User talk:Arms & Hearts/Archive 4

Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Herb Rooney

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Talkback

Hello, Arms & Hearts. You have new messages at Wikipedia:Redirects_for_discussion/Log/2013_July_11#Westchester.2C_New_York.
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Emmette Hernandez Coleman (talk) 05:22, 14 July 2013 (UTC)

Books and Bytes: The Wikipedia Library Newsletter

Books and Bytes

Volume 1, Issue 1, October 2013

by The Interior (talk · contribs), Ocaasi (talk · contribs)

Greetings Wikipedia Library members! Welcome to the inaugural edition of Books and Bytes, TWL’s monthly newsletter. We're sending you the first edition of this opt-in newsletter, because you signed up, or applied for a free research account: HighBeam, Credo, Questia, JSTOR, or Cochrane. To receive future updates of Books and Bytes, please add your name to the subscriber's list. There's lots of news this month for the Wikipedia Library, including new accounts, upcoming events, and new ways to get involved...

New positions: Sign up to be a Wikipedia Visiting Scholar, or a Volunteer Wikipedia Librarian

Wikipedia Loves Libraries: Off to a roaring start this fall in the United States: 29 events are planned or have been hosted.

New subscription donations: Cochrane round 2; HighBeam round 8; Questia round 4... Can we partner with NY Times and Lexis-Nexis??

New ideas: OCLC innovations in the works; VisualEditor Reference Dialog Workshop; a photo contest idea emerges

News from the library world: Wikipedian joins the National Archives full time; the Getty Museum releases 4,500 images; CERN goes CC-BY

Announcing WikiProject Open: WikiProject Open kicked off in October, with several brainstorming and co-working sessions

New ways to get involved: Visiting scholar requirements; subject guides; room for library expansion and exploration

Read the full newsletter

Thanks for reading! All future newsletters will be opt-in only. Have an item for the next issue? Leave a note for the editor on the Suggestions page. --The Interior 20:35, 27 October 2013 (UTC)

delete lengthy synopsis

This content is too long and detailed and lacks references. Please don't put it back. Andrevan@ 15:25, 13 November 2013 (UTC)

Borsa

Seems reasonable based on the guidelines. I was looking at it from the point of view of date of last activity (1992); there was nothing for him mentioned after that date. But rereading the guidelines for the Possibly living category, I think you are right to move it to Living people. Thanks, FeanorStar7 10:23, 16 November 2013 (UTC)

Your WP:RX Request

Hello, Arms & Hearts. Please check your email; you've got mail!
It may take a few minutes from the time the email is sent for it to show up in your inbox. You can at any time by removing the {{You've got mail}} or {{ygm}} template.

. John M Baker (talk) 04:47, 25 November 2013 (UTC)

Football in Australia

The article was prodded because it was created by a user following extensive discussion that Football in Australia adequately covered the topic of all the various football codes in Australia. All the links to the articles about those codes appear in the article and in the footer. There was extensive discussion about the creation of disambiguation and attempts to create one were viewed as a POV fork to push the idea regarding the name of soccer. This approach was repeatedly rejected for months. --LauraHale (talk) 16:32, 1 December 2013 (UTC)

Right, makes sense I guess. How would you feel about the links in the lede of Football in Australia being amended to point to the Australia-specific articles currently listed in the dab page? (So e.g. Australian rules football in Australia and Rugby league in Australia rather than Australian rules football and Rugby league respectively.) That way the article would basically fulfil the purpose of dab page (i.e. providing links to what people searching for the title might be looking for, maybe rendering the existing dab page conclusively redundant. – Arms & Hearts (talk) 14:13, 2 December 2013 (UTC)

The Wikipedia Library Survey

As a subscriber to one of The Wikipedia Library's programs, we'd like to hear your thoughts about future donations and project activities in this brief survey. Thanks and cheers, Ocaasi ^{t | c} 15:09, 9 December 2013 (UTC)

Discussion about "Template:Cop"

There is a discussion at Wikipedia:Redirects_for_discussion/Log/2014_February_15#Template:Cop about the second nomination of Template:Cop in which you may be interested. --Jax 0677 (talk) 06:31, 15 February 2014 (UTC)

Discussion about "Template:Wprk"

There is a discussion at Wikipedia:Redirects_for_discussion/Log/2014_February_8#Template:wprk about the nomination of Template:wprk in which you may be interested. --Jax 0677 (talk) 09:16, 16 February 2014 (UTC)

Discussion about "Template:Wpcm"

There is a discussion at Wikipedia:Redirects_for_discussion/Log/2014_February_25#Template:Wpcm about the nomination of Template:Wpcm in which you may be interested. --Jax 0677 (talk) 07:28, 28 February 2014 (UTC)

List of peace activists

Hello Arms & Hearts, and good to meet you. You've tagged a POV tag on the list of peace activists without saying why on the talk page, and so may I assure you that every entrant has been checked for "peace activism" on their own pages here. I've honed it to relevant people and articles, although additional information on some of them is needed, and I'd be glad to work with you on the page if you see needed areas of improvement. I wouldn't think references are needed on every entrant as their own pages hold the key references. Having kept good watch on the page, and fought the good fight with vandals, I feel it's a good page, but ask for your thoughts on what you see may be wrong with it except for the incompleteness of some of the entries. Thanks! Randy Kryn 3:37 9 March 2014 (UTC)

Hi Randy Kryn. sorry for doing the whole drive-by tagging thing on that article – I've been meaning to make a few changes but found it hard to find the time. I'm going to have to disagree with you on the issue of references – neither WP:V nor WP:BLP makes any exceptions for situations where facts are cited in other articles, so I don't think the fact that there are citations in the entries' own articles is enough. (I'm also pretty sure there's no specific reference for "peace activist" designation in a lot of the articles, and to include anybody in the list we really ought to have a reference saying "John Doe is a peace activist".) Ideally every entry would be cited – see List of libertarians in the United States for an example of a list of individuals that, while incomplete, is pretty comprehensively referenced. As far as WP:NPOV is concerned I was mostly struck by the frequent use of "inspiration(al)" in descriptions, which doesn't seem like a word that should be used in neutral descriptions, especially without a source. The POV concerns are more easily ironed-out than the reference issue so I'll try to have a look at that sometime soon. Hope that all makes sense! – Arms & Hearts (talk) 10:26, 9 March 2014 (UTC)

Every list on Wikipedia should ideally have in-line citations, but that would remove most lists or par them down to so little content that they'd be useless. You've done a commendable job citing entrants on the List of Libertarians in the United States, nice work, and I wish that could be the norm here. On the peace activist page I've added entrants and removed many from when I found the list (an editor on the talk page made the case for removal of Robert Kenney, saying he helped start the war that he then opposed which made sense), and the word "inspiration" on some entrants is mine (someone like Mohandas Gandhi, for example, did work which inspired others to continue working on his ideals and philosophy) but I can see why it wouldn't be appropriate here. I've also included nonviolent anti-war leaders within the term "peace activist", and since I've been a news and history junkie since my youth (don't bogart that Newsweek my friend, pass it over to me) I knew which pages to look under for many of those, and then transferred their names to the list. Reading and going through hundreds of other articles here (and isn't it amazing that almost every topic or name you look for on Wikipedia has an entrant, although many still don't) I culled and then studied other names, to either add or subtract them from the list, so tried to shape the list to those individuals and topics which touch on anti-war, anti-nuclear bomb, organizing for peaceful solutions to a war, and See also topics which relate to those areas. I guess I'm proud of the look and feel of the page - non-official and discouraged wikipedian traits but traits which in real-life drive most editors forward I assume - but that pride must be tempered, of course, with accuracy, available proof, and the ability to add or subtract information which proves inaccurate. Before this note gets too long, thanks for the discussion and the probable ultimate page improvement. Randy Kryn 12:15 9 March 2014 (UTC)

Redirects for discussion

There are several redirects for discussion at Wikipedia:Redirects_for_discussion/Log/2014_March_27 in which you may be interested. --Jax 0677 (talk) 16:05, 29 March 2014 (UTC)

Redirects for discussion

There are several redirects for discussion at Wikipedia:Redirects_for_discussion/Log/2014_April_14 in which you may be interested. --Jax 0677 (talk) 03:23, 14 April 2014 (UTC)

Talkback

Hello, Arms & Hearts. You have new messages at Muboshgu's talk page.
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– Muboshgu (talk) 13:56, 19 April 2014 (UTC)

VisualEditor newsletter—April 2014

Since the last newsletter, the VisualEditor team has mostly worked on performance improvements, image settings, and preparation for a simplified citation template tool in its own menu.

