User talk:Snow Rise/Archive 15

Please comment on Talk:Recusancy

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Administrators' newsletter – July 2019

News and updates for administrators from the past month (June 2019).

Administrator changes

28bytes • Ad Orientem • Ansh666 • Beeblebrox • Boing! said Zebedee • BU Rob13 • Dennis Brown • Deor • DoRD • Floquenbeam¹ • Flyguy649 • Fram² • Gadfium • GB fan • Jonathunder • Kusma • Lectonar • Moink • MSGJ • Nick • Od Mishehu • Rama • Spartaz • Syrthiss • TheDJ • WJBscribe

¹Floquenbeam's access was removed, then restored, then removed again.

²Fram's access was removed, then restored, then removed again.

Bureaucrat changes

28bytes • WJBscribe • Wizardman

Interface administrator changes

MSGJ • TheDJ

CheckUser changes

Beeblebrox • BU Rob13 • DoRD

Oversight changes

Beeblebrox • BU Rob13 • DoRD • GB fan

Guideline and policy news

• A request for comment seeking to alleviate pressures on the request an account (ACC) process proposes either raising the account creation limit for extended confirmed editors or granting the account creator permission on request to new ACC tool users.

• In a related matter, the account throttle has been restored to six creations per day as the mitigation activity completed.

• The scope of CSD criterion G8 has been tightened such that the only redirects that it now applies to are those which target non-existent pages.
• The scope of CSD criterion G14 has been expanded slightly to include orphan "Foo (disambiguation)" redirects that target pages that are not disambiguation pages or pages that perform a disambiguation-like function (such as set index articles or lists).
• A request for comment seeks to determine whether Wikipedia:Office actions should be a policy page or an information page.

Technical news

• The Wikimedia Foundation's Community health initiative plans to design and build a new user reporting system to make it easier for people experiencing harassment and other forms of abuse to provide accurate information to the appropriate channel for action to be taken. Community feedback is invited.

Miscellaneous

• In February 2019, the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) changed its office actions policy to include temporary and project-specific bans. The WMF exercised this new ability for the first time on the English Wikipedia on 10 June 2019 to temporarily ban and desysop Fram. This action has resulted in significant community discussion, a request for arbitration (permalink), and, either directly or indirectly, the resignations of numerous administrators and functionaries. The WMF Board of Trustees is aware of the situation, and discussions continue on a statement and a way forward. The Arbitration Committee has sent an open letter to the WMF Board.

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Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 21:20, 1 July 2019 (UTC)

Please comment on Talk:Electric smoking system

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Please comment on Talk:Rheumatoid arthritis

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Please comment on Talk:Presidency of Donald Trump

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Please comment on Talk:Post-classical history

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Please comment on Talk:Electric smoking system

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Please comment on Talk:Infobox

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field

Regarding this RfC, I am not sure what the phrase "have gone meta" means. Somewhat related (perhaps?): battlefield mentality. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 10:39, 9 July 2019 (UTC)

No, while it is certainly true that there has been a fair amount of battlefield mentality in the roving battle of wills over infoboxes, with the two sides endlessly circling eachother and landing en masse to duke it out over countless articles, even following ArbCom's intercession on the matter, that was not what I was referring to via that phrase. See meta-discussion for the closest article topic we have on my idiomatic usage there: typically the unending infobox duels have played out as differences of opinion over practical discussions trying to resolve whether to utilize a box and, if so, how many of its parameters to use. This time it's actually a battle over the tone of the Infobox article itself (but still as a proxy for the two sides' strong feelings on whether they are appropriate for articles in general, as is clear from the comments there. That's what I meant by "meta". Though utterly unsurprisingly, I'm already seeing the involvement of the exact same faces I see literally anytime I get bot summoned to a dispute that turns out to involve infoboxes, no matter the subject matter of the article itself or where the discussion originates on the project. Snow ^{let's rap} 13:22, 9 July 2019 (UTC)

Sorry, I guess I wasn't clear: being German, I simply don't know the phrase, can you say "have gone meta" in simple English, please? - You won't see my face in that discussion (waste of time, I'm busy with the Vespers) ;) - Just wondering: which recent infobox discussions do you remember? Fear not, I won't go there; please just support - or not - my impression that there are not many. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 13:32, 9 July 2019 (UTC)

The usage is somewhat idiomatic, so the closest I can give for definition is Meta or the afore-mentioned meta-discussion. Basically "meta" means self-referential, at least in this context. What I was saying is that anyone who answers enough RfCs will see a certain number of Infobox discussions, but this is the first one I've seen wherein the subject was infoboxes were an encyclopedic subject in and of themselves. Does that explanation help to clarify? Snow ^{let's rap} 05:19, 12 July 2019 (UTC)

On a 10 July, the Witch of Pungo was pardoned, 300 years after her trial. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 07:02, 10 July 2019 (UTC)

10 July 2019 this. I reviewed the article for DYK, no infobox, that was my involvement. Who do you think are the "We" who have decided? --Gerda Arendt (talk) 15:16, 10 July 2019 (UTC)

11 July this. I added an infobox, it was reverted, I discussed it, and left. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 23:12, 11 July 2019 (UTC)

WP:WPX

I only just noticed your comment in Wikipedia:WikiProject_X/Pilots back in 2015! You were a bit ahead of the curve on that - WP:WikiProject Biology will probably have the WP:X formatting implemented as part of some of the users there trying to jumpstart its usefulness again (discussion). The consolidated WP:MolBio has just had WP:X implemented so is a useful test case for it. T.Shafee(Evo&Evo)^talk 06:23, 10 July 2019 (UTC)

Please comment on Talk:Ben Shapiro

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Please comment on Talk:Neolithic Subpluvial

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Please comment on Talk:Beitar Illit

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Feedback re: new image in the RA entry

I have proposed a new image to use for the RA article that is consistent with lead images used for other diseases. I would like your feedback as I am hoping to resolve this dispute in a timely fashion. It has now been over a month that this dispute has been going on with no end in sight because no one is commenting or voting. Thank you. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Rheumatoid_arthritis Thisnotnpov (talk) 23:51, 17 July 2019 (UTC)

Please comment on Talk:Supernova

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Absolutely not?

