User talk:Alsee/Archive 11

This is an archive of past discussions with User:Alsee. 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.

Archive 5

←

Archive 9

→

Please comment on Wikipedia talk:Community portal

The feedback request service is asking for participation in this request for comment on Wikipedia talk:Community portal. Legobot (talk) 04:32, 25 March 2019 (UTC)

Tech News: 2019-13

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

The new version of the content translation tool will be used for all new translations. The older version will still be used for translations that were started with it. Most users won’t see any change. More than 80% of the published translations are already using the new version. [1]

Problems

There was a problem with editing with Safari on iOS. When you wrote an edit summary you couldn't save the edit. This has now been fixed. [2]
The editing toolbar sometimes disappears when you scroll on iOS devices. This will be fixed soon. [3]
Wikis can over-ride interface messages on-wiki. A problem meant that sometimes an old versions of any changed messages were shown instead. This included the sitenotice and other important parts of the interface. This was fixed at around 2019-03-22 16:00 (UTC). Logged-out users may still get the wrong message. Purging the page should fix it for them. [4]

Changes later this week

The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 26 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 27 March. It will be on all wikis from 28 March (calendar).

Meetings

You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 27 March at 16:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

18:04, 25 March 2019 (UTC)

Please comment on Wikipedia:Reliable sources/Noticeboard

The feedback request service is asking for participation in this request for comment on Wikipedia:Reliable sources/Noticeboard. Legobot (talk) 04:28, 29 March 2019 (UTC)

Please comment on Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)

The feedback request service is asking for participation in this request for comment on Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals). Legobot (talk) 04:30, 1 April 2019 (UTC)

Tech News: 2019-14

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Changes later this week

Notifications tell you about things that happen on the wiki. You can turn on notifications about new links to pages you created. For performance reasons you can no longer get e-mails about this. [5]
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 2 April. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 3 April. It will be on all wikis from 4 April (calendar).

Meetings

You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 3 April at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

16:28, 1 April 2019 (UTC)

Please comment on Wikipedia:Reliable sources/Noticeboard

The feedback request service is asking for participation in this request for comment on Wikipedia:Reliable sources/Noticeboard. Legobot (talk) 04:34, 4 April 2019 (UTC)

Please comment on Wikipedia talk:Criteria for speedy deletion

The feedback request service is asking for participation in this request for comment on Wikipedia talk:Criteria for speedy deletion. Legobot (talk) 04:34, 7 April 2019 (UTC)

Tech News: 2019-15

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

More wikis are now testing visual editor section editing for mobile users. You can read more.
Admins on French and Polish Wikipedia can block someone from editing a page or a namespace. If your wiki wants to get these blocks before they are available to all wikis, you can tell the developers. [6][7]

Problems

You will be able read but not edit most wikis for 30 minutes on 11 April at 05:00 (UTC). This is because of a hardware problem. You can see a list of the affected wikis. [8]
A map update caused some problems on 29 March and 30 March. It was rolled back. [9]
Pages on some Wikivoyages had problems with the top headline. This has been fixed. [10]

Changes later this week

When you add an edit summary the VisualEditor will search your recent edit summaries in case you want to re-use one. This works in both the visual and wikitext modes on desktop. It also works on the mobile site. [11]
The Wikimedia wikis will get a URL shortener. This will work from 11 April. You can read more. [12]
The {{REVISIONID}} magic word will no longer work. This is for performance reasons. When you preview a page it will return "" (empty string). When you read a page it will return "-" (dash). For now this will only affect content namespaces. [13]
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 9 April. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 10 April. It will be on all wikis from 11 April (calendar).

Meetings

You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 10 April at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

You will be able to preview references. This means that when you hover over the link you will get a popup that shows you a preview of the reference. It will work much like page previews. This is so you don't have to go to the bottom of the page to see a reference. This will now be available as a beta feature on German and Arabic Wikipedia. [14][15]
The Wikidata JSON output will change. Empty containers will be serialised as empty objects. This is a breaking change that will affect tools that use JSON outputs and APIs. It will happen on 30 April. You can read more and see how to test your code.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

18:24, 8 April 2019 (UTC)

Please comment on Wikipedia:Arbitration/Policy/Proposed amendment (April 2019)

The feedback request service is asking for participation in this request for comment on Wikipedia:Arbitration/Policy/Proposed amendment (April 2019). Legobot (talk) 04:30, 11 April 2019 (UTC)

Tech News: 2019-16

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

All wikis now have the TemplateWizard for the wikitext editor.

Changes later this week

The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 16 April. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 17 April. It will be on all wikis from 18 April (calendar).

Meetings

You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 17 April at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

Wikidata will get a new constraint status called suggestion. This will change how the WikibaseQualityConstraints constraint checking API works. [16][17]
You can test the depicts property for structured data on Commons.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

23:00, 15 April 2019 (UTC)

Please comment on Talk:Ralph Northam

The feedback request service is asking for participation in this request for comment on Talk:Ralph Northam. Legobot (talk) 04:24, 18 April 2019 (UTC)

Thank You

I just wanted to say thanks for trying to help me on my draft article but a couple of people have killed my motivation to actually work on it and when I asked how to make a stub article in the teahouse I was told making it a stub wasn't going to help the article at all because there is nothing that talks about it whatsoever and they didn't even answer my question. But that's beside the point I just wanted to say thanks again for trying to help me but idk what else to do on it because like that person said there is currently nothing online to help that article, so I'm essentially just going to give up on it as much as I regret it :/. Zebrazach20062 (talk) 15:28, 21 April 2019 (UTC)

Zebrazach20062 I had posted a bunch of sources to your usertalk, and I just copied them to the draft talk page so they don't get lost in case you leave. They might be adequate for Notability, but I'm not sure how good the gamer websites are. I posted to WT:WikiProject_Video_games#Are_these_sources_considered_adequate_for_notability asking for an opinion on them. Alsee (talk) 15:48, 21 April 2019 (UTC)

You didn't have to do that, but thank you Zebrazach20062 (talk) 18:08, 21 April 2019 (UTC)

Tech News: 2019-17

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

The advanced search function URL now shows which namespaces you search in. The namespace field is collapsed by default on the search page. You can also add new fields to the search interface through a hook. [18][19][20]
The wikis now look slightly different in the mobile web version. [21]

Changes later this week

There is no new MediaWiki version this week.

