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Wikipedia:Village pump (miscellaneous)/Archive 59

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Village pump (miscellaneous) archive  

This page contains discussions that have been archived from Village pump (miscellaneous). Please do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to revive any of these discussions, either start a new thread or use the talk page associated with that topic.

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Press coverage

I don't think many Wikipedians know this, but we have Press coverage pages. I'd welcome your input at Wikipedia talk:Press coverage 2018#Social Science Computer Review at Wikipedia:Press coverage 2017. It's a little more interesting than it sounds, ANI is mentioned. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 11:11, 28 May 2018 (UTC)

Ideological bias on Wikipedia

The article was nominated for deletion, so I'm posting notice of Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Ideological bias on Wikipedia here for wider community input. Atsme📞📧 15:33, 28 May 2018 (UTC)

White Helmets controversy RfC

There is a Request for Comment regarding a controversy at the White Helmets page. Any editor reading this is welcome to chime in. Best, GPRamirez5 (talk) 15:52, 30 May 2018 (UTC)

New Wikipedia Library Accounts Available Now (May 2018)


Hello Wikimedians!

 
The TWL OWL says sign up today!

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Expansions

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First designs for Special:Block with Granular blocks

The Anti-Harassment Tools team enlisted the assistance of Alex Hollender, a User Experience designer at Wikimedia Foundation to create wireframe designs of the Special:Block with the Granular block feature included. Our first wireframes are based on the discussions on the Granular block talk page, Wishlist proposal, and Phabricator to date.

Because the Special:Block page is already at its limits with its current layout and we would like to propose a new organized layout for Special:Block. This will make it easier to add the granular blocking (page, category, namespace, etc) and whatever is to come in the future. All of the same functionality is available on this new layout, but in a more organized, step-by-step process.

Take a look at the wireframe and leave us your feedback. For the Anti-Harassment Tools team, SPoore (WMF), Trust & Safety, Community health initiative (talk) 19:07, 31 May 2018 (UTC)

Zooming Wikipedia page size

This question has been reposted at WP:Village pump (technical)
The following discussion has been closed. Please do not modify it.

It seems now, Wikipedia's display goes out of wack, when one zooms to over 150% size. GoodDay (talk) 22:07, 31 May 2018 (UTC)

Seems like a good post for VPT and also this is probably dependent on OS and browser. You might want to give more info. Killiondude (talk) 22:09, 31 May 2018 (UTC)

Expert review

 – --Pipetricker (talk) 08:07, 1 June 2018 (UTC)

WP:Tag needs professional help

WP:Tag/WP:TAG redirect somewhere else besides WP:Tags. None of these disambiguate nearly as many things as are necessary. I mean, I was trying to remember what way of putting parameters into <graph> would be equivalent to {{#tag:graph|etc}}, and looking up [[WP:#tag]] is hopeless because "#" wasn't a valid index character in 1980 and it won't be searchable in the year 198,000 either. But none of those redirects will get you to Help:Magic words, I can assure you. We need a super-duper disambiguation page to cover what I think must be hundreds of incompatible but similar-sounding meanings for the word "tag". I don't even understand all the uses of the word over at MediaWiki and how many are irrelevant to Wikipedia, they have ways of adding custom tags by which I mean stuff in < > and all sorts of fun stuff. I thought I should ask if anyone had suggestions for a way to organize it all. Wnt (talk) 23:20, 31 May 2018 (UTC)

You can certainly create such a dab page. Ruslik_Zero 08:27, 2 June 2018 (UTC)

EU Proposed Copyright changes 'Link Tax' and Wikipedia

The EU parliament is voting on proposed new copyright law (in 2 weeks no less) that may impact Wikipedia's ability to link to news websites (a proposed 'link tax' among other things such as "Making platforms directly liable for all copyright infringements by their users"). Could anyone with a background in law please review this and come back whether there is a concern for Wikipedia and if we should be worried? SoWhy?[1][2] — Insertcleverphrasehere (or here) 07:24, 4 June 2018 (UTC)

This looks exceedingly dangerous, exceedingly stupid ... and is being amazingly little covered by the press. If this is half as real as it looks, then we cannot trust the media to give even basic coverage of the most crucial issues; they are not media at all, only a vicious political censorship cartel. On the other hand, there is the possibility that somehow we are being misled. I want more data than I have to work with. [note: more data is available; see below]]
To quote [3]:

France, Italy, Spain and Portugal want to force upload filters on not-for-profit platforms (like Wikipedia) and on platforms that host only small amounts of copyrighted content (like startups). Even if platforms filter, they should still be liable for copyright infringements of their users under civil law, just not under criminal law.

What is clear here is that Wikipedia needs to do an overall analysis of this ASAP, including of course relevant articles. If the story holds up, then accommodation is not an option -- they don't have unlimited money to give away because editors want to cite their sources! In that case the WMF needs to get developers and legal personnel on basic housekeeping such as:
  • Blocking all connections from the European Union
  • Globally locking all accounts that a basic AI robot detects might be associated with an EU resident
  • Permanently disbanding Wikimedia France, Wikimedia Italy, Wikimedia Portugal, etc.
  • Liquidating all equipment and real estate in the EU
It should be noted that, due to numerical factors, it won't be effective for the WMF to allow local projects autonomy to make any banning decisions; they will have to take direct authority to exclude editors of many nationalities. It may be time to make it a strictly American project with no participation whatsoever permitted from other countries, save to make copies of the data if they are able to access it. Wnt (talk) 23:45, 4 June 2018 (UTC)
See also Jimbo Wales' comment thread and the banner proposal. Wnt (talk) 23:56, 4 June 2018 (UTC)
(pinged) Sorry, copyright law is not my field but this is something the WMF's lawyers probably can and should handle and not individual Wikipedias. Regards SoWhy 09:00, 5 June 2018 (UTC)
  • What is clear here is that Wikipedia's lawyers should be left to do an analysis of this on their own time, and that what we don't need is Chicken Little-level panic over what isn't our problem here. The foundation has lawyers for a reason, and it's not our place to do their job for them. It's our job to write encyclopedia articles. Full stop. --Jayron32 01:52, 8 June 2018 (UTC)
@Jayron32: WMF weighed in on this some time ago: [4] They are listed as a sponsoring organization at https://saveyourinternet.eu/ . It is a bad proposal for Wikipedia, at the level of creation, reuse, and sourcing of materials: [5] At User talk:Jimbo Wales the founder of Wikipedia is speaking out against it. Wnt (talk) 11:02, 8 June 2018 (UTC)
That's an opinion piece in a blog. Unless and until the WMF writes a directive telling me to do something different, it all means nothing. Still just chicken little. --Jayron32 11:51, 10 June 2018 (UTC)
I'm no expert, but from what I've heard of this, it would mean that editors such as myself would be unable to post fair use images, link to online sources (which would mean we can't cite web sources!!!  ), or even quote copyrighted material. It would make it nigh-on impossible for me to write a GA video game article, as that would generally require the use of a screenshot. If I'm right about this, it is extremely serious and needs a lot more attention than it is receiving. Adam9007 (talk) 21:02, 8 June 2018 (UTC)
  • The proposal is not yet law, and the exact wording is still TBD. This makes it currently not a legal issue, but a "political" one. A banner to make people aware was considered, but has received little support at WP:VPR, because apparently trying to protect our way of working on the Internet is too "political" and so shouldn't be done. We should try to avert the problem instead of sending our lawyers to deal with the fallout later. —Kusma (t·c) 11:58, 10 June 2018 (UTC)

Dome of the Rock

hello

the article of Dome of the Rock is protected and Some images & vector are waiting in the talk page to place in article gallery. Can anyone help me?

Seyyedalith (talk) 22:50, 9 June 2018 (UTC)

  Done--1233Talk 12:30, 10 June 2018 (UTC)

Language Filter

Hello,

until recently, there was a language filter extension for Wikipedia: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/language-filter-for-wikip/ibgceajjjioihilfcdppneoljcaofokk?hl=ru&gl=CZ Unfortunately, its development has been stopped.

This filter was absolutely indispensable. Lots (probably hundreds of millions) of users are bilingual and want switch between two languages, or want to switch to English because articles in their mother tongue are not as good. Examples of both/either of these conditions would be: English-Swedish, English-Latvian, English-German, English-French, English-Chinese, English-Spanish, ...

The Wikipedia language bar has lots of entries that are of no relevance to 99.99% of users. E.g. even though I grew up in South-West Germany, Wikipedia articles in the local dialect (Alemannic) are of no user to me whatsoever. Same goes for dozens of official languages that are simpliy irrelevant to 99%. The Chrome extension allowed users to define languages that would subsequently show up at the top of the list, and clearly emphasized visually. This was very very helpful and one of the most frequent clicks I did on Wikipedia.

Please implement this into Wikipedia ASAP. __________

PS. On a side not, I would also like to mention that in mobile view, it would be really helpful if at any point the user had access to a menu of the contents/headlines/sub-headlines of any given article - instead of having to scroll down for minutes in the hopes of searching what he is looking for.

--80.187.105.82 (talk) 13:18, 8 June 2018 (UTC)

This is already done by the built-in software, without the need for extensions. If the languages that appear initially are not the ones the user needs, the user can click the "More" button, and select the right language, and this language will subsequently appear in the initial list.
The list of languages on mobile devices works differently, but there's a plan to make it more similar. It will take some time to develop, however.
As for your last comments, this is also how it works on the mobile site: it initially shows the first paragraph and a list of headings. Perhaps you are using the desktop view on your phone? Scroll all the way down and tap on "Mobile view". --Amir E. Aharoni (talk) 20:55, 8 June 2018 (UTC)
Hello Amire80, thank you! -- However, I'm sorry to say that I seem to be unable to follow you. On my iphone 5s, when I go to any article and start reading, and at some point down the road (whilst reading some lengthy expanded paragraph) decide that I would like to jump to some later paragraph/topic, then this is very tedious. There is no menu that I can click to see an overview of the headlines of the complete Wikipedia article. Instead I must tap twice on the top of the iphone screen so I will see the introductory text. Then I have to scroll down a bit to see the various unexpanded headlines. Whilst scrolling through these, I will also have to un-expand any paragraphs that I have previously expanded. All of this just to get and overview of the headlines in the Wikipedia article. Mobile View is activated. I also find Mobile View and Desktop view are both on the extremes on mobile devices: Mobile View, even with small fonts, is far too simple, requiring lots of scrolling and wasting space, and having little structure/overview, and Desktop View is (of course) overkill. The fact that I still often go to Desktop view on my 4" (!) mobile device just to be able to get a grip on the article/get an overview shows where there problem is.
I also can't see how the Languages section (bottom of left vertical bar) works. I am mainly switching between English, German. I just want these two to appear at the top of the list, but instead they always appear at some random position so I have to search them. Granted, they are not suddenly hidden, but I still can't see the point. I would like my preferred languages to show up at the top, just like with the Chrome extension, this was so comfortable. Just imagine that icons in LibreOffice Writer or MS Word would always move their position within the icon bars...!
I hope there were no misunderstandings here; if so, I apologize. --Satellite7 (talk) 12:20, 10 June 2018 (UTC)
I'm not sure that I understand the problem with the mobilde view, but I suggest asking at the page mw:Extension talk:MobileFrontend.
As for languages, it's not random, but alphabetical. The list is no more than nine items long, and if there's an article in English or German (Deutsch), then it will appear in the alphabetical order of the language code as one of the nine items. When there are no more than items, finding the same two languages repeatedly shouldn't be too hard (this was actually researched and tested). --Amir E. Aharoni (talk) 13:05, 10 June 2018 (UTC)
Language filter: Here's what it used to look like (see also the description I gave it (headline of image) https://imgur.com/a/qXWlqeK I think it's great and I cannot see any advantage in mixing languages that are in frequent use by the user with languages he can't even decipher the names of. (Case closed...) :-)
Thank you for pointing me to the mobilefrontend page! And thank you for having responded to my questions. --Satellite7 (talk) 22:00, 10 June 2018 (UTC)

Watchlist changes

I watch changes to pages using my watchlist, but can I review changes that have been made to the watchlist itself? I removed some temporarily high-traffic pages from my watchlist planning to add them back later, but lost my list of which pages they were. Daask (talk) 14:43, 9 June 2018 (UTC)

The best place for this would be at WP:VPT but no, there is no history of a watchlist so changes to it are lost. I occasionally use the "Edit raw watchlist" link at the top, then copy all the content to a local text file so I can keep a history. Johnuniq (talk) 00:23, 10 June 2018 (UTC)
You might consider using Special:Recentchangeslinked on something like a User:Daask/High-traffic page in the future. --Izno (talk) 14:50, 10 June 2018 (UTC)

Most massive black hole

There is a need to make an article about the most massive black hole. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 109.185.175.84 (talk) 15:50, 11 June 2018 (UTC)

Check out Supermassive black hole – we don't have the means to compare them directly yet. --Zac67 (talk) 16:41, 11 June 2018 (UTC)

Two experiments: Eliciting New Editor Interest and Team effect

Hi all. This is Leila from WMF Research team. I'm reaching out to you to notify you about two experiments that we intend to run on enwiki over the course of the next 2 weeks (start time will likely be in the week of 2018-06-18, I will update this thread once we know if it can happen in that week from our end). Both experiments are on newcomers with the broad goal of helping a more diverse newcomer pool to stay on the projects for longer to contribute (each experiment has specific measurements). I'll explain them in some more depth below along with pointers:

Given the design of these experiments and the target audience, we do not expect them to negatively affect active editor workflows. If you have questions or comments about these experiments, please let me know. Thank you! --LZia (WMF) (talk) 00:58, 12 June 2018 (UTC)

Longest serving Wikipedians

I note that I have been contributing regularly for 14 years come the end of the month - who else has been around for 'a long time' (whether on a regular or occasional basis)? Jackiespeel (talk) 16:39, 16 May 2018 (UTC)

Congratulations! I've got nearly 13 years. --Zac67 (talk) 17:48, 16 May 2018 (UTC)
Check out the Category:Members of the Ten Year Society of Wikipedia editors and Wikipedia:List of Wikipedians in order of arrival/2001. Also Wikipedia:Wikipediholic. Rmhermen (talk) 17:49, 16 May 2018 (UTC)
Is there a 15-Year Society yet? I am a for-interest wikian. Jackiespeel (talk) 18:38, 16 May 2018 (UTC)
@Rmhermen: - How do people get added to Category:Members of the Ten Year Society of Wikipedia editors? Ross-c (talk) 10:05, 18 May 2018 (UTC)
Interesting! Where is there info about phase II & phase III? And what was the "slashdotting"? (btw, Thanks, Jackie, Zak, and esp Rmhermen! I saw your name on 2001 list! rags (talk) 14:12, 21 May 2018 (UTC)
@Ross-c: You just put the userbox on your page, see Wikipedia:Ten Year Society. --Zac67 (talk) 14:45, 21 May 2018 (UTC)
Thank you. Ross-c (talk) 18:13, 21 May 2018 (UTC)
I use {{User Wikipedian For}} to track how long I've been on Wikipedia. That template could be updated to auto-add people to categories. I have my 15 year mark coming up this year. Jason Quinn (talk) 06:49, 27 May 2018 (UTC)
Had an idea once: Using Echo and a bot to wish 50 users each day to have a happy Wikipedia birthday. I built a prototype, but figured I'd get flak for developing it. — Dispenser 10:47, 29 May 2018 (UTC)
Slashdotting = Slashdot effect. Smmurphy(Talk) 01:15, 5 June 2018 (UTC)
Me I think, but compared to yourself, I'm just a nipper. scope_creep (talk) 15:25, 11 June 2018 (UTC)
12 years, 10 months. Not much of a nipper. scope_creep (talk) 15:28, 11 June 2018 (UTC)
Anyone who contributes regularly (even 'occasional minor improvements') for a long period should be recognised.
Perhaps there could be the Wikipedian equivalent of the Clock of the Long Now (or a 'X has been active/an occasional contributor on Wikipedia for Y% of its life' 'whatsit' to put on one's userpage. Jackiespeel (talk) 16:46, 13 June 2018 (UTC)
I joined in November 2001. So over 16 years at the moment. Didn't know the Ten Year Society thing existed! -- Derek Ross | Talk 18:07, 13 June 2018 (UTC)

Wiki Loves Yerevan International edit-a-thon

 

For the purpose of increasing the number of Yerevan related content in the Internet, Wikimedia Armenia announces international one-month edit-a-thon from June 15 – July 15, 2018. You are kindly invited to get involved and start editing and improving articles about Yerevan.

Hope you'll enjoy editing and have fun during this interesting process.

One participant from the first 15 most written language Wikipedias with the most points will be invited to Yerevan to join the events organized in the frames of Yerevan 2800th anniversary. For more details please visit the edit-a-thon page on Meta.

See you soon in sunny Yerevan!--Lilit (WM AM) (talk) 12:59, 14 June 2018 (UTC)

How can the Interaction Timeline be useful in reporting to noticeboards?

The Anti-Harassment Tools team built the Interaction Timeline to make it easier to understand how two people interact and converse across multiple pages on a wiki. The tool shows a chronological list of edits made by two users, only on pages where they have both made edits within the provided time range. Our goals are to assist users to make well informed decisions in incidents of user misconduct and to keep on-wiki discussions civil and focused on evidence.

We're looking to add a feature to the Interaction Timeline that makes it easy to post statistics and information to an on-wiki discussion about user misconduct. We're discussing possible wikitext output on the project talk page, and we invite you to participate! Thank you, For the Anti-Harassment Tools team, SPoore (WMF), Trust & Safety, Community health initiative (talk) 21:38, 16 June 2018 (UTC)

Commons to en:Wiki

I recently became aware of the contributions to Commons by ACTVR. I haven't examined all of them, but those I have seen are carefully edited versions of older (but nevertheless presumably copyright) British company logos. I think that many, perhaps all, have their ("fair use"!) place in en:WP articles -- but not in Commons. I've put up one for deletion, and, in my nomination, mentioned the others. I think it would be beneficial if, for most (all?) of these files, somebody would upload it to en:WP with a different filename, switch the link in the article to this new upload, provide a fair use rationale, and perhaps do a couple of other things that I can't immediately think of. However, I cannot be that body: my "RL" has deadlines looming.

Alternatively, perhaps there already exists help for moving stuff such as this from Commons to en:WP; I don't know, and sorry but I lack the time needed to investigate. -- Hoary (talk) 13:57, 14 June 2018 (UTC)

I really don't have the time needed for this stuff, but I thought I'd do it for one file: File:MPP logo.jpg. I gave this a different filename, selected "fair use | logo", and wrote:

The logo of Micro Precision Products, in a JPEG edited by User:ACTVR, who in 2013 uploaded it to Commons as File:MPP logo.jpg, stating that it, together with a score of other logos was ACTVR's "Own work". Surely it instead should be presumed to be copyright, and should not be at Commons (and I am about to ask for its deletion).

Fair use rationale: The image is used to identify the company Micro Precision Products. Use of the logo is intended to help readers identify the company, assure readers that they have reached the relevant article containing critical commentary about the company, and illustrate the company's intended branding message in a way that would be laborious or impossible to express via words alone.

Source: Wikimedia Commons (File:MPP logo.jpg). User:ACTVR did not specify their source for this. The logo is identical to that shown on the back cover of Basil Skinner, Micro Precision Products: The MPP Story and the Products (Newquay, Cornwall: MPP Publications, 2004), to that shown in the advertisement for the MPP Monorail Camera that is reproduced on page 42 of this book, and also to that on the MPP Monorail Camera as shown in this advertisement.

But I was told: "This file is a duplicate of the following file: [File:MPP logo.jpg]" and "Please modify the file description below and try again." I don't know how I could constructively modify the file description. I could open the file with GIMP and fiddle with a few pixels and save as a different file, but this seems like cheating (and some bot might flag it as nefarious). What to do? (Not that I, this week, would be in a mood to do any of it.) -- Hoary (talk) 13:02, 15 June 2018 (UTC)
Attempt at discussion failed here; succeeded at commons:Commons:Village_pump#Moving_from_Commons_to_en:Wikipedia. If anyone here is interested, please go there. -- Hoary (talk) 22:23, 17 June 2018 (UTC)

Help with finding an essay

Hi. I read a Wikipedia essay a short while ago detailing how to avoid repetition. One of the things it detailed was that editors should avoid using different synonyms in repetetive text and instead shorten it. It mentioned that “title” shouldn’t be used as a synonym for “game” due to its ambiguity.

