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Administrators' newsletter – January 2022

News and updates for administrators from the past month (December 2021).

Administrator changes

Amalthea • Ihcoyc (deceased) • Kateshortforbob • Kirill Lokshin • Rifleman 82 • Ryan Norton • Wrp103

Interface administrator changes

Mr. Stradivarius

CheckUser changes

Cabayi • Donald Albury • Enterprisey • Izno • Wugapodes

Opabinia regalis

Casliber • David Fuchs • Newyorkbrad • SoWhy

Oversighter changes

Cabayi • Donald Albury • Enterprisey • Izno • Wugapodes

Opabinia regalis

Casliber • David Fuchs • Newyorkbrad • SoWhy

Guideline and policy news

• Following consensus at the 2021 RfA review, the autopatrolled user right has been removed from the administrators user group; admins can grant themselves the autopatrolled permission if they wish to remain autopatrolled.

• Additionally, consensus for proposal 6C of the 2021 RfA review has led to the creation of an administrative action review process. The purpose of this process will be to review individual administrator actions and individual actions taken by users holding advanced permissions.

Arbitration

• Following the 2021 Arbitration Committee elections, the following editors have been appointed to the Arbitration Committee: Beeblebrox, Cabayi, Donald Albury, Enterprisey, Izno, Opabinia regalis, Worm That Turned, Wugapodes.

Miscellaneous

• The functionaries email list (functionaries-enlists.wikimedia.org) will no longer accept incoming emails apart from those sent by list members and WMF staff. Private concerns, apart from those requiring oversight, should be directly sent to the Arbitration Committee.

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Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 00:25, 3 January 2022 (UTC)

How we will see unregistered users

Hi!

You get this message because you are an admin on a Wikimedia wiki.

When someone edits a Wikimedia wiki without being logged in today, we show their IP address. As you may already know, we will not be able to do this in the future. This is a decision by the Wikimedia Foundation Legal department, because norms and regulations for privacy online have changed.

Instead of the IP we will show a masked identity. You as an admin will still be able to access the IP. There will also be a new user right for those who need to see the full IPs of unregistered users to fight vandalism, harassment and spam without being admins. Patrollers will also see part of the IP even without this user right. We are also working on better tools to help.

If you have not seen it before, you can read more on Meta. If you want to make sure you don’t miss technical changes on the Wikimedia wikis, you can subscribe to the weekly technical newsletter.

We have two suggested ways this identity could work. We would appreciate your feedback on which way you think would work best for you and your wiki, now and in the future. You can let us know on the talk page. You can write in your language. The suggestions were posted in October and we will decide after 17 January.

Thank you. /Johan (WMF)

18:13, 4 January 2022 (UTC)

Administrators' newsletter – February 2022

News and updates for administrators from the past month (January 2022).

Administrator changes

AustralianRupert • Cimon Avaro • Euryalus • Jehochman • Nunh-huh

28bytes

Bureaucrat changes

28bytes

Interface administrator changes

Evad37 • Galobtter

Ragesoss

Guideline and policy news

• The Universal Code of Conduct enforcement guidelines have been published for consideration. Voting to ratify this guideline is planned to take place 7 March to 21 March. Comments can be made on the talk page.

Technical news

• The user group oversight will be renamed suppress in around 3 weeks. This will not affect the name shown to users and is simply a change in the technical name of the user group. The change is being made for technical reasons. You can comment in Phabricator if you have objections.
• The Reply Tool feature, which is a part of Discussion Tools, will be opt-out for everyone logged in or logged out starting 7 February 2022. Editors wishing to comment on this can do so in the relevant Village Pump discussion.

Arbitration

• Community input is requested on several motions aimed at addressing discretionary sanctions that are no longer needed or overly broad.
• The Arbitration Committee has published a generalised comment regarding successful appeals of sanctions that it can review (such as checkuser blocks).
• A motion related to the Antisemitism in Poland case was passed following a declined case request.

Miscellaneous

• Voting in the 2022 Steward elections will begin on 07 February 2022, 14:00 (UTC) and end on 26 February 2022, 13:59 (UTC). The confirmation process of current stewards is being held in parallel. You can automatically check your eligibility to vote.
• Voting in the 2022 Community Wishlist Survey is open until 11 February 2022.

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Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 03:02, 3 February 2022 (UTC)

Precious anniversary

Precious

One year!

--Gerda Arendt (talk) 09:17, 14 February 2022 (UTC)

Thank you! the wub "?!" 23:06, 15 February 2022 (UTC)

Administrators' newsletter – March 2022

News and updates for administrators from the past month (February 2022).

Administrator changes

Modussiccandi

BOZ • Brookie (deceased) • Jackmcbarn • Jamesday • Jonathunder • Master of Puppets • Saravask

CheckUser changes

Callanecc

Oversighter changes

Callanecc

Guideline and policy news

• A RfC is open to change the wording of revision deletion criterion 1 to remove the sentence relating to non-infringing contributions.
• A RfC is open to discuss prohibiting draftification of articles over 90 days old.

Technical news

• The deployment of the reply tool as an opt-out feature, as announced in last month's newsletter, has been delayed to 7 March. Feedback and comments are being welcomed at Wikipedia talk:Talk pages project. (T296645)
• Special:Nuke will now allow the selection of standard deletion reasons to be used when mass-deleting pages. This was a Community Wishlist Survey request from 2022. (T25020)
• The ability to undelete the talk page when undeleting a page using Special:Undelete or the API will be added soon. This change was requested in the 2021 Community Wishlist Survey. (T295389)

Arbitration

• Several unused discretionary sanctions and article probation remedies have been rescinded. This follows the community feedback from the 2021 Discretionary Sanctions review.

Miscellaneous

• The 2022 appointees for the Ombuds commission are Érico, Faendalimas, Galahad, Infinite0694, Mykola7, Olugold, Udehb and Zabe as regular members and Ameisenigel and JJMC89 as advisory members.
• Following the 2022 Steward Elections, the following editors have been appointed as stewards: AntiCompositeNumber, BRPever, Hasley, TheresNoTime, and Vermont.
• The 2022 Community Wishlist Survey results have been published alongside the ranking of prioritized proposals.

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Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 01:47, 2 March 2022 (UTC)

Hi who is Chitti? You can reply in my 109.177.156.102 (talk) page — Preceding undated comment added 13:54, 4 March 2022 (UTC)

Growth Newsletter #20

Welcome to the twentieth newsletter from the Growth team!

The Growth team's objective is to work on software changes that help retain new contributors in Wikimedia projects.

Suggested edits

As of February, 300,000 suggested edits have been completed since the feature was first deployed in December 2019.

Add a link is the team's first structured task, deployed in May 2021. It has improved outcomes for newcomers. The team is now working on a second iteration based on community feedback and data analysis. Improvements will include: improved algorithmic suggestions, guardrails to prevent too many similar links to be added, and clearer encouragement for users to continue making edits. After adding these improvements, we will deploy this task to more Wikipedias.

Add an image is the second structured task built by our team. It was deployed in November 2021 to four pilot Wikipedias. This is a more challenging task for newcomers. However, it adds more value to articles (so far, over 1,000 images have been added). We are currently learning from communities and from the data on what is working well and what needs improvements. The project page contains links to interactive prototypes. We are very interested to hear your thoughts on this idea as we build and test the early versions. We will soon deploy this task to more Wikipedias as a test.

"Add a link" and "Add an image" now both have a limitation on how many of these tasks newcomers can do per day. It is meant to discourage careless newcomers from making too many problematic edits.

Positive reinforcement

Over the last two years, the Growth team has focused on building suggested edits: easy tasks for newcomers to start with. We have learned with this experience that these tasks help many newcomers to make their first edits. Now, the team is starting a new project : "positive reinforcement". Its goal is to make newcomers proud of their editing and to make them want to come back for more of them. With the positive reinforcement project, we are considering three kinds of features:

• Impact stats: give newcomers the ability to see how many people read the articles they edit.
• Leveling up: encourage newcomers to progress from easier tasks to harder tasks.
• Personalized praise: encourage mentors and other editors to "thank" and award newcomers for good work.

This project is just beginning, and we hope for community thoughts on the direction. We know that things can wrong if we offer the wrong incentives to newcomers, so we want to be careful. Please visit the talk page to help guide the project!