Meetings

You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 23 April at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

Wikipedia articles will have the sameAs meta property. It adds structured data. This makes it easier for search engines to find Wikipedia articles. It also makes it easier to reuse content. There will an A/B test. [22][23]

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

19:08, 23 April 2019 (UTC)

Please comment on Talk:Decline in insect populations

The feedback request service is asking for participation in this request for comment on Talk:Decline in insect populations. Legobot (talk) 04:25, 24 April 2019 (UTC)

Growth team updates #7

Welcome to the seventh newsletter from the Growth team!

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

Newcomer homepage release this week

The main feature that the team has been working on over the last month is the newcomer homepage. This feature gives newcomers a place on the wiki to get oriented, learn about editing, and see their impact (see the accompanying screenshot from Test Wikipedia). We intend to release this feature to Czech, Korean, and Vietnamese Wikipedias on May 2nd.

Like the other Growth team features, this will be deployed in a controlled experiment, in which half of newcomers will have access to their homepage and half will not. Users with the feature will be able to access it by clicking their username at the top of their browser, and it will only be available on desktop -- not mobile. Experienced users who want to see their homepage will be able to turn it on in their preferences.

Wikis receiving the newcomer homepage can expect these things:

Additional questions will come to the help desk from the "help module" on the homepage.
Mentors who have signed up for the "mentorship module" will start to receive questions on their user talk pages.
More users may create and edit user pages through the "start module".

Recent and future homepage development

The most important piece developed for the homepage over the last month is the "start module", which gives newcomers clear actions to take when they are new: add/confirm their email, go through a tutorial, start their user page. We learned about the need for this module from user tests last month. The next priorities for the newcomer homepage are:

Mobile design: to work well in mobile browsers, the homepage needs a separate design and engineering. See the accompanying mockups for potential mobile designs.
Features for discovery: only about 15% - 30% of newcomers will discover their homepage by clicking their username at the top of their browser. We are going to be designing additional ways for newcomers to find out about it.
Additional modules: the initial version contains some of the simpler modules. Potential upcoming modules include task recommendations and a feed of activity on the wiki.

Other updates

Help panel leading indicators: our team published data on the help panel's initial performance. The evaluation exposes some areas for improvement, but we think the help panel's behavior so far is healthy and that it is not having a negative impact on the wikis. We will be publishing additional data, making plans, and asking for community thoughts around the future of the help panel over the course of the next two weeks. If you are interested in trying out the help panel on your wiki, please let us know on our team's talk page.
Long term plans: the team had a week of planning meetings, in which we talked about some longer-term ideas for Growth work. Some of the top ideas are: to extend the newcomer homepage to help user's build their identity through a user profile, and to revisit the "engagement emails" project that the team put on hold. Over the next month, we will be asking for community conversation around how the team can spend our time in the next fiscal year, that starts in July.

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

16:18, 29 April 2019 (UTC)

Tech News: 2019-18

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

The Wikipedia app for Android now invites users to add Wikidata descriptions to Wikidata objects that have Wikipedia articles but no Wikidata descriptions. It will only invite users who have added a number of Wikidata descriptions in the app without being reverted. This is to avoid spam and bad edits. [24][25]

Problems

Tech News was late last week because of a MassMessage bug. Other newsletters had the same problem. [26]

Changes later this week

You will see when you last refreshed the recent changes page. This is so you can see how recent the changes are. [27]
When you write a comment in Structured Discussions but have not posted it yet your web browser will save it in local storage instead of session storage. This means you do not lose them even if you close your web browser. Structured Discussions used to be called Flow. [28]
You will be able to turn off milestone notifications. Milestone notifications congratulate you when you have made certain numbers of edits. [29]
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 30 April. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 1 May. It will be on all wikis from 2 May (calendar).

Meetings

You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 1 May at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

The Wikidata wb_terms table will be dropped. This will affect some Wikidata tools. They need to be updated. The table has become too big which is causing problems. This will happen on 29 May. You can read more. You can ask for help if you need it.
Wikimedia wikis will soon use a token when you log out. This changes how the API works. Some tools might need to be updated. [30]

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

22:27, 29 April 2019 (UTC)

Please comment on Talk:Cannabidiol

The feedback request service is asking for participation in this request for comment on Talk:Cannabidiol. Legobot (talk) 04:26, 30 April 2019 (UTC)

Please comment on Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)

The feedback request service is asking for participation in this request for comment on Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals). Legobot (talk) 04:28, 6 May 2019 (UTC)

Tech News: 2019-19

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Problems

Special:Watchlist can show the wrong information. It does not always show which edits are read and which are unread. The developers are working on solving the problem. [31]

Changes later this week

The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 7 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 8 May. It will be on all wikis from 9 May (calendar).

Meetings

You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 8 May at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

16:27, 6 May 2019 (UTC)

Please comment on Talk:List of the Mesozoic life of Wyoming

The feedback request service is asking for participation in this request for comment on Talk:List of the Mesozoic life of Wyoming. Legobot (talk) 04:24, 13 May 2019 (UTC)

Tech News: 2019-20

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Changes later this week

The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 14 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 15 May. It will be on all wikis from 16 May (calendar).

Meetings

You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 15 May at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

00:48, 14 May 2019 (UTC)

Please comment on Wikipedia talk:Template messages/User talk namespace

The feedback request service is asking for participation in this request for comment on Wikipedia talk:Template messages/User talk namespace. Legobot (talk) 04:34, 16 May 2019 (UTC)

Call for submissions for the Community Growth space at Wikimania 2019

Welcome to a special newsletter from the Growth team! This special newsletter is not about Wikimedia Foundation Growth team projects. Instead, it is a call for submissions for the Community Growth space at Wikimania 2019. We think that many people who receive this newsletter may have something valuable to contribute to this space at Wikimania. We haven't translated the newsletter, because Wikimania's language is English.