This is news to me. Is there a guideline to that effect?

It's accepted practice to move extended comments from Survey to Discussion, and collapsing them instead has multiple advantages over that, including preserving context. It doesn't constitute a statement that the discussion was inappropriate, it doesn't stop discussion within the collapse, and it doesn't discourage interested editors from reading the collapsed comments if the "subject line" is written appropriately. ―Mandruss ☎ 03:29, 19 July 2019 (UTC)

Yes, the relevant policy language is at WP:TPO. The basic rule is that you never edit, move, or hide/hat another editors comments, except in the case of a handful exceptions, which are discussed in that subsection--or with their permission, of course. Further, there have been various community discussions that have made express that the hatting template in particular should not be used unless there is a violation of WP:FOC or in the case of clear disruption. One can always ask another user to hat a longer than usual response, but an editor should not go around hatting in such circumstances under their own impetus--and FYI, I'm not sure where you've seen people moving responses to the survey section, but TPO is clear that this is not permitted either, absent agreement by the editor who added the comments; it is perfectly permissible to respond to !votes within the section they are made, even though some editors believe that the discussions look cleaner/are more organized if this is avoided.

I'm sometimes in the habit (as are many veteran editors) of self-hatting extended discussions of collateral issues to the main topic of the discussion, but in the present case, the comments I left were directly on point to the discussion at hand, and they weren't even all that long, given the number of policies the invoked by comment responded to. As such, in this case I am going to decline to accede to Awilley's impression on the matter, though I am sure the action was intended in good faith. In this case, I think it's very important to note that the policies cited do not in fact prohibit the content being considered, and I don't think hatting that discussion is appropriate (or in this case, that it makes the discussion less cluttered or easier to follow, for that matter). Snow ^{let's rap} 03:52, 19 July 2019 (UTC)

The language at TPO is "not edit or delete others' posts without their permission." To collapse is not to edit or delete. I grant that Awilley might have used {{cot}} instead of {{hat}}, as they have different interpretations and applications. ―Mandruss ☎ 05:00, 19 July 2019 (UTC)

That is only a part of the language I was referring to: WP:TPO also contains the following: "If a discussion goes off-topic (per the above subsection § How to use article talk pages), editors may hide it using the templates {{Collapse top}} and {{Collapse bottom}} or similar templates—these templates should not be used by involved parties to end a discussion over the objections of other editors...." (emphasis added). And, as I said, this is a discussion that I have seen play out in community discussions before, and I have never seen the policy interpreted in any other way. If you want to establish a consensus otherwise (or just more clarity) you could always take the matter to WP:VPP or WT:TPG, but I have a hard time seeing the community validating a standard that would allow community members to collapse the comments and responses of other editors on talk pages whenever they decide (on their own idiosyncratic impressions) that the comment is too long or not important enough. In any event, until such time as the relevant policies do change, I intend to keep my posts uncollapsed except in that occasional case that I am convinced they they present WP:FOC issues, or the comment is just massively large (in which case I would self-hat it myself). I have on occasion accepted a hatting of a sub-discussion I was involved with, even if I wasn't consulted before hand, if I found the hatter's argument compelling, but in this case I do not: I feel the comments are on point and more than reasonable in size, considering the number of issues and policies that were raised in the comment I was responding to. Snow ^{let's rap} 07:44, 19 July 2019 (UTC)

As I said, the collapse needn't end the discussion, so your TPO quote does not apply. That is the essential point; the object is not to end the discussion but to isolate it. The factors entering into a decision to collapse in that situation are the same as those that govern the decision to move extended discussion from Survey to Discussion, and those "idiosyncratic impressions" are already endorsed by the community; it's always a judgment call like the judgment calls we face every day, and that's ok. It's a useful organizational tool, nothing more dramatic than that, and I haven't suggested it should be used in other situations. ―Mandruss ☎ 10:31, 19 July 2019 (UTC)

At the end of the day, WP:TPG paints in broad brushstrokes that one should not be altering the comments of others, including formatting, placement and other details which change it's profile on the talk page, and every expression of community consensus I have ever seen play out in any talk page or community forum has been consistent with that principle: the occasions when one is permitted to hat discussions are well established/enumerated in policies and in the guidance for the templates themselves. Also, your argument that the wording from TPO doesn't apply to any template used where the discussion can technical continue doesn't hold water, because the template that is expressly mentioned as an exemplar is {{Collapse}}. Also, the template Awilley used is one for formally closing discussion; it even has language prohibiting further discussion built into the template header, so I don't see where your "it doesn't end discussion" argument has legs.

Look, we can debate this until the cows come home, if you like, but ultimately I'm confident that whatever major community forum the issue might be raised in, it would reject the suggestion that TPG's broad mandate to respect another editor's right to present their argument (so long as it's on point to the content issues being discussed) doesn't apply to hatting. And at the end of the day, as TPG makes clear, it's all about objection: as I said before, I am sure Awilley acted in good faith here, and I can appreciate how people working regularly on that page might become accustomed to using the template a little more liberally than usual, because the discussion so often runs off into WP:OR or personal disputes that have little to no bearing on the content issue being contemplated. But this content was WP:FOC and directly relevant to the discussion of the issues being contemplated in the thread, not some tangential side discussion between myself and the editor I was responding to. It was therefor not an appropriate comment to hat--and such a change should clearly be dropped if the editor whose comments were collapsed objects. And as far as I can tell, Awilley seems to have no issue leaving the matter at that. That should be the end of it.