News for mentors

• The mentor dashboard is available at all wikis. It helps mentors see who their mentees are and keep track of their activity. It is automatically activated where a list of mentors has been created. If you need assistance to create a list of mentors, please contact us.
• The mentor dashboard has a new module: settings. It is now possible for mentors to define their status (active or away). They can specify the volume of questions they want to receive, and they can claim mentees in an easier way. It is also possible for mentors to quit, which will automatically reassign their mentees to other mentors.
• We are working on an ability for a mentee to opt-out (and back in) to having a mentor.
• Previously, in the table that displays mentees activity, the filters displayed all mentees, even the ones with zero edits or lots of edits. We have changed this so that only mentees with between 1 and 500 edits are visible by default. Mentors can change this value in their filters.
• We are currently working on a special page for mentors to sign-up.

Some wikis have created userboxes that mentors can display on the user pages. If your wiki has one, please link it to Wikidata!

Scaling

Previously, at most Wikipedias, only 80% of newcomers were getting the Growth features. This was done for experimentation, to have a control group. We have changed this setting. Now 100% of new accounts at all Wikipedias get the Growth features (except a few, kept as test wikis). We invite communities to update their onboarding documentation and tutorials. Please include the Growth features in it. To help you, we have created an help page that can be translated and adapted to your wiki.

How to help

Do you have questions about the Growth features? This translatable FAQ contains answers to the most common questions about the Growth team work. We regularly update it.

Interface translations are important for newcomers. Please help for your language, by translating or copyediting interface translations for the Growth features.

Growth team's newsletter prepared by the Growth team and posted by bot • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

17:12, 16 March 2022 (UTC)

Campaigns Product Update #3

Hello Campaigns Product Newsletter subscribers!

We are excited to share our updates:

• Proposal to create new namespaces: We have proposed to create two namespaces, which are “Event” and “Event talk.” This way, we can easily create an Event Center that pulls data from event pages. This Event Center may include tools to create event pages with registration support, a calendar of events, and event statistics, among other features. More importantly, the Event Center will highlight organizing as an essential part of the Wikimedia movement. Please give us feedback on Phabricator or Meta about our proposal to create two new namespaces.

• Engineering updates: We are excited that we have finished hiring for our engineering team! Three engineers and an engineering manager have joined our team since our last update. In the last few months, they have conducted technical planning and launched the building phase of the project. They are now building the registration tool. You can see the updated team on meta.

• Design updates: We conducted usability tests with a small group of testers for early feedback on the desktop wireframes. After collecting this feedback, we have developed a new version for desktop wireframes, which will be ready to share in the next few weeks. These desktop wireframes display the user flow of two experiences: one for organizers who want to add registration to their event pages, and another for participants who want to register for an event. Additionally, the design team is also currently working on the first version of mobile wireframes, which will be shared during the next office hour.

1. View the latest desktop wireframes in Figma for Campaign Organizer Prototype and Participant Registration Prototype.

2. Leave us some feedback on the desktop wireframes. Note that we haven’t posted the newest version of the desktop wireframes on the project page yet, but we will soon (and you can feel free to add feedback on any version you have seen).

• Ambassador updates: Three product ambassadors for the Arabic, French and Swahili communities have now joined our team! They will help us collect feedback from Wikimedia communities about the project and understand the needs of organizers, through gathering first-hand information. These ambassadors are immersed as actual members of these communities, so they will also help us identify the needs of the organizers in our pilot communities. The ambassadors are: M. Bachounda for Arabic communities, Georges Fodouop for French communities, and Antoni Mtavangu for Swahili communities.

What is next?

Next Office Hour: We will be holding an office hour on March 31, 2022 at 15:00 UTC, which will be conducted via Zoom. We invite everyone to attend, and we really hope to see you! The focus will be on the Registration Tool. The team will also be providing community updates on the usability test findings and design highlights for the wireframes. We will also share our current Project timeline and answer any questions you may have. Join us and share your thoughts on these developments!

In a few months, we are expecting to have the early testable version of the tool. By then, the team will be doing the first round of general testing and gathering feedback. We are looking forward to adding more features on the tool such as communication support, potentially by the end of this year. If you know other organizers that might be interested in following these developments, please recommend that they subscribe to the newsletter. We want to receive as much feedback as we can.

Thank you!

The Campaign Product Team

MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 17:26, 22 March 2022 (UTC)

Special day

{{u|Sdkb}} ^talk 05:54, 24 March 2022 (UTC)

Thanks! the wub "?!" 10:44, 24 March 2022 (UTC)

Campaign Product Team Office Hour - March 31, 2022

Hello Campaign Product Newsletter subscribers!

The Campaign Product Team will be hosting the next office hour to share exciting updates on the Registration Tool and new proposed namespaces for events. We will also be sharing community updates on the usability tests and design highlights of the latest mobile and desktop wireframes.

Join us and share your thoughts on these developments!

Date: March 31, 2022

Time: 15:00 UTC

Zoom Link: https://wikimedia.zoom.us/j/82046580320

You may also watch Campaigns Office Hour: Introducing the Campaigns Product Team to learn more about the Team and the previous wireframes.

Feel free to send a message to ibrazal-ctr@wikimedia.org if you want to receive an email reminder for this meeting.

Thank you.

The Campaign Product Team

MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 17:37, 30 March 2022 (UTC)

Administrators' newsletter – April 2022

News and updates for administrators from the past month (March 2022).

Administrator changes

Firefly • Sdrqaz

Ad Orientem

Geschichte • Ryan Postlethwaite • Sabine's Sunbird • Wassupwestcoast

Interface administrator changes

Evad37

Guideline and policy news

• An RfC is open proposing a change to the minimum activity requirements for administrators.

Technical news

• Access to Special:RevisionDelete has been expanded to include users who have the deletelogentry and deletedhistory rights. This means that those in the Researcher user group and Checkusers who are not administrators can now access Special:RevisionDelete. The users able to view the special page after this change are the 3 users in the Researcher group, as there are currently no checkusers who are not already administrators. (T301928)
• When viewing deleted revisions or diffs on Special:Undelete a back link to the undelete page for the associated page is now present. (T284114)

Arbitration

• Wikipedia:Arbitration Committee/Procedures § Opening of proceedings has been updated to reflect current practice following a motion.
• A arbitration case regarding Skepticism and coordinated editing has been closed.
• A arbitration case regarding WikiProject Tropical Cyclones has been opened.

Miscellaneous

• Voting for the Universal Code of Conduct Enforcement guidelines has closed, and the results were that 56.98% of voters supported the guidelines. The results of this vote mean the Wikimedia Foundation Board will now review the guidelines.

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Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 18:14, 7 April 2022 (UTC)

New administrator activity requirement

The administrator policy has been updated with new activity requirements following a successful Request for Comment.

Beginning January 1, 2023, administrators who meet one or both of the following criteria may be desysopped for inactivity if they have:

1. Made neither edits nor administrative actions for at least a 12-month period OR
2. Made fewer than 100 edits over a 60-month period

Administrators at risk for being desysopped under these criteria will continue to be notified ahead of time. Thank you for your continued work.

22:53, 15 April 2022 (UTC)

Museums dashboard glitch

Hallo, I created a little stub for Church Cottage Museum as it was the only local black symbol on the map at the Museums Day project ... and tried to register it as a contribution (just as a gesture really, not a serious Competitor!) but on https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Events/International_Museum_Day_2022/Participate the link to "UK Dashboard" fails (" Programs & Events Dashboard - 500 — internal server error. :-(" ). Is this your territory, or could you pass a message on to someone appropriate? Thanks. PamD 07:55, 6 May 2022 (UTC)

Hi @PamD. Not my territory I'm afraid, and actually not WMF's either: that dashboard is maintained by Wiki Education. I dropped them an email in case they hadn't seen, and bumped up the priority of the phabricator task. Hopefully they can get it fixed soon. the wub "?!" 11:03, 6 May 2022 (UTC)

@PamD Sage restarted the server, and it's working again. the wub "?!" 12:15, 6 May 2022 (UTC)

Thanks. I've tried to register my little stub, but perhaps it's really only wanting work on WikiData - but I updated that record by adding a link to its first wikiepedia article, so I guess that counts. PamD 12:23, 6 May 2022 (UTC)

Administrators' newsletter – May 2022

News and updates for administrators from the past month (April 2022).

Administrator changes

Colin M

David.Monniaux • Fribbler • Grue • Kpjas • West.andrew.g

CheckUser changes

Ks0stm

Oversighter changes

Ks0stm

Guideline and policy news

• Following an RfC, a change has been made to the administrators inactivity policy. Under the new policy, if an administrator has not made at least 100 edits over a period of 5 years they may be desysopped for inactivity.
• Following a discussion on the bureaucrat's noticeboard, a change has been made to the bureaucrats inactivity policy.