Could somebody please help me find this essay? I couldn’t find it at Wikipedia:Essay directory as I don’t remember what it is called. Interqwark talk contribs 06:12, 19 June 2018 (UTC)

@Interqwark: This search found Wikipedia:The problem with elegant variation, which matches your description. -- John of Reading (talk) 08:26, 19 June 2018 (UTC)
@John of Reading: Thank you! I searched for “repetition” in essays but couldn’t find it, for some reason. Interqwark talk contribs 08:31, 19 June 2018 (UTC)

IP-users 110.169.nnn.mmm

I'm not shure if I must report this here, but I could not find another place. Since early this year IP-users 110.169.nnn.mmm, where nnn=13 and nnn=12 were the busiest, have been contributing many times with "not existing template arguments". The pattern is always on one day many contributions are made, and only on that one day. Next time such a thing happens, it is the same pattern, but another address. Some examples: 110.169.13.23, 110.169.12.191. I could not find all edits by all 110.169.nnn.mmm addresses, but there must be more than those I noticed. --FredTC (talk) 14:56, 18 June 2018 (UTC)

See Special:Contributions/110.169.0.0/16 for any edits by 110.169.x.x. Johnuniq (talk) 23:19, 18 June 2018 (UTC)
Thank for explaining tis usage of Special:Contributions. Some analysis shows the pattern mentioned above is indeed more often present than I noticed. Some examples are: Ananda Mahidol 3 edits, Bhumibol Adulyadej 6 edits, Somchai Wongsawat 9 edits, and again, by the same IP Somchai Wongsawat 12 edits and Maha Thammaracha 12 edits. I cannot judge every edit, but many of such edits had to be reverted. Is this a reason to have these addresses on a special watch list? --FredTC (talk) 07:20, 21 June 2018 (UTC)

Experiment to understand Wikipedia citation usage

Hi everyone,

The Wikimedia Foundation Research team is starting a project on understanding the role of external citations in Wikipedia reading. This project aims to understand how Wikipedia readers use the citations, which in turn can inform the editor and tool developer communities about the usage (or not) of citations by Wikipedia readers. Some more information about this research on the project page: m:Research:Characterizing Wikipedia Citation Usage.

To be able to do this, we will collect data on readers’ citation usage, starting 2018-06-25. We will collect data that captures the interactions of readers (not logged-in users) with references and footnotes. We will initially sample 1–15% of the traffic to validate the quality of the data. Once that’s verified, we intend to do data collection at 100% sampling rate for a period of one week. Please note that given that we do not know the frequency of citation usage, we may have to change this plan based on the initial validation steps. We will keep this thread posted with changes if they occur, and we will update our project page.

To follow the progress of the project and monitor our research results, please also look at this task. If you are interested to know more, or if you have any question, or any observation, please ping me! Miriam (WMF) (talk) 15:28, 20 June 2018 (UTC)

Hasty delation of Judit Hidasi & Hasty proposed delation of Judit Hidasi bibliography

To whom it may concern. I am astonished at @Randykitty:'s act because I think she is not right but we are human beings and to err is human. I think she has not paid enough attention to the fact that I am an CONFIRMED editor and I am aware of the facts of notability guideline for academics and the rule of WP:SCHOLAR and the article in question is highly suitable for creating a wikipedia article. So These articles ARE NOT an Unambiguous ADVERTISING or PROMOTION. Her nomination for delation was pretty husty and unreasoned, I think, and I understand her intention to defend the interests of Wikipedia but on the one hand the article was about a famous and notable scientist, scholar, professor of linguistics from Hungary who teaches and researches not only in Hungary but in the universities of Japan, Taiwan, Russia, Germany and Romania, so she is known worldwide and his scientific efforts were honored with lotsa awarded eg. Order of the Rising Sun 3rd Class, Gold Rays with Neck Ribbon by HM Akihito, Emperor of Japan on 8 November 2005 in Tokyo

so it was an unfriendly act to offend these articles but on the other hand if this Hungarian scholar were not a notable scholar, she would not have been invited to teach and research to the notable universities of the world therefore this article was abouut a notable woman, scientist who is respected in my country and in Western Europe (Germany) and Eastern Europe (Romania, Russia) and in the Far East (Japan, Taiwan).

Her article has been existing for two years and I do not understand why it were an un unambiguous advertising or promotion??!!!! If her own article were an advertising or promotion then all living scholars' articles would be advertisings or promotions and you all might think she (who will be 70 years old on 11 July) should die if her article were rightful??!!! And it is pretty weird that @Randykitty: has nominated the article for delation at 13:37, 23 June 2018 (UTC) and it have been delated in five hours, at 18:47, 23 June 2018 by @Swarm: this is nonsense!!!! There WASN'T any time to revise it, to defend it for me, to explain my opinion.

@Randykitty: is not right, both articles Judit Hidasi and Judit Hidasi bibliography own several secondary sources and not only in Hngarian but in English, too. I think if a person can be found in a book of the Biographies of the Contemporary Hungarian Linguists, that person can also deserve the article on wikipedia. A biography has been written about Judit Hidasi in Hungary:

  • Kálmán Bolla (ed.) (2009). Judit Hidasi (PDF) (in Hungarian). In: Kálmán Bolla (ed.): Magyar nyelvész pályaképek és önvallomások (Biographies of the Contemporary Hungarian Linguists) 85. Budapest: Zsigmond Király Főiskola (King Sigismund University). Retrieved 2018-06-24. {{cite book}}: |author= has generic name (help) ISBN 978-963-9559-44-8

I understand @Randykitty: does not know this linguist in her own country but the scientists who research the communication in the world, they know her name. She is among the respected and notable linguists.

I hope I have managed to prove my arguments and standpoint that the articles in question should be kept on English wikipedia and now the admins of enwiki will give up the idea to delate Judit Hidasi bibliography as @Randykitty: has written it to me, and the article of Judit Hidasi will be restored without delay and I can remove the text that looks like this: {{proposed deletion/dated...}} and you all will accept this, you all agree with me and you all won't change my editing and you would no longer like to delate both of them. Please Ask the opinion of the Hungarian administrators and workshops that deal with Hungarian topics. I DO NOT accept that the delation of the article of this Hungarian scholar was well substantiated and that two admins can make a decision about this important topic without any discussions, diputes, debates so the decision of delation was hasty and unreasoned. Best regards.Borgatya (talk) 21:46, 24 June 2018 (UTC)

The bibliography is clearly unsuitable for inclusion (see WP:NOTCV in particular), for the main article it's impossible to gauge at the moment since it's now deleted, although I have no reason to doubt Randykitty's judgement that this was a case of WP:CSD#G11. I suggest you create the article as a WP:DRAFT first, where the article can be brought inline with our standards, if it is indeed suitable for inclusion. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 00:27, 25 June 2018 (UTC)
  •   Administrator note Will follow up with user on their own talk page. Swarm ♠ 06:22, 25 June 2018 (UTC)

Thanks for your kind attention @Headbomb: and @Swarm:but I MUST emphasize that you're not right because the aricle Judit Hidasi was neither an advertising nor a promotion. Judit Hidasi is a respected scholar in the world, I cannot understand whether her article might exist in 9 languages: Japanese, Chinese, German, Russian, French, Romanian, Irish, Korean and Hungarian why they do not consider her articles as an advertising or promotion because maybe they are more informed, open-minded, cooperative and friendly, and her bibliography belongs to her aricle as a filmography to an actor or list of plays and works to a writer or a list of paintings to a painter, it is not prohibited that there exists a separate list of works among the other scholars or artists. E.g. Noam Chomsky is a famous American linguist, he is the most famous linguist in the world and though he is more famous than Professor Judit Hidasi but I think, this is not a mistake, pity because each linguists are less famous than Noam Chomsky but they DO have even own wikipedia aricles and Noam Chomsky is also a living scholar who has an own aricle about his works: Noam Chomsky bibliography and filmography but nobody think that it would be a mistake so this bibliographic article is not considered as an advertising or promotion but he is a living person, too for whom that list is also useful. The bibliograpy can prove that he or she a respected and notable scholar and they who debate the existence of a list of scientific works, do not understand the scientific research and they cannot judge the existence of a wikipedia article because they can prove their incompetence in wikipedia cases. I DO NOT UNDERSTAND why Judit Hidasi's article would be worst than Noam Chomsky's beacaue both of them are respected scholars in their fields. And Noam Chomsky's article is much more longer than Ms. Judit Hidasi's was and Ms. Judit Hidasi's article have not contained any prohibited things, fact and it was pretty neutral, more neutral than Noam Chomsky's article. And I have NOT received any concrete answer what is exact problem with Ms. Judit Hidasi's article. Neither @Randykitty: who has nominated it nor @Swarm: who has delated it, have not pointed out the exact, concrete problemes, mistakes that would have justified their rights to delate this article and the only answer was from them that JUST BECAUSE but it ain't an exact reply so I can say that their acts were unrightful and I strongly urge you to restore Ms. Judit Hidasi's article becase the reason that they have justified their motivations was nonsense and causeless and they cannot have proved their opinions thoroughly. I have been an active, respected, confirmed editor on English wikipedia for 10 years, I have registered in 2008 and until now I have been creating lotsa articles and my articles are always were suitable for the high level of wikipedia and I can have always been fulfilling the criterions of wikipedia, I know the rules of creating new articles well so it was VERY, VERY, VERY, VERY unfriendly to delate Ms Judit Hidasi's article and you must know the wikipedia is nobody's own property and wikipedia is a public ownership so it is prohibited to delate an article which can belong to the public attention. Please Restore Ms Judit Hidasi's article and I do not have to rewrite it because I have already written it well.Borgatya (talk) 21:33, 27 June 2018 (UTC)

  • @Borgatya: I have directly provided you with a concrete explanation of why Judit Hidasi was deleted, on your talk page. Another admin has endorsed my comment there, which brings us up to three different administrators who are trying to get the same message across to you. I don't see you raising any direct points of contention or confusion from any of the messages you've received, so I'm interpreting this as you're choosing not to listen to us because you're angry about the article being deleted. I'm sorry, but we've tried to sympathize with you and work with you here, but the one thing we aren't going to do is bend the rules for you. You are correct on one point: you do not have to rewrite the article. There is no burden on you to do so. You are not required to take any further action. You can simply move on if you do not wish to do the work. But, if you feel so strongly about it, you have already been instructed on what needs to be done, I have offered to restore the article so that you may do so, and you have even been referred to a project that might be able to assist you in rewriting it. It's up to you whether or not you wish to do this work, but I suspect in the time it's taken you to write out these angry messages, you could have rewritten the article three times by now. Swarm ♠ 07:14, 28 June 2018 (UTC)
  • Borgatya, The closest I can get to an "exact, concrete problem" is that the tone is not neutral. This may be difficult for a person who is writing in a non-native language to understand, and cannot be reduced to specific words or phrases which are objectionable, which is why I suggest the assistance of copyeditors skilled in the English Wikipedia's policies, which are not required to be the same as those of any other Wikipedia, so comparison is irrelevant, as no-one here will even bother to check. Comparison with other articles on English Wikipedia is also pointless, as we do not use precedent as a justification when there is a conflict with policy or style guidance. As a last attempt to express the problem, consider rewriting the article not as an admirer of Judit Hidasi and her work, which you clearly are, but as someone who does not actually care about her or her work, but must write an article providing the available and relevant information only. Cheers, · · · Peter (Southwood) (talk): 10:36, 28 June 2018 (UTC)
    Borgatya, After reading my comment above, I think I may be able to clarify a bit more. When I read the article in its current (deleted) form, it was very clear to me that you think very highly of Judit Hidasi and her work. It is entirely acceptable for you to feel this way, but that feeling must not be apparent from the article. Cheers, · · · Peter (Southwood) (talk): 10:44, 28 June 2018 (UTC)

In the course of my researches I have come across a number of cases where 'topic X' is covered on a number of different language WPs #but not on the English Wikipedia# (for a variety of reasons). Jackiespeel (talk) 12:41, 3 July 2018 (UTC)

Spike in page views

I've noticed strange spikes in the number of page views, according to the statistics. For instance, on the Talk:Checkmate talk page are the daily stats. Most days are consistently about 400-500 but there is a spike to nearly 8,000. Are these spikes real and what causes them? Bubba73 You talkin' to me? 17:00, 25 June 2018 (UTC)

Bubba73 - there might be another high-profile article that links to this article, the spike being spillover traffic. There might be a bot that is stuck. There might be a social media thread that linked the article. Etc it's impossible to know, but spikes are real traffic. The Signpost has a regular column it tries to piece together why certain articles have so much traffic. -- GreenC 04:26, 2 July 2018 (UTC)
Thanks, so the spike is real. It is hard to imagine that all of a sudden 20x more people directly look up checkmate for one day, so they are probably coming some other route. Bubba73 You talkin' to me? 04:29, 2 July 2018 (UTC)

Hello

Please note that Harlan Ellison died on 28 june according to Google. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 109.185.175.84 (talk) 23:04, 28 June 2018 (UTC)

Hello. That information has been incorporated into the article. In the future, feel free to make the changes yourself. Anyone's allowed to edit, provided they follow the rules. — AfroThundr (u · t · c) 16:08, 29 June 2018 (UTC)

Cash prizes???

I discovered today that we've got contests which offer cash prizes. For example, WP:WikiProject Women in Red/The World Contest. This seems rather contrary to the volunteer ethic which has been behind wikipedia since day one. I'm all for the goal of creating new biographies of women. It just surprises me that cash prizes are involved. Are these contests legit? -- RoySmith (talk) 18:42, 29 June 2018 (UTC)

RoySmith Who funded it? Are there others? It's good work, until the Koch Brothers fund a Wikipedia editathon contest via a Dark Money Foundation grant. Any special interest could incentivize the creation and expansion of material that would benefit them, which is not far away from paid editing. -- GreenC 04:36, 2 July 2018 (UTC)
(edit conflict)I think "who funded it" is the most important question. If the WMF paid users to edit articles about or relating to Wikipedia or its "competitors," that'd be a problem. If the WMF gave out cash prizes for editing in non-commercial topics, I could see arguments for and against it ("who gets rewarded and why? where did the WMF get the money from?"). (But if the WMF ever wants to give admins a stipend for their work, there'd be absolutely no objections from me, though there is the smallest possibility that I could potentially be the tiniest bit biased in distantly related matters). If a WikiProject crowdsources funds to encourage much needed work that is otherwise perfectly in line with site policies and guidelines, I don't really see that as being too different from encouraging a friend to join by offering to buy them lunch. Ian.thomson (talk) 04:54, 2 July 2018 (UTC)
Yes they are legit. Oftentimes the money even comes from the WMF and I brought up a similar concern years ago regarding the optics of cash prizes versus paid editing that was brushed off. --Majora (talk) 04:50, 2 July 2018 (UTC)

File:OswaldinMinsk.jpg: is this non-free media necessary?

There are tons of free photos of Lee Harvey Oswald on Commons (c:Category:Lee Harvey Oswald), which contradicts the claim "and for whom there is no known representation under a 'free' license" in the Licensing section of File:OswaldinMinsk.jpg, as well as "Where no free equivalent is available or could be created that would adequately give the same information" under Non-free use rationale. --fireattack (talk) 05:09, 2 July 2018 (UTC)

Probably not. Note that File:Oswaldneworleans.jpg is also a fair use photo in the same article. Generally these are sent to WP:FFD to discuss the merits of having them as fair use. Killiondude (talk) 05:14, 2 July 2018 (UTC)
File:OswaldinMinsk.jpg has been tagged as public domain. --Pipetricker (talk) 09:56, 4 July 2018 (UTC)

Wiki4MediaFreedom contest

Hello, the Wiki4MediaFreedom contest is running and will last until the 15th of July. You can either improve or update articles in English or translate articles from English to Italian, Albanian, Bulgarian, Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian or Montenegrin (see the rules. The prizes are online gift voucher. See Meta for more information. --Niccolò Caranti (OBC) (talk) 07:38, 2 July 2018 (UTC)

Manually trigger replacement of dead URL with archive

I know various bots automatically replace dead URLs with archived pages. I'm looking for a way to manually trigger a replacement of dead URLs with archives. While I'm open to purely automated solutions, I'm imagining an interface similar to Refill, which would assist me in replacing the URL with an archive in cases where bots cannot, eg. when |access-date= is missing. Daask (talk) 20:08, 2 July 2018 (UTC)

InternetArchiveBot allows you to run one specified page through its WMFLabs interface. See RunBotSingle. --Izno (talk) 20:29, 2 July 2018 (UTC)
FYI, IABot can cope with missing access dates.—CYBERPOWER (Chat) 16:53, 3 July 2018 (UTC)

EU and copyright

As I (and no doubt others) have come across the banner about the legislation - if it passed how would it directly affect WP - and how could WP adapt to accommodate the changes?

Is any cooperation with other websites who are likely to be affected (eg fanfiction) being pursued? Jackiespeel (talk) 12:51, 3 July 2018 (UTC)

Jackiespeel, please see Wikipedia:Village_pump_(proposals)#I_would_like_everyone_to_read_this, the linked article, as well as the proposal for a banner to be put up. — Insertcleverphrasehere (or here) 12:59, 3 July 2018 (UTC)
The Misc section is the logical starting point for such questions - and cooperation with other websites is a Good Thing. Jackiespeel (talk) 13:05, 3 July 2018 (UTC)

About Billboard templates

Hi, I'm from Spanish Wikipedia. The template BillboardID uses these other templates for store the IDs of the artists. In eswiki we use the same system. Now, Billboard website doesn't use anymore the artist ID, but uses a link like www.billboard.com/music/jodi-benson, using simply the artist name. This causes problems with the chart templates, like some user said here. In eswiki we discussed about move all data to Wikidata (where only 600 items have this property), but the fact is that there are over 30000 artists, and it's nedeed a bot for move data. I make this request here, because in enwiki these templates have more info than ours, and I think this would benefit both wikis. Thanks. --Giovanni Alfredo Garciliano Díaz ★ talk 00:56, 4 July 2018 (UTC)

Should we keep these articles?

I'm not sure if this is the right place to post this could more experienced editors please take a look at Category:Coptic_calendar and articles like Pashons 25 (Coptic Orthodox liturgics) and Pashons 17 (Coptic Orthodox liturgics) — I know we have WP:DOTY but I don't know which notability guideline would cover the creation of "day" articles for different calender systems...has there been previous discussion about this? Seraphim System (talk) 16:59, 4 July 2018 (UTC)

Individual articles for liturgical calendars are not problematic by themselves. I don't see how these days might be any different from articles such as 2003 in paleontology or 2003 in French television, prima facie: if we allow such articles to contextualise years, the same should apply to contextualise days. Leefeniaures audiendi audiat 20:01, 7 July 2018 (UTC)

Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market says: "English Wikipedia added a banner asking the readers to contact their representatives in the European parliament." Did it? I haven't seen one. --Espoo (talk) 21:11, 4 July 2018 (UTC)

It was only added for internet addresses in Europe. --Izno (talk) 21:17, 4 July 2018 (UTC)
I'm in Finland. --Espoo (talk) 21:23, 4 July 2018 (UTC)
Have you turned off notifications/banners in your preferences? Matt Deres (talk) 16:14, 5 July 2018 (UTC)
Couldn't find any setting for banners. --Espoo (talk) 19:59, 5 July 2018 (UTC)
It's on the Gadgets tab under Browsing; "Suppress display of CentralNotices". --Pipetricker (talk) 21:23, 5 July 2018 (UTC)
Thanks, but that's not checked. Someone explained on the article's talk page that there was a bug due to which the banner was only shown to users who were logged out. "I am in the Netherlands, and I was yesterday using two browsers, I was logged in on one of them and not logged in on another one. The browser where I was not logged in showed me the banner." --Espoo (talk) 02:09, 6 July 2018 (UTC)
I didn't see it too, and thought maybe it was because I had already previewed it through a link like this, but the Display to setting for "Logged in users" at m:Special:CentralNoticeBanners isn't checked. Was that intentional (I see no reason for that), or as Guy Macon (at the article's talk page) said, due to a bug of some sort? --Pipetricker (talk) 12:23, 6 July 2018 (UTC)

This sort of thing is caused by not giving the WMF enough time to set up a test page or test wiki and allow us to confirm that everything works properly. We really need to start earlier when making proposals that require even minor modifications to the Wiki software.