Anyway, if none of that convinces you, I don't think we can look forward to agreeing on this any time soon, and I don't get the feeling you are looking to put the issue to a community so much as discuss the matter informally with me here. Which has been fine, but if we keep at it, I'm guessing we're just going to end up more polarized over it. I do appreciate you coming here to discuss the matter in a polite manner, though. Snow ^{let's rap} 11:55, 19 July 2019 (UTC)

Re: "If a discussion goes off-topic (per the above subsection § How to use article talk pages), editors may hide it using the templates {{Collapse top}} and {{Collapse bottom}} or similar templates—these templates should not be used by involved parties to end a discussion over the objections of other editors...." I am not an "involved party" I am an uninvolved admin trying to restore a bit of order to a survey section. For the other part of your objection, I'm happy to use the COT template instead of the HAT template. ~Awilley (talk) 13:08, 19 July 2019 (UTC)

Awilley, my mistake: I did not note that you were not involved in that particular discussion, or that you might be acting in an administrative capacity. Nevertheless, I believe such action is outside of community consensus as to the appropriate degree of suppression that an editor can use in removing the WP:FOC comments of another editor from easy viewing by participants in an ongoing discussion. Those templates, by clear indication in multiple policies (and documentation pages), are meant for only a handful of situations. Aside from the policies already referenced above, there is additionally this from WP:REFACTOR: "If another editor objects to refactoring then the changes should be reverted." I feel that's fairly simple and direct language regarding the matter at hand, and the guideline makes it clear that collapsing text templates are among the situations included in the definition of refactoring.

So again, I ask that you please respect my objection here and remove that template. I'm not exactly keen to take this matter to a community space (I'm not really flush for time at the moment and what little I can spare for the project is earmarked for other tasks), but I'm afraid I would have no other choice but to do so if you feel that this additional policy language does not clarify the matter. I believe it would be a dangerous precedent to attempt to shift the historical community approach on such things to allow editors to collapse the WP:FOC comments of other editors for simple streamlining of the thread--whether the party hatting is an admin or not, and regardless of whether they are approaching the matter uninvolved and in good faith. You can point to the fact that "technically" COT allows for discussion to continue, but the fact of the matter is, any degree of hatting substantially decreases the likelihood that comments will be seen an engaged with by others--which is why this is not allowed except for comments that have been judged WP:disruptive or, at a minimum, completely off-topic, and any other usage requires the consent of the authoring editor, none of which are the case here. WP:REFACTOR makes this explicit, and WP:TPG and the documentation for all relevant templates (COT included) have convergent language.

We don't really know eachother, so I'll just have to ask you to take it on faith when I say I'm not in the habit of making a fuss over minor formatting issues. But the potential for abuse if we erode the precautionary principle here (regarding acts that could suppress other editor's views) makes this matter not a trivial one. Therefor I believe accepting such curtailing of an editor's freedom to engage on a topic under our WP:CONSENSUS principles would be a disservice to the community and the project. Admin or not, good faith or not, I think you've got this one wrong and I ask you to reconsider to save us (and probably a huge number of other editors) the effort of litigating the matter in an administrative or policy space, when I'm pretty confident of the outcome under our policies as written and as typically interpreted by the community. I appreciate you too must do what you think is right, but I'd urge you to re-read the relevant sections of the policies we've been discussing one more time before deciding. Snow ^{let's rap} 19:16, 19 July 2019 (UTC)

I believe you, and appreciate the thoughtfulness of your response here. I get the concern, and we don't want people hatting comments willy nilly. However there are some situations where the community follows certain norms with which comments can go where, and how many threaded replies will be tolerated in certain locations. You see this all the time at WP:RfA for instance...we'll tolerate a certain number of brief replies, but when things get out of hand an admin or bureaucrat steps in and moves all the replies to the talk page. Big RfCs with separate sections for Survey and Discussion are another instance of this. Here's another extreme example. (Imagine what that page would look like if everybody started responding to each others' votes!) The Trump RfC was starting to get crazy, with multiple long threads sprouting up in the Survey sections, and people were abusing the normal leniency. If nobody had stepped in the threads would have multiplied, getting longer and more off-topic. It makes it difficult for later participants and for the closer(s). Furthermore it's unfair to allow just a few editors to dominate the Survey section like that, responding to every point while repeating their own arguments. What makes their input more valuable than anyone else's? At some point a line needed to be drawn, and I drew it at 4 or more threaded replies, and I think I've been consistent and fair in that, hatting 5 threads that went over the limit with neutral summaries of their contents. Is there something uniquely valuable in your reply and the replies to your reply that I should make an exception for them?

Look, there was nothing wrong with your comment other than it being a really long comment in a Survey section instead of a Discussion section. And And there's no curtailing anybody's freedom to engage in threaded discussion. Everyone is free to discuss to your hearts content...in the Discussion section. Does that somewhat answer your concern? ~Awilley (talk) 21:30, 19 July 2019 (UTC)

Hey, I get what a challenge it must be trying to keep Talk:Donald Trump in order, I really do. I get bot summoned there four or five times a year now, and it's more often than not a frickin' gnarled mess of off-topic OR, SYNTH, or just random speculation on completely collateral issues/general ranting about whoever the flavour-of-the-month boogeyman is the "libs"/"cons", all tinged with WP:BATTLEGROUND up to and including PAs. You know, before 2016, I had responded to the better part of a thousand RfCs in my time here, but never had I once been bot summoned to the same article twice--not once. Simpler times... Anyway, although I've seen a general trend towards more organization, civility, and adherence to TPG and WP:CONSENSUS standards when I have been summoned there of late, I get the need for some enforced organization, and I begin to see that in the consistent manner you are applying your approach, you are trying create an understanding among the editors that they can continue discussion within the templates and that they are simply a new approach to thread collapsing.

