User talk:Nick Moyes

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A barnstar for you!

	The Brilliant Idea Barnstar
	Your new user handout is wonderful. Describes creating new pages perfectly. Legacypac (talk) 17:14, 23 March 2018 (UTC)

For Context: User:Nick Moyes/editathon/handout1

A barnstar for you!

	The Original Barnstar
	For your welcome message to me Adam Song 00:31, 30 March 2018 (UTC)

A barnstar for you!

	The Original Barnstar
	Thanks for your guidance on my raised question. I really appreciate. Rahulbtrivedi (talk) 19:04, 25 April 2018 (UTC)

A barnstar for you!

	The Random Acts of Kindness Barnstar
	Thanks for telling me about Wikipedia:Signature tutorial! I got to change it! ―YoloMaxi ☎ (contribs) 01:46, 26 April 2018 (UTC)

A barnstar for you!

	The Random Acts of Kindness Barnstar
	Thanks for that, for help you've got it Sincerely Jhoven Sulla (talk) 03:18, 6 May 2018 (UTC)

I have unreviewed a page you curated

Hi, I'm Onel5969. I wanted to let you know that I saw the page you reviewed, The Child (Doctor Who audio), and have un-reviewed it again. If you have any questions, please ask them on my talk page. Thank you.

Onel5969 ^{TT me} 23:42, 10 May 2018 (UTC)

Thanks

Thanks for the links Nick! While finding where to type this, I read everything on here and I think I became inspired... Anyway, I have looked at some of them and they really helped. Again, thanks! Searcher of useful facts01 (talk) 05:49, 13 May 2018 (UTC)

Notability of Isola

Nick, regarding your notability post for Isola (comics), I've updated the page now that the issue is out with a "Reception" section that hopefully fulfils your criteria. —Hellboybookeeper (talk) 15:20, 13 May 2018 (UTC)

Tech News: 2018-20

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

Recent changes

• Dynamic maps are now available on most Wikipedias. Labels on maps can also be in different languages.
• The new Advanced Search interface is now available as a Beta Feature on all wikis. This makes it easier to learn about and to use many of the powerful options in our search. Feedback is appreciated. [1]

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 15 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 16 May. It will be on all wikis from 17 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 16 May at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• In the mobile view, warnings for when something is wrong with a page are not as clear as they should be. The developers are working on this. You can give feedback and suggestions.
• The developers are working on making the Wikipedia Android app available in more languages. You can give feedback, suggestions and help test it. Read more on mediawiki.org [2]

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

22:23, 14 May 2018 (UTC)

Portals WikiProject update, 15 May 2018

We are at 74 members. If you know anyone who might find this WikiProject interesting, please invite them.

The RfC has ended

The RfC was closed May 11th, and a closing statement was posted May 12th which says "There exists a strong consensus against deleting or even deprecating portals at this time."

Ongoing tasks

Some major activities that we are in the middle of include:

• Adding the missing existing portals to the main portals list at Portal:Contents/Portals. Instructions are on the talk page. There are about 125 portals left to be processed. (There were 400). Keep up the good work!
• Development discussions on how to migrate the subpages to the base pages. There are around 150,000 subpages in portal space, associated with the various sections on a typical portal. We are trying to obsolete them section type by section type. Currently, we're working on obsoleting the intro subpages and the "selected articles" subpages. Please join in.

Other tasks

• The list of portals not ready to be listed on the main list can be found at Wikipedia:WikiProject Portals#These are not listed yet (scroll down to see them - they are marked Not ready). They are incomplete. If you want a specific portal to work on, please consider choosing one from that list.
• Over the years, some incomplete portals (portals under construction) got added to Portal:Contents/Portals. Therefore, every portal listed there needs to be inspected, and any that are incomplete should be removed from that list and added to the not ready list at Wikipedia:WikiProject Portals#These are not listed yet (scroll down to see it). On Portal:Contents/Portals, I'm already almost done inspecting the portals in the culture section, and so you can skip those. The types of things to look for are empty sections (most will have a redlinked subpage), lack of "selected" sections, portal stubs with just an intro and end sections, and very poor layout (like seriously unbalanced columns).

Portal-building resources

During his work on portals, Broter found a quote randomizer. It is {{Random quotation}}.

Trailblazer: approaching the one-page portal

Broter has transformed the Portal:Community of Christ so it is comprised of only 3 pages in portal space: the base page, its box-header subpage, and its box-footer subpage. Its other other subpages are now obsolete and are waiting for deletion. Nice job, Broter!

Well, that's all for now. See ya around the portals.    — The Transhumanist   06:39, 16 May 2018 (UTC)

Can you give me some help with Portal:Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart?

I wish to start a portal about Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, but I am not very good with the coding, so please can I have some help? Here is the page: Portal:Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. I would also like the background to be carmine colour (##960018), and the text to be gold colour (#FFD700). Thank you! --Mozart834428196 (talk) 17:23, 17 May 2018 (UTC)

Hi, Mozart834428196. You're probably aware there was a recent RFC which proposed the deletion of all portals? Thankfully, consensus was in favour of their retention, and there's now a lot of work going on to ensure that all Portals are properly maintained, and that pages that serve no purpose are deleted. If you genuinely feel that a new portal on Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart would serve as a topic taster to his life and work in a manner that the existing page does not, and that it would be be well-maintained, then that's really great. There are currently huge changes happening to the way Portals are operated, though I don't think there's yet any new guidance on how to properly build a new one and to maintain them. I don't think I am the right one to advise or help you, as I only help maintain previously constructed portals. Might I suggest you either post your question on the talk page of Wikipedia:WikiProject Portals, or on the talk page of User:The Transhumanist who has done an absolutely brilliant job of defending them and ensuring their retention and in working towards new ways of running them? My one note of real concern on your ambition is to observe that you've only been on Wikipedia for three weeks, so I do wonder whether you'll stick around to see it through. Whilst there's currently no obligation to gain concensus for creating a new Portal, I might suggest you would do well to raise the proposal at the Talk page of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Classical music to see who might be willing to assist you in determining what content is appropriate, and what is not. It's very easy to start a project and not see it through, or to maintain it. It was for those reasons that many editors were in favour of the deletion of every single Portal. Good luck! Regards, Nick Moyes (talk) 22:34, 17 May 2018 (UTC)

@Mozart834428196: as Nick conveyed above, things have changed quite a lot, and are continuing to change pretty fast. So, don't worry too much about being a portal maintainer, but by all means be a portal builder! Once you have the portal set up fully, it will almost run completely on its own, and whoever else is around after that could easily maintain it. Once we (the WikiProject) are done developing tools for portals, portals will be fully automated after their initial build, and will be contained almost fully on a single page. For now though, some subpages are needed (like for pictures).

Check out the portal now. I've given you a more developed starting point, using some of our new coding (much easier). To stick in your colors, go to Portal:Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart/box-header. There are also notes in most of the sections on how to complete them. Though, for the picture section, click on the redlink, and insert a file in the new page that opens up. Keep doing that until no more redlinks come up. That will give you a selection of 5 pictures that the portal will randomly show.

Feel free to change anything you want. Don't worry about making errors, as everything is fixable. Also feel free to ask further questions. And, above all, have fun.

Portals use templates extensively, so it would help you to read up on those. The template used for the "selected" sections is Template:Transclude random excerpt.

By the way, what other portals are you interested in building?    — The Transhumanist   07:55, 18 May 2018 (UTC)

It would be quite good if we could make a Georgian Era portal. I advise the title Portal:Georgian Era. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Mozart834428196 (talk • contribs) 12:26, 18 May 2018 (UTC)

Also, in that portal, you could have a "selected Georgian satirical cartoon". --Mozart834428196 (talk) 12:30, 18 May 2018 (UTC)

Nicola Spence

Thank you for reviewing the article. I'll go in an make those fixes thanks. When I am tired sometimes the temptation to use a bare link gets the better of me...Million_Moments (talk)

@Million Moments: No worries. I know what you mean, though. For that reason I like to prepare stuff as a draft or work on new articles in my sandbox, so I can get it all looking right before it goes live. Regards, Nick Moyes (talk) 14:06, 20 May 2018 (UTC)

Tech News: 2018-21

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

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 22 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 23 May. It will be on all wikis from 24 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 23 May at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• It could become easier to reference different pages of a book in an article. You can give feedback. The last day for feedback is 27 May.

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

17:34, 21 May 2018 (UTC)

NPR Newsletter No.11 25 May 2018

Hello Nick Moyes, thank you for your work reviewing New Pages!

ACTRIAL:

• WP:ACREQ has been implemented. The flow at the feed has dropped back to the levels during the trial. However, the backlog is on the rise again so please consider reviewing a few extra articles each day; a backlog approaching 5,000 is still far too high. An effort is also needed to ensure that older unsuitable older pages at the back of the queue do not get automatically indexed for Google.

Deletion tags

• Do bear in mind that articles in the feed showing the trash can icon may have been tagged by inexperienced or non NPR rights holders. They require your further verification.

Backlog drive:

• A backlog drive will take place from 10 through 20 June. Check out our talk page at WT:NPR for more details. NOTE: It is extremely important that we focus on quality reviewing. Despite our goal of reducing the backlog as much as possible, please do not rush while reviewing.

Editathons

• There will be a large increase in the number of editathons in June. Please be gentle with new pages that obviously come from good faith participants, especially articles from developing economies and ones about female subjects. Consider using the 'move to draft' tool rather than bluntly tagging articles that may have potential but which cannot yet reside in mainspace.

Paid editing - new policy

• Now that ACTRIAL is ACREQ, please be sure to look for tell-tale signs of undisclosed paid editing. Contact the creator if appropriate, and submit the issue to WP:COIN if necessary. There is a new global WMF policy that requires paid editors to connect to their adverts.

Subject-specific notability guidelines

• The box at the right contains each of the subject-specific notability guidelines, please review any that are relevant BEFORE nominating an article for deletion.
• Reviewers are requested to familiarise themselves with the new version of the notability guidelines for organisations and companies.

Not English

• A common issue: Pages not in English or poor, unattributed machine translations should not reside in main space even if they are stubs. Please ensure you are familiar with WP:NPPNE. Check in Google for the language and content, tag as required, then move to draft if they do have potential.

News

• Development is underway by the WMF on upgrades to the New Pages Feed, in particular ORES features that will help to identify COPYVIOs, and more granular options for selecting articles to review.
• The next issue of The Signpost has been published. The newspaper is one of the best ways to stay up to date with news and new developments. between our newsletters.

---

Go here to remove your name if you wish to opt-out of future mailings. MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 20:34, 24 May 2018 (UTC)

Portals WikiProject update, 25 May 2018

We have grown to 79 members.

Please provide a warm welcome to our latest additions, Wpgbrown, Cactus.man, JLJ001, and Wumbolo.

A lot is going on, much of it on the WikiProject's talk page, so be sure to go there and join in on any of the many discussions taking place there.

Elsewhere around the portal project, or related to portals, the following is happening...

New news template ready for testing

Evad37 has created a new template, with supporting lua module, to handle news in portals...

{{Transclude selected current events}} is ready to be tested in some actual portals. Let Evad37 know if you need help with the search patterns.

Noyster commented that "This is the best portal innovation since sliced bread!"

See the relevant discussion at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Portals#Alternative to Wikinews.

Thank you, Evad.

Coming soon: Automatic article alerts (but there is a glitch)

Our WikiProject is now subscribed to the bot that makes automatic article alerts, but the subpage where they are posted has not been added to our WikiProject page yet because of a weird problem...

Featured portal nominations from two years ago keep popping up on there.

Please check Wikipedia:WikiProject Portals/Article alerts to see if you can figure out how to fix this.

Once that is remedied, it will be posted on our WikiProject page.

Thank you.

Note that, this will only track base pages, because to track the rest, we'd have to create over 140,000 talk pages for the subpages, and that just isn't worthwhile (as we're trying to remove the subpages anyways). Therefore, any alerts for subpages will still need to be posted manually.

New portal, still needs work

• Portal:Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, courtesy of Mozart834428196. See also, the discussion.

Drafting a new portals guideline

Your input/editing is welcome on the draft-in-progress of a new guideline for portals.

See or work on the draft at User:Cesdeva/sandbox11.

See also the discussion at: Wikipedia talk:Portal guidelines#RfC on new portal guidelines

RfC on new TOC layout for main portal list

There is a proposal to change the look of the table of contents at Portal:Contents/Portals.

See: Portal talk:Contents/Portals#RFC on layout update.

Deletion discussion survivors

Thank you to those who have participated in portal deletion discussions. There are still some editors out there who despise portals, and this comes across in their argumentation style. Wow. Such negativity. But, there is some good news...

• Portal:Quidditch survived its 2nd deletion nomination
• Portal:Prehistory of Antarctica did the same

Current deletion discussions are posted on our WikiProject page.

Portal space clean up

While portal detractors are trying to get rid of portals via MfD, we have deleted many of them via speedy deletion (per {{Db-p1}} or {{Db-p2}}). Essentially, they were bare skeletons, with maybe a little meat on them. The plus here is that speedy deletion is without prejudice to re-creating the portals. They can easily be restarted from scratch without getting approval, or be undeleted by request by someone willing to work on them. We have kept track of these, for when someone wants to rebuild them. They are listed at Portal talk:Contents/Portals#These are not listed yet.

We are also removing subpages, the functions of which have been migrated to portal base pages. To see which ones have been removed, look for the redlinks in our watchlist.

There is also an MfD concerning some of these at Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Redundant subpages of the Cornwall portal.

For subpages that need to be deleted, you can conveniently place this speedy deletion template at the top of each of them:

{{Db-g6|rationale=of subpage clean up – this subpage's function has been migrated to the portal base page and is no longer needed}}

Then an admin will come along and delete them.

Please help list the unlisted portals!

There are still 100 existing portals not yet presented on the main portal list at Portal:Contents/Portals. There were 400, so we've come a long way. Thank you! But we are not done yet...

Please list a couple of them. Every little bit helps. If each member of this project listed one more, it would almost all be done. Many hands make light work.

The list of missings, and instructions, are to be found at Portal talk:Contents/Portals#These are not listed yet.

I hope to see you there!

Wrapping up

These developments make up just the tip of the iceberg. I'll have more to report in the next update, soon.    — The Transhumanist   00:32, 25 May 2018 (UTC)

Whoa, I missed one...

There's an article about the Portals WikiProject in the new issue of Signpost:

Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2018-05-24/WikiProject report

Enjoy.

P.S.: We now have 80 members. Evad37 just joined!    — The Transhumanist   01:37, 25 May 2018 (UTC)

Requesting

Hello Nick Moyes, I apologize for disturbing you. This is the subject of the page Majid Rafizadeh. I am not sure who and how to reach to the appropriate person for my serious concern. Based on the following from Wikipedia site, I have read that "Biographies of living persons, where the subject is of marginal notability, may be deleted by any administrator if the subject of the biography requests deletion" and "Where the subject of a BLP has requested deletion, the deletion policy says: "Discussions concerning biographical articles of relatively unknown, non-public figures, where the subject has requested deletion and there is no rough consensus, may be closed as delete." It also adds that "the BLP may be speedy deleted". The page is also subjected to excessive socket puppetry. As a result, I am writing to request if possible please, the deletion of the page. If you'd like to confirm that I am who I am please feel free to call me or email me. http://iaccouncil.org/contact/ Mr198013 (talk) 03:18, 25 May 2018 (UTC)

MAY

Many thanks for your message, let me know if I mess up?! Thanks --Dymchurch (talk) 20:23, 27 May 2018 (UTC)

@Dymchurch: You're welcome. My only advice is not to rush into reverting and warning editors for vandalism unless you're absolutely sure of it. You can get 'templated', as we call it, for leaving inappropriate templates yourself! But any questions - I'm happy to help here or at the Teahouse. Two little things I could point out is that you only need to use two equal marks either side of a word to create a new topic header, not three. Using three either side creates a sub-heading of the last topic. Oh, and maybe I'd suggest avoiding using the name of the month unless you are actually leaving a warning to another editor. In those circumstances, seeing the name of the month is quite helpful as we can all see which warnings have been given recently (we can ignore the older ones, as we 'assume good faith' that a poor editor in the past has now improved). One little tip which took me years to appreciate was that if you type "WP:keyword" in the normal Wkipedia search box (where keyword is a logical help topic word that you need assistance on, and without any quotemarks), you get offered one of our many pages on guidance and policies. You can see these 'shortcuts' shown at the top right of any guidance page, and they're usually very logical and mostly memorable. May I offer you best wishes at the start of your Wikipedia journey. I hope you enjoy contributing here as much as I have done! Nick Moyes (talk) 20:58, 27 May 2018 (UTC)

Cambridgea foliata

Hi thanks very much for your message on the Cambridgea foliata article regarding citations for stridulatory organs. I've added the citation you suggested and also re-used a book citation but included the page number which states that this species doesn't have stridulatory organs. Still new to this so please let me know if more is needed. Thanks! Lanipai (talk) 02:03, 28 May 2018 (UTC)

Honister Crag and its SSSI

Thank you for your comments on how these subjects should be covered. I was wondering how Fleetwith Pike should be mentioned and I will follow up your suggestions. --Thoughtfortheday (talk) 10:56, 28 May 2018 (UTC)

It's time: the Portals WikiProject AWBers are needed for a task...

I'm contacting you because you indicated on the Portals WikiProject's members list that you use AWB.

We are now working on a task that requires your help.

Please see Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Portals#AWB team please tackle maintenance run on intro sections.

