User talk:L3X1/Archive 7

Please comment on Talk:Flag of Australia

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Please comment on Talk:Jimmy Page

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Please comment on Talk:Daniel Mallory Ortberg

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A quick question ...

Hello - I'm already involved in an edit dispute on an article (and do not wish to get you involved in that), but I noticed that here you had reverted another person's change to the article. Since his change corrected mistakes and improved the article, I was wondering if you would explain why you reverted it (and since there was no explanation in the edit summary). Thanks in advance. __173.235.84.234 (talk) 19:38, 4 September 2018 (UTC)

Hi, and sorry for the delay. I undid the edit for a couple main reasons: The additions to the | ShortSummary were unsourced (in the sense nothing was provided to allow me to double check the validity of the change), I also felt it was a little long. I now see that last part was in error, as Episodes 2, 15, and 16 have relatively lengthy summaries. I did not scroll down in the window to see the typo fix. I have undone this, thank you for bringing it to my attention. ^Thanks, L3X1 ◊distænt write◊ 00:29, 5 September 2018 (UTC)

Thank you - it's good to know there are still editors on Wikipedia who are willing to discuss and collaborate on articles! __173.235.84.234 (talk) 20:12, 7 September 2018 (UTC)

Please comment on Wikipedia:Biographies of living persons/Noticeboard

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Please comment on Talk:Bo Burnham

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Please comment on Talk:Mattress Performance (Carry That Weight)

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Please comment on Talk:Ron DeSantis

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Please comment on Talk:Geoffrey Owens

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Please comment on Talk:Lisa Littman

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Please comment on Talk:Ron Stallworth

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Please comment on Talk:Naomi Osaka

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Please comment on Talk:Keanu Reeves

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NPR Newsletter No.13 18 September 2018

Hello L3X1, thank you for your work reviewing New Pages!

The New Page Feed currently has 2700 unreviewed articles, up from just 500 at the start of July. For a while we were falling behind by an average of about 40 articles per day, but we have stabilised more recently. Please review some articles from the back of the queue if you can (Sort by: 'Oldest' at Special:NewPagesFeed), as we are very close to having articles older than one month.

Project news

• The New Page Feed now has a new "Articles for Creation" option which will show drafts instead of articles in the feed, this shouldn't impact NPP activities and is part of the WMF's AfC Improvement Project.

As part of this project, the feed will have some larger updates to functionality next month. Specifically, ORES predictions will be built in, which will automatically flag articles for potential issues such as vandalism or spam. Copyright violation detection will also be added to the new page feed. See the projects's talk page for more info.

• There are a number of coordination tasks for New Page Patrol that could use some help from experienced reviewers. See Wikipedia:New pages patrol/Coordination#Coordinator tasks for more info to see if you can help out.

Other

• A new summary page of reliable sources has been created; Wikipedia:Identifying reliable sources/Perennial sources, which summarizes existing RfCs or RSN discussions about regularly used sources.

Moving to Draft and Page Mover

• Some unsuitable new articles can be best reviewed by moving them to the draft space, but reviewers need to do this carefully and sparingly. It is most useful for topics that look like they might have promise, but where the article as written would be unlikely to survive AfD. If the article can be easily fixed, or if the only issue is a lack of sourcing that is easily accessible, tagging or adding sources yourself is preferable. If sources do not appear to be available and the topic does not appear to be notable, tagging for deletion is preferable (PROD/AfD/CSD as appropriate). See additional guidance at WP:DRAFTIFY.
• If the user moves the draft back to mainspace, or recreates it in mainspace, please do not re-draftify the article (although swapping it to maintain the page history may be advisable in the case of copy-paste moves). AfC is optional except for editors with a clear conflict of interest.
• Articles that have been created in contravention of our paid-editing-requirements or written from a blatant NPOV perspective, or by authors with a clear COI might also be draftified at discretion.
• The best tool for draftification is User:Evad37/MoveToDraft.js^(info). Kindly adapt the text in the dialogue-pop-up as necessary (the default can also be changed like this). Note that if you do not have the Page Mover userright, the redirect from main will be automatically tagged as CSD R2, but in some cases it might be better to make this a redirect to a different page instead.
• The Page Mover userright can be useful for New Page Reviewers; occasionally page swapping is needed during NPR activities, and it helps avoid excessive R2 nominations which must be processed by admins. Note that the Page Mover userright has higher requirements than the NPR userright, and is generally given to users active at Requested Moves. Only reviewers who are very experienced and are also very active reviewers are likely to be granted it solely for NPP activities.