But I have a large number of misgivings: For one, this is extremely atypical and I'm not sure the average editor, used to HATs being used to close down disruption, will automatically parse your intention here, seeing as we don't have templates that we could use that expressly invite continued discussion--and by conventional practice, we do not use existing templates to encapsulate content except where it signifies disruption or discussion having come to an end. Even if we could normalize it so that everyone understood the meaning, it would still have significant consequences, owing to human psychology and UI factors. Skimming would be come more tedious, people would tire of opening the boxes, and using cntrl-F to navigate the article outside the live editing UI (a vital function for veteran editors) would become unusable. I will take your word for it that this approach has been used at RfA of late: I haven't responded to one in months, best I can recall, but I would suggest that RfA is a fundamentally different context. It's about one of our meta processes as a community, whereas in this case we are talking about discussion of an important content issue and the project's single highest profile article--a lot rides on this particular content discussion (the question of whether Wikipedia will allow an article to discuss what reliable sources say about the mental health of the presently most powerful human being on the planet) and I'd argue that it may be a bad time to experiment with bringing this approach on to an article talk page, as we may not fully appreciate the effects it may have on the usual consensus project.

Now, you've inquired if I see anything exceptional in my arguments that justifies a divergence from the general approach you've developed here. But the thing about exceptionalism is that its far too subjective and prone to bias for me to be an objective judge of my own contributions in that respect. What I will say is that I don't think that's the right test under policy: the question ought to be whether my comments were WP:FOC--you even identify that as the threshold test yourself above. And I think by any reasonable assessment of that test, my comments were extremely on point to the questions raised. I've hatted a discussion or eight in my time--one on that very same talk page actually, if memory serves, but that's the standard I always use: only consider the hatting when discussion has gone off topic, not before.

I'll be honest: I'm torn. Now that other sub-discussions have grown and been hatted in a similar fashion, I better understand how you are applying this system and wonder if maybe I should question myself as to whether I am being needlessly inflexible about experimenting with a new discussion formatting tool. On the other hand, I think our traditional WP:FOC test is what people expect and what is validated by community consensus, and I feel it generally works pretty well for the project. And again, the thread in question represents a particularly sticky instance to be mixing things up. And I also worry about not having a standard where the mere objection of the other editor cannot be the basis for reverting the refactoring by default; I think that's an important principle that saves us a lot of edit warring and forestalls a lot of collateral arguments in itself. I'll need to give this some more thought when I am better rested before determining how I feel about this approach to talk page management in general, and this instance in particular. But for moment I'll just say that I appreciate your transparency and willingness to engage on the topic. Snow ^{let's rap} 22:49, 19 July 2019 (UTC)

Just two small points of clarification: 1. The intent was not to put a stop to the side discussions, nor to encourage people to continue the discussions inside the collapse templates. It's more a preventative measure to deter future side discussions from occurring in the survey section. Kind of a "Hey folks, please keep future threaded discussion in the Discussion section" but without saying it outright. 2. Before collapsing a discussion I usually also try to wait until it wanders off-topic, gets messy, has unhelpful personal comments, or has people just repeating their points again and again. I think I had a little lower threshold yesterday because there was so much of it.

I'm probably going to back off on future collapsing for this RfC...a part of the rationale is to save time for readers and closers, and if the collapsing is getting more than the normal pushback and wasting time in other ways then it's probably not worth it.

Re: "frickin' gnarled mess of off-topic OR, SYNTH, or just random speculation on completely collateral issues/general ranting about whoever the flavour-of-the-month boogeyman is the "libs"/"cons", all tinged with WP:BATTLEGROUND" preach ~Awilley (talk) 01:56, 20 July 2019 (UTC)

Awilley and I are on different pages here. His intent was "any continuation should be in the Discussion section" and mine is "any continuation should be within this collapse". The latter was done once recently on that page, with clear explanations in the "subject lines", and it was accepted by the group without objection.

I thought something very useful had been invented organically. No longer would editors face the choice of (1) allowing Survey section subthreads to grow without limit, or (2) the quite difficult task of moving large chunks of discussion from one section to another, thereby yanking them out of context and dumping them all together in one enormous hard-to-edit subsection. I had toyed with several solutions, none of them much better, including a separate subsection for each discussion. I thought I had finally stumbled on an acceptable solution, with the sole downside (all solutions have downsides) that editors would be required to click "[show]" and some Ctrl+F searches would become impossible. Apparently I was wrong, and I won't try it again. ―Mandruss ☎ 02:19, 20 July 2019 (UTC)

Please comment on Talk:NYC Pride March

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The Signpost: 31 July 2019

• News and notes: Wikimedia grants less accessible for travel, equipment, meetups, and India

• In the media: Politics starts getting rough

• Discussion report: New proposals in aftermath of Fram ban

• Arbitration report: A month of reintegration

• Gallery: Classic panoramas from Heinrich Berann

• On the bright side: What's making you happy this month?

• Community view: Video based summaries of Wikipedia articles. How and why?

• News from the WMF: Designing ethically with AI: How Wikimedia can harness machine learning in a responsible and human-centered way

• Recent research: Most influential medical journals; detecting pages to protect

• Special report: Administrator cadre continues to contract

• Traffic report: World cups, presidential candidates, and stranger things

• In focus: The French Wikipedia is overtaking the German

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 16:18, 31 July 2019 (UTC)

Please comment on Talk:People's Mujahedin of Iran

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Please comment on Talk:Satoshi Nakamoto

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Administrators' newsletter – August 2019

News and updates for administrators from the past month (July 2019).

Administrator changes

Johnuniq • Kosack • Valereee

Ad Orientem • Ched • Gadfium • Jonathunder • Nick • Yelyos

Bald Zebra • Beetstra • Doug Bell • Journalist • Ruud Koot • Splash • Voice of Clam

Interface administrator changes

Dinoguy1000

CheckUser changes

RickinBaltimore

Oversight changes

Beeblebrox

RickinBaltimore

Guideline and policy news

• Following a request for comment, the page Wikipedia:Office actions has been changed from a policy page to an information page.
• A request for comment (permalink) is in progress regarding the administrator inactivity policy.

Arbitration

• Editors may now use the template {{Ds/aware}} to indicate that they are aware that discretionary sanctions are in force for a topic area, so it is unnecessary to alert them.