Technical news

• The ability to undelete the associated talk page when undeleting a page has been added. This was the 11th wish of the 2021 Community Wishlist Survey.
• A public status system for WMF wikis has been created. It is located at https://www.wikimediastatus.net/ and is hosted separately to WMF wikis so in the case of an outage it will remain viewable.

Arbitration

• Remedy 2 of the St Christopher case has been rescinded following a motion. The remedy previously authorised administrators to place a ban on single-purpose accounts who were disruptively editing on the article St Christopher Iba Mar Diop College of Medicine or related pages from those pages.

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Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 23:35, 9 May 2022 (UTC)

Happy Birthday!

Wishing The wub a very happy birthday on behalf of the Birthday Committee!   interstatefive  (talk) - just another roadgeek 00:00, 29 May 2022 (UTC)

Editing newsletter 2022 – #1

Read this in another language • Subscription list for the multilingual newsletter • Local subscription list

New editors were more successful with this new tool.

The New topic tool helps editors create new ==Sections== on discussion pages. New editors are more successful with this new tool. You can read the report. Soon, the Editing team will offer this to all editors at most WMF-hosted wikis. You can join the discussion about this tool for the English Wikipedia is at Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)#Enabling the New Topic Tool by default. You will be able to turn it off in the tool or at Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-editing-discussion.

The Editing team plans to change the appearance of talk pages. These are separate from the changes made by the mw:Desktop improvements project and will appear in both Vector 2010 and Vector 2022. The goal is to add some information and make discussions look visibly different from encyclopedia articles. You can see some ideas at Wikipedia talk:Talk pages project#Prototype Ready for Feedback.

Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk)

23:15, 30 May 2022 (UTC)

Administrators' newsletter – June 2022

News and updates for administrators from the past month (May 2022).

Administrator changes

Tamzin

Barek • Darkwind • Geometry guy • ProcseeBot • RoyBoy • Sean Whitton • Valereee • Visorstuff • WAvegetarian

Sn0wflake → VersedFenrir

CheckUser changes

Ivanvector

Guideline and policy news

• Several areas of improvement collated from community member votes have been identified in the Universal Code of Conduct Enforcement guidelines. The areas of improvement have been sent back for review and you are invited to provide input on these areas.

Technical news

• Administrators using the mobile web interface can now access Special:Block directly from user pages. (T307341)
• The IP Info feature has been deployed to all wikis as a Beta Feature. Any autoconfirmed user may enable the feature using the "IP info" checkbox under Preferences → Beta features. Autoconfirmed users will be able to access basic information about an IP address that includes the country and connection method. Those with advanced privileges (admin, bureaucrat, checkuser) will have access to extra information that includes the Internet Service Provider and more specific location.

Arbitration

• Remedy 2 of the Rachel Marsden case has been rescinded following a motion. The remedy previously authorised administrators to delete or reduce to a stub, together with their talk pages, articles related to Rachel Marsden when they violate Wikipedia's biographies of living persons policy.
• An arbitration case regarding WikiProject Tropical Cyclones has been closed.

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Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 17:56, 2 June 2022 (UTC)

A Dobos torte for you!

7&6=thirteen (☎) has given you a Dobos torte to enjoy! Seven layers of fun because you deserve it. To give a Dobos torte and spread the WikiLove, just place {{subst:Dobos Torte}} on someone else's talkpage, whether it be someone you have had disagreements with in the past or a good friend.

7&6=thirteen (☎) 17:55, 22 June 2022 (UTC)

@7&6=thirteen Delicious, I remember enjoying one of these when visiting Hungary a few years ago. Thank you very much! the wub "?!" 19:00, 22 June 2022 (UTC)

Late Thanks

Hi there, I would like to say thank you for fixing the template "Template: Get parameter". I know this is a week late but still. THTB lol'nt (talk) 11:01, 28 June 2022 (UTC)

Growth team newsletter #21

Welcome to the twenty-first newsletter from the Growth team!

New project: Positive reinforcement

Mockup of the Impact module, redesigned to add Positive reinforcement.

• The Growth team started a new project: Positive reinforcement. We want newcomers to understand there is an interest in regularly editing Wikipedia, and we want to improve new editor retention.
• We asked users from Arabic, Bangla, Czech and French Wikipedia about their feedback. Some people participated at mediawiki.org as well.
• We summarized the initial feedback gathered from these community discussions, along with how we plan to iterate based on that feedback.
• The first Positive Reinforcement idea is a redesign of the impact module: incorporating stats, graphs, and other contribution information. This idea received the widest support, and we plan to start our work based on the design illustrated on the side.
• Please let us know what you think of this project, in any language.

For mentors

• We have worked on two new features, to inform them about the mentorship:
  • In the Mentor module, we now provide more information about the public nature of the mentors/newcomer relationship and the fact that talk pages are public.
  • We now allow newcomers to opt-in and opt-out of mentorship.

Scaling

• "Add a link" available at more wikis ― Add a link feature has been deployed to more wikis: Catalan Wikipedia, Hebrew Wikipedia, Hindi Wikipedia, Korean Wikipedia, Norwegian Bokmål Wikipedia, Portuguese Wikipedia, Simple English Wikipedia, Swedish Wikipedia, Ukrainian Wikipedia, Abkhazian Wikipedia, Achinese Wikipedia, Adyghe Wikipedia, Afrikaans Wikipedia, Akan Wikipedia, Alemannisch Wikipedia, Amharic Wikipedia, Aragonese Wikipedia, Old English Wikipedia, Syriac Wikipedia, Egyptian Arabic Wikipedia, Asturian Wikipedia, Atikamekw Wikipedia, Avaric Wikipedia, Aymara Wikipedia, Azerbaijani Wikipedia, South Azerbaijani Wikipedia. This is part of the progressive deployment of this tool to more Wikipedias. The communities can configure locally how this feature works.
• "Add an image" available at more wikis ― Add an image feature will be deployed to more wikis: Greek Wikipedia, Indonesian Wikipedia, Polish Wikipedia, Chinese Wikipedia. These communities will be able to configure locally how this feature works. [1]

Suggested edits

• Selecting topics ― We have created an "AND" filter to the list of topics at Special:Homepage. This way, newcomers can decide to select very specific topics ("Transportation" AND "Asia") or to have a broader selection ("Transportation" OR "Asia"). At the moment this feature is tested at pilot wikis.
• Changes for Add a link ― We have built several improvements that came from community discussion and from data analysis. They will be available soon at the wikis.
  • Algorithm improvements ― The algorithm now avoids recommending links in sections that usually don't have links and for first names. Also, it now limits each article to only having three link suggestions by default (limited to the highest accuracy suggestions of all the available ones in the article).
  • User experience improvements ― We added a confirmation dialog when a user exits out of suggestion mode prior to making changes. We also improved post-edit dialog experience and allow newcomers to browse through task suggestions from the post-edit dialog.
  • Community configuration ― We allow communities to set a maximum number of links per article via Special:EditGrowthConfig.
  • Future change for Add a link feature ― We will suggest underlinked articles in priority. [2]
• Patrolling suggested edits ― Some users at Arabic Wikipedia, Spanish Wikipedia, and Russian Wikipedia told us that "Add a link" and "Add an image" edits can be challenging to patrol. We are now brainstorming improvements to help address this challenge. We have already some ideas and we started some work to address this challenge. If you have any thoughts to add about the challenges of reviewing these tasks or how we should improve these tasks further, please let us know, in any language.

Community configuration

Communities can configure how the features work, using Special:EditGrowthConfig.

• Communities can set the maximum number of "add an image" suggested tasks a newcomer can complete daily. [3]
• Future change: allow communities to customize the "add a link" quality gate threshold easily, using Special:EditGrowthConfig. [4]

Growth team's newsletter prepared by the Growth team and posted by bot • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

13:03, 5 July 2022 (UTC)

Administrators' newsletter – July 2022

News and updates for administrators from the past month (June 2022).

Administrator changes

AA • Gwalla • Ioeth • Laurascudder • Moriori (deceased) • Nat • Rfl

Drilnoth → AFigureOfBlue

Bureaucrat changes

Lee Vilenski

Interface administrator changes

Nihiltres

Technical news

• user_global_editcount is a new variable that can be used in abuse filters to avoid affecting globally active users. (T130439)

Arbitration

• An arbitration case regarding conduct in deletion-related editing has been opened.