List of other useful scripts for New Page Reviewing

Twinkle provides a lot of the same functionality as the page curation tools, and some reviewers prefer to use the Twinkle tools for some/all tasks. It can be activated simply in the gadgets section of 'preferences'. There are also a lot of options available at the Twinkle preferences panel after you install the gadget. In terms of other gadgets for NPR, HotCat is worth turning on. It allows you to easily add, remove, and change categories on a page, with name suggestions. MoreMenu also adds a bunch of very useful links for diagnosing and fixing page issues. User:Equazcion/ScriptInstaller.js(info): Installing scripts doesn't have to be complicated. Go to your common.js and copy importScript( 'User:Equazcion/ScriptInstaller.js' ); into an empty line, now you can install all other scripts with the click of a button from the script page! (Note you need to be at the ".js" page for the script for the install button to appear, not the information page) User:TheJosh/Scripts/NewPagePatrol.js(info): Creates a scrolling new pages list at the left side of the page. You can change the number of pages shown by adding the following to the next line on your common.js page (immediately after the line importing this script): npp_num_pages=20; (Recommended 20, but you can use any number from 1 to 50). User:Primefac/revdel.js(info): Is requesting revdel complicated and time consuming? This script helps simplify the process. Just have the Copyvio source URL and go to the history page and collect your diff IDs and you can drop them into the script Popups and it will create a revdel request for you. User:Lourdes/PageCuration.js(info): Creates a "Page Curation" link to Special:NewPagesFeed up near your sandbox link. User:Writ Keeper/Scripts/deletionFinder.js: Creates links next to the title of each page which show up if it has been previously deleted or nominated for deletion. User:Evad37/rater.js(info): A fantastic tool for adding WikiProject templates to article talk pages. If you add: rater_autostartNamespaces = 0; to the next line on your common.js, the prompt will pop up automatically if a page has no Wikiproject templates on the talk page (note: this can be a bit annoying if you review redirects or dab pages commonly).

Go here to remove your name if you wish to opt-out of future mailings. MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 23:11, 17 September 2018 (UTC)

Please comment on Talk:Nabil Gabol

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Please comment on Talk:Mohammad bin Salman

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Please comment on Talk:Tom O'Carroll

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Please comment on Talk:Shenphen Rinpoche

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Please comment on Template talk:Death year and age

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Please comment on Talk:Jeremy Corbyn

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Portals WikiProject update #019, 22 Sept 2018

Portals progress report

Don't blink. You might miss something.

As of a few days ago, portals had doubled in about a month and a half.

Also, there were 98 incompleted portals in Category:Portals under construction. Now there are just 43.

The WikiProject page has been thoroughly revised

The goals, plans, and task sections have all been updated.

Orphaned portals need a home...

Many new portals are still orphans, and need links pointing to them:

1. A portal link at the bottom of corresponding navigation footer template. E.g., Template:Machines for Portal:Machines. See examples of a portals link at the bottom of Template:Robotics and Template:Forestry.
2. A {{Portal}} box in the See also section of the corresponding root article for each portal. If there is no See also section, create one and place the portal template in that. (Rather than placing them in an external links section -- they're not external links).
3. A {{Portal}} template placed at the top of the category page corresponding to each portal.

All new and revamped portals can be found at Category:Single-page portals.

Portal:Contents/Portals

This is the main list of portals.

Nearly 2,000 of the new portals need to be listed here.

They can be found at Portal talk:Contents/Portals#These are not listed yet. Instructions are included there.

Customized Portal Rating system is now in place

Portals now have a new rating system of their own designed specifically to support portal evaluation! We were trying to use the standard assessment system for articles, but that doesn't fit portals very well.

Many thanks to Evad37, Waggers, AfroThundr3007730, SMcCandlish, Tom, BrendonTheWizard, and Pbsouthwood for their work and input on this.

The new system can be found at the top of all portal talk pages, in the WikiProject portals box. Those with "???" ratings need to be assessed, which makes up most of the older portals.

Most of the new portals were started out with an initial "Low" level of importance when their talk pages were created. Those deserving higher importance should be promoted as you come across them.

Improving the new portals

The starting point for new portals included minimal parameters and content, in the form of default values in the template(s) used for their creation.