Mistakes happen. The other day someone at Sony was supposed to upload a trailer for an upcoming movie to YouTube, but accidentally uploaded the entire movie. And who can forget the time that Anthony Weiner tried to send a picture of his penis to a woman through Twitter, and accidentally sent it to everyone who was following him on Twitter. The WMF is really quite good at having someone else double check things like banners and thus catching the errors before they go live -- but we need to give them time to do that. --Guy Macon (talk) 15:12, 6 July 2018 (UTC)

Just Fyi. It was not meant to run in the US Canada India South Africa etc, anywhere outside the EU. Alanscottwalker (talk) 16:04, 6 July 2018 (UTC)

But Finland is inside EU. Anyone from there suppose to see it. –Ammarpad (talk) 13:32, 7 July 2018 (UTC)
It's just a bug. A mistake was made, and because of the mistake, the banner was only shown to users who were logged out. --Guy Macon (talk) 13:39, 7 July 2018 (UTC)

Title in italics

I have a n00b question; how can I directly show the title in Italics, wihout actually dropping the "italic title" template into the article? Such as Epistulae Morales ad Lucilium. Thanks in advance guys, - LouisAragon (talk) 20:26, 8 July 2018 (UTC)

{{DISPLAYTITLE:''Epistulae Morales ad Lucilium''}}. See WP:DISPLAYTITLE. —Cryptic 20:35, 8 July 2018 (UTC)
LouisAragon, what is the reason you don't want to use {{italic title}}? --Pipetricker (talk) 21:44, 8 July 2018 (UTC)
LouisAragon, I assume you are asking what makes the title of Epistulae Morales ad Lucilium appear in italics without any obvious code in the article. The Template:Infobox book in the article automatically italicizes the title. Hope this helps. StarryGrandma (talk) 00:02, 9 July 2018 (UTC)
Ah, seems like we misunderstood the question. Thank you, Grandma. --Pipetricker (talk) 15:40, 9 July 2018 (UTC)
Yeah, Grandma hit the nail on the head. :-) Learned a few more things. Thanks y'all, - LouisAragon (talk) 17:03, 9 July 2018 (UTC)

Dragovic (disambiguation) and Ilija Janković

Article Dragovic (disambiguation) should be renamed in only Dragovic

Article Ilija Janković should should be deleted, since there should be a special article, see: hr:Ilija Janković

--SrpskiAnonimac (talk) 17:56, 10 July 2018 (UTC)

Global preferences are available

Global preferences are now available, you can set them by visiting your new global preferences page. Visit mediawiki.org for information on how to use them and leave feedback. -- Keegan (WMF) (talk)

19:19, 10 July 2018 (UTC)

Cookies added to IP blocks

The Anti-Harassment Tools team expanded cookie blocking to IP blocks and this week it will be deployed on all wiki after successful testing on Italian Wikipedia. (phab:T152462) SPoore (WMF), Trust & Safety, Community health initiative (talk) 22:44, 10 July 2018 (UTC)

(Possibly) copyrighted work that was contributed by the (possible) copyright-holder

Here is the first revision of Procedural texture (from 2004). At the bottom you can see "This article was written by Enrique Flouret from The Photoshop Roadmap". Note that the contributor is User:Eflouret himself (who has been inactive since 2004).

There appears to be a few separate issues here, and they haven't been corrected even up to the latest revision:

  1. The first is the (excessive) copyrighted code taken from "The RenderMan Companion". I'm pretty sure that's a copyright violation and should be deleted (which I've done).
  2. The second issue, I'm not quite sure how to express it. Do we even need the "This article was written by Enrique Flouret..." attribution if User:Eflouret is the one who put his article in the edit box and hit the "Publish changes" button? Is this actually required to avoid self-plagiarism?
  3. Another possible issue is that the attribution was changed to simply "This article was taken from The Photoshop Roadmap with written authorization" in a later revision.

I'm pretty sure Wikipedia doesn't allow copyrighted text in the first place, even if we assume that we have permission to use it in this case. If that is the case, what should be done about Procedural texture? It's very first revision is a copyright violation. Brightgalrs (/braɪtˈɡæl.ərˌɛs/)[ᴛ] 17:29, 30 June 2018 (UTC)

On #2, we never actually need an article-space attribution if the attribution is provided in the page history. --Izno (talk) 14:06, 1 July 2018 (UTC)
Brightgalrs, I'm puzzled by what you mean by "pretty sure Wikipedia doesn't allow copyrighted text in the first place". By "copyrighted", do you perhaps mean carrying a copyright notice? Because under the Berne Convention, the copyright belongs to the author by default, without any need to register copyright. And contributions are licensed by the contributors "to the public under one or several liberal licenses", with the contributor retaining the copyright. See Wikipedia:Copyrights.
Regarding pre-existing material such as that first revision, I guess the issue is whether there is credible evidence that the submitter is in fact the copyright owner. --Pipetricker (talk) 12:58, 10 July 2018 (UTC)

Infobox place in mobile site

At first in mobile site the infobox is placed before the 1st paragraph and then it placed between the 1st and the 2nd paragraph and now it placed before the 1st paragraph again, what's happened? --Hddty. (talk) 01:24, 6 July 2018 (UTC)

Heya, Hddty.. For the large majority of articles you should be seeing the introductory paragraph and then the infobox. There are exceptions where the infobox is placed first. I've been told this is something like less than 1% of articles. Your experiences could be due to templates and/or inboxes formatting content in a way that the mobile site struggles with. Example articles are appreciated. Here's an example of the {{Stack}} template giving us some trouble earlier this year. CKoerner (WMF) (talk) 15:02, 9 July 2018 (UTC)
Small update There was a regression, which means you did notice something askew Hddty.! The team is looking into it and will hopefully have a fix in place shortly. CKoerner (WMF) (talk) 15:45, 11 July 2018 (UTC)
@CKoerner (WMF): I think the infobox moved from below the lead to above the lead after some major edit. After I do this edit the infobox moved to above the lead. I just wondering is there a consensus to place the infobox below the lead because at the beginning of mobile site Wikipedia the infobox is placed above the lead. Hddty. (talk) 23:11, 11 July 2018 (UTC)

What questions concerning the strategy process do you have?

Hi!

I'm Tar Lócesilion, a Polish Wikipedia admin and a member of Wikimedia Polska. Last year, I worked for Wikimedia Foundation as a liaison between communities and the Movement Strategy core team. My task was to ensure that all online communities were aware of the movement-wide strategy discussion. This year, my task similar. Phase II of the strategy process was launched in April. Currently, future Working Groups members are being selected, and related pages on Meta-Wiki are being designed.

I’d like to learn what questions concerning the strategy process would you like to be answered on the FAQ page? Please answer here, on my talk page, or on a dedicated talk page on Meta-Wiki. Thanks!

If you have any questions or concerns, please, do ask!

Thanks, SGrabarczuk (WMF) (talk) 18:25, 14 July 2018 (UTC)

New watchlist system

A new watchlist system was introduced. Does this make control on the edits of the pages in the wathlist more efficient? Does this give more control on bot edits on the pages and more control on checking revisions? Wat are the actual differences? Is still using tools to make minor changes on a page a problem (if this was ever a problem)? -- Magioladitis (talk) 23:41, 16 July 2018 (UTC)

Duplicates in Category:Peru district templates

Recently I've been wandering around and saw the Category:Peru district templates may have some duplicates such as Template:Districts of Huánuco Province and Template:Districts of Huánuco Region. As both templates are created by the same person, I wonder if this is intentional or not. As the creator may have left Wikipedia, I think it might be suitable to ask here. If they are indeed duplicates, should we do a mass redirect or mass delink + delete?JC1 (talk) 15:43, 16 July 2018 (UTC)

They are not exact duplicates but part of a system to use templates to categorize districts by province. Huánuco Province is one of 11 provinces in the Huánuco Region. The content of {{Districts of Huánuco Province}} is basically just:
{{Districts of Huánuco Region}}
[[Category:Districts of the Huánuco Province]]
It doesn't duplicate the code but transcludes the other template and adds a category. The other 10 provinces have similar templates which add {{Districts of Huánuco Region}} plus a category for districts of their own province. I don't see a need to change anything. {{Districts of Huánuco Province}} shows all districts of all 11 provinces. The template size is sensible to me. If starting from scratch, I might have used another system where all districts of all 11 provinces add {{Districts of Huánuco Region}} directly and then either add "Category:Districts of the X Province" directly or gets the template to add the right category by passing their province as a parameter. But changing the system now seems like unnecessary work. PrimeHunter (talk) 00:54, 17 July 2018 (UTC)
The series of province templates should be WP:TFDd per WP:TEMPLATECAT. --Izno (talk) 06:04, 17 July 2018 (UTC)

Facebook seems to be auto-deleting posts that contain WP links.

I am not sure why (though I have my suspicions, see below) but it seems that Facebook is deleting posts that contain Wikipedia links. For example two different people posted the following link in comments only to have the comment be automatically deleted with seconds.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_College_of_Pediatricians

Would some other editors who are willing please log onto WP and try to post that link or some other WP article, preferably in some sort of political group, wait about 15 seconds, and then try to reply their own post. I think this is a malfunction of FB trying to "catch" fake news and maybe some over eager beaver coded that WP is "fake" ... just s theory. Of course you can delete the comments when done if they are not auto-deleted. I do NOT need to see your FB post, I just would like to know if the problem is affecting WP links for others. Let me know please by posting your experience here. Thank you. 172.88.134.103 (talk) 05:28, 18 July 2018 (UTC)

This is irrelevant to editing Wikipedia, for the most part. This is solely on FB's end, and there's no value in performing a breaching experiment to bite our thumb at them. I also note the convenient unverifiability of your story. —Jeremy v^_^v Bori! 11:02, 18 July 2018 (UTC)
I am going to address your "concerns" point-by-point because you raise so many diverse ones.
  • This is irrelevant to editing Wikipedia, for the most part. -- True. This page is the WP Village Pump Misc which is defined at the top as being for "messages that do not fit into any other category." We have plenty of places on WP to discuss editing, but this is a forum for discussing miscellaneous matters of potential concern to the WP "village" / community.
  • This is solely on FB's end -- Of course this is on Facebook's end. But if their end is affecting our reputation that is not "solely on" them, we have a legitimate right to be concerned and active in protecting ourselves from blacklisting if in deed that is what FB has done.
  • there's no value in performing a breaching experiment. -- I have to assume good faith that you do not understand what you linked to. Per the wikilink you used: "a breaching experiment is an experiment that seeks to examine people's reactions to violations of commonly accepted social rules or norms.'" No where in my request was there anything even close to a request for a breaching experiment. I did not ask for anyone's "reactions", simply for their factual observations (experiences) of what actually happens when they try to post a WP link -- any link they choose -- onto FB. I also in no way suggested anything that could even vaguely be described as "violations of commonly accepted social rules or norms". I am concerned that automated software run by FB has inaccurately put WP on a blacklist in the same way that many ISP's have blacklist filters for email. Being put onto such a list could have been caused by a badly coded algorithm with no human intent to do so, or even by merely bad syntax in a complex regex statement. If that has happened it is a mistake, an error, a bug in the function of that software. I was asking for other editors to discretely attempt to see if the "bug" is repeatable, nothing more. This is totally standard practice when a software or other design bug is suspected.
  • bite our thumb at them. -- Again I wonder if you understand the words you use. To bite one's thumb at another is to intentionally insult them. I suggest no such thing. In fact if evidence suggested that there was indeed a problem my next step would be to write to the WP Foundation and ask that the matter be handled discretely by the higher, more diplomatic, levels of WP leadership.
  • I also note the convenient unverifiability of your story. -- Well DUH!!! Of course the events I related are unverifiable. Even I cannot verify them which is why I asked for independent verification by unrelated WP editors. In the end it does not matter if the examples I spoke of were verifiable, only if WE could reproduce the results ourselves and therefor be certain of what was happening. Sheesh!
I do not understand why you have taken such a suspicious and seemingly hostile attitude towards a simple request to see if WP is being unfairly targeted by a possibly flawed piece of binary machine code. 172.88.134.103 (talk) 02:21, 19 July 2018 (UTC)
  • The IP could be responding to this recent news event. BUT, Facebook announced not long ago it would be using Wikipedia in its fight against Fake News. See also Wikipedia's project of being a source of Knowledge Integrity -- GreenC 14:10, 18 July 2018 (UTC)
Hi GreenC. No I am not responding to that article, I was unaware of it before now. I also was unaware of Knowledge Integrity. My sister's boyfriend is one of the two persons who I mentioned in my original comment above and he was the one who said his posts with links (not just WP links by the way) were randomly vanishing right after being posted. He showed me where another user stated they had experienced the same thing. But since I was not there watching when these people did what they did I could not assume they had not made some sort of error, or had in some way been personally targetted by a group administrator or FB's complaint response team. The only logical course of action (as I explain in my response to Jeremy above) is to try an obtain independent objective verification of the symptom described. Isn't that a reasonable thing to do? 172.88.134.103 (talk) 02:21, 19 July 2018 (UTC)

Wikipedia: Fact or Fiction?

Putting this here for your possible enjoyment. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 18:09, 20 July 2018 (UTC)

Essays or other guidelines regarding the use of quotes inside of citations

Does anyone know if there are essays or other resources discussing what are appropriate uses of quotes within a citation? My general understanding is quotes in a citation would be used when the fact in the article might need more explanation without interfering with the readability of the article itself. As a hypothetical, if an article contains a fact may seem odd or incorrect at first read, the quote in the citation could provide additional text for the interested reader.

There are 8 planets in the solar system [1]

At the same time I would assume it shouldn't be used if the quote doesn't directly relate to the text the citation supports

The planets orbit around the sun [2]

In the first case the quote helps clarify for those who were taught there are 9 planets in the solar system and is thus directly related to/supports the article text. In the second case the material is only indirectly related and in no way clarifies the article text. I would presume in this case the quote shouldn't be used. However, that is only my opinion. Does Wikipedia have any resources talking about this? Thanks! Springee (talk) 17:04, 21 July 2018 (UTC)

  • Here's the relevant guideline: In most cases it is sufficient for a citation footnote simply to identify the source (as described in the sections above); readers can then consult the source to see how it supports the information in the article. Sometimes, however, it is useful to include additional annotation in the footnote, for example to indicate precisely which information the source is supporting (particularly when a single footnote lists more than one source – see § Bundling citations and § Text–source integrity, below). A footnote may also contain a relevant exact quotation from the source. This is especially helpful when the cited text is long or dense. A quotation allows readers to immediately identify the applicable portion of the reference. Quotes are also useful if the source is not easily accessible. –dlthewave ☎ 17:00, 23 July 2018 (UTC)

References

  1. ^ title=Example Ref| quote="When Pluto was declared not a planet the number was reduced from 9 to 8"
  2. ^ title=Example 2| quote="Saturn is a gas planet and the second largest in the solar system"

Which Wikipedias had significant number of articles contributed to by a bot?

Looking at a list of Wikipedias by language, there are some outliers, and I recall some Wikipedias had had tens if not hundred of thousands of articles created by some bot. Is there any place that lists such cases? Do you recall which Wikipedias has significant article-creation-by-bot initiatives? --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 09:09, 24 July 2018 (UTC)

Swedish Wikipedia and especially Waray Wikipedia and Cebuano Wikipedia have huge amounts of bot-generated material. The English Wikipedia had Rambot create thousands of articles in 2002, which meant a large percentage of English Wikipedia was bot-generated for a while. —Kusma (t·c) 09:39, 24 July 2018 (UTC)
List of Wikipedias#Detailed list is a helpful indicator. Just compare article count to user count and you can spot which are mostly bot-filled. Regards SoWhy 13:16, 24 July 2018 (UTC)

Hello

Please note that Gopaldas Neeraj died on thursday 19 july according to Google. Thank you. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 109.185.175.84 (talk) 15:30, 19 July 2018 (UTC)

  Resolved
The article Gopaldas Neeraj appears to have been updated. – Uanfala (talk) 09:50, 25 July 2018 (UTC)

New Filters Opt Out Fails

The new filters are cluttering up my Watchlist so I decided to opt out. I turned off "Hide the improved version of Recent Changes" on my "Recent changes" preferences page, but the Watchlist clutter is still there. I'm using Chrome and I tried an f5 reload but no luck. Is this feature broken? Praemonitus (talk) 01:41, 24 July 2018 (UTC)

To opt-out of the watchlist changes, you should opt out on the "Watchlist" preferences tab, not on the "Recent changes" preferences tab (a mistake easily made). --Pipetricker (talk) 07:58, 24 July 2018 (UTC)
Yes the help page on the topic wasn't particularly helpful. Thank you. Praemonitus (talk) 14:38, 24 July 2018 (UTC)

Using piped links to introduce incorrect spellings

This is more of a comment than anything, but anyone else have noticed piped links where the left side consists of the correctly spelt actual title of the article and the right side of a misspelling? I find it simply baffling that this is a thing that exists.

One particularly blatant example I just corrected was [[artificial vagina|artificial-vagina]]. Like, what the hell, dude? Obviously you saw the title of the article already. In contrast, artificial-vagina is a redlink. Applying simple everyday logic, you can deduce that the article title is the/a correct spelling and your own spelling is incorrect. Why go to the length to create a piped link instead of simply writing [[artificial vagina]]? I'm not sure that even the VE can fully explain this phenomenon. And I'm pretty sure I encountered this phenomenon already before the VE was rolled out by default. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 13:56, 26 July 2018 (UTC)

I don't know why those were hyphenated, either, but this particular instance was added here by FreeKnowledgeCreator. —DoRD (talk)​ 14:04, 26 July 2018 (UTC)
It is usually pointless to ask someone about a minor detail of an edit they made years ago. This is one of those cases. I don't care about the spelling of "artificial vagina". FreeKnowledgeCreator (talk) 14:59, 26 July 2018 (UTC)
I just don't understand why anyone would type the equivalent of [[Barack Obama|Barock Obama]]. (Or, even better: "Baroque Osama".) It just makes no sense. It can't happen accidentally. It feels like an editor who does this wants to prank and annoy wikignomes like me. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 23:51, 27 July 2018 (UTC)
Can you give another example? Some might see a hyphenation as the correct spelling, not saying that is the case in the given example. --Emir of Wikipedia (talk) 11:25, 28 July 2018 (UTC) (please   mention me on reply; thanks!)

Hello 2

Please put Ian Stanley (golfer) on july 28 in the deaths list. Thank you. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 109.185.175.84 (talk) 06:10, 29 July 2018 (UTC)

John/Jack

Is it safe to assume that readers would recognize Jack as a nickname for John? Also, where should this question be asked? —151.132.206.26 (talk) 14:27, 17 July 2018 (UTC)

  Note: This post pertains to the edit request at Talk:John F. Kennedy#Semi-protected edit request on 17 July 2018. I replied there. ‑‑ElHef (Meep?) 17:04, 17 July 2018 (UTC)
@ElHef: That's what prompted me to wonder, but no, I was simply asking whether Jack is a sufficiently commonly known nickname for John (it's actually rather unfamiliar to me). —151.132.206.26 (talk) 21:55, 23 July 2018 (UTC)
There are variations, both regional and temporal; so I'd say, do not assume. --Orange Mike | Talk 22:41, 23 July 2018 (UTC) a/k/a Mikey, or Mick, or Mickey, or Mischa, or Miĉcjo...
Please don't assume. In Europe (beside possibly UK) it is generally not known that Jack 1) is not shorthand for Jacques resp. Jacob and 2) John F. Kennedy could have been called Jack by anyone in any circumstance. 194.174.76.21 (talk) 16:40, 30 July 2018 (UTC) Marco Pagliero Berlin

Hüttenmeister and Huttenreüter

Does anyone have an english word for these occupations? They are used for occupations With respect to mining both in Norway and in Germany. Breg Pmt (talk) 17:48, 28 July 2018 (UTC)

I find "foreman", "headman", "glass master", "master smelter", "glasswork master", "director of the founderies" and "metallurgist" for "Hüttenmeister", while "Hüttenreuter" was sometimes a synonym and sometimes someone charged with the accounting. With respect to mining "foreman" is probably the word you are looking for. 194.174.76.21 (talk) 17:10, 30 July 2018 (UTC) Marco Pagliero Berlin

Gifford Lectures - list?