• In an oft-requested improvement, VisualEditor now displays red links (links to non-existent pages) in the proper color. Links to sister projects and external URLs are still the same blue as local links.
• You can now open templates by double-clicking them or by selecting them and pressing  Return.  This also works for references, images, galleries, mathematical equations, and other "nodes".
• VisualEditor has been disabled for pages that were created as translations of other pages using the Translate extension (common at Meta and MediaWiki.org). If a page has been marked for translation, you will see a warning if you try to edit it using VisualEditor.
• When you try to edit protected pages with VisualEditor, the full protection notice and most recent log entry are displayed. Blocked users see the standard message for blocked users.
• The developers fixed a bug that caused links on sub-pages to point to the wrong location.
• The size-changing controls in the advanced settings section of the media or image dialog were simplified further. VisualEditor's media dialog supports more image display styles, like borderless images.
• If there is not enough space on your screen to display all of the tabs (for instance, if your browser window is too narrow), the second edit tab will now fold into the drop-down menu (where the "Move" item is currently housed). On the English Wikipedia, this moves the "Edit beta" tab into the menu; on most projects, it moves the "Edit source" tab. This is only enabled in the default Vector skin, not for Monobook users. See this image for an example showing the "Edit source" and "View history" tabs after they moved into the drop-down menu.
• After community requests, VisualEditor has been deployed as an opt-in feature at Meta and on the French Wikinews.

The drop-down menu is on the right, next to the search box.

Looking ahead:  A new, locally controlled menu of citation templates will put citations immediately in front of users. You will soon be able to see the Table of Contents while editing. Support for upright image sizes (preferred for accessibility) is being developed. In-line language setting (dir="rtl") will be offered as a Beta Feature soon. Looking further out, the developers are also working on support for viewing and editing hidden HTML comments. It will be possible to upload images to Commons from inside VisualEditor.

If you have questions or suggestions for future improvements, or if you encounter problems, please let everyone know by posting a note at Wikipedia:VisualEditor/Feedback or by joining the office hours on Monday, 19 May 2014 at 18:00 UTC. If you'd like to get this on your own page, subscribe at Wikipedia:VisualEditor#Newsletter for English Wikipedia only or at meta:VisualEditor/Newsletter for any project. Thank you! Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 20:23, 23 April 2014 (UTC) Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion/Log/2014 April 24 Thank you! — Preceding unsigned comment added by Batka83 (talk • contribs) 01:01, 24 April 2014 (UTC)

3RR

It takes two to tango, so are you. Difference is, I'm restoring citations from independent source in a section called 'Candidates and campaign', and you're expunging everything on site. Please remember to be civil, reasonable, and constructive in your edits doktorb _words^deeds 15:11, 7 May 2014 (UTC)

Christ, calm down. And no, check the history again, I'm not. – Arms & Hearts (talk) 15:16, 7 May 2014 (UTC)

The history shows you, you again, then an hitherto unrelated IP address. Whatever am I to think. doktorb _words^deeds 15:53, 7 May 2014 (UTC)

You can think whatever you like so long as you're prepared to back it up. I would've thought you'd know that by now, but then again you've apparently yet to get to grips with WP:AGF or WP:NPOV, so who knows. – Arms & Hearts (talk) 16:25, 7 May 2014 (UTC)

Re: List of Pokémon (1–51)

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Message added 20:24, 18 May 2014 (UTC). You can remove this notice at any time by removing the {{Talkback}} or {{Tb}} template.

Washington State Election Templates

Well, I clicked on the link to go to the nominations for deletion for the Washington State Elections templates, and there was no mention of them. I created those templates to make navigation easier. I guess when I can find a discussion, I'll be able to actually discuss it... Chadlupkes (talk) 19:37, 19 May 2014 (UTC)

Hi Chadlupkes, sorry for the inconvenience. To see and contribute to the relevant discussions just go to Wikipedia:Templates for discussion#May 19. The specific discussions are also linked on the relevant template pages and in the relevant sections on your talk page, but they're all right next to each other so if you've found one you've found them all, if you see what I mean. Perhaps there was a delay in updating the main TfD page? If you're still having trouble you might need to be a little more specific. – Arms & Hearts (talk) 22:11, 19 May 2014 (UTC)

VisualEditor newsletter—May 2014

Did you know?

The cite menu offers quick access to up to five citation templates.  If your wiki has enabled the "⧼visualeditor-toolbar-cite-label⧽" menu, press "⧼visualeditor-toolbar-cite-label⧽" and select the appropriate template from the menu.

Existing citations that use these templates can be edited either using the "⧼visualeditor-toolbar-cite-label⧽" tool or by selecting the reference and choosing the "⧼visualeditor-dialogbutton-reference-tooltip⧽" item in the "Insert" menu.

Read the user guide for more information.

Since the last newsletter, the VisualEditor team has mostly worked on the new citation tool, improving performance, reducing technical debt, and other infrastructure needs.

The biggest change in the last few weeks is the new citation template menu, labeled "⧼visualeditor-toolbar-cite-label⧽". The new citation menu offers a locally configurable list of citation templates on the main toolbar. It adds or opens references using the simplified template dialog that was deployed last month. This tool is in addition to the "⧼visualeditor-dialogbutton-reference-tooltip⧽" item in the "Insert" menu, and it is not displayed unless it has been configured for that wiki. To enable this tool on your wiki, see the instructions at VisualEditor/Citation tool.

Eventually, the VisualEditor team plans to add autofill features for these citations. When this long-awaited feature is created, you could add an ISBN, URL, DOI or other identifier to the citation tool, and VisualEditor would automatically fill in as much information for that source as possible. The concept drawings can be seen at mw:VisualEditor/Design/Reference Dialog, and your ideas about making referencing quick and easy are still wanted.

• There is a new Beta Feature for setting content language and direction.  This allows editors who have opted in to use the "Language" tool in the "Insert" menu to add HTML span tags that label text with the language and as being left-to-right (LTR) or right-to-left (RTL), like this:  <span lang="en" dir="ltr">English</span>. This tool is most useful for pages whose text combines multiple languages with different directions, common on Right-to-Left wikis.
• The tool for editing mathematics formulae in VisualEditor has been slightly updated and is now available to all users, as the "⧼math-visualeditor-mwmathinspector-title⧽" item in the "Insert" menu. It uses LaTeX like in the wikitext editor.
• The layout of template dialogs has been changed, putting the label above the field.  Parameters are now called "fields", to avoid a technical term that many editors are unfamiliar with.
• TemplateData has been expanded:  You can now add "suggested" parameters in TemplateData, and VisualEditor will display them in the template dialogs like required ones.  "Suggested" is recommended for parameters that are commonly used, but not actually required to make the template work.  There is also a new type for TemplateData parameters: wiki-file-name, for file names.  The template tool can now tell you if a parameter is marked as being obsolete.
• Some templates that previously displayed strangely due to absolute CSS positioning hacks should now display correctly.
• Several messages have changed: The notices shown when you save a page have been merged into those used in the wikitext editor, for consistency.  The message shown when you "⧼visualeditor-toolbar-cancel⧽" out of an edit is clearer. The beta dialog notice, which is shown the first time you open VisualEditor, will be hidden for logged-in users via a user preference rather than a cookie.  As a result of this change, the beta notice will show up one last time for all logged-in users on their next VisualEditor use after Thursday's upgrade.
• Adding a category that is a redirect to another category prompts you to add the target category instead of the redirect.
• In the "Images and media" dialog, it is no longer possible to set a redundant border for thumbnail and framed images.
• There is a new Template Documentation Editor for TemplateData.  You can test it by editing a documentation subpage (not a template page) at Mediawiki.org: edit mw:Template:Sandbox/doc, and then click "Manage template documentation" above the wikitext edit box.  If your community would like to use this TemplateData editor at your project, please contact product manager James Forrester or file an enhancement request in Bugzilla.
• There have been multiple small changes to the appearance:  External links are shown in the same light blue color as in MediaWiki.  This is a lighter shade of blue than the internal links.  The styling of the "Style text" (character formatting) drop-down menu has been synchronized with the recent font changes to the Vector skin.  VisualEditor dialogs, such as the "⧼visualeditor-toolbar-savedialog⧽" dialog, now use a "loading" animation of moving lines, rather than animated GIF images.  Other changes were made to the appearance upon opening a page in VisualEditor which should make the transition between reading and editing be smoother.
• The developers merged in many minor fixes and improvements to MediaWiki interface integration (e.g., edit notices), and made VisualEditor handle Education Program pages better.
• At the request of the community, VisualEditor has been deployed to Commons as an opt-in. It is currently available by default for 161 Wikipedia language editions and by opt-in through Beta Features at all others, as well as on several non-Wikipedia sites.

Looking ahead:  The toolbar from the PageTriage extension will no longer be visible inside VisualEditor. More buttons and icons will be accessible from the keyboard.  The "Keyboard shortcuts" link will be moved out of the "Page options" menu, into the "Help" menu. Support for upright image sizes (preferred for accessibility) and inline images is being developed. You will be able to see the Table of Contents while editing. Looking further out, the developers are also working on support for viewing and editing hidden HTML comments. VisualEditor will be available to all users on mobile devices and tablet computers. It will be possible to upload images to Commons from inside VisualEditor.

