User talk:L3X1/Archive 8

This is an archive of past discussions with User:L3X1. 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.

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Wikipedia:WikiProject Portals update #025, 30 Dec 2018

We can now crop the tops of pics to make banners

Before, we could only cut off the bottom of pics.

User:FR30799386 has pulled it off, and made the upgrade to {{Portal image banner}}...

So, this:

Niagara falls, from the Canadian side

Becomes this:

Niagara falls, from the Canadian side

Here's the code for the above banner:

{{Portal image banner|File:American Falls from Canadian side in winter.jpg | [[Niagara falls]], from the Canadian side |maxheight=175px |overflow=Hidden|croptop=10}}

To see it employed in a portal, check out Portal:Niagara Falls.

About that end of the year goal...

We were racing against time to create 5,000 portals by the end of the year (just for the heck of it).

We made it. We've passed the 5,000 portals mark, with time to spare!

And the 5,000th portal is Portal:Major League Baseball, by Happypillsjr.

Congratulations!

What's next?

The 10,000th portal mark. But...

...there is plenty else to do in addition to building new portals:

The new portals need to be linked to from the encyclopedia.
On those portals about subjects that are not typically capitalized, the search parameters need to be refined/expanded, to maximize the chances of Did you know and In the news items being found and displayed.
A Recognized content section needs to be added to each portal that has a corresponding WikiProject.
Addition of a category on those portals that lack a subject category.
Implement the portal category system, adding the appropriate categories to each portal.
Upgrade, and complete (as per the tasks enumerated above), the old-style portals that are not regularly maintained, which have not been converted yet (about 1,100 of them).
Find and fix the remaining bugs in the underlying lua modules.
Build portal tools (scripts) to assist in the creation, development, and maintenance of portals.
Build a script to help build navbox footer templates, via the harvesting of categories, amongst other methods.
Update the portal building instructions.
Update the portal guideline.
Refine the programming of the portals to reduce their load time.
Design and develop the next generation of portals and portal components.

And whatever else you can dream up.

But most of all, have a...

Happy New Year!

L3X1, thank you for your contributions to the Portals Project, and have a prosperous, productive and enjoyable New Year.

Sincerely, — The Transhumanist 12:27, 30 December 2018 (UTC)

Administrators' newsletter – January 2019

News and updates for administrators from the past month (December 2018).

Administrator changes

Galobtter

Orangemike

BorgQueen • Davidruben • Ocee • Revolving Bugbear • Theda • There'sNoTime • Timc • Tijuana Brass • Tristessa de St Ange

Bureaucrat changes

Addshore

CheckUser changes

Joe Roe • SilkTork

Euryalus • Newyorkbrad • There'sNoTime

Oversight changes

AGK • Joe Roe • SilkTork

Euryalus • Newyorkbrad • There'sNoTime

Guideline and policy news

There are a number of new or changed speedy deletion criteria, each previously part of WP:CSD#G6:

G14 (new): Disambiguation pages that disambiguate only zero or one existing pages are now covered under the new G14 criterion (discussion). This is {{db-disambig}}; the text is unchanged and candidates may be found in Category:Candidates for speedy deletion as unnecessary disambiguation pages.
R4 (new): Redirects in the file namespace (and no file links) that have the same name as a file or redirect at Commons are now covered under the new R4 criterion (discussion). This is {{db-redircom}}; the text is unchanged.
G13 (expanded): Userspace drafts containing only the default Article Wizard text are now covered under G13 along with other drafts (discussion). Such blank drafts are now eligible after six months rather than one year, and taggers continue to use {{db-blankdraft}}.

The Wikimedia Foundation now requires all interface administrators to enable two-factor authentication.
Members of the Bot Approvals Group (BAG) are now subject to an activity requirement. After two years without any bot-related activity (e.g. operating a bot, posting on a bot-related talk page), BAG members will be retired from BAG following a one-week notice.

Technical news

Starting on December 13, the Wikimedia Foundation security team implemented new password policy and requirements. Privileged accounts (administrators, bureaucrats, checkusers, oversighters, interface administrators, bots, edit filter managers/helpers, template editors, et al.) must have a password at least 10 characters in length. All accounts must have a password:

At least 8 characters in length
Not in the 100,000 most popular passwords (defined by the Password Blacklist library)
Different from their username

User accounts not meeting these requirements will be prompted to update their password accordingly. More information is available on MediaWiki.org.