I was going to update the article Gifford Lectures to include recent lectures and then noticed that the article is essentially always going to be mainly a list. There are several things that could be done:

  1. Move the list out into a separate article List of Gifford Lectures while keeping Gifford Lectures as a stub
  2. Move the article itself to List of Gifford Lectures
  3. Leave as-is

The problem with leaving it as-is is that the article is always going to comprise mainly of the list, as there just isn't that much you can say about a lecture series in prose form (well, I suspect there actually is, but most of it isn't going to be notable, and it certainly isn't going to be sourceable).

This is also the problem with just separating the list out – it just leaves a perpetual stub – hence considering the possibility of perhaps just renaming the whole thing to "List of Gifford Lectures". Thought I'd come here to get some second opinions!

--Newbiepedian (talk · C · X! · L) 13:26, 25 July 2018 (UTC)

I'd leave the title as-is. It's easier to find pages if they start with the real name rather than "List of". WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:38, 27 July 2018 (UTC)
Per WhatamIdoing, I would also leave it as is. The "List of..." titling is essentially a form of disambiguation, to indicate that there's a separate article from the main one just for the list, for example List of Prime Ministers of the United Kingdom as distinct from Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. Insofar as there isn't need for two articles, there's no need for the "List of..." bit. Even if the article is basically all list, there's no main article from which to make a distinction, so there's no need to have the "List of..." bit. --Jayron32 18:22, 30 July 2018 (UTC)

New user group for editing sitewide CSS/JS

Hi all!

To improve the security of our readers and editors, permission handling for CSS/JS pages has changed. (These are pages like MediaWiki:Common.css and MediaWiki:Vector.js which contain code that is executed in the browsers of users of the site.) A new user group, interface-admin, has been created. Starting four weeks from now, only members of this group will be able edit CSS/JS pages that they do not own (that is, any page ending with .css or .js that is either in the MediaWiki: namespace or is another user's user subpage).

You can learn more about the motivation behind the change here.

Please add users who need to edit CSS/JS to the new group (this can be done the same way new administrators are added, by stewards or local bureaucrats). This is a dangerous permission; a malicious user or a hacker taking over the account of a careless interface-admin can abuse it in far worse ways than admin permissions could be abused. Please only assign it to users who need it, who are trusted by the community, and who follow common basic password and computer security practices (use strong passwords, do not reuse passwords, use two-factor authentication if possible, do not install software of questionable origin on your machine, use antivirus software if that's a standard thing in your environment).

Thanks!
Tgr (talk) 13:08, 30 July 2018 (UTC) (via global message delivery)

I feel this could just be bundled with TemplateEditor rights, but whatevs. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 14:10, 30 July 2018 (UTC)
Plausible, but TE is a bit more candyish than I expect this right will be (should be?). --Izno (talk) 14:42, 30 July 2018 (UTC)

RFC: Interface administrators and transition

Commenters here should discuss at WT:Interface administrators. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Izno (talk • contribs) 00:26, 31 July 2018 (UTC)

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Per the above section, only interface administrators will be able to edit sitewide and user CSS and Javascript soon. Please take a moment to review the above (as well as the linked items) and then leave a comment: who should have access to this permission, and how should we go about grandfathering existing administrators (if at all?). --Izno (talk) 14:42, 30 July 2018 (UTC)

Future access

  • Anyone who runs for RFA and is successful should have access to this user group. He should be required to disclose this intent during RFA so that users may assess the administrator's need for it.

    I think we should also have a separate process to establish access to this right. While I expect most administrators who apply for this right will be granted the right, there will be some non-administrator users who may be experienced with Javascript and CSS to whom it would also be reasonable to provide access to this user group. --Izno (talk) 14:42, 30 July 2018 (UTC)

  • Oppose existence of this RfC as rushed and premature. TonyBallioni (talk) 15:06, 30 July 2018 (UTC)
    • TonyBallioni, why do you say this is rushed and premature? Special:ListUsers/interface-admin exists now, and we have about 27.5 days to either get some names in that empty list or start regretting our inaction and delay. WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:05, 30 July 2018 (UTC)
      • Because it’s not a proposal, was rushed into basically upon seeing a BN post, isn’t coherent, and didn’t try to form any informal consensus beforehand so we could get an actual proposal together. Not to mention it’s on VPM, which is the most obscure village pump. There’s a discussion on Wikipedia talk:Interface administrators trying to get a consensus policy proposal together. Once we have that, which hopefully should only take a few days, a clear RfC can be put to the community. Planning is the most important part of any RfC, and this one kinda just happened. TonyBallioni (talk) 23:13, 30 July 2018 (UTC)
  • Oppose Anyone who runs for RFA and is successful should have access to this user group This is exactly the opposite of the intention of why this new user group was introduced. there will be some non-administrator users who may be experienced with Javascript and CSS No. Again, this is against the entire point. Non-admins should not ever have access to site-wide JS/CSS. They didn't before, and they shouldn't now. In fact, only a very small percentage of admins should be able to edit site JS/CSS. That is, the admins who actually would need to, which is, in fact, a very small percentage. To put it in perspective, you can put "interface admin" up there with CheckUser, if not above it. — MusikAnimal talk 15:12, 30 July 2018 (UTC)
    @MusikAnimal: You listed a bunch of "should nots". Who should? What's the process for granting them the right? WP:Requests for interface administrator? What is the purpose of that discussion if you've already had the WP:RFA? Solely to evaluate their technical acumen? Why should admin specifically be a requirement? CheckUser is not today (though you'd be hard-pressed to do your job--such that it's a soft requirement for most). Just some thoughts. --Izno (talk) 15:19, 30 July 2018 (UTC)
    I think an RfA-style process is overdoing it. There are literally only a handful of admins who regularly edit MediaWiki JS/CSS. We can easily find out who these people are, grant the right, and call it a day. From that point forward there can be appointments at WP:AN or something. I'm not sure... we should think through some options. I believe in general it will be obvious who would benefit from the right (known developers, frequent WP:VPT, etc.), and we don't need an overly bureaucratic process. That is certainly up for debate. — MusikAnimal talk 15:26, 30 July 2018 (UTC)
    Are all developers and frequent VPTers administrators on en.WP? The former might as well be but they are not for the most part, because of the general trust we have that techies are going to stick to techie stuff. The latter is not--and in general, there are a number of users I might trust to be able to hack on the CSS/JS without necessarily being administrators (because I might not trust them to perform one of the 3 core functions--delete/block/protect--with all those rights entail for certain specific or some classes of specific users, but I perversely would trust them to act as appropriate for the technical side [And not to Do Evil]). How do we stave the bureaucracy off? Any requests process is going to question whether the user is trusted and whether the user is trusted to do the technical things in the background. --Izno (talk) 15:38, 30 July 2018 (UTC)
    Eh, I don't know about that, MusikAnimal. If you decided some day that you didn't want to have people hassling you about some core sysop function like deleting copyright violations or blocking vandals, then I'd still like you to be able to do JS/CSS work. While the standards should be similarly high (but not identical, as it's not identical work), and while most relevant people will likely have both, I really don't think that we should have a rule that only people who are willing to have the sysop bit should be allowed to hold the interface-admin bit. WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:57, 31 July 2018 (UTC)
  • Support with modification I can support Anyone who runs for RfA, requests this userright in their RfA, and is successful should have access to this user group. There's no reason why the evaluation for this userright can't be done simultaiously with evaluation for the other admin tools. I think you may have been trying to say this, but it comes across that all new admins will get this userright. I don't think this should be given to non-adminsitrators, as it could be abused to hijack admin accounts and perform admin actions. --Ahecht (TALK
    PAGE    ) 16:07, 30 July 2018 (UTC)
  • Comment I find this proposal confusing. It almost seems to be saying that all RfA candidates from now on must now state a position on this userright - which many of us have never heard of and most of us would never dream of using. In any case I would not combine the granting of this userright with the granting (or not) of adminship at the RfA as suggested by Ahecht above. It would really muddy the waters. Let RfA be RfA; either the community wants the person to be an admin or they don't. The userright should be evaluated separately. --MelanieN (talk) 16:19, 30 July 2018 (UTC)
I would assume the default, if not mentioned, would be to not grant the userright. --Ahecht (TALK
PAGE) 16:26, 30 July 2018 (UTC)
  • Oppose existence of this RfC as rushed and premature Malicious JavaScript can cause massive damage both to Wikipedia and to individual editors. That has happened on some smaller Wikipedias. It is only a matter of time before another admin account is compromised (which has happened at enwiki on several occasions). Malicious scripting is not fixable with reverts and a much higher level of security is required. Johnuniq (talk) 22:59, 30 July 2018 (UTC)
  • Oppose. The entire purpose of this new user group was to remove this ability from most administrators who are not competent enough to be dealing with site-wide JavaScript, so if the only requirement is a successful RfA, that kind of defeats the purpose of creating the group, doesn't it? Mz7 (talk) 00:24, 31 July 2018 (UTC)

Grandfathering

  • My opinion: We should grandfather those administrators who have edited MediaWiki or user-space CSS and Javascript within the past X days/months/years if they request it. --Izno (talk) 14:42, 30 July 2018 (UTC)
  • Oppose existence of this RfC as rushed and premature. TonyBallioni (talk) 15:06, 30 July 2018 (UTC)
  • Oppose This seems okay except user-space CSS and Javascript. Many admins (probably the majority), or any prolific user for that matter, has edited their own userspace JS/CSS. I think we could run a query to exclude edits to their own userspace, but we're not talking about the userspace anyway, so let's not focus on that. — MusikAnimal talk 15:20, 30 July 2018 (UTC)
The new permission is other users' JS/CSS. So that omitted detail is another flaw in the RfC as stated. DMacks (talk) 19:44, 30 July 2018 (UTC)
  • Support with modification I can support Currently active administrators (30 edits in the last 2 months) who have edited site-wide CSS or Javascript within the past X days/months. Per MusikAnimal, editing user-space CSS and Javascript requires a far lesser level of trust. --Ahecht (TALK
    PAGE    ) 16:13, 30 July 2018 (UTC)

General commentary on interface administrator RFC

  • Oppose this defeats the point of the new right. Also is a really poorly formatted RfC that doesn't have clear policy language and is only discussing opinions. It probably should be closed. TonyBallioni (talk) 14:53, 30 July 2018 (UTC)
    What defeats the point? --Izno (talk) 15:02, 30 July 2018 (UTC)
    As for "poor formatting", you are free to include other questions. The most important in my mind was the access question. I don't see a need to restrict or structure the discussion, as this is a new group, for which people may have a wide range of expectations. As you can see, I've provided mine. Elsewhere, at a non-policy discussion, you have provided yours. Maybe you should provide it here instead. :) --Izno (talk) 15:02, 30 July 2018 (UTC)
    No, I'm not going to make this RfC even more than a mess. Shut this down until we have a clear policy proposal. RfCs with a bunch of questions don't work. TonyBallioni (talk) 15:04, 30 July 2018 (UTC)
    I don't see a need for "a clear policy proposal" seeing as the questions here are clear. My assumption is that the majority of WP:Administrators otherwise applies given the rights we are considering. Do you see places where it shouldn't? Do you want to work on that proposal, or are you just stonewalling? How much time do you want to put into that proposal? Are you aware no administrators will have access to the right under policy in the next few weeks without answering at least the second question? --Izno (talk) 15:10, 30 July 2018 (UTC)
    I'm fully aware, and I'm busy working on it now. Question based RfCs don't work. Clear policy proposals put to the community for consensus do. TonyBallioni (talk) 15:15, 30 July 2018 (UTC)
  • Comment - This seems rather confusing to me. Are we simply having a conversation regarding which admins will have access to the new right, would this conversation have the ability to be requested etc? Lee Vilenski (talk • contribs) 14:58, 30 July 2018 (UTC)
    There are two questions. One is "who today should have the right?" and one is "who in the future should have the right?". --Izno (talk) 15:02, 30 July 2018 (UTC)
  • Regardless of the RFC, I think the right should be treated akin to abusefilter-modify: Every admin can assign the right to themselves but shouldn't do so unless they really know what they are doing. That seems to work for the edit filter, so it should also work for this user right. Regards SoWhy 15:48, 30 July 2018 (UTC)
    @SoWhy: that will not be allowed by the new global rules, access must be managed by stewards or bureaucrats. The community could empower the crats to issue it "upon request" to existing admins though. — xaosflux Talk 15:54, 30 July 2018 (UTC)
    That sounds good as well, let's do that then.   Regards SoWhy 16:16, 30 July 2018 (UTC)
    SoWhy and/or others. There's discussion at Wikipedia talk:Interface administrators about figuring out the granting requirements. TonyBallioni (talk) 16:24, 30 July 2018 (UTC)
  • This will make fixing errors with someone's common.js harder. We should remind people that problems can be bypassed by temporarily turning off javascript in their browser. This can be done in an edit notice. NinjaRobotPirate (talk) 19:25, 30 July 2018 (UTC)
    @NinjaRobotPirate: note, sysops (and only sysops) will still be able to delete those pages. — xaosflux Talk 20:49, 30 July 2018 (UTC)
The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Template:Automated tools

Just to let you know, I've added {{automated tools}} to {{Draft article}} and {{AFC submission/helptools}}. It will add the following links to the templates:

You can see them (as of writing) in action at Draft:Scafida#See_also (expand the "How to improve your article" section) or at Draft:Shell Pernis Refinery).

Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 14:33, 1 August 2018 (UTC)

Category:American political catchphrases

Hello guys. I'm a regular contributor in the Indonesian Wikipedia. Recently there, someone brought up whether a political slogan should have its own article. The slogan is coming from the opponent of the current President of Indonesia. I decided to look for slogans here and I found Category:American political catchphrases. There, a slogan can be a redirect page (such as Feel the Bern or I am not a crook) or an article (such as Make America Great Again and We are the 99%). Is there any considerations as to why some are articles while the others are only redirect pages? Thank you. Sersan Mayor Kururu (talk) 06:36, 2 August 2018 (UTC)

Could someone please check hickoryrecord.com for me

Could someone (presumably in the US, or at least outside the EU) please check that this link works okay, and that the source is indeed a WP:RS. It's blocked for me, due to their GDPR angst. -- Finlay McWalter··–·Talk 14:14, 2 August 2018 (UTC)

I don't think a source that isn't accessible (to a large part of the world) qualifies as RS. --Zac67 (talk) 17:02, 2 August 2018 (UTC)
On the contrary, there are many reliable sources which exist only in book form: Reliability is not determined by the ability to read it RIGHT NOW. Merely that someone (it doesn't have to be YOU even, just "a person, on earth"), with some modicum of effort, could find it and check it. It could be a book in a library, an archived newspaper on microfiche, whatever. Just that it was a) published and b) available for someone (again, not necessarily you, right now) could check. In this case the source is the Hickory Daily Record, a genuine bona fide, honest-to-god daily paper, so its reliability is as good as any other. It does real journalism. The text of the article is about President Trump nominating Brock Long to head FEMA. I'm not sure what text it is being used to verify, but the article is fairly unremarkable, just your standard newspaper article which identifies Long as the appointee, and a short biography of Long's prior professional experience. In the future, FWIW, the Wikiproject WP:REX is designed exactly for thsi sort of question (rather than the ref desk or the Village Pump). REX is designed to ask for help checking references you don't have access to yourself. --Jayron32 18:12, 2 August 2018 (UTC)
Exactly – books or newspapers can't be geoblocked. I was referring to a web site that denies access from the Internet. I'm not completely against using this kind of sources but there's an undeniable problem with them. Sabotizing this problem is a good approach though. --Zac67 (talk) 18:44, 2 August 2018 (UTC)
Geoblocked websites are also not a problem. You just ask someone who lives where they can check it for you. Like at WP:REX. No issues at all. --Jayron32 18:58, 2 August 2018 (UTC)

Wiki Education hiring an experienced Wikipedian

Wiki Education is hiring an experienced Wikipedian for a part-time (20 hours/week) position. The focus of this position is to help new editors (students and other academics) learn to edit Wikipedia. The main focus of the position is monitoring and tracking contributions by Wiki Education program participants, answering questions, and providing feedback. We're looking for a friendly, helpful editor who like to focus on article content, but also with a deep knowledge of policies and guidelines and the ability to explain them in simple, concise ways to new editors. They will be the third member of a team of expert Wikipedians, joining Ian (Wiki Ed) and Shalor (Wiki Ed). This is a part-time, U.S. based, remote or San Francisco based position.

See our Careers page for more information. Ian (Wiki Ed) (talk) 20:12, 6 August 2018 (UTC)

Experiment: Eliciting New Editor Interest

Hi all. A while back, I wrote a post here to tell you about two experiments related to enwiki newcomers the Research team at Wikimedia Foundation has set up to run. We had some delays for running those experiments, but as of a couple of hours ago we've started one of them. We will run this iteration for a period of 1-2 weeks and after that is completed, will move to the second one. If you have any questions, please reach out to us at the task in Phabricator or the talk page of the research. Thanks! --LZia (WMF) (talk) 23:10, 6 August 2018 (UTC)

WP:GENDERID advice requested

JY Yang is a writer who goes by the pronoun "they". I'm not sure which of the following article versions is preferable:

  • this older version, which avoids the use of pronouns so as not to confuse the reader as to why a known person is referred to as "they". But using no pronouns looks kind of weird, especially if the article is ever expanded.
  • the current version, which uses "they" but explains this at the outset, per GENDERID's advice to "explain it without overemphasis on first occurrence in an article". My concern with this is that it gives undue attention to what is ultimately a minor aspect of the biography, especially in a stub.