Please see below for the message from the organizers of the Community Growth space at Wikimania.

---

Wikimania 2019 is organized into 19 “spaces”, which are all accepting proposals for sessions. This message comes from the team organizing the Community Growth space.

Since you are interested b Growth team projects, and potentially involved in welcoming newcomers initiatives on your wiki, we would like to invite you to submit a proposal to the Community Growth space because of the actions you’ve done around newcomers on wikis. The deadline for submission is June 1. See below for Community Growth submission topics and session formats. Topics and sessions have to be in English.

In the Community Growth space, we will come together for discussions, presentations, and workshops that address these questions:

What is and is not working around attracting and retaining newcomers?
How should Wikimedia activities evolve to help communities grow and flourish?
How should our technology and culture evolve to help new populations to come online, participate and become community members?

Recommended topics: please see this link for the list for the list of recommended topics. If you do not plan to submit a proposal, you can also suggest additional topics here. If your topic does not fit into our space, remember that there are 18 other spaces that could welcome you sharing your knowledge and perspective.

Types of session. We prefer sessions that are participatory, interactive, promote conversations, and give a voice to parts of our movement that are heard less often. Please see this link for the list of recommended session formats.

Poster submissions. Posters are also a good way to introduce a topic, or show some results of an action. Please consider submitting one!

More information about the Community Growth space, topics, and submission formats is available on the proposal page.

Please submit your proposal. The reviews will happen at the beginning of June.

If you have questions about Wikimania in general, please ask them on the Wikimania wiki.

On behalf of the Community Growth leadership team, Trizek (WMF), 11:44, 16 May 2019 (UTC)

NPR Newsletter No.18

Hello Alsee,

WMF at work on NPP Improvements

Niharika Kohli, a product manager for the growth team, announced that work is underway in implementing improvements to New Page Patrol as part of the 2019 Community Wishlist and suggests all who are interested watch the project page on meta. Two requested improvements have already been completed. These are:

Allow filtering by no citations in page curation
Not having CSD and PRODs automatically marked as reviewed, reflecting current consensus among reviewers and current Twinkle functionality.

Reliable Sources for NPP

Rosguill has been compiling a list of reliable sources across countries and industries that can be used by new page patrollers to help judge whether an article topic is notable or not. At this point further discussion is needed about if and how this list should be used. Please consider joining the discussion about how this potentially valuable resource should be developed and used.

Backlog drive coming soon

Look for information on the an upcoming backlog drive in our next newsletter. If you'd like to help plan this drive, join in the discussion on the New Page Patrol talk page.

News

Following a request for comment, the subject-specific notability guideline for pornographic actors and models (WP:PORNBIO) was removed; in its place, editors should consult WP:ENT and WP:GNG.

Discussions of interest

A request for bot approval for a bot to patrol two kinds of redirects
There has been a lot discussion about Notability of Academics
What, if anything, would a SNG for Softball look like

Six Month Queue Data: Today – 7242 Low – 2393 High – 7250

Stay up to date with even more news – subscribe to The Signpost.
Go here to remove your name if you wish to opt-out of future mailings.
Delivered by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) on behalf of DannyS712 (talk) at 19:17, 17 May 2019 (UTC)

Please comment on Wikipedia:Reliable sources/Noticeboard

The feedback request service is asking for participation in this request for comment on Wikipedia:Reliable sources/Noticeboard. Legobot (talk) 04:33, 20 May 2019 (UTC)

Tech News: 2019-21

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

The report for phase 1 of the talk pages consultation 2019 has been published. Communities are invited to start phase 2 of the consultation on their wikis.

Problems

File descriptions for files from Commons were not shown properly on other Wikimedia wikis for a few days. For example the image descriptions and license information were missing. This has now been fixed. [32][33]
Some diffs show an error message when you try to see them. The developers are working on fixing it. It could be because of some edit comments. [34][35]

Changes later this week

The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 21 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 22 May. It will be on all wikis from 23 May (calendar).

Meetings

You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 22 May at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

The content translation tool on Wikipedia can use machine translations. There is a system to stop translations where the editors do not fix machine translation mistakes. This warns or stops them if they seem to just copy what the machine translation gives them. If this system is too strict or not strict enough you can tell the language team. [36]
The Wikidata wbeditentity API endpoint will remove all aliases if the request includes an empty alias. This is how it supposed to work. It has not been working this way because of a bug. This will start on 12 June. [37]

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

13:03, 20 May 2019 (UTC)

Please comment on Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)

The feedback request service is asking for participation in this request for comment on Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals). Legobot (talk) 04:29, 24 May 2019 (UTC)

Tech News: 2019-22

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Changes later this week

Big changes to the replica database will happen on 3 June. Some tools on Cloud Services will stop working if the maintainers do not update them to use the new schema. This probably affects tools that query for revisions or log entries made by a user. [38][39]
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 28 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 29 May. It will be on all wikis from 30 May (calendar).

Meetings

You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 29 May at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

15:33, 27 May 2019 (UTC)

Please comment on Wikipedia talk:Biographies of living persons

The feedback request service is asking for participation in this request for comment on Wikipedia talk:Biographies of living persons. Legobot (talk) 04:31, 30 May 2019 (UTC)

Please comment on Wikipedia:Reliable sources/Noticeboard

The feedback request service is asking for participation in this request for comment on Wikipedia:Reliable sources/Noticeboard. Legobot (talk) 04:31, 2 June 2019 (UTC)

Tech News: 2019-23

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent changes

You can now write all special letters in all African Wikipedia languages. This works in the desktop version. [40]
There is now a field called depicts on Commons. This is a way to show what is in a picture with the help of Wikidata. It is still in development. [41]
Some tools on Toolforge may break on or after 3 June because of database changes. Maintainers should update their tools to use the new schema. [42][43]

Problems

You will be able to read but not to edit Wikimedia Commons for 30 minutes on 19 June at 05:00 (UTC). This is to fix a hardware problem. [44]

Changes later this week

Some wikis have one tab for the visual editor and one tab for a wikitext editor. Others wikis just have one tab. If your wiki has two tabs, clicking a link to create a new page has always opened a wikitext editor. It will now open the editor you used the last time you edited. [45]
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 4 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 5 May. It will be on all wikis from 6 May (calendar).

