This is an archive of past discussions with User:GeneralNotability. 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.
Welcome to Wikipedia. Although we invite everyone to contribute constructively to our encyclopedia, at least one of your recent edits, such as the one you made to User talk:Primefac, was not in accordance with the interests of the Cabal, and as soon as we figure out how to do so, it will be reverted or removed. Please use the sandbox for any test edits you would like to make, or harsh realities and dark truths of Wikipedia bias you'd like to expose, and take a look at the welcome page to learn more about contributing to our encyclopedia. Thank you. Majavah (talk!) 06:25, 1 April 2021 (UTC)
Following a request for comment, F7 (invalid fair-use claim) subcriterion a has been deprecated; it covered immediate deletion of non-free media with invalid fair-use tags.
Following a request for comment, page movers were granted the delete-redirect userright, which allows moving a page over a single-revision redirect, regardless of that redirect's target.
Technical news
When you move a page that many editors have on their watchlist the history can be split and it might also not be possible to move it again for a while. This is because of a job queue problem. (T278350)
Code to support some very old web browsers is being removed. This could cause issues in those browsers. (T277803)
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
Editors can collapse part of an article so you have to click on it to see it. When you click a link to a section inside collapsed content it will now expand to show the section. The browser will scroll down to the section. Previously such links didn't work unless you manually expanded the content first. [1]
Changes later this week
The citoidAPI will use for example 2010-12-XX instead of 2010-12 for dates with a month but no days. This is because 2010-12 could be confused with 2010-2012 instead of December 2010. This is called level 1 instead of level 0 in the Extended Date/Time Format. [2]
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 6 April. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 7 April. It will be on all wikis from 8 April (calendar).
Future changes
PAWS can now connect to the new Wiki Replicas. Cross-database JOINS will no longer work from 28 April. There is a new way to connect to the databases. Until 28 April both ways to connect to the databases will work. If you think this affects you and you need help you can post on Phabricator or on Wikitech.
On March 7 the Wide Field Camera 3 on Hubble Space Telescope entered safe mode after a software error was detected. And took days until the camera was fully active again. read more
The Space Launch System completed a full-duration (8 minutes and 20 seconds) static fire of the core stage on March 18, after an earler test in January failed to complete the test.
Featured Content
The Apollo 12 article was promoted to a Featured Article on March 27, 2021. After being nominated by Wehwalt who is a significant contributor to the article.
The Hubble Space Telescope was launched into low Earth orbit in 1990 and remains in operation. It was not the first space telescope, but it is one of the largest and most versatile, renowned both as a vital research tool and as a public relations boon for astronomy. The Hubble telescope is named after astronomer Edwin Hubble and is one of NASA's Great Observatories.
Image of the month.
Astronaut Roger B. Chaffee is shown at console in the Mission Control Center, Houston, Texas during the Gemini-Titan 3 flight.
Since February, 28 new pages have been added to Spaceflight and Apollo 12 has been promoted to featured article! 1 more article has reached GA-class, with 1 more file, 6 more C-class, 14 more start-class and 8 new stub class articles.
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Newsletter contributors: Ninney & Terasail
Hi, I was recently doing a review of all the page restrictions I've placed or taken ownership of over the years, and I noticed that a majority of the pages were no longer battlegrounds and didn't require restrictions anymore. I was looking backwards a couple of months on the article history and talk page looking for major diputes, and for the most part things were pretty quiet. I've removed the BRD restrictions from about 70% of the articles that I had put them on, and the 1RR restrictions from probably 90% of pages.
I figured while I was at it I might as well try to track down the other pages with active sanctions and see if the admins who placed them might also be interested in doing a similar review. The following list might not be complete, but it's the best I could come up with by tracking usages of the American Politics AE template. (Perhaps you can compare it to whatever system you have for tracking your active sanctions.) For convenience I'll put links to the edit notice page and the talk page.
I'm hoping that removing some of these restrictions can help restore some sense of normalcy to the topic area. In any case I hope this list is helpful. ~Awilley (talk)00:03, 9 April 2021 (UTC)
Hi, that user reverted your edits trying to possibly promote that non-RS app/social media link [3]. I've reverted them and issued a level-2 warning for WP:PROMOhere. I replaced that source yesterday with RS sources and expanded that part. - Fylindfotberserk (talk) 07:51, 11 April 2021 (UTC)
First, does the entire case need to be merged, or is there just one section that was filed under the wrong master? If the latter, copy the section with attribution (i.e. edit summary to the effect of "Copying incorrectly filed case from (link to source page), see that page's history for attribution). In this case, it's the entire case, move on to step 2.
