This is an archive of past discussions with User:HouseBlaster. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page.
Hello mentor. I am a retired linux kernel developer. I want to create a page for a small local company that buys and sells grain. --Nick Hennenfent (talk) 01:28, 13 July 2023 (UTC)
@Nhennenfent: Hi! I just logged on... don't expect answers this quickly in the future! The first thing I need to ask you is if you have any conflict of interest regarding the company. Then, we have to determine if the company is notable in the way Wikipedia uses the term. To demonstrate notability, you need at least 2 or 3 sources that are independent of the subject, reliable, and contain significant coverage of the topic – more than just a passing mention. You can see more information about this at our page on Wikipedia's "golden rule". Do you have multiple sources that meet this criteria? Best,HouseBlastertalk01:34, 13 July 2023 (UTC)
Feedback request: Wikipedia policies and guidelines request for comment
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 18 July. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 19 July. It will be on all wikis from 20 July (calendar).
MediaWiki system messages will now look for available local fallbacks, instead of always using the default fallback defined by software. This means wikis no longer need to override each language on the fallback chain separately. For example, English Wikipedia doesn't have to create en-ca and en-gb subpages with a transclusion of the base pages anymore. This makes it easier to maintain local overrides. [1]
The action=growthsetmentorstatus API will be deprecated with the new MediaWiki version. Bots or scripts calling that API should use the action=growthmanagementorlist API now. [2]
Hi, I had created a page which is getting rejected. I need help in understanding why this is happening and what steps should I take to get the page published --Mahendra Rasiklal Luniya (talk) 10:23, 18 July 2023 (UTC)
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 25 July. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 26 July. It will be on all wikis from 27 July (calendar).
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 Synchronizer tool is now available to keep Lua modules synced across Wikimedia wikis, along with updated documentation to develop global Lua modules and templates.
The tag filter on Special:NewPages and revision history pages can now be inverted. For example, you can hide edits that were made using an automated tool. [3][4]
The Wikipedia ChatGPT plugin experiment can now be used by ChatGPT users who can use plugins. You can participate in a video call if you want to talk about this experiment or similar work. [5]
Problems
It was not possible to generate a PDF for pages with non-Latin characters in the title, for the last two weeks. This has now been fixed. [6]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 1 August. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 2 August. It will be on all wikis from 3 August (calendar).
Starting on Tuesday, a new set of Wikipedias will get "Add a link" (Georgian Wikipedia, Kara-Kalpak Wikipedia, Kabyle Wikipedia, Kabardian Wikipedia, Kabiyè Wikipedia, Kikuyu Wikipedia, Kazakh Wikipedia, Khmer Wikipedia, Kannada Wikipedia, Kashmiri Wikipedia, Colognian Wikipedia, Kurdish Wikipedia, Cornish Wikipedia). This is part of the progressive deployment of this tool to more Wikipedias. The communities can configure how this feature works locally. [7]
We shared our annual plan, for the period July 2023 - June 2024.
Our first project of the year will be Community configuration 2.0, which helps editors with extended rights transparently and easily configure important on-wiki functionality.
After we finish work on Community configuration 2.0, we will hope to fit in one of the following projects:
Article creation: This project aims to provide new editors with better guidance and guardrails in the article creation process, with the intention of lightening the load of new page reviewers.
Non-editing participation: This project aims to create low-risk ways for readers to participate in Wikipedia with the intention of funneling more readers into contributing to the Wikimedia movement.
Suggested Edits are now receiving topic predictions via the new Language-Agnostic Topic Classification. This change affects non-English Wikipedia wikis. It will ensure newcomers receive a greater diversity of task recommendations. Before, as this feature was a test, English Wikipedia was used to select topics. The change is gradual as lists of topics are refreshed when they become empty. The Research team will evaluate the impact in a few months. [8]
Starting on August 1, a new set of Wikipedias will get "Add a link": Georgian Wikipedia, Kara-Kalpak Wikipedia, Kabyle Wikipedia, Kabardian Wikipedia, Kabiyè Wikipedia, Kikuyu Wikipedia, Kazakh Wikipedia, Khmer Wikipedia, Kannada Wikipedia, Kashmiri Wikipedia, Colognian Wikipedia, Kurdish Wikipedia, Cornish Wikipedia, Cornish Wikipedia.
Mentorship
The Growth team provides dedicated features to establish a mentorship program for newcomers. Every newcomer gets a volunteer mentor who provides encouragement and answers questions. Communities can set up or join this mentorship system by visiting Special:ManageMentors. This mentorship system is configurable by the community at Special:EditGrowthConfig.
More communities have implemented mentorship. A Wikimedia Foundation data scientist will be looking at the impact of Mentorship. We will look at the impact on Spanish and English Wikipedia. [9]
The Growth team will also host a Mentoring new editors on Wikipedia session at Wikimania 2023 in Singapore. Workshop attendees will help brainstorm improvements to Growth’s mentorship features.
Positive reinforcement
We will share more complete experiment analysis for all the three parts of the Positive reinforcement project soon. At the moment, the new Impact module, Leveling up, and Personalized praise are still being A/B tested on the Growth team's pilot wikis.
In the meantime, initial leading indicators for the Personalized praise project have been published. Although this is still a relatively small sample, results seem healthy. They show that Mentors are indeed receiving notifications and clicking through to view their praise-worthy mentees.
Growth contributes to IP Editing migration
The Growth team is currently focusing on IP Editing: Privacy Enhancement and Abuse Mitigation. It is a project that touches many different Wikimedia Foundation teams. The Growth team will focus on temporary accounts through two main points:
the user experience of a logged-out user, that switches to a temporary account,
change Growth-owned extensions and features, so that they work as expected with temporary accounts. [10]
Birth year is wrong and is that really John Mackenzie in the picture?
I am just a person who likes to read things on Wikipedia. I do not have an account. I am also the grandson of John Mackenzie VC. I have a copy of his birth record. He was born on November 22 of 1870 not 1871. Also I have some pictures of John Mackenzie mostly from the last few years of his life. He married my grandmother in 1910 while he was based in Lucknow India. The picture on his Wikipedia page looks not much like the pictures I have of John. I realize this is a picture of a much younger man that most of what I have. If this picture is of John I would love to know where it came from. Thanks 76.67.79.77 (talk) 13:57, 1 August 2023 (UTC)
76.67.79.77, I think I perpetrated a mistake made by the original uploader of the image. The source says that this image depicts J McKenzie (note the lack of the letter "a").About the birthday, that is interesting. His grave says he died at age 43, which would place his birthday in 1871. And Victoria Cross Medals, published by the UK military, says he was born in 1871. But other records such as Scotland, Births and Baptisms, 1564–1950 say 1870. I think the best thing to do is note the inconsistency in the article. I have run out of time for Wikipedia today, so I plan to get to this tomorrow. Best,HouseBlastertalk02:02, 3 August 2023 (UTC)
I have a hard time getting on to respond as most days I get the IP is blocked. I get whatever Bell Media my service provider assigns to me. I have lots of information about John Mackenzie VC including pictures and documents. I am willing to share these. I have a not much used email account ikemccaslin@ mail.com. If you let me know where I can contact you I will respond with my personal email. Thanks 76.67.79.77 (talk) 16:10, 6 August 2023 (UTC)
Tech News: 2023-32
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
Mobile Web editors can now edit a whole page at once. To use this feature, turn on "⧼Mobile-frontend-mobile-option-amc⧽" in your settings and use the "Edit full page" button in the "More" menu. [14]
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
The Content translation system is no longer using Youdao's machine translation service. The service was in place for several years, but due to no usage, and availability of alternatives, it was deprecated to reduce maintenance overheads. Other services which cover the same languages are still available. [15]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 15 August. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 16 August. It will be on all wikis from 17 August (calendar).