Thank you.    — The Transhumanist   22:37, 28 May 2018 (UTC)

Tech News: 2018-22

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

Recent changes

• You can now use global preferences on most wikis. This means you can set preferences for all wikis at the same time. Before this you had to change them on each individual wiki. Global preferences will come to the Wikipedias later this week. [3][4]
• It is now easier for blocked mobile users to see why they were blocked. [5]
• Wikidata now supports lexicographical data. This helps describe words.
• There is now a checkbox on Special:ListUsers to let you see only users in temporary user groups. [6]
• Some rare invisible Unicode characters have recently been banned from page titles. This includes soft hyphens (U+00AD) and left-to-right (U+2066) and right-to-left (U+2067) isolate markers. Existing pages with these characters will soon be moved by a script. [7]
• There's a new Wikimedia Foundation team to support the Wikimedia technical communities. It's called the Technical Engagement team. Most of the team members did similar work in other teams before this. [8]

Problems

• Some translatable pages are showing old translations instead of latest ones. The cause of this issue has been fixed. We will update all pages automatically to show the latest translations. [9]

Changes later this week

• There will be a new special page named PasswordPolicies. This page gives information about the password rules for each user group on that wiki. [10]
• A new way to see moved paragraphs in diffs is coming to most wikis. This is to make it easier to find the moved paragraphs and the changes in them. [11]
• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 29 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 30 May. It will be on all wikis from 31 May (calendar).
• Wikis can enable Citoid to provide automatic reference look-up in the visual editor and the 2017 wikitext editor. This is complex. The tool will now disable itself if the configuration isn't correct. It has warned about this in the JavaScript console since February. Check that your wiki is configured correctly. You can ask for help if you need it. [12]

Meetings

• You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 29 May at 18:30 (UTC). See how to join.
• You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 30 May at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• Content Translation drafts which have not been updated in over a year will be removed. This allows other users to translate those articles. [13]
• A survey is collecting information on what users think about how Wikimedia wiki pages are loaded. This information could be used in future development. [14]
• Some wikis will switch to use the Remex parsing library. This is to replace Tidy. It will happen on 30 May and 13 June. Wikis with fewer than 100 linter issues in the main namespace in all high-priority linter categories will switch. This includes Wikidata. Tidy will probably be removed on all wikis in the first week of July. [15][16]

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

12:40, 29 May 2018 (UTC)

Women in Red June Editathons

		Welcome to Women in Red's June 2018 worldwide online editathons. New: [[Wikipedia:WikiProject Women in Red/Meetup/79|WiR Loves Pride]] New: [[Wikipedia:WikiProject Women in Red/Meetup/80|Singers and Songwriters]] New: [[Wikipedia:WikiProject Women in Red/Meetup/81|Women in GLAM]] New: [[Wikipedia:WikiProject Women in Red/Meetup/82|Geofocus: Russia/USSR]] Continuing: [[Wikipedia:WikiProject Women in Red/Meetup/00|#1day1woman Global Initiative]]
		(To subscribe: Women in Red/English language mailing list and Women in Red/international list. Unsubscribe: Women in Red/Opt-out list)

--Megalibrarygirl (talk) 17:15, 29 May 2018 (UTC) via MassMessaging

Portals WikiProject update #007, 31 May 2018

We have grown to 89 members.

This is the seventh issue of this newsletter. For previous issues, see our newsletter archive.

Welcome

A warm welcome to our nearly one dozen new members...

Our new members include:

• Evad37
• Checkingfax
• Grey Wanderer
• Voceditenore
• TestPAKISTAN
• Godsy
• Greatedits1
• Charlesdrakew
• Ww2censor
• Simon Burchell
• TheGridExe

Be sure to say "hi" and welcome them to the team.

The portal set has shrunk

There were 1515 portals, but now we have 1475, because we speedy deleted a bunch of incompleted portals that had been sitting around for ages, that were empty shells or had very little content. Because they were speedied, they can be rebuilt from scratch without acquiring approval from WP:DRV.

Maintenance runs on the portals set have begun

This is what we have been gearing up for: upgrading the portals en masse, using AWB.

More than half of the Associated Wikimedia sections have been converted to no longer use a subpage. This chore will probably be completed over the next week or two. Many thanks to the WikiGnome Squad, who have added an Associated Wikimedia section to the many geography-related portals that lacked one. The rest of the subjects await. :)

The next maintenance drive will be on the intro sections. Notices have gone out to the WikiProjects for which one or more portals fall within their subject scope. Once enough time has elapsed for them to respond (1 week), AWB processing of intro sections will begin.

Thank you, you

I'd like to take this opportunity to thank you all for your part in the RfC. I went back and reread much of it. I believe your enthusiasm played a major part in turning the tide on there. I'm proud of all of you.

Why reread that mess, you ask?

To harvest ideas, and to keep the problems that need to be fixed firmly in mind. But, also to keep in touch. See below...

Thank yous all around

I've contacted all of the other opposers of the RfC proposal to delete portals, to thank them for their support, and to assure them that their decision was not made in vain. I updated them on our activities, provided the link to the interviews about this project in the Signpost, pointed out our newsletter archive so they can keep up-to-date with what we are doing, and I invited them all to come and have a look-see at our operations (on our talk page).

Sockpuppet, and reverting his work

It so happened that one of our members was a sockpuppet: JLJ001. According to the admin who blocked him, he was a particularly tricky long term abuser. This is a weird situation, since the user was quite helpful. He will be missed.

This has been somewhat disruptive, because admins are doing routine deletions of the pages (portals, templates, etc.) he created, and reversion of his edits (I don't know if they will be reverting all of them). Please bear with them, as they are only doing what is best in the long run.

The following pages have been deleted by the admins so far, that I know of:

• Portal:Plymouth
• Portal:Bedfordshire
• Portal:Suffolk
• Portal:Norfolk
• User:JLJ001/tag
• Template:Non-standard portal flag
• Template:Portal flag

Automation so far, section by section...

• Intro – {{Transclude lead excerpt}}
• Selected article – {{Transclude random excerpt}}
• In the news – {{Transclude selected current events}}
• Associated Wikimedia – {{Wikimedia for portals|species=no|voy=no}}
• Categories – {{#tag:categorytree|{{PAGENAME}}}}

Automatic article alerts is up and running

Automatic article alerts are now featured on the project page.

Some super out-of-date entries kept showing up on there, so posting it on the Project page was delayed. Thanks to Evad37 and AfroThundr for providing solutions on this one. Evad37 adjusted the workflow settings per Wikipedia:Article alerts/Subscribing#Choosing workflows, to make sure only the appropriate page types show up. AfroThundr removed the tags from the old entries that caused them to keep showing up in the article alerts.

Other things that could use some automation

Noyster pointed out that it would be nice to automate the updating of the portals section at the Community bulletin board.

Another major component of the portal system is the main list of portals, at Portal:Contents/Portals. How would we go about automating the updating of that?

Please post your ideas on the WikiProject's talk page. Thank you.

Deletion discussion survivors

Keep in mind that we have already speedy deleted almost all of the nearly empty portals, which can be rebuilt without approval whenever it is convenient to do so. Other portals should be completed if at all possible rather than delete them through MfD (which requires approval from Deletion review to rebuild).

• Portal:Juanes – see the discussion

(Current deletion discussions are posted on our WikiProject page).

Portals needing repair

• Portal:Toys

Wrapping up

There's still more, but it will have to wait until next issue.

Until then, see ya around the project.    — The Transhumanist   12:02, 31 May 2018 (UTC)

Cake

Kpgjhpjm (talk) has given you a WikiCake! WikiCakes promote WikiLove and hopefully this one has made your day a little better. Spread the WikiLove by giving someone else a cake, whether it be someone you have had disagreements with in the past or a good friend. Bon appetit!

Spread the tastiness of cakes by adding {{subst:GiveCake}} to their talk page with a friendly message.

Kpgjhpjm (talk) 03:05, 1 June 2018 (UTC)

Administrators' newsletter – June 2018

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

Administrator changes

None

Al Ameer son • AliveFreeHappy • Cenarium • Lupo • MichaelBillington

Guideline and policy news

• Following a successful request for comment, administrators are now able to add and remove editors to the "event coordinator" group. Users in the event coordinator group have the ability to temporarily add the "confirmed" flag to new user accounts and to create many new user accounts without being hindered by a rate limit. Users will no longer need to be in the "account creator" group if they are in the event coordinator group.
• Following an AN discussion, all pages with content related to blockchain and cryptocurrencies, broadly construed, are now under indefinite general sanctions.

Technical news

• IP-based cookie blocks should be deployed to English Wikipedia in June. This will cause the block of a logged-out user to be reloaded if they change IPs. This means in most cases, you may no longer need to do /64 range blocks on residential IPv6 addresses in order to effectively block the end user. It will also help combat abuse from IP hoppers in general. For the time being, it only affects users of the desktop interface.
• The Wikimedia Foundation's Anti-Harassment Tools team will build granular types of blocks in 2018 (e.g. a block from uploading or editing specific pages, categories, or namespaces, as opposed to a full-site block). Feedback on the concept may be left at the talk page.
• There is now a checkbox on Special:ListUsers to let you see only users in temporary user groups.
• It is now easier for blocked mobile users to see why they were blocked.

Arbitration

• A recent technical issue with the Arbitration Committee's spam filter inadvertently caused all messages sent to the committee through Wikipedia (i.e. Special:EmailUser/Arbitration Committee) to be discarded. If you attempted to send an email to the Arbitration Committee via Wikipedia between May 16 and May 31, your message was not received and you are encouraged to resend it. Messages sent outside of these dates or directly to the Arbitration Committee email address were not affected by this issue.

Miscellaneous

• In early May, an unusually high level of failed login attempts was observed. The WMF has stated that this was an "external effort to gain unauthorized access to random accounts". Under Wikipedia policy, administrators are required to have strong passwords. To further reinforce security, administrators should also consider enabling two-factor authentication. A committed identity can be used to verify that you are the true account owner in the event that your account is compromised and/or you are unable to log in.

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Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 21:00, 1 June 2018 (UTC)

Thank you for the cookies!

Hello, you had answered a question I had asked in the Teahouse (about Jessica Jung) but since I had gone for an overseas trip, I was unable to respond to it sooner. Thank you for being so helpful and welcoming! Jesstan01 (talk) 10:25, 2 June 2018 (UTC)

@Jesstan01: You're very welcome. I'm afraid it's terribly easy for new editors to be upset when someone else makes a change to their contributions. And we can often be too terse in the way we do it, which doesn't help, of course, even if we don't mean it. Regards Nick Moyes (talk) 18:47, 2 June 2018 (UTC)

Your thread has been archived

Hi Nick Moyes! You created a thread called AFC: Dhruv Prashant Patel at Wikipedia:Teahouse, but it has been archived because there was no discussion for a few days. You can still find the archived discussion here. If you have any additional questions that weren't answered then, please create a new thread. Archival by User:Lowercase sigmabot III, notification delivery by Muninnbot, both automated accounts. You can opt out of future notifications by placing {{bots|deny=Muninnbot}} (ban this bot) or {{nobots}} (ban all bots) on your user talk page. Muninnbot (talk) 19:08, 2 June 2018 (UTC)

Future of portals

Hi Nick,

I noticed your interest in the philosophical side of the portal endeavor.

Forecasting the future of portals can be posed as answering the following question...

What will portals become?

Based on the direction we're heading, it looks like the portals of the not-so-distant future will likely include the following features:

1. Introduction *
2. Selected article section(s) *
3. Selected picture section(s) *
4. In the news *
5. Did you know... *
6. Anniversaries / On this day...
7. Quotes
8. Categories *
9. Things to do *
10. Topics *
11. Quality content (list)
12. New content (list)
13. Related portals *
14. Associated Wikimedia *

Those marked with asterisks are already included as standard, on the Template:Box portal skeleton.

Of those in the list above, 3 have been automated so far, directly upon the Template:Box portal skeleton, and 2 have been semi-automated. It looks highly likely that all the features listed will become automated. By "automated", I mean it works right out of the box — as soon as you substitute the template onto the portal page.

We are heading in that direction, fairly rapidly.

Thoughts?    — The Transhumanist   20:50, 3 June 2018 (UTC)

@The Transhumanist: Thank you for the notification. You really have done an amazing job with all this. The one thing I find hard to support is the idea of "Things to do" being part of Portals, moving forward. I think 'things to do' ought really to be the domain of WikiProjects, or at the very least found only the Portal Talk Pages. If portals are indeed, 'topic tasters' for newcomers to any subject, I have to wonder why we need to so visibly identify tasks we want to undertake. But maybe others feel differently, and that's fine, of course. Keep up the great work! Regards, Nick Moyes (talk) 22:05, 3 June 2018 (UTC).

Once automated, the to do list would be a copy of whatever was on the associated WikiProject page. Originating tasks on the portal page does seem awkward, as it competes with that function on the WikiProject page, creating a second center of management. What if those 2 centers work at cross-purposes? Can you think of any other arguments for or against?    — The Transhumanist   22:13, 3 June 2018 (UTC)

@The Transhumanist: I confess to being a little out of my depth in how you're getting automation to work. (have been rather preoccupied with real world matters recently) But if there's a genuine need to mirror a 'to do' list that a WikiProject manages, can't it simply be transcluded as a section of a Portal's Talk Page? Should Portals be managing 'to do' lists at all? I can see the value of giving users the opportunity to contribute at WikiProjects, but it's just hard to see 'to do' lists as the best way to achieving this. Nick Moyes (talk) 22:42, 3 June 2018 (UTC)

Templates are a form of automation. You can further automate templates using lua modules, to turn templates into programs. As for to-do lists in portals, I'm neutral. They were included in portal design as they were seen as a bridge between reading and editing, and between the encyclopedia and its editing community. We need to convert readers into editors, and portals were designed to help with that, and thus were allowed to have both encyclopedic and project space content. I'm not sure turning portals into an exclusive extension of article space is a good idea. Convince me.    — The Transhumanist   22:58, 3 June 2018 (UTC)

Goodness, The Transhumanist, there's a challenge! Searching for an analogy. . . OK, got it. See Wikipedia like a department store... full of interesting things (articles). People can go straight to those things if they know they want them, and our search tools assist them in that task. But people like to window-shop, don't they? They browse, and they make impulse purchases. Portals are (or should be) like the big, attractive, open window displays, attracting the attention of passers-by and those proverbial 'window shoppers'. See WikiProjects like the store management team. These guys know their goods. They plan, coordinate and encourage staff to improve the stock the hold. They meet and they plan what new stock to buy, and decide how best to display it. Crucially, they decide what stock is selected and shown and how it is displayed in the shop front windows. It's these displays that attract casual passers-by to come in and make spontaneous purchases. Now, imagine your shop window display is bright, vibrant and exciting - full of tempting items. It's only a sample of the stock held by the store, but the design quality draws people in. They'll buy stuff, for sure. Now, imagine in one corner of that window display you see a list of things the management team intend to get around to doing or stocking. It's in the window, but do you feel it belongs there? How does seeing that list of unfinished tasks make you feel about that store? Do you think, "hey, these guys are on the job", or do you feel, "oh dear, they've not really got this window display sorted yet, have they?" Showing 'to do' lists on portals is a bit like that. It displays all our weaknesses and does nothing to present the quality of our stock. Leave 'to do' lists out of the window display! It's probably because Portals weren't delivering high quality window displays that we nearly lost them all. Shop window displays, like Portals, should show off what's in the store - they shouldn't be recruitment areas for new staff. I can't accept that it was ever a good idea for Portals to be tools to convert readers into editors (shoppers into store staff). I think that's actually quite a foolish notion. They should be places where experienced staff show passers-by (readers) the wonder of the goods on offer, and draw them into the store to sample their wares. Convinced? Nick Moyes (talk) 23:29, 3 June 2018 (UTC)

Yes, you've convinced me. The Main page, that portals are based on, doesn't showcase Wikipedia's shortcomings. It puts our best foot forward. How did that get lost on portals?    — The Transhumanist   02:46, 4 June 2018 (UTC)

Which, leaves us with the problem of what to replace it with. It's typically a half-column component. See that section in User:The Transhumanist/Sandbox/Sample portal.    — The Transhumanist   02:54, 4 June 2018 (UTC)

Adjusted, the features list might look like this:

1. Introduction *
2. Selected article section(s) *
3. Selected picture section(s) *
4. In the news *
5. Did you know... *
6. Selected anniversary
7. Selected quotation
8. Categories *
9. Get involved
10. Topics *
11. Quality content (list)
12. Related portals *
13. Associated Wikimedia *

See potential configuration using these here: User:The Transhumanist/Sandbox/Portal design objectives    — The Transhumanist   08:02, 4 June 2018 (UTC)

@The Transhumanist: I can be quite happy with that. Thanks for listening to my point of view. Nick Moyes (talk) 22:27, 4 June 2018 (UTC)

The more I think about it, the more I realize why it is an optional feature. Not every subject has a WikiProject, which is where to-do lists come from. No WikiProject, no to-do list. To make a to-do list in a portal when there isn't a WikiProject turns the portal into a WikiProject, which is not a purpose of portals. The idea was for portals to be a bridge to editing, not coordination centers (that's what WikiProjects are for).    — The Transhumanist   05:55, 5 June 2018 (UTC)

@The Transhumanist: Well, I'd agree with that. If others feel that displaying a 'to do' list is still needed, then we still have the Portal talk page for that. (One could simply add a footnote to the effect of: "To help develop or maintain articles relevant to this Portal, see WikiProject name/Portal Talk Page. Nick Moyes (talk) 07:56, 5 June 2018 (UTC)

I just built Portal:Sacramento, California to test out some of the new features. {{Transclude random excerpt}} seems to work great. I loaded a hell of a lot of article names as parameters in there, and it didn't hiccup once. I'm interested in your comments in general, but especially about how we might improve the picture slideshow. Be sure to try that out.    — The Transhumanist   08:09, 5 June 2018 (UTC)

Tech News: 2018-23

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

• The MonoBook skin has been optimised for mobile devices. It now looks different. [17]
• Planet Wikimedia collects blogs about Wikimedia. It will now use the Rawdog feed aggregator to do this instead of Planet. [18][19]
• Redirect links in Special:WhatLinksHere now link to the original page and not the target page. This was done earlier and changed the used messages on some pages. This was a problem for wikis that customized the message. A new change fixed this by using the old messages with one more parameter for customization. Wikis that already changed their customized messages will have to move the customization back again. [20]

Problems

• You will not be able to edit some wikis between 06:00 and 06:30 UTC on 13 June. You can see if your wiki is one of them.
• MassMessage did not work 24–28 May. This is also why last week's Tech News was late. [21]

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 5 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 6 June. It will be on all wikis from 7 June (calendar).

