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This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Fences and windows (talk | contribs) at 15:03, 9 January 2021 (→‎Regarding my Topic Ban: Reply). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

Problematic IP editor

Hi there. Last April, you blocked an IP editor for a week for dumping huge amounts of data in demography articles, often with formatting and sourcing problems, as discussed at Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/IncidentArchive920#178.217.194.100's long-term edit warring and continued addition of unsourced statistics. I've just noticed that the editor seems to have resumed this behaviour since the block. I need to look into the edits in more detail (there are a lot of them), but your thoughts would be welcome. Cordless Larry (talk) 17:39, 7 January 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Hi Cordless Larry, I can see they're still making a lot of edits to demography articles - are these recent edits disruptive? This issue of what information should be included in demographics articles and in what format may benefit from drawing up some proposed guidelines and a wider discussion at the village pump. Thanks, Fences&Windows 14:33, 8 January 2017 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks for the reply. I still need to investigate the edits further (sorry - I got distracted with other things). It does at least appear that the IP's more recent additions are sourced. I agree that a wider discussion would be worthwhile. Pinging Jolly Janner, who has been involved in this case previously and might also have a view on this. Cordless Larry (talk) 14:43, 8 January 2017 (UTC)[reply]
One of the original issues was the IP's refusal to format numbers correctly, despite numerous warnings, and this appears to still be the case with some edits. Here, they get the number format right, but don't cite a source. For many of the other edits, it's hard to tell if the figures are supported by the sources. Take this, for instance. There are five sources cited below that table, so it's hard to know where to look. I doubt that the IP is making up these figures, but the nature of the data dumps makes it very difficult to verify anything. Cordless Larry (talk) 21:46, 8 January 2017 (UTC)[reply]
I have started a discussion at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Geography#Vital statistics tables in country demography articles to try to gather views on the inclusion of large vital statistics tables. Cordless Larry (talk) 10:15, 11 January 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Requesting userfication

Hello, Fences and windows, I am trying to request access to deleted page, please? I found your username on the page Category:Wikipedia_administrators_willing_to_provide_copies_of_deleted_articles of those willing to provide copies of deleted articles.... only requesting so I can retain content and reference links, etc. Obra Architects is the page in question. [overzealous writer and new user, but if possible I'd like the content to either work on it or reconsider, only to retrieve content please, if possible] I appreciate your help. Thanks, J.seoulJ.seoul (talk) 15:57, 10 January 2017 (UTC)[reply]

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13:36, 1 February 2017 (UTC)

Your edit on Ruthenia

You should already be familiar with WP:NONENG. In fact, if you check the latest editing history, you may have noticed that, not only have I had only just expanded the refs and verified them to be correct (here. If you are so dubious of my integrity that you feel compelled to tag variants for 'fact', please ask Ymblanter (or another Russian speaker) to double check. Thank you. --Iryna Harpy (talk) 09:34, 14 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Iryna Harpy - it's not a question of your integrity - Cram101/CTI Reviews copies its information from Wikipedia so it is unquestionably not a reliable source. You cannot verify that source as this is WP:CIRCULAR referencing and your own knowledge of Russian cannot be used as a reference. Someone decided to cite those Cyrillic versions with that source, but it cannot be used so needs to be replaced. Fences&Windows 11:42, 14 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]
Iryna Harpy, please compare the source to the lead of Kievan Rus'. I've removed it again, please don't restore it. Cram101 rely on duping people, as with other similar "book" publishers, and we need to be wary. Fences&Windows 11:49, 14 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]
I've now understood why you referred to WP:NONENG. The reference I removed that supposedly directly supported the Cyrillic names is in English, a direct copy of a Wikipedia article. Another reference, now reference 1, is in Cyrillic and was cited at the end of the alternative names, seemingly to support other Latin names. If that reference actually also supports those Cyrillic names, that's fine. I already understood we can use non-English sources and I was never questioning this. Fences&Windows 12:00, 14 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]
Hi, Fences and Windows. My apologies for my own mistake. It was the last edit of the night, and I'm in the midst of moving (setting up my place for photos pre-auction, whilst juggling the finalisation of the new place): it's a poor excuse for making such silly errors, but it happened.
The ludicrous part is that I was thinking of removing the Cram101 reference myself as I've encountered that series in other articles in the past... and have removed it as CIRC! As for the lead of the Kievan Rus' article, I should have recognised it as an incarnation of the lead as I also work on that article. Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea culpa.
As regards the Russian, Ukrainian and Polish sources, it's nigh on impossible to find English language sources for some of the details. My intention is to grab the relevant quotes and translate them into English when I have a little more time. It will make for somewhat cumbersome intext references, but it will at least serve as a stamp of being verified and translated by a hooman bean. I'm still on the prowl for quality English language texts for an article in desperate need of more RS. --Iryna Harpy (talk) 20:58, 14 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]
Cool. It's great to be able to add sources from non-English sources, we definitely miss out on a lot of knowledge when we only use what's written in English. Fences&Windows 21:11, 14 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]
Agreed. I do, however, prefer that at least one other party checks both the entire text, as well as the selected quotes in the translations. The major problem is that we can't guarantee that editors aren't cherry picking or inadvertently misinterpreting the source. I've encountered both good faith and serious POV usage of sources on a number of Eastern European centred articles. (Thanks for creating a reflist here: straggly refs in unrelated sections are a pet peeve of mine.) --Iryna Harpy (talk) 21:36, 14 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Reply to welcome

