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.
The comments were closed while I was writing my reply, and I had an edit conflict. Let me ask you this: If Tazmin had made the exact same comments, but about a Biden voter instead, what would you think? BilCat (talk) 01:38, 1 May 2022 (UTC)
BilCat, what you're asking is an apples-to-oranges comparison. Tamzin's comments in Q14 are directed at a rather specific group: those people expressing avowed, continuing support for Donald Trump following the post-election misinformation generally and the events of January 6, 2021 in particular. Not just those who voted for Trump. You can't say "well, what if she said that about Biden," because, well, Biden didn't egg his followers on until they stormed the U.S. Capitol building. (Also, your question seems to presuppose I'm a Biden supporter...at the very least, I'm not engaged in anything resembling "avowed and continuing" support for him either!). GeneralNotability (talk) 02:07, 1 May 2022 (UTC)
Or, to put it differently: if Tamzin had merely said "I think Trump voters should be desysopped", and we were living in an alternate universe where Trump said "oh well, I lost, good game" a few days after the election, then I wouldn't be supporting her. GeneralNotability (talk) 02:10, 1 May 2022 (UTC)
You mean like Hillary and the Democrats did when Trump won the first time? LOL! The point is, who a person supports politically should have no bearing on their suitability to be an admin. Period. And from what I've seen lately, there are many people who would oppose supporting any admin who simply voted for Trump. I've seen admins openly say that. Scary. BilCat (talk) 03:16, 1 May 2022 (UTC)
BilCat, I'm not particularly interested in getting into extended political arguments here. Much to my displeasure, the past couple days have had me express more political opinions on-wiki than I think I ever have. I really don't have anything else to add on the matter other than acknowledging your stance. GeneralNotability (talk) 16:56, 1 May 2022 (UTC)
Honestly, I agree with you on that, and as a rule, I don't express my political opinions on Wikipedia. I just wish that was everyone's rule too. That's why I thinks Tamzim's comments were inappropriate, and I stand by that. You don't have to respond, and I won't add anymore here anyway. BilCat (talk) 17:34, 1 May 2022 (UTC)
I don't speak Spanish, but I think I can figure out 'Esta cuenta está bloqueada globalmente'. Looks like they've already been dealt with. GirthSummit (blether)16:51, 1 May 2022 (UTC)
Wikidata Bug Triage Hour on May 5th at 16:00 UTC, online. Open discussion - you can bring a Phabricator ticket that you care about or that needs to be improved.
May 3rd. Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call: The call will include presentations on two projects using Wikidata to enhance discoverability of archival and museum collections. Sharon Garewal (JSTOR) will present “Adding Wikidata QIDs to JSTOR Images,” and Daniela Rovida and Jennifer Brcka (University of Notre Dame) will present “‘Archives At’: An opportunity to leverage MARC to create Linked Open Data.” [1]
Workshop "Wikidata, Zotero and Cita": tools to understand the construction of knowledge (in Spanish) - YouTube
Georeferencing cultural heritage on Wikidata - YouTube
Theory of Machine Learning on Open Data: The Wikidata Case by Goran S. Milovanovic - YouTube
Introduction to SPARQL (Wikidata Query Service (in Czech) - YouTube
Wikidata: A Knowledge Graph for the Earth Sciences - YouTube
Tool of the week
User:Nikki/LowercaseLabels.js - is a userscript that adds a button when editing labels to change the text to lowercase.
EqualStreetNames - is a tool that maps the inequality of name attributions.
Other Noteworthy Stuff
OpenRefine is running its two-yearly user survey! Do you use OpenRefine? Then fill in the survey to tell us how and why you use OpenRefine. Results and outcomes will inform future decisions about the tool.
The April update for the Wikidata Query Service scaling project is now available.
Lexicographical data: We are finishing up the information box that should help new users understand quickly what lexicographical data is. We also added the help text to encourage people to check if the Lexeme already exists before creating one.
REST API: We started working on the REST routes to get all statements of an Item and retrieve a single statement from an Item.
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
On all remaining wikis (group 2), the software to play videos and audio files on pages has now changed. The old player has been removed. Some audio players will become wider after this change. The new player has been a beta feature for over four years. [2][3]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 3 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 4 May. It will be on all wikis from 5 May (calendar).
Future changes
The developers are working on talk pages in the Wikipedia app for iOS. You can give feedback. You can take the survey in English, German, Hebrew or Chinese.
Several CSS IDs related to MediaWiki interface messages will be removed. Technical editors should please review the list of IDs and links to their existing uses. These include #mw-anon-edit-warning, #mw-undelete-revision and 3 others.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Last week, there was a problem with Wikidata's search autocomplete. This has now been fixed. [8]
Last week, all wikis had slow access or no access for 20 minutes, for logged-in users and non-cached pages. This was caused by a problem with a database change. [9]
The Vector (2022) skin will be set as the default on several more wikis, including Arabic and Catalan Wikipedias. Logged-in users will be able to switch back to the old Vector (2010). See the latest update about Vector (2022).
Future meetings
The next open meeting with the Web team about Vector (2022) will take place on 17 May. The following meetings are currently planned for: 7 June, 21 June, 5 July, 19 July.