Meetings

You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 5 May at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

15:24, 3 June 2019 (UTC)

Question

Just cos u're a wikipedia dinosaur: What's the best path to finding out if a user is an admin from the point of encounter- mostly signatures and edit histories? Thanks! Usedtobecool ^TALK 12:35, 4 June 2019 (UTC)

Usedtobecool there's a deeply entrenched idea that an admin is "just another editor" when they're not acting in a formal capacity, so I think there's a general aversion to anything that would make admin-status stand out on a passing encounter. When I do want to check, the easiest method I've found is to go to their contribution history, go to the bottom of the page, and click User rights. Note: that link doesn't seem to exist on some of the foreign wikis. A possibly quicker method, which I haven't been using... would be to just try loading the page WP:Requests_for_adminship/USERNAME. I expect that would get an accurate answer in almost all cases. Alsee (talk) 13:36, 4 June 2019 (UTC)

AfD for Coach Meddy

Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Coach Meddy is currently a red link at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Log/2019 June 4. Do you plan to create this AfD page, or should I remove the red link from the log? – Lord Bolingbroke (talk) 23:15, 4 June 2019 (UTC)

Lord Bolingbroke thanx, but I think I have it all cleaned up now. Twinkle was glitching on me, perhaps because my AFD text was long. Alsee (talk) 23:49, 4 June 2019 (UTC)

Weird. If I understand what happened correctly, Twinkle added an AfD tag to the article and added the deletion discussion page (Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Coach Meddy) to the log, but didn't actually create the discussion page? Thanks for tidying up at any rate. – Lord Bolingbroke (talk) 00:03, 5 June 2019 (UTC)

Lord Bolingbroke correct. Twinkle was spitting out a bunch of error messages about an incorrect token when I tried to save the AFD form. At first I thought it was because I took so long between clicking Twinkle-AFD and eventually saving. (I had to re-write about half of it from scratch, ugh.) But it errored again even when I wrote it in notepad and saved the AFD form with only minor time spent editing. I'm guessing it didn't like the length, or maybe the {{cot}}/{{cob}}? Or maybe just some random internet glitch. Shrug. Alsee (talk) 00:12, 5 June 2019 (UTC)

¯\_(ツ)_/¯ I've never encountered anything like that before. Oh well, sometimes it's good to slow down and do things by hand anyway. – Lord Bolingbroke (talk) 00:30, 5 June 2019 (UTC)

Sorry to eavesdrop. Let the devs know, maybe? Usedtobecool ^TALK 07:19, 5 June 2019 (UTC)

Greetings Usedtobecool. Coincidentally I have lots of experience engaging the Foundation and stuff like bug reports. If any further problems turn up I'd be happy to take care of this. However at the moment it's a brief glitch, for one person, of unclear nature, and I didn't properly take note of the error messages that popped up. There's a good chance that the issue is isolated to Twinkle - an AFD nomination involves three edits and the first two edits of the process did go through correctly. It's possible Twinkle was unhappy with my abnormally-long AFD nomination or something. Any report I filed right now would be abysmally vague. Alsee (talk) 14:48, 5 June 2019 (UTC)

Yeah, sure, of course, duh :D Removing from watchlist now; no more barging in lol :) See you around! Usedtobecool ^TALK 16:03, 5 June 2019 (UTC)

Please comment on Wikipedia:Reliable sources/Noticeboard

The feedback request service is asking for participation in this request for comment on Wikipedia:Reliable sources/Noticeboard. Legobot (talk) 04:30, 6 June 2019 (UTC)

June 2019

Hello. This is a message to let you know that one or more of your recent contributions, such as the edit you made to Prakash Neupane, did not appear constructive and has been reverted. Please take some time to familiarise yourself with our policies and guidelines. You can find information about these at our welcome page which also provides further information about contributing constructively to this encyclopedia. If you only meant to make test edits, please use the sandbox for that. If you think I made a mistake, or if you have any questions, you may leave a message on my talk page. Being a Nepali editor I even don't know how many workers and contributors are there then how can you directly tell and remove the content? this is really something fishy here and you can't remove it at your own. Owlf 20:30, 6 June 2019 (UTC)

Owlf I was just in the middle of posting on your talk page, but we can discuss it here. First, Don't template the regulars... I'm not a new user and it should be obvious that my edit was not a test edit.

Regarding your revert at Prakash Neupane, and your question: How can any international editor can tell this is self-published and how can they know how many peoples are wroking on these online newspaper?

The kathmandutribune.com/about page helpfully tells us that the entire "staff" of this "newspaper" consists of two people, plus two foreign correspondents. The byline of the cited piece is By Kathmandu Tribune, obviously indicating it was WP:SELFPUBLISHED by the website owner with zero editorial oversight. Furthermore each piece on the site has a handy pageview counter. Pages on the site have negligible readership, and in many cases a significant percentage of that "readership" of their articles is actually just Wikipedia editors checking up on refs that have been added pointing to those pages. I have also seen sufficient evidence (which hopefully I don't need to dig up) that the site posts paid promotional content.

As a fellow editor with the WP:New pages patrol right, hopefully my reply offered some helpful tips on how to spot these sorts of impressive-looking but unreliable tiny "online newspaper" websites. Kathmandu Tribune does not qualify as a Reliable Source for anything substantial, and it definitely doesn't qualify as a Reliable Source for anything potentially promotional. The article for Kathmandu Tribune is one of a half-dozen currently open AFDs, involving multiple accounts making blatantly promotional COI edits.