Thank you for your kind message. I am a religious studies scholar and have been editing here and there, very occasionally, for some years. I now adventured to write my first Wikipedia entry as a draft: Weixin Shengjiao. I studied quite carefully the pages you indicated and hope I did everything right but you may want to take a look at my draft page, which is waiting for review. One question, why the image in the Infobox appear aligned right rather than center? Than you Aida Young Aidayoung (talk) 14:43, 20 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]

No problem Aida. I've moved your comment down here, the convention is to post new comments at the bottom of a talk page. Sorry for welcoming you after you've been editing for 10 years! I fixed the image using the instructions in Help:Infobox picture. As you're a scholar in this area, you might like and be able to improve two articles I worked on a few years ago: Daejongism and Daesun Jinrihoe. Fences&Windows 18:15, 20 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Dear Fences, again my Wiki-ignorance makes me wonder whether it's better to answer on your Talkpage or my Talkpage. I will have a look at the two articles, starting from Daesun JInrihoe. It is the larger group deriving from Gang Il-sun. My impression is that the article, which by the way is not too bad, was written in its first version by somebody whose native language is not English. Another problem is that it mostly relies on very old sources, while more recent scholarly research now does exist. Here is the message I posted on my own Talk Page: Thank you, very useful work, and please explain how you managed to put the image in the center. Weixin Shengjiao is one among several religious movements that in my personal opinion are under-represented in Wikipedia - this is the reason I also made some edit to the page about Gang Il-sun, whose posterity is extremely complicated (around one hundred religious movements derived from him) but, by the estimate of leading scholar of Korean religion Donald Baker, today may well have some ten million followers when you add up the various movements. What I mean is Gang Il-sun is an important character and deserved a more detailed entry. It is of course not Wikipedia's but our fault as religious scholars. For many years, both I and others found writing in Wikipedia difficult - and it doesn't go in the list of publications for academic advancement... As evidence of our Wiki-ignorance, I never heard before of WP-DYK. I believe the "hooks" can be that "a Taiwanese religious movement teaching I Ching and Feng Shui gathered from 1984 to 2016 some 300,000 followers" (I prefer to stay with the conservative estimate) and "ceremonies honoring the ancestors in Taiwan organized by the religious movement Weixin Shengjiao attract every year on January 1 more than 30,000, including the island's top political authorities." Best regards and thank you again Aidayoung (talk) 19:34, 20 February 2017 (UTC)[reply] 

Aidayoung (talk) 19:42, 20 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]

I am posting here too my answer to your comments in my own Talk Page Dear Fences and windows, I will work on Daesun Jinrihoe as soon as possible. Yes, the page shows different hands. I believe criticism should of course be kept but Jorgensen wrote his article sixteen years ago, in the immediate aftermath of the fights between the two factions, which generated a lot of hostile attention in the Korean media. The problems have not been completely eliminated, but a Council held in Yeoju in 2013 allowed the two factions to coexist more or least peacefully. DJ also tried to address the other criticism that surfaced in the media and I would say its public image is better than in 2001. Answering your questions on Weixin Shengjiao, I have mentioned in the entry that it translates "Sacred Teachings of the Mind Only." The problem however is that the Chinese notion of "mind" is not equivalent to the Western one. As far as I know, as it has received very little scholarly attention (in addition to what I quoted there are only three unpublished conference papers), WS has also eluded the radars of critics of fringe religions. Did you write the article on Daejongism as well? If yes, what is a deliberate decision to exclude the controversial matter of the relationship between Daejongism and Dahn Yoga, the organization of Ilchi Lee?Aidayoung (talk) 18:48, 21 February 2017 (UTC)Aidayoung (talk) 16:54, 22 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Hi Aidayoung, I did re-write Daejongism. Before I edited, it was an largely unsourced stub. I then expanded it using what sources I could find. I'm not a religious scholar and I've not got a particular interest in these new religious movements, but I stumbled on them somehow and decided to improve our coverage. I didn't deliberately exclude the relationship between Daejongism and Dahn Yoga, it just wasn't covered by the sources I found.
The reception of Daesun Jinrihoe can be framed according to the age of the sources and with your access to more scholarly sources it should be improved. Fences&Windows 20:39, 22 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you for your suggestions about Daesun Jinrihoe. I will get to it as soon as possible. Daejongism in my opinion is understandable and well-written in its present incarnation.I will only add in the next few days some updated references to scholarly literature and perhaps a sentence or two on the controversies about the relationships with Dahn Yoga. Aidayoung (talk) 11:34, 23 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Dear Fences, I have now made a number of edits to the page that you re-wrote on Daejongism. Please check whether you agree. Best, AidaAidayoung (talk) 18:50, 24 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks Aida, that looks good. Fences&Windows 15:54, 25 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]