Starting on Wednesday, a new set of Wikipedias will get "Add a link" (Latin Wikipedia, Ladino Wikipedia, Luxembourgish Wikipedia, Lak Wikipedia, Lezghian Wikipedia, Lingua Franca Nova Wikipedia, Ganda Wikipedia, Limburgish Wikipedia, Ligurian Wikipedia, Lombard Wikipedia, Lingala Wikipedia, Latgalian Wikipedia, Latvian Wikipedia, Maithili Wikipedia, Basa Banyumasan Wikipedia, Moksha Wikipedia, Malagasy Wikipedia, Armenian Wikipedia, Kyrgyz Wikipedia). This is part of the progressive deployment of this tool to more Wikipedias. The communities can configure how this feature works locally. [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.
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 22 August. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 23 August. It will be on all wikis from 24 August (calendar).
@Tralim1997: Hello! I want to apologize for the wait for a response – real life unexpectedly sucked me away from Wikipedia for a while. I believe you are asking about how to sign a message. To do so, simply type ~~~~, which will automatically convert to your signature when you save the page. Let me know if you have any other questions, and happy editing!HouseBlastertalk03:22, 26 August 2023 (UTC)
Hi there, I am new to editing and have focused on an article Silver Point Capital based on recent reporting. Are you able to confirm that this kind of edit makes sense?
@Elfiot: Hello! A couple of notes. One, I see that another editor has objected to the edit on the grounds that it is not from a neutral point of view. When this happens, the best thing to do is to start a thread on the article's talk page (you can see instructions on how to do so at Wikipedia:Dispute resolution § Resolving content disputes).I also noticed that your edit included the phrase "Critics argue this would...". These are called "weasel words", and should be avoided. Instead, specify which critics argued the bankruptcy would undermine recovery from the opioid epidemic.Let me know if anything I said is unclear or if you have other questions. In any event, happy editing!HouseBlastertalk03:39, 26 August 2023 (UTC)
Tech News: 2023-35
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
As part of the changes for the better diff handling of paragraph splits, improved detection of splits is being rolled out. Over the last two weeks, we deployed this support to group0 and group1 wikis. This week it will be deployed to group2 wikis. [27]
All Special:Contributions pages now show the user's local edit count and the account's creation date. [28]
Wikisource users can now use the prpbengalicurrency label to denote Bengali currency characters as page numbers inside the <pagelist> tag. [29]
Two preferences have been relocated. The preference "Enable the visual editor" is now shown on the "Editing" tab at all wikis. Previously it was shown on the "Beta features" tab at some wikis. The preference "Use the wikitext mode inside the visual editor, instead of a different wikitext editor" is now also shown on the "Editing" tab at all wikis, instead of the "Beta features" tab. [30][31]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 29 August. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 30 August. It will be on all wikis from 31 August (calendar).
All right-to-left language wikis, plus Korean, Armenian, Ukrainian, Russian, and Bulgarian Wikipedias, will have a link in the sidebar that provides a short URL of that page, using the Wikimedia URL Shortener. This feature will come to more wikis in future weeks. [32]
Future changes
The removal of the DoubleWiki extension is being discussed. This extension currently allows Wikisource users to view articles from multiple language versions side by side when the <=> symbol next to a specific language edition is selected. Comments on this are welcomed at the phabricator task.
A proposal has been made to merge the second hidden-categories list (which appears below the wikitext editing form) with the main list of categories (which is further down the page). More information is available on Phabricator; feedback is welcome!
I saw your comment on this discussion. I couldn't find anything that I though was fit to merge, so I turned the article into a redirect aiming at Erickson Living. If you want to wade into the pre-redirect version to find some material at the "biography" that should be transferred over, you're a better person than I am. :-) Joyous! | Talk19:49, 17 November 2022 (UTC)
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
EditInSequence, a feature that allows users to edit pages faster on Wikisource has been moved to a Beta Feature based on community feedback. To enable it, you can navigate to the beta features tab in Preferences. [33]
There is a new option for Administrators when they are changing the usergroups for a user, to add the user’s user page to their watchlist. This works both via Special:UserRights and via the API. [35]
The LoginNotify extension was not sending notifications since January. It has now been fixed, so going forward, you may see notifications for failed login attempts, and successful login attempts from a new device. [37]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 5 September. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 6 September. It will be on all wikis from 7 September (calendar).
Starting on Wednesday, a new set of Wikipedias will get "Add a link" (Eastern Mari Wikipedia, Maori Wikipedia, Minangkabau Wikipedia, Macedonian Wikipedia, Malayalam Wikipedia, Mongolian Wikipedia, Marathi Wikipedia, Western Mari Wikipedia, Malay Wikipedia, Maltese Wikipedia, Mirandese Wikipedia, Erzya Wikipedia, Mazanderani Wikipedia, Nāhuatl Wikipedia, Neapolitan Wikipedia, Low German Wikipedia, Low Saxon Wikipedia, Nepali Wikipedia, Newari Wikipedia, Norwegian Nynorsk Wikipedia, Novial Wikipedia, N'Ko Wikipedia, Nouormand Wikipedia, Northern Sotho Wikipedia, Navajo Wikipedia, Nyanja Wikipedia, Occitan Wikipedia, Livvi-Karelian Wikipedia, Oromo Wikipedia, Oriya Wikipedia, Ossetic Wikipedia, Punjabi Wikipedia, Pangasinan Wikipedia, Pampanga Wikipedia, Papiamento Wikipedia, Picard Wikipedia, Pennsylvania German Wikipedia, Palatine German Wikipedia, Norfuk / Pitkern Wikipedia, Piedmontese Wikipedia, Western Punjabi Wikipedia, Pontic Wikipedia, Pashto Wikipedia). This is part of the progressive deployment of this tool to more Wikipedias. The communities can configure how this feature works locally. [38][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
ORES, the revision evaluation service, is now using a new open-source infrastructure on all wikis except for English Wikipedia and Wikidata. These two will follow this week. If you notice any unusual results from the Recent Changes filters that are related to ORES (for example, "Contribution quality predictions" and "User intent predictions"), please report them. [41]
When you are logged in on one Wikimedia wiki and visit a different Wikimedia wiki, the system tries to log you in there automatically. This has been unreliable for a long time. You can now visit the login page to make the system try extra hard. If you feel that made logging in better or worse than it used to be, your feedback is appreciated. [42]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 12 September. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 13 September. It will be on all wikis from 14 September (calendar).
As part of the changes for the Better diff handling of paragraph splits wishlist proposal, the inline switch widget in diff pages is being rolled out this week to all wikis. The inline switch will allow viewers to toggle between a unified inline or two-column diff wikitext format. [43]
Future changes
All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes on 20 September. This is planned at 14:00 UTC. More information will be published in Tech News and will also be posted on individual wikis in the coming weeks. [44]
The Enterprise API is launching a new feature called "breaking news". Currently in BETA, this attempts to identify likely "newsworthy" topics as they are currently being written about in any Wikipedia. Your help is requested to improve the accuracy of its detection model, especially on smaller language editions, by recommending templates or identifiable editing patterns. See more information at the documentation page on MediaWiki or the FAQ on Meta.
Redirect drive: In response to an unusually high redirect backlog, we held a redirect backlog drive in May. The drive completed with 23851 reviews done in total, bringing the redirect backlog to 0 (momentarily). Congratulations to Hey man im josh who led with a staggering 4316 points, followed by Meena and Greyzxq with 2868 and 2546 points respectively. See this page for more details. The redirect queue is steadily rising again and is steadily approaching 4,000. Please continue to help out, even if it's only for a few or even one review a day.
Redirect autopatrol: All administrators without autopatrol have now been added to the redirect autopatrol list. If you see any users who consistently create significant amounts of good quality redirects, consider requesting redirect autopatrol for them here.