Blocked administrators may now block the administrator that blocked them. This was done to mitigate the possibility that a compromised administrator account would block all other active administrators, complementing the removal of the ability to unblock oneself outside of self-imposed blocks. A request for comment is currently in progress to determine whether the blocking policy should be updated regarding this change.
{{Copyvio-revdel}} now has a link to open the history with the RevDel checkboxes already filled in.

Arbitration

Following the 2018 Arbitration Committee elections, the following editors have been appointed to the Arbitration Committee: AGK, Courcelles, GorillaWarfare, Joe Roe, Mkdw, SilkTork.

Miscellaneous

Accounts continue to be compromised on a regular basis. Evidence shows this is entirely due to the accounts having the same password that was used on another website that suffered a data breach. If you have ever used your current password on any other website, you should change it immediately.
Around 22% of admins have enabled two-factor authentication, up from 20% in June 2018. If you haven't already enabled it, please consider doing so. Regardless of whether you use 2FA, please practice appropriate account security by ensuring your password is secure and unique to Wikimedia.

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 21:38, 1 January 2019 (UTC)

West

I've really tried, including some private inquiries among people who should know, but I've come up with absolutely nothing as far as solid sourcing. I think this has to remain "a story told". And in that form I don't think it makes a good DYK at all -- much as I'd like it to. So with your permission I'll withdraw the nomination, OK? E Eng 02:09, 4 January 2019 (UTC)

EEng With your tenure and experience in content editing and DYK I'll defer to you, I'm fine with the withdrawal. Thanks again for your time and effort, sorry it didn't pan out. ^Thanks, and have a Happy 2019! ^fromL3X1 ◊distænt write◊ 03:08, 4 January 2019 (UTC)

Don't be discouraged, and try me again next time. It was an interesting find nonetheless. E Eng 03:13, 4 January 2019 (UTC)

Will do for sure! ^Thanks,and happy 2019! ^fromL3X1 ◊distænt write◊ 03:15, 4 January 2019 (UTC)

Don't forget to kiss my ring on the way out. E Eng 03:26, 4 January 2019 (UTC)

Better than a boot, i guess :) ^Thanks,and happy 2019! ^fromL3X1 ◊distænt write◊ 17:46, 4 January 2019 (UTC)

Not Constructive Edits?

How's this not constructive?!

Univeliver: "45% of their managerial staff being women"

This is extremely important first of all.

- ApofisTheGreat

As this was a long time ago I don't recall the circumstances, I am looking into the matter and will get back to you soon, ^Thanks,L3X1 ◊distænt write◊ 18:13, 5 January 2019 (UTC)

William H. West (Soldier) listed at Redirects for discussion

An editor has asked for a discussion to address the redirect William H. West (Soldier). Since you had some involvement with the William H. West (Soldier) redirect, you might want to participate in the redirect discussion if you have not already done so. PamD 13:23, 16 January 2019 (UTC)

William h west (soldier) listed at Redirects for discussion

An editor has asked for a discussion to address the redirect William h west (soldier). Since you had some involvement with the William h west (soldier) redirect, you might want to participate in the redirect discussion if you have not already done so. PamD 13:24, 16 January 2019 (UTC)

Wikipedia:WikiProject Portals update #026, 20 Jan 2019

Well, here's the first issue of the new year. Enjoy...

New participants

A hearty welcome to new arrivals to the portals department:

Harvesting categories tool prototype

DannyS712 has created a user script prototype, User:DannyS712/Cat links, that can pull members from a category, a functionality we've been after since the project's revamp last Spring. Now, it's a matter of applying this technique to scripts that will place the items where needed, such as with a section starter script and/or portal builder script.

New portals since last issue

What else is going on

There have been some discussions at Wikipedia talk:Portal guidelines.

DreamyJazz is working on a bot to place links to portals on root articles, category pages, and navigation footer templates.

Portal bugs are getting dealt with soon after they are reported.

Lots of wikignome activity (using Hotcat, etc.).