If you have questions or suggestions for future improvements, or if you encounter problems, please let everyone know by posting a note at mw:VisualEditor/Feedback or by joining the office hours on Thursday, 19 June 2014 at 10:00 UTC. If you'd like to get this newsletter on your own page (about once a month), please subscribe at w:en:Wikipedia:VisualEditor/Newsletter for English Wikipedia only or at meta:VisualEditor/Newsletter for any project. Thank you! Whatamidoing (WMF) 22:16, 21 May 2014 (UTC)

May 2014

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Reference Errors on 24 June

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• On the Catch-22 page, your edit caused a cite error (help). (Fix | Ask for help)

Please check this page and fix the errors highlighted. If you think this is a false positive, you can report it to my operator. Thanks, ReferenceBot (talk) 00:31, 25 June 2014 (UTC)

VisualEditor global newsletter—June 2014

Did you know?

The character formatting menu, or "Style text" menu lets you set bold, italic, and other text styles. "Clear formatting" removes all text styles and removes links to other pages.

Do you think that clear formatting should remove links? Are there changes you would like to see for this menu? Share your opinion at MediaWiki.org.

The user guide has information about how to use VisualEditor.

The VisualEditor team is mostly working to fix bugs, improve performance, reduce technical debt, and other infrastructure needs. You can find on Mediawiki.org weekly updates detailing recent work.

• They have moved the "Keyboard shortcuts" link out of the "Page options" menu, into the "Help" menu. Within dialog boxes, buttons are now more accessible (via the Tab key) from the keyboard.
• You can now see the target of the link when you click on it, without having to open the inspector.
• The team also expanded TemplateData: You can now add a parameter type  "date" for dates and times in the ISO 8601 format, and  "boolean" for values which are true or false. Also, templates that redirect to other templates (like {{citeweb}} → {{cite web}}) now get the TemplateData of their target (bug 50964). You can test TemplateData by editing mw:Template:Sandbox/doc.
• Category: and File: pages now display their contents correctly after saving an edit (bug 65349, bug 64239)
• They have also improved reference editing: You should no longer be able to add empty citations with VisualEditor (bug 64715), as with references. When you edit a reference, you can now empty it and click the "use an existing reference" button to replace it with another reference instead. 
• It is now possible to edit inline images with VisualEditor. Remember that inline images cannot display captions, so existing captions get removed. Many other bugs related to images were also fixed.
• You can now add and edit {{DISPLAYTITLE}} and __DISAMBIG__ in the "Page options" menu, rounding out the full set of page options currently planned.
• The tool to insert special characters is now wider and simpler.

Looking ahead

The VisualEditor team has posted a draft of their goals for the next fiscal year. You can read them and suggest changes on MediaWiki.org.

The team posts details about planned work on VisualEditor's roadmap. You will soon be able to drag-and-drop text as well as images. If you drag an image to a new place, it won't let you place it in the middle of a paragraph. All dialog boxes and windows will be simplified based on user testing and feedback. The VisualEditor team plans to add autofill features for citations. Your ideas about making referencing quick and easy are still wanted. Support for upright image sizes is being developed. The designers are also working on support for viewing and editing hidden HTML comments and adding rows and columns to tables.

Supporting your wiki

Please read VisualEditor/Citation tool for information on configuring the new citation template menu, labeled "⧼visualeditor-toolbar-cite-label⧽". This menu will not appear unless it has been configured on your wiki.

If you speak a language other than English, we need your help with translating the user guide. The guide is out of date or incomplete for many languages, and what's on your wiki may not be the most recent translation. Please contact me if you need help getting started with translation work on MediaWiki.org.

VisualEditor can be made available to most non-Wikipedia projects. If your community would like to test VisualEditor, please contact product manager James Forrester or file an enhancement request in Bugzilla.

Please share your questions, suggestions, or problems by posting a note at mw:VisualEditor/Feedback or by joining the office hours on Saturday, 19 July 2014 at 21:00 UTC (daytime for the Americas and Pacific Islands) or on Thursday, 14 August 2014 at 9:00 UTC (daytime for Europe, Middle East, Asia).

To change your subscription to this newsletter, please see the subscription pages on Meta or the English Wikipedia. Thank you! Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 04:59, 25 June 2014 (UTC)

Rick Shaw photo and page

Not sure what to do here, as I am not a tech wiz with Wiki page coding. The photograph is mine. I shot it as a self-portrait in 2011 and I have attached the appropriate copyright symbols to the Wiki page, the uploaded file, and in the metadata of the jpg file itself. I am a professional photojournalist and the photograph is mine, although anyone is free to use it. If the appropriate Wiki boxes or style is not perfect, forgive me. I followed the instructions as best I know how. Regarding the Wiki page: The page provides background and information to more than 13,000 professional photojournalists and visual editors at news organizations around the world. We are a non-profit, state-affiliated educational institution -- the University of Missouri -- and provide academic and professional development at no cost to anyone. There is no intentional pretense here -- our goal with the page is simply to provide background and supporting information for the main Pictures of the Year International page. Rickshaw7425 (talk) 20:09, 7 July 2014 Rickshaw7425 (talk) 20:10, 7 July 2014 (UTC)Rick Shaw

@Rickshaw7425: Hi! Sorry for any confusion. As you've probably found out there are a ridiculous number of things about Wikipedia that can be confusing for new editors. The photo is absolutely not a problem at all, at least as far as I know, so no need to worry there. There's also no problems with style or formatting that aren't easily fixable, and I don't think anybody's accusing you of any pretense. The problem, from my perspective at least, is that the article about you falls foul of at least a couple of Wikipedia's guidelines, which is why I think it should probably be deleted. (Of course this isn't a commentary on you as a person or your work – it's just that not everybody can have a Wikipedia article about them.)

You should probably read the following two guidelines: Wikipedia: Autobiography and Wikipedia: Notability (people). The gist is that (a) Wikipedia strongly discourages people from writing articles about themselves, and (b) that in order for there to be an article about a person, that person should have been the subject of significant coverage in published sources that are independent of the person. In practice this means there should be at least a handful of substantial newspaper or magazine pieces, chapters in books, or papers in academic journals about you. Unfortunately the fact that the the article is useful, that you're a non-profit, etc., don't factor in as far as Wikipedia's guidelines are concerned.

If you think the article should be kept, you should go to Wikipedia: Articles for deletion/Rick Shaw and explain why, with reference to Wikipedia policies and guidelines, and ideally also with examples of news articles or other sources that indicate notability. You can find out more about the Articles for deletion process at Articles for deletion § How to contribute. (You might also want to take a look at Wikipedia: Arguments to avoid in deletion discussions, which addresses some points similar to the ones you've made above.) Hopefully this has cleared things up a bit, but if there's anything else I can help with don't hesitate to let me know. – Arms & Hearts (talk) 20:59, 7 July 2014 (UTC)

July 2014

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• * W. R. F. Browning with Graham Stanton and Richard Coggins ''A Dictionary of the Bible'' ([[Oxford University Press]] (1996)<ref>{{cite journal|url=http://ext.sagepub.com/content/108/11/340.

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Resource request.

I am sorry if you don't like this method of asking for resources but I need "Sir Ernest MacMillan: The Importance of Being Canadian" for 5x expansion of symphony six. I requested for it at WP:RX. Shrike had sent me a link but it showed the 404 error. I want to access the pages 227, 230, 232, 235, 237 in the chapter: A Matter of Morality. These are not the part of the preview which Google shows. Thanks.--Skr15081997 (talk) 10:40, 21 July 2014 (UTC)

I don't have access to it I'm afraid. My institution's JSTOR access doesn't seem to cover books. – Arms & Hearts (talk) 15:46, 21 July 2014 (UTC)

After digging up the sources I was able to complete the 5x expansion. Thanks for the reply and help on the RX for the molossus articles, one of them has been nominated for DYK. I will start working on the others very soon.Thanks!--Skr15081997 (talk) 10:28, 22 July 2014 (UTC)

Telescopic Exo Shell

Hello Arms & Hearts,
I reverted your redirection of Telescopic Exo Shell. I couldn't tell if redirection was an official resolution of the deletion process or if it was ordinary boldness on your part. The way the edit summary was worded, it looked like there was not a consensus to redirect rather than delete. If there was indeed an official consensus to redirect rather than the expected delete, that should be pointed to in the edit summary (or talk page).
Personally, I'd rather see a full delete. "Telescopic Exo Shell" doesn't need it's own article to be searchable, it's mentioned in the Izz article.
Skyway (talk) 09:49, 31 July 2014 (UTC)