Embellishing embedded search strings

So, for the search strings in the "Did you know..." and "In the news" sections, this was the magic word {{PAGENAME}}, which represents the portal's name. Unfortunately, the resulting term is alway capitalized, which limits its effectiveness as a search string for anything but proper nouns. Results for those two sections can be improved, by replacing the "PAGENAME" magic word with multiple search strings, and search strings that begin with lower case letters. There is no inherent limit as to how many search parameters may be included. Lua search notation is used. The more general the subject, the more subtopic search terms you may want to include. For example, on Portal:Avengers (comics), {{PAGENAME}} turned up nothing. But, when more parameters were added, as in the wikicode below...

{{Transclude selected recent additions | {{PAGENAME}} | Iron Man | Spiderman | Antman | Hawkeye | The Hulk | Incredible Hulk | David Banner | Captain America | Scarlet Witch | Black Widow | Tony Stark | Nick Fury | Age of Ultron | Infinity War | months=36 | header={{Box-header colour|Did you know... }}|max=6}}

... that returned several results in the portal's DYK section.

Be sure you make the improvements to both the DYK section and the "In the news" section, as they both require the search strings.

Expanding the slideshow contents

The default starting selection for the image slideshow in most new portals is whatever images happen to be in the corresponding root article (via the PAGENAME magic word). You can improve image slideshows by adding more sourcepages and filenames as parameters in the "Selected images" section of portals.

See Template:Transclude files as random slideshow/doc for instructions.

More exciting things are to come...

Portals used to take about 6 hours or more to create. Now, for subjects that have particular navigation support, we've got that down to about one minute each, with even more content displayed than ever. True, that means the new portals pick you, rather than the other way around. Creating a specific portal that doesn't happen to have the requisite navigation support is still pretty time consuming. But, we are working on extending our reach beyond the low-hanging fruit.

And efforts are ongoing to keep shaving time off of the creation process. Eventually, we may get it down to seconds each.

In addition to improving automation, we're always looking for new features and improvements that we can add to portals, and there is plenty of potential to expand on the standard design so that new portals are even better right out of the starting gate. Additional designs are also possible.

On the horizon, there are many more portals waiting to be created. And we can expect to see at least a few more section types emerge. I never expected slideshows, for example, especially not for excerpts. Who knows where innovation will take us next?

Keep up the great work everyone.

Sincerely,    — The Transhumanist   07:07, 23 September 2018 (UTC)

Please comment on Talk:Winona Ryder

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Please comment on Talk:Eugene Gu

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Please comment on Talk:Francis Beaufort

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Please comment on Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Music

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Please comment on Talk:Oscar López Rivera

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October 2018 at Women in Red

		Please join us... We have four new topics for Women in Red's worldwide online editathons in October! New: Clubs Science fiction + fantasy STEM The Mediterranean Continuing: #1day1woman Global Initiative
		(To subscribe: Women in Red/English language mailing list and Women in Red/international list. Unsubscribe: Women in Red/Opt-out list) --Rosiestep (talk) 14:46, 28 September 2018 (UTC) via MassMessaging

Please comment on Talk:Hamas

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Please comment on Talk:Tom Crean (explorer)

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Please comment on Talk:Charles K. Kao

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Please comment on Talk:Andrei Radu

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Please comment on Talk:Christine Blasey Ford

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Please comment on Talk:Antisemitism in the UK Labour Party

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Please comment on Talk:Szlachta

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Administrators' newsletter – October 2018

News and updates for administrators from the past month (September 2018).

Administrator changes

Justlettersandnumbers • L235

Bgwhite • HorsePunchKid • J Greb • KillerChihuahua • Rami R • Winhunter

Interface administrator changes

Cyberpower678 • Deryck Chan • Oshwah • Pharos • Ragesoss • Ritchie333

Oversight changes

Guerillero • NativeForeigner • Snowolf • Xeno

Guideline and policy news

• Following a request for comment, the process for appointing interface administrators has been established. Currently only existing admins can request these rights, while a new RfC has begun on whether it should be available to non-admins.
• There is an open request for comment on Meta regarding the creation a new user group for global edit filter management.

Technical news

• Partial blocks should be available for testing in October on the Test Wikipedia and the Beta-Cluster. This new feature allows admins to block users from editing specific pages and in the near-future, namespaces and uploading files. You can expect more updates and an invitation to help with testing once it is available.
• The Foundations' Anti-Harassment Tools team is currently looking for input on how to measure the effectiveness of blocks. This is in particular related to how they will measure the success of the aforementioned partial blocks.
• Because of a data centre test, you will be able to read but not edit the Wikimedia projects for up to an hour on 10 October. This will start at 14:00 (UTC). You might lose edits if you try to save during this time.

