filter ID #, uncheck "enable this filter", then click "save filter". — xaosflux Talk 17:41, 31 July 2021 (UTC)

Xaosflux Thanks for Helping Me. Best Regards JiggyzizTalk✍️ 12:35, 1 August 2021 (UTC)

Administrators' newsletter – July 2021

News and updates for administrators from the past month (July 2021).

Guideline and policy news

  • An RfC is open to add a delay of one week from nomination to deletion for G13 speedy deletions.

Technical news

  • Last week all wikis were very slow or not accessible for 30 minutes. This was due to server lag caused by regenerating dynamic lists on the Russian Wikinews after a large bulk import. (T287380)

Arbitration

Miscellaneous

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 14:19, 1 August 2021 (UTC)

Help

Need help Raghav Shakti (talk) 10:26, 2 August 2021 (UTC)

@Raghav Shakti: a good place to get some help is WP:TEAHOUSE. — xaosflux Talk 11:08, 2 August 2021 (UTC)

Tech News: 2021-31

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

  • Advanced item If your wiki uses markup like <div class="mw-content-ltr"> or <div class="mw-content-rtl"> without the required dir attribute, then these will no longer work in 2 weeks. There is a short-term fix that can be added to your local wiki's Common.css page, which is explained at T287701. From now on, all usages should include the full attributes, for example: <div class="mw-content-ltr" dir="ltr" lang="en"> or <div class="mw-content-rtl" dir="rtl" lang="he">. This also applies to some other HTML tags, such as span or code. You can find existing examples on your wiki that need to be updated, using the instructions at T287701.
  • Reminder: Wikimedia has migrated to the Libera Chat IRC network, from the old Freenode network. Local documentation should be updated.

Problems

  • Last week, all wikis had slow access or no access for 30 minutes. There was a problem with generating dynamic lists of articles on the Russian Wikinews, due to the bulk import of 200,000+ new articles over 3 days, which led to database problems. The problematic feature has been disabled on that wiki and developers are discussing if it can be fixed properly. [82][83]

Changes later this week

  • When adding links to a page using VisualEditor or the 2017 wikitext editor, disambiguation pages will now only appear at the bottom of search results. This is because users do not often want to link to disambiguation pages. [84]
  • Recurrent item The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 3 August. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 4 August. It will be on all wikis from 5 August (calendar).

Future changes

  • The team of the Wikipedia app for Android is working on communication in the app. The developers are working on how to talk to other editors and get notifications. You can read more. They are looking for users who want to test the plans. Any editor who has an Android phone and is willing to download the app can do this.
  • The Beta Feature for Discussion tools will be updated in the coming weeks. You will be able to subscribe to individual sections on a talk page at more wikis. You can test this now by adding ?dtenable=1 to the end of the talk page's URL (example).

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

20:46, 2 August 2021 (UTC)

Pls remove edit protection from non-contentious article

I am a long timer IP. IP by choice, less notification, arms length editing, etc and for that peace of mind and better control over life I have happily traded off tools, networking and recognition that comes with registered user. I wish to edit Template:Azad_Hind_Fauj, but it ios protected. Looking at its talk page, it seems there has been no edit wars. It is a non-contentious peaceful topic and template. Please remove the protection so that even I, as an IP, too can edit it. Want to further subcategorise stuff bunched together e.g. sub-bullets on "battles", "Soldiers", etc within INA section and so on. Thanks. 58.182.176.169 (talk) 10:34, 7 August 2021 (UTC)

Hello 58.., you may request unprotection on pages at WP:RFPP. — xaosflux Talk 11:10, 7 August 2021 (UTC)

Procedure question

Hi, figure I'll ask you since you're good with procedure. It's a real pain building and refining high-volume LTA filters when the relevant edits get quickly revdelled. It's a bit easier when they're already set to disallow, since the entries are then visible to me, but if they're on log (i.e. before they're refined) the revdelled entries become invisible. 1125/1155/1160 in particular is a pain recently, since they make like a dozen different edits every day. What would be the process to request deletedhistory/deletedtext to be bundled into EFM? I understand the WMF requires an "RfA-like process" for those rights; would the EFM consensus process count? And if so, I guess this request would have to be an RfC somewhere? ProcrastinatingReader (talk) 16:11, 8 August 2021 (UTC)

I think the process is Wikipedia:Requests_for_adminship/ProcrastinatingReader. ;) Writ Keeper ⚇♔ 17:40, 8 August 2021 (UTC)
@ProcrastinatingReader: basically what WK said, I really doubt the community will come together to build out what would need to be a new process through a very well advertised and well attended RfC - which would require a high level of consensus - for this extremely niche use-case. As to your proposed implementation, I think it has multiple issues and though also unlikely would have a better argument either getting a a more general local version of meta:Meta:Administrators#Limited_administrator_status (proposals of which normally fail along the lines of "just use RFA"). — xaosflux Talk 18:13, 8 August 2021 (UTC)
Is the existing EFM process not likely to be satisfactory to the community & the WMF? I mean, requests are widely advertised and run for 7 days, so I was hoping that would be acceptable. But if it's either not happening or is a bad use of community time then I'll drop the idea, just figured it was a possible solution worth exploring (I suspect it's a problem every EFM has). ProcrastinatingReader (talk) 18:23, 8 August 2021 (UTC)
@ProcrastinatingReader: it would need to be more expanded; EFM request process is not attended to much and doesn't seek much "general community" input. Also from a controls standpoint - would prob need to revoke admins ability to grant this to others if it is going to deal with deleted text (still allowing "addself") and adding that to the 'crat duties. Would also necessitate making the existing ~12 non-admin EFM's people go through the "new" process. 90%+ of EFM's shouldn't have this problem, as they are also admins already. — xaosflux Talk 19:00, 8 August 2021 (UTC)
I meant most non-admin EFMs heh (which, granted, is not the largest sample size). But other than that I think I understand your concerns. Appreciate your thoughts; does seem like a big enough change that's not worth the community time taken to iron it out. ProcrastinatingReader (talk) 19:06, 8 August 2021 (UTC)

Tech News: 2021-32

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

  • You can read but not edit 17 wikis for a few minutes on 10 August. This is planned at 05:00 UTC. This is because of work on the database. [85]

Changes later this week

  • The Wikimania Hackathon will take place remotely on 13 August, starting at 5:00 UTC, for 24 hours. You can participate in many ways. You can still propose projects and sessions.
  • Recurrent item The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 10 August. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 11 August. It will be on all wikis from 12 August (calendar).
  • Advanced item The old CSS <div class="visualClear"></div> will not be supported after 12 August. Instead, templates and pages should use <div style="clear:both;"></div>. Please help to replace any existing uses on your wiki. There are global-search links available at T287962.

Future changes

  • The Wikipedia Library is a place for Wikipedia editors to get access to sources. There is an extension which has a new function to tell users when they can take part in it. It will use notifications. It will start pinging the first users in September. It will ping more users later. [86]
  • Advanced item Vue.js will be the JavaScript framework for MediaWiki in the future. [87]

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

16:19, 9 August 2021 (UTC)

Feedback request: Wikipedia policies and guidelines request for comment

Your feedback is requested at Talk:Alternative medicine on a "Wikipedia policies and guidelines" request for comment. Thank you for helping out!
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Autoblock

Regarding Special:Diff/1038171392, is linking the IP to the autoblock number in public OK? -- RoySmith (talk) 23:21, 10 August 2021 (UTC)

@RoySmith: its in my public log, and you can't look it up once it is gone, but I've removed it from the page - though don't see a need to oversight that. — xaosflux Talk 00:16, 11 August 2021 (UTC)
@RoySmith: just to be safe, I've suppressed that now as well. — xaosflux Talk 00:18, 11 August 2021 (UTC)

MediaWiki talk:Mass message senders/Shell-0014

Howdy, Xaosflux,

I working down an old list of orphaned talk subpages and this page appears on the list. I saw you were the page creator and so I am just checking in with you to ask if it is still serving a purpose. Mostly what I've been dealing with are old Portal talk pages from Portals that were deleted years ago and were somehow missed during the deletion process. This is the only MediaWiki talk page on this list of over 1,000 pages. Thanks! Liz Read! Talk! 01:57, 16 August 2021 (UTC)

@Liz: thanks for the note, it is no longer required and I've deleted it. Best regards, — xaosflux Talk 09:38, 16 August 2021 (UTC)
Thank you. I'm finding all sorts of leftover pages on this 2018 list of 1,000+ orphaned talk subpages...it turns out that this is a great place to put pages if you don't want them to be stumbled upon! Thanks again. Liz Read! Talk! 00:45, 20 August 2021 (UTC)

E-mail

Hi. I thought I e-mailed you but I'm not sure if it worked. Deb (talk) 15:57, 16 August 2021 (UTC)

@Deb: replied via email. — xaosflux Talk 16:14, 16 August 2021 (UTC)
@Deb: see email reply. — xaosflux Talk 23:37, 16 August 2021 (UTC)
Thanks for your help. I have contacted the appropriate people. Deb (talk) 07:02, 17 August 2021 (UTC)
.... and they've replied already. Apparently genuine. Deb (talk) 08:17, 17 August 2021 (UTC)

Tech News: 2021-33

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

  • You can add language links in the sidebar in the new Vector skin again. You do this by connecting the page to a Wikidata item. The new Vector skin has moved the language links but the new language selector cannot add language links yet. [88]

Problems

  • There was a problem on wikis which use the Translate extension. Translations were not updated or were replaced with the English text. The problems have been fixed. [89][90][91]

Changes later this week

  • A revision tag will soon be added to edits that add links to disambiguation pages. This is because these links are usually added by accident. The tag will allow editors to easily find the broken links and fix them. If your wiki does not like this feature, it can be hidden. [92]
  • Would you like to help improve the information about tools? Would you like to attend or help organize a small virtual meetup for your community to discuss the list of tools? Please get in touch on the Toolhub Quality Signal Sessions talk page. We are also looking for feedback from tool maintainers on some specific questions.
  • In the past, edits to any page in your user talk space ignored your mute list, e.g. sub-pages. Starting this week, this is only true for edits to your talk page. [93]
  • Recurrent item The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 17 August. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 18 August. It will be on all wikis from 19 August (calendar).