Any advice from MOS experts? @YarLucebith: you may want to comment also. Sandstein 08:08, 2 August 2018 (UTC)

I'm not an MOS expert, but it looks fine to me the way it is currently. — Insertcleverphrasehere (or here) 08:31, 2 August 2018 (UTC)
Sandstein: based on experiences here I think an in-text explanation for pronoun preferences is a good idea for people who use they-them pronouns, if only because it can limit the number of well meaning editors who mistakenly attempt to "fix" the article by adding gendered pronouns. This is entirely a stylistic preference, but I think placing it as a parenthetical in the second sentence might make it feel a little less overemphasized: "Yang — who is nonbinary and uses they/them pronouns — has written a series of "silkpunk" novellas..." Nblund talk 16:56, 6 August 2018 (UTC)
The only thing that stands out is that explanation (which I do think is helpful), it just looks weird since its coming from a primary source. Perhaps moving that to a footnote so that the reader understands without calling out far too much detail to it? That's more just odd, not wrong/inconsistent with GENDERID. --Masem (t) 16:59, 6 August 2018 (UTC)
Thanks for the ping, User:Sandstein. I agree with what I think User:Masem is saying; make the explanation of pronoun use a footnote attached to the first instance of “they”, rather than a substantial part of the lead. Then just run with it.
While here, I feel obliged to voice my skepticism regarding the (admittedly ubiquitous, and not unreasonable) assumption that readers will be genuinely confused by the use of the pronoun, as opposed to, say, disgruntled or irritated due to politically motivated prescriptivism. I, personally, have only ever seen non-binary pronouns “corrected” in circumstances where the responsible party realizes (either self-evidently or explicitly) that the pronouns were intended as written, but either feels a need to avoid confusing others, or—probably more often, I’m sad to say—feels empowered to declare this Wrong and rectify the transgression. I say this not to question anyone’s motives—I see only good will in this thread!—but to suggest that an abundance of caution in the name of the confused masses is, in my view, unwarranted. (It helps that virtually any source of info on Yang will provide matching usage, so anyone questing after the “right” gender pronouns out of genuine confusion will pretty quickly realize they’ve misunderstood)
One more thought: as it stands, GENDERID seems wholly inadequate here—it was clearly written first and foremost to address the issue of binary transgender people (i.e. trans men and trans women) whose notability falls partly—or perhaps in rare cases, entirely—outside the temporal scope of their presently declared identity and/or name. For people like Yang who have no widely disseminated deadname or previous gender identification, the particular pitfalls addressed by GENDERID are conveniently side-stepped, and we seem to be in the position of establishing new precedent. Let’s try something and see if it works. :)
tl;dr We’re venturing into uncharted waters; if the pronoun use is mentioned/explained somewhere relatively early on, I suspect we’ll be fine.YarLucebith (talk) 00:48, 8 August 2018 (UTC)

Request for Community Input

Hello all. I'm currently developing a Wikipedia TriviaBot for use in the IRC channels on freenode. The intent and spirit of this bot is to help new editors learn crucial knowledge as well as expand veteran editor's general knowledge of Wikipedia. The bot is currently functional, though I'd still say it's in its beta phase. The reason for this post is to request community's assistance with expanding the database of Wikipedia related trivia questions from 80 total questions to thousands. This page has been created as a place for the community to submit questions for addition to bot's database. All contributions will be credited to the editor who submitted the question. I thank all who get involved. Anyone who is regularly on IRC are also welcomed to contact me to test the bot. Operator873talkconnect 02:35, 7 August 2018 (UTC)

The bot is now active! Please stop in and see what you think! #wikipedia-trivia connect Operator873talkconnect 23:32, 7 August 2018 (UTC)
The bot is clearly broken, and just spouts trivia questions at a target less audience. It does not respond to my inputs.—CYBERPOWER (Around) 01:22, 8 August 2018 (UTC)

Question about order of names

The article about the actor Victor Banerjee lists all the western directors that he has worked with first, and then the Indian ones. (Based on their names.) Given that he has worked with Indian directors of the status of Satyajit Ray, I'm not sure about this ordering. Does anyone have any thoughts about this? Ross-c (talk) 10:31, 14 August 2018 (UTC)

Yeah, that's bad (shoutout to WP:WORLDVIEW), and particularly egregious in the case of Jerry London, who as far as I can tell is not a particularly noteworthy director, certainly not as compared to Polanski or Ray. As for solutions, we could 1. list them in alphabetical order (Akbar, Benegal, Ivory, Lean, London Polanski, Neame, Sen, Ray, Varma) 2. list them in the order that he collaborated with them (Ray, Ivory, Benegal, Lean, Neame, Sen, Polanski, Akbar). Of these two options, I'm slightly more partial to the second. We should also consider shortening the list, as it's currently half the length of the lead. Rosguill (talk) 23:55, 16 August 2018 (UTC)

These articles need to be renamed

These articles need to be renamed:

--SrpskiAnonimac (talk) 15:32, 8 August 2018 (UTC)

"Kobilja River" calls for upper case "River". Bus stop (talk) 15:43, 8 August 2018 (UTC)
Why should they be written that way? What do English language sources use for the names of those rivers? --Jayron32 18:00, 8 August 2018 (UTC)
Rivers are only called "Vrljika" and "Kobilja", "river" should be in brackets --SrpskiAnonimac (talk) 09:01, 9 August 2018 (UTC)

There seems to be some usage in English of "Vrljika River" and "Kobilja river".

"Traditional dishes offered at the end of the trip will give you an opportunity to enjoy the finest food at the spring of the Vrljika River inside the 250 years old mill."

"Around Vidovište, from Kobilja river (south-west) to Ilomska's canyon (north-east) there are the hamlets, as follows..." Bus stop (talk) 10:59, 9 August 2018 (UTC)

Then you need to rename all the articles which they have in the title (river) in River (Category:Rivers of Bosnia and Herzegovina), e.g:
For example, these rivers have the name river (Bosnian: rijeka)
A more important question... Are all these “Crna” articles about the same river? Blueboar (talk) 12:04, 9 August 2018 (UTC)
No, these are different rivers, there is more:
in Serbia:
in Republic of Macedonia:

Why is an article such as Ćehotina named that way? Why isn't it titled Ćehotina River? Are there different naming conventions in Montenegro and Bosnia and Herzegovina for rivers than there are in the United States? The United States of course has Mississippi River and Missouri River. I find "Our Rafting club promotes and is one of the organizers of permanent open championship of Bosnia and Herzegovina R6 rafting on the Ćehotina river, World Cup rafting on the Tara River and other events such as school rafting, etc." Wikipedia titles that article Tara (river). Bus stop (talk) 00:43, 10 August 2018 (UTC)

OTOH, we have Rhine and Danube minus the "River" or "(river)" bits. SharkD  ☎  22:58, 13 August 2018 (UTC)
Excellent point. How are we to make sense of this? Danube River (Encyclopedia Britannica). "Our Danube River cruises deliver you to culture-rich banks, from scenic vineyards to spectacular monasteries..." Again, Britannica: Rhine River. "Hillside castles, lush riverbanks and storybook villages take center stage during our Rhine River cruises through Switzerland, Germany and The Netherlands." Did our Manual of Style drop the ball on this? Bus stop (talk) 03:31, 15 August 2018 (UTC)
I think part of the problem is that English just doesn't have a consistent way of referring to rivers, and I suspect that speaker judgments may differ depending on different regional variants of English. Anecdotally, when rivers are particularly large/important and not confusable with other places bearing the same name, they tend to drop "river" from the name (e.g. The Nile, The Amazon). Going through a few lists of rivers articles, it seems like American conventions generally put "river" after the river name, whereas British conventions put "river" before the river name or drop it entirely. Curiously, other near-synonyms for river like "creek" and "brook" are always appended but also are treated differently grammatically: one would say "The Mississippi River is wide" but you would never say "The Redwood Creek is wide"; conversely, "Redwood Creek is wide" is acceptable but "Mississippi River is wide" is not.Rosguill (talk) 22:18, 16 August 2018 (UTC)
So I guess an attempt at attaining uniformity on a project-wide basis would actually be the wrong thing to do and we should instead make such article-title decisions on a case-by-case basis? Bus stop (talk) 22:39, 16 August 2018 (UTC)
Agreed, in fact this appears to already be the suggested practice per WP:NCGN and WP:PLACEDAB. NCGN states that we should use the most widely accepted English name, while PLACEDAB specifies that terms like "river" and "mountain" can be added when it is useful for disambiguation but does not stipulate a hard rule on their inclusion or exclusion.Rosguill (talk) 22:55, 16 August 2018 (UTC)
Thanks for those leads. Following those leads I found WP:NCRIVER which seems to confirm that a title is determined by a variety of factors but that a lot has to do with "common usage". Bus stop (talk) 12:23, 17 August 2018 (UTC)

40,000 scientists identified by Quicksilver AI as missing from Wikipedia

40,000 scientists identified by Quicksilver AI as missing from Wikipedia.

-- GreenC 18:15, 8 August 2018 (UTC)

Alright who wants to get to work on these and put those robots to shame.--Prisencolin (talk) 22:06, 8 August 2018 (UTC)
You? Blueboar (talk) 11:58, 9 August 2018 (UTC)
I've done a few. I have some doubts about the selection procedure: at first glance it looks to have been a relatively unsophisticated media trawl. T0mpr1c3 (talk) 04:24, 12 August 2018 (UTC)
And the generated articles read like press releases from university media departments. Their bot may need more training on suitable style. Graeme Bartlett (talk) 12:52, 12 August 2018 (UTC)
How reliable is it for establishing notability? · · · Peter (Southwood) (talk): 16:40, 12 August 2018 (UTC)
Nobody knows. I think a far better way would be to identify scientists who have won a prominent international prize but do not have a wikipedia page. T0mpr1c3 (talk) 05:00, 13 August 2018 (UTC)
I pointed this out over at the Signpost and at NPROF. The problem is that they took 30,000 articles on WP about academics, but we have no idea which ones, and if all 30,000 would meet our notability guidelines even under NPROF. As such, it's a "bad" data set that if there are a fair proportion of those in the 30,000 that would fail GNG /NPROF. If they had used articles that clearly passed either guideline, I am sure there would a good number of false positives (articles that would fail notability) but far less than what their current set has. --Masem (t) 05:42, 13 August 2018 (UTC)

Talk:Kosovo Pomoravlje#Title

Talk:Kosovo Pomoravlje#Title -- SrpskiAnonimac (talk) 22:22, 9 August 2018 (UTC)

Stojan Janković

I would ask one of the admina to lock the article so that they can only be edited by registered users, the vandal mi non stop cancels the change, and the change has sources -- SrpskiAnonimac (talk) 11:36, 12 August 2018 (UTC)

WP:RFPP is the place to ask for protection. This looks like a slow edit war. Though I cannot tell that anyone is a vandal. Just a sr vs hr disagreement. Graeme Bartlett (talk) 12:45, 12 August 2018 (UTC)

Hoax?

Can anyone find sufficient sourcing to prove to me whether or not Marcel·lí Perelló i Domingo is a hoax? I got nothing on GBooks. Ten Pound Hammer • (What did I screw up now?) 00:35, 13 August 2018 (UTC)

The Spanish version is more developed involving a lot of editors over time with many sources, doesn't look like a hoax. -- GreenC 00:41, 13 August 2018 (UTC)

Translation of image needed. Where to go?

I've been reading Wikipedia:RFT, but cannot figure out which procedure to follow when text on an image (not an article) needs to be translated. I just uploaded File:Tape Ball Color Space, Itten, 1919-20.jpg and cannot read the handwriting well enough to figure out what is written. Where do I go for such a translation? Do I go to the reference desk instead? Thanks. SharkD  ☎  17:17, 13 August 2018 (UTC)

@SharkD: there is no specific procedure for such a thing. My main advice would be to contact users who have noted on their userpage that they want to translate from German. See Category:Translators de-en for the full list, but it's good to pick someone who has recent activity. – Finnusertop (talk ⋅ contribs) 00:18, 14 August 2018 (UTC)
Okay thanks! SharkD  ☎  01:35, 14 August 2018 (UTC)

Search box for village pump pages

This is kind of "meta" but why is there a unified search box for all the village pump pages? It would be better in my view if each page had its own search box. Sure a "search all Village Pumps" option would be nice, but having the "all" as the default brings in tons of clutter to already apparently random results... Jytdog (talk) 13:02, 14 August 2018 (UTC)

can these images be uploaded to the commons?

By my reckoning these five illustrations are in public domain, but I would really appreciate a person knowledgeable in copyright confirming this.

The images are by illustrator Ellen Gertrude Cohen, created in 1891 and appear to be published in Britain in that year, but it is unclear of the publication. They are on a site that implies copyright, but they are not marked. May I upload all five images to the commons? If so, which tag? "in public domain in U.S."?

Thanks for taking a look. WomenArtistUpdates (talk) 15:58, 14 August 2018 (UTC)

If published at that time, it is in public domain in USA now. The British copyright status depends on the death year of Ellen Gertrude Cohen. You are better to ask at Commons:Village pump/Copyright. Ruslik_Zero 20:38, 14 August 2018 (UTC)
Thanks Ruslik0. I'll ask over there. Unfortunately I cannot find a death date for Ms. Cohen, but I'll put all that in over on the copyright page. Best. WomenArtistUpdates (talk) 20:57, 14 August 2018 (UTC)

Ordering of paragraphs in section

Hi, I am still looking for outside input for my RfC, reverting to random order has been done previously in April. Also this topic has been brought up before here at this page. Blueboar, JohnBlackburne and WhatamIdoing, would you consider adding a 3rd opinion to the RfC? So far only myself and the editor who disagrees have responded to the RfC. AadaamS (talk) 06:02, 16 August 2018 (UTC)
Having looked at the edits, it appears that "random ordering" might be a bit misleading, as the primary locus of the disagreement is whether the information should be ordered by date of events (i.e., the decade in which immigrants arrived in Sweden) or the date of research publication (i.e., the decade in which the research was published, regardless of whether it is reports about immigrants who arrived in the 1980s or the 2010s). WhatamIdoing (talk) 06:28, 17 August 2018 (UTC)
The paragraphs in the "Past" section appear in random order and the "past/recent" split seems random or not supported by any source. AadaamS (talk) 17:05, 17 August 2018 (UTC)

Requests for donations

The appeal only appears when one is not signed in - rather than for registered users (who are going to be more supportive of WP than non-signers), who if they are on computers where they have ticked the 'Keep me signed in' box may never see the appeals.

Possibly there could be different types of appeal: for example would it be possible to make the 'Donate to Wikipedia' link on the side more noticeable? Jackiespeel (talk) 16:18, 15 August 2018 (UTC)

@Jackiespeel: Do you have "Suppress display of fundraiser banners" checked under Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-gadgets? --Ahecht (TALK
PAGE) 17:41, 15 August 2018 (UTC)
The point was actually the reverse - those who are committed enough to create a user name might well be more willing to donate than IP-contributors/users.
The issue has been raised in the past (often in conjunction with comments on the amount of space taken up by the appeals - hence the suggestion that the link be made more noticeable). Jackiespeel (talk) 17:59, 15 August 2018 (UTC)
How difficult would it be to make the 'Donate to Wikipedia' link bold/larger or different typeface etc? Jackiespeel (talk) 10:41, 17 August 2018 (UTC)

Feminists???

Closing for obvious reasons. --Yair rand (talk) 21:12, 15 August 2018 (UTC)

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Word has come to me of feminists, who are going to storm Wikipedia. So people, there’s going to be more vandalism on this page. Just a quick reminder that you should never be afraid to edit a vandalised Article. I’m not against women, I just like Wikipedia. ScRiptED (talk) 17:22, 15 August 2018 (UTC)

Good. We should prepare cookies and tea for them, and make sure they are well-fed and energized for improving Wikipedia. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 18:18, 15 August 2018 (UTC)
The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Help with multilingual redirects of Wikipedia

According to WP:JCW/W8 and WP:JCW/W9, the following circular references to Wikipedia are made

Journal1 Type2 Target1 Type2 Citations Articles Citations/article Search
Wikipedia Web Wikipedia Web 2921 1644 1.777

Wikipedia (J·M·T)
Google (J·M·T)

Wikipedia bahasa Indonesia, ensiklopedia bebas ? — ? 10 9 1.111

Wikipedia (J·M·T)
Google (J·M·T)

Wikipedia tiếng Việt ? — ? 4 1, 2, 3 1.333

Wikipedia (J·M·T)
Google (J·M·T)

Wikipedia, den frie encyklopædi ? — ? 4 1, 2, 3, 4 1.000

Wikipedia (J·M·T)
Google (J·M·T)

Wikipedia, entziklopedia askea ? — ? 1 1 1.000

Wikipedia (J·M·T)
Google (J·M·T)

Wikipedia, la enciclopedia libre ? — ? 62 50 1.240

Wikipedia (J·M·T)
Google (J·M·T)

Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Book Wikipedia Web 8 7 1.143

Wikipedia (J·M·T)
Google (J·M·T)

Wikipedia, wolna encyklopedia ? — ? 12 12 1.000

Wikipedia (J·M·T)
Google (J·M·T)

Wikipedie ? Czech Wikipedia Web 2 1, 2 1.000

Wikipedia (J·M·T)
Google (J·M·T)

Wicipedia ? Welsh Wikipedia Web 4 1, 2, 3 1.333

Wikipedia (J·M·T)
Google (J·M·T)

Wikipedija ? Wikipedia Web 2 1, 2 1.000

Wikipedia (J·M·T)
Google (J·M·T)

Wikipedija, prosta enciklopedija ? — ? 2 1, 2 1.000

Wikipedia (J·M·T)
Google (J·M·T)

Wikipédia ? Wikipedia Web 66 58 1.138

Wikipedia (J·M·T)
Google (J·M·T)

Wikipédia, a enciclopédia livre ? — ? 10 8 1.250

Wikipedia (J·M·T)
Google (J·M·T)

If you could ensure that things from the journal column point to the correct target, that would be great. Thanks. Ignore the 'type' column. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 14:45, 16 August 2018 (UTC)

Also feel free to fix the circular refs themselves. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 14:48, 16 August 2018 (UTC)

Unnecessary redirections

Unnecessary redirections, Serbo-Croatia and Serbo–Croatia --SrpskiAnonimac (talk) 13:53, 17 August 2018 (UTC)

Seem fine to me. Plausible search terms/plausible typos. Redirects are cheap, and there's no need to get rid of redirects that aren't harmful. --Jayron32 13:59, 17 August 2018 (UTC)

EU Copyright Reform Update

As you might already know, there is currently a copyright reform going on in the European Union, which will affect Wikipedia and other free knowledge projects. In July, the European Parliament debated a proposal that would have been harmful for freedom of expression and collaboration online. Many Wikimedia organisations and communities took action in June and July to oppose it and contributed to the rejection of this version of the proposal.

After its summer break, the European Parliament will vote on new amendments to the European Commission’s original proposal on 12 September. Members of the European Parliament can submit such new amendments by 5 September. The European Wikimedia organisations, members of the Free Knowledge Advocacy Group EU, and the Wikimedia Foundation are working on making sure amendments that protect and grow free knowledge will be on the table. These include a new approach to Article 13, but also safeguarding the public domain, freedom of panorama and user generated content.

Over the coming weeks, it will be important for Wikimedia to promote our vision of a copyright framework that helps us share the sum of all knowledge online. Should your community wish to engage in further public policy actions around this we would greatly appreciate if you coordinate with us to make sure our message is coherent across countries. We want to promote sensible copyright rules that advance access to information and knowledge instead merely stopping a bad proposal.

You can help by translating and sharing information materials in your language, sending an opinion piece to media in your country, contacting MEPs from your region with suggestions to support positive amendments, or participating in events in Brussels and Strasbourg (on 6 and 11 September, tbc).

We will provide updates soon about the community activities. In addition, we will share information and guidance on important amendments to the copyright proposal in due time.--dimi_z (talk) 09:57, 21 August 2018 (UTC)

Experiment: Eliciting New Editor Interests (Update)

Hi all. An update about the experiment for eliciting new editor interests mentioned here earlier. The first phase of the experiment is completed. We have received 382 responses from new editors. We have applied the matching algorithm to the responses received and we are getting ready for the second stage. This means we have stopped emailing newly registered users. We continue to expect that the second and third stages of the experiment not have negative impact on active editor workflows. This being said, we are actively monitoring the space. If you have questions, please ping here or on the project's talk page. Thank you! --LZia (WMF) (talk) 14:45, 21 August 2018 (UTC)

Template:Expert needed

{{Expert needed}} seems to be a very underused template.

So is there any proof that use of this template actually gets anything done? I've seen uses dating back to 2008 that have gone completely unanswered. FoxTrot used to have it for several years, without response from anyone anywhere despite multiple alerts. Ten Pound Hammer • (What did I screw up now?) 07:37, 11 August 2018 (UTC)

I'm surprised a template like this exists, as it seems to go against the principles of no original research. Aiken D 09:11, 11 August 2018 (UTC)
How so? An expert is likely to know more about the sources that exist for a topic and to know which sources are high quality. Anomie⚔ 11:54, 11 August 2018 (UTC)
I think it's useful in that it notifies other editors that there is information in the article that is vague, contradictory, or incomplete such that an editor without knowledge of the topic cannot further improve it without making dangerous assumptions that may be incorrect. I've frequently had this experience when copyediting articles about locations in India and Nigeria, as it's not always clear which terms are interchangeable, or even sufficiently translated. That having been said, I don't believe there's any system that attempts to inform potential experts about the article, so these templates often go unanswered.Rosguill (talk) 21:54, 16 August 2018 (UTC)
I agree. In my opinion we as a community, ought to have a more aggressive program to identify and attract experts. Until we do that, those templates will largely fall on deaf ears but I would prefer to solve the real problem rather than address a symptom of the problem.--S Philbrick(Talk) 17:31, 22 August 2018 (UTC)
In theory this sounds good. I agree with what Rosguill and S Philbrick have brought up. I'd say the talk page equivalent might be a better use in terms of visual appearance for readers, but that's a conversation for a TFD. Killiondude (talk) 20:46, 22 August 2018 (UTC)
Could we consider renaming Expert needed to something less imposing (brainstorming: "double check", "advice needed")? "Expert needed" at first glance makes me think that we're looking for someone with a PhD or extensive experience in the relevant field, when for a lot of these cases even a passing familiarity with the topic (or languages and/or locations relevant to the topic) would suffice. Rosguill (talk) 21:57, 22 August 2018 (UTC)

Rfc on the inclusion of the Erdős–Bacon number in biographies.