Arbitration

• The Arbitration Committee has, by motion, amended the procedure on functionary inactivity.
• The community consultation for 2018 CheckUser and Oversight appointments has concluded. Appointments will be made by October 11.
• Following a request for comment, the size of the Arbitration Committee will be decreased to 13 arbitrators, starting in 2019. Additionally, the minimum support percentage required to be appointed to a two-year term on ArbCom has been increased to 60%. ArbCom candidates who receive between 50% and 60% support will be appointed to one-year terms instead.
• Nominations for the 2018 Arbitration Committee Electoral Commission are being accepted until 12 October. These are the editors who help run the ArbCom election smoothly. If you are interested in volunteering for this role, please consider nominating yourself.

---

• Discuss this newsletter
• Subscribe
• Archive

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 20:13, 5 October 2018 (UTC)

Please comment on Talk:List of years in Bulgaria

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Please comment on Talk:Donald Trump

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Please comment on Talk:Jimmy Page

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Please comment on Talk:D. H. Lawrence

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Please comment on Wikipedia talk:Biographies of living persons

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Please comment on Talk:Arvo Pärt

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Portals WikiProject update #020, 12 Oct 2018

Whew, a lot has been happening.

A bit of defending of the portals has been needed. But, most activity recently has been directed upon maintenance and development of existing portals.

The majority of portals now use the new design, about 2400 of them, leaving around 1200 portals that still employ the old style.

Newest portals

• Aceh
• Aegean Sea
• Arthur Wellesley
• Azores
• Bashkortostan
• Birmingham
• Black Sea
• Canary Islands
• Carpathian Mountains
• Caucasus
• Columbia River
• Davao City
• Dnieper
• Easter Island
• Exploration
• Galápagos Islands
• Glasgow
• Great Wall of China
• Guangdong
• Kaliningrad Oblast
• Kanpur
• Kigali
• Kuril Islands
• Kuwait City
• Leeds
• Lhasa
• Loire Valley
• Lucknow
• Lviv
• Map projections
• Marseille
• Midwestern United States
• Missouri River
• Multan
• Mysore
• Niger River
• Northeast India
• Odessa
• Orchestras
• Panama Canal
• Peshawar
• Polynesia
• Poznań
• Pretoria
• Rat Pack
• Sammy Davis Jr.
• Shandong
• South China Sea
• Southern United States
• Suez Canal
• Svalbard
• Tatarstan
• Tigris River
• Visakhapatnam
• Volga River
• Western Ghats
• Western United States
• Yellowstone National Park
• Yosemite National Park

Please inspect these portals, and report problems or suggest improvements at WT:WPPORTD. Thank you.

MfDs

Since the last issue of this newsletter, Nineteen portals were nominated for deletion. All posted by the same person.

Two portals were deleted.

One resolved as "no consensus".

Sixteen resolved as "keep".

Links to the archived discussions are provided below:

1. Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Air France
2. Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Alexander Korda
3. Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:August Derleth
4. Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Average White Band
5. Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Bee-eaters
6. Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Ben E. King
7. Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Benny Goodman
8. Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Bill Bryson
9. Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Billy Idol
10. Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Billy Ocean
11. Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Bob Hope
12. Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Bobbie Rosenfeld Award
13. Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Body piercing
14. Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Canton, Michigan
15. Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Compostela Group of Universities
16. Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Diplo
17. Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Diversity of fish
18. Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Pebble Beach
19. Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Peter, Paul and Mary

Many thanks to those who participated in the discussions.

To watch for future MfD's, keep in mind that the Portals WikiProject is supported by automatic alerts. You can see them at: Wikipedia:WikiProject Portals#Article alerts: portals for deletion at MfD

Creation criteria

There was also some discussion of creation criteria for portals. The result was that one of the participants in the discussion reverted the portal guidelines to the old version, which has the minimum number of articles for a portal included in there: "about 20 articles", a guideline that was in place since 2009.

Many of the portals that existed prior to April 2018 do not have that many (being limited to however many subpages the portal creator created), and therefore, these portals need to be upgraded to the new design (which automatically provides many articles for display). Using the new design, exceeding 20 articles for display is very easy.

Linking to the new portals

Efforts have been underway to place links to new portals (all 2200 of them created since April).

