User talk:DatGuy/Archives/2018/March
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Bots Newsletter, March 2018
| Bots Newsletter, March 2018 | |
|---|---|
 Greetings! Here is the 5th issue of the Bots Newsletter (formerly the BAG Newletter). You can subscribe/unsubscribe from future newsletters by adding/removing your name from this list. Highlights for this newsletter include:
We currently have 6 open bot requests at Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval, and could use your help processing!
While there were no large-scale bot-related discussion in the past few months, you can check WP:BOTN and WT:BOTPOL (and their corresponding archives) for smaller issues that came up.
Thank you! edited by: Headbomb 03:11, 3 March 2018 (UTC) (You can subscribe or unsubscribe from future newsletters by adding or removing your name from this list.) | |
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
- You can now make longer edit summaries. [1]
Changes later this week
- You can notify users in edit summaries. They will get a ping just as if they had been mentioned on a wiki page. [2]
- On Special:AbuseLog you can now choose to list only actions that actually made an edit. Other actions are when the filter warned the editor or blocked the edit from being made. There are also more search options. [3][4]
Wikis can enable Citoid to provide automatic reference look-up in the visual editor and the 2017 wikitext editor, but it is complex. The tool will now warn in the JavaScript console if the configuration isn't correct. Soon Citoid will disable itself if the configuration isn't correct. Check that your wiki is configured correctly. You can ask for help if you need it. [5]
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 6 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 7 March. It will be on all wikis from 8 March (calendar).
Meetings
- You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 6 March at 19:30 (UTC). See how to join.
- You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 7 March at 16:00 (UTC). See how to join.
Future changes
- In the future you will be able to use global preferences. This means you could change a preference for all wikis instead of having to change it every time for each wiki. You can now test global preferences and give feedback.
- You can now read about planned works on maps during 2018. This will be done by June. You can give feedback on the planned maps work.
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
17:12, 5 March 2018 (UTC)
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
- 3D models can now be uploaded to Commons. [6]
- Page Previews has been updated to use HTML for previews. This has fixed many issues. An A/B test was done on English and German Wikipedia to measure how it is used. Other changes were also made. [7]
- Some edits have to be checked against too many conditions before they can trigger an abuse filter. If that is the reason no filter is triggered the edit will be tagged for review. [8]
- Auto-saving has been added to the visual editor and the 2017 wikitext editor. Right now it is meant to help if your browser crashes or if you accidentally close a tab. [9]
Problems
- The abuse filter did not tag all edits that should have been tagged after last week's MediaWiki version had come to the wikis. It was fixed on 9 March (UTC). [10]
Changes later this week
- You can notify users in edit summaries. They will get a ping just as if they had been mentioned on a wiki page. This was originally planned to happen last week. [11]
- It is now possible to specify the block parameters for each filter in Special:AbuseFilter. The parameters include block duration and if the user should be blocked from editing their own talk page. The block duration is separate for anonymous and registered users. [12][13]
- A hundred Wikimedia wikis will switch to use the Remex parsing library. This is to replace Tidy. It will happen on 13 and 14 March. Other wikis will be recommended to switch soon when they have fixed the errors that must be fixed. Tidy will be removed in the middle of 2018. [14][15][16]
- The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 13 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 14 March. It will be on all wikis from 15 March (calendar).
Meetings
- You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 13 March at 19:30 (UTC). See how to join.
- You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 14 March at 16:00 (UTC). See how to join.
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
19:44, 12 March 2018 (UTC)
ACTRIAL - next steps for the Future of AfC & NPP
Hello DatGuy/Archives/2018, thank you for your efforts reviewing New Page and AfC submissions and your support for the ACTRIAL initiative.
The conclusion to the ACTRIAL report commissioned by the Wikimedia Foundation strongly reiterates our long-time on going requirements for the NPP and AfC processes to be improved. Within minutes of the trial being switched off, the feed was swamped with inappropriate creations and users are being blocked already.
This is now the moment to continue to collaborate with the WMF and their developers to bring the entire Curation system up to date by making a firm commitment to addressing the list of requirements to the excellent suite of tools the WMF developed for Curation. Some of these are already listed at Phabricator but may need a boost.
The conclusions also make some recommendations for AfC.
A place to discuss these issues initially is here where you are already a task force member.
Wikipedia:The future of NPP and AfC. To opt-out of future mailings, go here. From MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 19:02, 15 March 2018 (UTC)
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Problems
- On March 12 early morning UTC, the number of 503 error messages increased due to an issue on esams datacenter. It has been fixed. [17]
Changes later this week
- The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 20 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 21 March. It will be on all wikis from 22 March (calendar).
Meetings
- There is no Editing team meeting this week.
- You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 21 March at 16:00 (UTC). See how to join.
Future changes
- From April 4, the autopatrol status of edits will only be accessible in the Recent Changes database table, so only for 30 days. [18][19]
- In-Context Help and Onboarding is a new project, aiming to improve retention of new wiki editors. The goal is to give them short tutorials and other training experiences based on their activity. Collaboration team is expecting feedback and comments on the project talk page, especially from people working with newcomers.