I request that you self-revert your edit that restored this source to the article. Thanks. Alsee (talk) 21:16, 6 June 2019 (UTC)

RSN RfC

So first I want to say that I'm not disputing your !vote - you can come to whatever conclusion you think is appropriate and I totally respect that. I happen to think the source is RS but biased (the authors are for the most part established academics) myself, so I can certainly see how others would disagree. AFAICR I never added any content on the basis of these authors myself (though I did undo some blanket reverts by Icewhiz and FR which used this source but in those cases the issues went beyond just Chodakiewicz) My concern was mostly with regard to you "buying in" into the nonsense that Icewhiz is peddling (I'm concerned that others may as well too, precisely because they only "skim" the diffs - which don't show what he claims they show - and jump to conclusions). Volunteer Marek (talk) 21:09, 9 June 2019 (UTC)

Tech News: 2019-24

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 create a PDF from a page on the wiki this is now done by Proton. Before this we used Electron. It should look the same but work better. Both use Chromium. This is a different system from when you collect several articles into a book and make a PDF from them. [46][47]
The Flagged Revisions extension now uses the standard OOUI icons. There will be additional minor fixes for positioning in the next deployment. [48]
Bots and other scripts that do not set an identifiable User-Agent may find their requests strictly rate-limited until they identify themselves properly. [49]

Problems

Please check if the Flagged Revisions configuration on your wiki is as you expect (or as it was a few weeks ago). If not, please report it. [50]

Changes later this week

There is no new MediaWiki version this week.

Meetings

You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 12 June at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

17:06, 10 June 2019 (UTC)

Please comment on Talk:Tonsillectomy

The feedback request service is asking for participation in this request for comment on Talk:Tonsillectomy. Legobot (talk) 04:27, 13 June 2019 (UTC)

Growth team updates #8

Welcome to the eighth newsletter from the Growth team!

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

May was a busy month, and we apologize for a slightly late newsletter.

General news

The Growth team will begin to work with the Arabic Wikipedia community as a new target wiki. This is in addition to Korean, Czech, and Vietnamese Wikipedias.
Several members of the Growth team attended Wikimedia Hackathon. To see what we worked on and learned, read this update (in English).
Wikimania 2019 is coming up in August. The conference will include a "Community Growth" space, for sessions about how our communities expand through software and programs.

Early results from newcomer homepage release

The newcomer homepage was deployed in Czech and Korean Wikipedias on May 6 for desktop users. It is deployed in an A/B test, so that half of newcomers have access to the homepage and half do not. They access it by clicking on their username in their personal tools along the top of the window.
After about a month of usage, we see a few interesting trends. We think that the usage is going well so far, as we continue to work on the feature
- About half of users who visit the homepage click on a link or button.
- About half of users visit the homepage more than once, with about a fifth of users visiting on multiple days.
- Users are interacting with all the different modules on the page -- there is no clear favorite.
- Users have been asking questions to their mentors -- but not on the help desk.

Next steps for homepage

Because we are seeing good reactions to the homepage from the first users, we are prioritizing work that helps more users find their homepage:
- Mobile homepage: the team is currently building the mobile version of the homepage. We tested this design with five users, giving us confidence that the design is strong.
- Features to aid discovery: only a minority of newcomers who have a homepage will find their homepage on their own. The team is designing features that help newcomers learn where to find their homepage. The most important feature will point to the homepage link using a GuidedTour.
User tests showed that the most important thing to add to the homepage are clear task recommendations to help newcomers get started with editing right away. This is the module that we will be working on next.

Future of team in the next year

The Growth team has been working since September 2018, and we're now planning for the work we'll be doing for the next fiscal year, which begins in July.
Though we have not yet developed a feature that clearly increases growth in our target wikis, we believe that the features we have been developing have high potential to increase growth if we continue to work on them.
Therefore, the team will continue to work on the features we have started, and we will develop related features that improve the overall newcomer experience. These features may include:
- Improvements to how newcomers can build their user pages and develop their on-wiki identity. See initial notes here.
- Improvements to how newcomers receive notifications on-wiki and through email, so that they quickly find out if other users are contacting them.
- Processes that help newcomers get awards or recognition for good work.
- Ways for newcomers to see the activity on the wiki and find others who share their interests.
We will start discussions with communities to help us define these ideas before we work on them.

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

09:02, 13 June 2019 (UTC)

Please comment on Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)

The feedback request service is asking for participation in this request for comment on Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals). Legobot (talk) 04:27, 16 June 2019 (UTC)

Tech News: 2019-25

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Problems

You will be able to read but not to edit Wikimedia Commons for 30 minutes on 19 June at 05:00 (UTC). This is to fix a hardware problem. [51]

Changes later this week

MIDI files can soon be played without the Score extension. You can then add them with [[File:Filename.midi]]. Later override_midi and override_audio will stop working. Instead you will need to add the MIDI file below the music score. [52]
A new video player will soon replace the old one. You will be able to enable it as a beta feature in your preferences. It will later be enabled for everyone if there are no big problems. [53]
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 18 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 19 June. It will be on all wikis from 20 June (calendar).

Meetings

You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 19 June at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

Some gadgets and user scripts still use the old wgEnableAPI and wgEnableWriteAPI values. These values are always true. They will soon be removed. This might break the gadgets and scripts. You should fix your gadgets to not use these values. [54]

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

20:37, 17 June 2019 (UTC)

Please comment on Wikipedia talk:Reliable sources/Noticeboard

The feedback request service is asking for participation in this request for comment on Wikipedia talk:Reliable sources/Noticeboard. Legobot (talk) 04:31, 19 June 2019 (UTC)

Please comment on Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)

The feedback request service is asking for participation in this request for comment on Wikipedia:Village pump (technical). Legobot (talk) 04:31, 22 June 2019 (UTC)

Gravedancing

I consider your comments under the vote I previously cast to be gravedancing and request you tread lightly, please. My WP:TBAN was for argument style (bludgeoning, they say), not bad faith. I don't appreciate your casting aspersions. Thanks. --Anomalapropos (talk) 06:23, 23 June 2019 (UTC)

Hi Anomalapropos. I do not believe my edit was gravedancing. I am pretty sure that you and I have never interacted before, and I have no hostility towards you.