Keep up the good work. — The Transhumanist 09:30, 20 January 2019 (UTC)

February 2019 at Women in Red

February 2019, Volume 5, Issue 2, Numbers 107-111

Happy February from Women in Red! Please join us for these virtual editathons.

February events: Social Workers Black Women

February geofocus: Ancient World

Continuing initiatives: Suffrage #1day1woman2019

Help us plan our future events: Ideas Cafe

Join the conversations on our talkpage:

Image attribution: Johntex (CC BY-SA 3.0)
Subscription options: English language opt-in International opt-in Unsubscribe
--Rosiestep (talk) 20:09, 26 January 2019 (UTC) via MassMessaging

Wikipedia:WikiProject Portals update #027, 28 Jan 2019

Portal styles

For a visually intensive portal, see Portal:Hummingbirds.

If you find any other portals that stand out, please send me the links so I can include them in the next issue. Thank you.

Conversion continues

There are about 1100 portals left in the old style, with subpages and static excerpts. As those are very labor intensive to maintain (because their maintenance is manual), all those except the ones with active maintainers (about 100) are slated for upgrade = approximately 1000. We started with 1500, and so over a quarter of them have been processed so far. That's good, but at this rate, conversion will take another 3 years. So, some automation (AWB?) is in order. We just need to keep at it, and push down on the gas pedal a bit harder.

You can find the old-style portals with an insource search of "box portal skeleton".

Flagship portals: the portals on the Main Page

Speaking of upgrades...

The following portals are listed in the header at the top of Wikipedia's Main Page, and get far more traffic than all other portals:

Of those, all but one have been revamped to an automated self-updating single-page design.

The remaining one, Portal:Mathematics has manual maintainers, and has been partially upgraded.

As these are our flagship fleet, they need to be kept in top-notch condition.

Check 'em out, and improve them if you can.

And be sure they are on your watchlist.

New portals since last issue

Keep 'em coming!

Deorphanizing the new portals

As you know, thousands of the new portals are orphans, that is, having no links to them from article space. For all practical purposes, that means they are not part of the encyclopedia yet, and readers will be unlikely to find them.

What is needed are links to these portals from the See also sections of the corresponding root articles.

Dreamy Jazz to the rescue...

Dreamy Jazz has created a bot to place the corresponding category link to the end of each portal (if it is missing), and place a link to each portal in the See also section of the corresponding root articles.

That bot, named User:Dreamy Jazz Bot, is currently in its trial period performing the above described edits!

To take a look at the edits it has made so far, see Special:Contributions/Dreamy_Jazz_Bot.

It shouldn't be long before the bot is processing the entire set of new portals.

Good news indeed.

Way to go, Dreamy Jazz!

And, that's a wrap

That's all I have to report this time around.

No doubt there will be more to tell soon.

Until then, — The Transhumanist 13:12, 28 January 2019 (UTC)

RfC closure

Can you please close this RfC? [1] The thing is starting to become tiresome. --3E1I5S8B9RF7 (talk) 09:57, 30 January 2019 (UTC)

Looking into it right now. Outcomes appear to be 8-4 oppose, or closing as no consensus to add but I will consider other options per closing guidelines and arguments. It may take me a few hours to do it. ^Thanks,L3X1 ◊distænt write◊ 13:37, 30 January 2019 (UTC)

Ran out of time today, will do tomorrow. ^Thanks,L3X1 ◊distænt write◊ 03:07, 31 January 2019 (UTC)

Hi. Can I ask you to add a more detailed summation to the close? In particular:

You appear above to have combined the !votes to exclude all bullet points with the !votes to exclude only the massacre, when the two are significantly different outcomes;
It is not clear that you have given due weight to the only !votes that referenced Wikipedia guidelines, specifically WP:MILMOS, which proscribes all but "X victory" or a see aftermath link in the infobox result.

Obviously the close goes against my preferred outcome, and obviously I'm thinking of challenging it, but before I do it would be useful for your thoughts on the above; it's entirely possible that I've got it all wrong. Thanks. Factotem (talk) 17:03, 31 January 2019 (UTC)

Just a sec. ^Thanks,L3X1 ◊distænt write◊ 17:08, 31 January 2019 (UTC)

ThreatMatix's !vote: in favor for the proposal based on other campaigns having massacres listed in them, and as the individual massacres don't have their own article yet, only a place of a List, this is fine.