Meetings

• You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 5 June at 18:30 (UTC). See how to join.
• You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 6 June at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• The new filters for edit review tools and interface for watchlists will leave beta. This is planned to happen in June or early July. [22][23]

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

21:54, 4 June 2018 (UTC)

Did i leve a notice on Orcinus Meyris page?

I am not sure — Preceding unsigned comment added by Bubblesorg (talk • contribs)

Me neither. Let me know if you need assistance with Orcinus meyeri. And dont forget to sign your posts, please. Nick Moyes (talk) 07:22, 6 June 2018 (UTC)

Mailyne Andrieux

I see that you have proposed the article I created at Mailyne Andrieux for deletion. Seeing as this article passes WP:NTENNIS Ausmor627 (talk) 04:00, 6 June 2018 (UTC)

This article passes WP:NTENNIS because any player who has competed in the main draw of a Grand Slam is considered notable. Ausmor627 (talk) 04:04, 6 June 2018 (UTC)

@Ausmor627: That may well be the case. But what I left was a WP:BLPPROD notice. This is for biographies of living people that contain no references at all. Because you have now added some, you are now allowed to remove that PROD notice. In future please ensure every article you create contains at least one reference right from the start. Please now just add a proper References section heading, followed by a {{reflist}} template. Many thanks. Regards from the UK, Nick Moyes (talk) 06:58, 6 June 2018 (UTC)

Skandha (disambiguation)

Hi Nick, Skandha means Compound Matter in Jainism and Buddhism. If you look into Pudgala article, which means all types of Matter in Jainism, you will realize that they are of two types : Paramanu (Elementary Matter Particles ) and Skandha ( Compound Matter). Jainism doesn't have a separate article about Paramanu and Skandha and hence I, being lazy, linked to existing Pudgala article instead of creating separate new Paramanu article and Skandha article for Jainism.

I included Prakriti, which means Matter in one of the sects of Hinduism, for completeness so that we can give equal treatment to Buddhism, Jainism and Hinduism. Realphi (talk) 21:08, 6 June 2018 (UTC)

I change text for Pudgala to Skandha to remove the confusion on the disambiguation page. Realphi (talk) 21:45, 6 June 2018 (UTC) thanks

@Realphi: It's very kind of you to respond so quickly to my question. Unfortunately a Disambiguation Page page is only for resolving possible confusing when searching for articles with similar titles, not creating additional confusion by including completely different words, as at Skandha (disambiguation) Forgive me for not having a proper appreciation of the subjects, but I don't think it is really needed to appreciate that this new page is not really OK. May I suggest that you either include these as terms and wikilinks within the article on Skandha, or simply add Pudgala and Prakriti to the 'See also' section, which is for related topics not mentioned in the article itself.

I do appreciate your concern to improve Wikipedia, but I feel there is no alternative here but to propose this page for deletion with a WP:PROD notice. This can be removed by any editor, but I would then only submit it for discussion at Articles for Deletion, where I am confident it would still be removed. Please don't be offended by my action, and do please continue working to improve access to information here in one of the ways I've suggested.

(I see whilst I was drafting this that you have altered the DAB page and that to one of its target pages, but I still don't think this is helping, especially as you felt it was justifiable to remove the Skandha wikilink from within Pudgala). Regards from the UK, Nick Moyes (talk) 22:18, 6 June 2018 (UTC)

Hi Nick, I have created a new article Skandha_(Jainism) and linked it to the disambiguous page. Hope that suffices to keep wikipedia page. Thanks. Realphi (talk) 23:17, 6 June 2018 (UTC)

Also removed Prakriti. Thanks. Realphi (talk) 23:25, 6 June 2018 (UTC)

Hi, Realphi. It may just be sufficient, but only if you support your new page with citations to Reliable Sources! We do not allow editors just to post from their personal opinion or personal knowledge. So you must address this immediately, or another editor may well propose that new page for deletion. I'm sure you appreciate that every article here must only contain content that can be tracked back to other independent sources. I will give you some leeway on this, and will return in a day or so to check you have added them. (You will also need to add categories, add wikilinks, and ensure the page title and the emboldened name in the lead paragraph actually match one another. In the meantime I will not propose that DAB page for deletion, but cannot guarantee that another editor won't do so. I am sorry that I might appear to be being harsh on you. It is not personal in any way, I promise. I would express these concerns whether or not this was about trees, footballers, mountains, religions, or a host of other topics. Best wishes, Nick Moyes (talk) 23:29, 6 June 2018 (UTC)

Done except adding category and wikilinks. Thanks for your help. Realphi (talk) 00:22, 7 June 2018 (UTC)

A barnstar for you!

	The Original Barnstar
	I think almost a year since you encouraged me on that first dyk. Thank you...I've had an amazing year Whispyhistory (talk) 23:45, 6 June 2018 (UTC)

Hey, Whispyhistory. Thank you so much; it's really great to hear from you. Yes, I've watched your commitment and contributions to Wikipedia skyrocket since this time last year. (If I'm honest, I take a little pride in feeling I've helped you a tiny bit along the start of that route.) It is fantastic to see a new editor like you become a competent and increasingly productive contributor here. Wow, so many DYKs since that first one, too! Brilliant stuff.

Last year I took early retirement, and since then I've found myself more and more fascinated and involve in the maintenance of the encyclopaedia. So my own productivity in articles has rather fallen somewhat. I've also dabbled with adopting another less experienced editors, and when I have time I would quite like to see if it's possible to turn WP:AAU around into supporting committed new editors, rather than those who come for just a few weeks to create one article, as many have, before leaving. Recently, I've been pondering whether to put myself forward to be considered as an admin, but still feel after all this time I have a lot more yet to learn. I found assisting at the Teahouse a very rewarding way to share editing skills with newcomers who have questions, whilst also learning from others when I can't answer something myself. Maybe you might find that of interest, too, someday? Best wishes, Nick Moyes (talk) 00:13, 7 June 2018 (UTC)

I think you have the perfect attitude and intelligence for administration. The learning curve is never-ending. Keep in touch. Whispyhistory (talk) 05:35, 7 June 2018 (UTC)

Portals WikiProject update #008, 7 June 2018

The WikiProject now has 92 participants, including 16 admins.

Welcome

A warm welcome to the newest members of the team:

• Keith D
• RL0919

Be sure to say hi.

Congrats

Pbsouthwood has just gotten through the grueling RfA process to become a Wikipedia administrator. Be sure to congratulate him.

The reason he went for it was: "For some time I expect to be busy with subpage deletion for Wikipedia:WikiProject Portals as mentioned above. The amount of work is expected to keep me busy for some time. I am primarly a content creator and contributor to policy discussions, but would be willing to consider other admin work on request, providing that I feel that my involvement would be appropriate and not too far outside my comfort zone."

New feature: Picture slideshow

Picture slideshow

• 
  Sacramento from near the Sacramento River
• 
  Capitol Mall, seen from the Capitol
• 
  Sacramento Memorial Auditorium
• 
  Tower Bridge
• 
  US Bank Tower
• 
  State Capitol Building
• 
  Pocket Sacramento Canal
• 
  Old Town Sacramento, the capital as it looked like in 19th century

Evad37 has figured out a way to let the user flip through pictures without purging the page. Purging is awkward because there is an intermediary confirmation screen that you have to click on "yes". In the new picture slideshow section, all you have to do is click on the > to go to the next picture or < to instantly show the previous feature. The feature also shuffles the pictures when the page is initiated, so that they are shown in a different order each time the user visits the page (or purges it).

It is featured in Portal:Sacramento, California. Check it out to the right.

Keep in mind that the feature is a beta version. Please share your comments on how to refine this feature, at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Portals#Refining the Picture slideshow.

The one-page portal has been achieved

We now have a one-page portal design. It isn't fully automated, nor is it even fully semi-automated, as there are still some manually filled-in areas. But it no longer requires any subpages in portal space, and that is a huge improvement. For example, Portal:Sacramento, California utilizes the one-page design concept. While is employs heavy use of templates, it does not have any subpages of its own.

I commend you for your teamwork

This is the most cooperative team I've ever seen. With a strong spirit of working together to get an important job done. Kudos to you.

In conclusion...

There's more. A lot more. But it will have to wait until next issue, but you don't have to wait. See what's going on at the WikiProject's talk page.    — The Transhumanist   02:10, 7 June 2018 (UTC)

Gog the Mild

Hi Nick. Many thanks for the advice re auto-translating. Lest you are worried I am a moderately experienced editor and have no intention of copying and pasting auto-translated garbage. (I do some work at GOCE and have been on the receiving end of some of that.)

What follows may be inappropriate. If so, please say; no offence will be taken. I live in Derby - born and bred. Looking at your user page it is likely we have mutual acquaintances. I would be most interested in getting involved in any Museum/Wikipedia activities going on in future and would appreciate a heads up. The March editathon looked like a lot of fun.

If I have the odd Wikipedia query I hope that you won't mind if I direct them your way, There are a number of things which I would like to do, but find the instructions completely opaque. Eg, as you have picked up, using AWB, or checking new pages.

Thanks again, and curse those Tory cuts. Gog the Mild (talk) 01:28, 11 June 2018 (UTC)

Hi, Gog the Mild. Thanks for stopping by. I'm pleased to hear another very active editor lives nearby. I'm wondering whether it's other Wikipedians like Roger B. that you might know, or maybe former colleagues from the museum world? Yes, the event in March was great fun, and we did throw up the idea of perhaps arranging a regular (or occasional) meetup at the University. We now have three Wikipedia editors who work there (two relatively new and enthusiastic ones in the library), and we did discuss whether an evening get together in their bar might be worthwhile. Interested? We've not taken this idea forward, but just thought I'd mention it. I am only too pleased to be able to help any editor - I find I learn a lot along the way, too. So feel free to give me a shout directly if you ever need any help, though as you'll have gathered, my experience with foreign language articles is limited.

Maybe you'd like to consider adding your name to Wikipedia:WikiProject Derbyshire, which is rather in the doldrums at present. I've been slowly working away at colleagues in the Derwent Valley WHS to consider Wikipedia-related projects when applying for HLF grants, or to engage local volunteers in liberating archived content. I also fancy trying to get Derby Quad of Local Studies more involved - maybe running some training courses or activity days, and have a supportive contacts there. So, lots of possibilities - never enough time! Hopefully, we might meet up one day. I'll certainly keep you informed of any local events that might come up. Feel free to email me directly should you ever wish to. Regards, Nick Moyes (talk) 08:05, 11 June 2018 (UTC)

A local Wikipedia social sounds good. It fact I would be enthusiastic.

Re assistance: thanks, will do.

Added. I have also found an unassessed article which needs copy editing; I will have a look at it. (Someone I know, but I don't see a CoI.)

If you need physical assistance on any local projects, let me know. Eg I have some second hand contacts with Quad and some local groups - I suspect that yours will be better. I also have some experience of training; mostly 16-25 year olds, but I find that it transfers. Plus no compunctions about teaching people something where I am only a page ahead of them, or possibly vice-versa. These days that mostly finds outlet via work for the Prince's Trust but I would be happy to chip into any workshops etc on Wikipedia. (Back in the day I also used to have some experience filing in funding applications etc.)

And finally, a query. I do a lot of assessing for the MilHist Project - 800 articles in their April drive. But I am unsure what the rules are, if any, re up- or down-grading non-MilHist articles, or for other projects on articles which are also MilHist tagged. Obviously I am only talking about start, C and B class and articles which I have not significantly contributed to myself. Eg I assessed Strutt's Park Roman Fort and Talk:Derventio Coritanorum for the drive. (I note that a highly experienced editor attempted to change my assessment for the latter, but doesn't seem to understand how assessment templates work.) So am I ok to change the grades on the other projects to match? And if an article has nothing to do with MilHist am I free to simply assess it, across all of its projects? Gog the Mild (talk) 10:09, 11 June 2018 (UTC)

Tech News: 2018-24

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

• In the Wikipedia app for Android or iOS users can create reading lists. The reading lists can be seen on different devices if you are logged in to your account. There is now a browser extension so you can add pages to your reading list from a web browser. At the moment it works with Firefox and Chrome. [24]
• There is a new version of Pywikibot. Pywikibot is a tool to automate tasks on MediaWiki wikis. [25]

Problems

• The MonoBook skin was changed to make it work better for mobile users. This caused some problems. The change was rolled back to fix them. The new version is now back on the wikis. MonoBook users can opt out from the new responsive design. [26]

Changes later this week

• The new filters for edit review tools and interface for watchlists will leave beta. For most wikis this will happen on 18 June. For the rest it will happen on 25 June. [27][28]

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 12 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 13 June. It will be on all wikis from 14 June (calendar).

Meetings

• You can join the Readers Web team IRC office hour. There you can discuss tools to contribute on the mobile web for the existing MediaWiki skins. The meeting will be on 18 June at 16:00 (UTC). See how to join.
• You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 12 June at 18:30 (UTC). See how to join.
• You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 13 June at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• You will be able to move local wiki files to Commons and keep their original data intact. This is planned to come to the first wikis in June.

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

21:55, 11 June 2018 (UTC)

Minor thing

[29] Your second diff is a wikilink to the article diff. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 12:29, 12 June 2018 (UTC)

Thank you - fixed now. Nick Moyes (talk) 15:43, 12 June 2018 (UTC)

AWB task requests, from the Portals WikiProject

1) Replace the intro box sections on portals with an upgrade. See details at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Portals/Tasks#AWB task: converting/upgrading intro sections.

2) Replace categories box sections on portals with an upgrade. See details at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Portals/Tasks#AWB task: Converting category sections.

Enjoy.    — The Transhumanist   08:08, 13 June 2018 (UTC)

greetings

as a matter of background (unnecessary) I used to live next to an unskiable mountain in tasmania - it got snow but was a horrible conglomerate part of the west coast range....

recently I have found a vast amount of categories with the word mountain in their title with no mountain project tag on the talk pages - and had gone from various regions and today bumped into the alps, in a manner of speaking...

WikiProject Mountains of the Alps - that is

the project looks resurrectable - but needs some tweaking in template/assessment areas - any thoughts/advice/whatever? JarrahTree 09:50, 15 June 2018 (UTC)

Hi JarrahTree, thanks for dropping by. I've left a reply on Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Mountains of the Alps. I do agree that looking at reviewing quality assessment could be helpful. Nick Moyes (talk) 10:34, 15 June 2018 (UTC)

NPP Backlog Elimination Drive

Hello Nick Moyes, thank you for your work reviewing New Pages!

We can see the light at the end of the tunnel: there are currently 2900 unreviewed articles, and 4000 unreviewed redirects.

Announcing the Backlog Elimination Drive!

• As a final push, we have decided to run a backlog elimination drive from the 20th to the 30th of June.
• Reviewers who review at least 50 articles or redirects will receive a Special Edition NPP Barnstar: . Those who review 100, 250, 500, or 1000 pages will also receive tiered awards: , , , .
• Please do not be hasty, take your time and fully review each page. It is extremely important that we focus on quality reviewing.

---

Go here to remove your name if you wish to opt-out of future mailings. — Insertcleverphrasehere ^{(or here)} 06:57, 16 June 2018 (UTC)

Portals WikiProject update #009, 15 June 2018

(Article slideshow prototype)
Selected animals

• 

  

  
  

  

  
  The cat (Felis catus), also referred to as domestic cat or house cat, is a small domesticated carnivorous mammal. It is the only domesticated species of the family Felidae. Advances in archaeology and genetics have shown that the domestication of the cat occurred in the Near East around 7500 BC. It is commonly kept as a pet and farm cat, but also ranges freely as a feral cat avoiding human contact. Valued by humans for companionship and its ability to kill vermin, the cat's retractable claws are adapted to killing small prey like mice and rats. It has a strong, flexible body, quick reflexes, and sharp teeth, and its night vision and sense of smell are well developed. It is a social species, but a solitary hunter and a crepuscular predator. Cat communication includes vocalizations—including meowing, purring, trilling, hissing, growling, and grunting–as well as body language. It can hear sounds too faint or too high in frequency for human ears, such as those made by small mammals. It secretes and perceives pheromones.
  
  Female domestic cats can have kittens from spring to late autumn in temperate zones and throughout the year in equatorial regions, with litter sizes often ranging from two to five kittens. Domestic cats are bred and shown at events as registered pedigreed cats, a hobby known as cat fancy. Animal population control of cats may be achieved by spaying and neutering, but their proliferation and the abandonment of pets has resulted in large numbers of feral cats worldwide, contributing to the extinction of bird, mammal, and reptile species.
  
  As of 2017
  '"`UNIQ--nowiki-00000024-QINU`"'
  ,
  '"`UNIQ--nowiki-00000025-QINU`"'
  the domestic cat was the second most popular pet in the United States, with 95.6 million cats owned and around 42 million households owning at least one cat. In the United Kingdom, 26% of adults have a cat, with an estimated population of 10.9 million pet cats as of 2020
  '"`UNIQ--nowiki-00000026-QINU`"'
  .
  '"`UNIQ--nowiki-00000027-QINU`"'
  As of 2021
  '"`UNIQ--nowiki-00000028-QINU`"'
  ,
  '"`UNIQ--nowiki-00000029-QINU`"'
  there were an estimated 220 million owned and 480 million stray cats in the world. (Full article...)
• 

  

  
  The horse (Equus ferus caballus) is a domesticated, one-toed, hoofed mammal. It belongs to the taxonomic family Equidae and is one of two extant subspecies of Equus ferus. The horse has evolved over the past 45 to 55 million years from a small multi-toed creature, close to Eohippus, into the large, single-toed animal of today. Humans began domesticating horses around 4000 BCE, and their domestication is believed to have been widespread by 3000 BCE. Horses in the subspecies caballus are domesticated, although some domesticated populations live in the wild as feral horses. These feral populations are not true wild horses, which are horses that never have been domesticated and historically linked to the megafauna category of species. There is an extensive, specialized vocabulary used to describe equine-related concepts, covering everything from anatomy to life stages, size, colors, markings, breeds, locomotion, and behavior.
  
  Horses are adapted to run, allowing them to quickly escape predators, and possess a good sense of balance and a strong fight-or-flight response. Related to this need to flee from predators in the wild is an unusual trait: horses are able to sleep both standing up and lying down, with younger horses tending to sleep significantly more than adults. Female horses, called mares, carry their young for approximately 11 months and a young horse, called a foal, can stand and run shortly following birth. Most domesticated horses begin training under a saddle or in a harness between the ages of two and four. They reach full adult development by age five, and have an average lifespan of between 25 and 30 years.
  