The outcome of Wikipedia deletion discussions and other discussions is intended, ideally, be an impartial reflection of Wikipedia policies. It is not considered unusual to note in an AFD when a !vote might not carry full weight for some reason. Most commonly this is done when a user is new or a Single purpose account, because they may have little knowledge or concern for relevant Wikipedia policies. This is also done when there is concern that a !vote may have been Canvassed to the discussion, that the editor may have a conflict of interest in a subject, or when the editor has been sanctioned (usually a block). When a discussion is closed the closer will evaluate all of the rationales and information available, in the context of Wikipedia policy, and determine whether my note is relevant or whether to ignore it, when determining a formal consensus result.

I do not doubt that you were working with good intentions. I noticed that you received friendly advice from Valereee on your usertalk. I'm not sure if you are planning to join us to edit other topics or whether you would welcome more advice, but I would be happy to help explain how things work here and how to be more successful. Wikipedia is a very unusual place. When people first arrive here it can be like being dropped into a foreign country with an alien culture and unknown rules. Not everyone will fit in here - for most people "writing an encyclopedia as a fun hobby" is about as weird and incomprehensible as "jumping out of airplanes as a fun hobby". But if you do decide to join us, I promise you that the policies and norms on Wikipedia do come together in a way starts to make sense. An encyclopedia that "anyone can edit" should have fallen into worthless chaos the day the edit button appeared. But we found a way to make it work. Wikipedia has over five million articles, and those articles cover every controversial topic on the planet. Wikipedia is a collaborative project - most of our rules and expectations center on how to work with other editors. How to work with other editors even when they radically disagree. I can help explain how that works, if you plan to stay with us and you want a helpful guide.

An interesting note: It seems that an unusually high percentage of our editors are on the autistic spectrum. It's clear that for many on the spectrum, it is not a barrier to succeeding here. In fact in some ways it seems that it may even be a positive fit. Part of the way we work is to declare many of the messy "people issues" as invalid in our discussions and procedures. There are policies for how things should work, for what is or is not a valid argument, and those standards should be applied objectively regardless of how people feel about the article-subject. We're here to build an encyclopedia, and a good encyclopedia writer treats Hitler's biography the same he treats the biography of some great and heroic person. What information belongs in an neutral objective encyclopedia article? And how do we resolve disputes?

Part of making this all work is that we have a rather unique definition of "neutral". Our articles do not contain "truth". A main reason you got topic banned is because you made a very very common mistake. Basically, you were trying to argue Truth. Arguing Truth does not work here. Yes that seems bizarre to everyone at first, but it makes sense when you understand what we have to do here. On the internet, arguments about Truth are a never ending waste of time. On the internet, someone will come along and waste 42 months arguing the Truth of any side of any issue. It quickly becomes obvious that Wikipedia can't work that way. Those kinds of arguments are disruptive to our work. If a Truth-argument (or anything else) disrupts our work, it leads to topic bans or full blocks. So we can get back to work. There are other kinds of arguments that do work here. In some cases those other methods can be a powerful tool for winning disagreements on Wikipedia, but they require accepting that it's not about Truth. They require giving up any battle when those policies and methods go against your desired result. Alsee (talk) 14:03, 23 June 2019 (UTC)

Anomalapropos oops, I mean to say "I noticed that you received friendly advice from Valereee on your usertalk, and your positive response. I believe it is a good sign that you may do well if you decide to continue editing." I wanted to add that back in as a new comment so it didn't get lost. Alsee (talk) 14:11, 23 June 2019 (UTC)

Tech News: 2019-26

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Problems

The new version of MediaWiki for last week was not fully released due to issues. It was removed from most wikis on Tuesday and from test wikis on Thursday. [55]
Most wikis were slow and then briefly read-only last week due to one of the database servers having a problem. It is now replaced. [56]

Changes later this week

The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 25 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 26 June. It will be on all wikis from 27 June (calendar).

Meetings

You can watch or join the next Wikimedia Language showcase. It will be about the usage of Machine Translation in Wikimedia projects. The showcase will be on 26 June at 13:00 (UTC). A recording will be kept for later viewing
You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 26 June at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

17:29, 24 June 2019 (UTC)

Please comment on Talk:Rheumatoid arthritis

The feedback request service is asking for participation in this request for comment on Talk:Rheumatoid arthritis. Legobot (talk) 04:26, 29 June 2019 (UTC)

New Page Review newsletter July-August 2019

Hello Alsee,

WMF at work on NPP Improvements

More new features are being added to the feed, including the important red alert for previously deleted pages. This will only work if it is selected in your filters. Best is to 'select all'. Do take a moment to check out all the new features if you have not already done so. If anything is not working as it should, please let us know at NPR. There is now also a live queue of AfC submissions in the New Pages Feed. Feel free to review AfCs, but bear in mind that NPP is an official process and policy and is more important.

QUALITY of REVIEWING

Articles are still not always being checked thoroughly enough. If you are not sure what to do, leave the article for a more experienced reviewer. Please be on the alert for any incongruities in patrolling and help your colleagues where possible; report patrollers and autopatrolled article creators who are ostensibly undeclared paid editors. The displayed ORES alerts offer a greater 'at-a-glance' overview, but the new challenges in detecting unwanted new content and sub-standard reviewing do not necessarily make patrolling any easier, nevertheless the work may have a renewed interest factor of a different kind. A vibrant community of reviewers is always ready to help at NPR.

Backlog

The backlog is still far too high at between 7,000 and 8,000. Of around 700 user rights holders, 80% of the reviewing is being done by just TWO users. In the light of more and more subtle advertising and undeclared paid editing, New Page Reviewing is becoming more critical than ever.

Move to draft

NPR is triage, it is not a clean up clinic. This move feature is not limited to bios so you may have to slightly re-edit the text in the template before you save the move. Anything that is not fit for mainspace but which might have some promise can be draftified - particularly very poor English and machine and other low quality translations.