Miscellaneous

• Following a research project on masking IP addresses, the Foundation is starting a new project to improve the privacy of IP editors. The result of this project may significantly change administrative and counter-vandalism workflows. The project is in the very early stages of discussions and there is no concrete plan yet. Admins and the broader community are encouraged to leave feedback on the talk page.
• The new page reviewer right is bundled with the admin tool set. Many admins regularly help out at Special:NewPagesFeed, but they may not be aware of improvements, changes, and new tools for the Curation system. Stay up to date by subscribing here to the NPP newsletter that appears every two months, and/or putting the reviewers' talk page on your watchlist.

  Since the introduction of temporary user rights, it is becoming more usual to accord the New Page Reviewer right on a probationary period of 3 to 6 months in the first instance. This avoids rights removal for inactivity at a later stage and enables a review of their work before according the right on a permanent basis.

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Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 19:24, 3 August 2019 (UTC)

Please comment on Wikipedia:Village pump (miscellaneous)

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The Signpost: 30 August 2019

• News and notes: Documenting Wikimania and our beginnings

• In focus: Ryan Merkley joins WMF as Chief of Staff

• In the media: Many layers of fake news: Fake fiction and fake news vandalism

• Discussion report: Meta proposals on partial bans and IP users

• Traffic report: Once upon a time in Greenland with Boris and cornflakes

• Op-Ed: We couldn't have told you this, but Wikipedia was censored

• Opinion: The Curious Case of Croatian Wikipedia

• Community view: Chinese Wikipedia and the battle against extradition from Hong Kong

• News from the WMF: Meet Emna Mizouni, the newly minted 2019 Wikimedian of the Year

• Recent research: Special issue on gender gap and gender bias research

• On the bright side: What's making you happy this month?

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Administrators' newsletter – September 2019

News and updates for administrators from the past month (August 2019).

Administrator changes

Bradv • Chetsford • Izno

Floquenbeam • Lectonar

DESiegel • Jake Wartenberg • Rjanag • Topbanana

CheckUser changes

Callanecc • LFaraone • There'sNoTime

Oversight changes

Callanecc • Fox • HJ Mitchell • LFaraone • There'sNoTime

Technical news

• Editors using the mobile website on Wikipedia can opt-in to new advanced features via your settings page. This will give access to more interface links, special pages, and tools.
• The advanced version of the edit review pages (recent changes, watchlist, and related changes) now includes two new filters. These filters are for "All contents" and "All discussions". They will filter the view to just those namespaces.

Arbitration

• A request for comment is open to provide an opportunity to amend the structure, rules, and procedures of the 2019 English Wikipedia Arbitration Committee election and to resolve any issues not covered by existing rules.

Miscellaneous

• A global request for comment is in progress regarding whether a user group should be created that could modify edit filters across all public Wikimedia wikis.

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New Page Review newsletter September-October 2019

Hello Snow Rise,

Backlog

Instead of reaching a magic 300 as it once did last year, the backlog approaching 6,000 is still far too high. An effort is also needed to ensure that older unsuitable older pages at the back of the queue do not get automatically indexed for Google.

Coordinator

A proposal is taking place here to confirm a nominated user as Coordinator of NPR.

This month's refresher course

Why I Hate Speedy Deleters, a 2008 essay by long since retired Ballonman, is still as valid today. Those of us who patrol large numbers of new pages can be forgiven for making the occasional mistake while others can learn from their 'beginner' errors. Worth reading.

Deletion tags

Do bear in mind that articles in the feed showing the trash can icon (you will need to have 'Nominated for deletion' enabled for this in your filters) may have been tagged by inexperienced or non NPR rights holders using Twinkle. They require your further verification.

Paid editing

Please be sure to look for the tell-tale signs of undisclosed paid editing. Contact the creator if appropriate, and submit the issue to WP:COIN if necessary. WMF policy requires paid editors to connect to their adverts.

Subject-specific notability guidelines' (SNG). Alternatives to deletion

• Reviewers are requested to familiarise themselves once more with notability guidelines for organisations and companies.
• Blank-and-Redirect is a solution anchored in policy. Please consider this alternative before PRODing or CSD. Note however, that users will often revert or usurp redirects to re-create deleted articles. Do regularly patrol the redirects in the feed.

Not English

• A common issue: Pages not in English or poor, unattributed machine translations should not reside in main space even if they are stubs. Please ensure you are familiar with WP:NPPNE. Check in Google for the language and content, and if they do have potential, tag as required, then move to draft. Modify the text of the template as appropriate before sending it.

Tools

Regular reviewers will appreciate the most recent enhancements to the New Pages Feed and features in the Curation tool, and there are still more to come. Due to the wealth of information now displayed by ORES, reviewers are strongly encouraged to use the system now rather than Twinkle; it will also correctly populate the logs.

Stub sorting, by SD0001: A new script is available for adding/removing stub tags. See User:SD0001/StubSorter.js, It features a simple HotCat-style dynamic search field. Many of the reviewers who are using it are finding it an improvement upon other available tools.

Assessment: The script at User:Evad37/rater makes the addition of Wikiproject templates extremely easy. New page creators rarely do this. Reviewers are not obliged to make these edits but they only take a few seconds. They can use the Curation message system to let the creator know what they have done.

DannyS712 bot III is now patrolling certain categories of uncontroversial redirects. Curious? Check out its patrol log.

Go here to remove your name if you wish to opt-out of future mailings.

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WikiProject X Newsletter • Issue 15

Newsletter • September 2019

A final update, for now:

The third grant-funded round of WikiProject X has been completed. Unfortunately, while this round has not resulted in a deployed product, I am not planning to resume working on the project for the foreseeable future. Please see the final report for more information.

Regards,

-— Isarra ༆ 19:24, 29 September 2019 (UTC)

The Signpost: 30 September 2019

• From the editors: Where do we go from here?

• Special report: Post-Framgate wrapup

• In the media: A net loss: Wikipedia attacked, closing off Russia? welcoming back Turkey?