Miscellaneous

• The New Pages Patrol queue has around 10,000 articles to be reviewed. As all administrators have the patrol right, please consider helping out. The queue is here. For further information on the state of the project, see the latest NPP newsletter.

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Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 13:29, 10 July 2022 (UTC)

Event Registration Tool: Demo and Invitation to Test

Hello Subscribers!

The Campaigns Product Team from the Wikimedia Foundation will be hosting two office hours to demo the new Event Registration Tool, and train organizers how to use it. In these office hours, you will learn how to:

• Create an event page in the new event namespace (as an event organizer)
• Enable registration on your event page (as an event organizer)
• Collect data on who registered for your event (as an event organizer)
• Register for an event on the event page (as an event participant)

You can attend one office hour or both, depending on your availability on the following dates:

• Session 1: Thursday, July 21, 2022 at 5:00 PM UTC
• Session 2: Saturday, July 23, 2022 at 12:00 PM UTC

These events will be multilingual, with live interpretations in Arabic, English, French, Italian, and Portuguese, and Swahili. Note that Portuguese will be available on the 21st, but not the 23rd. We strongly encourage you to join and share your feedback on the tool. Your feedback will help us improve the tool so that Wikimedians can have a better event experience. To register, please reply to this email or sign-up to our page, by adding your signature.

Thank you!

IBrazal (WMF) (talk) 06:38, 18 July 2022 (UTC)

Campaign Product Team Office Hour - July 21, 2022

Hello Campaign Product Newsletter subscribers!

The Campaign Product Team will be having an office hour today, July 21, 2022 at 17:00 UTC via Zoom to demo the first release of the Event Registration Tool.

You may join the office hour using this meeting link.

We look forward to your participation.

Thank you.

Best,

The Campaign Product Team

MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 14:46, 21 July 2022 (UTC)

A long time in the making

	It came home!
	What a difference a year makes. Couldn't have written a better ending. Thanks for all your hard work! Cielquiparle (talk) 10:07, 1 August 2022 (UTC)

@Cielquiparle Agreed! I'll admit I was not getting my hopes up too much having been disappointed so many times before, but what a triumph. And so great to see the support behind the team! the wub "?!" 14:45, 1 August 2022 (UTC)

Administrators' newsletter – August 2022

News and updates for administrators from the past month (July 2022).

Administrator changes

Valereee

Anthony Appleyard (deceased) • Capitalistroadster • Samsara

Guideline and policy news

• An RfC has been closed with consensus to add javascript that will show edit notices for editors editing via a mobile device. This only works for users using a mobile browser, so iOS app editors will still not be able to see edit notices.
• An RfC has been closed with the consensus that train stations are not inherently notable.

Technical news

• The Wikimania 2022 Hackathon will take place virtually from 11 August to 14 August.
• Administrators will now see links on user pages for "Change block" and "Unblock user" instead of just "Block user" if the user is already blocked. (T308570)

Arbitration

• The arbitration case request Geschichte has been automatically closed after a 3 month suspension of the case.

Miscellaneous

• You can vote for candidates in the 2022 Board of Trustees elections from 16 August to 30 August. Two community elected seats are up for election.
• Wikimania 2022 is taking place virtually from 11 August to 14 August. The schedule for wikimania is listed here. There are also a number of in-person events associated with Wikimania around the world.
• Tech tip: When revision-deleting on desktop, hold ⇧ Shift between clicking two checkboxes to select every box in that range.

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Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 08:45, 5 August 2022 (UTC)

Semi-protection for Timeline of the 21st century

I was wondering if you could semi-protect that page as it has faced persistent unconstructive editing from IP sockpuppets of the same user (who has been blocked) Serendi^podous 09:51, 23 August 2022 (UTC)

@Serendipodous Wow, that's one persistent user. Semi-protected it for 3 months. It might be good to have an editnotice for that and similar pages setting out inclusion criteria. Even if it doesn't deter our sockpuppeteer, it could help out some good faith users. the wub "?!" 10:19, 23 August 2022 (UTC)

Thank you that was... a long few years. Serendi^podous 17:52, 23 August 2022 (UTC)

Feedback on Vector (2022) conversation

The slides to our latest Wikimania presentation

Hello! As a member of WikiProject Usability, I wanted to draw your attention to a conversation currently underway on WP:VPR (see the beginning of the discussion) around adopting Vector 2022 as the new default skin.

The Web team at the Wikimedia Foundation has been working on Vector 2022 for the past three years, collaborating with the English Wikipedia community as well as other wikis to ensure that the skin performs better qualitatively and quantitatively for readers and communities than the previous Vector skin. The goal of the new skin is to create a more welcoming and easier to use experience for readers and editors across the wiki. For more details, see our new FAQ.

For the past couple of months, we have collected thoughts from the English Wikipedia community on what changes need to be made to the skin prior to it being considered ready for deployment. Our next step would be to start an RfC to assess whether the community considers Vedtor 2022 ready.

Prior to the beginning of the RfC, we wanted to draw your attention to the current conversation and encourage your feedback on the skin.

Our results from Vector 2022 at a glance

• The sticky header makes it easier to access tools that editors use often. It decreases scrolling to the top of the page by 16%
• The new table of contents makes it easier to navigate to different sections. Readers and editors jumped between sections 50% more than with the old table of contents
• The new search bar is easier to find and makes it easier to find the correct search result from the list. This increased the amount of searches started by 30% on the wikis we tested on
• The collapsible sidebar allows readers and editors to choose whether they want to see the main menu or not. Our testing shows that this allows people to better focus on their current task - reading with a collapsed menu, or editing with an open menu
• The language switching menu makes it possible to switch languages without scrolling
• The user menu collects all user links in a single place, making it easier to understand what each link does. In testing, 71% of surveyed editors reported positive experiences with the new menu

Thank you, OVasileva (WMF), SGrabarczuk (WMF) (talk) 12:27, 25 August 2022 (UTC)

Editing news 2022 #2

Read this in another language • Subscription list for this multilingual newsletter

The [subscribe] button shortens response times.

The new [subscribe] button notifies people when someone replies to their comments. It helps newcomers get answers to their questions. People reply sooner. You can read the report. The Editing team is turning this tool on for everyone. You will be able to turn it off in your preferences.

–Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 00:36, 26 August 2022 (UTC)

Administrators' newsletter – September 2022

News and updates for administrators from the past month (August 2022).

Administrator changes

DanCherek • DatGuy • Femke • Z1720

Aldux • Graham Beards • Nyttend

Interface administrator changes

Mr. Stradivarius

Guideline and policy news

• A discussion is open to define a process by which Vector 2022 can be made the default for all users.
• An RfC is open to gain consensus on whether Fox News is reliable for science and politics.

Technical news

• The impact report on the effects of disabling IP editing on the Persian (Farsi) Wikipedia has been released.
• The WMF is looking into making a Private Incident Reporting System (PIRS) system to improve the reporting of harmful incidents through easier and safer reporting. You can leave comments on the talk page by answering the questions provided. Users who have faced harmful situations are also invited to join a PIRS interview to share the experience. To sign up please email Madalina Ana.

Arbitration

• An arbitration case regarding Conduct in deletion-related editing has been closed. The Arbitration Committee passed a remedy as part of the final decision to create a request for comment (RfC) on how to handle mass nominations at Articles for Deletion (AfD).
• The arbitration case request Jonathunder has been automatically closed after a 6 month suspension of the case.

Miscellaneous

• The new pages patrol (NPP) team has prepared an appeal to the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) for assistance with addressing Page Curation bugs and requested features. You are encouraged to read the open letter before it is sent, and if you support it, consider signing it. It is not a discussion, just a signature will suffice.
• Voting for candidates for the Wikimedia Board of Trustees is open until 6 September.

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Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 11:13, 1 September 2022 (UTC)

Lambeth Walk - Nazi Style - by Charles A. Ridley

Hello, I note that you were the uploader of the Lambeth Walk - Nazi Style - by Charles A. Ridley video file. I have recently done my best to clean up the Triumph of the Will page but in the course of doing so, realised that the film may remain copyrighted in both Germany and the United States.

Would a derivative work published by the UK Ministry of Information not be subjected to the same copyright? After all, the video features footage from the film. Just seeking your opinion if I should nominate it for deletion. Best regards. Seloloving (talk) 11:31, 10 September 2022 (UTC)

@Seloloving Oh, thanks for spotting that. I admit I hadn't even thought about the original film still being copyrighted. Yes, probably best to nominate it for deletion so the copyright gurus at Commons can weigh in. the wub "?!" 12:29, 10 September 2022 (UTC)

Campaigns Product Update #4

Hello Campaigns Product Newsletter subscribers!

