Administrators' newsletter – July 2018

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

 

  Administrator changes

  PbsouthwoodTheSandDoctor
  Gogo Dodo
  AndrevanDougEVulaKaisaLTony FoxWilyD

  Bureaucrat changes

  AndrevanEVula

  Guideline and policy news

  • An RfC about the deletion of drafts closed with a consensus to change the wording of WP:NMFD. Specifically, a draft that has been repeatedly resubmitted and declined at AfC without any substantial improvement may be deleted at MfD if consensus determines that it is unlikely to ever meet the requirements for mainspace and it otherwise meets one of the reasons for deletion outlined in the deletion policy.
  • A request for comment closed with a consensus that the {{promising draft}} template cannot be used to indefinitely prevent a WP:G13 speedy deletion nomination.

  Technical news

  • Starting on July 9, the WMF Security team, Trust & Safety, and the broader technical community will be seeking input on an upcoming change that will restrict editing of site-wide JavaScript and CSS to a new technical administrators user group. Bureaucrats and stewards will be able to grant this right per a community-defined process. The intention is to reduce the number of accounts who can edit frontend code to those who actually need to, which in turn lessens the risk of malicious code being added that compromises the security and privacy of everyone who accesses Wikipedia. For more information, please review the FAQ.
  • Syntax highlighting has been graduated from a Beta feature on the English Wikipedia. To enable this feature, click the highlighter icon ( ) in your editing toolbar (or under the hamburger menu in the 2017 wikitext editor). This feature can help prevent you from making mistakes when editing complex templates.
  • IP-based cookie blocks should be deployed to English Wikipedia in July (previously scheduled for June). This will cause the block of a logged-out user to be reloaded if they change IPs. This means in most cases, you may no longer need to do /64 range blocks on residential IPv6 addresses in order to effectively block the end user. It will also help combat abuse from IP hoppers in general. For the time being, it only affects users of the desktop interface.

  Miscellaneous

  • Currently around 20% of admins have enabled two-factor authentication, up from 17% a year ago. If you haven't already enabled it, please consider doing so. Regardless if you use 2FA, please practice appropriate account security by ensuring your password is secure and unique to Wikimedia.

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 19:22, 3 July 2018 (UTC)

23:09, 9 July 2018 (UTC)

16:00, 16 July 2018 (UTC)

09:44, 24 July 2018 (UTC)

14:05, 30 July 2018 (UTC)

The Signpost: 31 July 2018

Administrators' newsletter – August 2018

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

 

  Administrator changes

  Sro23
  KaisaLYmblanter

  Guideline and policy news

  • After a discussion at Meta, a new user group called "interface administrators" (formerly "technical administrator") has been created. Come the end of August, interface admins will be the only users able to edit site-wide JavaScript and CSS pages like MediaWiki:Common.js and MediaWiki:Common.css, or edit other user's personal JavaScript and CSS. The intention is to improve security and privacy by reducing the number of accounts which could be used to compromise the site or another user's account through malicious code. The new user group can be assigned and revoked by bureaucrats. Discussion is ongoing to establish details for implementing the group on the English Wikipedia.
  • Following a request for comment, the WP:SISTER style guideline now states that in the mainspace, interwiki links to Wikinews should only be made as per the external links guideline. This generally means that within the body of an article, you should not link to Wikinews about a particular event that is only a part of the larger topic. Wikinews links in "external links" sections can be used where helpful, but not automatically if an equivalent article from a reliable news outlet could be linked in the same manner.

  Technical news


Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 01:31, 5 August 2018 (UTC)

19:39, 6 August 2018 (UTC)

cleanup

Hi, I want to clean up Paddy Steinfort's page to remove the UPE template. How can I do that? Thank you Bradgd (talk) 22:07, 8 August 2018 (UTC)

17:53, 13 August 2018 (UTC)

Addition to rater tool's Wikiproject list

Hi Meno25, I was wondering if you'd be so kind as to add "WikiProject Peer review" (with synonym "Peer review") to the list of Wikiprojects on Kephir's exceedingly useful rater tools js page here [31]? Many thanks, --Tom (LT) (talk) 09:45, 13 August 2018 (UTC)

@Tom (LT): Hi and thank you for your message. I added {{WikiProject Peer review}} to rater but I didn't add {{Peer review}} because it is actually a different template (not a redirect to {{WikiProject Peer review}}). --Meno25 (talk) 15:59, 13 August 2018 (UTC)
Thanks, much appreciated :). --Tom (LT) (talk) 20:34, 13 August 2018 (UTC)