Notifying users

Remember to use the message feature if you are just tagging an article for maintenance rather than deletion. Otherwise articles are likely to remain perma-tagged. Many creators are SPA and have no intention of returning to Wikipedia. Use the feature too for leaving a friendly note note for the author of a first article you found well made or interesting. Many have told us they find such comments particularly welcoming and encouraging.

PERM

Admins are now taking advantage of the new time-limited user rights feature. If you have recently been accorded NPR, do check your user rights to see if this affects you. Depending on your user account preferences, you may receive automated notifications of your rights changes. Requests for permissions are not mini-RfAs. Helpful comments are welcome if absolutely necessary, but the bot does a lot of the work and the final decision is reserved for admins who do thorough research anyway.

Other news

School and academic holidays will begin soon in various places around the Western world. Be on the lookout for the usual increase in hoax, attack, and other junk pages.

Our next newsletter might be announcing details of a possible election for co-ordinators of NPR. If you think you have what it takes to micro manage NPR, take a look at New Page Review Coordinators - it's a job that requires a lot of time and dedication.

Stay up to date with even more news – subscribe to The Signpost.
Go here to remove your name if you wish to opt-out of future mailings.

MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 04:38, 30 June 2019 (UTC)

Tech News: 2019-27

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

The development of Wikidata Bridge has started. The goal is to allow Wikidata edits from Wikipedia. [57]

Problems

Sometimes pages load slowly for users routed to the Amsterdam data center. Investigation is in progress. [58]
Wikidata query service was overloaded between 11:50 UTC until 13:15 UTC on June 24. It has been fixed. [59]

Changes later this week

You will be able to read but not to edit all wikis for a short amount of time, on 3 July at 06:00 (UTC). This is to move a database. [60]
There is no deployment of a new version of MediaWiki on the wikis this week (calendar).

Meetings

You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 3 July at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

21:22, 1 July 2019 (UTC)

Please comment on Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)

The feedback request service is asking for participation in this request for comment on Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals). Legobot (talk) 04:33, 3 July 2019 (UTC)

Please comment on Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)

The feedback request service is asking for participation in this request for comment on Wikipedia:Village pump (technical). Legobot (talk) 04:29, 7 July 2019 (UTC)

Tech News: 2019-28

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

For event organizers, if you request a temporary lift of the IP cap for mass account creation, this will now also raise the edit rate limit for those new accounts at the event, which will prevent another bottleneck. [61]
Administrators at all Wiktionary, Wikivoyage, and Wikisource wikis are now able to use the new partial blocks feature. [62]

Changes later this week

The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 9 July. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 10 July. It will be on all wikis from 11 July (calendar).
The design of MediaWiki's software windows will change for desktop users. Layout will be simpler, buttons will be bolder and clearer, and close buttons will be just icons. This is like the mobile design. This will affect ContentTranslation, VisualEditor, TemplateWizard, and other tools. [63]

Meetings

You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 10 July at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

Wikidata will be in read-only mode on 30 July from 05:00 to 05:30 UTC because of a server switch. [64]
There will be a change in the name format of new Wikidata RDF dumps starting on 15 July. [65]

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

20:12, 8 July 2019 (UTC)

Please comment on Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)

The feedback request service is asking for participation in this request for comment on Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals). Legobot (talk) 04:30, 11 July 2019 (UTC)

Please comment on Wikipedia:Reliable sources/Noticeboard

The feedback request service is asking for participation in this request for comment on Wikipedia:Reliable sources/Noticeboard. Legobot (talk) 04:35, 15 July 2019 (UTC)

Tech News: 2019-29

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

The mobile web will get more advanced editing tools. Seven more Wikipedias can use them now. This works for Arabic, Indonesian, Italian, Persian, Japanese, Spanish and Thai Wikipedia. You can try the tools on the mobile web and give feedback. [66]

Changes later this week

The abuse filter system user will soon do maintenance edits on broken abuse filters. This user is called Edit filter and has administrator rights. This is meant to fix technical problems. It will not do any other changes. You can read more.
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 16 July. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 17 July. It will be on all wikis from 18 July (calendar).

Meetings

You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 17 July at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

The Wikipedia app for Android will invite users to add image captions to images on Commons. It will only invite users who have added a number of edits in the app without being reverted. This is to avoid spam and bad edits. You can read more and leave feedback. [67]

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

15:29, 15 July 2019 (UTC)

Editing News #1—July 2019

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

Did you know?

Did you know that you can use the visual editor on a mobile device?

Every article has a pencil icon at the top. Tap on the pencil icon to start editing.

Edit Cards

This is what the new Edit Cards for editing links in the mobile visual editor look like. You can try the prototype here: 📲 Try Edit Cards.

Welcome back to the Editing newsletter.

Since the last newsletter, the team has released two new features for the mobile visual editor and has started developing three more. All of this work is part of the team's goal to make editing on mobile web simpler.

Before talking about the team's recent releases, we have a question for you:

Are you willing to try a new way to add and change links?

If you are interested, we would value your input! You can try this new link tool in the mobile visual editor on a separate wiki.

Follow these instructions and share your experience:

📲 Try Edit Cards.

Recent releases

The mobile visual editor is a simpler editing tool, for smartphones and tablets using the mobile site. The Editing team has recently launched two new features to improve the mobile visual editor:

Section editing
- The purpose is to help contributors focus on their edits.
- The team studied this with an A/B test. This test showed that contributors who could use section editing were 1% more likely to publish the edits they started than people with only full-page editing.
Loading overlay
- The purpose is to smooth the transition between reading and editing.

Section editing and the new loading overlay are now available to everyone using the mobile visual editor.

New and active projects

This is a list of our most active projects. Watch these pages to learn about project updates and to share your input on new designs, prototypes and research findings.

Edit cards: This is a clearer way to add and edit links, citations, images, templates, etc. in articles. You can try this feature now. Go here to see how: 📲Try Edit Cards.
Mobile toolbar refresh: This project will learn if contributors are more successful when the editing tools are easier to recognize.
Mobile visual editor availability: This A/B test asks: Are newer contributors more successful if they use the mobile visual editor? We are collaborating with 20 Wikipedias to answer this question.
Usability improvements: This project will make the mobile visual editor easier to use. The goal is to let contributors stay focused on editing and to feel more confident in the editing tools.