We are excited to share our updates:

• Event Registration v0

We have successfully launched Event Registration tool V0 on beta cluster and collected feedback from the first batch of testers. This tool is part of a more comprehensive organizing solution, the Event Center, which hopes to support movement organizers. Through this registration solution, organizers can collect useful data on campaign participants and their needs while respecting participant privacy.

Testing update. In our first round of feedback collection, testers were composed of different types of organizers around the movement with a language focus on Arabic, French, English, and Swahili communities. Most of the testers successfully created their test event registrations and signed up for a test event registration created by other organizers. Simple, easy to use, and aids in managing event participants were the common feedback we received from first-time users. In contrast, access and proper localization of the tool were the points for improvement identified. We are working on V1, which will include communication support and integration with the Programs and Event Dashboard. This will be released on Meta-Wiki soon. We hope to address accessibility during this launch and improve localization problems once the tool has been deployed in local wikiprojects.

The tool is still available for testing on the beta cluster. Feel free to leave feedback on our project talk page or this form.

• Organizer Lab
  Looking for a way to learn how to effectively organize around sustainability? Join the beta version of the Organizer Lab on WikiLearn to understand how to effectively organize a global campaign around sustainability and climate change! Applications are open from September 22 - October 19, 2022. The Organizer Lab will be a 9-week online learning experience from the end of October until mid December that prepares participants to obtain knowledge about the topics that they wish to create, a call to action for strategic knowledge gaps, as well as more generalized Wikimedia organizing and campaign/event design skills.

Read more about the program!

What's Next:

• Organizer Lab Information Session. We invite you to join our information session for the Organizer Lab on September 30, 2022 at 14:00 UTC via Zoom. Join this session!
  

• Organizer User Rights. We are reaching out to a pool of administrators from Arabic, French and Swahili communities to collect feedback on what is the best way to define organizer user rights, what privileges to give to community organizers, and what are the limitations of these privileges. Feel free to reach out to our product ambassadors or send an email to ibrazal-ctr@wikimedia.org if you are interested to be part of these conversations.

---

Community Feedback:

"Participants have been always asking the organizers are asked by participants whether they are registered, now participants will just look directly if they are registered, Thank you for creating the system"
- French Organizer

“I think that the platform will facilitate the process of promoting events and searching for participants”
- Arabic Organizer

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Thank you!

The Campaigns Product Team

MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 06:30, 21 September 2022 (UTC)

Growth team newsletter #22

Welcome to the twenty-second newsletter from the Growth team!

Newcomers tasks reach the 500,000 edits milestone — more data publicly available

As of the last week of June 2022, the newcomers of the world have completed over 500,000 newcomer tasks. In other words, newcomers have made over half a million Wikipedia edits via Growth’s “Suggested Edits” module.

• About 30% of those edits were completed on mobile devices.
• Usage continues to increase; in June 2022 almost 50,000 newcomer tasks were completed.

We have added some new data to Grafana. You can now check the number of edits and reverts by task types, or the number of questions asked to mentors. You can filter the data by wiki.

If you have any questions, or there is more data you want access to, please let us know.

Ongoing projects and explorations

The new impact module is part of the Positive Reinforcement project. The image displays the mockup for mobile we used for user testing.

We are continuing our work on our new project, Positive Reinforcement. User testing of initial Positive Reinforcement designs was just completed. Interviews were conducted in Arabic, English, and Spanish. The outcome has been published on the Positive Reinforcement page. We are now utilizing user testing feedback along with prior community feedback to iterate and improve designs.

We are exploring the idea of a Copy Edit structured task. We have tested copy edits in Wikipedia articles for arwiki, bnwiki, cswiki, eswiki (Growth pilot-wikis) and enwiki with two different methods: LanguageTool and Hunspell. We will share more details here and on the associated Copy Edit page once the evaluation is complete.

Add an image was utilized at GLAM events in Argentina, Mexico, and Chile. For an overview of what was learned from these events, read: #1Pic1Article I: how Latin American heritage experts added images to Wikipedia (in English).

Experiments analysis

Add a Link Experiment Analysis has been published. The most important points are:

• Newcomers who get the Add a Link structured task are more likely to be activated (i.e. make a constructive first article edit).
• They are also more likely to be retained (i.e. come back and make another constructive article edit on a different day).
• The feature also increases edit volume (i.e. the number of constructive edits made across the first couple weeks), while at the same time improving edit quality (i.e. the likelihood that the newcomer's edits aren't reverted).

Newcomer task edit type analysis has been published.

• Communities had expressed concern that newcomers whose initial edits were structured tasks wouldn’t go on to learn how to complete more difficult tasks. The Growth team data scientist conducted a Newcomer task edit type analysis to see if this was indeed the case.
• Results from analysis indicate that this likely isn’t a significant concern. More than 70% of users who start with the easy task "Add a link" also make another task type. Read the full analysis and methodology here.

News for mentors

A new system for the mentors list

The configuration of the mentors list will change over the next weeks. In the future, mentors will sign up, edit their mentor description and quit using Special:MentorDashboard. This new system will make the development of new features for mentors much easier.

At the moment, the mentor list is a simple page anyone can edit, unless it’s protected. With the new page, mentors will be able to edit only their own description, while administrators will be able to edit the entire mentors' list if needed.

The deployment will happen first at the pilot wikis, then at all wikis. Existing lists of mentors will be automatically converted, no action will be needed from the mentors. [5][6]

Mentors will be informed about the next steps soon, by a message posted on the talk page of existing Mentor lists.

Learn more about this new structured page on mediawiki.org.

A tip for mentors

Did you know that mentors can filter their mentees' changes at Special:MentorDashboard (and star the ones that require attention)? This feature helps to keep an eye on newcomers' edits, helping mentors to fix minor details, and encourage them if necessary.

And did you know that mentors have special filters to highlight their mentees' edits at Special:RecentChanges? Look for the following filters in RecentChanges: Your starred mentees, Your unstarred mentees.

Other improvements

Some improvements will be made to the mentor dashboard in the coming weeks:

• While we now offer some options for mentors to take a break, the option to quit mentoring was not easy to find. This will be improved. [7]
• Mentors at wikis using FlaggedRevisions will have a way to discover their mentees' pending edits. [8]
• Dashboard discovery for new mentors will be improved. [9]

Recent changes and fixed bugs

• We moved to a new Image Suggestions API. This new API will allow us to deploy Add an Image to more wikis. [10]
• Starting September 19, a few more wikis now offer Add an image to newcomers. These wikis are Greek Wikipedia, Polish Wikipedia, Chinese Wikipedia, Indonesian Wikipedia, Romanian Wikipedia. [11]
• Add an image has been disabled for a few days due to technical issue. "Add an image" added a blank line instead of an image. This has been fixed. [12]
• In order to know if Special:EditGrowthConfig is used by communities, we now instrument page loads and saves of configuration. [13]

Have a question? A suggestion?

Please let us know! You can also read our FAQ page.

Growth team's newsletter prepared by the Growth team and posted by bot • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

17:18, 21 September 2022 (UTC)

Administrators' newsletter – October 2022

News and updates for administrators from the past month (September 2022).

Administrator changes

ScottishFinnishRadish

Staxringold

Ahoerstemeier (deceased) • Ched

Interface administrator changes

Cyberpower678

CheckUser changes

GorillaWarfare

Guideline and policy news

• Following an RfC, consensus was found that if the rationale for a block depends on information that is not available to all administrators, that information should be sent to the Arbitration Committee, a checkuser or an oversighter for action (as applicable, per ArbCom's recent updated guidance) instead of the administrator making the block.
• Following an RfC, consensus has been found that, in the context of politics and science, the reliability of FoxNews.com is unclear and that additional considerations apply to its use.
• Community comment on the revised Universal Code of Conduct enforcement guidelines is requested until 8 October.

Technical news

• The Articles for creation helper script now automatically recognises administrator accounts which means your name does not need to be listed at WP:AFCP to help out. If you wish to help out at AFC, enable AFCH by navigating to Preferences → Gadgets and checking the "Yet Another AfC Helper Script" box.