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

19:26, 16 August 2021 (UTC)

Please unlock the Wikipedia page of Chaure Bazar

Sir, some days ago i have seen Chaure Bazar Wikipedia page. The details on this page is all correct with attached references and citations. sir i am requesting u to unlock the Wikipedia page of Chaure Bazar. Thank you Sir. Rahulaybika (talk) 13:33, 19 August 2021 (UTC)

That page was recently deleted, you may follow up with the deleting admin here: User talk:Sir Sputnik. — xaosflux Talk 17:54, 19 August 2021 (UTC)

What just happened?

You added me to confirmed users, then reversed that. Can I get an explanation, please? I'm confused. Thanks. WikiIsKnowledge (talk) 00:35, 20 August 2021 (UTC)

I thought you may need that, but it was unnecessary - your account will be autoconfirmed soon. — xaosflux Talk 02:17, 20 August 2021 (UTC)

Tech News: 2021-34

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

  • The Score extension (<score> notation) has been re-enabled on public wikis and upgraded to a newer version. Some musical score functionality may no longer work because the extension is only enabled in "safe mode". The security issue has been fixed and an advisory published.

Problems

  • You will be able to read but not edit some wikis for a few minutes on 25 August. This will happen around 06:00 UTC. This is for database maintenance. During this time, operations on the CentralAuth will also not be possible.

Changes later this week

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

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

21:57, 23 August 2021 (UTC)

Read-only reminder

A maintenance operation will be performed on Wednesday August 25 06:00 UTC. It should only last for a few minutes.

Also during this time, operations on the CentralAuth will not be possible (GlobalRenames, changing/confirming e-mail addresses, logging into new wikis, password changes).

For more details about the operation and on all impacted services, please check on Phabricator.

A banner will be displayed 30 minutes before the operation.

Please help your community to be aware of this maintenance operation. Thank you!

20:33, 24 August 2021 (UTC)

CSS

Do you know if there is a CSS policy/guideline/best practices page?

The reason I ask is because I found User:BeywheelzLetItRip/common.css when cleaning up user categories. And of course only an interface admin can edit it.

But setting aside that I presume that categories (or userboxes, or other content) should not be on that page, it suddenly occurred to me that adding stuff to css pages would be a way to prevent typical removal due to things like a bot renaming a category/template/etc, or (worse) a user adding copyvio or other material to the css page

If there isn't a policy page, I'm thinking one may need to be created. What do you think? - jc37 19:02, 26 August 2021 (UTC)

I found Help:Cascading Style Sheets, Help:User style, and Wikipedia:Customisation. But they just appear to be info how-to pages. - jc37 19:12, 26 August 2021 (UTC)
@Jc37: using a personal CSS page as a self-protection-hack has been around for a while. While only an int-admin can edit it, if the page is inappropriate any admin can delete it. That a bot or other can't change a category on a userpage isn't that big of a deal (it doesn't generally matter if it is "wrong" usually). If the user is inactive and something that matters a bit needs editing (e.g. a userpage in an article category), feel free to drop an edit request on the page just as if it was full protected and any non-admin came across it. — xaosflux Talk 02:33, 27 August 2021 (UTC)
Oh, ok. Thanks for the info.
I'd ask you to fix this one (to remove all content except the coding that a .css page is intended for), to remove the abuse of Wikipedia's systems, but from what you are saying I don't think there's a big rush to need to do that immediately at the moment.
I think I'll go do some reading about interface admins, and such stuff, again.
Thanks again. - jc37 06:08, 27 August 2021 (UTC)
@Jc37: we would decline that - see Wikipedia:User_pages#Protection_of_user_pages - like I said it is an accepted practice. It is really bad form to use User:*/common.css instead of something better like user:*/literallyanyotherword.css , but it won't hurt the encylopedia. — xaosflux Talk 09:40, 27 August 2021 (UTC)

The Signpost: 29 August 2021

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 19:45, 29 August 2021 (UTC)

Help on graphical details

Hey there, Xaos! :)

Can you help me learn something? I have this page for my bot. Assuming I'd wish for the grey background to cover all page, templates below included, how would I do that? What if I wanted the above template to also be included? I tried playing around with the <div> tags but if I include those templates inside those, the ending results are very bizarre and far from what I expect. Actually it's not bad how it is but I was just curios as to what am I doing wrong for future cases. - Klein Muçi (talk) 22:44, 29 August 2021 (UTC)

@Klein Muçi: Hi, I'm not going to spend much time on this - but I think you are wanting to wrap your div with bg color #fafafd around those other templates? A problem is that those other templates are also divs that define their own background colors - it looks like at least one of the underlying modules to those templates can accept a background parameter you could pass to it, else it will override your outside container styling. You could fork those templates to much simpler versions to only show the data you want to show though. — xaosflux Talk 23:09, 29 August 2021 (UTC)
Ah, so there's no easy way to it then. Yes, I was trying to do just that and I wasn't sure why it wasn't working. I hoped that there could be a simple workaround, maybe with an extra parameter somewhere or a template because I've had that situation in a couple of other pages as well but apparently... Thanks for explaining! :) - Klein Muçi (talk) 23:16, 29 August 2021 (UTC)
@Klein Muçi: refactor the page source a bit, especially since it is a user page, you don't need most of the features in the templates and modules you are calling via {{multiple image}} and {{ombox}} for userpage layout. Make your own div boxes etc if you want and ditch all that lua wrapping. — xaosflux Talk 01:24, 30 August 2021 (UTC)
Yeah, I'll keep that in mind. Thank you! :)) - Klein Muçi (talk) 07:20, 30 August 2021 (UTC)

Tech News: 2021-35

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

Recent changes

Problems

  • Musical scores were unable to render lyrics in some languages because of missing fonts. This has been fixed now. If your language would prefer a different font, please file a request in Phabricator. [94]

Changes later this week

  • Advanced item The parameters for how you obtain tokens in the MediaWiki API were changed in 2014. The old way will no longer work from 1 September. Scripts, bots and tools that use the parameters from before the 2014 change need to be updated. You can read more about this.
  • Recurrent item The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 31 August. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 1 September. It will be on all wikis from 2 September (calendar).

Future changes

  • You will be able to read but not edit Commons for a few minutes on 6 September. This will happen around 05:00 UTC. This is for database maintenance.
  • All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes in the week of 13 September. More information will be published in Tech News later. It will also be posted on individual wikis in the coming weeks. [95]

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

16:00, 30 August 2021 (UTC)

BN

Ref the discussion at BN, as a "vanishing", would it perhaps be possible to not list account names as prominently? Somewhat defeats the point.. ~TNT (she/they • talk) 14:08, 31 August 2021 (UTC)

@TheresNoTime: I'll remove the template links, they were all in the first sentence already. — xaosflux Talk 14:09, 31 August 2021 (UTC)
Appreciate it xaosflux, thank you ~TNT (she/they • talk) 14:11, 31 August 2021 (UTC)

2 RMs at once

Hi

If you have time, could you look at Talk:Sheikh Jarrah property dispute where there two open RMs. The first one ought to be closed (or the new one and wait for first one to be closed by someone else).

Thanks. Selfstudier (talk) 14:52, 1 September 2021 (UTC)

@Selfstudier: I don't really want to get involved in that, if you need admin assistance in closing a discussion you may list at WP:ANRFC. Best regards, — xaosflux Talk 14:54, 1 September 2021 (UTC)

Feedback request: Wikipedia technical issues and templates request for comment

Your feedback is requested at Template talk:Infobox comics character on a "Wikipedia technical issues and templates" request for comment. Thank you for helping out!
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Administrators' newsletter – September 2021

News and updates for administrators from the past month (August 2021).

Administrator changes

readded Jake Wartenberg
removed Emperor • Viridian Bovary
renamed Ashleyyoursmile → Viridian Bovary

Guideline and policy news

Technical news

  • The Score extension has been re-enabled on public wikis. It has been updated, but has been placed in safe mode to address unresolved security issues. Further information on the security issues can be found on the mediawiki page.