I have just opened an RFC on the above subject here Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Biography#Rfc_on_the_inclusion_of_the_Erdős–Bacon_number_in_biographies.. feel free to particpate. --Dom from Paris (talk) 16:55, 24 August 2018 (UTC)

The relevant context is here and here. --JBL (talk) 19:21, 24 August 2018 (UTC)

FYI: Automatic mapframe maps in Infobox building

  FYI

{{Infobox building}} now automatically displays dynamic <mapframe> maps by default, if available. If you are interested in any articles using this infobox, please review how the map displays in those articles: you can adjust the size, frame center point, initial zoom level, and marker icon using various optional parameters; the mapframe map may also be turned off using |mapframe=no.

See Template talk:Infobox building for further information and discussions. - Evad37 [talk] 05:12, 18 August 2018 (UTC)

Note: {{Infobox shopping mall}} now similarly displays automatic mapframe maps. - Evad37 [talk] 05:21, 25 August 2018 (UTC)

Flickr images, Commons and Wikipedia

On behalf of (at least part of, I can't speak for all) the Commons community I apologize for this deletion of 117 Huntington images that were used here. Many, probably most (but that's a bit harder to check now..) are properly licensed.

It's not the first time this happens, nor will it be the last. Another DR with 90 images (49 used here, 23 on ruwiki, 12 or less on various others) is also about to be executed. I'm not linking it now because that might cause it to be deleted faster and I haven't saved all the pictures yet.

Undeletion is feasible for a few in case of The Huntington (the deletion was so careless even PD-old works have been deleted), but for most undeletion is probably not possible on the short term.

Now my question. Would enwiki appreciate it if I upload the images that are properly licensed locally? And is there a tool to upload Flickr images to enwiki? Alexis Jazz (talk) 22:12, 25 August 2018 (UTC)

Question about number of watchers

If one goes to the History section of an article, one can click on "Number of watchers" (in case any one is curious, I shall say that Wikipedia: Village pump had 954 viewers last time I looked). My question is this. How many days is this a record of the watchers that an article has had? Perhaps it might be an idea to change "Number of watchers" to "Number of watchers in past x days". Vorbee (talk) 19:27, 23 August 2018 (UTC)

@Vorbee: Watchers are editors that have added the page to their Watchlist. It is a count of the current number of watchlists that contain the page, not views over a certain period. If you're interested in page views, see https://tools.wmflabs.org/pageviews. --Ahecht (TALK
PAGE) 20:47, 23 August 2018 (UTC)

Feedback for User:Citation bot/use

I just gave this page a major revamp. It could look a fresh pair of eyes, especially from users that never used User:Citation bot before. Please give feedback at User talk:Citation bot/use. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 17:37, 28 August 2018 (UTC)

Hungarian cities and towns

Around the population of 30000, the situation is quite chaotic (the numbers are the rank in population):

23. Dunakeszi city. 24. Szigetszentmiklós city. 25. Salgótarján city. 26. Cegléd city. 27. Baja city. 28. Ózd town. 29. Vác town. 30. Szekszárd city. 31. Mosonmagyaróvár town. 32. Gödöllő town. 33. Hajdúböszörmény town. 34. Pápa town. 35. Gyula town. 36. Kiskunfélegyháza city. 37. Budaörs town. 38. Esztergom city. 39. Gyöngyös town. 40. Ajka city. 41. Orosháza city. 42. Kiskunhalas city. 43. Kazincbarcika town. 44. Szentes city. 45. Szentendre town. 46. Jászberény city. 63. (!!!) Keszthely city.

I know population isn't the only criteria in being a town or a city, but I don't understand why Szentes is more of a city than Siófok. --194.37.90.250 (talk) 12:25, 29 August 2018 (UTC)

Looking at WP:NCGN, there doesn't seem to be any established convention for the usage of town vs. city, and doesn't provide any special guidelines for Hungary. Ideally, we should reflect actual usage, so if most sources refer to Szentes as a city, then we should refer to it as a city. Rosguill (talk) 17:19, 29 August 2018 (UTC)

How to compare the actual size of the same article in different wikipedias?

There is a tool, which allows to compare how popular is the same article in different wikipedias.

I am looking for a similar tool to compare the actual size of the same article in different wikipedias. --Perohanych (talk) 17:57, 29 August 2018 (UTC)

Notice: User:Citation bot now expands select bareurl citations

For example, see [6].

This doesn't work with all bare urls, but it will work with urls to Google Books, arXiv, bibcode, JSTOR, doi, PMID and several other identifiers. If you see such bare urls in an article, you can activate Citation bot here or use the one-click citation expander gadget in your preferences. The Google Books output in particular will need to be reviewed, as sometimes Google Books links to magazine, rather than books proper. It shouldn't give anything egregiously wrong, but the citation might not have the full details, list a publisher for author, or might need to be converted to {{cite magazine}} or something.

Many thanks to User:AManWithNoPlan for this. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 15:04, 22 August 2018 (UTC)

@Headbomb: Is this intended to replace, or work alongside, ReFill? Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 08:44, 30 August 2018 (UTC)
Both tools have their use, this is just intended to... well just make the bot more useful than it was. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 10:39, 30 August 2018 (UTC)

Editing of sitewide CSS/JS is only possible for interface administrators from now

Hi all,

as announced previously, permission handling for CSS/JS pages has changed: only members of the interface-admin (Interface administrators) group, and a few highly privileged global groups such as stewards, can edit CSS/JS pages that they do not own (that is, any page ending with .css or .js that is either in the MediaWiki: namespace or is another user's user subpage). This is done to improve the security of readers and editors of Wikimedia projects. More information is available at Creation of separate user group for editing sitewide CSS/JS. If you encounter any unexpected problems, please contact me or file a bug.

Thanks!
Tgr (talk) 12:39, 27 August 2018 (UTC) (via global message delivery)

New Page Patrol – Help wanted

New Page Patrol needs experienced volunteers
 
  • We managed to reduce the New Page Patrol backlog down to nearly nothing by the end of June, but New Page Patrol is currently struggling to keep up with with the influx of new articles and is back up to several thousand unreviewed articles. We could use a few extra hands on deck. We are currently falling behind by about 50 articles per day.
  • Reviewing/patrolling a page doesn't take much time but it requires a good understanding of Wikipedia policies and guidelines; and Wikipedia needs experienced users to perform this task.
  • If you would like to join the project and help out, please see the granting conditions and review our instructions page. You can apply for the user-right HERE.
  • If you are an administrator, or already have the NPR user right, please consider reviewing a few extra articles per day. — Insertcleverphrasehere (or here) 23:24, 30 August 2018 (UTC)

Why Lana Rhoades has not a page for her but instead her name redirect to another page?

She's a pretty famous pornstar and Wikipedia in other languages has article for her.

Sorry if I mistaken section but I think this is the more appropriate. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Unvers (talk • contribs) 13:28, 4 September 2018 (UTC)

If she qualifies for a page because she meets the minimum requirements at Wikipedia (see here for information), then if a page does not yet exist, it only doesn't exist because you didn't create it yet. See, every word at Wikipedia is only here because people who care about a subject write words about it. If you care, and have not written about it yet, then there is no one else to blame except yourself. --Jayron32 13:38, 4 September 2018 (UTC)
@Unvers: In this case, however, please see Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Lana Rhoades where is was determined (last year) that she is not notable enough for her own article. If you disagree, I propose you create a draft with appropriate sourcing. Wikipedia:Your first article will be helpful to read. Once you are done, you can request review by experienced editors. Regards SoWhy 14:58, 4 September 2018 (UTC)

Ok, the fact is that the page that responds to the name of Lana Rhodes is a page of redirection that has the protection with the blue lock and that I being new user can not change, I noticed that on Italian Wikipedia that is that of my native language the article is there and also in some other language, I do not know if it is allowed to cite porn sites here but I saw that in one of these sites she is first for popularity and has 500 million views, of course this is not enough to get her on Wikipedia, if the community has decided, however, that she should not have a personal page since I'm a novice I do not feel like going against the decision because I physically can not create the page because it's protected by a blue lock that requires 500 changes and 90 days of inscription it seems to me, I will have to wait a while. Unvers (talk) 23:20, 4 September 2018 (UTC)

Unvers, if you manage to create a draft that passes review, someone will "fix" the "lock" problem, it's possible it takes an admin, redirects can be like that. You might find people interested in working with you at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Pornography. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 08:20, 5 September 2018 (UTC)

Read-only mode for up to an hour on 12 September and 10 October

Read this message in another language • Please help translate to other languages.

The Wikimedia Foundation will be testing its secondary data centre. This will make sure that Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia wikis can stay online even after a disaster. To make sure everything is working, the Wikimedia Technology department needs to do a planned test. This test will show if they can reliably switch from one data centre to the other. It requires many teams to prepare for the test and to be available to fix any unexpected problems.

They will switch all traffic to the secondary data center on Wednesday, 12 September 2018. On Wednesday, 10 October 2018, they will switch back to the primary data center.

Unfortunately, because of some limitations in MediaWiki, all editing must stop when we switch. We apologize for this disruption, and we are working to minimize it in the future.

You will be able to read, but not edit, all wikis for a short period of time.

  • You will not be able to edit for up to an hour on Wednesday, 12 September and Wednesday, 10 October. The test will start at 14:00 UTC (15:00 BST, 16:00 CEST, 10:00 EDT, 07:00 PDT, 23:00 JST, and in New Zealand at 02:00 NZST on Thursday 13 September and Thursday 11 October).
  • If you try to edit or save during these times, you will see an error message. We hope that no edits will be lost during these minutes, but we can't guarantee it. If you see the error message, then please wait until everything is back to normal. Then you should be able to save your edit. But, we recommend that you make a copy of your changes first, just in case.

Other effects:

  • Background jobs will be slower and some may be dropped. Red links might not be updated as quickly as normal. If you create an article that is already linked somewhere else, the link will stay red longer than usual. Some long-running scripts will have to be stopped.
  • There will be code freezes for the weeks of 10 September 2018 and 8 October 2018. Non-essential code deployments will not happen.

This project may be postponed if necessary. You can read the schedule at wikitech.wikimedia.org. Any changes will be announced in the schedule. There will be more notifications about this. Please share this information with your community. /User:Johan(WMF) (talk)

13:33, 6 September 2018 (UTC)

Question for the WMF (me thinks..)

OK, I am not sure where, or whom to ask about the recent changes.

Until recently (that is, a few days ago), you could look at a page history, then up to the left was a button which gave info about who had edited the page (by number of edits, and by added text).

It was basically this tool: https://xtools.wmflabs.org/articleinfo/index.php with the info about the article automatically filled in.

Why has that been removed? (Ok, you can still find it, but now you have to look around, while before it was right there, easily available.) Huldra (talk) 21:34, 7 September 2018 (UTC)

You mean the "Page statistics" link that's the second link at the top? --SarekOfVulcan (talk) 21:39, 7 September 2018 (UTC)
User:SarekOfVulcan LOL, yeah, you are right.. Thanks..Huldra (talk) 21:45, 7 September 2018 (UTC) (feeling like an idiot...)
NP, it was an instructive hunt. :-) --SarekOfVulcan (talk) 21:50, 7 September 2018 (UTC)
The link is made by MediaWiki:Histlegend which was modified today [7] after discussion on the talk page. PrimeHunter (talk) 22:17, 7 September 2018 (UTC)
Thanks, User:PrimeHunter, I had no idea even where to start looking for that stuff (now, back to my Middle Eastern stuff), Huldra (talk) 22:28, 7 September 2018 (UTC)

Wikipedia Peer Review - Request for reviewers

 
Wikipedia adsfile info – #14

Wikipedia peer review needs more reviewers. Please join us and contribute some reviews, or add yourself to our volunteers list to get regular updates of unanswered reviews.

Peer review provides a way for new and experienced editors alike to ask for and provide input into an article that is being developed. It's often a stepping stone for new editors, or for articles on their way to featured article status. It's a great way to help new editors become experienced with our wiki ways, improve articles, and learn about completely new subject areas.

We usually have between 10 - 20 unanswered reviews, often waiting for months, that only require a pair of eyes and some kind advice. We look forward to seeing you around!

Yours, --Tom (LT) (talk) 23:00, 8 September 2018 (UTC)

Results and new experiment to understand Wikipedia citation usage

Hi everyone,

Please find the results of our first analysis about readers' interactions with references in English Wikipedia in our project page. This is work from the Wikimedia Foundation Research team, in the context of the "Citation Usage" project. This project aims to understand how Wikipedia readers use the citations, and the role of external citations in Wikipedia reading, which in turn can inform the editor and tool developer communities about the usage (or not) of citations by Wikipedia readers.

After a first round of data collection, which ended on 2018-07-08, we analyzed the data and identified a number of issues. We have modified our instrumentation to address these issues, and we will start a second round of data collection next week. We will collect data that captures readers' (not logged-in users) page views, as well as their interactions with references and footnotes. We will initially sample 1–15% of the traffic to validate the data quality, then turn at 100% sampling rate for a period of one month. All details can be found here. We may have to change this plan based on the initial validation steps, and we will keep this thread and our project page posted with changes if they occur.

To follow the progress of the project and monitor our research results, please also look at this task. If you are interested to know more, or if you have any question, or any observation, please ping me or leave a message on the project page! Miriam (WMF) (talk) —Preceding undated comment added 17:38, 31 August 2018 (UTC)

@Miriam (WMF): I dropped some notes on the discussion page.--S Philbrick(Talk) 14:06, 3 September 2018 (UTC)
@Sphilbrick: Thank you for your precious suggestions! I will address them this week and make the changes in the analysis page accordingly. Miriam (WMF) (talk) 11:07, 4 September 2018 (UTC)

Update: due to the overload of events, we temporarily stopped the data collection. We are making changes to the schema to sample page load events at 50%, and will start it again next week. We will keep this thread informed with all news. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Miriam (WMF) (talk • contribs) 15:04, 11 September 2018 (UTC)

RfC Admiral Sir Francis Beaufort founder of the Beaufort Wind Scale

I'm not sure if this is the correct procedure but I read that an RfC can be published at the Village pump. I'd like to hear a wider opinion on this question

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Francis_Beaufort#RfC_on_National_Origins Centuryofconfusion (talk) 01:42, 13 September 2018 (UTC)

Changes to Special:Block

Hello all,

If you’re interested in changes to how Special:Block works, then see the discussion about Partial blocks. Your thoughts are greatly appreciated.

  • The third set of designs for a new layout of Special:Block are also available for review and comment.

Please spread the word to others (especially administrators) who might be interested in helping re-design Special:Block's layout. Cheers, For the Anti-Harassment Tools team, SPoore (WMF), Trust & Safety, Community health initiative (talk) 15:07, 13 September 2018 (UTC)

Adding short descriptions and defining pictures for search

Hello. I noted the Short description of "Azərbaycan" page with purple color in the following picture.

 

My first question: how to add such descriptions to pages? Second question: If the article contains more than 1 photo, how to define which photo will be shown in search (for examle Azerbaijan's flag in "Azərbaycan" page)? For both questions, give universal methods for all languages. Ki999 (talk) 11:57, 14 September 2018 (UTC)

@Ki999: See the Wikidata method at Wikipedia:FAQ/Editing#How do I edit mobile subtitles? It requires a Wikidata item for the page. I think the alternative feature used by {{Short description}} is only enabled at the English Wikipedia. Special:Version#mw-version-parser-function-hooks lists shortdesc, meaning that feature exists here. It is not at az:Special:Version#mw-version-parser-function-hooks. See mw:Extension:PageImages#Image choice. It is not possible to specify the image directly. PrimeHunter (talk) 12:44, 14 September 2018 (UTC)
@PrimeHunter: Thank you!

Commons will soon stop accepting some GFDL-only media

In hindsight, this is better suited for Meta as other projects are affected as well: m:Wikimedia Forum#Commons will soon stop accepting some GFDL-only media. Alexis Jazz (talk) 13:02, 14 September 2018 (UTC)

Template:Media_by_uploader and how to confirm uploads are in fact own work?

Per the comments on the closure of a TfD here Wikipedia:Templates_for_discussion/Log/2018_July_23#Template:Media_by_uploader it was suggested that a VP discussion be had. I've marked this template as deprecated as an amended wording was implemented in {{Img-unclaimed}} and {{img-claimed}}, but given the wording of those templates is related to the one at the closed TFD, this discussion also concerns them.

The problem is essentially that before Wikipedia developed the upload policies it currently now has and to some extent the structure imposed by the {{information}} template, some media was uploaded under a set of assumptions that whilst in good faith at the time, aren't necessarily the same assumptions that would be made when evaluating media that would be uploaded under the current policies. One of these assumptions being that where the uploader said something like "I made this" on the file description page, the file was implicitly considered own work, (One of the current recommend approach is for the uploader to use Own work as the Source: field and to use a license like {{Self}} or {{Self2}} at the time of upload.

Why does this matter? Currently a query at WMF Quarry (https://quarry.wmflabs.org/query/29651) lists at least 27,000 uploads (an expanded query listed at least 50,000) for which a source couldn't be recognised. The actual number of uploads that don't have a source is certainly going to be considerably smaller. In many instances the source for older images will be a statement to the effect "I made this" or " Photo taken by username", but NOT as it didn't exist the time an explicitly included {{own}}tag or {{information}} block. Some contributors in the past have added these in good faith, but I was advised against off-wiki (more than once) about automatically adding own work (or {{own}} without some kind of confirmation (either from the original uploader or by other means). Whilst assumption of good faith is a key Wikipedia trait, taking it on trust that something is own work based on limited meta-data is not necessarily a long-term approach.

{{media by uploader}}, {{img-unclaimed}},{{img-claimed}} were intended as part of a pragmatic approach, as by asking uploader to more actively confirm 'own' work status, without needing to take media through the FFD or PROD process which would be inappropriate given that many of the affected uploads are sourced, and are (implied or not) indeed own work by their uploaders.

ShakespeareFan00 (talk) 11:09, 14 September 2018 (UTC)

After a good chat with SF00 off-wiki, the issue seems to be as follows. There are three classes of images:
1. Images which are identified as own works, but without the exact {{Own}} template.
2. Images which are tagged with a licence but no clear source (and are presumed own works for some reason)
3. Images without any source or licence (if presumed own, then they are automatically licensed under the GFDL and CC-BY-SA)
SF00 has been previously instructed that tagging case 1 as {{Own}} is not appropriate which has lead them to attempt to create a new process of clarification. I'd like to invite the community to either allow SF00 to get on fixing the tags, or to put some proper thought into how we want to handle this. TheDragonFire (talk) 11:41, 14 September 2018 (UTC)
  • I think there are several good cases where it is perfectly safe to just put the {{own}} template in the image without further interaction from the uploader or putting any warning templates anywhere: (1) the uploader clearly says "my own work" or "I took this photo on my trip to Africa" or some such thing, (2) the uploader attributes the photo to "Bob Smith" and either the user's Wikipedia user name is BobSmith123 or the user says on their user page that their name is Bob Smith, (3) the user uses the {{GFDL-self}} or {{PD-self}} template. All three of these cases are obviously with the proviso that the claim is credible - that the image hasn't been published outside of Wikipedia, doesn't have EXIF data that contradicts what the user says, etc. On the other hand, if there is no claim of authorship at all or the photo is attributed to a person that we don't reasonably believe to be the uploader, then {{npd}} or {{nsd}} is the correct template. If the uploader is still an active user, then we can/should attempt to discuss the issue with the user rather than just tagging the image - that is more likely to get a positive response than just tagging 10 images and leaving 10 identical templates on the talk page. (Obviously, there is little we can do if the uploader hasn't editing in 10 years - we have no choice but to tag and delete the image.) --B (talk) 20:06, 16 September 2018 (UTC)

RfC: Coverage of Roundup Cancer Case

If interested, please comment here. petrarchan47คุก 04:10, 17 September 2018 (UTC)

Who are our fellow Wikipedians?