Arbitration

• Remedy 8.1 of the Muhammad images case will be rescinded 1 November following a motion.
• A modification to the deletion RfC remedy in the Conduct in deletion-related editing case has been made to reaffirm the independence of the RfC and allow the moderators to split the RfC in two.
• The second phase of the 2021-22 Discretionary Sanctions Review closes 3 October.

Miscellaneous

• An administrator's account was recently compromised. Administrators are encouraged to check that their passwords are secure, and reminded that ArbCom reserves the right to not restore adminship in cases of poor account security. You can also use two-factor authentication (2FA) to provide an extra level of security.
• Self-nominations for the electoral commission for the 2022 Arbitration Committee elections open 2 October and close 8 October.
• You are invited to comment on candidates in the 2022 CUOS appointments process.
• An RfC is open to discuss whether to make Vector 2022 the default skin on desktop.
• Tech tip: You can do a fuzzy search of all deleted page titles at Special:Undelete.

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Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 11:43, 1 October 2022 (UTC)

Geonotice Request

Hi! I'm wondering if you can process the latest request(s) at Wikipedia:Geonotice#Requests. The PAMM one is mine, and I'm working with the museum to find applicants. I tried to get the coordinates right, but they need to be formatted correctly. Thanks!! Ocaasi ^{t | c} 10:54, 3 October 2022 (UTC)

@Ocaasi Done. Good luck with the search, and I hope you're doing well! the wub "?!" 13:02, 3 October 2022 (UTC)

Donate

Thanks for clarifying phab:T219759 for me. I should have checked the date on the screenshots. (I don't know the mechanics or etiquette of Phabricator well enough to post this message there.) Certes (talk) 13:49, 3 October 2022 (UTC)

@Certes Not a problem, thanks for pointing it out so that I could update the task. the wub "?!" 13:58, 3 October 2022 (UTC)

Speedy deletion nomination of Category:English cricket seasons from 2001

A tag has been placed on Category:English cricket seasons from 2001 indicating that it is currently empty, and is not a disambiguation category, a category redirect, a featured topics category, under discussion at Categories for discussion, or a project category that by its nature may become empty on occasion. If it remains empty for seven days or more, it may be deleted under section C1 of the criteria for speedy deletion.

If you think this page should not be deleted for this reason you may contest the nomination by visiting the page and clicking the button labelled "Contest this speedy deletion". This will give you the opportunity to explain why you believe the page should not be deleted. Please do not remove the speedy deletion tag from the page yourself. Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 01:13, 29 October 2022 (UTC)

For info, this is part of a series of deletions following Wikipedia:Categories_for_discussion/Log/2022_October_20#Category:English_cricket_seasons_from_1598_to_1763. See e.g. [14]

This is also going to empty Category:Seasons in Welsh cricket, Category:Cricket in Wales by year, Category:Welsh cricket in the 21st century, etc. I suspect that this is an unintended side-effect that was overlooked. If you want any help to repopulate the Welsh hierarchy, Qwerfjkl who emptied the sub-categories is taking a short break, but may be willing to assist afterwards. Or perhaps you might simply add the English century categories into the Welsh parent categories. – Fayenatic London 16:17, 4 November 2022 (UTC)

Thanks @Fayenatic london for the info. I don't remember why I made that category 16 (!) years ago, although I expect it was just implementing the result of a previous CFD which I used to do a lot of. I'll leave it to people more interested in cricket to sort out, it's not one of my usual areas.

By the way, from your username and page I'll give a shameless plug for m:Meetup/London/186 on Sunday 13th November in case you're interested! the wub "?!" 17:50, 4 November 2022 (UTC)

Thanks, I have attended before, years ago… enjoyed it, but it's not good domestic politics! 😬 – Fayenatic London 18:56, 4 November 2022 (UTC)

Administrators' newsletter – November 2022

News and updates for administrators from the past month (October 2022).

Administrator changes

• 
  • Isabelle Belato
  • Whpq
• 
• 
  • Atama
  • Astronautics~enwiki
  • Athaenara
  • Eddie891
  • GraemeL
  • Marianocecowski
  • Natalya
  • Pratyeka
  • SB Johnny

Interface administrator changes

• TheresNoTime
• Ragesoss

CheckUser changes

• 
  • Blablubbs
  • Firefly
• Joe Roe

Oversight changes

• DGG

Guideline and policy news

• The article creation at scale RfC opened on 3 October and will be open until at least 2 November.
• An RfC is open to discuss having open requests for adminship automatically placed on hold after the seven-day period has elapsed, pending closure or other action by a bureaucrat.

Arbitration

• Eligible editors are invited to self-nominate themselves from 13 November 2022 until 22 November 2022 to stand in the 2022 Arbitration Committee elections.
• The arbitration case request titled Athaenara has been resolved by motion.
• The arbitration case Reversal and reinstatement of Athaenara's block has entered the proposed decision stage.
• AmandaNP, Mz7 and Cyberpower678 have been appointed to the Electoral Commission for the 2022 Arbitration Committee Elections. Xaosflux and Dr vulpes are reserve commissioners.

Miscellaneous

• The 2022 CheckUser and Oversight appointments process has concluded with the appointment of two new CheckUsers.
• You can add yourself to the centralised page listing time zones of administrators.
• Tech tip: Wikimarkup in a block summary is parsed in the notice that the blockee sees. You can use templates with custom options to specify situations like {{rangeblock|create=yes}} or {{uw-ublock|contains profanity}}.

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Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 00:23, 1 November 2022 (UTC)

UK virtual meetings

Hi The wub, I hope you’re doing well! I noticed that quite some time has passed since the last UK virtual. Even though I was only able to come to a few, the ones I did attend I enjoyed immensely— they were the highlights of my month. I was just curious if you planned on organising other Zoom meetings, and if so, when. ◇HelenDegenerate◆ 00:23, 16 November 2022 (UTC)

@HelenDegenerate Thanks for saying, I'm glad you enjoy them! For various reasons I'd better not try and host one this month though, sorry about that. Maybe in December. the wub "?!" 21:23, 20 November 2022 (UTC)

I never made one but came here to say I would love to attend one in the future! So adding my name in enthusiasm Rhagfyr (talk) 19:42, 7 December 2022 (UTC)

ArbCom 2022 Elections voter message

Hello! Voting in the 2022 Arbitration Committee elections is now open until 23:59 (UTC) on Monday, 12 December 2022. 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 2022 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) 00:27, 29 November 2022 (UTC)

Growth team newsletter #23

Welcome to the twenty-third newsletter from the Growth team!

Highlights

• Mentorship: We released the new structured mentor list to all wikis. This change makes mentorship easier to setup, manage and use.
• Positive reinforcement: An improved impact module is available for testing.

Screenshot of the positive reinforcement module improvements.

Positive reinforcement: an improved impact module to test

The goal of the Growth team is to encourage newcomers to try editing for the first time, and encourage them to keep editing. We want to increase newcomers' motivation by showing them how impactful their edits are.

Newcomers have access to an impact module; you can find yours at Special:Impact. The revised impact module provides new editors with more context about their impact. It will display the number of edits, the number of thanks received, the last time they edited, the number of consecutive days they edited, and the number of views for the articles they edited.

This module will soon be available at our pilot wikis starting December 1. You can already test this new module at Beta Wikipedia. For safety reasons, do not use your regular account and password at Beta wiki. Create a new, specific account for this wiki, with a different password.

Structured tasks: improvements based on patroller feedback

After the deployment of Structured tasks, we received feedback from various communities regarding how patrollers of recent changes were feeling overwhelmed by an increase in edits to check, and how some edits were poor quality or of poor relevance.

We made several improvements based on the feedback we received. Several points of improvement have already been addressed:

• Patroller fatigue:
  • By default, newcomers can complete up to 25 "add a link" tasks and 25 "add an image" tasks per day. If patrollers are overburdened, each community can use Special:EditGrowthConfig to lower that limit.

• Quality of edits: what constitutes a "quality edit" is not a well defined concept. We initiated a discussion and summarized our findings. We also worked on the following improvements:
  • Add a Link
    • Underlinked articles are now prioritized, so it's less likely that newcomers are adding links to articles that are already have a lot of links.
    • The confidence score was increased, so suggestions are more likely to be accurate.
    • The default number of suggested links per article has been lowered to 3. This can be changed at Special:EditGrowthConfig. Communities can also exclude articles containing certain templates or categories from being suggested.
  • Add an Image
    • Lists will no longer receive "add an image" suggestions.
    • Disambiguation pages will no longer receive "add an image" suggestions.
    • We have many further improvements we plan to make to "add an image" in early 2023. [15]

The Positive Reinforcement project will also address some of the concerns around encouraging newcomers to progress to higher value edits. The Growth team will soon work on strategies geared at "Leveling up" newcomers so they progress from easy to more difficult tasks.