PM67's !vote: with all due to respect to him (and I have plenty) this seemed to be more a personal opinion than something based in policy. I don't believe the existence of the statement in the inbox violates NPOV and or UNDUE, but as nice as (and important when it comes to how we format articles) the sentiment is, I consider this to be a weaker support. I disagree with Billerica's reply on principle, Foo caused because of Bar is a result of Bar, not correlation in this case.

Buckshot06's: pretty much same as PM67s.

Nom's oppose: Correctly quotes the template page on how the result parameter should be used

GregorB and Slatersteven agree with nom

Bilseric bases part of their vote off the material being NPOV, int he context of all the other results listed I disagree, is "Exodus of Serb civilians" NPOV as well? Is the entire thing NPOV because it divides it up into a Decisive and Strategic victory? I'm a little surprised this wasn't engage on during the RFC though it was slightly touched on in the preceding section, with the discussion between Bilseric and Peacemaker67.

Your response: It it inline with what Template:Infobox Military Conflict lays out for the result parameter, I thought about closing with "Remove everything that doesn't comply with Template instructions, but felt that was too close to a ~~supervise~~supervote to be fair.

^^Supported by Cinderella and to a certain extent Indy Beetle,

Pincrete's response, esp the part tarting out from a position of "highlighting effects on civilians", while ostensibly honourable, is inherently problematic for all sorts of reasons is why I am not giving much weight to the Supports.

Antidiskriminiator's response: to me very much looks like cherrypicking, as they use it to contradict the preceding statement may use one of two standard terms (my emphasis) and the following bit contradictory statements like "decisive tactical victory but strategic defeat".

In lieu of all that I see no consensus for the inbox to contain the sentence, and a weak consensus for it to be removed, however different editors have differing opinions of whether to nuke the entire results parameter to bring it into compliance with the Template or not. Hope this clarifies, ^Thanks,L3X1 ◊distænt write◊ 17:47, 31 January 2019 (UTC)

Thanks. That actually goes into much more detail than I asked for. Much appreciated. I don't understand what you mean by "too close to a supervise to be fair", specifically "supervise". Would you mind clarifying that bit? Factotem (talk) 18:04, 31 January 2019 (UTC)

You're very welcome, Factotem. Sorry about the typo, I meant to write Supervote not supervise. ^Thanks,L3X1 ◊distænt write◊ 18:53, 31 January 2019 (UTC)

Sorry. None the wiser. "Supervote"? Factotem (talk) 18:58, 31 January 2019 (UTC)

WP:SUPERVOTE Basically working my own will into the closing, or picking out on argument and holding above all others. ^Thanks,L3X1 ◊distænt write◊ 19:03, 31 January 2019 (UTC)

I'm not sure what you mean by "picking out on argument and holding above all others." Surely that's the whole point of an RfC, how consensus is determined? Also, do I understand this right, you chose not to close as 'delete all bullet points' because that is your own preferred outcome? Sorry to be ignorant here. Just trying to understand. Factotem (talk) 19:21, 31 January 2019 (UTC)

Consensus is when a majority agree on an argument, not the closer. I chose not to close it as delete all bullet points because while Cinderella, Pincrete and you agree, and 3E1I5S8B9RF7 seems to agree, Slatersteven and Bilseric don't explicitly come out and say so; leaving open a possibility that they just want the specific phrase of the Massacre removed and not the entire bulleted list. I will start a new section at the bottom of the page asking if they all agree with you that the results parameter should be reworked completely to be inline with the Template documentation. ^Thanks,L3X1 ◊distænt write◊ 20:52, 31 January 2019 (UTC)

I'm just a little surprised at your decision. The straight !vote count is fairly evenly divided between include massacre, exclude massacre and remove all bullet points (3E1I5S8B9RF7's !vote doesn't explicitly state remove all, but their argument is firmly based on the guideline that says remove all, their subsequent comments pretty much confirm a preference for remove all and they did actually try to remove all). Even if the !vote wasn't so evenly distributed, the only reference to 'policy' (actually a guideline) relevant to this specific question, which carries a lot more weight in determining consensus than !votes based on opinions, strongly supports a remove all decision. I don't see anything in this discussion to persuade me otherwise. But I'm boring myself now. I'll leave it here and see if anyone else feels strongly enough to contribute an opinion. I appreciate the time you've given here. Thank you. Factotem (talk) 21:23, 31 January 2019 (UTC)

No problem, glad to be of service. ^Thanks,L3X1 ◊distænt write◊ 21:25, 31 January 2019 (UTC)

Administrators' newsletter – February 2019

News and updates for administrators from the past month (January 2019).