1. Link (portal button) from corresponding category pages.  Done
2. Link from See also section on corresponding root articles. Partially implemented
3. Link from bottom of corresponding templates. Partially implemented
4. Link for each portal on Portal:Contents/Portals. Partially implemented

Your help is needed. It is easy to access the page mentioned in #1, #2, & #3 from the portals themselves.

AWBers could do these tasks even faster (that's how the category pages were done), except #4...

Item #4 above pretty much has to be done by hand. (If you can find a way to speed that up, I would be very impressed). The links needing placement can be found at Portal talk:Contents/Portals#These are not listed yet. Instructions are included there.

The conversion effort: news sections

There are still around 1200 old-style portals that have only undergone partial conversion to the new design concepts, still relying on subpages with copied/pasted excerpts that have been going stale for years, out of date (manually posted) news entries, etc.

The section currently being tackled on these is news. You can help by deleting any news section on the old-style portals that has news entries that are years old (that is the dead giveaway to a manual news section). Be sure not to delete the news sections of portals that have up-to-date news, or active maintainers. For maintainers, look at the portal's categories, and/or check the participants list at WP:WPPORT.

Eventually, conditional news sections (that appear only when news items are available for display) will be added using AWB to all portals without a news section.

News items (and even the news sections themselves) are automatically generated for portals that were created using the Basic portal start page. On those portals, there is a hidden comment at the top of the page (that you can see in the edit window), that says this:

<!-- This portal was created using subst:Basic portal start page -->

Design development

Presently, we are in the process of implementing the new design features, creating new portals with them, and installing them in existing portals.

But, what about development of new new design features?

We have a wish department.

Post your wishes at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Portals/Design#Discussions about possible cool new features, and they might come true. Many have already, and for many of those, this is where they were posted.

Cascade effect

A resource that has been elusive so far will be obtained eventually: categories. That is, the ability to pull category member links to populate a page.

Rather than populate portals directly with such links, it may be more beneficial to the encyclopedia to utilize them in navigation footers, because portals already have the ability to generate themselves based on those.

So, this would create a cascade effect: auto-gathering entries from categories, would enable the construction of new navigation footers, that would in turn support the development of new portals.

The cascade effect would also be felt by existing portals, as existing navigation footers could be expanded using the category harvesting methods, which would in turn expand the coverage of portals that access those navigation footers.

You can help by providing leads about any potential category harvesting methods. Please report anything you know about harvesting categories at WT:WPPORTD. Thank you.

Looking into the future: the quantum portal?

One idea that has been floating around is the concept of a pageless portal. That is, a portal that isn't stored anywhere, instead being generated when you click on a menu item or button.

Many of the new portals were generated by a single click, and then saved via a second click.

Therefore, it seems likely that the portals of the future will employ the one-click concept.

Because of the need for customization by users, this concept would need to be augmented with a way to integrate user contributions. This could be done in at least two ways: posting an existing portal, autogenerating one from scratch if such does not yet exist, or have a special data page for user contributions that is folded into the auto-generated portal.

How soon? That is up to you. All that is needed are persons to implement it.

Until next time...

Keep up the good work on portals. They are improving daily. Thank you.    — The Transhumanist   04:23, 12 October 2018 (UTC)

Please comment on Talk:George Soros

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Please comment on Talk:Sugar

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Please comment on Talk:Frank Zappa

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Get ready for November with Women in Red!

		Three new topics for WiR's online editathons in November, two of them supporting other initiatives New: Religion Deceased politicians Asia Continuing: #1day1woman Global Initiative
		Latest headlines, news, and views on the Women in Red talkpage (Join the conversation!): WikiProject AfroCine launches (To subscribe: Women in Red/English language mailing list and Women in Red/international list. Unsubscribe: Women in Red/Opt-out list)

--Megalibrarygirl (talk) 18:40, 14 October 2018 (UTC) via MassMessaging

Please comment on Talk:Regional power

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Please comment on Talk:Saudi Arabia

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Herbert E. Meyer

Heads up that Herbert E. Meyer which you marked as no action needed at CopyPatrol was actually a lightly changed speaker's biography and has since been deleted as a COPYVIO. Best, Barkeep49 (talk) 13:32, 16 October 2018 (UTC)

Thanks Barkeep49. I don't recall looking at this one today so I guess I hit the wrong button on the wrong item in the CP queue. ^Thanks, L3X1 ◊distænt write◊ 02:03, 17 October 2018 (UTC)

Please comment on Talk:List of vegetarians

The feedback request service is asking for participation in this request for comment on Talk:List of vegetarians. Legobot (talk) 04:23, 17 October 2018 (UTC)

