User talk:TheSandDoctor/Archives/2020/January
 | This page is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page. |
Administrators' newsletter – January 2020
News and updates for administrators from the past month (December 2019).
|
|
|
Guideline and policy news
- A request for comment asks whether partial blocks should be enabled on the English Wikipedia. If enabled, this functionality would allow administrators to block users from editing specific pages or namespaces, rather than the entire site.
- A proposal asks whether admins who don't use their tools for a significant period of time (e.g. five years) should have the toolset procedurally removed.
- Following a successful RfC, a whitelist is now available for users whose redirects will be autopatrolled by a bot, removing them from the new pages patrol queue. Admins can add such users to Wikipedia:New pages patrol/Redirect whitelist after a discussion following the guidelines at Wikipedia talk:New pages patrol/Redirect whitelist.
Arbitration
- The fourth case on Palestine-Israel articles was closed. The case consolidated all previous remedies under one heading, which should make them easier to understand, apply, and enforce. In particular, the distinction between "primary articles" and "related content" has been clarified, with the former being
the entire set of articles whose topic relates to the Arab-Israeli conflict, broadly interpreted
rather thanreasonably construed
. - Following the 2019 Arbitration Committee elections, the following editors have been appointed to the Arbitration Committee: Beeblebrox, Bradv, Casliber, David Fuchs, DGG, KrakatoaKatie, Maxim, Newyorkbrad, SoWhy, Worm That Turned, Xeno.
- The fourth case on Palestine-Israel articles was closed. The case consolidated all previous remedies under one heading, which should make them easier to understand, apply, and enforce. In particular, the distinction between "primary articles" and "related content" has been clarified, with the former being
Miscellaneous
- This issue marks three full years of the Admin newsletter. Thanks for reading!
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Changes later this week
- When trying to move a page, if the target title already exists then a warning message is shown. The warning message will now include a link to the target title. [1]
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 7 January. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 8 January. It will be on all wikis from 9 January (calendar).
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
21:23, 6 January 2020 (UTC)
Cleanup
Hey TSD, can you help me with some cleanup. My creation logs dating back to 2012 show I created:
- User:FeedbackResponder, used when we had Special:FeedbackDashboard.
- User:TypoScanBot, reason explained on user page.
Can you please block these? All the best, ~riley (talk) 08:44, 3 January 2020 (UTC)
- Sure thing! Always happy to help.
Done (indef blocks) w/ autoblock disabled and account creation blocked w/ email disabled. Those settings okay with you or would you like adjustment? --TheSandDoctor Talk 08:52, 3 January 2020 (UTC)
- No autoblock? Boring! Thank you :) ~riley (talk) 09:01, 3 January 2020 (UTC)
- Can you also block User:Riley Huntley1 (confirmation of ownership), User:Riley H (confirmation of ownership) and User:ArchaicMatters (confirmation of ownership) doppelgangers? ~riley (talk) 09:51, 8 January 2020 (UTC)
- @~riley: Done with the same settings as above. --TheSandDoctor Talk 14:09, 8 January 2020 (UTC)
- @~riley:
- Can you also block User:Riley Huntley1 (confirmation of ownership), User:Riley H (confirmation of ownership) and User:ArchaicMatters (confirmation of ownership) doppelgangers? ~riley (talk) 09:51, 8 January 2020 (UTC)
- No autoblock? Boring! Thank you :) ~riley (talk) 09:01, 3 January 2020 (UTC)
Happy First Edit Day!
Have a very happy first edit anniversary!
From the Birthday Committee, CAPTAIN RAJU(T) 00:38, 8 January 2020 (UTC)
- Thank you, CAPTAIN RAJU! I find it hard to believe that it has been 3 years now. --TheSandDoctor Talk 08:08, 8 January 2020 (UTC)
username
Hi. I hope you are doing well.
I cant be sure why "TrueLightOfIran" can be username policy violation, as you said here. Would you kindly explain it? —usernamekiran(talk) 09:36, 5 January 2020 (UTC)
- Hello Usernamekiran, my apologies for the delayed response. "TrueLightOfIran" could be considered a WP:DISRUPTNAME violation, specifically falling under the third bullet point "Usernames that seem intended to provoke emotional reaction ("trolling")." This determination was influenced by the previous username which resulted in the block, "DirectorOfTheCIA", along with this one, and the coincidental timings of these after the recent geopolitical/military developments between the US and Iran. --TheSandDoctor Talk 03:59, 6 January 2020 (UTC)
- hi. thanks for the response. Yeah, when i was thinking about it, i didnt factor in the previous username nor the current political situations. See you around :) —usernamekiran(talk) 05:45, 10 January 2020 (UTC)
- @Usernamekiran: You're welcome! I'm glad you asked and that I was able to explain it for you. When in doubt, by all means ask.
--TheSandDoctor Talk 06:43, 10 January 2020 (UTC)
- @Usernamekiran: You're welcome! I'm glad you asked and that I was able to explain it for you. When in doubt, by all means ask.
- hi. thanks for the response. Yeah, when i was thinking about it, i didnt factor in the previous username nor the current political situations. See you around :) —usernamekiran(talk) 05:45, 10 January 2020 (UTC)
Hi, and thank you for your contributions to Wikipedia. It appears that you tried to give MotoGP: Ultimate Racing Technology 2 a different title by copying its content and pasting either the same content, or an edited version of it, into another page with a different name. This is known as a "cut-and-paste move", and it is undesirable because it splits the page history, which is legally required for attribution. Instead, the software used by Wikipedia has a feature that allows pages to be moved to a new title together with their edit history.