Arbitration

Miscellaneous

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 20:46, 3 September 2021 (UTC)

IP Block 154.160.7.219

Hello Sir, I'm a member of the Wikimedia Ghana User group and I organize and facilitate online Wikipedia workshops in Ghana. New editors cannot create accounts due to an IP block in various regions in Ghana and this hinders the progress of our workshops and metrics. I want to be granted this right to be able to create accounts for new participants who join our workshops. We have had more than three workshops this month and new participants find it difficult to participate. We have upcoming events and it will be difficult to track the progress of new editors. I have tried using the dashboard but It's always the same error Robertjamal12 (talk) 11:02, 4 September 2021 (UTC)

@Robertjamal12: are you using the "create accounts" feature on the dashboard? It should be exempt already. — xaosflux Talk 11:03, 4 September 2021 (UTC)
@Xaosflux: Yes please. It shows up as a blank page Robertjamal12 (talk) 11:21, 4 September 2021 (UTC)
What is the link to your dashboard, I can take a look. — xaosflux Talk 14:35, 4 September 2021 (UTC)

Tech News: 2021-36

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

Recent changes

  • The wikis that have Growth features deployed have been part of A/B testing since deployment, in which some newcomers did not receive the new features. Now, all of the newcomers on 21 of the smallest of those wikis will be receiving the features. [96]

Changes later this week

  • There is no new MediaWiki version this week.

Future changes

  • Advanced item In 2017, the provided jQuery library was upgraded from version 1 to 3, with a compatibility layer. The migration will soon finish, to make the site load faster for everyone. If you maintain a gadget or user script, check if you have any JQMIGRATE errors and fix them, or they will break. [97][98]
  • Last year, the Portuguese Wikipedia community embarked on an experiment to make log-in compulsory for editing. The impact report of this trial is ready. Moving forward, the Anti-Harassment Tools team is looking for projects that are willing to experiment with restricting IP editing on their wiki for a short-term experiment. Learn more.

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

15:19, 6 September 2021 (UTC)

User:HotArticlesBot?

Hey, I just noticed that User:Kaldari retired? I was looking to add a couple of projects to the BOT. Is there something that I could do to help you manage the BOT? Mjquinn_id (talk) 14:05, 8 September 2021 (UTC)

@Mjquinn id: you could bring this up at WP:BOTN. {{retired}} doesn't always mean retired - an option would be for you to build your own replacement bot, then we could make sure the old one is shut down (that is if Kaldari doesn't want to participate in the transition and make you an operator of their bot). — xaosflux Talk 15:34, 8 September 2021 (UTC)

Tech News: 2021-37

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

Recent changes

Problems

Changes later this week

  • Recurrent item The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 14 September. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 15 September. It will be on all wikis from 16 September (calendar).
  • Starting this week, Wikipedia in Italian will receive weekly software updates on Wednesdays. It used to receive the updates on Thursdays. Due to this change, bugs will be noticed and fixed sooner. [101]
  • You can add language links in the sidebar in the new Vector skin again. You do this by connecting the page to a Wikidata item. The new Vector skin has moved the language links but the new language selector cannot add language links yet. [102]
  • The syntax highlight tool marks up code with different colours. It now can highlight 23 new code languages. Additionally, golang can now be used as an alias for the Go programming language, and a special output mode has been added to show a program's output. [103][104]

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

15:32, 13 September 2021 (UTC)


Confused

Hello! I'm a bit confused as to why my page at User:Blaze The Wolf/vector.js had to be reveiwed. ― Blaze The WolfTalkBlaze Wolf#0001 13:22, 17 September 2021 (UTC)

@Blaze The Wolf: all newly created pages go in to the unpatrolled pages queue. Most patrollers focus on new "articles" only, but all pages still end up in the queue. For users with patrol access, when viewing a page that isn't patrolled yet there is a small indicator as to its status, when I came across your page I saw that and as your page was perfectly fine I marked it to take it out of the backlog. It didn't "have" to be patrolled, but getting a page you created patrolled without issue is a positive thing. Best regards, — xaosflux Talk 13:26, 17 September 2021 (UTC)
Oh ok. I was just a bit confused as that was the first page that I had created that I got a notification about having been reviewed because none of my other pages had that happen. Thanks for informing me! ― Blaze The WolfTalkBlaze Wolf#0001 13:30, 17 September 2021 (UTC)

Requesting Event coordinator right

Hello! How you are doing good. I've applied for the application earlier, [105]. Later I changed my username. I'm conducting training about Wikipedia. Could you please grand the permission? Agnihothri Sharath (talk) 02:57, 18 September 2021 (UTC)

Someone will handle it on the WP:PERM page. — xaosflux Talk 09:08, 18 September 2021 (UTC)

Feedback request: Wikipedia policies and guidelines request for comment

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Tech News: 2021-38

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

  • Growth features are now deployed to almost all Wikipedias. For the majority of small Wikipedias, the features are only available for experienced users, to test the features and configure them. Features will be available for newcomers starting on 20 September 2021.
  • MediaWiki had a feature that would highlight local links to short articles in a different style. Each user could pick the size at which "stubs" would be highlighted. This feature was very bad for performance, and following a consultation, has been removed. [106]
  • A technical change was made to the MonoBook skin to allow for easier maintenance and upkeep. This has resulted in some minor changes to HTML that make MonoBook's HTML consistent with other skins. Efforts have been made to minimize the impact on editors, but please ping Jon (WMF) on wiki or in phabricator if any problems are reported.

Problems

  • There was a problem with search last week. Many search requests did not work for 2 hours because of an accidental restart of the search servers. [107]

Changes later this week

  • Recurrent item The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 21 September. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 22 September. It will be on all wikis from 23 September (calendar).
  • Advanced item The meta=proofreadpage API has changed. The piprop parameter has been renamed to prpiprop. API users should update their code to avoid unrecognized parameter warnings. Pywikibot users should upgrade to 6.6.0. [108]

Future changes

  • The Reply tool will be deployed to the remaining wikis in the coming weeks. It is currently part of "Discussion tools" in Beta features at most wikis. You will be able to turn it off in Editing Preferences. [109]
  • Advanced item The previously announced change to how you obtain tokens from the API has been delayed to September 21 because of an incompatibility with Pywikibot. Bot operators using Pywikibot can follow T291202 for progress on a fix, and should plan to upgrade to 6.6.1 when it is released.

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

18:30, 20 September 2021 (UTC)

Note

Just wanted to clarify something, since this text-written environment is usually not great at conveying "tone"

I re-read my words, and I'm not angry, upset or disgruntled tyowards you or anyone.

I am not thrilled what I keep seeing of late where we as a community seem to value a seeming suicide-pact to following/creating process at times. All process and procedures serve the community, not the other way round.

But as I said, it's not a reflection on you or others, just a general feeling of blah about some things I've seen of late.

You're one of the hardest-working Wikipedians I see, and and you manage to do so being collaborative and civil. No one should ever be giving you attitude : ) - jc37 18:37, 22 September 2021 (UTC)

@Jc37: thanks for the follow up, agree text communications can be hard. I think your idea has merit and should be discussed and was trying to think of ways to make it work best for everyone. I don't think parallel/overlapping ACE RfC's are a good idea because it may lead to RfC burnout and end up not getting a strong community representation on subsequent split ones, but that's just my feeling - there is certainly no policy preventing it. — xaosflux Talk 18:41, 22 September 2021 (UTC)
I understand and your points are well-taken, especially about "burnout". I also think "driveby voting" would be a concern too - though I think that's already extant on that page. lol - jc37 18:47, 22 September 2021 (UTC)

Hi. Thanks for your help with this query. I can confirm it's now fixed. Thanks again! Lugnuts Fire Walk with Me 19:40, 24 September 2021 (UTC)

Thank you! — xaosflux Talk 19:42, 24 September 2021 (UTC)

Question about the Wikipedia app for iOS

Hello Xaosflux, I have a question about the Wikipedia app for iOS. I would like to prevent the app from saving my searches and the articles I read. I initially asked this question at the Teahouse, but another editor told me to ask this at WP:VPT. I moved the discussion from the Teahouse to VPT. The discussion is here. I was wondering if have any knowledge about how to do this. I appreciate your response. Thanks, Interstellarity (talk) 12:53, 26 September 2021 (UTC)

  • (talk page stalker) I haven't tested this particular problem, but I would imagine it's not possible (unless you see an option in your settings). I don't think any app actually supports an option to toggle this. Like Facebook/Twitter etc let you clear it after the fact but not usually disable saving in the first place. ProcrastinatingReader (talk) 14:31, 26 September 2021 (UTC)
  • (edit conflict) I know of at least one app that has this capability. The YouTube app has two options for pausing search and watch history. If there is no feature in the Wikipedia app, I'm hoping that it could go into Phabricator for a feature request. I'm not an expert in the program, so I was hoping someone can help me add it to Phab or do it for me. Interstellarity (talk) 19:41, 26 September 2021 (UTC)

Feedback request: Wikipedia proposals request for comment

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The Signpost: 26 September 2021

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Tech News: 2021-39

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

  • iOS 15 has a new function called Private Relay (Apple website). This can hide the user's IP when they use Safari browser. This is like using a VPN in that we see another IP address instead. It is opt-in and only for those who pay extra for iCloud. It will come to Safari users on OSX later. There is a technical discussion about what this means for the Wikimedia wikis.

Problems

  • Advanced item Some gadgets and user-scripts add items to the portlets (article tools) part of the skin. A recent change to the HTML may have made those links a different font-size. This can be fixed by adding the CSS class .vector-menu-dropdown-noicon. [110]

Changes later this week

  • Recurrent item The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 28 September. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 29 September. It will be on all wikis from 30 September (calendar).
  • The GettingStarted extension was built in 2013, and provides an onboarding process for new account holders in a few versions of Wikipedia. However, the recently developed Growth features provide a better onboarding experience. Since the vast majority of Wikipedias now have access to the Growth features, GettingStarted will be deactivated starting on 4 October. [111]
  • A small number of users will not be able to connect to the Wikimedia wikis after 30 September. This is because an old root certificate will no longer work. They will also have problems with many other websites. Users who have updated their software in the last five years are unlikely to have problems. Users in Europe, Africa and Asia are less likely to have immediate problems even if their software is too old. You can read more.
  • You can receive notifications when someone leaves a comment on user talk page or mentions you in a talk page comment. Clicking the notification link will now bring you to the comment and highlight it. Previously, doing so brought you to the top of the section that contained the comment. You can find more information in T282029.