WMF work on PageTriage: The WMF Moderator Tools team, consisting of Sam, Jason and Susana, and also some patches from Jon, has been hard at work updating PageTriage. They are focusing their efforts on modernising the extension's code rather than on bug fixes or new features, though some user-facing work will be prioritised. This will help make sure that this extension is not deprecated, and is easier to work on in the future. In the next month or so, we will have an opt-in beta test where new page patrollers can help test the rewrite of Special:NewPagesFeed, to help find bugs. We will post more details at WT:NPPR when we are ready for beta testers.
Articles for Creation (AFC): All new page reviewers are now automatically approved for Articles for Creation draft reviewing (you do not need to apply at WT:AFCP like was required previously). To install the AFC helper script, visit Special:Preferences, visit the Gadgets tab, tick "Yet Another AFC Helper Script", then click "Save". To find drafts to review, visit Special:NewPagesFeed, and at the top left, tick "Articles for Creation". To review a draft, visit a submitted draft, click on the "More" menu, then click "Review (AFCH)". You can also comment on and submit drafts that are unsubmitted using the script.
You can review the AFC workflow at WP:AFCR. It is up to you if you also want to mark your AFC accepts as NPP reviewed (this is allowed but optional, depends if you would like a second set of eyes on your accept). Don't forget that draftspace is optional, so moves of drafts to mainspace (even if they are not ready) should not be reverted, except possibly if there is conflict of interest.
Pro tip: Did you know that visual artists such as painters have their own SNG? The most common part of this "creative professionals" criteria that applies to artists is WP:ARTIST 4b (solo exhibition, not group exhibition, at a major museum) or 4d (being represented within the permanent collections of two museums).
Reminders
Newsletter feedback - please take this short poll about the newsletter.
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
MediaWiki now has a stable interface policy for frontend code that more clearly defines how we deprecate MediaWiki code and wiki-based code (e.g. gadgets and user scripts). Thank you to everyone who contributed to the content and discussions. [45][46]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 19 September. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 20 September. It will be on all wikis from 21 September (calendar).
New Page Review article queue, March to September 2023
Backlog update:
At the time of this message, there are 11,300 articles and 15,600 redirects awaiting review. This is the highest backlog in a long time. Please help out by doing additional reviews!
October backlog elimination drive:
A one-month backlog drive for October will start in one week! Barnstars will be awarded based on the number of articles and redirects patrolled. Articles will earn 4x as many points compared to redirects. You can sign up here.
PageTriage code upgrades:
Upgrades to the PageTriage code, initiated by the NPP open letter in 2022 and actioned by the WMF Moderator Tools Team in 2023, are ongoing. More information can be found here. As part of this work, the Special:NewPagesFeed now has a new version in beta! The update leaves the NewPagesFeed appearance and function mostly identical to the old one, but updates the underlying code, making it easier to maintain and helping make sure the extension is not decommissioned due to maintenance issues in the future. You can try out the new Special:NewPagesFeed here - it will replace the current version soon.
Notability tip:
Professors can meet WP:PROF #1 by having their academic papers be widely cited by their peers. When reviewing professor articles, it is a good idea to find their Google Scholar or Scopus profile and take a look at their h-index and number of citations. As a very rough rule of thumb, for most fields, articles on people with a h-index of twenty or more, a first-authored paper with more than a thousand citations, or multiple papers each with more than a hundred citations are likely to be kept at AfD.
Reviewing tip:
If you would like like a second opinion on your reviews or simply want another new page reviewer by your side when patrolling, we recommend pair reviewing! This is where two reviewers use Discord voice chat and screen sharing to communicate with each other while reviewing the same article simultaneously. This is a great way to learn and transfer knowledge.
Hello. How do you search on Wikipedia now? A search box used to appear on the first page, but now I can't find anywhere --Hstmd01 (talk) 20:20, 23 September 2023 (UTC)
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
The Vector 2022 skin will now remember the pinned/unpinned status for the Table of Contents for all logged-out users. [49]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 26 September. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 27 September. It will be on all wikis from 28 September (calendar).
Gadget definitions will have a new "namespaces" option. The option takes a list of namespace IDs. Gadgets that use this option will only load on pages in the given namespaces.
Future changes
New variables will be added to AbuseFilter: global_account_groups and global_account_editcount. They are available only when an account is being created. You can use them to prevent blocking automatic creation of accounts when users with many edits elsewhere visit your wiki for the first time. [50][51]
Meetings
You can join the next meeting with the Wikipedia mobile apps teams. During the meeting, we will discuss the current features and future roadmap. The meeting will be on 27 October at 17:00 (UTC). See details and how to join.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
There is a new user preference for "Always enable safe mode". This setting will make pages load without including any on-wiki JavaScript or on-wiki stylesheet pages. It can be useful for debugging broken JavaScript gadgets. [52]
Gadget definitions now have a new "contentModels" option. The option takes a list of page content models, like wikitext or css. Gadgets that use this option will only load on pages with the given content models.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 3 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 4 October. It will be on all wikis from 5 October (calendar).
Future changes
The Vector 2022 skin will no longer use the custom styles and scripts of Vector legacy (2010). The change will be made later this year or in early 2024. See how to adjust the CSS and JS pages on your wiki. [53]
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
One new wiki has been created: a Wikipedia in Fon (w:fon:) [54]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 10 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 11 October. It will be on all wikis from 12 October (calendar).
Starting on Wednesday, a new set of Wikipedias will get "Add a link" (Swahili Wikipedia, Walloon Wikipedia, Waray Wikipedia, Wolof Wikipedia, Kalmyk Wikipedia, Xhosa Wikipedia, Mingrelian Wikipedia, Yiddish Wikipedia, Yoruba Wikipedia, Zhuang Wikipedia, Zeelandic Wikipedia, Min Nan Wikipedia, Zulu Wikipedia). This is part of the progressive deployment of this tool to more Wikipedias. The communities can configure how this feature works locally. [55]
At some wikis, newcomers are suggested images from Commons to add to articles without any images. Starting on Tuesday, newcomers at these wikis will be able to add images to unillustrated article sections. The specific wikis are listed under "Images recommendations" at the Growth team deployment table. You can learn more about this feature.[56]
In the mobile web skin (Minerva) the CSS ID #page-actions will be replaced with #p-views. This change is to make it consistent with other skins and to improve support for gadgets and extensions in the mobile skin. A few gadgets may need to be updated; there are details and search-links in the task.
@Powarhistory: Working in Wikipedia "administration" (i.e. "behind-the-scenes" work) is very simple. There is a long list of potential things you can volunteer to do at this page. You don't need to ask permission to help out, be bold and do it!Becoming an administrator (a formal role which allows you to delete pages, block people, etc.) is a very difficult process. Generally, the community looks for at least 18 months of active editing before giving someone access to the administrator tool set.HouseBlastertalk22:34, 16 October 2023 (UTC)
Thank you for reply to me. I am regular reader of wiki since its starting time. Many time some users are adding wrong or inappropriate imformation which need to remove.Till being admin how I can report to adimn to change or midify the wrong information. Powarhistory (talk) 22:50, 16 October 2023 (UTC)
Community Configuration 2.0 is a feature that will enable Wikimedia communities to easily customize and configure features to meet their unique needs. This approach provides non-technical moderators with more independence and control over enabling/disabling and customizing features for their communities.
Initial designs are drafted for two different approaches (see images). We will soon demo interactive prototypes to interested admins, stewards, and experienced editors (T346109). Please let us know if you have feedback on the design approach, or want to participate in prototype testing.
IP Masking
The Growth team has been working on several updates to ensure Growth maintained features will be compatible with future IP Masking changes. This work has included code changes to: Recent Changes (T343322), Echo notifications (T333531), the Thanks extension (T345679) and Mentorship (T341390).