In most cases, once your account is four days old and has ten edits, you should be able to move an article yourself using the "Move" tab at the top of the page (the tab may be hidden in a dropdown menu for you). This both preserves the page history intact and automatically creates a redirect from the old title to the new. If you cannot perform a particular page move yourself this way (e.g. because a page already exists at the target title), please follow the instructions at requested moves to have it moved by someone else. Also, if there are any other pages that you moved by copying and pasting, even if it was a long time ago, please list them at Wikipedia:Requests for history merge. Thank you. Reach Out to the Truth 22:09, 9 January 2020 (UTC)
- @Reach Out to the Truth: I believe you have warned the wrong user. I did not do the above action nor have I ever edited the article as far as I can tell. --TheSandDoctor Talk 06:31, 10 January 2020 (UTC)
- Sorry about that. You had previously moved the article away from that title, creating a redirect. Someone else later performed a copy-and-paste move back to that title. I used Twinkle to perform the CSD nomination and had no idea that notifying the creator would blame them for the copy-and-paste move. I will try to keep this in mind in the future. Reach Out to the Truth 13:44, 10 January 2020 (UTC)
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
- You can no longer read Wikimedia wikis if your browser use very old TLS. This is because it is a security problem for everyone. It can lead to downgrade attacks. Since 9 December you just see a warning. Soon the browser will not connect to the wikis at all. Most are users on Android systems older than 4.4. You can read the browser recommendations. [2]
- Special:LinkSearch has been moved from the "Redirecting special pages" section on Special:SpecialPages to the "Lists of pages" section. [3]
Changes later this week
Wikis can protect pages so that only some users can edit them. The standard protection levels are Require autoconfirmed or confirmed access and Require administrator access. If your wiki use more protection levels the technical name might be renamed for standardisation. This doesn't affect what users see. [4]- The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 14 January. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 15 January. It will be on all wikis from 16 January (calendar).
Future changes
- Deepcat and Catgraph will stop working. This will happen at the end of January. This is because you can now use the normal search function instead. [5]
- You can use
<ref follow="…">to merge footnotes that follow each other. It is meant to be used for digitised books on Wikisource. If the order of the footnotes is wrong no error was shown but the bad <ref> was shown outside the <references /> list. This will change and you will see an error message instead. [6]
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 18:40, 13 January 2020 (UTC)
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Changes later this week
- The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 21 January. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 22 January. It will be on all wikis from 23 January (calendar).
Future changes
- There is a new suggestion for what to show when someone edits without registering an account. This is to give unregistered editors better privacy and make some anti-vandalism work go faster. You can give feedback.
- Pywikibot is a Python library to automate work on wikis. It will no longer support Python 2. Use the
python2tag if you need to continue running Python 2 scripts. The Pywikibot team strongly recommends to migrate to Python 3. You can get help to do so. [7] - The weekly MediaWiki branch cut will soon become automated. The timing for this cut may change. You can discuss in Phabricator if this affects you. [8]
- You can read about coming technical events and mentoring interns.
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
19:42, 20 January 2020 (UTC)
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.
| 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)
Congrats to all editors! GeekLabs (talk) 03:41, 22 January 2020 (UTC)
Merry Christmas
|
Merry Christmas and a Prosperous 2020! |
|
Hello TheSandDoctor, 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 heartfelt and warm greetings for Christmas and New Year 2020. Spread the love by adding {{subst:Seasonal Greetings}} to other user talk pages. |
- Thank you ~riley! Wishing you the same
--TheSandDoctor Talk 07:29, 26 December 2019 (UTC)
Merry Christmas
Many thanks, and same to you! GiantSnowman 10:31, 26 December 2019 (UTC)
- You're welcome and thank you very much, GiantSnowman! Means a lot --TheSandDoctor Talk 19:34, 26 December 2019 (UTC)
A question
Hi, what do you think is the best way to deal with this sort of renegade deletion of sources (not the first time)? [9] [10] Sadkσ (talk is cheap) 13:58, 22 January 2020 (UTC)
- (talk page stalker)@Sadko: I would say keep engaging him on the talk page, but this is pretty widespread now. So. He's received the WP:ARBEURO notice, and this editing applies. He's cleaning sources about Serb history and descent. Warn him on his talk page. If he persists, take him to WP:AE. Katietalk 16:18, 22 January 2020 (UTC)
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Problems
- Some mobile diffs have problems. A couple of buttons are not shown. Structured data diffs on Commons are confusing. The developers are working on fixing it. [11][12]
- Administrators on wikis that use Structured Discussions can't move discussion pages. This is a bug. The developers are working on fixing it. [13]
Changes later this week
- There is no new MediaWiki version this week.
Future changes
- There is JavaScript code on Special:Undelete for administrators that makes it possible to automatically select multiple checkboxes by holding the "Shift" key and clicking. This code is also loaded by accident on other special pages and on articles. This makes pages slower to load. This will be fixed. If you know of other special pages where this is useful please tell the developers at phab:T232688.
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
18:53, 27 January 2020 (UTC)