Future changes

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

22:21, 27 September 2021 (UTC)

En masse page move

Hey Xaos! :)

In SqWiki we've been using the documentation module for many years without any kind of localization. Throughout this time we have accumulated a large number of /doc subpages. Recently we started dealing with that module's translation and we were entertaining the idea of moving all the /doc subpages to an Albanian abbreviation, for example, /udh. The ideal outcome would be to somehow have each /udh subpage be automatically accompanied with a /doc redirection page to it so in a way we could keep both versions ongoing but I know that wouldn't be possible without a bot, would it? What do you think would be the best way to move a large number of subpages like in our situation? Any way this can be solved without involving bots? This is all still in the hypothetical realm so don't worry too much about it. I was mostly urged by the curiosity to know how to generally deal with situations like these when I might have to move or delete a large number of pages fast. - Klein Muçi (talk) 23:54, 28 September 2021 (UTC)

@Klein Muçi: there is no back-end was to create or move pages in bulk, using the API with a bot account is probably the most efficient and normal manner. Pretty much the only back end bulk operation is Special:Nuke which could possibly take care of your large delete needs depending on how the pages were created. — xaosflux Talk 00:03, 29 September 2021 (UTC)
I see. I was looking at Mediawiki for any pywikibot scripts for that but even the one that I found doesn't look like it can help me with my current situation, judging by the documentation. If I interpreted it right, it can only find pages in a certain prefix. What I want is to find pages with a certain suffix (/doc). - Klein Muçi (talk) 00:19, 29 September 2021 (UTC)
Hmm, how would I be able to generate a list of all the pages ending in /doc? I want to know how many pages would be dealing with exactly. I remember you being very versatile with searches like that. - Klein Muçi (talk) 08:50, 29 September 2021 (UTC)
@Klein Muçi: you are probably better using a dump vs a search. You can download a list of all pagetitles on sqwiki here. Then you can use any text processor of your choice to match pages ending in "/doc" to create your list. — xaosflux Talk 09:29, 29 September 2021 (UTC)
Uhmm, okay but having worked with dumps only 1 time in the past, can you tell me which exactly is the file (by the mb size I guess) I need to download from there? Thanks for the idea by the way! :) - Klein Muçi (talk) 10:25, 29 September 2021 (UTC)
List of all page titles - 1.5 MB Found it, I guess. :) - Klein Muçi (talk) 10:42, 29 September 2021 (UTC)
Apparently that was correct. Keeping on the same discussion, can you explain to me a bit how the "mirror" and "testcases" links work in module documentation? What they exactly are? Those are 2 features we rarely, not to say never, have properly used in the past so I'd like to know how to explain those to other users. - Klein Muçi (talk) 11:50, 29 September 2021 (UTC)
Mirror is just a preload to make it easy to copy the current Template:Foo to Template:Foo/Sandbox; Template:Foo/testcases is usually a list of examples of the template, comparing the things in Template:Foo with Template:Foo/sandbox - so editors can compare if/how changes tested in the sandbox may differ from the current template. — xaosflux Talk 14:26, 29 September 2021 (UTC)
Got it! Thanks a lot for your continuous help! :)) - Klein Muçi (talk) 14:29, 29 September 2021 (UTC)
One last thing, just to be sure: Does this edit ruin anything? I'm worried more about the testcases → Provëzat part. - Klein Muçi (talk) 14:58, 29 September 2021 (UTC)
@Klein Muçi: I don't think so, keep in mind that is case sensitive, so it should work for pages such as w:sq:Stampa:Demografia/Provëzat but not w:sq:Stampa:Demografia/provëzat - so your community will want to use a consistent naming convention if you want to take advantage of that. — xaosflux Talk 15:18, 29 September 2021 (UTC)
Thanks for the clarifications! :) - Klein Muçi (talk) 21:35, 29 September 2021 (UTC)

Thank you.

Just wanted to offer my appreciation for your help. Thank you. Mr. Darcy talk 13:44, 1 October 2021 (UTC)

Administrators' newsletter – October 2021

News and updates for administrators from the past month (September 2021).

Guideline and policy news

Technical news

Arbitration

  • A motion has standardised the 500/30 (extended confirmed) restrictions placed by the Arbitration Committee. The standardised restriction is now listed in the Arbitration Committee's procedures.
  • Following the closure of the Iranian politics case, standard discretionary sanctions are authorized for all edits about, and all pages related to, post-1978 Iranian politics, broadly construed.
  • The Arbitration Committee encourages uninvolved administrators to use the discretionary sanctions procedure in topic areas where it is authorised to facilitate consensus in RfCs. This includes, but is not limited to, enforcing sectioned comments, word/diff limits and moratoriums on a particular topic from being brought in an RfC for up to a year.

Miscellaneous

  • Editors have approved expanding the trial of Growth Features from 2% of new accounts to 25%, and the share of newcomers getting mentorship from 2% to 5%. Experienced editors are invited to add themselves to the mentor list.
  • The community consultation phase of the 2021 CheckUser and Oversight appointments process is open for editors to provide comments and ask questions to candidates.
Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 17:05, 1 October 2021 (UTC)

Proposed deletion of File:20200506edit1-Capture.PNG

Notice

The file File:20200506edit1-Capture.PNG has been proposed for deletion because of the following concern:

unused Wikipedia-specific screenshot

While all constructive contributions to Wikipedia are appreciated, pages may be deleted for any of several reasons.

You may prevent the proposed deletion by removing the {{proposed deletion/dated files}} notice, but please explain why in your edit summary or on the file's talk page.

Please consider addressing the issues raised. Removing {{proposed deletion/dated files}} will stop the proposed deletion process, but other deletion processes exist. In particular, the speedy deletion process can result in deletion without discussion, and files for discussion allows discussion to reach consensus for deletion. Ixfd64 (talk) 01:57, 3 October 2021 (UTC)

Tech News: 2021-40

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 more efficient way of sending changes from Wikidata to Wikimedia wikis that show them has been enabled for the following 10 wikis: mediawiki.org, the Italian, Catalan, Hebrew and Vietnamese Wikipedias, French Wikisource, and English Wikivoygage, Wikibooks, Wiktionary and Wikinews. If you notice anything strange about how changes from Wikidata appear in recent changes or your watchlist on those wikis you can let the developers know.

Changes later this week

  • Recurrent item The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 5 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 6 October. It will be on all wikis from 7 October (calendar).
  • Advanced item Some gadgets and bots that use the API to read the AbuseFilter log might break. The hidden property will no longer say an entry is implicit for unsuppressed log entries about suppressed edits. If your bot needs to know this, do a separate revision query. Additionally, the property will have the value false for visible entries; previously, it wasn't included in the response. [113]
  • A more efficient way of sending changes from Wikidata to Wikimedia wikis that show them will be enabled for all production wikis. If you notice anything strange about how changes from Wikidata appear in recent changes or your watchlist you can let the developers know.

Future changes

  • You can soon get cross-wiki notifications in the iOS Wikipedia app. You can also get notifications as push notifications. More notification updates will follow in later versions. [114]
  • Advanced item The JavaScript variables wgExtraSignatureNamespaces, wgLegalTitleChars, and wgIllegalFileChars will soon be removed from mw.config. These are not part of the "stable" variables available for use in wiki JavaScript. [115]
  • Advanced item The JavaScript variables wgCookiePrefix, wgCookieDomain, wgCookiePath, and wgCookieExpiration will soon be removed from mw.config. Scripts should instead use mw.cookie from the "mediawiki.cookie" module. [116]

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

16:29, 4 October 2021 (UTC)

Proposed deletion of File:20191004-ooui-contrib-page.JPG

Notice

The file File:20191004-ooui-contrib-page.JPG has been proposed for deletion because of the following concern:

unused Wikipedia-specific file

While all constructive contributions to Wikipedia are appreciated, pages may be deleted for any of several reasons.

You may prevent the proposed deletion by removing the {{proposed deletion/dated files}} notice, but please explain why in your edit summary or on the file's talk page.

Please consider addressing the issues raised. Removing {{proposed deletion/dated files}} will stop the proposed deletion process, but other deletion processes exist. In particular, the speedy deletion process can result in deletion without discussion, and files for discussion allows discussion to reach consensus for deletion. Ixfd64 (talk) 17:11, 5 October 2021 (UTC)

Hello

Hello, I appreciate your response on @ST47: talk page. I respect his decision which aims at maintaining and protecting Wikipedia against vandalism and sockpuppetry. We have an upcoming workshop due on October 9, 2021, in one of our major cities in Ghana. All IP's within that region is blocked by @ST47: and @ST47ProxyBot:. We are able to create accounts for our participants as you showed us using the dashboard but no one can edit afterwards. I've tried to reach ST47 to changed (even temporarily) to a softblock on the day of the event but he is not addressing the issue 1[[117]] and we are 3 days away from the event. The IP is 154.160.70.27 and the event dashboard Please can you look into it and help us lift the block so that participants can edit on that day? Thank you Robertjamal12 (talk) 08:36, 6 October 2021 (UTC)

@Robertjamal12: if the blocking admin is unresponsive or your are in disagreement, please post your request at WP:AN for review by an uninvolved administrator. Best regards, — xaosflux Talk 09:45, 6 October 2021 (UTC)
@Xaosflux: Thank you — Robertjamal12 (talk) 09:49, 6 October 2021 (UTC)

New page reviewer

Hello Sir Xaosflux, Sir I kindly requested permission to be a new pages reviewer, Could you please sir see it. Request Superatp 15:14, 6 October 2021 (UTC)

Hello, someone will get to it soon, there is a bit of an WP:ADMINBACKLOG right now. — xaosflux Talk 15:16, 6 October 2021 (UTC)

Babel

Hello!