Before December, the Growth team will initiate community discussions with the goal of migrating communities from Flow to DiscussionTools. This move aims to minimize the necessity for additional engineering work to make Flow compatible with IP Masking. (T346108)
Mentorship
We assembled some resources for mentors at Mediawiki wiki. This resource page is translatable and will be linked from the mentor dashboard.
We are working to resolve a bug related to mentors properly returning after being marked as "Away". (T347024)
We continue the deployment of the structured task "add a link" to all Wikipedias. We plan to scale the task to all Wikipedias that have link suggestions available by the end of 2023.
We plan to scale the new Impact Module to all Wikipedias soon, but first we are investigating a bug with the job that refreshes the Impact Module data. (T344428)
At some wikis, newcomers have access to the "add an image" structured task. This task suggests images that may be relevant to add to unillustrated articles. Newcomers at these wikis can now add images to unillustrated articles sections. (T345940) The wikis that have this task are listed under "Images recommendations" at the Growth team deployment table.
Other news
We disabled the “add an image” task temporarily (T345188) because there was a failure in the image suggestions pipeline (T345141). This is now fixed.
After a 2.5 years-long collaboration with Bangala Wikipedia, we have decided to start a collaboration with another wiki. Swahili Wikipedia is now a pilot wiki for Growth experiments.
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 Unified login system's edge login should now be fixed for some browsers (Chrome, Edge, Opera). This means that if you visit a new sister project wiki, you should be logged in automatically without the need to click "Log in" or reload the page. Feedback on whether it's working for you is welcome. [57]
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 17 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 18 October. It will be on all wikis from 19 October (calendar).
Future changes
In 3 weeks, in the Vector 2022 skin, code related to addPortletLink and #p-namespaces that was deprecated one year ago will be removed. If you notice tools that should appear next to the "Discussion" tab are then missing, please tell the gadget's maintainers to see instructions in the Phabricator task.
I can't just move another category to this title, doing that won't move all of the category contents so we'd be left with a number of articles with red-link categories which, according to WP:REDNOT, need to be avoided. Please move the articles first to the redirect category and then the empty category can be moved. This is why closing CFDs are so complicated. LizRead!Talk!02:20, 18 October 2023 (UTC)
Hi Liz! I realize that – I have listed that nomination at WT:CFDW. I just nominated the (empty) category redirect for CSD because I was unsure if having a category redirect there would break the bot in some way. IOW, I believe Category:Fictional humans should be deleted per {{db-move}}, but the move should be done by the bot at some point in the future.HouseBlastertalk02:27, 18 October 2023 (UTC)
Hello! I have a fantasy wrestling league that I've been working on for 2017 and I feel like it would be cool to share it and explain it to the world, while there is no official "proof" that it exists since it is completely fantasy and only written on paper, with no actual live events being promoted or taking place. Will this be possible to even publish? --GSXO (talk) 01:18, 19 October 2023 (UTC)
@GSXO: Hello! Unfortunately, it does not seem like you would be able to publish something like that. Wikipedia's "golden rule" is that articles need to have significant coverage in independent, reliable sources. We have plenty of articles on things that do not exist (e.g. Harry Potter, Frodo Baggins), but they have to be covered by in detail by independent sources before they can have a Wikipedia article.HouseBlastertalk03:38, 19 October 2023 (UTC)
Your follow-up to closing CFDs is getting better but I see you moved this category but didn't move the contents of the category. They don't automatically move when you move the category page and, as a redirect category, it should be empty. I was alerted to this situation as the new category, Category:9th-century women from East Francia, showed as an empty category that should be tagged for CSD C1 speedy deletion.
@Liz: hi again! In this instance, a redirect was already going to be left so I figured the bot would do the moves for me. Should I do the moves manually? HouseBlastertalk21:53, 21 October 2023 (UTC)
Yes, if you don't request that the bot handle things, then the closer needs to take care of things. Really, ask Marco about doing this, he handles these closures all of the time and he executes these closures flawlessly. Right now, I've tagged Category:9th-century women from East Francia for CSD C1 because it still is empty. LizRead!Talk!01:09, 22 October 2023 (UTC)
If you think this page should not be deleted for this reason, you may contest the nomination by visiting the page and clicking the button labelled "Contest this speedy deletion". This will give you the opportunity to explain why you believe the page should not be deleted. However, be aware that once a page is tagged for speedy deletion, it may be deleted without delay. Please do not remove the speedy deletion tag from the page yourself, but do not hesitate to add information in line with Wikipedia's policies and guidelines. jp×g23:13, 21 October 2023 (UTC)
Sorry, there's not really a good reason to notify you about this, Twinkle did it by accident. jp×g05:49, 22 October 2023 (UTC)
Feedback request: Wikipedia policies and guidelines request for comment
If you're closing a category discussion can you please list the category at Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Working (you can put it on the talk page if you can't edit the main page). That way a bot can process it properly. Manually redirecting does not move the articles or the page history. Thanks in advance. Timrollpickering (talk) 11:52, 23 October 2023 (UTC)
No, RussBot is set to ignore redirects of less than seven days old precisely to prevent tampering. Nor does it actually move the category & history. Timrollpickering (talk) 14:57, 23 October 2023 (UTC)
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
There is a new Language and internationalization newsletter, written quarterly. It contains updates on new feature development, improvements in various language-related technical projects, and related support work.
Source map support has been enabled on all wikis. When you open the debugger in your browser's developer tools, you should be able to see the unminified JavaScript source code. [58]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 24 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 25 October. It will be on all wikis from 26 October (calendar).
I just signed up. However, I did not realize that my name will be public, so I need help in changing my user name. Thanks. --Azeb Clark (talk) 16:47, 24 October 2023 (UTC)
@Azeb Clark: You have two options. The first is to just request a rename at Special:GlobalRenameRequest. However, anyone will still be possible to see what your username was previously by looking at the rename log. Now, many people do not look at the rename log, but it will still be publicly accessible.The second way is to log out first (you can click here to log out) and then create a brand new account (if you do not log out, people will be able to see that "Azeb Clark" created a new account). If you choose this option, only certain users will be able to see that your old account. These users are called "CheckUsers", and they are only allowed to "check" if they are investigating disruption to the project. And nobody – not even CheckUsers – will be able to see this after 90 days. If you choose this option, you probably will be assigned a new mentor. Do not try to contact me, because that will make it very easy for someone to figure out who you are. Best,HouseBlastertalk17:58, 24 October 2023 (UTC)
Not super well versed in ArbCom proceedings, but now that you mention it, <strong>...</strong> seems more appropriate. And thank you for the barnstar!HouseBlastertalk01:59, 30 October 2023 (UTC)
Red links left after CFD
Hello!
Thanks for your involvement in closing CFD discussion. However I noticed that some back links are left.
Is there not a process where the users or admins implementing the close check the incoming links? In my understanding it's never done automatically. Incoming category links are usually this kind of horizontal bridges placed to precise scope and avoid confusion, and a bot would not be able to adapt them. I'm not sure who does what in such case, so sorry if you're the wrong person. Place Clichy (talk) 10:42, 26 October 2023 (UTC)
@Place Clichy: Hi! The procedure I follow when closing CfDs – the NAC section of CFDAI – is silent on the matter, but it appears that the non-non-admin-closure directions include instructions to deal with backlinks. I think it makes the most sense to add a pointer in the NAC section saying that these things should be done by the closer before/in addition to listing at WT:CFDW.HouseBlastertalk23:29, 28 October 2023 (UTC)
In theory an admin is supposed to address any backlinks when they remove the entry from WP:CFDW. That process has been backlogged lately (like everything else CfD related) because of the high volume of CfDs and relatively few active admins there, so I didn't get around to backlink checking this entry until now (and thus saw this discussion). * Pppery *it has begun...03:05, 30 October 2023 (UTC)
Hi HouseBlaster and thank you for the suggested improvements! I have read over the deletion discussion that you mention and in this article it appears all prior concerns have been addressed and corrected accordingly. The artist’s career has progressed significantly since 2022 and the content is new :-)
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 Structured Content team, as part of its project of improving UploadWizard on Commons, made some UX improvements to the upload step of choosing own vs not own work (T347590), as well as to the licensing step for own work (T347756).