Please comment on Wikipedia talk:WikiProject UK geography/How to write about counties

The feedback request service is asking for participation in this request for comment on Wikipedia talk:WikiProject UK geography/How to write about counties. Legobot (talk) 04:24, 18 October 2018 (UTC)

Please comment on Talk:Ron Stallworth

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Please comment on Talk:History of the Communist Party of China

The feedback request service is asking for participation in this request for comment on Talk:History of the Communist Party of China. Legobot (talk) 04:24, 20 October 2018 (UTC)

Please comment on Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Formula One

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Please comment on Talk:Leo Tolstoy

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Please comment on Talk:Louis Farrakhan

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Please comment on Talk:David M. Cote

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NPR Newsletter No.14 21 October 2018

Chart of the New Pages Patrol backlog for the past 6 months.

Hello L3X1, thank you for your work reviewing New Pages!

Backlog

As of 21 October 2018, there are 3650 unreviewed articles and the backlog now stretches back 51 days.

Community Wishlist Proposal

• There is currently an ongoing discussion regarding the drafting of a Community Wishlist Proposal for the purpose of requesting bug fixes and missing/useful features to be added to the New Page Feed and Curation Toolbar.
• Please join the conversation as we only have until 29 October to draft this proposal!

Project updates

• ORES predictions are now built-in to the feed. These automatically predict the class of an article as well as whether it may be spam, vandalism, or an attack page, and can be filtered by these criteria now allowing reviewers to better target articles that they prefer to review.
• There are now tools being tested to automatically detect copyright violations in the feed. This detector may not be accurate all the time, though, so it shouldn't be relied on 100% and will only start working on new revisions to pages, not older pages in the backlog.

New scripts

• User:Enterprisey/cv-revdel.js^(info) — A new script created for quickly placing {{copyvio-revdel}} on a page.

Go here to remove your name if you wish to opt-out of future mailings. — Insertcleverphrasehere ^{(or here)} 20:49, 21 October 2018 (UTC)

Administrators' newsletter – December 2018

News and updates for administrators from the past month (November 2018).

Administrator changes

Al Ameer son • Randykitty • Spartaz

Boson • Daniel J. Leivick • Efe • Esanchez7587 • Fred Bauder • Garzo • Martijn Hoekstra • Orangemike

Interface administrator changes

Deryck Chan

Guideline and policy news

• Following a request for comment, the Mediation Committee is now closed and will no longer be accepting case requests.
• A request for comment is in progress to determine whether members of the Bot Approvals Group should satisfy activity requirements in order to remain in that role.
• A request for comment is in progress regarding whether to change the administrator inactivity policy, such that administrators "who have made no logged administrative actions for at least 12 months may be desysopped". Currently, the policy states that administrators "who have made neither edits nor administrative actions for at least 12 months may be desysopped".
• A proposal has been made to temporarily restrict editing of the Main Page to interface administrators in order to mitigate the impact of compromised accounts.

Technical news

• Administrators and bureaucrats can no longer unblock themselves unless they placed the block initially. This change has been implemented globally. See also this ongoing village pump discussion (permalink).
• To complement the aforementioned change, blocked administrators will soon have the ability to block the administrator that placed their block to mitigate the possibility of a compromised administrator account blocking all other active administrators.
• Since deployment of Partial blocks on Test Wikipedia, several bugs were identified. Most of them are now fixed. Administrators are encouraged to test the new deployment and report new bugs on Phabricator or leave feedback on the Project's talk page. You can request administrator access on the Test Wiki here.

Arbitration

• Voting in the 2018 Arbitration Committee Elections is open to eligible editors until Monday 23:59, 3 December 2018. Please review the candidates and, if you wish to do so, submit your choices on the voting page.

Miscellaneous

• In late November, an attacker compromised multiple accounts, including at least four administrator accounts, and used them to vandalize Wikipedia. If you have ever used your current password on any other website, you should change it immediately. Sharing the same password across multiple websites makes your account vulnerable, especially if your password was used on a website that suffered a data breach. As these incidents have shown, these concerns are not pure fantasies.
• Wikipedia policy requires administrators to have strong passwords. To further reinforce security, administrators should also consider enabling two-factor authentication. A committed identity can be used to verify that you are the true account owner in the event that your account is compromised and/or you are unable to log in.