• Traffic report: Varied and intriguing entries, less Luck, and some retreads

• News from the WMF: How the Wikimedia Foundation is making efforts to go green

• Recent research: Wikipedia's role in assessing credibility of news sources; using wikis against procrastination; OpenSym 2019 report

• Gallery: Finding freely licensed photo collections

• On the bright side: What's making you happy this month?

• In focus: Wikidata & Wikibase for national libraries: the inaugural meeting

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Administrators' newsletter – October 2019

News and updates for administrators from the past month (September 2019).

Administrator changes

Barkeep49

Beetstra • KillerChihuahua • Kusma

Arcadian • Extraordinary Machine • Xeno

JamesBWatson → JBW

Interface administrator changes

Evad37

CheckUser changes

Courcelles • SilkTork • Timotheus Canens

Oversight changes

Courcelles • SilkTork • Timotheus Canens

Guideline and policy news

• Following a discussion, a new criterion for speedy category renaming was added: C2F: One eponymous article, which applies if the category contains only an eponymous article or media file, provided that the category has not otherwise been emptied shortly before the nomination. The default outcome is an upmerge to the parent categories.

Technical news

• As previously noted, tighter password requirements for Administrators were put in place last year. Wikipedia should now alert you if your password is less than 10 characters long and thus too short.

Arbitration

• The 2019 CheckUser and Oversight appointment process has begun. The community consultation period will take place October 4th to 10th.
• The arbitration case regarding Fram was closed. While there will be a local RfC focus[ing] on how harassment and private complaints should be handled in the future, there is currently a global community consultation on partial and temporary office actions in response to the incident. It will be open until October 30th.

Miscellaneous

• The Community Tech team has been working on a system for temporarily watching pages, and welcomes feedback.

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The Signpost: 31 October 2019

• In the media: How to use or abuse Wikipedia for fun or profit

• Special report: “Catch and Kill” on Wikipedia: Paid editing and the suppression of material on alleged sexual abuse

• In focus: The BBC looks at Chinese government editing

• Interview: Carl Miller on Wikipedia Wars

• Community view: Observations from the mainland

• Arbitration report: October actions

• Traffic report: Wrestling with a couple of teenagers, a Nobelist, and a lot of jokers

• Gallery: Wiki Loves Broadcast

• Recent research: Research at Wikimania 2019: More communication doesn't make editors more productive; Tor users doing good work; harmful content rare on English Wikipedia

• Essay: Wikipedia is in the real world

• News from the WMF: Welcome to Wikipedia! Here's what we're doing to help you stick around

• On the bright side: What's making you happy this month?

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Re: D&D article space

It's certainly a daunting task, made worse by the fact that the project space (despite having a Wikiproject) has never been well organized, so there's quite a bit of disarray and duplication. I'm starting with the low-hanging fruit: stuff with physical, real-world presence. Films, video games, novels, comic books, periodicals. Then moving to the source books themselves and the broad-picture setting headers before tackling the individual fictional topic articles that are where the project tends to get into trouble with in-universe issues. This approach makes it more likely that there will be viable merge and redirect targets for topics that have currency but lack independent notability. But it's not going to be fast, needless to say.

That said, I think it's probably going to be a little surprising how much of this can be referenced to third-party material. Not way down deep into the character and monster lists (which are, from a certain point of view, the same sort of thing), but that's true of every sprawling WAF topic space to some extent. But this product line is coming up on 50 years of continual publication, and effectively spawned an industry that has spawned other industries in turn. There's a surprising amount of literature on the topic in reliable sources, running the gamut from general purpose news sites to specialist reporting outlets to, in some cases, academic journals.

Our level of coverage of in-universe D&D topics is unquestionably out of hand. But, on the other hand, this is a product line with almost 50 years of continual publication that effectively created the role-playing game industry and is the formative influence on an awful lot of post-1980 fantasy works irrespective of genre. The biggest obstacles to a speedy revision of topic space are the volume of material to evaluate ... and identifying and physically locating sources. For my normal topic spaces, that's easy; silent film era periodicals are all in the public domain and a great many have been digitized. Genre magazines from the late 1970s and early 1980s? Somewhat more challenging.

Still, that which is worth doing is rarely easy. Squeamish Ossifrage (talk) 13:30, 1 November 2019 (UTC)

Well, I'm certainly prepared to be surprised by how much can be retained via normal GNG analysis if that's the outcome; as I said in the AfD, the only way to proceed is one article/determination at a time. That said, we're going to need to get organized about it if we really want to make headway--not just because the number of articles involved is truly is into four digits, but because the worst offenders tend to also be the largest and thus will have more WP:NOTHERE editors willing to stonewall and disrupt to keep the content live, no matter how many notability, inclusion, or copyright policies it is violating. I think you've mostly hit the nail on the head when you say the majority of broad-topic articles about the game and its impact (which is, as you say, considerable as regards pop culture and certain entertainment industries) are almost certainly viable, notable topics, but that the in-universe/lore stuff is (to say the least) more of a mixed bag. But then there are also massive articles like this one, which I don't even know how to begin to describe: if I were to write up the (long overdue) AfD for that article, it would take me five hours just to describe all of the policies, project standards, and pragmatic editorial principles it violates. But critically, while that article is ostensibly about lore, it's also just a straight-up replication of the content of the commercial materials the game is based upon.