  Horse breeds are loosely divided into three categories based on general temperament: spirited "hot bloods" with speed and endurance; "cold bloods", such as draft horses and some ponies, suitable for slow, heavy work; and "warmbloods", developed from crosses between hot bloods and cold bloods, often focusing on creating breeds for specific riding purposes, particularly in Europe. There are more than 300 breeds of horse in the world today, developed for many different uses. (Full article...)
• 

  

  
  

  

  
  The dog (Canis familiaris or Canis lupus familiaris) is a domesticated descendant of the wolf. Also called the domestic dog, it was domesticated from an extinct population of wolves during the Late Pleistocene, over 14,000 years ago by hunter-gatherers, prior to the development of agriculture. The dog was the first species to be domesticated by humans. Experts estimate that due to their long association with humans, dogs have expanded to a large number of domestic individuals and gained the ability to thrive on a starch-rich diet that would be inadequate for other canids.
  
  The dog has been selectively bred over millennia for various behaviors, sensory capabilities, and physical attributes. Dog breeds vary widely in shape, size, and color. They have identical skeletal structures (with the exception of the tail and skull), powerful jaws that house around 42 teeth, and well-developed senses of smell, hearing and sight. They perform many roles for humans, such as hunting, herding, pulling loads, protection, assisting police and the military, companionship, therapy, and aiding disabled people. Communication in dogs include eye gaze, facial expression, vocalization, body posture (including movements of bodies and limbs), and gustatory communication (scents, pheromones, and taste). They mark their territories by urinating on them, which is more likely when entering a new environment. Over the millennia, dogs became uniquely adapted to human behavior, and the human–canine bond has been a topic of frequent study. This influence on human society has given them the sobriquet of "man's best friend".
  
  The dog is the most popular pet in the United States, present in 34–40% of households. In developed countries, around 20% of dogs are kept as pets, while 75% of the population in developing countries largely consists of feral and community dogs. As of 2020, the global dog population was estimated at 700 million to 1 billion. (Full article...)
• 

  

  House mouse (Mus musculus)

  
  A mouse (<abbr title="
  '"`UNIQ--nowiki-0000002A-QINU`"'
  ">pl.: mice) is a small rodent. Characteristically, mice are known to have a pointed snout, small rounded ears, a body-length scaly tail, and a high breeding rate. The best known mouse species is the common house mouse (Mus musculus). Mice are also popular as pets. In some places, certain kinds of field mice are locally common. They are known to invade homes for food and shelter.
  
  Mice are typically distinguished from rats by their size. Generally, when a muroid rodent is discovered, its common name includes the term mouse if it is smaller, or rat if it is larger. The common terms rat and mouse are not taxonomically specific. Typical mice are classified in the genus Mus, but the term mouse is not confined to members of Mus and can also apply to species from other genera such as the deer mouse (Peromyscus).
  
  Domestic mice sold as pets often differ substantially in size from the common house mouse. This is attributable to breeding and different conditions in the wild. The best-known strain of mouse is the white lab mouse. It has more uniform traits that are appropriate to its use in research. (Full article...)

Don't mind that box to the right. We'll be talking about that later, below.

Almost done...

With the portals upgrades?

No. :)

What is almost done is the updating of the main list of portals!

There are 23 portals left to be listed.

Kudos to the WikiGnome Squadron, for spearheading this.

Once it is fully updated, we need to keep it up to date. When you complete a portal, remember to add it to Portal:Contents/Portals.

Concerning portal upgrades, we are working on those section-by-section...

Associated Wikimedia section conversion task complete

The Associated Wikimedia sections of the entire set of portals have been upgraded. These are now handled on each portal base page (bypassing the previously used corresponding subpages), using the {{Wikimedia for portals}} template rather than reiterated copied/pasted code.

So, to be more accurate on reporting upgrade progress, that's one section down (for the whole set of portals), with (about) nine sections to go. (Skipping curated portals, regarding custom content sections, of course).

Further section conversions (using AWB)

Work is underway on converting Portals' introduction sections, and the categories sections.

If you would like to help, see Wikipedia:WikiProject Portals#Upgrade introduction sections and Wikipedia:WikiProject Portals#AWB task: Convert category sections

Further section conversions (by hand)

Work has also started with converting selected picture sections to picture slideshow sections. See Wikipedia:WikiProject Portals#Install picture slideshows.

Quality rating system for portals under development

Currently, there is no quality rating for portals: in the Portals WikiProject box on each portals' talk page, it just says "Portal". But times are a changin'. Quality assessment is on the way, and you can help. See the discussion.

What's coming: excerpt slideshows

Evad37 has figured out a way to apply the picture slideshow feature to displaying article excerpts (now you can check out the provided box above). :) This allows us to bypass page purging to see the next selection, and you can even click through them rather quickly. Currently, the wikicode for doing this for article excerpts is a bit eye-boggling, and so we are looking into simplifying it. A streamlined version may be just around the corner.

Note that this is a prototype, not ready for widespread use. Click on the box in between the lesser than and greater than signs, to see what I mean. It was meant for pictures, and so the thumbnail feature doesn't apply to article prose very well. I've presented it even though it isn't ready, to show the direction portal development is heading. See the discussion.

Wow

I'm amazed at how rapidly portals are evolving. And we're still within a single generation of portal technological evolution. Imagine what they might be in 2 or 3 more generations of developments. Pretty soon, portals will be able to shake your hand. :)    — The Transhumanist   11:04, 16 June 2018 (UTC)

You're wasting your breath

WP:Administrators'_noticeboard/IncidentArchive969#Violations_of_WP:CIVIL,_WP:NPA,_and_WP:TPO EEng 00:07, 18 June 2018 (UTC)

Tech News: 2018-25

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

Recent changes

• Syntax highlighting has been a beta feature on Wikimedia wikis with text written from left to right. It is now a normal feature. It is based on CodeMirror. [30]

Changes later this week

• There is no new MediaWiki version this week.

Meetings

• You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 19 June at 18:30 (UTC). See how to join.
• You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 20 June at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• Some old web browsers will not be able to read the Wikimedia wikis. This is because they use an insecure way to connect to them. This means that we get less security for everyone else too. This affects about 0.08% of all traffic to the Wikimedia wikis. This affects for example those who read Wikipedia on a PlayStation 3. [31][32]
• The new filters for edit review tools and interface for watchlists will leave beta. Because there is no new MediaWiki version this week it will happen on 25 June for most wikis. For the rest it will happen in early July. [33][34]
• All wikis that have not already done so will switch to use the Remex parsing library on 5 July. This is to replace Tidy. You can help fix remaining errors. [35]

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

21:47, 18 June 2018 (UTC)

Link to the article that claims the final vote for the EU Copyright Law will be in December 2018 or January 2019

https://www.theverge.com/2018/6/20/17482554/eu-european-union-copyright-filter-article-11-13-passes-juri-vote — Preceding unsigned comment added by 207.172.180.75 (talk) 22:40, 20 June 2018 (UTC)

Thanks - do please add this to the page. Nick Moyes (talk) 22:41, 20 June 2018 (UTC)

The problem is, I'm not very good at adding sources — Preceding unsigned comment added by 207.172.180.75 (talk) 23:06, 20 June 2018 (UTC)

There's only one way to learn! Give it a go.Nick Moyes (talk) 23:33, 20 June 2018 (UTC)

Merge into VLBI

Hi Nick,

While I think the IVS is likely notable on it's own, I think it was OK to merge into the VLBI article until it gets developed further. But you forgot the {{R from merge}} template. This is important for preserving attribution. .--Mark viking (talk) 22:46, 20 June 2018 (UTC)

Yes, sorry, you may be right, though as yours were the only two edits, I felt I'd not unreasonably attributed the content to you on the target page. Hardly likely to lose any external links to it after just an hour in mainspace, either. Nick Moyes (talk) 22:57, 20 June 2018 (UTC)

Recent Geology Article Reviews

Zircon 2 (talk)16:36, 21 June 2018 (UTC) Nick, Thank you so much for taking the time to review some of my recent geology articles. You have a very fascinating career between your curator and climbing endeavors and I appreciate the time you've taken to read over these articles. Stay tuned! More to come on US, European and Asian geology as well as expansions on at least some of the existing articles with new source material I'm finding.

Also a technical question that I also posed to Justlettersandnumbers. Is there something I can do with SEO or categories to make sure that the Wiki articles I started on African and North American geo topics turn up in general web searches?

Hi Zircon 2. Or is it Zircon? (you seem to have set the wrong username in your signature. I think you need to fix that). You're welcome - it's a pleasure seeing interesting, technical articles being created. I don't have huge geological knowledge myself (though I did create this hands-on display on my county's geology some years ago.) As for SEO -I'm not sure what problem you're seeing. What I see is a top ranking return for Wikipedia pages that you've started and that have been reviewed at WP:NPP -e.g.  Geology of Sudan. (currently ranking 2nd and 3rd). I'm sure you know that unreviewed pages don't get indexed by Google unless they've gone unreviewed for something like 3 months. You should also give search engines time to find newly reviewed pages, too. Perhaps you might like to read WP:SEO for some of the problems editors encounter when trying to improve rankings. Feel free to suggest page names that you're bothered about (WRT SEO) and I'll take a look at them for you. Any way - keep up the good work! Regards from the Mercia Mudstone of the English Midlands. Nick Moyes (talk) 01:20, 22 June 2018 (UTC)

Content tags on David O. McKay School of Education

Nick, about a month ago you added some content tags to David O. McKay School of Education. I have tried to address those issues. Do you think the tags about "written like an advertisement", "excessive intricate detail", and "relies too much on primary sources" can now be removed? Thanks. Scd123 (talk) 19:38, 27 June 2018 (UTC)

Reckon it should be ok to remove them now. Thanks. Regards from the Swiss Alps. Nick Moyes (talk) 16:38, 28 June 2018 (UTC)

o

July 2018 at Women in Red

		Hello again from Women in Red! July 2018 worldwide online editathons: New: [[Wikipedia:WikiProject Women in Red/Meetup/83|Sub-Saharan Africa]] [[Wikipedia:WikiProject Women in Red/Meetup/84|Film + stage]] [[Wikipedia:WikiProject Women in Red/Meetup/85|20th-century]] [[Wikipedia:WikiProject Women in Red/Meetup/86|Women Rock]] Continuing: [[Wikipedia:WikiProject Women in Red/Meetup/00|Notable women, broadly-construed!]] Latest headlines, news, and views on the Women in Red talkpage (Join the conversation!): Are we losing momentum? London calling (the Mayor of London!) Publication about Wikipedia's coverage of women mathematicians Women in Red is featured in Toolhub
		(To subscribe: Women in Red/English language mailing list and Women in Red/international list. Unsubscribe: Women in Red/Opt-out list) --Rosiestep (talk) 14:04, 28 June 2018 (UTC) via MassMessaging

Portals WikiProject update #010, 30 June 2018

We've grown to 94 participants.

A warm welcome to dcljr and Kpgjhpjm.

Rating system for portals

We are in the process of developing a rating system specifically for portals, as the quality assessment scheme for articles does not apply to portals. It is coming along nicely. Your input would be very helpful. See the discussion at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Portals/General#Proposed new quality class assessments.

Better than a barnstar

One of our participants got involved with this WikiProject through interest in how the new generation of portals would be handled in WP's MOS (Manual of Style). It didn't take long before he got sucked in deeper. This has given him an opportunity to look around, and so, he has made an assessment of this WikiProject's operations:

I'm quite frankly really impressed and inspired by what's happening here. If you'd asked me a year ago if I thought portals should just be scrapped as a failed, dragged-out experiment, I would have said "yes". This planning and the progress toward making it all practical is exemplary of the wiki spirit, in particular of a happy service-to-readers puppy properly wagging its technological and editorial tail instead of the other way around, and without "drama". It's also one of the few examples I've seen in a long time of a new wikiproject actually doing something useful and fomenting constructive activity (instead of acting as a barrier to participation, and a canvassing/ownership farm for PoV pushers). Kudos all around. — SMcCandlish

Congratulations, everyone. Keep up the great work.

Slideshow development

We've run into a glitch with slideshows: they don't work on mobile devices.

Initially, we will need to explore options that allow portals to have slideshows without adversely affecting mobile viewers. See Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Portals/Design#Mobile view support.

Eventually, we may need another way to do slideshows. If we do go this route, and I don't see why we wouldn't, then (user configurable) automatic slideshows also become a possibility.

TemplateStyles RfC passed

Once implemented, this will allow editors to create and edit cascading style sheets for use with templates. This will expand what we can do with portals. For more detail, see mw:Extension:TemplateStyles and Wikipedia:TemplateStyles.

Automation effort

We've run into an obstacle using Lua-based selective transclusion: Lua is incapable (on Wikipedia) of reading in article names from categories. Because of this, we'll need to seek other approaches for fully automating the Selected article section. We are exploring sources other than categories, and other technologies besides Lua.

Speaking of using other sources, the template {{Transclude list item excerpt}} collects list items from a specified page, or from a section of that page, and transcludes the lead from a randomly selected link from that list. Courtesy of Certes. So, if you use this in a portal, and if the template specifies a page or section serviced by JL-Bot, you've now got yourself an automatically updated section in the portal. JL-Bot provides links to featured content and good articles, by subject.

What is "fully automated"? When you create a portal using a creation template, and the portal works thereafter without editor intervention, the portal is fully automated. That is, the portal is supported by features that fetch new content. If you have to add new article names every so often for it to display new content, then it is only semi-automated.

Currently, the Selected article section is semi-automated, because it requires that an editor supplies the names of the various articles for which excerpts are (automatically) displayed. For examples, look at the wikisource code of Portal:Reptiles, Portal:Ancient Tamil civilization, and Portal:Reference works.

So far, 3 sections are fully automatable: the introduction section, the categories section, and the Associated Wikimedia section.

Where is all this heading?

Henry.

Or some other name.

Eventually, the portal department will be a software program. And we won't have to do anything (unless we want to). Not even tell it what portals to create (unless we want to). It will just do it all (plus whatever else we want it to do). And we will of course give it good manners, and a name.

But, that is a few years off.

Until then, building portals is still (partially) up to us.    — The Transhumanist   13:33, 30 June 2018 (UTC)

Tech News: 2018-27

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 database for tags will be changed. This will happen on 2 July on French Wikipedia and 9 July on all other wikis. Please report if recent changes get slower or you can't save edits. This could especially affect editors who use the database on ToolForge. [36]

Problems

• Last week's MediaWiki update was rolled back. This was because of a database problem. [37]

Changes later this week

• There is no new MediaWiki version this week.

Meetings

• You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 3 July at 18:30 (UTC). See how to join.
• You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 4 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.

00:46, 3 July 2018 (UTC)

Administrators' newsletter – July 2018

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

Administrator changes

Pbsouthwood • TheSandDoctor

Gogo Dodo

Andrevan • Doug • EVula • KaisaL • Tony Fox • WilyD

Bureaucrat changes

Andrevan • EVula

Guideline and policy news

• An RfC about the deletion of drafts closed with a consensus to change the wording of WP:NMFD. Specifically, a draft that has been repeatedly resubmitted and declined at AfC without any substantial improvement may be deleted at MfD if consensus determines that it is unlikely to ever meet the requirements for mainspace and it otherwise meets one of the reasons for deletion outlined in the deletion policy.
• A request for comment closed with a consensus that the {{promising draft}} template cannot be used to indefinitely prevent a WP:G13 speedy deletion nomination.

Technical news

• Starting on July 9, the WMF Security team, Trust & Safety, and the broader technical community will be seeking input on an upcoming change that will restrict editing of site-wide JavaScript and CSS to a new technical administrators user group. Bureaucrats and stewards will be able to grant this right per a community-defined process. The intention is to reduce the number of accounts who can edit frontend code to those who actually need to, which in turn lessens the risk of malicious code being added that compromises the security and privacy of everyone who accesses Wikipedia. For more information, please review the FAQ.
• Syntax highlighting has been graduated from a Beta feature on the English Wikipedia. To enable this feature, click the highlighter icon () in your editing toolbar (or under the hamburger menu in the 2017 wikitext editor). This feature can help prevent you from making mistakes when editing complex templates.
• IP-based cookie blocks should be deployed to English Wikipedia in July (previously scheduled for June). This will cause the block of a logged-out user to be reloaded if they change IPs. This means in most cases, you may no longer need to do /64 range blocks on residential IPv6 addresses in order to effectively block the end user. It will also help combat abuse from IP hoppers in general. For the time being, it only affects users of the desktop interface.

Miscellaneous

• Currently around 20% of admins have enabled two-factor authentication, up from 17% a year ago. If you haven't already enabled it, please consider doing so. Regardless if you use 2FA, please practice appropriate account security by ensuring your password is secure and unique to Wikimedia.

---

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Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 19:22, 3 July 2018 (UTC)

Why does it matter that I created her?

y Sheesh, so anyways I STILL don't understand why 1. I can't become famous off my tumblr account https://emthecartoongirl.tumblr.com and 2. Why Josy the rabbit STILL doesn't qualify for "notability". And I've wondered, are The irate gamer and Sonichu notable either? Emilyiship'05 (talk) 01:17, 8 July 2018 (UTC)

If you can show to me how other, independant sources have covered your rabbbit cartoons in detail and in depth then I'll gladly help you understand what is and isn't regarded as 'notable' here. Wikipedia isn't a platform for you to push or promote your pet projects. Go do that somewhere else please. As for the second part of your question, I've no idea what you're referring to, I'm afraid. Regards, Nick Moyes (talk) 13:21, 8 July 2018 (UTC)

Tech News: 2018-28

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

• WebM video files have smaller file size but still be of the same quality. Creating WebM files will take longer time. [38]
• The new filters for edit review tools and interface for watchlists will leave beta. This was supposed to already have happened but was delayed. For most wikis this will happen on 9 July. For the rest it will happen on 16 July. [39]
• All wikis now use the Remex parsing library instead of Tidy. This could cause errors. You can help fix the errors. [40]

Problems

• When you rolled back an edit it could get both the Rollback and Undo tags. This has been fixed. [41]
• Rollbacks from autopatrolled users were not marked as patrolled. This has been fixed. [42]

Changes later this week

• When you edit a link in the visual editor there will be two separate buttons to change which page the link goes to (target) or its text (label). [43][44]
• On the mobile version you can find a link to an editor's contributions from their user page. Now this will work even if they haven't created a user page. [45]
• When you edit a discussion on the mobile version you sometimes get your signature automatically added. This will now not happen if you have already added a signature manually. This is to avoid double signatures. [46]
• Structured discussions toolbars will have more style options. [47]
• When you look at Wikimedia code in Gerrit there will be a new interface. It is on by default for new users. This is also true for developers. This is to make it easier to understand what is happening. [48]
• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 10 July. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 11 July. It will be on all wikis from 12 July (calendar).

