This is an archive of past discussions with User:Davidbuddy9. 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.
We would like to announce the start of the 4th GA Cup, a competition that seeks to encourage the reviewing of Good article nominations! Thus far, there have been three GA Cups, which were successful in reaching our goals of significantly reducing the traditionally long queue at GAN, so we're doing it again. Currently, there are over 400 nominations listed. We hope that we can again make an impact this time.
The 4th GA Cup will begin on November 1, 2016. Four rounds are currently scheduled (which will bring the competition to a close on February 28, 2017), but this may change based on participant numbers. We may take a break in December for the holidays, depending on the results of a poll of our participants taken shortly after the competition begins. The sign-up and submissions process will remain the same, as will the scoring.
Sign-ups for the upcoming competition are currently open and will close on November 14, 2016. Everyone is welcome to join; new and old editors, so sign-up now!
If you have any questions, take a look at the FAQ page and/or contact one of the judges.
To subscribe or unsubscribe to future GA Cup newsletters, please add or remove your name to our mailing list. If you are a participant, you will be on the mailing list no matter what as this is the easiest way to communicate between all participants.
We would like to announce the start of the 4th GA Cup, a competition that seeks to encourage the reviewing of Good article nominations! Thus far, there have been three GA Cups, which were successful in reaching our goals of significantly reducing the traditionally long queue at GAN, so we're doing it again. Currently, there are over 400 nominations listed. We hope that we can again make an impact this time.
The 4th GA Cup will begin on November 1, 2016. Four rounds are currently scheduled (which will bring the competition to a close on February 28, 2017), but this may change based on participant numbers. We may take a break in December for the holidays, depending on the results of a poll of our participants taken shortly after the competition begins. The sign-up and submissions process will remain the same, as will the scoring.
Sign-ups for the upcoming competition are currently open and will close on November 14, 2016. Everyone is welcome to join; new and old editors, so sign-up now!
If you have any questions, take a look at the FAQ page and/or contact one of the judges.
To subscribe or unsubscribe to future GA Cup newsletters, please add or remove your name to our mailing list. If you are a participant, you will be on the mailing list no matter what as this is the easiest way to communicate between all participants.
Victoria Coleman to fill long-vacant CTO role; Trustee Kelly Battles joins Quora executive team; last week for community input on Creative Commons 4.0 license
Thanks to everyone who celebrated the birthday by organizing or attending to an event, letting a message on Wikidata or on the social networks, writing a story or creating a present!
Here's the list of the birthday presents from the community and development team:
Four new types of charts for the Query Service: line chart, bar chart, scatter chart and area chart! Read more and try examples in the documentation (Jonas)
{{#statements:…}}, a new parser function is currently in development with better features: try it here! (Thiemo, Wikidata dev team and volunteers)
Search field added in Scholia, a tool to create scholarship profiles (fnielsen)
Technical documentation about Wikibase for PHP and JS scripts (Ladsgroup and Jonas)
new feature for the graph view in the Query Service: it can now browse the properties of items. see in the video (Jonas)
graph builder tool for the query service to create and export graphs (demo video) (Jonas, [[d:user:Smalyshev (WMF)|Smalyshev)
More work on federation in order to be able to use Wikidata's items and properties to describe media files on Wikimedia Commons in the future (phabricator:T149580)
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from November 8th. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from November 9th. It will be on all wikis from November 10th (calendar).
You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 8 November 2016 at 20:00 (UTC). See how to join.
You can join the next meeting with the Architecture committee. The topics this week are Image Thumbnail API and allow SVG files uploaded on MediaWiki to have XHTML namespaces. The meeting will be on 9 November at 21:00 (UTC). See how to join.
Future changes
RevisionSlider will be enabled by default on all beta wikis, on testwiki, testwiki2, mediawikiwiki and de.wikipedia.org. [6][7][8]
A new Wikidata PageRank dataset has been published. The dataset was computed in August 2016 and provides PageRank scores for 10,364,840 Wikidata entities.