Anyway, not to sound like a broken record, but we really need a task force for this effort, and a couple of VPP discussions to formulate some community consensus on what (generally) should stay and what should go--even if we ultimately need to judge each article on its own merits. I've been contemplating the effort myself for years now, but the task is so herculean (and my time on-project so limited over recent years, that I've always talked myself out of it. But perhaps now is the time to step up. One thing that I mentioned in the AfD that is worth repeating here is that any such effort would need to recruit some editors who are both experienced Wikipedians with clear perspective on our policies but also die-hard fans of the game. to some it may seem counter-intuitive to specifically recruit editors who may not be as neutral as the average editor, but from what I observed of the recent efforts in the area of WWF articles is that those editors who had skin in the game as fans (while also being good, thoroughly WP:HERE Wikipedians) were invaluable as mediators between our regular editorial community and the masses of would-be-disruptive editors who were called in via reddit to disrupt RfCs (which happened more than once). They were also the editors most likely to put actual time and effort into scaling down the articles, because they saw that the choice was between pruning the content or losing it all in indiscriminate purges. The issues and number of articles here are much larger (and I also expect that once the effort to get the clean-up underway gets noticed by the superfan editors, they will organize off project to register truly massive numbers of new accounts to frustrate that purpose), but I think getting those "moderates" on board should be considered a vital first order of business for the D&D clean-up as well.

In any event, its good to talk this over with someone for the first time in a while. Honestly, this is the last area I want to spend the majority of my time on the project working on for a whole year (which is about the minimum amount of time I think this would take, even if we had a few dozen editors working on it consistently), but the problems in this area are not exactly trivial either, so if we can get the ball rolling sooner rather than later, I'll be on-board. Snow ^{let's rap} 08:14, 3 November 2019 (UTC)

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New Page Review newsletter November 2019

Hello Snow Rise,

This newsletter comes a little earlier than usual because the backlog is rising again and the holidays are coming very soon.

Getting the queue to 0

There are now 804 holders of the New Page Reviewer flag! Most of you requested the user right to be able to do something about the huge backlog but it's still roughly less than 10% doing 90% of the work. Now it's time for action.
Exactly one year ago there were 'only' 3,650 unreviewed articles, now we will soon be approaching 7,000 despite the growing number of requests for the NPR user right. If each reviewer soon does only 2 reviews a day over five days, the backlog will be down to zero and the daily input can then be processed by every reviewer doing only 1 review every 2 days - that's only a few minutes work on the bus on the way to the office or to class! Let's get this over and done with in time to relax for the holidays.
Want to join? Consider adding the NPP Pledge userbox.
Our next newsletter will announce the winners of some really cool awards.

Coordinator

Admin Barkeep49 has been officially invested as NPP/NPR coordinator by a unanimous consensus of the community. This is a complex role and he will need all the help he can get from other experienced reviewers.

This month's refresher course

Paid editing is still causing headaches for even our most experienced reviewers: This official Wikipedia article will be an eye-opener to anyone who joined Wikipedia or obtained the NPR right since 2015. See The Hallmarks to know exactly what to look for and take time to examine all the sources.

Tools

• It is now possible to select new pages by date range. This was requested by reviewers who want to patrol from the middle of the list.
• It is now also possible for accredited reviewers to put any article back into the New Pages Feed for re-review. The link is under 'Tools' in the side bar.

Reviewer Feedback

Would you like feedback on your reviews? Are you an experienced reviewer who can give feedback to other reviewers? If so there are two new feedback pilot programs. New Reviewer mentorship will match newer reviewers with an experienced reviewer with a new reviewer. The other program will be an occasional peer review cohort for moderate or experienced reviewers to give feedback to each other. The first cohort will launch November 13.

Second set of eyes

• Not only are New Page Reviewers the guardians of quality of new articles, they are also in a position to ensure that pages are being correctly tagged for deletion and maintenance and that new authors are not being bitten. This is an important feature of your work, especially while some routine tagging for deletion can still be carried out by non NPR holders and inexperienced users. Read about it at the Monitoring the system section in the tutorial. If you come across such editors doing good work, don't hesitate to encourage them to apply for NPR.
• Do be sure to have our talk page on your watchlist. There are often items that require reviewers' special attention, such as to watch out for pages by known socks or disruptive editors, technical issues and new developments, and of course to provide advice for other reviewers.

Arbitration Committee

The annual ArbCom election will be coming up soon. All eligible users will be invited to vote. While not directly concerned with NPR, Arbcom cases often lead back to notability and deletion issues and/or actions by holders of advanced user rights.

Community Wish list

There is to be no wish list for WMF encyclopedias this year. We thank Community Tech for their hard work addressing our long list of requirements which somewhat overwhelmed them last year, and we look forward to a successful completion.

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Administrators' newsletter – November 2019

News and updates for administrators from the past month (October 2019).

Administrator changes

GermanJoe • Girth Summit • Kees08 • Nosebagbear

DESiegel • GB fan • MSGJ • Voice of Clam • WilyD

DeltaQuad • Fang Aili • Pakaran

Bureaucrat changes

DeltaQuad • Pakaran

Interface administrator changes

MSGJ

CheckUser changes

L235 • Mz7 • SQL • ST47

Ivanvector

DeltaQuad

Oversight changes

L235 • Mz7 • ST47 • Stwalkerster • The Blade of the Northern Lights • Xaosflux

DeltaQuad • DGG • Julia W

Guideline and policy news

• An RfC was closed with the consensus that the resysop criteria should be made stricter.

• The follow-up RfC to develop that change is now open at Wikipedia:Requests for comment/2019 Resysop Criteria (2).

• A related RfC is seeking the community's sentiment for a binding desysop procedure.

Arbitration

• Eligible editors may now nominate themselves as candidates for the 2019 Arbitration Committee Elections. The self-nomination period will close November 12, with voting running from November 19 through December 2.

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ArbCom 2019 election voter message

Hello! Voting in the 2019 Arbitration Committee elections is now open until 23:59 on Monday, 2 December 2019. All eligible users are allowed to vote. Users with alternate accounts may only vote once. 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 2019 election, please review the candidates and submit your choices on the voting page. If you no longer wish to receive these messages, you may add {{NoACEMM}} to your user talk page. MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 00:14, 19 November 2019 (UTC)

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Your RFC reply at List of countries and dependencies by area

Hi,

Someone has come along after you and put their survey response right in the middle of yours. Do you think you could rearrange your reply so that everything except the survey response is in the second section, Threaded Discussion? (It was in the instructions, probably should have been made clearer.) Thanks.Selfstudier (talk) 18:02, 27 November 2019 (UTC)

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The Signpost: 29 November 2019

• From the editor: Put on your birthday best

• News and notes: How soon for the next million articles?