Hi! I'm not sure exactly what "official" would mean in this context, but I think turning the article into a redirect is a fairly common resolution to proposed deletions. In this case, to expand on my edit summary, I got the sense that some of the content was likely to be merged into the Nofel Izz article, which wouldn't be possible if the article were deleted, since the content would be lost (whereas if it were redirected the content would remain accessible in the history). Given this, as well as that "Telescopic Exo Shell" is something people might search for and that there's material on the topic in the Nofel Izz article, a redirect seemed like a better idea than deletion. Since proposed deletion is for uncontested deletions, there doesn't need to be a consensus against deleting for an article to be deprodded Of course if you feel strongly that there shouldn't be a redirect then you're free to restore the article; however what you can't do, per WP:CONTESTED, is restore the prod tag once it's been removed (so I've removed it again and left the article as is). The next step would be AfD, but I'd point out that redirects are cheap and I can't see any reason (e.g. per WP:R#DELETE) why not having a redirect would be better than having one. – Arms & Hearts (talk) 11:14, 31 July 2014 (UTC)

James R. Dixon "Two Riots"

The link works for me. Use the pass 10ou13 and hit enter. you'll get a direct link to a .7z file (no pass there) with the page images. Maybe you you need to tell your browser to "save as..." or the like. trespassers william (talk) 23:03, 5 August 2014 (UTC) Oh, I get what you meant... trespassers william (talk) 23:10, 5 August 2014 (UTC)

Sorry, I could probably have been clearer – yeah, the link worked perfectly, thanks again. – Arms & Hearts (talk) 04:58, 6 August 2014 (UTC)

VisualEditor newsletter—July and August 2014

The VisualEditor team is currently working mostly to fix bugs, improve performance, reduce technical debt, and other infrastructure needs. You can find on Mediawiki.org weekly updates detailing recent work.

Dialog boxes in VisualEditor have been re-designed to use action words instead of icons. This has increased the number of items that need to be translated. The user guide is also being updated.

The biggest visible change since the last newsletter was to the dialog boxes. The design for each dialog box and window was simplified. The most commonly needed buttons are now at the top. Based on user feedback, the buttons are now labeled with simple words (like "Cancel" or "Done") instead of potentially confusing icons (like "<" or "X"). Many of the buttons to edit links, images, and other items now also show the linked page, image name, or other useful information when you click on them.

• Hidden HTML comments (notes visible to editors, but not to readers) can now be read, edited, inserted, and removed. A small icon (a white exclamation mark on a dot) marks the location of each comments. You can click on the icon to see the comment.
• You can now drag and drop text and templates as well as images. A new placement line makes it much easier to see where you are dropping the item. Images can no longer be dropped into the middle of paragraphs.
• All references and footnotes (<ref> tags) are now made through the "⧼visualeditor-toolbar-cite-label⧽" menu, including the "⧼visualeditor-dialogbutton-reference-tooltip⧽" (manual formatting) footnotes and the ability to re-use an existing citation, both of which were previously accessible only through the "Insert" menu. The "⧼visualeditor-dialogbutton-referencelist-tooltip⧽" is still added via the "Insert" menu.
• When you add an image or other media file, you are now prompted to add an image caption immediately. You can also replace an image whilst keeping the original caption and other settings.
• All tablet users visiting the mobile web version of Wikipedias will be able to opt-in to a version of VisualEditor from 14 August. You can test the new tool by choosing the beta version of the mobile view in the Settings menu.
• The link tool has a new "Open" button that will open a linked page in another tab so you can make sure a link is the right one.
• The "Cancel" button in the toolbar has been removed based on user testing. To cancel any edit, you can leave the page by clicking the Read tab, the back button in your browser, or closing the browser window without saving your changes.

Looking ahead

The team posts details about planned work on the VisualEditor roadmap. The VisualEditor team plans to add auto-fill features for citations soon. Your ideas about making referencing quick and easy are still wanted. Support for upright image sizes is being developed. The designers are also working on support for adding rows and columns to tables. Work to support Internet Explorer is ongoing.

Feedback opportunities

The Editing team will be making two presentations this weekend at Wikimania in London. The first is with product manager James Forrester and developer Trevor Parscal on Saturday at 16:30. The second is with developers Roan Kattouw and Trevor Parscal on Sunday at 12:30.

Please share your questions, suggestions, or problems by posting a note at the VisualEditor feedback page or by joining the office hours discussion on Thursday, 14 August 2014 at 09:00 UTC (daytime for Europe, Middle East and Asia) or on Thursday, 18 September 2014 at 16:00 UTC (daytime for the Americas; evening for Europe).

If you'd like to get this newsletter on your own page (about once a month), please subscribe at w:en:Wikipedia:VisualEditor/Newsletter for English Wikipedia only or at Meta for any project. Thank you! Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 18:14, 8 August 2014 (UTC)

August 2014

Hello, I'm BracketBot. I have automatically detected that your edit to John H. Van Evrie may have broken the syntax by modifying 1 "{}"s. If you have, don't worry: just edit the page again to fix it. If I misunderstood what happened, or if you have any questions, you can leave a message on my operator's talk page.

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• diverted attention from their own mistreatment of the white working class."{{sfn|Baker|1983|p=180}}} He thought that abolition of slavery would result in black people being forced into unfair

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Clacton by-election, 2014

Hello, I have reverted an edit you made to the Clacton by-election, 2014 article as you have removed a standard piece of layout for UK by-election articles, namely the candidates table. Please refrain from edits that will cause the article to deviate from the standard format for UK byelections, we need to remain consistent. Thank you. Owl In The House (talk) 19:27, 30 August 2014 (UTC)

I have again reverted your edit, please do not remove standard pieces of the by-election article format. I was about to rerevert the good changes that you had made. It is not easy to put a table back into an article without using the undo facility as it is to redo your changes manually. I will redo your edit but please do not remove that table again, if you do it will constitute an edit war, this would be a breach of Wiki policy. I am not saying your edit is rubbish, it is merely a case that you shouldn't be removing that table and that for formatting reasons it is not easy to restore the table manually. Thank you. Owl In The House (talk) 19:39, 30 August 2014 (UTC)

You may be blocked from editing without further warning the next time you disrupt Wikipedia, as you did at Clacton by-election, 2014.

Your conduct over this issue and indeed the comments you have made in the edit log of the article are completely unacceptable:

____________________Copied from the edit log of Clacton by-election, 2014 (top)___________________________

because clearly it's oh so difficult to revert edits you disagree with while retaining parts of them that you agree with. let's see if you manage it this time or if you're going to keep behaving like a petulant fucking child)

____________________Copied from the edit log of Clacton by-election, 2014 (top)___________________________

Wikipedia is not a playground and such games should not be played when making edits. I gave you a very clear and specific reason as to why I had to use the undo facility, I also stated I didn't have a problem with the rest of your edit (in the most part). The only changes I have made are for formatting reasons. You are in breach of several Wikipedia Policies including: Wikipedia:Content removal, Wikipedia:Edit warring, Wikipedia:Assume good faith and Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Words to watch (Wikipedia:Offensive material). I will put this incident on the edit warring noticeboard, consider this your final warning.

I repeat it is not so simple to manually replace a box or table with specific formatting once said table has been removed from the article, that is the only reason I used the undo facility, if it was so easy to copy and paste, I would have done that. It is simply unacceptable for whatever reason to remove a standard piece of the article format, every single by-election article has had a candidate box just as soon as more then one candidate has been announced. I repeat I have no problem with your edits to the text.

However again I must stress that "United Kingdom Independence Party" must not be used on Wikipedia, it is "UKIP", "UK Independence Party" or informally within text as "Ukip". Firstly, "United Kingdom Independence Party" isn't even the party's official name, secondly it has previously caused formatting issues when it comes to tables etc, so on Wikipedia we stick to 2 clear names. I realise it wasn't you that typed "United Kingdom Independence Party" but it was you who undid an edit which replaced it, this is why I am explaining this to you.

I don't want to fall out with you, I don't want to to revert or hold back your constructive editing of Wikipedia but it simply unacceptable to conduct yourself in this way.

This message is being sent to inform you that there is currently a discussion at Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard regarding an issue with which you may have been involved. Thank you. I have logged this incident on the Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard, I hope no further action is required. Let's try and move on from this constructively. Owl In The House (talk) 09:50, 31 August 2014 (UTC)

VisualEditor newsletter—September and October 2014

Did you know?

TemplateData is a separate program that organizes information about the parameters that can be used in a template. VisualEditor reads that data, and uses it to populate its simplified template dialogs.

With the new TemplateData editor, it is easier to add information about parameters, because the ones you need to use are pre-loaded.

See the help page for TemplateData for more information about adding TemplateData. The user guide has information about how to use VisualEditor.

Since the last newsletter, the Editing team has reduced technical debt, simplified some workflows for template and citation editing, made major progress on Internet Explorer support, and fixed over 125 bugs and requests. Several performance improvements were made, especially to the system around re-using references and reference lists. Weekly updates are posted on Mediawiki.org.