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 31 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 1 November. It will be on all wikis from 2 November (calendar).
Listings on category pages are sorted on each wiki for that language using a library. For a brief period on 2 November, changes to categories will not be sorted correctly for many languages. This is because the developers are upgrading to a new version of the library. They will then use a script to fix the existing categories. This will take a few hours or a few days depending on how big the wiki is. You can read more. [59][60]
Starting November 1, the impact module (Special:Impact) will be upgraded by the Growth team. The new impact module shows newcomers more data regarding their impact on the wiki. It was tested by a few wikis during the last few months. [61]
WikiProject Articles for creation is holding a month long Backlog Drive!
The goal of this drive is to reduce the backlog of unreviewed drafts to less than 2 months outstanding reviews from the current 4+ months. Bonus points will be given for reviewing drafts that have been waiting more than 30 days. The drive is running from 1 November 2023 through 30 November 2023.
With regards to this draft, would you advise submitting it for review as part of the Articles for Creation process, or moving it into the mainspace myself? I hesitate to move the draft only because I am still a fairly new editor.
Thanks for enlightening me. I don't come too often at CfD, so am less familiar with its procedures as, say, AfD. Cheers! --Randykitty (talk) 18:15, 1 November 2023 (UTC)
Please add Charles Ballay, MD to the Libertarian Candidates for President 2024
Can you please add Charles Ballay, MD for President in the Libertarian Candidates for President 2024. I am new to wikipedia editing and the information that I added was deleted. I will admit, I am not widely known on wikipedia or the internet. My website is www.Ballay2024.com. I can be referenced through the declared candidates on the FEC website. I can be searched on internet for as Dr Charles Ballay, an Otolaryngology doctor, practicing in Marrero, Louisiana.
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
In the Vector 2022 skin, the default font-size of a number of navigational elements (tagline, tools menu, navigational links, and more) has been increased slightly to match the font size used in page content. [62]
Problems
Last week, there was a problem displaying some recent edits on a few wikis, for 1-6 hours. The edits were saved but not immediately shown. This was due to a database problem. [63]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 7 November. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 8 November. It will be on all wikis from 9 November (calendar).
The Growth team will reassign newcomers from former mentors to the currently active mentors. They have also changed the notification language to be more user-friendly. [64][65]
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Last week, users who previously visited Meta-Wiki or Wikimedia Commons and then became logged out on those wikis could not log in again. The problem is now resolved. [70]
Last week, some pop-up dialogs and menus were shown with the wrong font size. The problem is now resolved. [71]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 14 November. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 15 November. It will be on all wikis from 16 November (calendar).
Future changes
Reference Previews are coming to many wikis as a default feature. They are popups for references, similar to the PagePreviews feature. You can opt out of seeing them. If you are using the gadgets Reference Tooltips or Navigation Popups, you won’t see Reference Previews. Deployment is planned for November 22, 2023.
Canary (also known as heartbeat) events will be produced into Wikimedia event streams from December 11. Streams users are advised to filter out these events, by discarding all events where meta.domain == "canary". Updates to Pywikibot or wikimedia-streams will discard these events by default. [72]
@CELBANPrep Publishing: Hello, and welcome! Great questions. I have been "officially" mentoring since April. I currently mentor a little over 500 users, but only 25ish have actually asked me a question. Let me know if you need any other help!HouseBlastertalk00:36, 16 November 2023 (UTC)
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Changes later this week
There is no new MediaWiki version this week. [73][74]
Starting on Wednesday, a new set of Wikipedias will get "Add a link" (Quechua Wikipedia, Romansh Wikipedia, Romani Wikipedia, Rundi Wikipedia, Aromanian Wikipedia, Tarandíne Wikipedia, Rusyn Wikipedia, Kinyarwanda Wikipedia, Sanskrit Wikipedia, Sakha Wikipedia, Santali Wikipedia, Sardinian Wikipedia, Sicilian Wikipedia, Scots Wikipedia, Sindhi Wikipedia, Northern Sami Wikipedia, Sango Wikipedia, Serbo-Croatian Wikipedia, Sinhala Wikipedia, Slovak Wikipedia, Slovenian Wikipedia, Samoan Wikipedia, Somali Wikipedia, Albanian Wikipedia, Serbian Wikipedia, Sranan Tongo Wikipedia, Swati Wikipedia, Southern Sotho Wikipedia, Saterland Frisian Wikipedia, Sundanese Wikipedia, Silesian Wikipedia, Tamil Wikipedia, Tulu Wikipedia, Telugu Wikipedia, Tetum Wikipedia, Tajik Wikipedia, Thai Wikipedia, Turkmen Wikipedia, Tagalog Wikipedia, Tswana Wikipedia, Tongan Wikipedia, Tok Pisin Wikipedia, Turkish Wikipedia, Tsonga Wikipedia, Tatar Wikipedia, Twi Wikipedia, Tahitian Wikipedia, Tuvinian Wikipedia, Udmurt Wikipedia, Uyghur Wikipedia, Uzbek Wikipedia, Venda Wikipedia, Venetian Wikipedia, Veps Wikipedia, West Flemish Wikipedia, Volapük Wikipedia). This is part of the progressive deployment of this tool to more Wikipedias. The communities can configure how this feature works locally. [75][76][77]
The Vector 2022 skin will have some minor visual changes to drop-down menus, column widths, and more. These changes were added to four Wikipedias last week. If no issues are found, these changes will proceed to all wikis this week. These changes will make it possible to add new menus for readability and dark mode. Learn more. [78]
I accidentally edited a page without being logged in and now my ip address is showing. I logged in and tried deleting myself but it is not removed - can you help? --Drolma108 (talk) 17:12, 23 November 2023 (UTC)
@Drolma108: Hello! To handle things like this, you should email the oversight team. They can "oversight" edits, which hides them from everyone – including administrators. I have done so in this case, and the details in question have already been removed. Do not request oversight by making a post on Wikipedia, as that draws attention to the information (see the Streisand effect). Best,HouseBlastertalk20:45, 25 November 2023 (UTC)
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 28 November. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 29 November. It will be on all wikis from 30 November (calendar). There is no new MediaWiki version next week. [79][80]
MediaWiki's JavaScript system will now allow async/await syntax in gadgets and user scripts. Gadget authors should remember that users' browsers may not support it, so it should be used appropriately. [81]
The deployment of "Add a link" announced last week was postponed. It will resume this week.
Hello! Voting in the 2023 Arbitration Committee elections is now open until 23:59 (UTC) on Monday, 11 December 2023. All eligible users are allowed to vote. Users with alternate accounts may only vote once.
The Arbitration Committee is the panel of editors responsible for conducting the Wikipedia arbitration process. It has the authority to impose binding solutions to disputes between editors, primarily for serious conduct disputes the community has been unable to resolve. This includes the authority to impose site bans, topic bans, editing restrictions, and other measures needed to maintain our editing environment. The arbitration policy describes the Committee's roles and responsibilities in greater detail.
@Rabeeh wiki: Hi! You might be interested in Wikipedia:WikiProject Technology ("WikiProjects" are groups of editors dedicated to improving specific types of articles). I will also leave a message on your talk page which will automatically be replaced by a bot with a list of potential articles to work on. Best,HouseBlastertalk14:49, 1 December 2023 (UTC)
This first meeting language will be English, but we plan to host conversations in other languages, and about other topics. Please visit the conversation page on-wiki for the details on how to join. You can also watch the page, or suggest ideas for upcoming conversations there.