• In the media: You say you want a revolution

• On the bright side: What's making you happy this month?

• Arbitration report: Two requests for arbitration cases

• Traffic report: The queen and the princess meet the king and the joker

• Technology report: Reference things, sister things, stranger things

• Gallery: Winter and holidays

• Recent research: Bot census; discussions differ on Spanish and English Wikipedia; how nature's seasons affect pageviews

• Essay: Adminitis

• From the archives: WikiProject Spam, revisited

• In focus: An update on the Wikimedia Movement 2030 Strategy

• Special report: How many people edit in your favorite language? Where are they from?

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Administrators' newsletter – December 2019

News and updates for administrators from the past month (November 2019).

Administrator changes

EvergreenFir • ToBeFree

Akhilleus • Athaenara • John Vandenberg • Melchoir • MichaelQSchmidt • NeilN • Youngamerican • 😂

CheckUser changes

Beeblebrox

Deskana

Interface administrator changes

Evad37

Guideline and policy news

• An RfC on the administrator resysop criteria was closed. 18 proposals have been summarised with a variety of supported and opposed statements. The inactivity grace period within which a new request for adminship is not required has been reduced from three years to two. Additionally, Bureaucrats are permitted to use their discretion when returning administrator rights.
• Following a proposal, the edit filter mailing list has been opened up to users with the Edit Filter Helper right.

Technical news

• Wikimedia projects can set a default block length for users via MediaWiki:ipb-default-expiry. A new page, MediaWiki:ipb-default-expiry-ip, allows the setting of a different default block length for IP editors. Neither is currently used. (T219126)

Arbitration

• Voting in the 2019 Arbitration Committee Elections is open to eligible editors until Monday 23:59, 2 December 2018 UTC. Please review the candidates and, if you wish to do so, submit your choices on the voting page.

Miscellaneous

• The global consultation on partial and temporary office actions that ended in October received a closing statement from staff concluding, among other things, that the WMF will no longer use partial or temporary Office Action bans... until and unless community consensus that they are of value or Board directive.

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New Page Review newsletter December 2019

Reviewer of the Year

This year's Reviewer of the Year is Rosguill. Having gotten the reviewer PERM in August 2018, they have been a regular reviewer of articles and redirects, been an active participant in the NPP community, and has been the driving force for the emerging NPP Source Guide that will help reviewers better evaluate sourcing and notability in many countries for which it has historically been difficult.

Special commendation again goes to Onel5969 who ends the year as one of our most prolific reviewers for the second consecutive year. Thanks also to Boleyn and JTtheOG who have been in the top 5 for the last two years as well.

Several newer editors have done a lot of work with CAPTAIN MEDUSA and DannyS712 (who has also written bots which have patrolled thousands of redirects) being new reviewers since this time last year.

Thanks to them and to everyone reading this who has participated in New Page Patrol this year.

Top 10 Reviewers over the last 365 days

Rank	Username	Num reviews	Log
1	Rosguill (talk)	47,395	Patrol Page Curation
2	Onel5969 (talk)	41,883	Patrol Page Curation
3	JTtheOG (talk)	11,493	Patrol Page Curation
4	Arthistorian1977 (talk)	5,562	Patrol Page Curation
5	DannyS712 (talk)	4,866	Patrol Page Curation
6	CAPTAIN MEDUSA (talk)	3,995	Patrol Page Curation
7	DragonflySixtyseven (talk)	3,812	Patrol Page Curation
8	Boleyn (talk)	3,655	Patrol Page Curation
9	Ymblanter (talk)	3,553	Patrol Page Curation
10	Cwmhiraeth (talk)	3,522	Patrol Page Curation

(The top 100 reviewers of the year can be found here)

Redirect autopatrol

A recent Request for Comment on creating a new redirect autopatrol pseduo-permission was closed early. New Page Reviewers are now able to nominate editors who have an established track record creating uncontroversial redirects. At the individual discretion of any administrator or after 24 hours and a consensus of at least 3 New Page Reviewers an editor may be added to a list of users whose redirects will be patrolled automatically by DannyS712 bot III.

Source Guide Discussion

Set to launch early in the new year is our first New Page Patrol Source Guide discussion. These discussions are designed to solicit input on sources in places and topic areas that might otherwise be harder for reviewers to evaluate. The hope is that this will allow us to improve the accuracy of our patrols for articles using these sources (and/or give us places to perform a WP:BEFORE prior to nominating for deletion). Please watch the New Page Patrol talk page for more information.

This month's refresher course

While New Page Reviewers are an experienced set of editors, we all benefit from an occasional review. This month consider refreshing yourself on Wikipedia:Notability (geographic features). Also consider how we can take the time for quality in this area. For instance, sources to verify human settlements, which are presumed notable, can often be found in seconds. This lets us avoid the (ugly) 'Needs more refs' tag.

Delivered by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) at 16:11, 20 December 2019 (UTC)

The Signpost: 27 December 2019

• From the editors: Caught with their hands in the cookie jar, again

• News and notes: What's up (and down) with administrators, articles and languages

• Special report: Are reputation management operatives scrubbing Wikipedia articles?

• In the media: "The fulfillment of the dream of humanity" or a nightmare of PR whitewashing on behalf of one-percenters?

• Discussion report: December discussions around the wiki

• Arbitration report: Announcement of 2020 Arbitration Committee

• Traffic report: Queens and aliens, exactly alike, once upon a December

• Technology report: User scripts and more

• Gallery: Holiday wishes

• Recent research: Acoustics and Wikipedia; Wiki Workshop 2019 summary

• From the archives: The 2002 Spanish fork and ads revisited (re-revisited?)

• On the bright side: What's making you happy this month?

• Op-Ed: Why we need to keep talking about Wikipedia's gender gap

• WikiProject report: Wikiproject Tree of Life: A Wikiproject report

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