Meetings

• You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 10 July at 18:30 (UTC). See how to join.
• You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 11 July at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• Today all administrators can edit CSS and JavaScript for the entire wiki. There will be a new user group for editing CSS and JavaScript. Administrators will no longer automatically be able to do this. This is because it is a security risk when all administrator accounts can edit JavaScript even if they never plan to or do not know how it works. You can read more. [49]
• Page previews will be on by default for new accounts. [50]

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

23:09, 9 July 2018 (UTC)

Portals WikiProject update #011, 10 July 2018

We now have 97 participants.

Be sure to welcome our newest members, BrantleyIzMe, Coffeeandcrumbs, and Nolan Perry, with warm regards.

Work is proceeding apace. We have 2 major thrusts right now: converting the intro sections of portals, and building the components of the one-page automated model...

Converting the intro sections

We need everybody, except those building software components, to work on converting intros. If you have AWB, definitely use that. If not, then work on them manually. Even one a day, or as often as you can muster, will help a lot. There are only about 1,000 of them left to go, so if everyone chips in, it will go pretty quickly. Remember, there are 97 of us!

The intros for most of the portals starting with A through F have already been converted to use the {{Transclude lead excerpt}} template.

The standard wikicode for the automated intro that we want to put into place looks like this:

{{/box-header|Introduction|noedit=yes|}}
{{Transclude lead excerpt | {{PAGENAME}} | paragraphs=1-2 | files=1}}
{{Box-footer|[[{{PAGENAME}}|Read more...]]}}

That works for most portals, but not all. For some portals it requires some tweaking, and for others, we may have to use a different or more customized approach. Remember to visually inspect each portal you work on and make sure that it works before moving on to the next one.

Be sure to skip user-maintained portals. They are listed at Wikipedia:WikiProject_Portals#Specific_portal_maintainers.

AWB tips

I've started an AWB tips page, for those of you feeling a bit overwhelmed by that power user tool. Feel free to add to it and/or improve it.

Portal automation

We have some very talented Lua programmers, who are pushing the limits of what we can do in gathering data from Wikipedia's various namespaces and presenting it in portals. Due to their efforts, Lua is powering the selective transclusion core of our emerging automated portal design, in the form of selected article sections that rotate content, and slideshows.

To go beyond Lua's limits, to take full advantage of Mediawiki's API, we are in the midst of adding another programming language to the resources we shall be making use of: JavaScript. The ways that JavaScript can help us edit portals to boost the power of our Lua solutions, are being explored, which will likely make the two languages synergistic if not symbiotic. Research is under way on how we can use JavaScript to make some of the portal semi-automated features fully automatically self-updating, in ways that Lua cannot. Like gathering random members from a category and inserting them into a portal's templates as parameters. Once the parameters are in place, Lua does the rest.

If you would like to get involved with design efforts, or just keep up on them, see Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Portals/Design.

When should we start building new portals?

Well, not at the present time, because building portals is quite time consuming. The good news is that we are working on a design that will be fully automated, or as close to that as we can get. And the new design is being implemented in the portal department's main portal creation template. This means, that not only will portals update themselves, their creation will be highly automated as well. That's the nature of templates. You put them in place, and they just... work.

What I'm getting at here, is that it would be better to wait to build lots of new portals until after the new design is completed. Because with it, instead of taking hours to create a new portal, it will likely take minutes.

That does not mean we should be idle in the meantime. The main reason most of us are here is because it became apparent that portals were largely unmaintained and had grown out-of-date. This had become so apparent that a proposal was made to delete all the portals and the portal namespace to boot. That makes our main objective in the short term to improve all the existing portals so that the community will want to keep them—forever.

Building lots of new portals comes later. Let's fix up the ones we have first. ;)

And on that note, I bid you adieu. Until next newsletter, see ya 'round the WikiProject.    — The Transhumanist   12:31, 10 July 2018 (UTC)

What are you talking about?

Ashwrat is an actual Hindu deity i could provide a citation if so needed, Your allegation is unfounded and quite rude. Newke 2.0 (talk) 00:46, 14 July 2018 (UTC)

Hello, Newke 2.0. Of course a citation is needed! More than one in fact. Until you cite some sources we don't know whether what you've written is made up or not. We call this Verifiability, and even you seem to have some problems spelling the name consistently. Like I said, I didn't know enough about the subject to determine whether what you were trying to write about was genuine or not. I'm sorry if you interpret my reply to you at the Teahouse as rude. Clearly, if you can supply citations to support what you want to write about, then do that, please. Until you actually do - and write about it in more than 14 words - any draft article (such as Draft:Ahswrat) is wholly unworthy of submission for review, and most people do find rejection at WP:AFC very demoralising. Regards, Nick Moyes (talk) 01:03, 14 July 2018 (UTC)

Ah, I see your draft has now been deleted as a 'blatant hoax'. So there you go. Nick Moyes (talk) 21:19, 14 July 2018 (UTC)

Peter Mt. Shasta

Hi Nick, I hope that I am replying to your take down notice correctly, as the method to reply was not clear. Obviously I am a new editor on Wikipedia. I started a page on Peter Mt. Shasta yesterday, July 12, 2018, and don't understand why you want to remove it. Although it is about a living person, he is a public figure who has been interviewed on radio talk shows. At least one of his books has been published by an independent publisher, Pearl Publishing. He is an internationally known spiritual teacher with 8 books in circulation and 20 videos on YouTube. He is also mentioned in at least 2 other Wikipedia articles (Ascended Masters is one). It is a public service to have this page available. Please advice with any suggested edits to make it more acceptable to you.

Best wishes, DharmaMountain (talk) 16:42, 13 July 2018 (UTC)Dharma Mountain

Nick, I added the references you requested to the Peter Mt. Shasta page and removed the tag. Please let me know if you find this satisfactory.

Many thanks DharmaMountain (talk) 18:56, 13 July 2018 (UTC)Dharma Mountain

@DharmaMountain: You didn't quite post on my talk page correctly, but not to worry. I've moved them both together here now. New posts go at the bottom of a talk page - just click 'add topic' and you'll get a box in which to write to another user.

As a new editor, may I welcome you to Wikipedia. It can be very hard to understand all the procedures and guidelines, and making an acceptable new article is actually the hardest task for any new editor to achieve. You said to me, you "don't understand why you want to remove it". It's not that I wanted to remove it immediately, but we have a hard and fast rule here that any biography of a living person must be referenced. At the time yours did not, so I placed a WP:PROD notice as a way to get you to fix that shortcoming. So thank you for responding. Unlike a Article for deletion notice, anyone can remove a PROD notice. But that doesn't stop an article subsequently being put forward for a deletion discussion, where consensus of other editors is sought. I fear yours may soon be, as I see nothing yet that makes this person clearly meet our Notability criteria for people. Admittedly, I haven't looked to see if any of those references are available online yet, but we need in depth coverage of a person by independent sources to show that they are 'worthy' of people taking note of them. Like him, I've been on many radio talk shows, appeared many times on TV, and have published scholarly books and articles, but I do also know I don't get anywhere near meeting Wikipedia's notability criteria. So please focus on how others have written about him. Importantly, as a manner of style, we need a lead sentence which summarises who he is, and why he's important (notable). Just take a look at any other article to see what I mean. After that, a section on his life, religious awakening, awards and honours etc would break the article down into navigable chunks. We also need a references section

I'd also suggest removing the redlinks to the books you mentioned - I doubt they would meet our WP:NBOOKS criteria, and redlinks in borderline articles tend to serve as a flag that demonstrate people are trying too hard. Ensure every statement is supported by a reference, and include the url in the reference if one's available. Both of our editing tools have drop-down templates for inserting references, each capturing fields like title, author, date, publisher. See Referencing for Beginners.

Bottom line: I really can't see anything that makes this person stand out as meriting an article on Wikipedia. We aren't a public service, listing or promoting every minor celebrity, sportperson, scientist or preacher. Wikipedia only cares about people that other independent sources have written about in depth. It ignores self-published books, blogs and so forth. I'm sorry if this sounds harsh, but I'm holding back on putting this article up for deletion purely so as not to discourage a new editor, as I know how horrible it is to have one's work dismissed. I do hope this sounds reasonable, and do please understand that most editors experience one of their pages put up for deletion at one time or another. Just like a young bird leaving the nest, this is a vulnerable time for any new article. Maybe with a bit more understanding and a chance to strengthen its wings this article might well fly. But sadly I have my doubts. I'll pop by in a few weeks and see how it's coming along. It may be then that a discussion on deletion - or otherwise - is worth having. Regards from the UK, Nick Moyes (talk) 01:55, 14 July 2018 (UTC)

A barnstar for you!

	The Original Barnstar
	Thank you so much for helping me navigate my way through Wikipedia as a newcomer! RaisinBrannen (talk) 01:22, 14 July 2018 (UTC)

Kung Fu Panda

Just an FYI, there is an WP:LTA regarding KFP. I'm not an expert on it but I think the Teahouse thing is part of it. John from Idegon (talk) 02:51, 15 July 2018 (UTC)

Portals WikiProject update #012, 15 July 2018

We have 97 participants.

Getting faster

Automation makes things go faster, even portal creation. One of the components Certes made was {{Transclude list item excerpt}}. I became curious about its possible applications.

So I worked out a portal design using it, the initial prototypes being Portal:Kyoto (without a "Selected pictures" section), and Portal:Dubai (with a "Selected pictures" section). Then I used Portal:Dubai as the basis for further portals of this type...

I was able to revamp Portal:Munich from start to finish in less than 22 minutes.

Portal:Dresden took about 19 minutes.

Portal:Athens took less than 17 minutes.

Did Portal:Florence in about 13 minutes.

Portal:Stockholm also in about 13.

Portal:Palermo approx. 12 minutes.

Why?

To see, and to show, what may become feasible via automation.

It now looks highly feasible that we could get portal construction time down to a few minutes, or maybe even down to a few seconds.

The singularity is just around the corner. :)

Slideshows

When using the {{Random slideshow}} template to display pictures, be sure to use the plural tense in the section title: "Selected pictures". That's because slideshows don't show up on many mobile devices. Instead the whole set of pictures is shown, hence the section title "Selected pictures", as it fits both situations.

In case you are curious, here is a list of the portals so far that have a slideshow:

• Algae
• Amphibians
• Anatomy
• Ancient Tamil civilization
• Athens
• Bangladesh.
• Berkshire
• Birds
• Buckinghamshire
• Cenozoic
• Dresden
• Dubai
• East Sussex
• Fish
• Florence
• Florida

• Genocide
• Gilgit-Baltistan
• H. P. Lovecraft
• Hampshire
• Human body
• Humanism
• Isle of Wight
• Kent
• London transport
• Mammals
• Milan
• Munich
• Oxfordshire
• Palermo
• Prague
• Reference works
• Reptiles

• Sacramento
• Saint Petersburg
• Salem
• Scottish Islands
• South East England
• Stockholm
• Surrey
• Sydney
• Tamil People
• Telephones (empty – please add some pictures)
• Turin
• Underwater diving
• Vienna
• West Sussex

Progress on intro conversions

The intros for most of the portals up through the letter "O" have been converted, using this wikicode:

{{/box-header|Introduction|noedit=yes|}}
{{Transclude lead excerpt | {{PAGENAME}} | paragraphs=1-2 | files=1}}
{{Box-footer|[[{{PAGENAME}}|Read more...]]}}

Where the pagename didn't match the article title for the subject, the title was typed in.

Most of the portals that do not contain {{/intro}} or {{{{FULLPGENAME}}/Intro}} have not yet been processed.

About a thousand portals use the method of selective transclusion for the intro section. That's about two-thirds. That means we have one-third of the way to go on the intro section conversions.

Much more to come...

So much has been happening with portals that I can't keep up with it. (That's good). Which means, more in the upcoming issue. Until then, see ya 'round the project. Sincerely,    — The Transhumanist   08:46, 15 July 2018 (UTC)

Tech News: 2018-29

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

• You can now use global preferences on Wikimedia wikis. You can set them on the global preferences page. [51]
• You can now see a new log of pages being created at Special:Log/create. It includes pages which are later deleted. It is now available on all Wikimedia wikis except Commons and Wikidata. [52]
• You can see how many pageviews a wiki had from specific countries. The Wikistats2 maps have now been updated. [53]

Changes later this week

• Your watchlist will show changes from the last seven days instead of three. If you have already set a length preference it will not change. [54]
• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from July 17. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from July 18. It will be on all wikis from July 19 (calendar).

Meetings

• You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on July 17 at 18:30 (UTC). See how to join.
• You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on July 18 at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• Some articles have messages to readers about problems with the article. For example that it does not cite sources or might not be neutral. Readers do not see these messages on the mobile version. The developers now want to show them. You can read more and leave feedback.
• You can use <inputbox> to create search boxes for specific pages. For example to search the archives of a community discussion page. Instead of prefix:Page name you will see a text that explains which pages are being searched. You can read more and leave feedback.

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

16:01, 16 July 2018 (UTC)

Portals WikiProject update #013, 18 July 2018

I got overwhelmed IRL (in real life) during the production of issue #12. So, here is a catch-up issue, to help bring you (and me) up to speed on what is happening with portals...

By the way, we still have 97 participants. (Tell all your friends about this WikiProject, and have them join!)

Panoramas!

One cool feature of some of the geographical portals is a panoramic picture at the top of the intro section.

Check these out:

• Portal:Kyoto
• Portal:Miami
• Portal:Seattle
• Portal:Houston
• Portal:Tokyo
• Portal:New Orleans
• Portal:Brisbane
• Portal:Calgary
• Portal:Moscow

The Portals WikiGnome squadron is busy adding panoramas to geographical portals that don't yet have one. Feel free to join in on the fun. See task details at Wikipedia:WikiProject Portals#Add a panorama or skyline to a geographic portal.

Caveat: avoid super-huge pics, as they can cause portal scripts to time-out. Please try to keep picture size down below 2 megabytes. Thank you.

Auto-populated slideshows

Speaking of pictures...

We now have two slideshow templates. You may be familiar with {{Random slideshow}}, in which the editor types in (or copies/pastes) a list of pictures he or she wants it to display.

Well, now we have another template, courtesy of Evad37, which accepts one or more page names instead, and displays a random image off of the listed pages. So instead of listing dozens of files by hand, you can include a title or three to be scanned automatically. It even lets you specify particular sections.

The new slideshow template is {{Transclude files as random slideshow}}.

Here's a sample, that grabs images from a single page:

Selected motorcycle or motorcycling pictures

• 
  A 1969 Harley-Davidson chopper, a replica of the 'Captain America' bike from Easy Rider (from Outline of motorcycles and motorcycling)
• 
  Brough Superior SS 100 1925 (from Outline of motorcycles and motorcycling)
• 
  Logo of the British Motorcyclists Federation (BMF) (from Outline of motorcycles and motorcycling)
• 
  Joey Dunlop on his Honda RC30 ready for the Senior TT (from Outline of motorcycles and motorcycling)
• 
  BMW's first motorcycle, the 1923-1925 R32 (from Outline of motorcycles and motorcycling)
• 
  Lucius Copeland 1894 (from Outline of motorcycles and motorcycling)
• 
  2015 BMW R1200RT Sport Touring Motorcycle (from Outline of motorcycles and motorcycling)
• 
  A 1954 Triumph T110 (from Outline of motorcycles and motorcycling)
• 
  Ernesto 'Che' Guevara (left) holding the handlebars of his 500 cc single cylinder Norton motorcycle (from Outline of motorcycles and motorcycling)
• 
  FIM Motocross World Championship, taking place at Mallory Park, England (from Outline of motorcycles and motorcycling)
• 
  Honda Super Cub, the archetypal underbone and the world's best-selling motor vehicle (from Outline of motorcycles and motorcycling)
• 
  Honda CB750 inline four, the first to be called a 'superbike', and the archetypal Universal Japanese Motorcycle (from Outline of motorcycles and motorcycling)

New Template:Box-header colour

Speaking of new templates, here's another one!

Also from Evad37, we have a new component for starting section boxes, that is color configurable, and that bypasses the need for box-header subpages altogether. It is {{Box-header colour}}.

For color support, see Web colors.

For the discussion in which this was inspired, see Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Portals/Tasks#Colour combinations for accessibility.

(In case you didn't notice, the slideshow box above uses this new template).

BTW, don't forget to close your box with {{Box-footer}}.

Where are we on the redesign?

The answer to this question is quite involved, and would fill this page to overflowing. Therefore, this subject, including a complete update on where we are at and where we are going with portal design, is covered at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Portals/Design.

Where are we on portal conversion?

An AWB pass to convert intros on the portals has been completed. The pass couldn't convert them all (due to various formatting configurations, etc.).

All but about 170 portals now have introductions selectively transcluded on the base page. Not counting manually maintained portals, that leaves about 70 portals that either need their intros converted, or they need an intro.

Next, we'll be converting the categories sections!

What's the plan, man?

The course of action we have been taking goes something like this, with all steps being pursued simultaeneously...

1) Design a one-page automated portal model

2) Convert existing portals to that design (except those being manually maintained)

3) Remove subpages no longer needed

4) Develop further tools to empower editors working on portals

Later, when the tools are up to the task, filling in the gaps in coverage (with new portals) will also become practical.

Are we caught up yet?

Probably not.