There were three issues that required urgent fixes: a deployment error that meant that many buttons didn't work correctly (bugs 69856 and 69864), a problem with edit conflicts that left the editor with nowhere to go (bug 69150), and a problem in Internet Explorer 11 that caused replaced some categories with a link to the system message, MediaWiki:Badtitletext (bug 70894) when you saved. The developers apologize for the disruption, and thank the people who reported these problems quickly.

Increased support for devices and browsers

Internet Explorer 10 and 11 users now have access to VisualEditor. This means that about 5% of Wikimedia's users will now get an "Edit" tab alongside the existing "Edit source" tab. Support for Internet Explorer 9 is planned for the future.

Tablet users browsing the site's mobile mode now have the option of using a mobile-specific form of VisualEditor. More editing tools, and availability of VisualEditor on smartphones, is planned for the future. The mobile version of VisualEditor was tweaked to show the context menu for citations instead of basic references (bug 68897). A bug that broke the editor in iOS was corrected and released early (bug 68949). For mobile tablet users, three bugs related to scrolling were fixed (bug 66697, bug 68828, bug 69630). You can use VisualEditor on the mobile version of Wikipedia from your tablet by clicking on the cog in the top-right when editing a page and choosing which editor to use.

TemplateData editor

A tool for editing TemplateData will be deployed to more Wikipedias soon.  Other Wikipedias and some other projects may receive access next month. This tool makes it easier to add TemplateData to the template's documentation.  When the tool is enabled, it will add a button above every editing window for a template (including documentation subpages). To use it, edit the template or a subpage, and then click the "Edit template data" button at the top.  Read the help page for TemplateData. You can test the TemplateData editor in a sandbox at Mediawiki.org. Remember that TemplateData should be placed either on a documentation subpage or on the template page itself. Only one block of TemplateData will be used per template.

Other changes

Several interface messages and labels were changed to be simpler, clearer, or shorter, based on feedback from translators and editors. The formatting of dialogs was changed, and more changes to the appearance will be coming soon, when VisualEditor implements the new MediaWiki theme from Design. (A preview of the theme is available on Labs for developers.) The team also made some improvements for users of the Monobook skin that improved the size of text in toolbars and fixed selections that overlapped menus.

VisualEditor-MediaWiki now supplies the mw-redirect or mw-disambig class on links to redirects and disambiguation pages, so that user gadgets that colour in these in types of links can be created.

Templates' fields can be marked as 'required' in TemplateData. If a parameter is marked as required, then you cannot delete that field when you add a new template or edit an existing one (bug 60358). 

Language support improved by making annotations use bi-directional isolation (so they display correctly with cursoring behaviour as expected) and by fixing a bug that crashed VisualEditor when trying to edit a page with a dir attribute but no lang set (bug 69955).

Looking ahead

The team posts details about planned work on the VisualEditor roadmap. The VisualEditor team plans to add auto-fill features for citations soon, perhaps in late October.

The team is also working on support for adding rows and columns to tables, and early work for this may appear within the month. Please comment on the design at Mediawiki.org.

In the future, real-time collaborative editing may be possible in VisualEditor. Some early preparatory work for this was recently done.

Supporting your wiki

At Wikimania, several developers gave presentations about VisualEditor. A translation sprint focused on improving access to VisualEditor was supported by many people. Deryck Chan was the top translator. Special honors also go to संजीव कुमार (Sanjeev Kumar), Robby, Takot, Bachounda, Bjankuloski06 and Ата. A summary of the work achieved by the translation community has been posted here. Thank you all for your work.

VisualEditor can be made available to most non-Wikipedia projects. If your community would like to test VisualEditor, please contact product manager James Forrester or file an enhancement request in Bugzilla.

Please join the office hours on Saturday, 18 October 2014 at 18:00 UTC (daytime for the Americas; evening for Africa and Europe) and on Wednesday, 19 November at 16:00 UTC on IRC.

Give feedback on VisualEditor at mw:VisualEditor/Feedback. Subscribe or unsubscribe at Meta. To help with translations, please subscribe to the Translators mailing list or contact Elitre at Meta. Thank you!

— Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 00:11, 8 October 2014 (UTC)

WP:RX

Hi. You can find a copy of "The Mark of Beast: Animality and Human Oppression" by Mark S. Roberts here. Marking your request at WP:RX as resolved. Please confirm. Regards,  NQ  talk 14:02, 21 October 2014 (UTC)

Thank you! That's great. – Arms & Hearts (talk) 21:16, 24 October 2014 (UTC)

VisualEditor newsletter—November 2014

Did you know?

VisualEditor is also available on the mobile version of Wikipedia. Login and click the pencil icon to open the page you want to edit. Click on the gear-shaped settings in the upper-right corner, to pick which editor to use. Choose "Edit" to use VisualEditor, or "Edit source" to use the wikitext editor.

It will remember whether you used wikitext or VisualEditor, and use the same editor the next time you edit an article.

The user guide has information about how to use VisualEditor. Not all features are available in Mobile Web.

Since the last newsletter, the Editing Team has fixed many bugs and requests, and worked on support for editing tables and for using non-Latin languages. Their weekly updates are posted on Mediawiki.org. Informal notes from the recent quarterly review were posted on Meta.

Recent improvements

The French Wikipedia should see better search results for links, templates, and media because the new search engine was turned on for everyone there. This change is expected at the Chinese and German Wikipedias next week, and eventually at the English Wikipedia.

The "pawn" system has been mostly replaced. Bugs in this system sometimes added a chess pawn character to wikitext. The replacement provides better support for non-Latin languages, with full support hopefully coming soon.

VisualEditor is now provided to editors who use Internet Explorer 10 or 11 on desktop and mobile devices. Internet Explorer 9 is not supported yet.

The keyboard shortcuts for items in the toolbar's menus are now shown in the menus. VisualEditor will replace the existing design with a new theme from the User Experience / Design group. The appearance of dialogs has already changed in one Mobile version. The appearance on desktops will change soon. (You can see a developer preview of the old "Apex" design and the new "MediaWiki" theme which will replace it.)

Several bugs were fixed for internal and external links. Improvements to MediaWiki's search solved an annoying problem: If you searched for the full name of the page or file that you wanted to link, sometimes the search program could not find the page. A link inside a template, to a local page that does not exist, will now show red, exactly as it does when reading the page. Due to a error, for about two weeks this also affected all external links inside templates. Opening an auto-numbered link node like [1] with the keyboard used to open the wrong link tool. These problems have all been fixed.

TemplateData

The tool for quickly editing TemplateData will be deployed to all Wikimedia Foundation wikis on Thursday, 6 November.  This tool is already available on the biggest 40 Wikipedias, and now all wikis will have access to it. This tool makes it easier to add TemplateData to the template's documentation.  When the tool is enabled, it will add a button above every editing window for a template (including documentation subpages). To use it, edit the template or a subpage, and then click the "Edit template data" button at the top.  Read the help page for TemplateData. You can test the TemplateData editor in a sandbox at Mediawiki.org. Remember that TemplateData should be placed either on a documentation subpage or on the template page itself. Only one block of TemplateData will be used per template.

You can use the new autovalue setting to pre-load a value into a template. This can be used to substitute dates, as in this example, or to add the most common response for that parameter. The autovalue can be easily overridden by the editor, by typing something else in the field.

In TemplateData, you may define a parameter as "required". The template dialog in VisualEditor will warn editors if they leave a "required" parameter empty, and they will not be able to delete that parameter. If the template can function without this parameter, then please mark it as "suggested" or "optional" in TemplateData instead.

Looking ahead

Basic support for inserting tables and changing the number of rows and columns in tables will appear next Wednesday. Advanced features, like dragging columns to different places, will be possible later. The VisualEditor team plans to add auto-fill features for citations soon. To help editors find the most important items more quickly, some items in the toolbar menus will be hidden behind a "More" item, such as "underlining" in the styling menu. The appearance of the media search dialog will improve, to make picking between possible images easier and more visual. The team posts details about planned work on the VisualEditor roadmap.

The user guide will be updated soon to add information about editing tables. The translations for most languages except Spanish, French, and Dutch are significantly out of date. Please help complete the current translations for users who speak your language. Talk to us if you need help exporting the translated guide to your wiki.

You can influence VisualEditor's design. Tell the VisualEditor team what you want changed during the office hours via IRC. The next sessions are on Wednesday, 19 November at 16:00 UTC and on Wednesday 7 January 2015 at 22:00 UTC. You can also share your ideas at mw:VisualEditor/Feedback.

Also, user experience researcher Abbey Ripstra is looking for editors to show her how they edit Wikipedia. Please sign up for the research program if you would like to hear about opportunities.