Obituaries

• Shock Brigade Harvester Boris (Raymond Arritt) passed away on 14 November 2018. Boris joined Wikipedia as Raymond arritt on 8 May 2006 and was an administrator from 30 July 2007 to 2 June 2008.

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Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 03:36, 3 December 2018 (UTC)

I’ll miss your advice, Boris. ^Thanks, L3X1 ◊distænt write◊ 04:38, 3 December 2018 (UTC)

NPR Newsletter No.16 15 December 2018

Hello L3X1,

Reviewer of the Year

This year's award for the Reviewer of the Year goes to Onel5969. Around on Wikipedia since 2011, their staggering number of 26,554 reviews over the past twelve months makes them, together with an additional total of 275,285 edits, one of Wikipedia's most prolific users.

Thanks are also extended for their work to JTtheOG (15,059 reviews), Boleyn (12,760 reviews), Cwmhiraeth (9,001 reviews), Semmendinger (8,440 reviews), PRehse (8,092 reviews), Arthistorian1977 (5,306 reviews), Abishe (4,153 reviews), Barkeep49 (4,016 reviews), and Elmidae (3,615 reviews).
Cwmhiraeth, Semmendinger, Barkeep49, and Elmidae have been New Page Reviewers for less than a year — Barkeep49 for only seven months, while Boleyn, with an edit count of 250,000 since she joined Wikipedia in 2008, has been a bastion of New Page Patrol for many years.

See also the list of top 100 reviewers.

Less good news, and an appeal for some help

The backlog is now approaching 5,000, and still rising. There are around 640 holders of the NPR flag, most of whom appear to be inactive. The 10% of the reviewers who do 90% of the work could do with some support especially as some of them are now taking a well deserved break.

Really good news - NPR wins the Community Wishlist Survey 2019

At #1 position, the Community Wishlist poll closed on 3 December with a resounding success for NPP, reminding the WMF and the volunteer communities just how critical NPP is to maintaining a clean encyclopedia and the need for improved tools to do it. A big 'thank you' to everyone who supported the NPP proposals. See the results.

Training video

Due to a number of changes having been made to the feed since this three-minute video was created, we have been asked by the WMF for feedback on the video with a view to getting it brought up to date to reflect the new features of the system. Please leave your comments here, particularly mentioning how helpful you find it for new reviewers.

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If you wish to opt-out of future mailings, go here.

MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 21:14, 14 December 2018 (UTC)

About Portal:Cars which you have marked for manual maintenance

Hello,

I have noticed that you marked the portal Cars for manual maintenance in June 2018, but this notice has not been updated in 6 months. This notice needs to be kept up to date to reflect the current status of the portal in December 2018. You can:

1. Update the date to December 2018 if you have and are continuing to maintain the portal.
2. Remove yourself as a manual maintainer, which will allow for automatic maintenance.

If you don't respond by updating the date in the notice in 2 weeks, then your name will be removed from the notice and the portal marked for automatic maintenance.

Thanks for your dedication to Portal:Cars. If you have questions about this message please {{ping}} me about it. Thanks and happy editing, Dreamy Jazz 🎷 ^{talk to me | my contributions} 23:55, 13 December 2018 (UTC)

Dreamy Jazz Thanks for message! Unfortunately I cannot remember how (nor seem to find) to update the date to 2018. Could you please tell me how to do this? ^Thanks, L3X1 ◊distænt write◊ 00:25, 15 December 2018 (UTC)

L3X1 Hello. If you edit the page using source editor, at the top of the edit box the template {{Portal maintenance status}} should be present. One of the parameters in this template should be the |date= parameter. This currently says "June 2018", but needs to be changed to say "December 2018". Thanks for your continued efforts from me and all the WikiProject Dreamy Jazz 🎷 ^{talk to me | my contributions} 12:21, 15 December 2018 (UTC)

West

I hope you know I'm doing my best to salvage the arrest story. It's just not going so well. EEng 22:17, 19 December 2018 (UTC)

Thank you so much for working on this, I've never had this much trouble trying to find sources (mostly because what I do IRL has plenty of fresh sources). I was checking on Franklin Pierce's arrest story, and for something so interesting it is proving difficult to get information on that, too. ^Thanks, L3X1 ◊distænt write◊ 14:35, 20 December 2018 (UTC)