Administrator changes

Enterprisey • JJMC89

BorgQueen

Harro5 • Jenks24 • Graft • R. Baley

Interface administrator changes

Enterprisey

Guideline and policy news

A request for comment is currently open to reevaluate the activity requirements for administrators.
Administrators who are blocked have the technical ability to block the administrator who blocked their own account. A recent request for comment has amended the blocking policy to clarify that this ability should only be used in exceptional circumstances, such as account compromises, where there is a clear and immediate need.
A request for comment closed with a consensus in favor of deprecating The Sun as a permissible reference, and creating an edit filter to warn users who attempt to cite it.

Technical news

A discussion regarding an overhaul of the format and appearance of Wikipedia:Requests for page protection is in progress (permalink). The proposed changes will make it easier to create requests for those who are not using Twinkle. The workflow for administrators at this venue will largely be unchanged. Additionally, there are plans to archive requests similar to how it is done at WP:PERM, where historical records are kept so that prior requests can more easily be searched for.

Miscellaneous

Voting in the 2019 Steward elections will begin on 08 February 2019, 14:00 (UTC) and end on 28 February 2019, 13:59 (UTC). The confirmation process of current stewards is being held in parallel. You can automatically check your eligibility to vote.
A new IRC bot is available that allows you to subscribe to notifications when specific filters are tripped. This requires that your IRC handle be identified.

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 02:15, 4 February 2019 (UTC)

Wikipedia:WikiProject Portals update #028, 04 Feb 2019

Here's a quicky status report:

Old-style portals: 1,018

Single-page portals: 4,367

Total portals: 5,385

But of course, there has been more going on than just that...

Dreamy Jazz Bot is up and running!

Dreamy Jazz Bot has been approved and is now up and running.

What it does is places missing links to orphaned portals. It places a link in the See also section of the corresponding root article, and it puts one at the top of the corresponding category page.

We have thousands of new portals that have yet to be added to the encyclopedia proper, just waiting to go live.

When they do go live, over the coming days or weeks, due to Dreamy Jazz Bot, it will be like an explosion of new portals on the scene. We should expect an increase in awareness and interest in the portals project. Perhaps even new participants.

Get ready...

Get set...

Go!

Another sockpuppet infiltrator has been discovered

User:Emoteplump, a recent contributor to the portals project, was discovered to be a sockpuppet account of an indefinitely blocked user.

When that happens, admins endeavor to eradicate everything the editor contributed. This aftermath has left a wake of destruction throughout the portals department, again.

The following portals which have been speedy deleted, are in the process of being re-created. Please feel free to help to turn these blue again:

And the corresponding talk pages:

New portals since the last issue

Keep up the great work

Until next time, — The Transhumanist 09:01, 4 February 2019 (UTC)

Wikipedia:WikiProject Portals update #029, 13 Feb 2019

Where we are at:

Single-page portals: 4,704

Total portals: 5,705

The Ref desks survived the proposal to shut them down

You might be familiar with the Ref desks, by their link on every new portal. They are a place you can go to ask volunteers almost any knowledge-related question, and have been a feature of Wikipedia since August of 2005 (or perhaps earlier). They were linked to from portals in an effort to improve their visibility, and to provide a bridge from the encyclopedia proper to project space (the Wikipedia community).

Well, somebody proposed that we get rid of them, and the community decided that that was not going to happen. Thank you for defending the Ref desks!

Here's a link to the dramatic discussion:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(proposals)/Indefinitely_semiprotecting_the_refdesk#Proposal_II:_Shut_down_the_Ref_Desks

The cleanup after sockpuppet Emoteplump continues...