If you would like to help with translations of this newsletter, please subscribe to the Translators mailing list or contact us directly, so that we can notify you when the next issue is ready. Subscribe or unsubscribe at Wikipedia:VisualEditor/Newsletter. Thank you!

— Whatamidoing (WMF) 20:41, 6 November 2014 (UTC)

VisualEditor newsletter—December 2014

Did you know?

Basic table editing is now available in VisualEditor. You can add and remove rows and columns from existing tables at the click of a button.

The user guide has more information about how to use VisualEditor.

Since the last newsletter, the Editing Team has fixed many bugs and worked on table editing and performance. Their weekly status reports are posted on Mediawiki.org. Upcoming plans are posted at the VisualEditor roadmap.

VisualEditor was deployed to several hundred remaining wikis as an opt-in beta feature at the end of November, except for most Wiktionaries (which depend heavily upon templates) and all Wikisources (which await integration with ProofreadPage).

Recent improvements

Basic support for editing tables is available. You can insert new tables, add and remove rows and columns, set or remove a caption for a table, and merge cells together. To change the contents of a cell, double-click inside it. More features will be added in the coming months. In addition, VisualEditor now ignores broken, invalid rowspan and colspan elements, instead of trying to repair them.

You can now use find and replace in VisualEditor, reachable through the tool menu or by pressing ⌃ Ctrl+F or ⌘ Cmd+F.

You can now create and edit simple <blockquote> paragraphs for quoting and indenting content. This changes a "Paragraph" into a "Block quote".

Some new keyboard sequences can be used to format content. At the start of the line, typing "*  " will make the line a bullet list; "1.  " or "# " will make it a numbered list; "==" will make it a section heading; ": " will make it a blockquote. If you didn't mean to use these tools, you can press undo to undo the formatting change. There are also two other keyboard sequences: "[[" for opening the link tool, and "{{" for opening the template tool, to help experienced editors. The existing standard keyboard shortcuts, like ⌃ Ctrl+K to open the link editor, still work.

If you add a category that has been redirected, then VisualEditor now adds its target. Categories without description pages show up as red.

You can again create and edit galleries as wikitext code.

Looking ahead

VisualEditor will replace the existing design with a new theme designed by the User Experience group. The new theme will be visible for desktop systems at MediaWiki.org in late December and at other sites early January. (You can see a developer preview of the old "Apex" theme and the new "MediaWiki" one which will replace it.)

The Editing team plans to add auto-fill features for citations in January. Planned changes to the media search dialog will make choosing between possible images easier.

Help

• Share your ideas and ask questions at mw:VisualEditor/Feedback.
• Translations of the user guide for most languages are oudated. Ukrainian, Portuguese, Spanish, French, and Dutch translators are nearly current. Please help complete the current translations for users who speak your language.
• Talk to the Editing team during the office hours via IRC. The next session is on Wednesday, 7 January 2015 at 22:00 UTC.
• File requests for language-appropriate "Bold" and "Italic" icons for the character formatting menu in Phabricator.
• The design research team wants to see how real editors work. Please sign up for their research program.

If you would like to help with translations of this newsletter, please subscribe to the Translators mailing list or contact us directly, so that we can notify you when the next issue is ready. Subscribe or unsubscribe at Meta.

Thank you! WhatamIdoing (WMF) (talk) 23:37, 20 December 2014 (UTC)

VisualEditor News 2015—#1

Since the last newsletter, the Editing Team has fixed many bugs and worked on VisualEditor's appearance, the coming Citoid reference service, and support for languages with complex input requirements. Status reports are posted on Mediawiki.org. Upcoming plans are posted at the VisualEditor roadmap.

The Wikimedia Foundation has named its top priorities for this quarter (January to March). The first priority is making VisualEditor ready for deployment by default to all new users and logged-out users at the remaining large Wikipedias. You can help identify these requirements. There will be weekly triage meetings which will be open to volunteers beginning Wednesday, 11 February 2015 at 12:00 (noon) PST (20:00 UTC). Tell Vice President of Engineering Damon Sicore, Product Manager James Forrester and other team members which bugs and features are most important to you. The decisions made at these meetings will determine what work is necessary for this quarter's goal of making VisualEditor ready for deployment to new users. The presence of volunteers who enjoy contributing MediaWiki code is particularly appreciated. Information about how to join the meeting will be posted at mw:Talk:VisualEditor/Portal shortly before the meeting begins. 

Due to some breaking changes in MobileFrontend and VisualEditor, VisualEditor was not working correctly on the mobile site for a couple of days in early January. The teams apologize for the problem.

Recent improvements

The new design for VisualEditor aligns with MediaWiki's Front-End Standards as led by the Design team. Several new versions of the OOjs UI library have also been released, and these also affect the appearance of VisualEditor and other MediaWiki software extensions. Most changes were minor, like changing the text size and the amount of white space in some windows. Buttons are consistently color-coded to indicate whether the action:

• starts a new task, like opening the ⧼visualeditor-toolbar-savedialog⧽ dialog:  blue ,
• takes a constructive action, like inserting a citation:  green ,
• might remove or lose your work, like removing a link:  red , or
• is neutral, like opening a link in a new browser window:  gray.

The TemplateData editor has been completely re-written to use a different design (T67815) based on the same OOjs UI system as VisualEditor (T73746). This change fixed a couple of existing bugs (T73077 and T73078) and improved usability.

Search and replace in long documents is now faster. It does not highlight every occurrence if there are more than 100 on-screen at once (T78234).

Editors at the Hebrew and Russian Wikipedias requested the ability to use VisualEditor in the "Article Incubator" or drafts namespace (T86688, T87027). If your community would like VisualEditor enabled on another namespace on your wiki, then you can file a request in Phabricator. Please include a link to a community discussion about the requested change.

Looking ahead

The Editing team will soon add auto-fill features for citations. The Citoid service takes a URL or DOI for a reliable source, and returns a pre-filled, pre-formatted bibliographic citation. After creating it, you will be able to change or add information to the citation, in the same way that you edit any other pre-existing citation in VisualEditor. Support for ISBNs, PMIDs, and other identifiers is planned. Later, editors will be able to contribute to the Citoid service's definitions for each website, to improve precision and reduce the need for manual corrections.

We will need editors to help test the new design of the special character inserter, especially if you speak Welsh, Breton, or another language that uses diacritics or special characters extensively. The new version should be available for testing next week. Please contact User:Whatamidoing (WMF) if you would like to be notified when the new version is available. After the special character tool is completed, VisualEditor will be deployed to all users at Phase 5 Wikipedias. This will affect about 50 mid-size and smaller Wikipedias, including Afrikaans, Azerbaijani, Breton, Kyrgyz, Macedonian, Mongolian, Tatar, and Welsh. The date for this change has not been determined.

Let's work together

• Share your ideas and ask questions at mw:VisualEditor/Feedback.
• Please help complete translations of the user guide for users who speak your language.
• Join the weekly bug triage meetings beginning Wednesday, 11 February 2015 at 12:00 (noon) PST (20:00 UTC). Information about how to join the meeting will be posted at mw:Talk:VisualEditor/Portal shortly before the meeting begins. Contact James F. for more information.
• Talk to the Editing team during the office hours via IRC. The next session is on Thursday, 19 February 2015 at 19:00 UTC.

Subscribe or unsubscribe at Wikipedia:VisualEditor/Newsletter. Translations are available through Meta. Thank you! Whatamidoing (WMF) 20:23, 2 February 2015 (UTC)

VisualEditor News #2—2015

Did you know?

With Citoid in VisualEditor, you click the 'book with bookmark' icon and paste in the URL for a reliable source:

Citoid looks up the source for you and returns the citation results. Click the green "Insert" button to accept its results and add them to the article:

After inserting the citation, you can change it. Select the reference, and click the "Edit" button in the context menu to make changes.

The user guide has more information about how to use VisualEditor.

Since the last newsletter, the Editing Team has fixed many bugs and worked on VisualEditor's performance, the Citoid reference service, and support for languages with complex input requirements. Status reports are posted on Mediawiki.org. The worklist for April through June is available in Phabricator.

The weekly task triage meetings continue to be open to volunteers, each Wednesday at 11:00 (noon) PDT (18:00 UTC). You do not need to attend the meeting to nominate a bug for consideration as a Q4 blocker. Instead, go to Phabricator and "associate" the Editing team's Q4 blocker project with the bug. Learn how to join the meetings and how to nominate bugs at mw:Talk:VisualEditor/Portal.

Recent improvements

VisualEditor is now substantially faster. In many cases, opening the page in VisualEditor is now faster than opening it in the wikitext editor. The new system has improved the code speed by 37% and network speed by almost 40%.

The Editing team is slowly adding auto-fill features for citations. This is currently available only at the French, Italian, and English Wikipedias. The Citoid service takes a URL or DOI for a reliable source, and returns a pre-filled, pre-formatted bibliographic citation. After creating it, you will be able to change or add information to the citation, in the same way that you edit any other pre-existing citation in VisualEditor. Support for ISBNs, PMIDs, and other identifiers is planned. Later, editors will be able to improve precision and reduce the need for manual corrections by contributing to the Citoid service's definitions for each website.