Looking ahead

Wikimania: Several members of the Editing Team will be attending Wikimania in August 2019. They will lead a session about mobile editing in the Community Growth space. Talk to them about how editing can be improved.
Talk Pages: In the coming months, the Editing Team will begin improving talk pages and communication on the wikis.

Learning more

The VisualEditor on mobile is a good place to learn more about the projects we are working on. The team wants to talk with you about anything related to editing. If you have something to say or ask, please leave a message at Talk:VisualEditor on mobile.

PPelberg (WMF) (talk) and Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 21:24, 15 July 2019 (UTC)

Please comment on Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Icons

The feedback request service is asking for participation in this request for comment on Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Icons. Legobot (talk) 04:36, 18 July 2019 (UTC)

Tech News: 2019-30

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

Communities interested by easing newcomers' first steps can now benefit from the Growth team experiments on their wikis. Check the conditions and the request process.
The Coolest Tool Award 2019 is looking for nominations. You can recommend tools by July 29. The awarded tools will be presented at Wikimania. [68]

Problems

The release of the last version of MediaWiki (1.34.0-wmf.14) has been blocked for groups 1 and 2. [69]

Changes later this week

Phabricator database will be moved to a different server. Writes will be blocked on Thursday 25 July, between 05:30 and 06:00 AM UTC. Reads will remain unaffected. [70]
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 23 July. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 24 July. It will be on all wikis from 25 July (calendar).

Meetings

You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 24 July at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

Some items in the visual editor will change later this week. This will make it easier to edit links, citations, and templates on both desktop and mobile. [71][72]
With advanced search turned on you will be able to choose the sorting order of the search results when you do a search. [73][74]
Users who edit from IP addresses whitelisted on a request for temporary lift of the IP cap for mass account creation will bypass CAPTCHAs. This will happen in August. If you think this should not happen for some reason, please let us know.
The variable user_wpzero will be removed from AbuseFilter. A list of filters needing a fix is provided.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

13:07, 22 July 2019 (UTC)

Growth team updates #9

Welcome to the ninth newsletter from the Growth team!

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

Opening Growth features to more wikis

The Growth team has existed for about one year. During that time, we have developed several features that we think can help increase retention. Though we are still gathering data to detect scientifically whether the features increase retention, we think that some of the features are ready to be deployed on more wikis that want to experiment with them. If your community is enthusiastic about welcoming newcomers, we encourage you to contact us so that we can verify together if your wiki is eligible.

Then, go through the checklist to start the process of getting these features:

Help panel: allow newcomers to find help and ask questions while they edit.
Welcome survey: learn what topics and types of edits newcomers are interested in.
EditorJourney: learn what workflows newcomers go through on their first day.

General news

A new quarter of the year has started, and the team has set our goals for the next three months. The most important goals are:
- Newcomer homepage: increase activity through a task recommendations module. Now that we have seen several weeks of positive activity on the newcomer homepage, we think that the most important thing to add is a way for newcomers to find tasks to work on. The challenge will be recommending the right kind of tasks at the right point of their journey.
- Newcomer homepage: increase feature discovery rate by 100%. Right now, only 20% - 30% of newcomers ever visit their homepage. We want to double that number by making sure all newcomers know how to find it.
- Help panel: increase usefulness through improvements to affordance, search, and UX flow. We have looked closely at data and anecdotes from the usage of the help panel, and we plan to pursue specific improvements to increase its effectiveness (see accompanying image of a feature that helps newcomers find responses to their questions).
Wikimania is coming up next month, which includes a "Community Growth" space. We hope to see people from all communities there to talk about how to bring newcomers into our movement.
We have started to deploy features to our team's fourth target wiki: Arabic Wikipedia. That wiki is the biggest one we target, it has a high percentage of mobile users, and also is our first right-to-left language. This will help us make sure that our features are valuable for as many types of users as possible.

Mobile homepage and early analysis

The mobile version of the newcomer homepage was deployed to Czech, Korean, and Vietnamese Wikipedias. Now, newcomers can access their homepage from both desktop and mobile devices.
We have published our first set of data about the performance of the newcomer homepage. In summary, we are happy with the homepage's performance so far. We see about half of visitors clicking on something, and the majority of them returning to the homepage multiple times.
Because we see positive usage of the homepage, we will deploy several small features in the next two weeks that help more newcomers discover their homepage (see accompanying image of a feature that helps newcomers discover their homepage from their empty Contributions page).
As listed in our goals above, we'll be starting to focus on adding task recommendations to the newcomer homepage. We'll be publishing early thoughts on this feature so that community members can give their thoughts and advice.

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

14:26, 23 July 2019 (UTC)

Please comment on Talk:Urolagnia

The feedback request service is asking for participation in this request for comment on Talk:Urolagnia. Legobot (talk) 04:26, 25 July 2019 (UTC)

Please comment on Wikipedia talk:Good article criteria

The feedback request service is asking for participation in this request for comment on Wikipedia talk:Good article criteria. Legobot (talk) 04:33, 28 July 2019 (UTC)

Tech News: 2019-31

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Problems

Wikidata will be in read-only mode on 30 July from 05:00 to 05:30 UTC because of a server switch. [75]

Changes later this week

The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 30 July. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 31 July. It will be on all wikis from 1 August (calendar).

Meetings

You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 31 July at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

21:42, 29 July 2019 (UTC)

Tech News: 2019-32

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Changes later this week

The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 6 August. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 7 August. It will be on all wikis from 8 August (calendar).

Problems

A change in RelatedArticles extension accidentally enabled it for everyone, not just for mobile users. This has been fixed. [76][77]

Meetings

You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 7 August at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

Today everyone can see IP addresses if someone edits without an account. In the future this could be more hidden. This is to protect unregistered editors so fewer can see their IP address. This would only happen after we make sure the tools for vandal fighting can still be effective. You can read more and comment.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

13:24, 5 August 2019 (UTC)