OP blocked until he can convince another admin that he can edit without attacking other editors again. --SarekOfVulcan (talk) 18:24, 17 September 2018 (UTC)

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

I have done over 200,000 edits to Wikipedia articles while logged in, and a similar number (but I don't know what it is) while not logged in. And as in all cases, there are some aspects of Wikipedia that I am familiar with and others that I am not.

Before Wikipedia existed, I was aware of the International Workshop on Bayesian Inference and Maximum Entropy Methods in Science and Engineering, an annual conference at which persons, most of whom are professors in physical sciences, assemble to present their research findings to others in attendance. I attended this particular conference in 1991. Those who attend this conference take an unconventional view, outside the mainstream, of the role of probability theory in the sciences. There are many conferences at which professors in many fields, who are interested in a particular topic that attracts a small number of their colleagues, annually assemble to present to each other their latest findings or creations. Some of these are gathering of those who take some non-mainstream view, and many are not, but either way, it is not considered grounds for suspicion about one's competence or honesty that one participates in such a thing, and I never expected that anyone would think it is until I encountered a dozen-or-so Wikipedian who told me I was stupid or dishonest or otherwise deeply flawed because I couldn't see that such a conference is a scam.

It was asserted on a Wikipedia page about professors in health-related fields, one of them a surgeon in the medical school at Johns Hopkins University and one a professor of psychology at UCLA, and various others, that their reason for using the standard terminology of their fields was only to create a false impression of legitimacy (this is absurd and clearly dishonest), that they don't publish, or at least not on the topic of their common interest, outside of a journal that their group had founded (this is false, as may be quickly verified), and that they do not collaborate in research with others outside their group (this is false, as may be quickly verified).

I objected to those assertions as clearly libelous and I was told that I was wrong without any attempt of six persons asserting this to tell me why I was wrong or to argue or discuss this with me. There is supposed to be collegiality among Wikipedians, and merely issuing a definitive ruling on a matter about which one disagrees with a fellow Wikipedian while refusing to discuss or argue, is inconsistent with that.

One person wrote that professors in health fields were "using sciencey-sounding language to advocate something that is unquestionably commercially lucrative but which does not appear to have significant academic support". Note that:

  • professors were using the language of their own academic fields;
  • "unquestionably commercially lucrative". What? Since when is organizing conferences like this commercially lucrative? I don't know the details of finances of such things, but this is implausible. Can anyone tell me about this?
  • "which does not appear to have significant academic support." How so? That professors organize conferences is academic support. Just how much support constitutes being "significant" will bear examination. Generally disagreeing with prevailing views in one's field and organizing conferences of those who agree with one's own views is not considered justification for accusations of dishonesty; it just means one disagrees with a prevailing view.

And now to the point: I want to know who these people are (not their names, and not individually). Their refusal to argue or discuss the issues with fellow Wikipedians is an occasion for suspicion. I have heard it asserted that a lot of mudslinging happens on Wikipedia on politically charged issues or other controversial things, but only asserted; I have not seen that sort of thing, probably because my stomping grounds within Wikipedia have not included certain areas very much. The person who made the assertion about the "unquestionably" lucrative nature of organizing conferences among professors declined to answer my request for the specifics about that. His assertions about the amount of academic support not being "significant" is also something about which he declined to be specific after being asked.

A Wikipedian and his followers (apparently there actually are such things as followers; I don't know how that happens) who gather to simultaneously oppose the position taken by one Wikipedian should assume good faith and should be willing either to argue or discuss or instruct their interlocutor, rather than just giving orders. But it is not so. Is there something that should be done about this? Michael Hardy (talk) 16:35, 16 September 2018 (UTC)

Really? --Izno (talk) 17:17, 16 September 2018 (UTC)
Wikipedia:Drop the stick and back slowly away from the horse carcass GMGtalk 17:35, 16 September 2018 (UTC)
If you are frustrated because editors will not respond to your points, I welcome you to Wikipedia (which seems odd considering you have many times my Wikipedia experience) and refer you to WP:SATISFY. There is no objective mechanism by which stronger arguments prevail, except in the rare case of a clear policy connection, and the rest of us learn to live with that or leave. I and others are dealing with exactly such a situation today, losing a debate to a majority with lame arguments in a discussion with no clear policy connection. If the trend continues to the close, we will review WP:How to lose, say our respective personal versions of the Serenity Prayer, and move on. We won't come to the Village Pump and complain about it.
Suggest speedy close as wrong venue and/or forum shop. ―Mandruss ☎ 17:56, 16 September 2018 (UTC)
@Mandruss: You misunderstand. My question was meant literally. I was seeking information. I have not encountered anything like this situation before. Michael Hardy (talk) 19:28, 16 September 2018 (UTC)
Michael, for your own sake please let this go. Allowing things to keep gnawing away at you like this cannot be good for your soul. Shock Brigade Harvester Boris (talk) 19:53, 16 September 2018 (UTC)
@Shock Brigade Harvester Boris: As I said, I am seeking information. I do not understand the behavior of some people around here, and I didn't know people of that sort existed. Michael Hardy (talk) 22:34, 16 September 2018 (UTC)
You have been told why your "claims" are not actionable on numerous occasions by a number of different editors, but you simply did not accept "no" as an answer, nor would you accept all of these explanations as valid because it's not the explanation you are looking for, so you continue to seek for new venues to re-litigate. Your not the first person to be in a similar situation; it seems like plain texts cannot get through to you, so perhaps you need to meet an experienced editor in person to explain to you. I am sure you personally know a few of them; the best ones are probably your fellow mathematicians that are proficient in the communication style of Wikipedia. Alex Shih (talk) 00:39, 17 September 2018 (UTC)
@Alex Shih: (1) "Actionable" is not the point. They may be BLP violations without being actionable. We're not concerned with actionability here because of the "no legal threats" policy.
(2) I'm not trying to "re-litigate" anything; I am seeking information. I never said I'm the first person in this situation; I said I've never seen it before.
(3) If I've been told _why_ it's not a BLP violation, it was based only on falsehoods. There have been numerous factually incorrect statements by people who I think are gaslighting me because I've gone against their agenda. Nobody has addressed this question while attempting to be factually correct. For example, the claim that organizing these kinds of conferences among professors is commercially lucrative.
(4) Give me the diffs. Under the circumstances and in view of your past behavior, what you're doing looks like gaslighting. Michael Hardy (talk) 17:15, 17 September 2018 (UTC)
@Alex Shih: Let's be clear: I've been told that my observations lack merit, by people who were contemptuous of any discussion or argument with me, and who appear to have motives unrelated to the merits or demerits of what I said. Michael Hardy (talk) 18:15, 17 September 2018 (UTC)
More casting of WP:ASPERSIONs without a shred of evidence. Will this ever stop? Without a block that is. MarnetteD|Talk 18:18, 17 September 2018 (UTC)
The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Vulgate

Forgive and please advise if this is the wrong place to bring this up. Wikisource has only the first few chapters of the vulgate. This seems like a serious oversight that could be easily mended. Couldn’t any of many copies be uploaded? I regret if I’m being naive about the factors involved. Temerarius (talk) 02:16, 13 September 2018 (UTC)

Pinging several of the Wikisource admins: It sounds like Temerarius would like to help with Wikisource. Can someone point the correct direction? Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 20:13, 18 September 2018 (UTC)
The place to ask would be s:Wikisource:Scriptorium/Help, and it would be helpful to identify a public domain version of the vulgate suitable for uploading. bd2412 T 20:44, 18 September 2018 (UTC)
Consider the Clementine Vulgate Project as a source for the text. EdJohnston (talk) 21:39, 18 September 2018 (UTC)
Is this a desire to have a Latin text of the Vulgate put online, or an English translation of the Vulgate? This makes a big difference, since it involves different Wikisources (Latin versus English). Wikisource is divided into different language projects just as Wikipedia is. So the first question to be answered is: Which language are we discussing here? --EncycloPetey (talk) 01:06, 19 September 2018 (UTC)
Thanks all. Not a translation, just a Latin text. Temerarius (talk) 03:04, 20 September 2018 (UTC)
  Resolved

— billinghurst sDrewth 08:15, 19 September 2018 (UTC)

Legally Blondes 2

This redirect "Legally Blondes 2" is unnecessary, it needs to be deleted...."Legally Blonde 2" is correct --SrpskiAnonimac (talk) 10:39, 17 September 2018 (UTC)

@SrpskiAnonimac: This is not the place. See Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion. ―Mandruss ☎ 15:23, 17 September 2018 (UTC)
For which I nominated it shortly after the note. Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion/Log/2018 September 17#Legally Blondes 2. --Izno (talk) 15:57, 17 September 2018 (UTC)

fold3

Is there anyone out there who can guide me through a few simple questions regarding my efforts to open a fold3 account, with Wikipedia permissions? -Broichmore (talk) 11:00, 20 September 2018 (UTC)

Broichmore, have you applied for access to WP:Fold3 yet? User:Samwalton9 (WMF) could probably help you get started with Wikipedia:The Wikipedia Library. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 16:56, 20 September 2018 (UTC)
@Broichmore: I see you were approved for a Fold3 account - are you having issues accessing or using your account? Samwalton9 (WMF) (talk) 09:06, 21 September 2018 (UTC)
Thanks for your help, Yes, no access; it's apparently been resolved now, I'll know for sure in a couple of weeks. Broichmore (talk) 10:33, 21 September 2018 (UTC)

The GFDL license on Commons

This has been posted here because your wiki allows local file uploads. Please help translate to other languages..

Commons will no longer allow uploads of photos, paintings, drawings, audio and video that use the GFDL license and no other license. This starts after 14 October. Textbooks, manuals and logos, diagrams and screenshots from GFDL software manuals that only use the GFDL license are still allowed. Files licensed with both GFDL and an accepted license like Creative Commons BY-SA are still allowed.

There is no time limit to move files from other projects to Commons. The licensing date is all that counts. It doesn't matter when the file was uploaded or created. Every wiki that allows local uploads should check if bots, scripts and templates that are used to move files to Commons need to be updated. Also update your local policy documentation if needed.

The decision to allow files that only have a GFDL license, or not allow them, is a decision all wikis can make for themselves. Your wiki can decide to continue allowing the files that Commons will no longer allow after 14 October. If your wiki decides to continue to allow files after 14 October that Commons will no longer allow those files should not be moved to Commons. — Alexis Jazz, distributed by Johan using MassMessage

18:11, 20 September 2018 (UTC)

A question about some policies

Hi! Can someone tell me if you have any policies here regarding disclosure of personal data and conflicts between certain users that are going on outside of the wiki itself (like on Facebook - with offences, nickname disclosures and such)? Because I couldn't find any (or I didn't search thoroughly enough). If there're none, I'd like to know what are the best practices regarding these situations. --Piramidion 05:56, 29 September 2018 (UTC)

Try WP:OUTING. Enterprisey (talk!) 06:03, 29 September 2018 (UTC)
Thanks! That's what I was looking for. But what about outing made outside of Wikipedia, say, on a public Facebook page? Do the Wikipedia rules apply here and should the user get blocked?--Piramidion 08:58, 29 September 2018 (UTC)
No, but it all depends. Generally, only what happens on-wiki is of concern as far as policies are concerned. However, if user Example at some off-wiki website was attacking an editor (outing is the worst attack) and if there were good reason to believe that Example was the same person as User:Example, the latter might be blocked. You could consider emailing an admin with the details and asking their opinion. Johnuniq (talk) 09:06, 29 September 2018 (UTC)
Thanks for the answer. The example case you mentioned, was exactly the one I was thinking of, so it directly addresses my concerns. As for emailing an admin, well, there is such a case, but not on this wiki, and there was no actual outing (only personal attacks with some use of personal data that had been previously posted on Wikipedia by the targeted person). The thing is we do not have appropriate policies regarding this, and I wanted to know how far can Wikipedia policies reach, and if their scope is larger than Wikipedia itself. So I decided to check some opinions of the much more experienced community of enwiki. Thanks for your help!--Piramidion 09:55, 29 September 2018 (UTC)

Closing an archived discussion

When a discussion is archived, and it is requested that the discussion be closed, where does the closing statement go? Enterprisey (talk!) 01:11, 27 September 2018 (UTC)

@Enterprisey: You restore it from the archive (a manual copy-and-paste operation), remove it from the archive, and then close it normally. ―Mandruss ☎ 09:09, 29 September 2018 (UTC)
Thanks! Enterprisey (talk!) 23:38, 29 September 2018 (UTC)

Research about how to measure the effectiveness of blocks

The Community health initiative is starting a project to measure the effectiveness of blocks. The first step is to discuss with the wikimedia community ideas about how to do it. To that end, the Anti-Harassment Tools team and Morten Warncke-Wang has created a page with some initial ideas and a discussion space to talk about these and your ideas.

AHT is particularly interested to learn whether the new partial blocks feature is successful as a tool or instrument. Therefore, the first part of this research will mainly focused on the short term gains in the utility of partial blocks in order to understand whether it appears to be working and if there appears to be a need for changes. These measurements will provide us with insight quickly. Currently there is not much known about how sitewide blocks affect users. This makes a comparison of the effects of the new partial block feature to sitewide blocks difficult. To provide all of us with some insight, the Anti-Harassment Tools team would like to examine historical block data across wikimedia projects to establish a baseline.

However, our list of measurements that we propose has a lot of longer term ones, e.g. surveys. These are important and should be considered to be implemented later, because they can provide all of us with insight that is otherwise hidden.

Please join us to discuss these proposed measurements. For the Anti-Harassment Tools team and Morten Warncke-Wang. SPoore (WMF), Trust & Safety, Community health initiative (talk) 15:04, 1 October 2018 (UTC)

Results from global Wikimedia survey 2018 are published

Hello! A few months ago the Wikimedia Foundation invited contributors to take a survey about your experiences on Wikipedia. The report is now published on Meta-Wiki! We asked contributors 170 questions across many different topics like diversity, harassment, paid editing, Wikimedia events and many others.

Read the report or watch the presentation, which is available only in English. Add your thoughts and comments to the report talk page. Feel free to share the report on Wikipedia/Wikimedia or on your favorite social media. Thanks! --EGalvez (WMF) 20:18, 1 October 2018 (UTC)

Surname pages - articles or disambigs?

There's enwiki page Kerrigan, which lists people (and a character) with given surname. And there are exactly the same pages in other wikis: ru:Керриган, de:Kerrigan, fr:Kerrigan, etc. I've tried to connect them via wikidata and met a merge conflict. The problem is that in ruwiki and some other wikis this page considered as disambiguation page, while in enwiki this is an article, am I correct?

If there are several articles about people with the same surname in Russian Wikipedia, there's always a disambiguation page with the list of articles and sometimes there is an article about this surname with history, etymology, etc, but without any lists. Seems like in enwiki there's always one page with complete list and, very rarely, additional facts. IMHO, they looks more like disambigs, not like articles - there is no sources at page, there's probably no reliable sources at all, meaning that there is no notability. Which page should they connected to? I can find any variant.

What variant is correct? Facenapalm (talk) 14:04, 2 October 2018 (UTC)

Brainstorm: Useful "pseudo article" categories.. or something

I'm going to be a bit unclear here, and ask for some input on how best to deal with this. I'm tempted to invoke some form of WP:IAR, but I wanna see what alternatives are first.

Let's say we have a certain predatory publisher (Foobar Publications) which meets WP:N, and has article on Wikipedia. Said publisher produces a lot of crap journals, none of which meet WP:N, so the standard practice here is to redirect individual journal entries to the publisher (e.g. Scientific Research Publishing, redirects). Since we have a main article, categories, and redirects, we can easily find problematic citations to that publisher and its journals via Special:WhatLinksHere and other tools like WP:JCW or WP:CRAPWATCH.

But let's say we have a certain publisher (Foobar Publications) which doe not meet WP:N, and therefore doesn't have an article on Wikipedia. And said publisher produces a lot of crap journals (Open Foobar Journal of Bunk, Open Foobar Journal of Crap, Open Foobar Journal of Junk... ), none of which meet WP:N. As things stand now, we can have no information on Wikipedia about those journals, "Special:WhatLinksHere" is useless, and other tools like WP:JCW or WP:CRAPWATCH cannot be used to their full potential.

The question here, is how do we best deal with this? My WP:IAR instinct is

  1. Categorize and redirect Foobar Publications in/to Category:Foobar Publications academic journals.
  2. Categorize and redirect individual journals (Open Journal of Bunk, Open Journal of Crap, Open Journal of Junk, etc.) in/to Category:Foobar Publications academic journals
  3. Redirect standard abbreviations (Open J. Bunk, Open J. Crap, Open J. Junk, etc.) to Category:Foobar Publications academic journals
  4. Add a hatnote to the category, possibly something like
    This category is for academic journals published Foobar Publications, a predatory open-access publisher.
    or
    This category is for academic journals published by Foobar Publications, a predatory open-access publisher which does not meet our notability guidelines.

The idea is that we'd have something very similar to Category:Scientific Research Publishing academic journals, except without the main article and we could leverage our predatory publishing fighting tools to their full effect. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 18:54, 2 October 2018 (UTC)

If this helps us keep predatory publishers and journals from being used within Wikipedia it has my strong support. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 19:34, 2 October 2018 (UTC)
How would we verify that the publishing company is predatory? Should we cite a source on the category page? Enterprisey (talk!) 19:57, 2 October 2018 (UTC)
I do not favor "redirect to category". I would be fine with "redirect to list", as long as we have a citation, which should be required regardless for any particular item. Should be the same purpose except that isn't a WP:XNR. --Izno (talk) 20:07, 2 October 2018 (UTC)
@Izno: But that's the thing. There's no publisher article because it's not notable, there's no list because the journals aren't notable either. There can be no mainspace target. The question is what do we do then? A redirect to a category seems like a good IAR solution (and is not forbidden by WP:XNR either).Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 20:16, 2 October 2018 (UTC)
Notability is not our inclusion criteria besides at the total-article level. Seeing as there are multiple lists in existence, a List of predatory journals could or even should exist, presumably sourced to those other lists. If the predatory journal is entirely unmentioned anywhere, we have no business covering it regardless of namespace. --Izno (talk) 20:26, 2 October 2018 (UTC)
(You can also do List of predatory journal publishers, but I suspect those two lists overlap significantly if not exactly.) --Izno (talk) 20:27, 2 October 2018 (UTC)

The problem with those are rather large. First is the issue of sourcing. Very often, you can only give one source for predatoriness, and most of those (e.g. Beall's list) will hedge and will mix "predatory" with "potentially predatory" and "questionable" publishers/journals. So you could have a journal that's merely questionable, but not predatory, mixed with journals which are definitely predatory, and others that are only potentially predatory. But because the list doesn't distinguish between them, we can't use it to say the journals/publishers are definitely predatory, and if you throw the word "potential" around, then it becomes near-meaningless as far as an article is concerned.