Who knows what our programmers and editors have dreamed up while I was writing this.

See ya again soon,    — The Transhumanist   11:08, 18 July 2018 (UTC)

Helleria brevicornis review

Thank you for your review of Helleria brevicornis:

Interesting article. But please be aware that it is NOT acceptable behaviour to hijack a pre-existing page which is already a redirect from a similarly named genus, even if it's a synonym or nom illegit. This can disrupt pre-existing links. I think you should have created a new page - e.g. Helleria (woodlouse) - and redirected from that, as per WP:MONOTYPICFAUNA. You were also wrong to assert in your edit summary that the plant genus was Helleri. (see this). BTW: This article could make a good WP:DYK, if you fancy it, as there's an interesting hook to it.

I really appreciate it, in future I will submit any new articles directly for review before publishing as is standard, that should prevent any policy breaches.
The assertion that plant genus was Helleri is a really serious mistake on my part based on a lazy search, I'm not sure what I was thinking at the time.
With regards to WP:DYK, the hook is what made me decide to write the article in the first place, but I reckon the prose of the article is ~600 characters with spaces at the moment and I don't think I can take it to the requisite 1500 without resorting to overly-detailed descriptions of H. brevicornis anatomy. I am planning to add to the article with information regarding maintenance of subsociality through coprophagy but that will be a line or two at most. I also can't seem to find any images of this woodlouse that don't have a non-commercial license...
Thanks again and best regards Edit-pi (talk) 14:15, 22 July 2018 (UTC)

@Edit-pi: Thanks for getting back to me. My apologies if my review feedback seemed unduly terse. I reckon you could easily get that article up to 1500 words, and I'll happily add in a section on Distribution for you if you want to put in the work to bring it up to DYK level, as there is a good article by Gentile et al which I will add for you. I don't think you need to go through AFC for another taxonomic article that the New Page review process is usually adequate to pick up any errors or weaknesses. Keep up the good work. Regards from the UK, Nick Moyes (talk) 20:59, 22 July 2018 (UTC)

@Edit-pi: I've now got it up to just under 1,800 characters! So, over to you if you fancy submitting it to WP:DYK. You've got 5 days left to do so, though once it's submitted, there's nothing to stop you further tweaking it. Nick Moyes (talk) 22:58, 22 July 2018 (UTC)

@Nick Moyes: Thanks for the edits and support. Your encouragement motivated me to spend some more time on the article. Please go through it once more if you have time. I'll be submitting for DYK review in the next couple of days.
ps I rewrote your edit, I hope you don't mind.
Thanks again Edit-pi (talk) 21:00, 23 July 2018 (UTC)

@Edit-pi: Of course I don't mind you rewording my hastily dictated edits. I'm chuffed you want to put it forward for DYK. It'll be nice to see a real woodlouse on the main page! My only two comments are a) to suggest you tidy up the External links, helping users understand what they're being offered. One of them could be something like "Photos of H. brevocornis (in French). b) You could consider contacting one of the sites holding images of the species and ask if the copyright holder would be willing to upload one of their pictures (low res will do) to Wikimedia Commons. I did this for Syracosphaera azureaplaneta and actually had some success! Cheers, Nick Moyes (talk) 23:51, 23 July 2018 (UTC)

Syracosphaera azureaplaneta

@Nick Moyes: Just to let you know: I have nominated the article for DYK and posted here in hope of an suitable photo. We'll see how it goes. Edit-pi (talk) 07:47, 25 July 2018 (UTC)

Well done on both counts, Nick Moyes (talk) 08:21, 25 July 2018 (UTC)

Box-header colour

The docs for Box-header colour states "Other parameters that are accepted by Template:Box-header can also be used in this template, apart from the following (which will be ignored if specified):

• title
• editpage
• noedit
• border
• titleforeground
• titlebackground
• foreground
• background

Which means it defaults to all of Box-header's other behaviors.

The docs for Box-header says "A template standardizing the portal templates and for other purposes. If used for other purposes, note that if the TOC and EDIT parameters are missing or not set to yes, the table of contents and all section editing will be suppressed."

So, I added TOC=yes, and it seems to have solved the problem. I think my talk page has TOC=yes somewhere else.

Thanks for the heads up. I'm going to check on the other participants' TOCs.    — The Transhumanist   00:56, 23 July 2018 (UTC)

Thank you

Hello, Nick Moyes. I want to thank you for the very compassionate and perceptive response to a young editor at the Teahouse. And, thank you also for all the helpful advice you offer there. Cullen³²⁸ Let's discuss it 03:37, 23 July 2018 (UTC)

@Cullen328: Thank you for that. I've certainly learned a lot since you invited me to contribute there, and its good to support amd help others when we can. Nick Moyes (talk) 08:45, 23 July 2018 (UTC)

August 2018 at Women in Red

		An exciting new month for Women in Red! August 2018 worldwide online editathons: New: [[Wikipedia:WikiProject Women in Red/Meetup/87|Indigenous women]] [[Wikipedia:WikiProject Women in Red/Meetup/88|Women of marginalized populations]] [[Wikipedia:WikiProject Women in Red/Meetup/89|Women writers]] [[Wikipedia:WikiProject Women in Red/Meetup/90|Geofocus: Bottom 10]] Continuing: [[Wikipedia:WikiProject Women in Red/Meetup/00/2018|#1day1woman Global Initiative Notable women, broadly-construed!]] For the first time, this month we are trying out our Monthly achievement initiative All creators of new biographies can keep track of their progress and earn virtual awards. It can be used in conjunction with the above editathons or for any women's biography created in August. Try it out when you create your first biography of the month.
		Latest headlines, news, and views on the Women in Red talkpage (Join the conversation!): Call for members for the Gender Diversity Visibility Community User Group (To subscribe: Women in Red/English language mailing list and Women in Red/international list. Unsubscribe: Women in Red/Opt-out list) --Rosiestep (talk) 11:22, 23 July 2018 (UTC) via MassMessaging

Tech News: 2018-30

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

• When you log in to your account you can choose to keep being logged in. This checkbox now works better than before on the mobile version for users without JavaScript. [55]
• Wikis that use Citoid can automatically generate citations for Swedish news sites. This only works in the visual editor. This now works for Swedish public service radio. More will come. Others could use this to add news sites in other languages in the future. [56]
• Editors can do max 90 edits per minute. This is new since last month. This does not affect bots or administrators. [57]

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 24 July. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 25 July. It will be on all wikis from 26 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 25 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.

09:44, 24 July 2018 (UTC)

Comment from Teahouse

Hi Nick I am repharsing as you requested. I i.e. AMAN TUGNAWAT to create new Artificial Intelligence products inspired by the Google search engine. Which is the best AI in the world in my opinion. The reason for my last message not making sense is because I am trying to be cryptic here. AND THE THING IS YOU CAN'T EVEN VERIFY IF ITS AMAN TUGNAWAT talking you right now.

MangoX0XA (talk) 01:24, 25 July 2018 (UTC)

You're still not making much sense, I'm afraid, MangoX0XA. I really don't care if you are the person you said you were - you do sound rather too young and immature actually to be them, and your English is not as good as I would expect for a graduate in Robotics and AI from a New York University. But whether you're trying to be cryptic or otherwise, the advice and welcome I left for you still stands. Nick Moyes (talk) 01:42, 25 July 2018 (UTC)

Patrol on Tashtego

Hi there. I saw you marked Tashtego as reviewed. I had come across the page earlier on NPP and restored the redirect. Most minor characters even in major literary works don't have their own pages. The particular reasoning for an exception in this case (categories) could apply to others as well. Asking you to reconsider the decision. Happy patrolling and Best, Barkeep49 (talk) 01:35, 25 July 2018 (UTC)

Hi, Barkeep49 Thanks for contacting me. You'd be most welcome to unreview the page, or indeed to restore the redirect. My rationale for marking this old page as 'reviewed' was simply to reduce the backlog and to remove a 2010-dated page from the back of the NPP list. It wasn't to signal my approval of the redirect being removed. I did have my doubts about whether a separate page was actually necessary, but thought on this occasion I'd leave it up to other editors to work together on. So, I don't really have any decision I need to reconsider - feel free to edit the page as you deem most appropriate. Best wishes, Nick Moyes (talk) 01:51, 25 July 2018 (UTC)

Thanks for the message. Undoing someone else's review is a move that raises eyebrows so I only try to do it in cases of clear mistakes not this which is definitely more a judgement call. I will be marking it unreviewed (which you'll get a message about). Best, Barkeep49 (talk) 01:54, 25 July 2018 (UTC)

Also as someone who patrols at the "oldest" end of the feed you my be interested in a flow chart I've made about how I do it. If you have any recommendations or suggestions they'd be most welcome. Best, Barkeep49 (talk)

Thanks for the notification, Barkeep49 - I know what you mean about raised eyebrows on unpatrolling. To be honest, I don't often go down to the oldest end of the queue, but I've now added your workflow page to my list of useful pages, and will read through it. Thanks very much for that. If I'm honest, I'd have assumed that keeping the page reviewed would have been fine, even if the redirect were to be re-established. I'd welcome you putting me right if I've misunderstood something on that, especially if there's a perceived value in keeping an old redirect page unreviewed so that it comes up clearly at NPP if it's wrongly turned back into an article. (I'm feeling this issue might have helpfully identified a gap in my experience). Cheers Nick Moyes (talk) 02:10, 25 July 2018 (UTC)

I didn't actually restore the redirect - unless it's a cut and dry case (e.g. someone is trying to restore a page that has been decided on as redirect at AfD) I don't do two undo/rollbacks in a row. That promotes an edit war. Instead I've found in most situations another patroller will reach the same conclusion I did and restore the redirect. Hence my note here. Glad it seems like my workflow might be useful. Best, Barkeep49 (talk) 02:15, 25 July 2018 (UTC)

I have unreviewed a page you curated

Hi, I'm Barkeep49. I wanted to let you know that I saw the page you reviewed, Tashtego, and have un-reviewed it again. If you have any questions, please ask them on my talk page. Thank you.

Best, Barkeep49 (talk) 01:54, 25 July 2018 (UTC)

A goat for you!

[[|left|150px]] I'm here to return the favor! :)

You are noot (talk) 21:59, 25 July 2018 (UTC)

Aw, thanks, You are noot! Unfortunately not all the goat arrived in one piece. But I do appreciate the sentiment. Nick Moyes (talk) 22:21, 25 July 2018 (UTC)

And a potential paradigm shift for you...

Portals WikiProject update #014, 27 July 2018

Development of design continues, full speed ahead...

Excerpt slideshows are here!

Can you say "paradigm shift"?

Now, in addition to picture slideshows, we have slideshows that can display excerpts. Portals are not just for topic tasting anymore. Now they can be made useful for surveying Wikipedia's coverage of entire subjects. This gives a deeper meaning to their name. Hmmm. "Portals"... Doorways to knowledge.

Portal:Lithuania was redesigned using excerpt slideshows. Check it out.

For those of you who cannot wait to test out these new toys...

We have not one, but three excerpt slideshow components to pick from:

{{Transclude excerpts as random slideshow}}

For this one, you specify the page names where the excerpts are to be extracted from.

{{Transclude list item excerpts as random slideshow}}

This one accepts source pages from where the page names are gathered from list items. Then an excerpt from one of those pages is displayed. The selection of what is included in the slide show can be limited to a specific number from the collection (of the page names gathered), and that selection is renewed from scratch each time the page is purged.

For example, if you specify Template:World Heritage Sites in Spain as a source page, the slideshow will cycle through those sites. Now you don't have to type them in one-by-one. This greatly reduces portal creation time.

{{Transclude linked excerpts as random slideshow}}

Same as above, but gathers links instead of just linked list items.

Panoramic banners

{{Portal image banner}} displays a panoramic picture the width of the page, and adjusts its size, so it stays that way even if the user changes page view size. And it accepts multiple file names, so that the picture displayed randomizes between them each time the page is visited/purged.

Give resizing the page a try:

Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania.

You can now balance section boxes

Before:

Reptile types

• 
  
  

  

  Corallus caninus

  
  Snakes are elongated, limbless reptiles of the suborder Serpentes (/sɜːrˈpɛntiːz/). Like all other squamates, snakes are ectothermic, amniote vertebrates covered in overlapping scales. Many species of snakes have skulls with several more joints than their lizard ancestors, enabling them to swallow prey much larger than their heads (cranial kinesis). To accommodate their narrow bodies, snakes' paired organs (such as kidneys) appear one in front of the other instead of side by side, and most have only one functional lung. Some species retain a pelvic girdle with a pair of vestigial claws on either side of the cloaca. Lizards have independently evolved elongate bodies without limbs or with greatly reduced limbs at least twenty-five times via convergent evolution, leading to many lineages of legless lizards. These resemble snakes, but several common groups of legless lizards have eyelids and external ears, which snakes lack, although this rule is not universal (see Amphisbaenia, Dibamidae, and Pygopodidae). (Full article...)
• 
  
  

  

  Aldabra giant tortoise
  (Aldabrachelys gigantea)

  
  Tortoises (/ˈtɔːrtəs.ɪz/ TOR-təs-iz) are reptiles of the family Testudinidae of the order Testudines (Latin for "tortoise"). Like other turtles, tortoises have a shell to protect from predation and other threats. The shell in tortoises is generally hard, and like other members of the suborder Cryptodira, they retract their necks and heads directly backward into the shell to protect them. (Full article...)
• 
  
  

  

  Male gharial

  
  The gharial (Gavialis gangeticus), also known as gavial or fish-eating crocodile, is a crocodilian in the family Gavialidae and among the longest of all living crocodilians. Mature females are 2.6 to 4.5 m (8 ft 6 in to 14 ft 9 in) long, and males 3 to 6 m (9 ft 10 in to 19 ft 8 in). Adult males have a distinct boss at the end of the snout, which resembles an earthenware pot known as a ghara, hence the name "gharial". The gharial is well adapted to catching fish because of its long, narrow snout and 110 sharp, interlocking teeth. (Full article...)
• 
  
  

  

  Nile crocodile (Crocodylus niloticus)

  
  Crocodiles (family Crocodylidae) or true crocodiles are large semiaquatic reptiles that live throughout the tropics in Africa, Asia, the Americas and Australia. The term crocodile is sometimes used even more loosely to include all extant members of the order Crocodilia, which includes the alligators and caimans (family Alligatoridae), the gharial and false gharial (family Gavialidae) among other extinct taxa. (Full article...)
• 
  
  

  

  Northern tuatara (Sphenodon punctatus punctatus)

  
  The tuatara (Sphenodon punctatus) is a species of reptile endemic to New Zealand. Despite its close resemblance to lizards, it is part of a distinct lineage, the order Rhynchocephalia. The name tuatara is derived from the Māori language and means "peaks on the back". (Full article...)
• 
  
  

  

  Blanus cinereus, Spain

  
  Amphisbaenia /æmfɪsˈbiːniə/ (called amphisbaenians or worm lizards) is a group of typically legless lizards, comprising over 200 extant species. Amphisbaenians are characterized by their long bodies, the reduction or loss of the limbs, and rudimentary eyes. As many species have a pink body and scales arranged in rings, they have a superficial resemblance to earthworms. While the genus Bipes retains forelimbs, all other genera are limbless. Phylogenetic studies suggest that they are nested within Lacertoidea, closely related to the lizard family Lacertidae. Amphisbaenians are widely distributed, occurring in North America, Europe, Africa, South America, Western Asia and the Caribbean. Most species are less than 6 inches (15 cm) long. (Full article...)
• 
  
  

  

  Common box turtle

  
  Turtles are reptiles of the order Testudines, characterized by a special shell developed mainly from their ribs. Modern turtles are divided into two major groups, the Pleurodira (side necked turtles) and Cryptodira (hidden necked turtles), which differ in the way the head retracts. There are 360 living and recently extinct species of turtles, including land-dwelling tortoises and freshwater terrapins. They are found on most continents, some islands and, in the case of sea turtles, much of the ocean. Like other amniotes (reptiles, birds, and mammals) they breathe air and do not lay eggs underwater, although many species live in or around water. (Full article...)
• 
  
  

  

  Clockwise from top left: veiled chameleon (Chamaeleo calyptratus), rock monitor (Varanus albigularis), common blue-tongued skink (Tiliqua scincoides), Italian wall lizard (Podarcis sicula), giant leaf-tailed gecko (Uroplatus fimbriatus), and legless lizard (Anelytropsis papillosus)

  
  Lizard is the common name used for all squamate reptiles other than snakes (and to a lesser extent amphisbaenians), encompassing over 7,000 species, ranging across all continents except Antarctica, as well as most oceanic island chains. The grouping is paraphyletic as some lizards are more closely related to snakes than they are to other lizards. Lizards range in size from chameleons and geckos a few centimeters long to the 3-meter-long Komodo dragon. (Full article...)
• 
  
  

  

  An American alligator (top) and a Chinese alligator

  
  An alligator, or colloquially gator, is a large reptile in the genus Alligator of the family Alligatoridae of the order Crocodilia. The two extant species are the American alligator (A. mississippiensis) and the Chinese alligator (A. sinensis). Additionally, several extinct species of alligator are known from fossil remains. Alligators first appeared during the late Eocene epoch about 37 million years ago. (Full article...)
• 
  
  

  

  Yacare caiman, Caiman yacare

  
  A caiman (/ˈkeɪmən/ (also spelled cayman) from Taíno kaiman) is an alligatorid belonging to the subfamily Caimaninae, one of two primary lineages within the Alligatoridae family, the other being alligators. Caimans are native to Central and South America and inhabit marshes, swamps, lakes, and mangrove rivers. They have scaly skin and live a fairly nocturnal existence. They are relatively small-sized crocodilians with an average maximum weight of 6 to 40 kg (13 to 88 lb) depending on species, with the exception of the black caiman (Melanosuchus niger), which can grow more than 4 m (13 ft) in length and weigh in excess of 450 kg (1,000 Ib). The black caiman is the largest caiman species in the world and is found in the slow-moving rivers and lakes that surround the Amazon basin. The smallest species is the Cuvier's dwarf caiman (Paleosuchus palpebrosus), which grows to 1.2 to 1.5 m (3.9 to 4.9 ft) long. There are six different species of caiman found throughout the watery jungle habitats of Central and Southern America. The average length for most of the other caiman species is about 2 to 2.5 m (6.6 to 8.2 ft) long. (Full article...)