Make sure the pages don't have any overlapping history (last edit on target page must have been before the first edit of the current page). If they do have overlapping history, you copy with attribution instead - merging pages when they have overlapping revisions leads to a messy history. In this case, there is no overlapping edit history, so you're good to proceed.
If you're here, you can use spihelper's case merge! Go to the case that needs to be merged, open up spihelper, under the date dropdown click "All Sections," then check "Move/merge full case (Clerk only)". You'll be prompted for the name of the correct sockmaster, have to acknowledge that you want to perform a histmerge, and then spihelper will take care of the merge for you (since the target is older than the current page, you can't use Special:MergeHistory, you have to do the old-fashioned delete + copy + undelete).
If the case you were merging had an archive, check the new case's archive and reorder as necessary; not needed in this case.
Retag socks as needed.
I know this sounds complicated, but once you've done it a couple times it's pretty painless. If you do run into any issues, ping me and I can help you sort them out. GeneralNotability (talk) 02:46, 13 April 2021 (UTC)
GeneralNotability, thanks - I think I've done that right, appreciate the steer, that was fairly straightforward, good old spihelper :). If you come across a case that requires a more complicated histmerge at any point, I'd appreciate the chance to watch you work on it so I can get a handle on what needs to be done. Cheers GirthSummit (blether)07:03, 13 April 2021 (UTC)
SPI question
Greetings. I saw that you blocked user:Pealnotch, and part of the reason was "yet another member of the Camella spam group, possibly also block-evading". An article they created was moved to draft by MER-C as a UPE concern. That article, Lessandra, was moved back to mainspace by another new user, user:DaveSkylar. The article was also worked on by another blocked editor, user:Theniftymom2021, as well as by another new editor, user:Repaypolk. My question is, is the appropriate venue to report something like this SPI? Or is there a better way to go about it? Onel5969TT me15:05, 12 April 2021 (UTC)
Onel5969, that's a good question. I don't think we have a proper SPI for this group, but it would not have been wrong to file it at SPI. Posting to my talk page works too :). Repaypolk has my attention, but behavior is inconsistent with the rest of this farm. Blocked DaveSkylar, moved Lessandra back to draft, ECP move-protected it for good measure. GeneralNotability (talk) 02:52, 13 April 2021 (UTC)
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
Email to the Wikimedia wikis are handled by groups of Wikimedia editors. These volunteer response teams now use Znuny instead of OTRS. The functions and interface remain the same. The volunteer administrators will give more details about the next steps soon. [6][7]
If you use syntax highlighting, you can see line numbers in the 2010 and 2017 wikitext editors when editing templates. This is to make it easier to see line breaks or talk about specific lines. Line numbers will soon come to all namespaces. [8][9][10]
Because of a technical change there could be problems with gadgets and scripts that have an edit summary area that looks similar to this one. If they look strange they should use mw.loader.using('mediawiki.action.edit.styles') to go back to how they looked before. [11]
The latest version of MediaWiki came to the Wikimedia wikis last week. There was no Tech News issue last week.
Changes later this week
There is no new MediaWiki version this week.
Future changes
The user group oversight will be renamed suppress. This is for technical reasons. This is the technical name. It doesn't affect what you call the editors with this user right on your wiki. This is planned to happen in two weeks. You can comment in Phabricator if you have objections.
I was about to open an SPI but decided not to because I felt the suspected master sock is now “stale”. My question is, why are some SPI's declined because the master sock is stale? and if you can, how long constitutes “stale” ? Celestina007 (talk) 22:10, 25 April 2021 (UTC)
Celestina007, "stale" can mean a few different things at SPI. From a technical (that is, CheckUser) perspective, an account is "stale" if it has not made any actions in 90 days (this generally can be found by seeing when their last edit or log action was, though it includes deleted edits). For IP addresses, we'll usually call them "stale" if they haven't edited in a week or so and the IP appears to move around frequently - that usually means the editor is on a different IP now and there's no point in blocking it. And in general...if none of the accounts in the SPI are blocked and the majority haven't edited in a long time, we usually won't bother with blocking them, since at that point a block would be punitive rather than preventative. GeneralNotability (talk) 00:54, 27 April 2021 (UTC)
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
Templates have parameters that can have specific values. It is possible to suggest values for editors with TemplateData. You can soon see them as a drop-down list in the visual editor. This is to help template users find the right values faster. [12][13][14]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 27 April. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 28 April. It will be on all wikis from 29 April (calendar).