Due to a possible hack, please consider resetting your passwords.
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
When you edit with the visual editor you can use meta + shift + k to add a reference. The meta key is often the control key or command key. [9]
Changes this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from November 15. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from November 16. It will be on all wikis from November 17 (calendar).
In Special:Preferences you can choose which language menus and buttons will be in. If there is no translation for that language, MediaWiki has a list of fallback languages. A fallback language is a language many will understand better than English. MediaWiki will now use English when there is no Ukrainian translation. [10]
Meetings
You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 15 November at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.
Notifications concerning Flow are no longer all grouped together in your preferences. The "Edits to my talk page" category will now include Flow notifications about your user talk page (if your user talk page uses Flow), and the "Mentions" category will now include mentions on Flow pages. Previously, all notifications related to Flow were grouped together in the "Structured Discussion" category. [14]
The orange bar will now also be displayed when a message is posted on a your user talk page if your talk page uses Flow; previously, it was only displayed if you had a wikitext talk page. [15]
Parlement & Politiek ID (P1749) has been completed in Mix'n'match. Over 5000 politicians from the Netherlands (and also Belgium) now have a link to this resource
Unit conversion has been rolled out for the first dimension for a short while now.
Undo diffs now utilize language fallbacks for property and item labels (gerrit:315291). Thanks to Matěj Suchánek!
Reworked database schema for Cognate (the extension that will do automatic interwiki links for Wiktionary). It is still waiting for security review before it can be deployed.
Worked more on basic version of Lexeme entity type
Fixed a bug where the links on action=info where wrong (phabricator:T149598)
Getting close to finishing the groundwork for Federation so that in the future you'll be able to use Wikidata's items and properties to describe files on Commons.
Added Innu-aimun as a language for monolingual text values (phabricator:T151129)
Worked on linking to Wikipedia articles in the statements on an ArticlePlaceholder (phabricator:T113955)
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
Administrators, bureaucrats, oversighters and checkusers can now use two-factor authentication. This makes their Wikimedia accounts more secure. This can be turned on in Special:Preferences. There are discussions on how to best turn it on for everyone. [16]
You can now search for file properties. For example you can search for media type, how big a file is or what resolution it has. [17]
A hacker group is hacking Wikimedia accounts. They can probably do this because users have the same passwords on Wikimedia wikis as on other sites. Please have a password you use only on the Wikimedia wikis and nowhere else. This is especially important for administrators, bureaucrats, oversighters and checkusers. These users can also turn on two-factor authentication. [18]
Changes this week
There is no new MediaWiki version this week.
RevisionSlider will be a default feature on German, Arabic and Hebrew Wikipedia. This will happen on 22 November. It will come to other wikis later. [19][20][21]
Meetings
You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 22 November at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.
Future changes
It will be possible to do cross-wiki search. The developers who work on this are looking for communities that want to test this. [22]
Hovercards will leave the beta stage. The Wikimedia Foundation Reading Web team wants communities to set Hovercards as a default option for readers who are not logged in. Communities that are interested can say so on the Hovercards talk page. [23]
Hello, Davidbuddy9. Voting in the 2016 Arbitration Committee elections is open from Monday, 00:00, 21 November through Sunday, 23:59, 4 December to all unblocked users who have registered an account before Wednesday, 00:00, 28 October 2016 and have made at least 150 mainspace edits before Sunday, 00:00, 1 November 2016.
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.
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 this week
When someone tries to log in to a blocked account they will be blocked by a cookie. This means their browser will be blocked even if they change their IP address. This makes it more difficult for returning vandals. [24]
When you use Content Translation to adapt a template to a new translation it will work differently. You can adapt big templates such as infoboxes. Translators will have control over the template parameters. A first version of this is released this week. It is possible it will not work correctly with all templates. There will be more updates for this soon. [25]
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 29 November. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 30 November. It will be on all wikis from 1 December (calendar).