Amphibian types

• 
  
  

  

  European fire-bellied toad (Bombina bombina), a member of the family Bombinatoridae

  
  Toad is a common name for certain frogs, especially of the family Bufonidae, that are characterized by dry, leathery skin, short legs, and large bumps covering the parotoid glands.
  
  A distinction between frogs and toads is made in scientific taxonomy (see below). In popular culture (folk taxonomy), toads are associated with drier, rougher skin and more terrestrial habitats. (Full article...)
• 
  
  

  

  Various types of frog

  
  A frog is any member of a diverse and largely carnivorous group of short-bodied, tailless amphibians composing the order Anura (coming from the Ancient Greek ἀνούρα, literally 'without tail'). The oldest fossil "proto-frog" Triadobatrachus is known from the Early Triassic of Madagascar (250 million years ago), but molecular clock dating suggests their split from other amphibians may extend further back to the Permian, 265 million years ago. Frogs are widely distributed, ranging from the tropics to subarctic regions, but the greatest concentration of species diversity is in tropical rainforest. Frogs account for around 88% of extant amphibian species. They are also one of the five most diverse vertebrate orders. Warty frog species tend to be called toads, but the distinction between frogs and toads is informal, not from taxonomy or evolutionary history.
  
  An adult frog has a stout body, protruding eyes, anteriorly-attached tongue, limbs folded underneath, and no tail (the tail of tailed frogs is an extension of the male cloaca). Frogs have glandular skin, with secretions ranging from distasteful to toxic. Their skin varies in colour from well-camouflaged dappled brown, grey and green to vivid patterns of bright red or yellow and black to show toxicity and ward off predators. Adult frogs live in fresh water and on dry land; some species are adapted for living underground or in trees.
  
  Frogs typically lay their eggs in the water. The eggs hatch into aquatic larvae called tadpoles that have tails and internal gills. They have highly specialised rasping mouth parts suitable for herbivorous, omnivorous or planktivorous diets. The life cycle is completed when they metamorphose into adults. A few species deposit eggs on land or bypass the tadpole stage. Adult frogs generally have a carnivorous diet consisting of small invertebrates, but omnivorous species exist and a few feed on plant matter. Frog skin has a rich microbiome which is important to their health. Frogs are extremely efficient at converting what they eat into body mass. They are an important food source for predators and part of the food web dynamics of many of the world's ecosystems. The skin is semi-permeable, making them susceptible to dehydration, so they either live in moist places or have special adaptations to deal with dry habitats. Frogs produce a wide range of vocalisations, particularly in their breeding season, and exhibit many different kinds of complex behaviors to attract mates, to fend off predators and to generally survive. (Full article...)
• 
  
  

  

  Spotted salamander, Ambystoma maculatum

  
  Salamanders are a group of amphibians typically characterized by their lizard-like appearance, with slender bodies, blunt snouts, short limbs projecting at right angles to the body, and the presence of a tail in both larvae and adults. All ten extant salamander families are grouped together under the order Urodela from the group Caudata. Urodela is a scientific Latin term based on the Ancient Greek οὐρά δήλη: ourà dēlē "conspicuous tail". Caudata is the Latin for "tailed ones", from cauda: "tail".
  
  Salamander diversity is highest in eastern North America, especially in the Appalachian Mountains; most species are found in the Holarctic realm, with some species present in the Neotropical realm. Salamanders never have more than four toes on their front legs and five on their rear legs, but some species have fewer digits and others lack hind limbs. Their permeable skin usually makes them reliant on habitats in or near water or other cool, damp places. Some salamander species are fully aquatic throughout their lives, some take to the water intermittently, and others are entirely terrestrial as adults.
  
  This group of amphibians is capable of regenerating lost limbs as well as other damaged parts of their bodies. Researchers hope to reverse engineer the regenerative processes for potential human medical applications, such as brain and spinal cord injury treatment or preventing harmful scarring during heart surgery recovery. The remarkable ability of salamanders to regenerate is not just limited to limbs but extends to vital organs such as the heart, jaw, and parts of the spinal cord, showing their uniqueness compared to different types of vertebrates. ⁤⁤This ability is most remarkable for occurring without any type of scarring. ⁤⁤This has made salamanders an invaluable model organism in scientific research aimed at understanding and achieving regenerative processes for medical advancements in human and animal biology. (Full article...)
• 
  
  

  

  Oscaecilia ochrocephala (Caeciliidae)

  
  Caecilians (/sɪˈsɪliən/; New Latin for 'blind ones') are a group of limbless, vermiform (worm-shaped) or serpentine (snake-shaped) amphibians with small or sometimes nonexistent eyes. They mostly live hidden in soil or in streambeds, and this cryptic lifestyle renders caecilians among the least familiar amphibians. Modern caecilians live in the tropics of South and Central America, Africa, and southern Asia. Caecilians feed on small subterranean creatures such as earthworms. The body is cylindrical and often darkly coloured, and the skull is bullet-shaped and strongly built. Caecilian heads have several unique adaptations, including fused cranial and jaw bones, a two-part system of jaw muscles, and a chemosensory tentacle in front of the eye. The skin is slimy and bears ringlike markings or grooves and may contain scales.
  
  Modern caecilians are a clade, the order Gymnophiona /ˌdʒɪmnəˈfaɪənə/ (or Apoda /ˈæpədə/), one of the three living amphibian groups alongside Anura (frogs) and Urodela (salamanders). Gymnophiona is a crown group, encompassing all modern caecilians and all descendants of their last common ancestor. There are more than 220 living species of caecilian classified in 10 families. Gymnophionomorpha is a recently coined name for the corresponding total group which includes Gymnophiona as well as a few extinct stem-group caecilians (extinct amphibians whose closest living relatives are caecilians but are not descended from any caecilian). Some palaeontologists have used the name Gymnophiona for the total group and the old name Apoda for the crown group'. However, Apoda has other even older uses, including as the name of a genus of Butterfly making its use potentially confusing and best avoided. 'Gymnophiona' derives from the Greek words γυμνος / gymnos (Ancient Greek for 'naked') and οφις / ophis (Ancient Greek for 'snake'), as the caecilians were originally thought to be related to snakes and to lack scales.
  
  The study of caecilian evolution is complicated by their poor fossil record and specialized anatomy. Genetic evidence and some anatomical details (such as pedicellate teeth) support the idea that frogs, salamanders, and caecilians (collectively known as lissamphibians) are each others' closest relatives. Frogs and salamanders show many similarities to dissorophoids, a group of extinct amphibians in the order Temnospondyli. Caecilians are more controversial; many studies extend dissorophoid ancestry to caecilians. Some studies have instead argued that caecilians descend from extinct lepospondyl or stereospondyl amphibians, contradicting evidence for lissamphibian monophyly (common ancestry). Rare fossils of early gymnophionans such as Eocaecilia and Funcusvermis have helped to test the various conflicting hypotheses for the relationships between caecilians and other living and extinct amphibians. ('Full article...)

After:

Reptile types

• 
  
  

  

  Male gharial

  
  The gharial (Gavialis gangeticus), also known as gavial or fish-eating crocodile, is a crocodilian in the family Gavialidae and among the longest of all living crocodilians. Mature females are 2.6 to 4.5 m (8 ft 6 in to 14 ft 9 in) long, and males 3 to 6 m (9 ft 10 in to 19 ft 8 in). Adult males have a distinct boss at the end of the snout, which resembles an earthenware pot known as a ghara, hence the name "gharial". The gharial is well adapted to catching fish because of its long, narrow snout and 110 sharp, interlocking teeth. (Full article...)
• 
  
  

  

  Yacare caiman, Caiman yacare

  
  A caiman (/ˈkeɪmən/ (also spelled cayman) from Taíno kaiman) is an alligatorid belonging to the subfamily Caimaninae, one of two primary lineages within the Alligatoridae family, the other being alligators. Caimans are native to Central and South America and inhabit marshes, swamps, lakes, and mangrove rivers. They have scaly skin and live a fairly nocturnal existence. They are relatively small-sized crocodilians with an average maximum weight of 6 to 40 kg (13 to 88 lb) depending on species, with the exception of the black caiman (Melanosuchus niger), which can grow more than 4 m (13 ft) in length and weigh in excess of 450 kg (1,000 Ib). The black caiman is the largest caiman species in the world and is found in the slow-moving rivers and lakes that surround the Amazon basin. The smallest species is the Cuvier's dwarf caiman (Paleosuchus palpebrosus), which grows to 1.2 to 1.5 m (3.9 to 4.9 ft) long. There are six different species of caiman found throughout the watery jungle habitats of Central and Southern America. The average length for most of the other caiman species is about 2 to 2.5 m (6.6 to 8.2 ft) long. (Full article...)
• 
  
  

  

  Blanus cinereus, Spain

  
  Amphisbaenia /æmfɪsˈbiːniə/ (called amphisbaenians or worm lizards) is a group of typically legless lizards, comprising over 200 extant species. Amphisbaenians are characterized by their long bodies, the reduction or loss of the limbs, and rudimentary eyes. As many species have a pink body and scales arranged in rings, they have a superficial resemblance to earthworms. While the genus Bipes retains forelimbs, all other genera are limbless. Phylogenetic studies suggest that they are nested within Lacertoidea, closely related to the lizard family Lacertidae. Amphisbaenians are widely distributed, occurring in North America, Europe, Africa, South America, Western Asia and the Caribbean. Most species are less than 6 inches (15 cm) long. (Full article...)
• 
  
  

  

  Nile crocodile (Crocodylus niloticus)

  
  Crocodiles (family Crocodylidae) or true crocodiles are large semiaquatic reptiles that live throughout the tropics in Africa, Asia, the Americas and Australia. The term crocodile is sometimes used even more loosely to include all extant members of the order Crocodilia, which includes the alligators and caimans (family Alligatoridae), the gharial and false gharial (family Gavialidae) among other extinct taxa. (Full article...)
• 
  
  

  

  Aldabra giant tortoise
  (Aldabrachelys gigantea)

  
  Tortoises (/ˈtɔːrtəs.ɪz/ TOR-təs-iz) are reptiles of the family Testudinidae of the order Testudines (Latin for "tortoise"). Like other turtles, tortoises have a shell to protect from predation and other threats. The shell in tortoises is generally hard, and like other members of the suborder Cryptodira, they retract their necks and heads directly backward into the shell to protect them. (Full article...)
• 
  
  

  

  Common box turtle

  
  Turtles are reptiles of the order Testudines, characterized by a special shell developed mainly from their ribs. Modern turtles are divided into two major groups, the Pleurodira (side necked turtles) and Cryptodira (hidden necked turtles), which differ in the way the head retracts. There are 360 living and recently extinct species of turtles, including land-dwelling tortoises and freshwater terrapins. They are found on most continents, some islands and, in the case of sea turtles, much of the ocean. Like other amniotes (reptiles, birds, and mammals) they breathe air and do not lay eggs underwater, although many species live in or around water. (Full article...)
• 
  
  

  

  Corallus caninus

  
  Snakes are elongated, limbless reptiles of the suborder Serpentes (/sɜːrˈpɛntiːz/). Like all other squamates, snakes are ectothermic, amniote vertebrates covered in overlapping scales. Many species of snakes have skulls with several more joints than their lizard ancestors, enabling them to swallow prey much larger than their heads (cranial kinesis). To accommodate their narrow bodies, snakes' paired organs (such as kidneys) appear one in front of the other instead of side by side, and most have only one functional lung. Some species retain a pelvic girdle with a pair of vestigial claws on either side of the cloaca. Lizards have independently evolved elongate bodies without limbs or with greatly reduced limbs at least twenty-five times via convergent evolution, leading to many lineages of legless lizards. These resemble snakes, but several common groups of legless lizards have eyelids and external ears, which snakes lack, although this rule is not universal (see Amphisbaenia, Dibamidae, and Pygopodidae). (Full article...)
• 
  
  

  

  Clockwise from top left: veiled chameleon (Chamaeleo calyptratus), rock monitor (Varanus albigularis), common blue-tongued skink (Tiliqua scincoides), Italian wall lizard (Podarcis sicula), giant leaf-tailed gecko (Uroplatus fimbriatus), and legless lizard (Anelytropsis papillosus)

  
  Lizard is the common name used for all squamate reptiles other than snakes (and to a lesser extent amphisbaenians), encompassing over 7,000 species, ranging across all continents except Antarctica, as well as most oceanic island chains. The grouping is paraphyletic as some lizards are more closely related to snakes than they are to other lizards. Lizards range in size from chameleons and geckos a few centimeters long to the 3-meter-long Komodo dragon. (Full article...)
• 
  
  

  

  Northern tuatara (Sphenodon punctatus punctatus)

  
  The tuatara (Sphenodon punctatus) is a species of reptile endemic to New Zealand. Despite its close resemblance to lizards, it is part of a distinct lineage, the order Rhynchocephalia. The name tuatara is derived from the Māori language and means "peaks on the back". (Full article...)
• 
  
  

  

  An American alligator (top) and a Chinese alligator

  
  An alligator, or colloquially gator, is a large reptile in the genus Alligator of the family Alligatoridae of the order Crocodilia. The two extant species are the American alligator (A. mississippiensis) and the Chinese alligator (A. sinensis). Additionally, several extinct species of alligator are known from fossil remains. Alligators first appeared during the late Eocene epoch about 37 million years ago. (Full article...)

Amphibian types

• 
  
  

  

  Oscaecilia ochrocephala (Caeciliidae)

  
  Caecilians (/sɪˈsɪliən/; New Latin for 'blind ones') are a group of limbless, vermiform (worm-shaped) or serpentine (snake-shaped) amphibians with small or sometimes nonexistent eyes. They mostly live hidden in soil or in streambeds, and this cryptic lifestyle renders caecilians among the least familiar amphibians. Modern caecilians live in the tropics of South and Central America, Africa, and southern Asia. Caecilians feed on small subterranean creatures such as earthworms. The body is cylindrical and often darkly coloured, and the skull is bullet-shaped and strongly built. Caecilian heads have several unique adaptations, including fused cranial and jaw bones, a two-part system of jaw muscles, and a chemosensory tentacle in front of the eye. The skin is slimy and bears ringlike markings or grooves and may contain scales.
  
  Modern caecilians are a clade, the order Gymnophiona /ˌdʒɪmnəˈfaɪənə/ (or Apoda /ˈæpədə/), one of the three living amphibian groups alongside Anura (frogs) and Urodela (salamanders). Gymnophiona is a crown group, encompassing all modern caecilians and all descendants of their last common ancestor. There are more than 220 living species of caecilian classified in 10 families. Gymnophionomorpha is a recently coined name for the corresponding total group which includes Gymnophiona as well as a few extinct stem-group caecilians (extinct amphibians whose closest living relatives are caecilians but are not descended from any caecilian). Some palaeontologists have used the name Gymnophiona for the total group and the old name Apoda for the crown group'. However, Apoda has other even older uses, including as the name of a genus of Butterfly making its use potentially confusing and best avoided. 'Gymnophiona' derives from the Greek words γυμνος / gymnos (Ancient Greek for 'naked') and οφις / ophis (Ancient Greek for 'snake'), as the caecilians were originally thought to be related to snakes and to lack scales.
  
  The study of caecilian evolution is complicated by their poor fossil record and specialized anatomy. Genetic evidence and some anatomical details (such as pedicellate teeth) support the idea that frogs, salamanders, and caecilians (collectively known as lissamphibians) are each others' closest relatives. Frogs and salamanders show many similarities to dissorophoids, a group of extinct amphibians in the order Temnospondyli. Caecilians are more controversial; many studies extend dissorophoid ancestry to caecilians. Some studies have instead argued that caecilians descend from extinct lepospondyl or stereospondyl amphibians, contradicting evidence for lissamphibian monophyly (common ancestry). Rare fossils of early gymnophionans such as Eocaecilia and Funcusvermis have helped to test the various conflicting hypotheses for the relationships between caecilians and other living and extinct amphibians. ('Full article...)
• 
  
  

  

  Spotted salamander, Ambystoma maculatum

  
  Salamanders are a group of amphibians typically characterized by their lizard-like appearance, with slender bodies, blunt snouts, short limbs projecting at right angles to the body, and the presence of a tail in both larvae and adults. All ten extant salamander families are grouped together under the order Urodela from the group Caudata. Urodela is a scientific Latin term based on the Ancient Greek οὐρά δήλη: ourà dēlē "conspicuous tail". Caudata is the Latin for "tailed ones", from cauda: "tail".
  
  Salamander diversity is highest in eastern North America, especially in the Appalachian Mountains; most species are found in the Holarctic realm, with some species present in the Neotropical realm. Salamanders never have more than four toes on their front legs and five on their rear legs, but some species have fewer digits and others lack hind limbs. Their permeable skin usually makes them reliant on habitats in or near water or other cool, damp places. Some salamander species are fully aquatic throughout their lives, some take to the water intermittently, and others are entirely terrestrial as adults.
  
  This group of amphibians is capable of regenerating lost limbs as well as other damaged parts of their bodies. Researchers hope to reverse engineer the regenerative processes for potential human medical applications, such as brain and spinal cord injury treatment or preventing harmful scarring during heart surgery recovery. The remarkable ability of salamanders to regenerate is not just limited to limbs but extends to vital organs such as the heart, jaw, and parts of the spinal cord, showing their uniqueness compared to different types of vertebrates. ⁤⁤This ability is most remarkable for occurring without any type of scarring. ⁤⁤This has made salamanders an invaluable model organism in scientific research aimed at understanding and achieving regenerative processes for medical advancements in human and animal biology. (Full article...)
• 
  
  

  

  European fire-bellied toad (Bombina bombina), a member of the family Bombinatoridae

  
  Toad is a common name for certain frogs, especially of the family Bufonidae, that are characterized by dry, leathery skin, short legs, and large bumps covering the parotoid glands.
  