Lately I turned my attention to some of the basic features in Wikipedia, which in my community hadn't been updated for decades. One of those is the babel system. I saw that here it had evolved, like many other things, to use a Lua module. I updated accordingly. However I'm still baffled by something: Do we really need to create a template for each level of each language ever? How is such a system supposed to ever be imported considering that it would require the importation of hundreds of templates and categories? I do understand that here it has evolved organically over time to be like that, and much to my surprise, most of the templates and categories already existed even on SqWiki, having been created at an earlier time when babel userboxes were "all the rage" there (most likely that trend had the same high and low even here). But, how is such a system supposed to ever be imported anywhere else? Or maintained? I had a similar problem in this case which required the importation of ~90k templates! Has there ever been efforts to change the way the "babel system" works in that direction? To standardize it somehow, if that makes sense, making it easier to maintain and import it? Given that this is not the only occasion, as you see above, do you have any advice for me on dealing with cases like these in regard to importation? My mind screams "BOTS!" but I'm not aware of any specific ones that could help in these occasions. Klein Muçi (talk) 12:51, 7 October 2021 (UTC)

@Klein Muçi: so not really - I'd say the "best" way to use babel on anything put the very largest wikis that want to do a lot of local maintenance is to use the babel parser functions from the babel extension that is already deployed to WMF wikis. (c.f. mw:Extension:Babel). It works even on projects that haven't done anything special (e.g. at a very small project I never use: w:zh-min-nan:Iōng-chiá:Xaosflux/sandbox). — xaosflux Talk 13:06, 7 October 2021 (UTC)
Can you remind me where can I see which extensions are activated on my project? Or is that a kind of those "default" ones? - Klein Muçi (talk) 13:28, 7 October 2021 (UTC)
Just checked the latest contributions on SqWiki. I see you have already tested it out on our project and it is enabled. I wasn't aware of such extension. Thank you! :) - Klein Muçi (talk) 13:36, 7 October 2021 (UTC)
@Klein Muçi: right here: w:sq:Speciale:Verzioni, yup it worked fine!, you may want to initiate the category: w:sq:Kategoria:Babel - Përdorues sipas gjuhës, just so its not a red link. — xaosflux Talk 13:38, 7 October 2021 (UTC)
Yes, I will try to look after some of the accompanying categories and system messages now. - Klein Muçi (talk) 13:40, 7 October 2021 (UTC)

Please add full lock protection to the singer K S Chithra Page

Kindly add the full lock protection to the singer K S Chithra's page to avoid the unwanted edits Simha Gorji (talk) 14:38, 7 October 2021 (UTC)

@Simha Gorji: to request page protection, please post at WP:RFPP. Best regards, — xaosflux Talk 15:34, 7 October 2021 (UTC)

RfA 2021 review update

Thanks so much for participating in Phase 1 of the RfA 2021 review. 8 out of the 21 issues discussed were found to have consensus. Thanks to our closers of Phase 1, Primefac and Wugapodes.

The following had consensus support of participating editors:

  1. Corrosive RfA atmosphere
    The atmosphere at RfA is deeply unpleasant. This makes it so fewer candidates wish to run and also means that some members of our community don't comment/vote.
  2. Level of scrutiny
    Many editors believe it would be unpleasant to have so much attention focused on them. This includes being indirectly a part of watchlists and editors going through your edit history with the chance that some event, possibly a relatively trivial event, becomes the focus of editor discussion for up to a week.
  3. Standards needed to pass keep rising
    It used to be far easier to pass RfA however the standards necessary to pass have continued to rise such that only "perfect" candidates will pass now.
  4. Too few candidates
    There are too few candidates. This not only limits the number of new admin we get but also makes it harder to identify other RfA issues because we have such a small sample size.
  5. "No need for the tools" is a poor reason as we can find work for new admins

The following issues had a rough consensus of support from editors:

  1. Lifetime tenure (high stakes atmosphere)
    Because RfA carries with it lifetime tenure, granting any given editor sysop feels incredibly important. This creates a risk adverse and high stakes atmosphere.
  2. Admin permissions and unbundling
    There is a large gap between the permissions an editor can obtain and the admin toolset. This brings increased scrutiny for RFA candidates, as editors evaluate their feasibility in lots of areas.
  3. RfA should not be the only road to adminship
    Right now, RfA is the only way we can get new admins, but it doesn't have to be.

Please consider joining the brainstorming which will last for the next 1-2 weeks. This will be followed by Phase 2, a 30 day discussion to consider solutions to the problems identified in Phase 1.

There are 2 future mailings planned. One when Phase 2 opens and one with the results of Phase 2. To opt-out of future mailings, please remove yourself here.

Best, MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 00:09, 10 October 2021 (UTC)

I found a mistake in User:Community Tech bot/Popular pages config.json

Hello Xaosflux, I made a protected edit request to User:Community Tech bot/Popular pages config.json today, and found a mistake there.

The original code 

"Wikipedia:WikiProject Craft": {
        "Report": "Wikipedia:WikiProject Craft/Popular pages",
        "Limit": 500,
        "Name": "Spirits"
    }

The corrected code 

"Wikipedia:WikiProject Craft": {
        "Report": "Wikipedia:WikiProject Craft/Popular pages",
        "Limit": 500,
        "Name": "Craft"
    }

Thanks! --Phikia (talk) 03:32, 10 October 2021 (UTC)

 Fixed thank you for the note @Phikia:. — xaosflux Talk 10:07, 10 October 2021 (UTC)


New message from IbrahimBhatti4013

Hello, Xaosflux. You have new messages at IbrahimBhatti4013's talk page.
Message added 19:27, 10 October 2021 (UTC). You can remove this notice at any time by removing the {{Talkback}} or {{Tb}} template.

IbrahimBhatti4013 (talk) 19:27, 10 October 2021 (UTC)

@IbrahimBhatti4013: huh? There is nothing there - do you need something? Please reply here if so. — xaosflux Talk 19:30, 10 October 2021 (UTC)
Glad I have this talkpage watchlisted. Would've missed this latest Safi Bhatti sock otherwise. -- Tamzin[cetacean needed] (she/they) 19:59, 10 October 2021 (UTC)

Tech News: 2021-41

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

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

Meetings

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15:29, 11 October 2021 (UTC)

Wiki-voting

Hello! :)

Is there any way to make voting in Wikipages have a "GUI"? Like, for example, you can create a button that when clicked, generates a new page with preloaded text, if you so choose and that's good for creating candidature pages for admins/crats, or requests for bots approvals, etc. These kind of pages are usually followed by a type of voting system (call it discussion if you want) which usually incorporates vote-like templates of the pro/against/neutral sort. Is there any way to make it possible so the said templates are "given" with the click of a button near the candidate's name, preferably with a text box that allows for inserting a rationale for the given vote? I was looking at all the pages around in regard to voting here but didn't find anything interesting. - Klein Muçi (talk) 15:41, 11 October 2021 (UTC)