Gadgets will have a new option called "hidden". This means you can register gadgets that can't be turned on or off from the preferences page. Hiding gadgets was already possible by using [rights=hidden]. You should now use [hidden] instead. [rights=hidden] in old gadgets should be changed to [hidden]. [26][27]
Meetings
You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 29 November at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.
The Fossasia Opentech Submit in Singapore is looking for speakers. If you're in the area and want to introduce attendees to Wikidata, feel free to send your application!
November 28, 2016 was supposed to mark the end of the first round. However, we needed 16 competitors to move on, and currently only 10 have completed articles.
Thus, the judges have come together to let the participants decide what we shall do. Please complete this quick survey to let us know whether you would like a holiday break.
There will be two options for what we will do next in terms of Round 2 depending on the results of this poll.
If the survey indicates that the competitors want a break, we will have a 2nd round after the break ends with just the 10 competitors who have reviewed articles, starting in January (with a specific date TBA).
If the survey does not indicate that participants want a break, we will extend Round 1 until the end of December.
To subscribe or unsubscribe to future GA Cup newsletters, please add or remove your name to our mailing list. If you are a participant, you will be on the mailing list no matter what as this is the easiest way to communicate between all participants.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Everyone can now see Special:UserRights. Previously only those who could change user rights could. Other users got an error message. [29]
ORES can now show how likely an edit is to be damaging to the wiki with different colours. This only works for languages that have trained ORES to recognize damaging edits. [30]
Changes this week
You will now see categories with 0 pages in Special:Categories. Previously you did not see empty categories there. [31]
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 6 December. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 7 December. It will be on all wikis from 8 December (calendar).
Meetings
You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 6 December at 20:00 (UTC). See how to join.
Hello everyone, and welcome to the December 2016 GOCE newsletter. We had an October newsletter all set to go, but it looks like we never pushed the button to deliver it, so this one contains a few months of updates. We have been busy and successful!
Coordinator elections for the first half of 2017: Nominations are open for election of Coordinators for the first half of 2017. Please visit the election page to nominate yourself or another editor, and then return after December 15 to vote. Thanks for participating!
September Drive: The September drive was fruitful. We set out to remove July through October 2015 from our backlog (an ambitious 269 articles), and by the end of the month, we had cut that pile of oldest articles to just 83. We reduced our overall backlog by 97 articles, even with new copyedit tags being added to articles every day. We also handled 75% of the remaining Requests from August 2016. Overall, 19 editors recorded copy edits to 233 articles (over 378,000 words).
October Blitz: this one-week copy-editing blitz ran from 16 through 22 October; the theme was Requests, since the backlog was getting a bit long. Of the 16 editors who signed up, 10 editors completed 29 requests. Barnstars and rollover totals are located here. Thanks to all editors who took part.
November Drive: The November drive was a record-breaker! We set out to remove September through December 2015 from our backlog (239 articles), and by the end of the month, we had cut that pile of old articles to just 66, eliminating the two oldest months! We reduced our overall backlog by 523 articles, to a new record low of 1,414 articles, even with new tags being added to articles every day, which means we removed copy-editing tags from over 800 articles. We also handled all of the remaining Requests from October 2016. Officially, 14 editors recorded copy edits to 200 articles (over 312,000 words), but over 600 articles, usually quick fixes and short articles, were not recorded on the drive page.
Housekeeping note: we do not send a newsletter before every drive or blitz. To have a better chance of knowing when the next event will start, add the GOCE's message box to your Watchlist.
Thank you all again for your participation; we wouldn't be able to achieve what we have without you! Cheers from your GOCE coordinators: Jonesey95, Corinne and Tdslk.
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
It is with great sadness that we share the news of the passing of User:Coyau. He was a very active editor on Wikidata and the other Wikimedia projects. He will be deeply missed by his friends and family but his great work on open culture will stay. Feel free to browse and share his work. Thanks Guillaume for this message.