  A distinction between frogs and toads is made in scientific taxonomy (see below). In popular culture (folk taxonomy), toads are associated with drier, rougher skin and more terrestrial habitats. (Full article...)
• 
  
  

  

  Various types of frog

  
  A frog is any member of a diverse and largely carnivorous group of short-bodied, tailless amphibians composing the order Anura (coming from the Ancient Greek ἀνούρα, literally 'without tail'). The oldest fossil "proto-frog" Triadobatrachus is known from the Early Triassic of Madagascar (250 million years ago), but molecular clock dating suggests their split from other amphibians may extend further back to the Permian, 265 million years ago. Frogs are widely distributed, ranging from the tropics to subarctic regions, but the greatest concentration of species diversity is in tropical rainforest. Frogs account for around 88% of extant amphibian species. They are also one of the five most diverse vertebrate orders. Warty frog species tend to be called toads, but the distinction between frogs and toads is informal, not from taxonomy or evolutionary history.
  
  An adult frog has a stout body, protruding eyes, anteriorly-attached tongue, limbs folded underneath, and no tail (the tail of tailed frogs is an extension of the male cloaca). Frogs have glandular skin, with secretions ranging from distasteful to toxic. Their skin varies in colour from well-camouflaged dappled brown, grey and green to vivid patterns of bright red or yellow and black to show toxicity and ward off predators. Adult frogs live in fresh water and on dry land; some species are adapted for living underground or in trees.
  
  Frogs typically lay their eggs in the water. The eggs hatch into aquatic larvae called tadpoles that have tails and internal gills. They have highly specialised rasping mouth parts suitable for herbivorous, omnivorous or planktivorous diets. The life cycle is completed when they metamorphose into adults. A few species deposit eggs on land or bypass the tadpole stage. Adult frogs generally have a carnivorous diet consisting of small invertebrates, but omnivorous species exist and a few feed on plant matter. Frog skin has a rich microbiome which is important to their health. Frogs are extremely efficient at converting what they eat into body mass. They are an important food source for predators and part of the food web dynamics of many of the world's ecosystems. The skin is semi-permeable, making them susceptible to dehydration, so they either live in moist places or have special adaptations to deal with dry habitats. Frogs produce a wide range of vocalisations, particularly in their breeding season, and exhibit many different kinds of complex behaviors to attract mates, to fend off predators and to generally survive. (Full article...)

Notice how the box bottoms line up. That readjusts even if you click the slideshow buttons.

The template used for this is {{Flex columns}}.

By the way, when you include more than one box in a column, any left over whitespace in that column is divided between them.

Box-header colour

You may have noticed the new {{Box-header colour}} template used above. It lets you pick the color locally (right on the same page). Before, this was handled on a subpage somewhere.

Testing, testing

Now that we have lots of toys to play with for making cool portals...

Don't forget, that the majority of views of Wikipedia these days are from mobile devices. We need to make certain that portals display well on those. So, remember to check your work on portals in mobile view mode...

To see a portal in mobile view mode, insert a ".m" into a portal's url, after "en", like this:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Reptile

If you discover problems in a portal you can't fix, report them on Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Portals/Design.

Until next time...

Have fun.    — The Transhumanist   00:44, 27 July 2018 (UTC)

Question

I Have change Draft:Yu Qiuyu, can you move this draft to article about Yu Qiuyu? Thank you! — Preceding unsigned comment added by 39.162.2.107 (talk) 11:31, 28 July 2018 (UTC)

About the goat

It was meant to be cookies but it changed into a goat because of a glitch. ^_^ You are noot (talk) 17:25, 29 July 2018 (UTC)

You've got mail!

Hello, Nick Moyes. Please check your email; you've got mail!
It may take a few minutes from the time the email is sent for it to show up in your inbox. You can at any time by removing the {{You've got mail}} or {{ygm}} template.You are noot (talk) 17:32, 29 July 2018 (UTC)

Hello You are noot. Sorry, I wont be able to pick up emails or reply here for a while. I'm out of country right now, with very limited internet access. Regards from Canada.Nick Moyes (talk) 22:30, 29 July 2018 (UTC)

NPR Newsletter No.12 30 July 2018

Chart of the New Pages Patrol backlog for the past 6 months. ()

Hello Nick Moyes, thank you for your work reviewing New Pages!

June backlog drive

Overall the June backlog drive was a success, reducing the last 3,000 or so to below 500. However, as expected, 90% of the patrolling was done by less than 10% of reviewers.
Since the drive closed, the backlog has begun to rise sharply again and is back up to nearly 1,400 already. Please help reduce this total and keep it from raising further by reviewing some articles each day.

New technology, new rules

• New features are shortly going to be added to the Special:NewPagesFeed which include a list of drafts for review, OTRS flags for COPYVIO, and more granular filter preferences. More details can be found at this page.
• Probationary permissions: Now that PERM has been configured to allow expiry dates to all minor user rights, new NPR flag holders may sometimes be limited in the first instance to 6 months during which their work will be assessed for both quality and quantity of their reviews. This will allow admins to accord the right in borderline cases rather than make a flat out rejection.
• Current reviewers who have had the flag for longer than 6 months but have not used the permissions since they were granted will have the flag removed, but may still request to have it granted again in the future, subject to the same probationary period, if they wish to become an active reviewer.

Editathons

• Editathons will continue through August. Please be gentle with new pages that obviously come from good faith participants, especially articles from developing economies and ones about female subjects. Consider using the 'move to draft' tool rather than bluntly tagging articles that may have potential but which cannot yet reside in mainspace.

The Signpost

• The next issue of the monthly magazine will be out soon. The newspaper is an excellent way to stay up to date with news and new developments between our newsletters. If you have special messages to be published, or if you would like to submit an article (one about NPR perhaps?), don't hesitate to contact the editorial team here.

---

Go here to remove your name if you wish to opt-out of future mailings. — Insertcleverphrasehere ^{(or here)} 00:00, 30 July 2018 (UTC)

Tech News: 2018-31

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

Recent changes

• The design on Special:Log has changed. It will change again soon. Developers are working on fixing problems. [58]

Problems

• Deployment of 1.32.0-wmf.13 has been partially delayed. All deployments have been resumed and successfully done after bug fixes. [59][60]
• Deployment of 1.32.0-wmf.14 has been partially delayed. [61][62]

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 31 July. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 1 August. It will be on all wikis from 2 August (calendar).

Meetings

• You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 31 July at 18:30 (UTC). See how to join.
• You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 1 August at 15:00 (UTC) as well as at 23:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• After a community discussion, a new group for users will be created. "Interface administrators" will be the only users allowed to edit interface pages like MediaWiki:Common.css or MediaWiki:Common.js. This is done to avoid technical issues and improve security. That change will be effective by the end of August 2018.

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

14:05, 30 July 2018 (UTC)

Portals WikiProject update #015, 31 July 2018

Now that we have lots of toys to play with, it's play time!

Here are some fun activities to use our new toys on...

Fun activity #1: put the improved panorama template to use

Would you like to travel around the world? Well, this may be the next best thing...

Here's another fun toy to play with: {{Portal image banner}}

To see what it looks like, check out the panoramas at the tops of the following portals:

• Portal:India
• Portal:Melbourne
• Portal:Perth
• Portal:Monaco
• Portal:South Sudan
• Portal:Thiruvananthapuram
• Portal:Lithuania
• Portal:Brisbane
• Portal:Abu Dhabi
• Portal:Athens
• Portal:Barcelona
• Portal:Calgary
• Portal:Dhaka
• Portal:Dresden
• Portal:Edinburgh
• Portal:Florence
• Portal:Houston
• Portal:Miami
• Portal:Milan
• Portal:Moscow
• Portal:Munich
• Portal:Seattle
• Portal:Stockholm
• Portal:Turin
• Portal:Bermuda

The task: There are many geography portals that lack panoramas. Please add some. Please keep the file size down below 2 megabytes, and keep in mind that you may find quality banners at commons: at less than 200K (.2 megabytes). Good search terms to include with the place name are "banner", "cityscape", "skyline", "panorama", "landscape", etc.

Related task: There are also lots of geography portals that have panoramas used as gaudy banners (with print or icons splattered across them) or that display them in some random location on the page. In many cases, those pages would be improved by displaying the panorama as a clean picture at the top of the intro section, like on the examples above. This works best with banner-like panoramas. Please fix such pages when you come across them, if you believe it would improve the look of the page.

Taller images might be better suited displayed further down the page, or in the "Selected images" section.

Note that {{Portal image banner}} supports multiple images, and displays one at random upon the first visit, and each time the page is purged.

Fun activity #2: install "Selected images" sections

That is, image slideshows!

Over 200 have been installed so far. Just 1200 to go. (Be sure not to install them on portals with active maintainers, unless they want you to).

The title "Selected images" reflects the fact that not all images on Wikipedia are pictures, and encompasses maps, graphs, diagrams, sketches, paintings, pictures, and so on.

The toys we have to work with for this are:

{{Random slideshow}}

and

{{Transclude files as random slideshow}}

The task: Using one of the above templates directly on a portal's base page, replace static "Selected picture" sections, with a section like one of these:

Selected images

• 
  Koi are ornamental domesticated varieties of the common carp Cyprinus carpio, originated from China and widely spread in Japan. They are very closely related to goldfish. The word "koi" comes from Japanese meaning "carp".
• 
  The red lionfish (Pterois volitans) is a venomous coral reef fish from the Indian and western Pacific Oceans. The red lionfish is also found off the east coast of the United States, and was likely first introduced off the Florida coast in the early to mid 1990s.
• 
  A discus (Symphysodon discus) is guarding its eggs. As for most cichlids, brood care is highly developed with both the parents caring for the young. Additionally, adult discus produce a secretion through their skin, off which the larvae live during their first few days.
• 
  Salmon fry hatching (Salmo salar) - the larva has grown around the remains of the yolk - visible are the arteries spinning around the yolk and little oildrops, also the gut, the spine, the main caudal blood vessel, the bladder and the arcs of the gills.

Selected images

• 
  Dry Mountain Fire Lookout in the Ochoco National Forest, Oregon, US circa 1930 (from Wildfire)
• 
  Wildfire near Yosemite National Park, United States, in 2013. The Rim Fire burned more than 250,000 acres (1,000 km²) of forest. (from Wildfire)
• 
  Old-growth forest in the Opal Creek Wilderness, a wilderness area located in the Willamette National Forest in the U.S. state of Oregon, on the border of Mount Hood National Forest. It has the largest uncut watershed in Oregon. (from Old-growth forest)
• 
  Fungus Climacocystis borealis on a tree stump in the Białowieża Forest, one of the last largely intact primeval forests in Central Europe (from Old-growth forest)
• 
  Avatar Grove near Port Renfrew, British Columbia: Giant Douglas firs (left) and red cedars (right) fill the grove. (from Old-growth forest)
• 
  A coniferous forest pictured in the coat of arms of the Kainuu region in Finland (from Conifer)
• 
  Wildfire smoke in atmosphere off the U.S. West Coast in 2020 (from Wildfire)
• 
  Eucalyptus regnans forest in Tasmania, Australia (from Old-growth forest)
• 
  Charred shrubland in suburban Sydney (2019–20 Australian bushfires). (from Wildfire)
• 
  Elk Bath, an award-winning photograph of elk avoiding a wildfire in Montana (from Wildfire)
• 
  A surface fire in the western desert of Utah, United States (from Wildfire)
• 
  Fire Propagation Model (from Wildfire)
• 
  Wildfire burning in the Kaibab National Forest, Arizona, United States, in 2020. The Mangum Fire burned more than 70,000 acres (280 km²) of forest. (from Wildfire)
• 
  Ecological succession after a wildfire in a boreal pine forest next to Hara Bog, Lahemaa National Park, Estonia. The pictures were taken one and two years after the fire. (from Wildfire)
• 
  Aerial view of deliberate wildfires on the Khun Tan Range, Thailand. These fires are lit by local farmers every year to promote the growth of a certain mushroom. (from Wildfire)
• 
  Cupressaceae: scale leaves of Lawson's cypress (Chamaecyparis lawsoniana); scale in mm (from Conifer)
• 
  Charred landscape following a crown fire in the North Cascades, United States (from Wildfire)
• 
  Sediment off the Yucatán Peninsula (from Wildfire)
• 
  Pinaceae: needle-like leaves and vegetative buds of Coast Douglas fir (Pseudotsuga menziesii var. menziesii) (from Conifer)
• 
  Araucariaceae: awl-like leaves of Cook pine (Araucaria columnaris) (from Conifer)
• 
  In Abies grandis (grand fir), and many other species with spirally arranged leaves, leaf bases are twisted to flatten their arrangement and maximize light capture. (from Conifer)
• 
  Globosa, a cultivar of Pinus sylvestris, a northern European species, in the North American Red Butte Garden (from Conifer)
• 
  Animation of diaphragmatic breathing with the diaphragm shown in green (from Wildfire)
• 
  Pinaceae: unopened female cones of subalpine fir (Abies lasiocarpa) (from Conifer)
• 
  Mist condensing over rainforest in Danum Valley Conservation Area, Malaysia (from Old-growth forest)
• 
  A wildfire in Venezuela during a drought (from Wildfire)
• 
  Old-growth European beech forest in Biogradska Gora National Park, Montenegro (from Old-growth forest)
• 
  Virgin forest about 2,500 m (8,200 ft) above sea level in Shennongjia Forestry District, Hubei, China (from Old-growth forest)
• 
  Global fires during the year 2008 for the months of August (top image) and February (bottom image), as detected by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA's Terra satellite. (from Wildfire)
• 
  A Monterey pine forest in Sydney, Australia (from Conifer)
• 
  The 2020 Córdoba wildfires imaged by NASA's FIRMS (from Wildfire)
• 
  Tāne Mahuta, the biggest kauri (Agathis australis) tree alive, in the Waipoua Forest of the Northland Region of New Zealand. (from Conifer)
• 
  A dirt road acted as a fire barrier in South Africa. The effects of the barrier can clearly be seen on the unburnt (left) and burnt (right) sides of the road. (from Wildfire)
• 
  Phylogeny of the Pinophyta based on cladistic analysis of molecular data. (from Conifer)
• 
  The northern spotted owl primarily inhabits old-growth forests in the northern part of its range (Canada to southern Oregon) and landscapes with a mix of old and younger forest types in the southern part of its range (the Klamath region and California). (from Old-growth forest)
• 
  Smoke from the 2020 California wildfires settles over San Francisco (from Wildfire)
• 
  National map of groundwater and soil moisture in the United States. It shows the very low soil moisture associated with the 2011 fire season in Texas. (from Wildfire)
• 
  A Russian firefighter extinguishing a wildfire (from Wildfire)
• 
  Wildland firefighter working a brush fire in Hopkinton, New Hampshire, US (from Wildfire)
• 
  2003 Canberra bushfires, visible from Parliament House (from Wildfire)
• 
  A thin transverse section showing the internal structure of conifer wood (from Conifer)
• 
  Forest fires visible from a distance in Dajti National Park, Tirana, Albania (from Wildfire)
• 
  First-growth or virgin forest near Mount Rainier, 1914 (from Old-growth forest)
• 
  Old-growth red cedar stump near Port Renfrew, British Columbia (from Old-growth forest)
• 
  Cool temperate rainforest in Tasmania, Australia (from Old-growth forest)
• 
  Redwood tree in northern California redwood forest: According to the National Park Service, "96 percent of the original old-growth coast redwoods have been logged." (from Old-growth forest)
• 
  The narrow conical shape of northern conifers, and their downward-drooping limbs, help them shed snow. (from Conifer)
• 
  A prescribed burn in a Pinus nigra stand in Portugal (from Wildfire)
• 
  Antarctic beech old growth in Lamington National Park, Queensland, Australia (from Old-growth forest)
• 
  Downed wood replenishes topsoil as it decays. (from Old-growth forest)
• 
  Lightning-sparked wildfires are frequent occurrences during the dry summer season in Nevada. (from Wildfire)

The one on the left uses {{Random slideshow}} (which accepts file names), and the one on the right uses {{Transclude files as random slideshow}} (which accepts source pages from which the filenames are gathered).

The above section formatting is used on many of the pages you will come across, but not all. In those cases, use whatever section formatting matches the rest of the page.

Note that you may come across "Selected picture" sections done with {{Random portal component}} templates. That template call is the entire section. Replace it with a section that matches the other sections on the page, and put the new slideshow inside that.

For example, in Portal:California, this code:

{{Random portal component|max=21|seed=27|header=Selected picture|subpage=Selected picture}}

was replaced with this code:

{{/box-header|Selected images|noedit=yes}}
{{Transclude files as random slideshow
| {{PAGENAME}}
| Culture of {{PAGENAME}}
}}
{{Box-footer}}

And the new section blended right in with the formatting of the rest of the page. Note the use of the {{PAGENAME}} magic word. Plain article titles also work. Don't feel limited to one or two page names. But be sure to test each slideshow before installing the next one. (Or if you prefer, in batches - just don't leave them hanging). Report technical problems at the Portal design talk page.

Fun activity #3: upgrade "Selected article" sections

These sections, where unmaintained, have gone stale. That's because 1) the excerpts are static, having been manually copied and pasted, and 2) because they lack automatic addition of new entries.

They can be upgraded with:

{{Transclude random excerpt}}

or

{{Transclude list item excerpt}}

or

{{Transclude linked excerpt}}

All three of these will provide excerpts that won't go stale. The latter two can provide excerpt collections that won't go stale, by providing new entries over time. The key is to select source pages or source sections that are frequently updated, such as root article sections, mainstream lists, or navigation templates.

Where will this put us?

When the above tasks are completed for the entire collection of portals (except the ones with specific maintainers), we'll be more than half-way done with the portal system upgrade.

Keep up the great work.    — The Transhumanist   19:14, 30 July 2018 (UTC)

Crimean ride 1675

Hello. I have read your explanation for deleted article in my page. Only source from many revolutions history of Kievan Rus' is story of past years. This does not mean that corrections referring to it should be deleted. I also took description from one source. However, this is supported by many facts - campaign shifts the fact that Islam Gerei was often thrown out of throne and that, after year (1676), Turkish sultan had conflict with Cossacks (Reply of the Zaporozhian Cossacks). The Shaolin Monk   20:04, 4 aug 2018 (UTC)