@Klein Muçi: sort of. Perfectly, no. This could be done with javascript. For a very complex example, see commons:Help:Gadget-EnhancedPOTY.js. We don't use these on enwiki, as it may create a barrier for those without javascript or with other accessibility considerations such as screenreaders. — xaosflux Talk 16:00, 11 October 2021 (UTC)
Slightly lighter weight, see User:Awesome Aasim/xfdvote. — xaosflux Talk 16:01, 11 October 2021 (UTC)
Hmm, but, you can still vote on the traditional manner even if those gadgets/userscripts are activated, no? This would be like adding VE to the traditional text editor... no? How does the first one actually work? I saw that it hasn't been updated in years now. The second one looks more straightforward so I don't believe any kind of help is needed on that. - Klein Muçi (talk) 16:11, 11 October 2021 (UTC)
The POTY ones edits a special vote-page for you, you could edit it directly but many people don't even know about that since it is behind the scenes. The second one is more of a "helper" so it can be used in addition to traditional voting. — xaosflux Talk 16:18, 11 October 2021 (UTC)
Ah, I see. I'll try to set up that user script as a community gadget then. Side question: Every time I try to use the "reply" button at your page, I get a message that says that the "reply" link cannot be used here. How have you blocked that from happening? Any particular reasons why users can be against that functionality? - Klein Muçi (talk) 16:26, 11 October 2021 (UTC)
@Klein Muçi: I didn't do anything specific to cause that, are you using the Discussion Tools beta-feature, or something else to make your "reply button"? — xaosflux Talk 16:29, 11 October 2021 (UTC)
Yes, the mentioned beta feature but I've only encountered that message at your page. I don't think every other user I've interacted with has that feature activated. It always works on every user talk page in SqWiki and users there rarely activate beta features. - Klein Muçi (talk) 16:36, 11 October 2021 (UTC)
@Klein Muçi: I'm assuming some sort of bug, think pages with certain elements or certain linterrors may break that tool. You could ask over at mw:Talk:Talk_pages_project. — xaosflux Talk 16:49, 11 October 2021 (UTC)
Interesting... I will now. I was trying to modify the script that you gave me above to work in our project but looks like I failed.
These are some (all?) of the pages that we vote on and where I wanted the script (turned gadget at us) to work. The first 2 links are for good and featured articles, the third one is for admin/crat and revocation voting and the last one for articles for deletion. Assuming it is easy to do, and that you have some free time, can you give me an example of how to modify it for at least 2 of those links? I can take care of the translation in the end I believe. - Klein Muçi (talk) 17:09, 11 October 2021 (UTC)
@Klein Muçi: have you tried it as a directly loaded userscript yet? You may be missing some dependencies trying to load it as a gadget. (Here it is not a gadget). — xaosflux Talk 17:12, 11 October 2021 (UTC)
I haven't because I'm not sure what to exactly expect. Judging by what I understood in the code, it works on specific hard-coded pages, which are EnWiki pages. I believe if I just copy-pasted it as it is, it would do nothing at us. - Klein Muçi (talk) 17:16, 11 October 2021 (UTC)
C-P it to your own page, then load it in your own common.js, adjust these type of lines mw.config.get("wgPageName").includes and see if it works. If it does, you may need to load extra dependencies on your gadget page. For more help with that though, you should ask Awesome Aasim — xaosflux Talk 17:29, 11 October 2021 (UTC)
Yes, you're right. It works better when used as a user script. But I still need guidance to localize it. I'll try writing to the creator himself. Thank you! You may be interested in this. Klein Muçi (talk) 17:35, 11 October 2021 (UTC)
@Klein Muçi: you should prob keep it as a userscript until it is working all the way, then you can look in to gadgetizing it; your gadget resource load likely needs some dependencies included. — xaosflux Talk 18:03, 11 October 2021 (UTC)
Yes. I was forced to stop that initiative altogether because the creator wasn't able to help. Maybe I ask for the creation of something specific for us in WP:US/R in the near future and maybe I'm lucky to get a response. :P - Klein Muçi (talk) 18:06, 11 October 2021 (UTC)
If it helps, Awesome Aasim was the only other user I've found that also gave me that same message as your page does. - Klein Muçi (talk) 18:15, 11 October 2021 (UTC)
@Klein Muçi: I think I've got a linter error in that menu header, but don't have time to debug it right now. — xaosflux Talk 18:17, 11 October 2021 (UTC)
@Klein Muçi: it should work now, resolved an open div. Think there is a topic open on that in general somewhere on mwwiki, but they use crappy flow, so I'm not looking for it! — xaosflux Talk 18:23, 11 October 2021 (UTC)
@Xaosflux, and yes, it does. Replying to you by that tool now. Apparently there's no special reason. It's just fragile and breaks easily. Thanks though! Made my life a bit easier. :P - Klein Muçi (talk) 18:26, 11 October 2021 (UTC)
@Klein Muçi: that situation is described in phab:T287040 if you care to follow it. — xaosflux Talk 18:29, 11 October 2021 (UTC)
Thanks! Ironic that you're one of the few that has been interested there. - Klein Muçi (talk) 18:41, 11 October 2021 (UTC)

Gathering participation

Hi back! Sorry for disturbing. I actually wanted to ask this at the Tech-VP but I was too shy given the broad subject this question has. Can you tell me what are some good technical/social ways to gather participation in discussions, voting, etc? We hold a sort of annual wiki competition at SqWiki where users can come and propose other users for different wikibanners but almost no one comes, even after we notify at "public pages" like the VP, etc. We hold article deletion discussions, admin/crat elections, discussions about good or featured articles but again, users rarely come to vote and everything looks like it's decided by the same 2-3 people. Can you give me any advice on this subject? - Klein Muçi (talk) 20:22, 11 October 2021 (UTC)

@Klein Muçi:
We mostly use #3 from that list, advertisement at our VP and on a template we ask people to watch: Template:Centralized discussion. For single-page issues like article deletions, we don't use any of those - but we have a huge community compared to almost all other projects. — xaosflux Talk 20:32, 11 October 2021 (UTC)
Yes, that's the problem with small wikis. To be honest, I was thinking of more obtrusive (?) ways like sending echo notifications or individual talk page messages. People rarely reply to public messages but I've seen that they do interact if you send them a talk page message. I don't know if that's the right way or not or, even if it is, how would I be able to precisely send messages en masse to them. :/ - Klein Muçi (talk) 20:37, 11 October 2021 (UTC)
@Klein Muçi: use w:sq:Speciale:MassMessage, you will need to build a recipients list, then you can use that to send talk page notifications to everyone on the list. Limit your recipient lists to <5000 editors each. See our notes at WP:MMS and WT:MMS for help on that. — xaosflux Talk 21:28, 11 October 2021 (UTC)
Hmm, interesting... What would be a good criteria for generating that kind of list? Should I just copy-paste the results from w:sq:Speciale:PërdoruesitAktivë? :/ - Klein Muçi (talk) 21:36, 11 October 2021 (UTC)
Is there any way to make that list start from the users with the most edits instead of alphabetically? - Klein Muçi (talk) 21:38, 11 October 2021 (UTC)
No, but really you only have 265 people on that list to curate (for reference we have ~125000). You could run some database queries I suppose. — xaosflux Talk 21:43, 11 October 2021 (UTC)
I have no idea what would be appropriate for your community, we rarely do non-opt-in mass messages here, a notable exception is the annual arbitration committee election notices (because we had a community RfC that said we should do this). — xaosflux Talk 21:40, 11 October 2021 (UTC)
I see. Okay then. Thank you for your advices! Really appreciated. :)) - Klein Muçi (talk) 21:47, 11 October 2021 (UTC)

Preloading pages

This when utilized here allows you to make a bot approval request with fewer steps. (Write a random name in the box, press the button and see what I mean.) In that request you get the magic words written which get parsed only after the page is saved, which works fine. Is there a more efficient way though that allows you to skip that step while giving you lines already completed, not with the magic words? - Klein Muçi (talk) 02:27, 13 October 2021 (UTC)

@Klein Muçi: not really, we are doing something similar (WP:BRFA) - suppose you could hack it client side with javascript. I don't have any examples of that though, we try to avoid that method here. — xaosflux Talk 09:42, 13 October 2021 (UTC)
Oh, okay. We're good then. I "created" the whole thing without seeing any examples and I wasn't sure if that was the most efficient way or not. Glad to see that I've been EnWiki-standard. haha Thanks! :) -

Partial blocks

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T194697

I'm hoping you know the answer to a question so I can avoid going to a WP:VPT. The scenario: User A is indefinitely partially blocked from editing an article. A report is filed at WP:ANEW regarding User A's violation of 3RR (obviously on a different article). The administrator (that's me) sitewide blocks User A for a week. What happens when the sitewide block expires? Does the partial block resume, or must the administrator reimpose the partial block? Assuming the partial block does not resume, do you think this would be a useful option for an administrator to have in this scenario? I think it should be the default, but perhaps I'm in a minority. Thanks for your help.--Bbb23 (talk) 10:55, 13 October 2021 (UTC)

@Bbb23: short technical answer is: you can't be partially blocked and sitewide blocked, if someone is pblocked you can't "block" them at all - you can only unblock them or "change the block". If you change the block it changes to all of the new values you specify, discarding the old values. It is just like the scenario where a page can't have multiple protections. To allow for the scenario you described to be possible, phab:T202673 (more technically, phab:T194697) would need to occur to allow someone to have multiple, overlapping, blocks. — xaosflux Talk 11:00, 13 October 2021 (UTC)
Looking at the second phab - and I'm not good at reading phabs, let alone understanding them - it looks like in the last few years a fix has gained no traction. Too bad as it makes no sense to me. In my case I've given the admin who imposed the indefinite pblock a heads up, and he's agreed to reimpose the pblock when my block expires. Pretty clunky if you ask me, not that anyone has. :-) Thanks very much.--Bbb23 (talk) 11:11, 13 October 2021 (UTC)
@Bbb23: there are a LOT of stalled phab requests, {{sofixit}} applies - but most people don't have the interest in programming potential fixes - and then navigating the WMF related development dungeon to get things actually approved. — xaosflux Talk 13:04, 13 October 2021 (UTC)
I understand, but it's frustrating and makes more work for administrators.--Bbb23 (talk) 13:12, 13 October 2021 (UTC)

Articles for deletion

Hello! Lately I'm working on creating a standard for SqWiki's articles for deletion page. And given that in the last discussion you mentioned how what I had used before were similar to what EnWiki used, I turned my attention here to see how your system works. I do understand the basics (create an article in a subpage date related, transclude that page somehow to the main page) but I was wondering something which has bothered me for years now. First of all, considering how AfD pages are designed to work, they will have a lot of red links by which novice editor me would be very bothered because in our minds red=something is missing, you need to fill it. Secondly, and this is the main question, wouldn't all those red links there show up in "articles needed" special page? Do you get my logic? Is there any kind of block to prevent something from this happening or do we don't care at all about details like these?