Recent changes

• All Wikipedias now have the same onboarding experience. Previously, at a few wikis, 20% of new accounts didn't get the Growth features when they created their account. These 20% of new accounts were used as a control group, in order to know if the Growth features were changing newcomers' behavior. Experiments have shown that Growth features improve activation and retention, and as we want to provide the same onboarding experience at all Wikipedias, we have decided to remove the control groups. We will utilize control groups when testing new features, and German Wikipedia keeps a control group at their request. [16]
• The quality score for "add a link" suggestions will change. We will suggest less links for each article, but they will be more accurate. We will first deploy it at our pilot wikis, and then to all other wikis where this feature is available. [17][18]
• Growth's features FAQ has been updated and expanded. This page centralizes all the information about Growth features. We invite you to read it, and, if you can, to translate it.

News for mentors

• All Wikipedias can now setup and manage a mentorship program in an easier way.
  • We changed the process to make it more reliable, easier to improve and easier to use.
  • Wikipedias where mentorship hasn't been enabled yet can turn mentorship on following a new process. When done, mentors can sign-up by visiting Special:MentorDashboard.
  • Wikipedias where the list of mentors already existed have been converted to the new system.
  • A new special page — Special:ManageMentors — now displays the list of mentors. This page can be transcluded on any other page. There are also new processes to signup as a mentor or to quit mentorship, and we improved community mentorship management.
• The Mentor dashboard's "Your mentees" module will have a new footer, called "Recent changes by your mentees". This footer will include a link to Recent changes, where mentors can see only edits made by their own mentees. [19]

Deployments

• Add a link has been deployed to a 5th round of wikis. [20]

Improving this newsletter

We plan to have a more regular newsletter, every two months. We also want to know if the current format suits you! Let us know what you like, what you like less and your suggestions of improvements: leave us a comment, in your preferred language.

Growth team's newsletter prepared by the Growth team and posted by bot • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

20:57, 29 November 2022 (UTC)

Campaigns Product Team Office Hour - December 2022

Hello Campaigns Product Newsletter subscribers!

The Wikimedia Foundation Campaigns Team invites you to join our upcoming office hours. In each session, we will introduce V1 of Event Registration Tool, so you can begin using it for real events on Meta-wiki.

In V1, the following new features will be includedː

• Support for the organizer to specify an event timezone
• Automatic confirmation emails after participants have registered
• Private registration: the option for participants to register and only display their registered username to organizers of the event and we will teach you how you can use it yourself.

Office Hour Sessions:

• 1st Session: December 5, 2022 @ 18:00 UTC via Zoom
• 2nd Session: December 10, 2022 @ 12:00 UTC via Zoom

Join us and share your thoughts on these developments!

These office hours will be multilingual, with live interpretations in Arabic, English, French, and Swahili. Email us @ ibrazal-ctr@wikimedia.org or sign-up here if you want to receive a reminder for this meeting.

Thank you.

The Campaigns Product Team

Administrators' newsletter – December 2022

News and updates for administrators from the past month (November 2022).

Administrator changes

• Eddie891
• Euryalus
• TheresNoTime

• Alex.muller
• Excirial
• RedWordSmith
• Ron Ritzman
• TheresNoTime
• Stephen

Interface administrator changes

TheresNoTime

TheresNoTime

CheckUser changes

TheresNoTime

Oversight changes

TheresNoTime

Guideline and policy news

• Consensus has been found in an RfC to automatically place RfAs on hold after one week.
• The article creation at scale RfC has been closed.
• An RfC on the banners for the December 2022 fundraising campaign has been closed.

Technical news

• A new preference named "Enable limited width mode" has been added to the Vector 2022 skin. The preference is also shown as a toggle on every page if your monitor is 1600 pixels or wider. When disabled it removes the whitespace added by Vector 2022 on the left and right of the page content. Disabling this preference has the same effect as enabling the wide-vector-2022 gadget. (T319449)

Arbitration

• Eligible users are invited to vote on candidates for the Arbitration Committee until 23:59 December 12, 2022 (UTC). Candidate statements can be seen here.
• The proposed decision for the 2021-22 review of the discretionary sanctions system is open.
• The arbitration case Reversal and reinstatement of Athaenara's block has been closed.
• The arbitration case Stephen has been opened and the proposed decision is expected 1 December 2022.
• A motion has modified the procedures for contacting an admin facing Level 2 desysop.

Miscellaneous

• Tech tip: A single IPv6 connection usually has access to a "subnet" of 18 quintillion IPs. Add /64 to the end of an IP in Special:Contributions to see all of a subnet's edits, and consider blocking the whole subnet rather than an IP that may change within a minute.

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Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 12:45, 1 December 2022 (UTC)

Minor fix request - Visual editor (News citation template form)

Hello! Hope you are well. I was wondering if you could please pass on to the Visual Editor team, this super minor edit request for "News" citation templates. Namely, where it says Name of publication, right now it just says Example: [[The Wall Street Journal]]''. This has caused me to often forget that you can't just assume that the name of the publication is going to be the right target page, if that makes sense. (As visual editors, we usually don't need to worry about that, because we always can see the drop-down suggestions for the correct target.) I think it would be helpful to give a second example there, of a target page using a piped link (which also helps remind visual editors how to do piped links and in what order, etc.), such as The Telegraph / Daily Telegraph, etc. Cielquiparle (talk) 13:23, 14 December 2022 (UTC)

(And also...if you could please direct me to the right place to submit requests like this in the future...I would really appreciate it. Thank you!) Cielquiparle (talk) 13:26, 14 December 2022 (UTC)

Hi @Cielquiparle, good to hear from you! Hope you're doing well. I meant to follow up with you about visual editor questions after we last met, but totally forgot sorry! We can actually edit those things here without needing to get any of the VE developers involved: the information is pulled from Template:Cite news#TemplateData. Unfortunately it's only possible to have a single example, do you have a suggestion for a better example to demonstrate a piped link?

The best places to ask for technical requests are probably the Help desk or Village pump (technical). It is possible to submit requests directly in the bug tracking software Phabricator, but if you're not familiar with it (or even if you are!) it can be tricky to find the correct projects to tag, or whether something has been submitted already. And in this case it probably would have been speedy closed as something that can be fixed on-wiki. the wub "?!" 23:56, 15 December 2022 (UTC)

Happy New Year, The wub!

Happy New Year!

The wub,
Have a prosperous, productive and enjoyable New Year, and thanks for your contributions to Wikipedia.
— Moops ^⋠T⋡ 16:31, 2 January 2023 (UTC)

   Send New Year cheer by adding {{subst:Happy New Year fireworks}} to user talk pages.

— Moops ^⋠T⋡ 16:31, 2 January 2023 (UTC)

Thanks @Moops, a very Happy New Year to you as well! the wub "?!" 13:18, 3 January 2023 (UTC)

Administrators' newsletter – January 2023

News and updates for administrators from the past month (December 2022).

Administrator changes

• ComplexRational
• Extraordinary Writ

Stephen

• Andrew Yong
• Dbenbenn
• DESiegel
• GlassCobra
• Joe Decker
• Nancy
• Pathoschild
• StuffOfInterest
• William Pietri
• Wwwwolf
• Xdamr

Interface administrator changes

Nihiltres

CheckUser changes

Moneytrees

• Ivanvector
• SilkTork

Oversighter changes

• GeneralNotability
• Moneytrees

• Guerillero
• SilkTork

Guideline and policy news

• Speedy deletion criterion A5 (transwikied articles) has been repealed following an unopposed proposal.

Arbitration

• Following the 2022 Arbitration Committee elections, the following editors have been appointed to the Arbitration Committee: Barkeep49, CaptainEek, GeneralNotability, Guerillero, L235, Moneytrees, Primefac, SilkTork.
• The 2021-22 Discretionary Sanctions Review has concluded with many changes to the discretionary sanctions procedure including a change of the name to "contentious topics". The changes are being implemented over the coming month.
• The arbitration case Stephen has been closed.

Miscellaneous

• Voting for the Sound Logo has closed and the winner is expected to be announced February to April 2023.
• Tech tip: You can view information about IP addresses in a centralised location using bullseye which won the Newcomer award in the recent Coolest Tool Awards.