Citoid requires good TemplateData for your citation templates. If you would like to request this feature for your wiki, please post a request in the Citoid project on Phabricator. Include links to the TemplateData for the most important citation templates on your wiki.

The special character inserter has been improved, based upon feedback from active users. After this, VisualEditor was made available to all users of Wikipedias on the Phase 5 list on 30 March. This affected 53 mid-size and smaller Wikipedias, including Afrikaans, Azerbaijani, Breton, Kyrgyz, Macedonian, Mongolian, Tatar, and Welsh.

Work continues to support languages with complex requirements, such as Korean and Japanese. These languages use input method editors ("IMEs”). Recent improvements to cursoring, backspace, and delete behavior will simplify typing in VisualEditor for these users.

The design for the image selection process is now using a "masonry fit" model. Images in the search results are displayed at the same height but at variable widths, similar to bricks of different sizes in a masonry wall, or the "packed" mode in image galleries. This style helps you find the right image by making it easier to see more details in images.

You can now drag and drop categories to re-arrange their order of appearance ​on the page.

The pop-up window that appears when you click on a reference, image, link, or other element, is called the "context menu". It now displays additional useful information, such as the destination of the link or the image's filename. The team has also added an explicit "Edit" button in the context menu, which helps new editors open the tool to change the item.

Invisible templates are marked by a puzzle piece icon so they can be interacted with. Users also will be able to see and edit HTML anchors now in section headings.

Users of the TemplateData GUI editor can now set a string as an optional text for the 'deprecated' property in addition to boolean value, which lets you tell users of the template what they should do instead (T90734).

Looking ahead

The special character inserter in VisualEditor will soon use the same special character list as the wikitext editor. Admins at each wiki will also have the option of creating a custom section for frequently used characters at the top of the list. Instructions for customizing the list will be posted at mediawiki.org.

The team is discussing a test of VisualEditor with new users, to see whether they have met their goals of making VisualEditor suitable for those editors. The timing is unknown, but might be relatively soon.

Let's work together

• Share your ideas and ask questions at mw:VisualEditor/Feedback.
• Can you translate from English into any other language? Please check this list to see whether more interface translations are needed for your language. Contact us to get an account if you want to help!
• The design research team wants to see how real editors work. Please sign up for their research program.
• File requests for language-appropriate "Bold" and "Italic" icons for the character formatting menu in Phabricator.

Subscribe, unsubscribe or change the page where this newsletter is delivered at Meta. If you aren't reading this in your favorite language, then please help us with translations! Subscribe to the Translators mailing list or contact us directly, so that we can notify you when the next issue is ready. Thank you!

-Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk), 17:50, 3 April 2015 (UTC)

VisualEditor News #3—2015

Did you know?

When you click on a link to an article, you now see more information:

The link tool has been re-designed:

There are separate tabs for linking to internal and external pages.

The user guide has more information about how to use VisualEditor.

Since the last newsletter, the Editing Team has created new interfaces for the link and citation tools, as well as fixing many bugs and changing some elements of the design. Some of these bugs affected users of VisualEditor on mobile devices. Status reports are posted on Mediawiki.org. The worklist for April through June is available in Phabricator.

A test of VisualEditor's effect on new editors at the English Wikipedia has just completed the first phase. During this test, half of newly registered editors had VisualEditor automatically enabled, and half did not. The main goal of the study is to learn which group was more likely to save an edit and to make productive, unreverted edits. Initial results will be posted at Meta later this month.

Recent improvements

Auto-fill features for citations are available at a few Wikipedias through the citoid service. Citoid takes a URL or DOI for a reliable source, and returns a pre-filled, pre-formatted bibliographic citation. If Citoid is enabled on your wiki, then the design of the citation workflow changed during May. All citations are now created inside a single tool. Inside that tool, choose the tab you want (⧼citoid-citeFromIDDialog-mode-auto⧽, ⧼citoid-citeFromIDDialog-mode-manual⧽, or ⧼citoid-citeFromIDDialog-mode-reuse⧽). The cite button is now labeled with the word "⧼visualeditor-toolbar-cite-label⧽" rather than a book icon, and the autofill citation dialog now has a more meaningful label, "⧼Citoid-citeFromIDDialog-lookup-button⧽", for the submit button.

The link tool has been redesigned based on feedback from Wikipedia editors and user testing. It now has two separate sections: one for links to articles and one for external links. When you select a link, its pop-up context menu shows the name of the linked page, a thumbnail image from the linked page, Wikidata's description, and/or appropriate icons for disambiguation pages, redirect pages and empty pages. Search results have been reduced to the first five pages. Several bugs were fixed, including a dark highlight that appeared over the first match in the link inspector (T98085).  

The special character inserter in VisualEditor now uses the same special character list as the wikitext editor. Admins at each wiki can also create a custom section for frequently used characters at the top of the list. Please read the instructions for customizing the list at mediawiki.org. Also, there is now a tooltip to describing each character in the special character inserter (T70425).

Several improvements have been made to templates. When you search for a template to insert, the list of results now contains descriptions of the templates. The parameter list inside the template dialog now remains open after inserting a parameter from the list, so that users don’t need to click on "⧼visualeditor-dialog-transclusion-add-param⧽" each time they want to add another parameter (T95696). The team added a new property for TemplateData, "Example", for template parameters. This optional, translatable property will show up when there is text describing how to use that parameter (T53049).

The design of the main toolbar and several other elements have changed slightly, to be consistent with the MediaWiki theme. In the Vector skin, individual items in the menu are separated visually by pale gray bars. Buttons and menus on the toolbar can now contain both an icon and a text label, rather than just one or the other. This new design feature is being used for the cite button on wikis where the Citoid service is enabled.

The team has released a long-desired improvement to the handling of non-existent images. If a non-existent image is linked in an article, then it is now visible in VisualEditor and can be selected, edited, replaced, or removed.

Let's work together

• Share your ideas and ask questions at mw:VisualEditor/Feedback.
• The weekly task triage meetings continue to be open to volunteers, each Wednesday at 12:00 (noon) PDT (19:00 UTC). Learn how to join the meetings and how to nominate bugs at mw:Talk:VisualEditor/Portal. You do not need to attend the meeting to nominate a bug for consideration as a Q4 blocker. Instead, go to Phabricator and "associate" the Editing team's Q4 blocker project with the bug.
• If your Wikivoyage, Wikibooks, Wikiversity, or other community wants to have VisualEditor made available by default to contributors, then please contact James Forrester.
• If you would like to request the Citoid automatic reference feature for your wiki, please post a request in the Citoid project on Phabricator. Include links to the TemplateData for the most important citation templates on your wiki.

Subscribe, unsubscribe or change the page where this newsletter is delivered at Meta. If you aren't reading this in your favorite language, then please help us with translations! Subscribe to the Translators mailing list or contact us directly, so that we can notify you when the next issue is ready. Thank you! Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 17:31, 6 June 2015 (UTC)

The Wikipedia Library needs you!

We hope The Wikipedia Library has been a useful resource for your work. TWL is expanding rapidly and we need your help!

With only a couple hours per week, you can make a big difference for sharing knowledge. Please sign up and help us in one of these ways:

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Send on behalf of The Wikipedia Library using MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 04:31, 7 July 2015 (UTC)

Untitled Grizzly Bear album listed at Redirects for discussion

An editor has asked for a discussion to address the redirect Untitled Grizzly Bear album. Since you had some involvement with the Untitled Grizzly Bear album redirect, you might want to participate in the redirect discussion if you have not already done so. -- Tavix ^(talk) 00:24, 6 August 2015 (UTC)

VisualEditor News #4—2015

Read this in another language • Local subscription list • Subscribe to the multilingual edition

Did you know?

You can add quotations marks before and after a title or phrase with a single click.

Select the relevant text. Find the correct quotations marks in the special character inserter tool (marked as Ω in the toolbar).

Click the button. VisualEditor will add the quotation marks on either side of the text you selected.

You can read and help translate the user guide, which has more information about how to use VisualEditor.

Since the last newsletter, the Editing Team have been working on mobile phone support. They have fixed many bugs and improved language support. They post weekly status reports on mediawiki.org. Their workboard is available in Phabricator. Their current priorities are improving language support and functionality on mobile devices.

Wikimania

The team attended Wikimania 2015 in Mexico City. There they participated in the Hackathon and met with individuals and groups of users. They also made several presentations about VisualEditor and the future of editing.

Following Wikimania, we announced winners for the VisualEditor 2015 Translathon. Our thanks and congratulations to users Halan-tul, Renessaince, जनक राज भट्ट (Janak Bhatta), Vahe Gharakhanyan, Warrakkk, and Eduardogobi.