The wake of disruption left by Emoteplump and the admins who reverted many (but not all) of his/her edits is still undergoing cleanup. We could use all the help we can get on this task...

Almost all of the speedy deleted portals have been rebuilt from scratch.

For the portals he/she restarted (many of which were done mistakenly, overwriting restarts and further development that had already been done), and/or tagged as the maintainer, see https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:Emoteplump&oldid=881568794#Additional_Portals_under_my_watch

10,000 portals, here we come...

We're at 5,705 portals and counting.

New portals since issue #28

Prior to 2018, for the previous 14 years, portal creation was at about 80 portals per year on average. We did over 3 times that in just the past 9 days. At this rate, we'll hit the 10,000 portal mark in 5 months. But, I'm sure we can do it sooner than that.

What's next for portal pages?

There are 5 drives for portal development:

Create new portals
Expand existing portals, such as with new sections like Recognized content
Convert or restart old-style portals into automated single-page portals
Link to new portals from the encyclopedia
Pageless portals

Let's take a closer look at these...

1: Creating new portals

Portal creation, for subjects that happen to have the necessary support structures already in place, is down to about a minute per portal. The creation part, which is automated, takes about 10 seconds. The other 50 seconds is taken up by manual activities, such as finding candidate subjects, inspecting generated portals, and selecting the portal creation template to be used according to the resources available. Tools are under development to automate these activities as much as possible, to pare portal creation time down even more. Ten seconds each is the goal.

Eventually, we are going to run out of navigation templates to base portals off of. Though there are still thousands to go. But, when they do run out, we'll need an easy way to create more. A nav footer creation script.

Meanwhile, other resources are being explored and developed, such as categories, and methods to harvest the links they contain.

2: Expanding existing portals

The portal collection is growing, not only by the addition of new portals, but by further developing the ones we already have, by...

Improving and/or adding search parameters to better power the Did you know and In the news sections.
Adding more selected content sections, like Selected biographies.
Adding and maintaining Recognized content sections, via JL-Bot.
Adding pictures to the image slideshow.
Adding panoramic pics.
Categorizing portals.

More features will be added as we dream them up and design them. So, don't be shy, make a wish.

3: Converting old portals

By far the hardest and most time-consuming task we have been working on is updating the old portals, the very reason we revamped this WikiProject in the first place.

There are two approaches here:

A) Restart a portal from scratch, using our automated tools. For basic no-frills portals, that works find. But, for more elaborate portals, as that tends to lose content and features, the following approach is being tried...

B) Upgrade a portal section by section, so little to nothing is lost in the process.

4: Linking to new portals

Or "portal deorphanization"...

Dreamy Jazz Bot is purring along.

And a tool in the form of a script is under development for linking to portals at the time they are created, or shortly thereafter.

5...

See below...

New WikiProject for the post-saved-portal phase of operations...

Saved portals, are portals with a saved page.

What is the next stage in the evolutionary progression?

Quantum portals.

What are quantum portals?

Portals that come into existence when you click on the portal button, and which disappear when you leave the page.

Or, as Pbsouthwood put it:

...portals that exist only as a probability function (algorithm) until you collapse the wave form by observing through the portal button (run the script), and disappear again after use...

Introducing...

Wikipedia:WikiProject Quantum portals (see it's talk page).

Keep on keepin' on

...'til next time, — The Transhumanist 10:23, 14 February 2019 (UTC)

March 2019 at Women in Red

March 2019, Volume 5, Issue 3, Numbers 107, 108, 112, 113

Happy Women's History Month from Women in Red!

Please join us for these virtual events:
March: Art+Feminism & #VisibleWikiWomen
Geofocus: Francophone Women
Continuing initiatives: Suffrage #1day1woman

Other ways you can participate:
Help us plan our future events: Ideas Cafe
Join the conversations on our talkpage
Follow us on Twitter: @wikiwomeninred
Subscription options: English language opt-in International opt-in Unsubscribe
--Rosiestep (talk) 22:09, 18 February 2019 (UTC) via MassMessaging

Administrators' newsletter – March 2019

News and updates for administrators from the past month (February 2019).