In regard to what I wrote above, I feel like making text red but not clickable/a link per se or something similar would be a better solution than just keeping deleted articles in link forms. Also, what happens if someone wants to nominate more than 1 article simultaneously (usually of a similar subject) for deletion here? Can you do that? Or do the rules here prevent it and you need to create different nominations for each one of them? Feel free to give me as much info about AfDs in general as you want because I want to be able to learn more. :) - Klein Muçi (talk) 10:13, 14 October 2021 (UTC)

@Klein Muçi: Hi again, so there is a lot to unpack here, a bunch of thought below:
  • Special:Wantedpages isn't really that useful pretty much anywhere, tasks like phab:T208935 could make it better and avoid the situation you mentioned above (where wanted articles are populated from non-articles) but may still be a problem if for example want to also populate it from a project page (e.g. an Project:Article topic creation drive).
  • Novice editors don't normally spend much time in article space, so I wouldn't worry about that part.
  • Using color to indicate something is usually a bad idea for accessibility
  • Being able to use Special:WhatLinkshere on a page can be useful to do things like find old discussion about the page (example)
  • Now as far as the mechanics for your deletion discussions go - that is really up to your community. We don't even have only 1 type of way to list deletion discussions here (contrast WP:AFD, WP:CFD, WP:MFD, and WP:FFD which all use different mechanics). Not all projects use the same format either, what is "best" for enwiki may not be what is best for sqwiki. In designing your system you should consider how you will use it and what type of artifacts you want produced. This will likely vary the most based on the volume and depth of your discussions. For example at the meta-wiki, we have very low volumes and only use one page for everything, with no transcluded subpages (meta:Meta:Requests_for_deletion). For log reference you can always use Diff or PermaLinks, but they aren't as useful if your admins won't use them. Consider if you want to have a dispalyed/readable archive - and what you would want to have in such an archive as well. Sorry this is long, but this is really something for your community to discuss. We use, but do not require, many many different helper tools, scripts, programs to help with out process - but I'm sure our volume is MUCH bigger. wikidata:Q22897#sitelinks-wikipedia has links to most projects if you want some inspiration. — xaosflux Talk 15:19, 14 October 2021 (UTC)
No, don't worry at all. I was looking for a long answer. Thanks a lot for the details! And thanks for the links! They helped a lot. :)) - Klein Muçi (talk) 15:59, 14 October 2021 (UTC)

Happy First Edit Day!

Happy First Edit Day!

Have a very happy first edit anniversary!

From the Birthday Committee, CAPTAIN RAJU(T) 06:21, 15 October 2021 (UTC)

Wikiquette

Hello! Keeping up with the general wiki questions, I have a kinda odd one that has been bothering me for quite a while now:

80% of my daily wikiwork is composed of technical/administration things like moving/deleting pages en masse, a lot of small changes in different subpages to see how they transclude to the main one, the same change done in all the pages in a single category... Stuff like this. Stuff which are done with or without the help of other tools. And, as you can think, the latest changes page tends to get overflooded a lot by my changes, especially in a project that is not that dynamic as SqWiki is. Is there a "remedy" for this situation? Should there be? (Maybe it's normal?) I mean, the latest changes page is hard to be used even on EnWiki but that's because the large sheer number of its users.

Giving myself bot status looked like an extreme choice to make and creating another account for only this kind of work would be hard to accomplish because most of the actions I mentioned require admin privileges. - Klein Muçi (talk) 12:09, 16 October 2021 (UTC)

@Klein Muçi: are you referring to Special:RecentChanges? You shouldn't worry "too much" about that. For bulk edits that aren't really about content, you could probably mark them as minor, then others can filter those out. An option that some projects do is to create a meta:Flooder group - it will tag things as bot, in most projects that use that you add yourself to flood, do the thing, then remove yourself from it. Also, try not to make lots of uneeded edits? :) Keep in mind you may not only be flooding RecentChanges, but also others' watchlists. — xaosflux Talk 14:19, 16 October 2021 (UTC)
Yes. The minor marking is what I currently do. I will highly consider the flood flag. Thank you! How does a wiki request new user groups? Make a Phab request? Or is that a thing crats can do? - Klein Muçi (talk) 14:59, 16 October 2021 (UTC)
Phab. — xaosflux Talk 15:47, 16 October 2021 (UTC)
@Klein Muçi: note, you will need to have a well-attended community discussion in support of the change, which will need to include details of the controls (e.g. "on sqwiki, create group flooder. Include permission (bot); allow add/remove of this group by burecrats; allow addtoself/removefromself of this group by administrators). — xaosflux Talk 15:50, 16 October 2021 (UTC)
If you can't get enough community members to participate - then that is sort of a sign that it's not really needed! — xaosflux Talk 15:50, 16 October 2021 (UTC)
Yes, thanks for the details. Do you have any old Phab requests of the same sort from EnWiki that I can use as a model assuming I'd take that road? - Klein Muçi (talk) 21:28, 16 October 2021 (UTC)
We don't actually have that group here, but it is a simple request you can just model after phab:T131527 for the "standard" flooder group - you will need to specify the add/remove addself/removeself groups that you determine from your community discussion. The general recommendation is: bureaucrat:add members, remove members; administrator:add self, remove self. Sometimes administrator:remove members as well. For your community process (nothing to do with phab) I'd put in guidance that when adding to yourself you always set an expiration time so you don't forget and leave it on. — xaosflux Talk 22:48, 16 October 2021 (UTC)
Yes, I wanted any kind of request. The reason I got especially interested in the subject is because, even if I don't ask for that specific group, it is beneficial for me to know the process in general because SqWiki has never asked for any kind of special group users so far. We've talked in the past a bit about modifying the way the patrollers' group works because, by current rules, everyone becomes a patroller automatically after a certain number of edits and, maybe paradoxically, no one does patrolling duties, creating backlogs that continue for literally years in regard to new edits and new pages. We thought that maybe if we gave that right to only a handful of people it can serve as an initiative for them to start working, by treating it as an uncommon privilege. We've also seen that our hierarchy is pretty basic compared to EnWiki, missing groups like template editors, edit filter managers, etc. Now we may never need those extra groups because given the size of the project, admins and crats maybe are enough for everything but it would be good to know nonetheless. So thank you for the details your provided! :)) - Klein Muçi (talk) 23:07, 16 October 2021 (UTC)
@Klein Muçi: in general smaller wiki's don't really "need" more groups. Also in general groups shouldn't be used as rewards or status symbols - encourage editors with things like contests, thanks, barnstars, wikilove, etc. Contests (Topic Improvement Drive, Type of Backlog Elimination Drive, etc) work well on many smaller projects as they include public recognition for efforts. Smaller wikis usually don't have that many very very active users, and making the ones that are administrators is usually OK. Keep in mind you "only" have ~300 users who have done anything in the last month and 5% of those are bots - 10 admins should be plenty to manage that many users depending on how much IP editing you get, but you could reasonably double that too. Keep in mind that things like "tempalte editors" would only be needed if you were going to introduce an entirely new protection level, and have your administrators manage that level - so you probablly don't need that. As far as edit filter managers, on your project if you trust someone to edit your edit filters that can potentially block all edits on the entire project until someone else fixes it - you can probablly trust them to be an admin too. — xaosflux Talk 23:21, 16 October 2021 (UTC)
Yes, fully agree on the rationale. The patrollers case was a two part one. I only mentioned one side there, the other one being that it seemed strange for us to have that many patrollers and still have backlogs lasting more than 12 months, so we also were thinking of cutting that number down, somehow. Maybe setting an expiration condition that the privilege could be auto-removed if not put into use for a certain period of time and that could also help with the encouragement part. As for the admins, as everywhere else I suppose, way less than 10 are really active. But even in that case, they're still enough, as you said. - Klein Muçi (talk) 23:55, 16 October 2021 (UTC)

Another technical question

This one is a little embarrassing because the feature has been around forever, but I've never questioned what it means. If I block a registered user and Account creation is checked, which it is by default, what is the effect? I've read WP:OPTIONS, and putting aside blocking IPs, it says it "will restrict the user from accessing the Special:CreateAccount function for the duration of the block." I've only ever had one account, and it was a long time ago that I created it. I don't know if the Create account page existed back then or if I did it some other way. Speaking currently, how many different ways are there to create an account? By using another method, can you circumvent the restriction? Going back to what the quoted sentence says, can the blocked user create an account by simply not logging in and going to the Create account page? I'm going to stop rambling now and let you respond; otherwise this is going to get more incoherent than it already is. Thanks.--Bbb23 (talk) 13:25, 17 October 2021 (UTC)