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.
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.
The Wikimedia Hackathon will take place online on May 20–22, 2022. Are you interested in presenting something around Wikidata and Wikibase during the hackathon? Book a slot in the Wikidata+Wikibase room: Wikimedia Hackathon 2022/Schedule.
Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call May 17, 2022: Anson Parker and Lucy Carr-Jones (University of Virigina Claude Moore Health Sciences Library) will be talking about their Open Data Dashboard for analyzing University of Virginia Health publications using EuropePMC publication data as well as work to group publications based on institutional departments in Wikidata and how much of their content is "open." Agenda
LIVE Wikidata editing #80 - YouTube, Facebook, May 21 at 18:00 UTC
REST API: We continued implementing the REST routes to get all statements of an Item and retrieve a single statement from an Item (phab:T305988, phab:T307087, phab:T307088)
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 Wikimedia Hackathon 2022 will take place online on May 20–22. It will be in English. There are also local hackathon meetups in Germany, Ghana, Greece, India, Nigeria and the United States. Technically interested Wikimedians can work on software projects and learn new skills. You can also host a session or post a project you want to work on.
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 17 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 18 May. It will be on all wikis from 19 May (calendar).
Future changes
You can soon edit translatable pages in the visual editor. Translatable pages exist on for examples Meta and Commons. [12]
Hi, I was wondering if the script could be "enhanced" to allow the editor using it to control what happens to their watchlist. When I block editors with the script, it adds the blocked account to my watchlist. Sometimes that's okay, but other times it's not. For example, at Wikipedia:Sockpuppet investigations/Rowingasia, I blocked I think over 60 accounts, and there was no reason to have them on my watchlist, so I had to remove them one by one, which was tedious and time-consuming. Is it possible to do something? Thanks.--Bbb23 (talk) 00:11, 20 May 2022 (UTC)
At the time of the last newsletter (No.26, September 2021), the backlog was 'only' just over 6,000 articles. In the past six months, the backlog has reached nearly 16,000, a staggering level not seen in several years. A very small number of users had been doing the vast majority of the reviews. Due to "burn-out", we have recently lost most of this effort. Furthermore, several reviewers have been stripped of the user right for abuse of privilege and the articles they patrolled were put back in the queue.
Several discussions on the state of the process have taken place on the talk page, but there has been no action to make any changes. The project also lacks coordination since the "position" is vacant.
In the last 30 days, only 100 reviewers have made more than 8 patrols and only 50 have averaged one review a day. There are currently 840 New Page Reviewers, but about a third have not had any activity in the past month. All 839 administrators have this permission, but only about a dozen significantly contribute to NPP.
This means we have an active pool of about 450 to address the backlog. We cannot rely on a few to do most of the work as that inevitably leads to burnout. A fairly experienced reviewer can usually do a review in a few minutes. If every active reviewer would patrol just one article per day, the backlog would very quickly disappear.
If you have noticed a user with a good understanding of Wikipedia notability and deletion, do suggest they help the effort by placing {{subst:NPR invite}} on their talk page.
If you are no longer very active on Wikipedia or you no longer wish to be part of the New Page Reviewer user group, please consider asking any admin to remove you from the list. This will enable NPP to have a better overview of its performance and what improvements need to be made to the process and its software.
To opt-out of future mailings, please remove yourself here. Sent 05:17, 23 May 2022 (UTC)
Tech News: 2022-21
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 using the mobile web interface can now access Special:Block directly from user pages. [13]
The Growth team maintains a mentorship program for newcomers. Previously, newcomers weren't able to opt out from the program. Starting May 19, 2022, newcomers are able to fully opt out from Growth mentorship, in case they do not wish to have any mentor at all. [15]
Some editors cannot access the content translation tool if they load it by clicking from the contributions menu. This problem is being worked on. It should still work properly if accessed directly via Special:ContentTranslation. [16]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 24 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 25 May. It will be on all wikis from 26 May (calendar).
Future changes
Gadget and user scripts developers are invited to give feedback on a proposed technical policy aiming to improve support from MediaWiki developers. [17]
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
In the AbuseFilter extension, an ip_in_ranges() function has been introduced to check if an IP is in any of the ranges. Wikis are advised to combine multiple ip_in_range() expressions joined by | into a single expression for better performance. You can use the search function on Special:AbuseFilter to locate its usage. [18]
The IP Info feature which helps abuse fighters access information about IPs, has been deployed to all wikis as a beta feature. This comes after weeks of beta testing on test.wikipedia.org.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 31 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 1 June. It will be on all wikis from 2 June (calendar).
Some wikis will be in read-only for a few minutes because of a switch of their main database. It will be performed on 31 May at 07:00 UTC (targeted wikis).
The New Topic Tool will be deployed for all editors at most wikis soon. You will be able to opt out from within the tool and in Preferences. [19][20]
The list=usercontribs API will support fetching contributions from an IP range soon. API users can set the uciprange parameter to get contributions from any IP range within the limit. [21]
A new parser function will be introduced: {{=}}. It will replace existing templates named "=". It will insert an equal sign. This can be used to escape the equal sign in the parameter values of templates. [22]