However, there are other issues with such lists, assuming they could be made. For journals, there are literally tens of thousands of such crap journals out there. The lists would be too massive and too cumbersome to maintain/keep up to date, and would suffer from the problems above (what is predatory, what is only 'potentially' predatory, what has been wrongly accused of being predatory, etc...). And if we have a list of publishers instead, then we'd be redirecting tens of thousand of individual journal entries to a list of thousands of publishers, without any indication of which publisher is of relevance to individual journals. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 21:03, 2 October 2018 (UTC)

Your objections in the second paragraph are the same objections I might levy at your category scheme, also. And your former, as well. --Izno (talk) 21:15, 2 October 2018 (UTC)
Not really, since the journals would be simply categorized in their publisher category. If predatory is mentioned, a source can be added for that. If no good source exists, we just leave that out. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 21:39, 2 October 2018 (UTC)
Redirecting to a list of thousands of publishers is OK if anchors are used to identify the publisher. Having a list that is too large has been the case with list of minor planets. This has been split into numerous sublists. So I think we can overcome the problem of big lists. Since the issue of using content from predatory journals is not confined to English Wikipedia, perhaps a broader system could be used say on Meta or Commons to allow identification across all projects. Graeme Bartlett (talk) 21:55, 2 October 2018 (UTC)
Except that adding/removing/changing an entry invalidates several hundreds, if not thousands of redirects per addition/removal. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 22:02, 2 October 2018 (UTC)

Karl Topia

Article "Karl Topia" needs to be renamed to "Karl Thopia", since the article about the family is called "Thopia family". All other articles about family members are called "... Thopia" (examples: George Thopia, Helena Thopia, etc.) ... Excuse in my English, I'm using Google Translate --SrpskiAnonimac (talk) 21:52, 1 October 2018 (UTC)

You should request for the move at WP:RMT. –Ammarpad (talk) 13:46, 2 October 2018 (UTC)
@Ammarpad: Can you do it, I do not know that? --SrpskiAnonimac (talk) 21:43, 2 October 2018 (UTC)
@Ammarpad: here (Category:Thopia family) you can see that all the other articles in the title have "Thopia", while the article "Karl Topia" has "Topia" --SrpskiAnonimac (talk) 22:39, 2 October 2018 (UTC)
Yes, moved. –Ammarpad (talk) 06:50, 3 October 2018 (UTC)

Templates

There seems to be an increasing use of templates on talk pages, and there is even WP:TEMPLAR which tells you not to template the regulars. It seems to me that, in the near future, talk pages will simply be a tessellation of templates. No one will be able to air a genuine issue with the article, because other editors will simply respond with a tortoise shell of templates. The problem is that, while the templates do explain Wikipedia policy, this policy is complex and nuanced and the particular issues of the article have a reality that goes beyond Wikipedia and even the Internet itself. Is it possible to restrain the Knights Templar or is Wikipedia going to buckle under a shield of templates???--Jack Upland (talk) 09:50, 3 October 2018 (UTC)

Reminder: No editing for up to an hour on 10 October

Read this message in another language • Please help translate to other languages.

The Wikimedia Foundation are testing its secondary data center. This will make sure that Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia wikis can stay online even after a disaster.

They switched all traffic to the secondary data center 12 September 2018. On Wednesday, 10 October 2018, they will switch back to the primary data center.

Unfortunately, because of some limitations in MediaWiki, all editing must stop while we switch.

You will be able to read, but not edit, all wikis for a short period of time.

You will not be able to edit for up to an hour on Wednesday, 10 October. The test will start a bit after 14:00 UTC (15:00 BST, 16:00 CEST, 10:00 EDT, 07:00 PDT, 23:00 JST). If you try to edit or save during these times, you will see an error message.

This project may be postponed if necessary. You can read the schedule at wikitech.wikimedia.org. Any changes will be announced in the schedule. Please share this information with your community. /User:Johan(WMF) (talk)

12:03, 4 October 2018 (UTC)

List of proposed measurements about the effectiveness of blocks

The Anti-Harassment Tools team plans to generate baseline data to determine the effectiveness of blocks and we'd like to hear from users who interact with blocked users and participate in the blocking process to make sure these measurements will be meaningful.

The full commentary and details on how these will be measured are under § Proposed Measurements. For sake of brevity and discussion here are the seven proposed measurements for determining the effectiveness of blocks:

Sitewide blocks effect on a user

  1.  Blocked user does not have their block expanded or reinstated.
  2.  Blocked user returns and makes constructive edits.


Partial block’s effect on the affected users

  1. Partially blocked user makes constructive edits elsewhere while being blocked.
  2. Partially blocked user does not have their block expanded or reinstated.


Partial block’s success as a tool

  1. Partial blocks will lead to a reduction in usage of sitewide blocks.
  2. Partial blocks will lead to a reduction in usage of short-term full page protections.
  3. Partial blocks will retain more constructive contributors than sitewide blocks.

Are we over-simplifying anything? Forgetting anything important? Talk to us here. SPoore (WMF), Trust & Safety, Community health initiative (talk) 15:24, 8 October 2018 (UTC)

Predatory open-access journal?

In this edit, I got a warning that I was citing a predatory open-access journal, but the warning didn't indicate which of the six sources I added was the offending one. How do I get more information on that? -- RoySmith (talk) 15:50, 9 October 2018 (UTC)

http://www.scirp.org/journal/PaperInformation.aspx?PaperID=81899&#abstract is the problem source. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 16:00, 9 October 2018 (UTC)
OK, but how does one know that from the warning message? -- RoySmith (talk) 16:11, 9 October 2018 (UTC)
I know out of memory. For other people, checking this URL leads to Special:AbuseFilter/891 which in turn shows that 4236 which is part of the SCIRP DOI is blacklisted. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 16:20, 9 October 2018 (UTC)

Wiki4MediaFreedom contest - II edition

 

Hello! This is to announce that Osservatorio Balcani e Caucaso Transeuropa, with which I'm working, has launched the II edition of the Wiki4MediaFreedom contest. You can participate by writing articles in the media freedom topic, with particular attention to the access to public information and killed journalists. There's time until November 30th. More information on Meta. --Niccolò Caranti (OBC) (talk) 10:39, 11 October 2018 (UTC)

Arabic diacritics in {{lang}} template in lead

At Zanzibar, someone has removed the diacritics from the spelling of the Arabic name for the territory. Do we have a guideline as to whether or not to provide the vocalized form? Largoplazo (talk) 18:04, 13 October 2018 (UTC)

I didn't find any (if there was one, I guess it would be in Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Arabic#Lead paragraph). Since a strict transliteration is encouraged next to the Arabic text, the non-vocalised form might actually be more useful (for searching etc.), but I don't think it's a difference that merits enforcing in either way. One related guideline is for Hebrew, it says not to include vowels (Wikipedia:Naming conventions (Hebrew)#Vowels and shva). Tokenzero (talk) 12:32, 14 October 2018 (UTC)

Donna Strickland wins Nobel prize -- without enwiki article

FYI: Donna Strickland won a Nobel Prize in Physics this week (she's now on our Main page of course). It appeared that she had no enwiki article at the time of Nobel announcement. (It was deleted in 2014 for copyright reasons). -DePiep (talk) 20:11, 5 October 2018 (UTC)

And then deleted again later for apparent lack of notability. But apparently some 33% of new Nobel winners have no article, which is slightly surprising. The man who won the Chemistry Nobel the next day had no article either, which has of course received no media coverage whatsoever, whereas this has been all over the media & several discussions here that I can't be bothered to link to (usual places - do a what links here). Johnbod (talk) 22:48, 5 October 2018 (UTC)
For the record, not 'deleted again', declined at article creation (with a request for more sources). Alanscottwalker (talk) 22:50, 5 October 2018 (UTC)
While it's entirely possible that whoever proposed deletion or declined the article creation failed to properly follow WP:ACADEMIC, the coverage of this is rather silly and misunderstands how Wikipedia operates. Are we just supposed to assume that researchers might win a Nobel in the future when reviewing articles? The fact that there are past Nobel winners that don't have articles is far more concerning than someone not having an article prior to winning a Nobel. signed, Rosguill talk 22:56, 5 October 2018 (UTC)
Wow. Johnbod Could you give the wiki page where this number is described & discussed? - DePiep (talk) 11:30, 6 October 2018 (UTC)
Well, List_of_Nobel_laureates lists all and none is a red link. -DePiep (talk) 13:04, 6 October 2018 (UTC)
I think Johnbod means that at the time the Nobel is announced, some have no article; but it is rapidly created due to the Nobel. 33% might be too high but as a regular at WP:ITNC where we do post the announcement of all Nobels, there is at least one or two laureates each year that have no article at the time of announcement, and editors step up to make one based on the weight of the Nobel so that it is done for the ITN posting. But that's also not accounting for how many start in poor shape that would be on the cusp of deletion (in the same manner as Strickland's draft) and get improved. I'd argue its something like 10-15% of Laureates don't have articles when the Nobel is announced, but closer to 60-75% that have very poor articles at that same point in time, all which are created/improved on the announcement. --Masem (t) 13:13, 6 October 2018 (UTC)
It's 13.19% of Nobel Laureates in Physics, Chemistry, and Physiology and Medicine since 2007.[8] GMGtalk 13:32, 6 October 2018 (UTC)
Well, that's one figure. The 33% covers a wider group of 212 Nobel winners, but going right back to WP's start - see User_talk:Bradv#About_your_rejection_of_the_AfC_on_Donna_Strickland. Johnbod (talk) 18:51, 6 October 2018 (UTC)
Did her page not exist because she is a women? No. -DePiep (talk) 21:23, 6 October 2018 (UTC)
We can't really say that in any statistical sense. There are too few women Nobel laureates overall to draw any conclusions. It very well may be the case. Now it may also very well be the case that this was the result of systemic bias, but also that that systemic bias lies largely external to Wikipedia, as some have pointed out, that we are often hamstrung by sources that themselves tend to prefer writing about men. GMGtalk 10:59, 17 October 2018 (UTC)
Another issue that is hard for academics that do not have much coverage until they get an esteemed award is that we have COI problems with BLPs in general where people are posting effective resumes to get hits. We have to err on the side of exclusion if notability is not there in the article. I would argue that Strickland could have passed some tests for notability prior to the Nobel, but those sources to support that were not provided at the state the draft was rejected. We need to stress to editors to make sure that when they create these articles they strive to make it encyclopedic rather than promotions/resume or CV-ish or the like. --Masem (t) 23:18, 5 October 2018 (UTC)
Yup... remember that there are two prongs to WP:Notability - the first is that the subject has to have done something noteworthy... the second is that others (reliable sources) have to have taken note of what the subject did. There are lots of academics who achieve the first prong without achieving the second. Blueboar (talk) 12:57, 6 October 2018 (UTC)
Clerly (TM), the physics editors, the Canadian editors, the Women in Red editors, and the press journalists (not to mention other groups/projects), failed us, they should all be fired. Alanscottwalker (talk) 18:05, 6 October 2018 (UTC)
Getting them fired seems rather harsh, surely fairer that they should have their pay deducted from 28 March to 3 October for failing to anticipate the future actions of the Nobel committee. . . dave souza, talk 00:57, 7 October 2018 (UTC)
Note: The original article in 2014 was deleted as an unambiguous copyright violation. It had nothing to due with notability. Rmhermen (talk) 19:39, 6 October 2018 (UTC)
Where does it say that? Hawkeye7 (discuss) 01:11, 7 October 2018 (UTC)
Admins can see it, and I vouch for what others have said about the deleted version. It was a copyvio outright from university pages. --Masem (t) 01:14, 7 October 2018 (UTC)
Here. You don't need to be an admin to see the deletion log. – Finnusertop (talk ⋅ contribs) 16:02, 9 October 2018 (UTC)
Since this was being raised as a persistent question, I had a careful look and the version that was deleted in March 2014 was an exact word for word copy of the two paragraphs of the OSA biography (as archived 2015-08-28) with the order of the paragraphs swapped, and a new opening sentence stating "Donna Strickland is a past president of the Optical Society." So it was a webpage of The Optical Society rather than a university page. . . . dave souza, talk 15:57, 9 October 2018 (UTC)
If anyone is interested, I reviewed scientists who won the Nobel since 2007. There were 12 (out of 91) that didn't have an article at the time that they won. A few more details here: https://twitter.com/rarohde/status/1047802023092076544. Dragons flight (talk) 16:01, 9 October 2018 (UTC)

Talk:Kosovo Pomoravlje#Title

Talk:Kosovo Pomoravlje#Title --SrpskiAnonimac (talk) 21:03, 15 October 2018 (UTC)

Baidu Baike

Why Baidu Baike (baike.baidu.com) has 16000000 articles but English Wikipedia has 5700000 articles — Preceding unsigned comment added by Amirh123 (talk • contribs) 15:04, 16 October 2018 (UTC)

They have a relaxed approach to copyright issues and notability.©Geni (talk) 20:55, 16 October 2018 (UTC)

but 16000000 is very big — Preceding unsigned comment added by Amirh123 (talk • contribs) 09:06, 17 October 2018 (UTC)

and quality and legality are important for us here. --Zac67 (talk) 09:15, 17 October 2018 (UTC)
As a random example, it has three pages (1 2 3) on exactly the same topic (the Baikonur Cosmodrome). To be fair, the first one seems to have a lot of content than Wikipedia (English or Chinese) does not (even some potentially interesting references, like [1] there). But, for example, the section "Historical events (历史事件)" is just copied from reference 2 there. There are also far fewer references in total, so it's much less likely to be credible. Some articles are known to be copied and plagiarized from Wikipedia, without attribution; some are machine translated (which leads to terrible language quality); see Wikipedia:Mirrors and forks/Baidu Baike. Baidu Baike is also more open to self-promoting content, so people create articles just to advertise themselves. Probably the main factor though is big numbers of very short articles on nonsense topics; for example, one article for each mobile app that provides a few wallpapers (see this search). Tokenzero (talk) 11:14, 17 October 2018 (UTC)

Question

Does the article "Freestyle battle" need to be a redirect to the article "Battle rap", or? --SrpskiAnonimac (talk) 14:30, 18 October 2018 (UTC)

@SrpskiAnonimac: This would best be discussed at Talk:Freestyle rap or Talk:Battle rap. --Ahecht (TALK
PAGE) 17:09, 23 October 2018 (UTC)

Peer reviews

Is it just me, or, are an absurd number drafts (or former drafts) being nominated for peer review recently? Regards, SshibumXZ (talk · contribs). 03:50, 21 October 2018 (UTC)

I've noticed the same thing, especially from newer editors. Has there been a big push to make peer review more prominent recently on-wiki, or is something else going on here? shoy (reactions) 13:54, 23 October 2018 (UTC)
Shoy, exactly, WP:PR is stressed as it is, so, I don't think the new people asking for peer reviews are gonna get much in the way of responses.
Does anyone else have an idea as to what has been happening? Regards, SshibumXZ (talk · contribs). 13:10, 26 October 2018 (UTC)

Media Viewer consensus

Is Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)/Media viewer 2014 the current consensus on Media Viewer? If so, the way for IPs to disable the Media Viewer is highly deceptive (burying it in something that looks like settings) and this may be a violation of consensus.  pythoncoder  (talk | contribs) 22:04, 25 October 2018 (UTC)

Ohboy. I'm not sure how much you know, but I'll try to summarize events.
When MediaViewer (MV) was built, the Wikimedia Foundation ran pop-up surveys asking random readers about it. On some tiny language Wikis they got generally positive results and they thought all was well. However when they ran the surveys on major languages (English and German), the reader-survey results TANKED. A majority of readers rejected it. (As far as I'm aware, no one has ever found an explanation for the differing reader-survey results between small languages and major languages.) EnglishWiki, Commons, and GermanWiki all had multiple RFCs on MV, with overwhelming consensus that MV should be DEFAULT OFF for everyone. However the foundation had decided that MV was a GoodThingTM, and they spent a fortune building it. They were dead set on rolling it out despite reader-rejection and community consensus. The community decided to follow consensus, and on German Wiki an admin edited the site-wide javascript to disable MV. Certain foundation staff decided to fight consensus, a very-new Executive Director and the Board of Trustees approved it. They editwarred the javascript and threatened to summarily revoke admins. They invented SuperProtect to win the editwar via page-protection, even admins couldn't edit a Superprotected page. The community was outraged, especially about Superprotect, everyone was angry and stressed on both sides. Nearly one THOUSAND editors signed on to a demand to remove Superprotect. Things got really ugly. The foundation announced that they would remove Superprotect, and that they would run a "consultation" to collaboratively work with the community to resolve the issue together. However during that "consultation" the foundation BANNED discussion of the default setting. Foundation staff edit-warred to blank the comments of people wanting it default-off. The foundation would only allow supportive comments, or bug reports, or enhancement requests. The foundation then selected four minor bugs or enhancements that they wanted to work on. Stuff that no one cared about. The foundation deemed the issue resolved.
This is the point when the linked RFC occurred. That was indeed the most recent RFC on the issue. As you can see there's a sizable majority for Media Viewer to default off. It was given an utterly bogus closure against the majority. That closure was challenged and unanimously declared invalid. Then it got a new closure, again disregarding the majority. It was also challenged. If I recall, that discussion didn't get much participation. It resulted in no consensus to endorse or overturn the closure, which defaults to keeping the closure.
The closure is ridiculously long, but my interpretation is that the closure decided participants were too dumb to understand the fixes or changes the foundation said they would make after the consultation, and that we should have waited until that work was done before running the RFC. The closer effectively disregarded and invalidated all !votes. If you read the last line of the closure, it explicitly says a new RFC needs to be run to produce a consensus result on the issue. By that point the conflict had been dragging on for half a year, and everyone was sick and tired. No followup RFC was run, and if a new RFC is run it is unclear whether the foundation will go back to war. As a side note, Commons has MV set default-off for logged in users and default on for logged out users. A more recent informal discussion at commons had a unanimous ten people wanting it fully default off.
As a direct result of this incident, all community-elected members were kicked off the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees. The newly elected Trustees had all explicitly ran on an anti-Superprotect platform. All non-elected members of the Board of Trustees (except Jimbo) were also soon replaced. The foundation staff members directly responsible for building Superprotect soon left or were fired. The executive director managed to last about a year more before being fired by the new board.
So the answer is yes, that's the current "consensus". But the closure on it denies the existence of any consensus on MediaViewer settings, and it says a fourth RFC has to be run. Alsee (talk) 07:44, 26 October 2018 (UTC)
That's preposterous but this being the WMF I'm not all that surprised.  pythoncoder  (talk | contribs) 12:23, 26 October 2018 (UTC)
And that is the short story. · · · Peter (Southwood) (talk): 12:51, 26 October 2018 (UTC)

Internet Archive and Chart Attack

Dear editors:

I edit a lot of articles about Canadian music subjects, and one of the sources I use regularly is a magazine called Chart Attack. It stopped publishing last year, and now the back issues seem to have disappeared from the web. The Wayback Machine has copies of a lot of the issues, and I am hoping that there is a way to search inside the archive for text within the specific domain "www.chartattack.com".

The links I've already added will all be dead, but I put in complete citations and URLs, so those should be okay for now, and likely one of the bots will come along and link them to the archived pages. However, there are a lot more articles that could benefit from the album reviews, etc., in the magazine, and I need a way to find them. If anyone knows of a way to search the Wayback Machine in this way, please explain. Thanks.—Anne Delong (talk) 19:03, 29 October 2018 (UTC)

Anne Delong, the answer is no. The material is there but not at this point retrievable. The Internet Archive has run a beta test on rudimentary retrieval, and there has been a bit of academic interest, see here. The web pages are just stored. They aren't indexed in a way that would make things findable in the way that Google indexes things and finds things. This is very frustrating. It is like having an enormous library with no doors or windows. Maybe in the future if someone donates enough money to them. At least the information isn't going away. StarryGrandma (talk) 23:15, 29 October 2018 (UTC)
@StarryGrandma: Is there anything that would prevent Google from indexing it? 142.160.89.97 (talk) 05:51, 30 October 2018 (UTC)
You can search the Wayback Machine but limited. Example. -- GreenC 23:22, 29 October 2018 (UTC)
Thanks, StarryGrandma and GreenC. I guess I could just read the magazine issue by issue...—Anne Delong (talk) 23:57, 29 October 2018 (UTC)
I don't know how reliable it is, but you can always put the following in Google: "www.chartattack.com" site:archive.org

That says "No results found". Repeating after omitting "www." finds some hits. Johnuniq (talk) 02:01, 30 October 2018 (UTC)

The Community Wishlist Survey

The Community Wishlist Survey. Please help translate to other languages..

Hey everyone,

The Community Wishlist Survey is the process when the Wikimedia communities decide what the Wikimedia Foundation Community Tech should work on over the next year.

The Community Tech team is focused on tools for experienced Wikimedia editors. You can post technical proposals from now until 11 November. The communities will vote on the proposals between 16 November and 30 November. You can read more on the wishlist survey page.

/User:Johan (WMF)

11:05, 30 October 2018 (UTC)

Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Village_pump_(miscellaneous)/Archive_59&oldid=1166857619"