January 2019 at Women in Red

January 2019, Volume 5, Issue 1, Numbers 104-108 Happy New Year from Women in Red! Please join us for these virtual editathons. January events: Women of War and Peace Play! January geofocus: Caucasus New, year-long initiative: Suffrage Continuing global initiative: #1day1woman2019 Help us plan our future events: Ideas Cafe To subscribe: Women in Red/English language mailing list and Women in Red/international list Unsubscribe: Women in Red/Opt-out list Image attribution: Nevit Dilmen (CC BY-SA 3.0) --Rosiestep (talk) 17:40, 21 December 2018 (UTC) via MassMessaging

Happy Holidays

Best wishes for this holiday season! Thank you for your Wiki contributions in 2018. May 2019 be prosperous and joyful. --K.e.coffman (talk) 23:37, 21 December 2018 (UTC) Noël ~ καλά Χριστούγεννα ~ З Калядамі ~ חנוכה שמח ~ Gott nytt år!

Thank you, K.e.coffman, and the same to you and yours! :) ^Thanks, L3X1 ◊distænt write◊ 23:46, 21 December 2018 (UTC)

Happy holidays!

Merry Christmas and a Prosperous 2019!

Hello L3X1, may you be surrounded by peace, success and happiness on this seasonal occasion. Spread the WikiLove by wishing another user a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year, whether it be someone you have had disagreements with in the past, a good friend, or just some random person. Sending you a heartfelt and warm greetings for Christmas and New Year 2019. Happy editing, Dreamy Jazz 🎷 talk to me | my contributions 21:30, 23 December 2018 (UTC) Spread the love by adding {{subst:Seasonal Greetings}} to other user talk pages.

Still on the trail

I've done an extensive review of book sources (about 70, no kidding) with no luck. However, I'm making some private inquiries which might turn something up even now, but I can't know how long before I'll get an answer. In the meantime I've created Template:Did_you_know_nominations/William_H._West_(policeman) to get in under the 7-day deadline, but I hope you understand that if we don't find something establishing this as more than a fun legend it won't make a good DYK and we should withdraw it. EEng 22:38, 23 December 2018 (UTC)

70 in one week, wow! I understand if we don't get a good source the DYK will fall through, but thanks again for your time, EEng. ^Thanks, L3X1 ◊distænt write◊ 23:34, 23 December 2018 (UTC)

Well, I didn't read them cover to cover. For the record, I checked about two dozen hagiographies of Grant, dating 1870 to 1900, giving plenty of uplifting examples of the man's humility and honesty and so on, but nothing along the lines of this story, and this suggest strongly that this was not a story known at the time. Also negative were checks of the index (searching arrest, carriage, horse, riding, police, and West), and skims of the chapters on Grant's time in the White House, in about fifty other works including a dozen modern biographies. Like I said, I've made some inquiries but I'm not hopeful. I'll let you know. EEng 00:02, 24 December 2018 (UTC)

Wikipedia:WikiProject Portals update #024, 26 Dec 2018

Last issue, I mentioned there would be a flood, and so, here it is...

Portals status

We now have 4,620 portals.

And the race to pass 5,000 by year's end is on...

Can we make it?

The New Year, and the 5,001st portal, await.

( New portals are created with {{subst:Basic portal start page}} or {{subst:bpsp}} )

Evad is back!

After disappearing in mid-thread, Evad37 has returned from a longer than expected wikibreak.

Be sure to welcome him back.

Improved cropping is coming to Portal image banner

User:FR30799386 is working on making {{Portal image banner}} even better by enabling it to chop the top off an image as well as the bottom.

Many pictures aren't suitable for banners because they are too tall. Therefor, User:FR30799386 added cropping to this template, so that an editor could specify part of a picture to be used rather than the whole thing.

Upgrade of flagship portals is underway

Work has begun on upgrading Wikipedia's flagship portals (those listed at the top of the Main page).

So far, Portal:Geography, Portal:History, and Portal:Technology have been revamped. Of course, you are welcome to improve them further.

Work continues on the other five. Feel free to join in on the fun.

Spotting missing portals that are redirects

In place of many missing portals, there is a redirect that leads to "the next best topic", such as a parent topic.

Most of these were created before we had the tools to easily create portals (they used to take 6 hours or more to create, because it was all done manually). Rather than leave a portal link red, some editors thought it was best that those titles led somewhere.

The subjects that have sufficient coverage should have their own portals rather than a redirect to some other subject.

Unfortunately, being blue like all other live links, redirects are harder to spot than redlinks.

To spot redirects easily, you can make them all appear green.

Keep 'em coming!

And I'll see you next issue.

Sincerely,    — The Transhumanist   08:09, 26 December 2018 (UTC)