For interface messages (translated at translatewiki.net), we saw the initiative affecting 42 languages. The average progress in translations across all languages was 56.5% before the translathon, and 78.2% after (+21.7%). In particular, Sakha improved from 12.2% to 94.2%; Brazilian Portuguese went from 50.6% to 100%; Taraškievica went from 44.9% to 85.3%; Doteli went from 1.3% to 41.2%. Also, while 1.7% of the messages were outdated across all languages before the translathon, the percentage dropped to 0.8% afterwards (-0.9%).

For documentation messages (on mediawiki.org), we saw the initiative affecting 24 languages. The average progress in translations across all languages was 26.6% before translathon, and 46.9% after (+20.3%).  There were particularly notable achievements for three languages. Armenian improved from 1% to 99%; Swedish, from 21% to 99%, and Brazilian Portuguese, from 34% to 83%. Outdated translations across all languages were reduced from 8.4% before translathon to 4.8% afterwards (-3.6%).

We published some graphs showing the effect of the event on the Translathon page. Thank you to the translators for participating and the translatewiki.net staff for facilitating this initiative.

Recent improvements

Auto-fill features for citations can be enabled on each Wikipedia. The tool uses the citoid service to convert a URL or DOI into a pre-filled, pre-formatted bibliographic citation. You can see an animated GIF of the quick, simple process at mediawiki.org. So far, about a dozen Wikipedias have enabled the auto-citation tool. To enable it for your wiki, follow the instructions at mediawiki.org.

Your wiki can customize the first section of the special character inserter in VisualEditor. Please follow the instructions at mediawiki.org to put the characters you want at the top. 

In other changes, if you need to fill in a CAPTCHA and get it wrong, then you can click to get a new one to complete. VisualEditor can now display and edit Vega-based graphs. If you use the Monobook skin, VisualEditor's appearance is now more consistent with other software.  

Future changes

The team will be changing the appearance of selected links inside VisualEditor. The purpose is to make it easy to see whether your cursor is inside or outside the link. When you select a link, the link label (the words shown on the page) will be enclosed in a faint box. If you place your cursor inside the box, then your changes to the link label will be part of the link. If you place your cursor outside the box, then it will not. This will make it easy to know when new characters will be added to the link and when they will not.

On the English Wikipedia, 10% of newly created accounts are now offered both the visual and the wikitext editors. A recent controlled trial showed no significant difference in survival or productivity for new users in the short term. New users with access to VisualEditor were very slightly less likely to produce results that needed reverting. You can learn more about this by watching a video of the July 2015 Wikimedia Research Showcase. The proportion of new accounts with access to both editing environments will be gradually increased over time. Eventually all new users have the choice between the two editing environments.

Let's work together

• Share your ideas and ask questions at Wikipedia:VisualEditor/Feedback.
• Can you read and type in Korean or Japanese? Language engineer David Chan needs people who know which tools people use to type in some languages. If you speak Japanese or Korean, you can help him test support for these languages. Please see the instructions at mw:VisualEditor/IME Testing#What to test if you can help.
• If your wiki would like VisualEditor enabled on another namespace, you can file a request in Phabricator. Please include a link to a community discussion about the requested change.
• Please file requests for language-appropriate "Bold" and "Italic" icons for the styling menu in Phabricator.
• The design research team wants to see how real editors work. Please sign up for their research program.
• The weekly task triage meetings continue to be open to volunteers, usually on Tuesdays at 12:00 (noon) PDT (19:00 UTC). Learn how to join the meetings and how to nominate bugs at mw:VisualEditor/Weekly triage meetings. You do not need to attend the meeting to nominate a bug for consideration as a Q1 blocker, though. Instead, go to Phabricator and "associate" the main VisualEditor project with the bug.

If you aren't reading this in your favorite language, then please help us with translations! Subscribe to the Translators mailing list or contact Elitre directly, so that she can notify you when the next issue is ready. Thank you! Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 00:01, 8 August 2015 (UTC)

Wikiquote and wikisource texts

Thank you for your recent objection to the removal of the Wikiquote and Wikisource texts on the Allen Ginsberg template, please see the wide-ranging discussion and possible routes to bring back the additions at my talk page, and maybe you can mull over some of the choices for the next step. Thanks! Randy Kryn 17:23, 1 September 2015 (UTC)

ArbCom elections are now open!

Hi,
You appear to be eligible to vote in the current Arbitration Committee election. The Arbitration Committee is the panel of editors responsible for conducting the Wikipedia arbitration process. It has the authority to enact binding solutions for disputes between editors, primarily related to serious behavioural issues that the community has been unable to resolve. This includes the ability to impose site bans, topic bans, editing restrictions, and other measures needed to maintain our editing environment. The arbitration policy describes the Committee's roles and responsibilities in greater detail. If you wish to participate, you are welcome to review the candidates' statements and submit your choices on the voting page. For the Election committee, MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 16:30, 23 November 2015 (UTC)

old rx request

Hello, Arms & Hearts. Please check your email; you've got mail!
It may take a few minutes from the time the email is sent for it to show up in your inbox. You can at any time by removing the {{You've got mail}} or {{ygm}} template.

--MrLinkinPark333 (talk) 02:01, 12 January 2016 (UTC)

New Hampshire Libertarians

I wasn't 100% how that worked. As the name for the party and the ideology are the same it's tough to see who belongs where as not all "libertarians" are members of the Libertarian Party — Preceding unsigned comment added by Mpen320 (talk • contribs)

Yes, you're right, it is confusing. It's worth noting though that categories can have short descriptions which appear at the top of the category page, and serve to clarify ambiguities like that; Category:New Hampshire Libertarians has a description which explains the category is for politicians of the Libertarian Party rather than libertarians in general. More generally, because titles on Wikipedia (including category titles) are written in sentence case, we would use "Libertarians" (upper-case L) for members of the party and "libertarians" (lower-case L) for people who subscribe libertarianism, so a category for people who believe in libertarian ideas and live in New Hampshire, if it existed, would be called "New Hampshire libertarians". Hope that clears things up a bit – if it's alright with you I'm now going to undo your edits to the articles in question in accordance with the guideline I mentioned on your talk page the other day. – Arms & Hearts (talk) 16:46, 12 June 2016 (UTC)

WP:BOLDTITLE

Hi! I'm here about this revert. If it isn't too much trouble, I would like to ask if the Beatles example overrides the Azaria Chamberlain example since Ezell Ford is a redirect to that page. Have a nice day, Me, Myself & I (☮) (talk) 00:09, 6 August 2016 (UTC)

@Me, Myself, and I are Here: Yes, I think you were right to begin with and I've reverted myself. The Azaria Chamberlain example is clearly the closest comparison in this case. Keep up the good work! – Arms & Hearts (talk) 00:25, 6 August 2016 (UTC)

Ah, thank you very much. Me, Myself & I (☮) (talk) 00:35, 6 August 2016 (UTC)

ArbCom Elections 2016: Voting now open!

Hello, Arms & Hearts. Voting in the 2016 Arbitration Committee elections is open from Monday, 00:00, 21 November through Sunday, 23:59, 4 December to all unblocked users who have registered an account before Wednesday, 00:00, 28 October 2016 and have made at least 150 mainspace edits before Sunday, 00:00, 1 November 2016.

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

If you wish to participate in the 2016 election, please review the candidates' statements and submit your choices on the voting page. MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 22:08, 21 November 2016 (UTC)

Aaron Bastani

http://www.uclconservatives.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/Issue-13.pdf

The original source for the Guido Fawkes story in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Bastani Jonknight73 (talk) 21:57, 4 June 2017 (UTC)

Thanks for this. I would still be opposed to including any claims about Bastani's possible past Conservative affiliations or support for Iain Duncan Smith in the article though, as all we have to support those claims are an unreliable source (the Guido post) and the primary source that you linked above – neither of which are appropriate for use in a biography of a living person, in which we have to be especially selective about sources. As you may have seen, I've nominated the article for deletion, as I don't think there are enough reliable secondary sources available on the subject for the article to be viable. – Arms & Hearts (talk) 22:21, 4 June 2017 (UTC)

Patrick Lambert

You created a redirect to an article about an election in Michigan in 2010. Since then, another Patrick Lambert (I assume) has been named principal chief of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians.

I fixed a link that went to the other article but I would assume the political candidate has much less notability than the chief. I'm not sure whether I want to tackle the biography of the chief, but I would assume you wouldn't object if I changed the redirect.— Vchimpanzee • talk • contributions • 20:59, 5 June 2017 (UTC)

Yes, I agree that the chief would be the primary topic and retargeting would be appropriate. – Arms & Hearts (talk) 23:06, 5 June 2017 (UTC)

I figured that would be the case. Thanks.— Vchimpanzee • talk • contributions • 14:21, 6 June 2017 (UTC)