Impact Module
At the beginning of November 2023, the Growth team deployed the New Impact Module to all Wikipedias. We recently released a follow up improvement to how edit data was displayed based on editor feedback. [82]
Developers can find some initial proof of concept code shared on gitlab.
Mentorship
When a mentor marked themselves as "Away", they were not getting their name assigned to new accounts when they returned. This has been fixed. [86]
We improved the message received by newcomers when their mentor quits, to reduce confusion. [87]
We worked on ensuring that all mentees are assigned to an active mentor. This required reassigning mentees with no mentors to a new mentor. We paused this as the clean-up script confused some editors. We will resume it when the identified blockers are resolved. [88]
It is now possible to create an Abuse Filter to prevent one user from signing up as a mentor. [89]
@Andazimeta: that is a really good question! Two or three good quality sources are required to establish "notability" (this is sometimes called the "golden rule of Wikipedia"). However, any information within an article needs to be verifiable. So: at least two or three, but really as many as are needed to verify everything in the article. When in doubt, cite!I would be more than happy to take a look at any specific article you have a question about. Best,HouseBlastertalk03:57, 1 December 2023 (UTC)
Hi! Thank you so much, I appreciate it. I'll let you know when I have an article ready, thanks for offering to take a look at it. Andazimeta (talk) 17:05, 4 December 2023 (UTC)
Question from Huntdailynews (22:50, 4 December 2023)
Sir, I want to change my username. Can you suggest to me how? I added a person's information here. I found the information about that person not available anywhere. So I try to add it here. Now how can I add the person's information here? --Huntdailynews (talk) 22:50, 4 December 2023 (UTC)
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
The spacing between paragraphs on Vector 2022 has been changed from 7px to 14px to match the size of the text. This will make it easier to distinguish paragraphs from sentences. [90]
The "Sort this page by default as" feature in VisualEditor is working again. You no longer need to switch to source editing to edit {{DEFAULTSORT:...}} keywords. [91]
Changes later this week
There is no new MediaWiki version this week. [92][93]
Registration & Scholarship applications are now open for the Wikimedia Hackathon 2024 that will take place from 3–5 May in Tallinn, Estonia. Scholarship applications are open until 5 January 2024.
Hi there, I am a retired (old school) NP editor. Not sure I know how to get started and how to interact. Any "let's get started" advice would be appreciated. --MissMoochie1952 (talk) 12:09, 5 December 2023 (UTC)
@MissMoochie1952: hello, and welcome! I have sent you a "welcome" message which contains a bunch of helpful links. The best advice I can give you is to be bold in improving Wikipedia!To get started, there are a bunch of "tasks" listed at the task center. I would also recommend checking out Category:All articles needing copy edit, which lists articles that, well, need a copy edit. You can click the "random page in this category" button, or you can filter by a specific genre of article.If you have any other questions please do not hesitate to ask. I am more than happy to help! Best,HouseBlastertalk12:33, 5 December 2023 (UTC)
@Thinker78: I'd be happy to elaborate. Editors do not need to rebut every point raised in opposition to a proposal for it to succeed. Your reference to WP:PARENTCAT was fully rebutted: WP:PARENTCAT is a guideline cautioning against putting an article in a category and one of its parents, which had nothing to do with the categories under discussion. You quoted from WP:EPONYMOUS and WP:CATMAIN, but did not explain why they were relevant. You cited WP:CATDEF, but that also was not a strong argument. Indeed, you rebutted it yourself later in the discussion when you quoted WP:CAT#TREE: For example, Category:France contains articles relating to the topic France.Outline of France is not "a France" (c.f. "awards honoring politicians" are not "a politician"), but is still in Category:France. In your last argument, you cited WP:CAT#TREE. Your quote missed the ending of that section: Sometimes, for convenience, the two types can be combined, to create a set-and-topic category. With all due respect, the reason people did not fully engage with your arguments is because they were not valid arguments. If you still disagree with my close, feel free to take it to WP:DRV.On a separate but related note, I disagree that it was a contentious discussion, given you were the only one opposed to the merge. Best,HouseBlastertalk18:53, 6 December 2023 (UTC)
I requested the rationale of your closure, it was unnecessary your speculation that "the reason people did not fully engage with your arguments is because they were not valid arguments". If you are saying that my arguments are not valid, that actually requires a discussion of its own. Because it makes me wonder whether you or other editors spent a while as I did analyzing the context or was it just passing 5-minute comments.
If it is the latter I would think your judgment may be due to lack of more in-depth analysis than my arguments not being valid. In that situation, your argument could be not valid and actually could be lacking. Not saying that's the case, but it is a possibility. I think it would have been more appropriate and neutral if you said something like, "After analyzing the thread, I found other editors having more weight in their arguments. The reason being...".
There was a whole context that I linked that I thought I didn't need to duplicate in the discussion. I did say, "It was precisely to try to solve a problem that I created the category. Check the thread at Category talk:Political families of the United States#Political families are not politicians." I don't know if you were able to check that because that was the motivation I created the category at hand.
It is unclear why you think my explanation of CATDFEF is rebutted by myself later in the discussion with CAT#TREE. You are quoting the info about a "topic category", which I included for context but I did not say Category:Politicians is a topic category. On the contrary, I said it is a "set category". Therefore, Category:Politicians, should not contain tangentially related topics as Category:France does. So I am left wondering if your argument is valid.
"Sometimes, for convenience, the two types can be combined, to create a set-and-topic category." Yes, but I don't think it is the case in Category:Politicians, which is why I created Category:Politicians' topics. And at the end I wasn't opposed to the category being deleted (Category:Politics could serve the purpose) but I do oppose the merge. Thinker78(talk)21:04, 6 December 2023 (UTC)
I fully realize that this is a good-faith disagreement; I am not trying to be difficult.You just identified the problem, twice: On the contrary, I said it is a "set category" and I don't think it is the case in Category:Politicians (emphasis mine). Consensus, in this instance, is that Category:Politicians ought to be a set-and-topic category.HouseBlastertalk23:39, 6 December 2023 (UTC)
As one of the people who tried to engage with Thinker78, I think that HouseBlaster drew the correct inference.
> With all due respect, the reason people did not fully engage with your arguments is because they were not valid arguments.
I *really* tried to engage, but felt like I was hitting a brick wall. As good-faith as Thinker was intended to be, they didn't really engage with the criticisms/concerns being raised by others. Mason (talk) 03:04, 7 December 2023 (UTC)
The problem of your approach Mason is that you were trying to use a discussion thread in CfD to in effect (not saying you intended to do so) publicly belittle me by stating how I was misinterpreting things, that I wasn't getting it, that you have superior knowledge (no you did not literally said this but it was in essence how you were stating things) and that you were going to teach me how things work. That to me was highly inappropriate the way you stated it. As I indicated before, you have your interpretation, I have mine interpretations, others have theirs and discussion threads are to seek consensus not to preach how much superior is your knowledge and how much inferior is mine.
Others have approached me in my talk page with due respect and I have been opened to their teachings, even though they didn't said they were going to teach me. They advised, they shared insights. And I welcome them. That's how I even learned about PetScan, from Oculi. But if you come at me in a CfD berating me or belittling me, you are getting the cold shoulder. It really amazes me I have to point this out. Sincerely, Thinker78(talk)04:27, 7 December 2023 (UTC)
Well, its unfortunate that you're interpreting my questions as belittling or that you're inferring that I think I have superior knowledge. I am/was trying to understand your argument and get you to consider other people's. But, every time I tried, you didn't engage with the argument and instead seemed to take it as a personal affront. I appricaite you explaining your perspective, even if you seem "amazed" that it is neccessary. I had not considered the distinction between the CfD and a talk page, because I tend to view them as equally public. Mason (talk) 00:08, 11 December 2023 (UTC)
Regardless, in the future, I will try to be more mindful of my word choice as I am sorry that you drew an inference that I thought you to be incompetant, by using the word competent (or something to that effect). It was a poor word choice. I don't view you that way; I just don't understand your perspective on categories, as it seems to be extremely different. Typically, my approach is to ask questions to gauge what the other person's understanding/perspective is based on. But, well, I guess your interpretation will remain a mystery to me. Mason (talk) 00:21, 11 December 2023 (UTC)
Hello, HouseBlaster. This is a bot-delivered message letting you know that Draft:Amgen Inc. v. Sanofi, a page you created, has not been edited in at least 5 months. Drafts that have not been edited for six months may be deleted, so if you wish to retain the page, please edit it again or request that it be moved to your userspace.