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
15:03, 19 March 2018 (UTC)
DatBot6
Seems to have gone to sleep, no edits since 22:12, 16 March 2018 Ronhjones (Talk) 23:25, 18 March 2018 (UTC)
- Fixed, issue was due to switching to python3. Dat GuyTalkContribs 13:31, 19 March 2018 (UTC)
- Great. There will be the usual daily batch of 50-80 tonight, I suspect. I'm trying to get the new files tagged automatically, but BRFA is very slow at present, Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/RonBot 3, so just using the bulk of the code to make a local list on my hard drive, then manually tag them. Ronhjones (Talk) 14:38, 19 March 2018 (UTC)
Datbot resizing
I left a message on your talk page in January that has gone unanswered, I would appreciate a response. Thanks, -- Whats new?(talk) 22:22, 19 March 2018 (UTC)
- I don't do the tagging. My bot just does the resizing. Paging Ronhjones. Dat GuyTalkContribs 13:59, 20 March 2018 (UTC)
- @Whats new?: As per NFC guideline images should be rescaled as small as possible to still be useful as identified by their rationale, and no larger. The images are only 138 pixels wide on the Article Page (which is the correct page where, according to policy, non-free images can be seen). Thus one could suggest reducing them to 138 pixels wide, but we also have a guideline of 100,000 pixels area, where the image will not be reduced further, so they were just reduced to the guideline - there is a 5% oversize allowance where it is not practical to reduce, but these images were more than 5% oversize. Ronhjones (Talk) 20:39, 20 March 2018 (UTC)
- @Ronhjones and DatGuy: Thatnks to both of you for responding. It just seems a bit silly to reduce the sizes by such minuscule amounts -- Whats new?(talk) 06:17, 21 March 2018 (UTC)
- @Whats new?: Trouble is one has to draw a line somewhere - and you can't please all the editors all of the time. Those images were 14% above the guideline, but the current system allows for 5% overage unless there is a need. Ronhjones (Talk) 18:23, 21 March 2018 (UTC)
- @Ronhjones and DatGuy: Thatnks to both of you for responding. It just seems a bit silly to reduce the sizes by such minuscule amounts -- Whats new?(talk) 06:17, 21 March 2018 (UTC)
- @Whats new?: As per NFC guideline images should be rescaled as small as possible to still be useful as identified by their rationale, and no larger. The images are only 138 pixels wide on the Article Page (which is the correct page where, according to policy, non-free images can be seen). Thus one could suggest reducing them to 138 pixels wide, but we also have a guideline of 100,000 pixels area, where the image will not be reduced further, so they were just reduced to the guideline - there is a 5% oversize allowance where it is not practical to reduce, but these images were more than 5% oversize. Ronhjones (Talk) 20:39, 20 March 2018 (UTC)
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Changes later this week
- Some of the interface icons and text sizes will change slightly, as part of the updates for improved accessibility and consistency. These icons are used in many features, including Notifications, Recent Changes, Beta Features, Visual Editor, 2017 Wikitext Editor, Code Editor, and others. While editor toolbars, dialogs, and menus will appear slightly bigger; elements on special pages will be slightly smaller. Functionality will not change. [20] [21]
- The deprecated #toc and #toctitle CSS ids have been removed. If your wiki was still using these for fake Tables of Content (ToC) then these might lose their styling. They can be replaced with .toc and .toctitle classes where appropriate. [22]
- TemplateStyles will be deployed to the Wikivoyages on 28 March 2018. [23]
- The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 27 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 28 March. It will be on all wikis from 29 March (calendar).
Meetings
- You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 27 March at 18:30 (UTC). See how to join.
- You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be one hour earlier than usual on 28 March at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.
Future changes
- From 9 April, the sort order of categories will be distorted for a short time. We are upgrading versions of an internationalisation library (ICU) and using a maintenance script to update existing database entries. This will last anywhere from a few hours to a few days, depending on wiki size. Read more details. [24]
- Changes are coming to search for Serbian projects. Cyrillic and Latin variants of a word and different grammatical forms of a word will be able to find each other. Read more on MediaWiki in Serbian or English.
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
20:04, 26 March 2018 (UTC)
New Page Review Newsletter No.10
ACTRIAL:
- ACTRIAL's six month experiment restricting new page creation to (auto)confirmed users ended on 14 March. As expected, a greatly increased number of unsuitable articles and candidates for deletion are showing up in the feed again, and the backlog has since increased already by ~30%. Please consider reviewing a few extra articles each day.
Paid editing
- Now that ACTRIAL is inoperative pending discussion, please be sure to look for tell-tale signs of undisclosed paid editing. Contact the creator if appropriate, and submit the issue to WP:COIN if necessary.
Subject-specific notability guidelines
- The box at the right contains each of the subject-specific notability guidelines, please review any that are relevant BEFORE nominating an article for deletion.
- Reviewers are requested to familiarise themselves with the new version of the notability guidelines for organisations and companies. A further discussion is currently taking place at: Can a subject specific guideline invalidate the General Notability Guideline?
Nominate competent users for Autopatrolled
- While patrolling articles, if you find an editor that is particularly competent at creating quality new articles, and that user has created more than 25 articles (rather than stubs), consider nominating them for the 'Autopatrolled' user right HERE.
News
- The next issue Wikipedia's newspaper The Signpost has now been published after a long delay. There are some articles in it, including ACTRIAL wrap-up that will be of special interest to New Page Reviewers. Don't hesitate to contribute to the comments sections. The Signpost is one of the best ways to stay up date with news and new developments - please consider subscribing to it. All editors of Wikipedia and associated projects are welcome to submit articles on any topic for consideration by the The Signpost's editorial team for the next issue.
To opt-out of future mailings, go here. MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 08:06, 30 March 2018 (UTC)