Administrator changes

Evad37

There'sNoTime

Alex Shih • Brian • Mushroom • Nakon • Oscarthecat • PeruvianLlama • Ragib • Reaper Eternal • Rossami • Tom

Interface administrator changes

Evad37 • Galobtter

Ritchie333

CheckUser changes

There'sNoTime

Keegan • Ks0stm

Oversight changes

There'sNoTime

Ks0stm • Sphilbrick

Guideline and policy news

The RfC on administrator activity requirements failed to reach consensus for any proposal.
Following discussions at the Bureaucrats' noticeboard and Wikipedia talk:Administrators, an earlier change to the restoration of adminship policy was reverted. If requested, bureaucrats will not restore administrator permissions removed due to inactivity if there have been five years without a logged administrator action; this "five year rule" does not apply to permissions removed voluntarily.

Technical news

A new tool is available to help determine if a given IP is an open proxy/VPN/webhost/compromised host.

Arbitration

The Arbitration Committee announced two new OTRS queues. Both are meant solely for cases involving private information; other cases will continue to be handled at the appropriate venues (e.g., WP:COIN or WP:SPI).
- paid-en-wpwikipedia.org has been set up to receive private evidence related to abusive paid editing.
- checkuser-en-wpwikipedia.org has been set up to receive private requests for CheckUser. For instance, requests for IP block exemption for anonymous proxy editing should now be sent to this address instead of the functionaries-en list.

Miscellaneous

Following the 2019 Steward Elections, the following editors have been appointed as stewards: Base, Einsbor, Jon Kolbert, Schniggendiller, and Wim b.

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 21:13, 4 March 2019 (UTC)

I was wondering where this was, yesterday.^Thanks,L3X1 ◊distænt write◊ 22:33, 5 March 2019 (UTC)

About a user sandbox you just reviewed

The sandbox Jok Juos was made as a template to create a hoax article. The user and its related sockpuppets had made lots of hoax edits, uploads and creations in both enwiki and eswiki. On eswiki, his drafts and sandboxes have been deleted. There is no such person as Jok Juos and, needless to say, there has never been a country called "Kinieny", maybe the sandbox page should be deleted even if its a sandbox.--MexTDT (talk) 00:23, 7 March 2019 (UTC)

Thank you for getting this, I was going to mark it for deletion for those reasons but was called away. I will CSD it ASAP.^Thanks,L3X1 ◊distænt write◊ 01:19, 7 March 2019 (UTC)

NPR Newsletter No.17

Hello L3X1,

News

The WMF has announced that Google Translate is now available for translating articles through the content translation tool. This may result in an increase in machine translated articles in the New Pages Feed. Feel free to use the {{rough translation}} tag and gently remind (or inform) editors that translations from other language Wikipedia pages still require attribution per WP:TFOLWP.

Discussions of interest

Two elements of CSD G6 have been split into their own criteria: R4 for redirects in the "File:" namespace with the same name as a file or redirect at Wikimedia Commons (Discussion), and G14 for disambiguation pages which disambiguate zero pages, or have "(disambiguation)" in the title but disambiguate a single page (Discussion).
{{db-blankdraft}} was merged into G13 (Discussion)
A discussion recently closed with no consensus on whether to create a subject-specific notability guideline for theatrical plays.
There is an ongoing discussion on a proposal to create subject-specific notability guidelines for chemicals and organism taxa.

Reminders

NPR is not a binary keep / delete process. In many cases a redirect may be appropriate. The deletion policy and its associated guideline clearly emphasise that not all unsuitable articles must be deleted. Redirects are not contentious. See a classic example of the templates to use. More templates are listed at the R template index. Reviewers who are not aware, do please take this into consideration before PROD, CSD, and especially AfD because not even all admins are aware of such policies, and many NAC do not have a full knowledge of them.

NPP Tools Report

Superlinks – allows you to check an article's history, logs, talk page, NPP flowchart (on unpatrolled pages) and more without navigating away from the article itself.
copyvio-check – automatically checks the copyvio percentage of new pages in the background and displays this info with a link to the report in the 'info' panel of the Page curation toolbar.
The NPP flowchart now has clickable hyperlinks.

Six Month Queue Data: Today – Low – 2393 High – 4828
Looking for inspiration? There are approximately 1000 female biographies to review.
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--MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 23:18, 15 March 2019 (UTC)