If the page has already been deleted, you can request it be undeleted so you can continue working on it.
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
On Wikimedia Commons, there are some minor user-interface improvements for the "choosing own vs not own work" step in the UploadWizard. This is part of the Structured Content team's project of improving UploadWizard on Commons. [95][96]
Problems
There was a problem showing the Newcomer homepage feature with the "impact module" and their page-view graphs, for a few days in early December. This has now been fixed. [97][98]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 12 December. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 13 December. It will be on all wikis from 14 December (calendar). [99][100]
Future changes
The 2023 Developer Satisfaction Survey is seeking the opinions of the Wikimedia developer community. Please take the survey if you have any role in developing software for the Wikimedia ecosystem. The survey is open until 5 January 2024, and has an associated privacy statement.
Hello, you marked this cat for moving to "Shin Chae-ho" and it hasn't yet been moved. I'm not sure if you're the right person to contact, but just wanted to get the ball rolling on it. toobigtokale (talk) 12:05, 12 December 2023 (UTC)
@Toobigtokale: hi! Normally these eventually get processed by a bot (like everything at CfD, there is a chronic backlog...). Since it is such a small category, I have gone ahead and done this one manually.HouseBlastertalk13:41, 12 December 2023 (UTC)
Feedback request: Wikipedia policies and guidelines request for comment
Hi HouseBlaster, thank you for closing the CFD I nominated, I was hoping to action on the result (dabify) and was wondering how exactly to go about doing that. I had a read of the disambiguation guidance but it doesn't say much about categories. Since it's a category would the disam. page just include links to the other "Children's Books set in New York..." categories? Thanks, LewcmTalk to me!21:14, 15 December 2023 (UTC)
You have this empty category listed for a speedy rename but I don't see it listed at that CFD section. Did you change your mind? If so, could you untag it for a rename and instead tag it for CSD C1? Thank you. LizRead!Talk!20:43, 17 December 2023 (UTC)
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Tech News
The next issue of Tech News will be sent out on 8 January 2024 because of the holidays.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 19 December. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 20 December. It will be on all wikis from 21 December (calendar). There is no new MediaWiki version next week. [101][102]
Starting December 18, it won't be possible to activate Structured Discussions on a user's own talk page using the Beta feature. The Beta feature option remains available for users who want to deactivate Structured Discussions. This is part of Structured Discussions' deprecation work. [103]
There will be full support for redirects in the Module namespace. The "Move Page" feature will leave an appropriate redirect behind, and such redirects will be appropriately recognized by the software (e.g. hidden from Special:UnconnectedPages). There will also be support for manual redirects. [104]
Future changes
The MediaWiki JavaScript documentation is moving to a new format. During the move, you can read the old docs using version 1.41. Feedback about the new site is welcome on the project talk page.
The Wishathon is a new initiative that encourages collaboration across the Wikimedia community to develop solutions for wishes collected through the Community Wishlist Survey. The first community Wishathon will take place from 15–17 March. If you are interested in a project proposal as a user, developer, designer, or product lead, you can register for the event and read more.
Hi HouseBlaster! I found your name on the participants list at WikiProject Edit requests and was hoping you could get involved at an edit request of mine where the ensuing discussion has stalled for lack of participation, here: Talk:Thoma Bravo#Next few requests.
For context, one part of the request was declined without a given reason. Additionally, in this edit, several well-sourced pieces of information were removed from the article, for reasons that I believe are off-base (I explain in greater detail in the talk page discussion). I pinged the editor who initially answered the request, but he did not respond. Thanks a lot! JBarTB (talk) 14:49, 20 December 2023 (UTC)
@JBarTB: Hi! The source you provided for the second edit is "dead", so I am unable to assess whether it ought to be included.As for the information that was removed, I am going to leave Spintendo a note. He does respond to a lot of edit requests, so I would assume he missed the ping. Looking at the removals, I agree with some of them and disagree with others. For example, the sentence
In October 2019, Thoma Bravo’s co-founder and managing partner, Orlando Bravo, was named the first Puerto Rican-born billionaire as he debuted at 287th place on the Forbes 400 ranking of the wealthiest Americans.
is a textbook case of a WP:COATRACK. On the other hand,
According to public data analyzed by Forbes, its funds returned 30% net annually. Since 2015, Thoma Bravo has sold or listed 25 investments worth $20 billion, four times their cost.
You tagged this category for a speedy rename but it is empty and it hasn't been renamed. Do you want to remove this CFD tag and retag it CSD C1? Just wondering what to do in the middle of another process that no longer seems necessary. LizRead!Talk!01:24, 23 December 2023 (UTC)
Hello HouseBlaster, may you be surrounded by peace, success and happiness on this seasonal occasion. Spread the WikiLove by wishing another user a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year, whether it be someone you have had disagreements with in the past, a good friend, or just some random person. Sending you heartfelt and warm greetings for Christmas and New Year 2024. Happy editing,
— Qwerfjkltalk08:32, 25 December 2023 (UTC)
New year, new scripts. Welcome to the 23rd issue of the Wikipedia Scripts++ Newsletter, covering around 39% of our favorite new and updated user scripts since 24 December 2021. That’s right, we haven’t published in two years! Can you believe it? Did you miss us?
Got anything good? Tell us about your new, improved, old, or messed-up script here!
User:Alexander Davronov/HistoryHelper has now become stable with some bugfixes and features such as automatically highlighting potentially uncivil edit summaries and automatically pinging all the users selected.
To a lesser extent, the same goes for User:PrimeHunter/Search sort.js. I wish someone would integrate the sorts into the sort menu instead of adding 11 portlet links.
Aaron Liu: Watchlyst Greybar Unsin is a rewrite of Ais's Watchlist Notifier with modern APIs and several new features such as not displaying watchlist items marked as seen (hence the name), not bolding diffs of unseen watchlist elements which doesn’t work properly anyways, displaying the rendered edit summary, proper display of log and creation actions and more links.
Alexis Jazz: Factotum is a spiritual successor to reply-link with a host of extra features like section adding, link rewriting, regular expressions and more.
User:Aveaoz/AutoMobileRedirect: This script will automatically redirect MobileFrontend (en.m.wikipedia) to normal Wikipedia. Unlike existing scripts, this one will actually check if your browser is mobile or not through its secret agent string, so you can stay logged in on mobile! Hooray screen estate!
Deputy is a first-of-its-kind copyright cleanup toolkit. It overrides the interface for Wikipedia:Contributor copyright investigations for easy case processing. It also includes the functionality of the following (also new) scripts:
User:Elominius/gadget/diff arrow keys allows navigation between diffs with the arrow keys. It also has a version that requires holding Ctrl with the arrow key.
Frequently link to Wikipedia on your websites yet find generating CC-BY credits to be such a hassle? Say no more! User:Luke10.27/attribute will automatically do it for ya and copy the credit to yer clipboard.
User:MPGuy2824/MoveToDraft, a spiritual successor (i.e. fork) to Evad37's script, with a few bugs solved, and a host of extra features like check-boxes for choosing draftification reasons, multi-contributor notification, and appropriate warnings based on last edit time.