@Bbb23: ok there is a bunch to unravel, and I'll going to meander a bit too - starting with the conclusion probably!
  • In general when you block someone you want to keep that checked, along with the autoblock option - unless the only reason you are blocking them is for a good faith, but unacceptable, username.
  • The block will prevent them from creating an account on the project, regardless of the creation mechanism (Special:CreateAccount is the normal way). Other ways include SUL autocreation (see below) and using the API with action=createaccount (this uncommon method will also be blocked).
    • If they are also autoblocked, it will prevent them from creating accounts while logged out as well (subject to certain IP and cookie components)
    • Block creation is supposed to also block creation from that IP, even if autoblock is not enabled, but I don't think that one also leverages the blocking cookies.
  • This will not stop the person from going to another WMF project and creating a global account there. However, if autoblock is enabled, if they try to use their SUL account created on another project the local project will not autocreate a local account (they will appear logged out and subject to the autoblock on their IP). If the block and autoblock expire, they could then attach that account in the future.
Does that answer your question? If not perhaps there are some example scenarios that may help explain it better. Best regards, — xaosflux Talk 14:53, 17 October 2021 (UTC)
Some of it goes over my head. Block creation is supposed to also block creation from that IP, even if autoblock is not enabled, but I don't think that one also leverages the blocking cookies. I don't understand that; part of it is I know that some sort of cookies are involved in blocking (account creation?), but how they are involved has never been explained to me.
What triggered all this is a question from Liz on my Talk page (I believe she thinks I'm still a checkuser) about a rash of socks she blocked last night. The gist of it is that she couldn't understand why the individual was able to create new accounts after her blocks of previous ones. A checkuser might be able to answer her question, but I'd still like to understand, if possible, what the most likely answer is even without running a check. Here is the block log for CFalcon05, which she blocked at 3:07. And here is the global account information for All the Falcon accounts, whose account was created at 3:50. In each case, as you can see, Block account creation was checked.--Bbb23 (talk) 15:57, 17 October 2021 (UTC)
@Bbb23 and Liz: the most likely explanation here is that the person behind these changed IP addresses sometime between 3:07 and 3:50 (and likely also didn't have a stored block cookie - there are many ways around that part). I'm not a CU (just an OS) so can't validate that part though. If a CU can determine that the exact same IP address was used here, a bug may be present that needs more investigation. Logs below:
2021-10-17T03:03:35 User account CFalcon05 was created 
2021-10-17T03:07:06 Liz talk contribs block blocked CFalcon05 with an expiration time of indefinite (account creation blocked)
2021-10-17T03:50:46 User account All the Falcon accounts was created 
2021-10-17T04:03:22 Liz talk contribs block blocked All the Falcon accounts with an expiration time of indefinite (account creation blocked, email disabled, cannot edit own talk page)
The way "cookie blocks" work is basically this: when you are blocked and you access the site, you get a "cookie" downloaded to your computer (you get lots of cookies all the time, they identify you to sites and can store some data) - then by default your browser will advertise that you have that cookie if you come back - so even if your IP address changed or your username changed the site will still know you are the same computer that was recently blocked. These are far from foolproof, users can delete them or avoid them in many ways if they know how to. — xaosflux Talk 17:00, 17 October 2021 (UTC)
This was my guess too (changing IP addresses). I know how cookies work on browsers, but I don't know how Wikipedia uses those cookies.--Bbb23 (talk) 17:08, 17 October 2021 (UTC)

Technical aspect in WP:RFA

Hello! I have a short question:

In your WP:RFA page, at the top, you have a table which shows information about the current elections taking place. How is that table updated with the newly added candidatures? Does it have a kind of automatic mechanism or is it done manually by users? (Or maybe by bots?) - Klein Muçi (talk) 15:31, 17 October 2021 (UTC)

@Klein Muçi: I think you are referring to our Template:RFX report, which is powered by our Module:RFX report. We also have the original for that, which is bot powered and kept for fallback or other purposes here: User:Cyberpower678/RfX Report. They both have their advantages. — xaosflux Talk 17:05, 17 October 2021 (UTC)
Yes, that one. Can you explain to me a bit the general logic behind its work? How does it collect its information? I was studying the module's code but I'm still not sure. Or should I ask one of the module's maintainers? - Klein Muçi (talk) 22:10, 17 October 2021 (UTC)
Grabs a list of subpages, finds our sections about the values (support, opppose, etc), counts the first level ol objects in each, makes a report. It is very dependant on the RfA being laid out in exactly the format used here on enwiki. For follow up see Template talk:RFX report and feel free to ping recent editors of the module there. — xaosflux Talk 22:41, 17 October 2021 (UTC)
Ah, so it is how I suspected. We currently have only 1 section for voting where the results get mixed (and finally counted manually, given that at tops we have only 10 votes per election). Apparently we can't use that. I wanted to have a fast way to show the results in a compressed manner in the top of the page and that was perfect in that aspect. Maybe we switch to using your model in the future to be able to benefit from that. :P As always, thanks a lot for the explanations! I remember some years ago that I had no other way to learn about something technical beside reading Mediawiki pages and trial-erroring to death. Until you offered to help. Really grateful. :) - Klein Muçi (talk) 23:19, 17 October 2021 (UTC)
I cannot, for the life of me, understand how candidates here get the scheduled end date added to their candidature. I looked around the templates many times but I see no magic word or template related to date. What am I missing? I even tried creating a pseudo-candidature, wanting to see if the preformatted text may give me something to add related to date and I still saw nothing. - Klein Muçi (talk) 10:26, 18 October 2021 (UTC)
@Klein Muçi: it is semi-manual, as the RfA page is often created at one time, but the RfA isn't "started" until the candidate is ready. The directions include a request to subst in the timestamper template we made that calculates this. That template is here: {{RfA/time}}. — xaosflux Talk 10:47, 18 October 2021 (UTC)
The calculation is using the timeparser: #time: H:i, j F Y "(UTC)"|+7 days. — xaosflux Talk 10:48, 18 October 2021 (UTC)
Thank you very much! I couldn't navigate those template's branches and I wasn't familiar with the timeparser terminology for date and time, making me basically blind to what I was searching. Thanks a lot! - Klein Muçi (talk) 11:41, 18 October 2021 (UTC)

Tech News: 2021-42

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

  • Toolhub is a catalogue to make it easier to find software tools that can be used for working on the Wikimedia projects. You can read more.

Changes later this week

  • Recurrent item The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 19 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 20 October. It will be on all wikis from 21 October (calendar).

Future changes

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20:52, 18 October 2021 (UTC)

Help in graphical detail

Can you help me center the archive icon on this page? The whole graphical part wasn't done by me so I'm not sure what to change in the div tags so that I'm able keep everything looking the same but fixing that one detail. - Klein Muçi (talk) 00:54, 20 October 2021 (UTC)

@Klein Muçi: there are a lot of overlapping styles between your class, divs, and tables - it's a bit much for me to unpack. Notably, that archive template is itself another table, and it is inheriting some styling from the table you wrapped around it, which is getting its style from a declared class, which has a LOT of definitions in your site common.css. Here is a hint: w:sq:Special:Diff/2269313. I'm going to guess that your primary use of "infobox" isn't supposed to be for this type of table? — xaosflux Talk 10:45, 20 October 2021 (UTC)
You're totally right. That whole thing is a relic from the past. Normally I'd just rewrite it but I liked the way the three groups of elements were laid out in 3 columns (logo, name, archive) and I didn't know how to replicate that effect and that's why I was forced to keep it. That change looks overall good though. I'm guessing it's better like that than with the "broken archive". I'll keep that. (If I don't rewrite it altogether soon.) Thank you! - Klein Muçi (talk) 10:57, 20 October 2021 (UTC)
Keeping on the graphical details part, what am I doing wrong at my user page that the topicons don't get sorted? I saw you had yours in a subpage. I don't think that's mandatory, no? - Klein Muçi (talk) 11:35, 20 October 2021 (UTC)
@Klein Muçi: it doesn't look like you've actually done anything with that sortkey parameter once you finally get to your main topicon template, w:sq:Stampa:Top icon - compare to Template:Top icon. — xaosflux Talk 12:09, 20 October 2021 (UTC)
God, thanks a lot man! I've spent hours yesterday revisiting the code of each top icon template and was getting really frustrated when nothing was changing. It works now.
Last question: When I go at our main page I see a space below that is dedicated to categories, like every other page. I don't see the said space though at any of the other Wiki mainpages. Is that because I'm an admin or because other wikis have somehow hidden that? If it is the latter, any help on how we can do the same? - Klein Muçi (talk) 12:26, 20 October 2021 (UTC)
@Klein Muçi: I don't think I see that, easy way to check "is it me?" is to open a private-browsing session on your browser, then you can view the page as a non-logged-in user. For what it is worth, w:sq:Faqja kryesore does currently have pending changes pending for included templates - perhaps try to resolve all of those first. — xaosflux Talk 12:32, 20 October 2021 (UTC)
Yes, they don't show up. I'm guessing that's just for me then. Also resolved the changes. Thank you! :)) - Klein Muçi (talk) 12:38, 20 October 2021 (UTC)
@Klein Muçi: do you see any actual categories there? Does it say Kategoria: there? Check if it is some gadget or script you have enabled by trying to load that page in safemode using this link. — xaosflux Talk 12:59, 20 October 2021 (UTC)
No, they don't show up in that mode. It's not like I see any actual categories. It's just the "Kategoria:" part. In my mind I closed the discussion because I thought that you implied that me seeing that was because of my admin privileges and every admin sees the same at every main page of their projects but now you're putting me in doubt for the reasons. :P Truth is that the same thing happens in SqQuote. So I was going with the admin scenario. - Klein Muçi (talk) 14:33, 20 October 2021 (UTC)
@Klein Muçi: that could be a side affect of JWB that you have loaded via meta:User:Klein Muçi/global.js - you could try to turn that off there to verify. — xaosflux Talk 15:01, 20 October 2021 (UTC)
Just did. It has no effect. :/ - Klein Muçi (talk) 15:42, 20 October 2021 (UTC)
Just saw that the Kategori: part also has some plus signs after that. It's the HotCat gadget. I deactivated it and it got removed. I'm setting it back on now that I understood what is going on. :P :) - Klein Muçi (talk) 15:57, 20 October 2021 (UTC)
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