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Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 01:09, 6 January 2023 (UTC)

Growth team newsletter #24

Welcome to the twenty-fourth newsletter from the Growth team!

Newcomer experience projects

The Growth team partnered with other WMF teams to conduct several experiments around increasing account creation and new editor retention. Results from four of these experiments are now available:

• Thank you pages & banners - Encourage donors to create accounts through thank you pages and banners.
• Marketing experiment - Run ads on-wiki and off-wiki to see how this impacts account activation.
• "Add an image" GLAM events - Host GLAM events that focus on using the "Add an image" tool.
• Welcome emails - Experiment sending welcome emails to newly created accounts.

Newcomer tasks

• Several communities suggested improving "add a link", by suggesting underlinked articles first. We released this change to Growth pilot wikis. We will review the data and collect feedback before considering releasing it to more wikis. [21]
• The deployment of the "add a link" to all Wikipedias is still in progress. Suggested links use a prediction model, which has to be trained. The deployments will resume after we finish training all models. [22]

Mentorship

• When someone wants to signup as a mentor, they are now informed if they don't meet the defined criteria. [23]
• Workshop hosts asked us to have workshop attendees assigned to them. They can soon use a custom URL parameter. This way, workshop hosts will continue mentoring the event's attendees after the workshop. It will be available in February. [24]
• Have you considered to help new editors on your wiki, by signing up to be a Mentor?
  • Please visit Special:MentorDashboard to check on the conditions to be a mentor, and sign up.
  • If your wiki does not have Mentorship enabled, consider setting it up. The Growth team can provide advice and assist as needed. Please ping Trizek (WMF) for assistance.

Other news

• In Special:SpecialPages, Growth experiments now have their own section. [25]
• This newsletter will have a new publication period, 6 times a year: January, March, May, July, September, November.

Translations

• Newsletter translation: We are looking for translators for this newsletter. If you are interested and have the needed English language proficiency to assist, then please add your name to this list. You will receive an invite on your talk page to translate the newsletter when it is ready.
• Interface translation: You can also help by translating the interface, or reviewing translations to make them more inclusive. Interface translations are hosted at translatewiki.net.

Growth team's newsletter prepared by the Growth team and posted by bot • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.• Help with translations

14:44, 31 January 2023 (UTC)

Administrators' newsletter – February 2023

News and updates for administrators from the past month (January 2023).

Administrator changes

Gimmetrow

• Bjelleklang
• Bob the Wikipedian
• Leithp
• WhisperToMe
• 100 inactive admins

CheckUser changes

• BDD
• Bradv
• Donald Albury
• Maxim
• MusikAnimal

Oversighter changes

• BDD
• Bradv
• Donald Albury
• Maxim

Guideline and policy news

• Following an RfC, the administrator policy now requires that prior written consent be gained from the Arbitration Committee to mark a block as only appealable to the committee.
• Following a community discussion, consensus has been found to impose the extended-confirmed restriction over the topic areas of Armenia and Azerbaijan and Kurds and Kurdistan.

Technical news

• The Vector 2022 skin has become the default for desktop users of the English Wikipedia.

Arbitration

• The arbitration case Armenia-Azerbaijan 3 has been opened and the proposed decision is expected 24 February 2023.
• In December, the contentious topics procedure was adopted which replaces the former discretionary sanctions system. The contentious topics procedure is now in effect following an initial implementation period. There is a detailed summary of the changes and administrator instructions for the new procedure. The arbitration clerk team are taking suggestions, concerns, and unresolved questions about this new system at their noticeboard.

Miscellaneous

• Voting in the 2023 Steward elections will begin on 05 February 2023, 21:00 (UTC) and end on 26 February 2023, 21:00 (UTC). The confirmation process of current stewards is being held in parallel. You can automatically check your eligibility to vote.
• Voting in the 2023 Community Wishlist Survey will begin on 10 February 2023 and end on 24 February 2023. You can submit, discuss and revise proposals until 6 February 2023.
• Tech tip: Syntax highlighting is available in both the 2011 and 2017 Wikitext editors. It can help make editing paragraphs with many references or complicated templates easier.

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Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 01:38, 2 February 2023 (UTC)

Precious anniversary

Precious

Two years!

--Gerda Arendt (talk) 11:01, 14 February 2023 (UTC)

Editing news 2023 #1

Read this in another language • Subscription list for this newsletter

This newsletter includes two key updates about the Editing team's work:

1. The Editing team will finish adding new features to the Talk pages project and deploy it.
2. They are beginning a new project, Edit check.

Talk pages project

Some of the upcoming changes

The Editing team is nearly finished with this first phase of the Talk pages project. Nearly all new features are available now in the Beta Feature for Discussion tools.

It will show information about how active a discussion is, such as the date of the most recent comment. There will soon be a new "Add topic" button. You will be able to turn them off at Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-editing-discussion. Please tell them what you think.

Daily edit completion rate by test group: DiscussionTools (test group) and MobileFrontend overlay (control group)

An A/B test for Discussion tools on the mobile site has finished. Editors were more successful with Discussion tools. The Editing team is enabling these features for all editors on the mobile site.

New Project: Edit Check

The Editing team is beginning a project to help new editors of Wikipedia. It will help people identify some problems before they click "Publish changes". The first tool will encourage people to add references when they add new content. Please watch that page for more information. You can join a conference call on 3 March 2023 to learn more.

–Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 18:19, 22 February 2023 (UTC)

Administrators' newsletter – March 2023

News and updates for administrators from the past month (February 2023).

Administrator changes

The Wordsmith

• Fuhghettaboutit
• Spinningspark (deceased)

CheckUser changes

Callanecc

Oversighter changes

Callanecc

Guideline and policy news

• Following a request for comment, F10 (useless non-media files) has been deprecated.
• Following a request for comment, the Portal CSD criteria (P1 (portal subject to CSD as an article) and P2 (underpopulated portal)) have been deprecated.
• A request for comment is open to discuss making the closing instructions for the requested moves process a guideline.

Technical news

• The results of the 2023 Community Wishlist Survey have been posted.

Arbitration

• Remedy 11 ("Request for Comment") of the Conduct in deletion-related editing case has been rescinded.
• The proposed decision for the Armenia-Azerbaijan 3 case is expected 7 March 2023.
• A case related to the Holocaust in Poland is expected to be opened soon.

Miscellaneous

• The 2023 appointees for the Ombuds commission are AGK, Ameisenigel, Bennylin, Daniuu, Emufarmers, Faendalimas, JJMC89, MdsShakil, Minorax and Renvoy as regular members and Zabe as advisory members.
• Following the 2023 Steward Elections, the following editors have been appointed as stewards: Mykola7, Superpes15, and Xaosflux.
• The Terms of Use update cycle has started, which includes a [p]roposal for better addressing undisclosed paid editing. Feedback is being accepted until 24 April 2023.

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Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 13:20, 1 March 2023 (UTC)

Level 2 vital article GA promotion

Hello The wub, I was just made aware of your very generous offer to donate to a charity on behalf of editors who promoted a level 2 vital article to GA status. I wanted to enquire whether this offer still stands and whether the recent promotion of the article knowledge qualifies. Phlsph7 (talk) 08:45, 10 March 2023 (UTC)

@Phlsph7 It certainly does, congratulations on a great GA and on being the first to claim a reward! Just let me know your choice of charity, and if you would like me to mention it at the Reward Board. You can email me if you would rather keep it private. the wub "?!" 13:21, 10 March 2023 (UTC)

Could you donate the money to the "All Grants Fund" by GiveWell? The international website is [26] but since you offered the reward in pounds, it might be better to use the UK website [27]. If it's a regular practice to mention it at the Reward Board then please do so. But as far as I'm concerned, it's not necessary. Thanks a lot for doing this and let's hope that I don't remain the sole awardee for too long. Phlsph7 (talk) 13:52, 10 March 2023 (UTC)

@Phlsph7 Excellent choice, to be honest that's where much of my charitable giving goes anyway :) I donated the £100 to the UK entity so they will be able to claim Gift Aid (an extra £25).

Thank you for the generosity and all the hard work on the article. I noticed that you have Communications nominated too, so you might end up the second awardee too at this rate. Good luck! the wub "?!" 14:20, 10 March 2023 (UTC)

Ah, that's great, I wasn't aware of Gift Aid. I have my fingers crossed for the article communication. For most of my nominations, it takes very long until they get reviewed, so it may well be a few more months, let's see. Phlsph7 (talk) 16:26, 10 March 2023 (UTC)