/CopyCodeBlock: one of the most important operations for any scripter and script-user is to copy and paste. This script adds a copy button in the top right of every code block (not to be confused with <code>) that will, well, copy it to your clipboard!
m:User:NguoiDungKhongDinhDanh/AceForLuaDebugConsole.js adds the Ace editor (a.k.a. the editor you see when editing JS, CSS and Lua on Wikimedia wikis) to the Lua debug console. "In my opinion, whoever designed it to be a plain <textarea> needs to seriously reconsider their decision."
GANReviewTool quickly and easily closes good article nominations.
ReviewStatus displays whether or not a mainspace page is marked as reviewed.
SpeciesHelper tries to add the correct speciesbox, category, taxonbar, and stub template to species articles.
User:Opencooper/svgReplace and Tol's fork replaces all rasterized SVGs with their original SVG codes for your loading pleasures. Tell us which one is better!
ArticleInfo displays page information at the top of the page, directly below the title.
/HeaderIcons takes away the Vector 2022 user dropdown and replaces it with all of the icons within, top level, right next to the Watchlist. One less click away! There's also an alternate version that uses text links instead of icons.
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
mediawiki2latex is a tool that converts wiki content into the formats of LaTeX, PDF, ODT, and EPUB. The code now runs many times faster due to recent improvements. There is also an optional Docker container you can install on your local machine.
The way that Random pages are selected has been updated. This will slowly reduce the problem of some pages having a lower chance of appearing. [105]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 9 January. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 10 January. It will be on all wikis from 11 January (calendar). [106][107]
Really late, but why did you close this as "no consensus but leaning towards keep" when there was unanimous opposition to the nomination? InfiniteNexus (talk) 06:07, 15 January 2024 (UTC)
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
Pages that use the JSON contentmodel will now use tabs instead of spaces for auto-indentation. This will significantly reduce the page size. [108]
Gadgets and personal user scripts may now use JavaScript syntax introduced in ES6 (also known as "ES2015") and ES7 ("ES2016"). MediaWiki validates the source code to protect other site functionality from syntax errors, and to ensure scripts are valid in all supported browsers. Previously, Gadgets could use the requiresES6 option. This option is no longer needed and will be removed in the future. [109]
An update on the status of the Community Wishlist Survey for 2024 has been published. Please read and give your feedback.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 16 January. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 17 January. It will be on all wikis from 18 January (calendar). [112][113]
Starting on January 17, it will not be possible to login to Wikimedia wikis from some specific old versions of the Chrome browser (versions 51–66, released between 2016 and 2018). Additionally, users of iOS 12, or Safari on Mac OS 10.14, may need to login to each wiki separately. [114]
The jquery.cookie module was deprecated and replaced with the mediawiki.cookie module last year. A script has now been run to replace any remaining uses, and this week the temporary alias will be removed. [115]
@ChappellRoanFan: hi! Thank you so much for your contributions to Wikipedia – truly. It is because of efforts just like yours that we have such an amazing resource. I have gone ahead and made the edit to fix the problem. The keyword "rowspan" determines how many "rows" a piece of text "spans", so I increased its value by one so it would "span" an additional row. Please let me know if you have any additional questions, because the only way a question is stupid is if you don't ask it! Best,HouseBlaster (talk · he/him) 01:04, 18 January 2024 (UTC)
Hey there @HouseBlaster. So I did something incorrectly but only realized AFTER I did so. There were quite a few open Cfds and I decided to close the ones where there was a clear opinion. However, I closed two where I myself had given an opinion. I only realized afterwards. My fault entirely, I completely missed my vote on those Cfds and I will take care in future.
I usually tend not to close Cfds (I know you and one other handle it) but there were a lot of them open for the past two days which should have been closed. So my question is should I reopen the ones I closed where I had given an opinion and if so how can I? Or should I leave them be? Omnis Scientia (talk) 20:18, 20 January 2024 (UTC)
Hi! I actually tried to write on the "Land Grant for colleges and Universities". I don't know if you got it or not....probably the wrong spot.....sorry. My concern is that Jonathan Baldwin Turner is really the founder and "Father of the Land Grant System". Too much credit is given to the legislator, and not enough to the conceptual inventor of the idea. Coincidentally, he is my 2nd great grandfather. All of us, and related to him, know that he was a professor of agriculture and protecting the farms with the orange hedge, which was popularly planted.My great great grandfather was a very vocal person and definitely got up and gave speeches and I would think probably contacted Lincoln or Morrill. Turner is well-known in Nebraska as the father of the Land Grant system. There are a couple of beautiful murals of Turner, Morrill, and Lincoln in a couple of college libraries I believe. I do have a photo of one or both of these murals I believe when you talked about the Morrill and the wonderful college system, my great great grandfather probably the founder of the idea being he was in a college. He is really the brains behind the creation and espoused it
before a bill was even passed. This is what I think, have heard and really it makes sense. I believe that you should check Nebraska for the true history about this man, Jonathan Baldwin, Turner. He was a huge thinker, and was always getting up given speeches. He was a true abolitionist, and was at the end of the underground railroad. This was not a man who stepped back and let things happen, he was probably more than likely the originator of the concept. Please check this out. I believe that the articles/biographies connected to the Land grant system should ALL initially be connected to Turner first and then related to the support team which brought the whole idea to fruition. Thank you so much for your thoughts/ research on this issue! I believe my 2nd great grandfather was probably the initiator of the land grant idea. --Creative Lizzie (talk) 23:29, 20 January 2024 (UTC)
@Creative Lizzie: hi! First, welcome to Wikipedia! Land-grant university says that The concept of publicly funded agricultural and technical educational institutions first rose to national attention through the efforts of Jonathan Baldwin Turner in the late 1840s, but we would need reliable sources to confirm that Turner created the idea. We have a policy against original research, so we cannot go through primary sources ourselves to determine who came up with the idea.HouseBlaster (talk · he/him) 00:44, 21 January 2024 (UTC)
Your decision to close as no consensus is not accurate of the conversation. The reasoning of the "keep" votes was addressed and they were not invited back to address the counterpoints. I'd seriously consider re-opening this discussion and pinging the participants or I'm going to just nominate them again. –Aidan721 (talk) 02:23, 21 January 2024 (UTC)
@Aidan721: When I closed the discussion, I read the !votes made by @Namiba and Aboutmovies as opposition to dealing with just some of the categories in the school buildings tree. Upon re-reading the discussion, my initial assessment stands. I think a (re)nomination of the entire tree would address both of their concerns. (Discussions at XfD are rarely relisted three times.)HouseBlaster (talk · he/him) 02:41, 21 January 2024 (UTC)
Thank you for closing this discussion. Would you mind also closing the one immediately above and also the one two down, because then I can update the template in one step to stop these being populated. Cheers! — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 21:01, 20 January 2024 (UTC)
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Problems
A bug in UploadWizard prevented linking to the userpage of the uploader when uploading. It has now been fixed. [116]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 23 January. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 24 January. It will be on all wikis from 25 January (calendar). [117][118]
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
Starting Monday January 29, all talk pages messages' timestamps will become a link. This link is a permanent link to the comment. It allows users to find the comment they are looking for, even if this comment was moved elsewhere. This will affect all wikis except for the English Wikipedia. You can read more about this change on Diff or on Mediawiki.org. [119]
There are some improvements to the CAPTCHA to make it harder for spam bots and scripts to bypass it. If you have feedback on this change, please comment on the task. Staff are monitoring metrics related to the CAPTCHA, as well as secondary metrics such as account creations and edit counts.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 30 January. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 31 January. It will be on all wikis from 1 February (calendar). [120][121]
Gadgets which only work in some skins have sometimes used the targets option to limit where you can use them. This will stop working this week. You should use the skins option instead. [123]