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DYK for Weixinism

Mifter (talk) 12:02, 16 March 2017 (UTC)[reply]

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Your close on User:Spacecowboy420

Hi, Fences and windows. Regarding your close on the latest Spacecowboy420 case, I appreciate your proposal, but restricting Spacecowboy420 from undiscussed redirects or mergers won't stop him from reckless blanking. And the main problem pointed to in these two ANI threads regarding him is his reckless blanking. Flyer22 Reborn (talk) 00:50, 11 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Hi Flyer22 Reborn, you're welcome to reopen the thread if you feel the discussion needs to continue and further admin action is needed. I didn't look further into Spacecowboy420's current editing. Fences&Windows 07:24, 11 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]
Flyer22 Reborn & Fences I have already planned to treat blanking articles, with the same consideration that I have agreed to use when redirecting/merging articles. As per my comments on ANI your advice "just use common sense and err of the side of caution when removing content" seems very sensible and easy to live with. (especially when combined with "discuss major changes first") - I hope that puts your mind at rest, Flyer. Spacecowboy420 (talk) 08:12, 11 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]
I responded on my talk page. Flyer22 Reborn (talk) 22:02, 12 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Disambiguation link notification for April 15

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I left a note which might be of interest to you

Talk page note--S Philbrick(Talk) 19:42, 21 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks Sphilbrick. I tried to add the infobox, but an edit filter blocked me! The page took English Wikipedia code in the preview, but then "computer says no". I progressively removed "fk a genre", the URL and then found the Spanish wikicode, but to no avail. Spanish Wikipedia's edit filter still thought I was vandalising... I put the code on the talk page and left a cry for help. Fences&Windows 20:14, 21 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]
OK, thanks for trying.--S Philbrick(Talk) 20:49, 21 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]
Sphilbrick, I was overthinking it. On Spanish Wikipedia, you can just add the empty infobox template, ficha, and it populates from Wikidata. I now have 10 edits under my belt at es.wikipedia. Fences&Windows 21:09, 21 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]
Wonderful! Thanks.--S Philbrick(Talk) 00:24, 22 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Note to self

Look up uses of infomory.com, famous101.com, answers.com, informationclearinghouse.info, Wikivisually, Wikivisual, newworldencyclopedia.org. Not reliable. Create William H. Sebrell, Jr, old scandal, Michael Scott (Chicago board of education), Steve Back? Fences&Windows 20:42, 22 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]

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Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 21:40, 1 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Daesun Jinrihoe

I have finally worked on Daesun Jinrihoe. I have reorganized, updated, and expanded the entry, and restored the parts on "criticism" that had been deleted (presumably by members of the movement) but, when updated, are informative. I have maintained where consistent with the reorganization the previous material, and have included missing page numbers in already existing references.Aidayoung Aidayoung (talk) 13:45, 5 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Nice work, Aidayoung! One IP user has been trying to santitise the article since last August. Fences&Windows 17:27, 5 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]
For coherence, I have also edited Jeung San Do (obviously written by members), Bocheonism and Gang Il-sun, and introduced a new entry JeungsanismAidayoung (talk) 17:57, 5 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]
Excellent, I had considered tackling those articles too years ago but balked at the task. Fences&Windows 18:37, 5 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Jeung San Do can still be vastly improved. Will try to do when I will have time Aidayoung (talk) 17:58, 6 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]

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Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 20:59, 6 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Deletion of page Angela Yuriko Smith

Fences and Windows, I'd like to ask you to consider reversing the deletion of page Angela Yuriko Smith due to a lack of sources. Originally, this was a creation of a family member at the beginning of my career as a fiction author to show support. Seven years later, I actually do have sources and a career worth noting and would like to re add the page. I've added a page suggestion in the appropriate area. This is my first time on Wikipedia other than as a user fact checking, so I apologize for any lack of protocol. Here is the original page deletion information:

20:15, 16 May 2011 Fences and windows (talk | contribs) deleted page Angela Yuriko Smith (Expired PROD, concern was: unsourced BLP)

And here is what I added in the "Suggest a new article" section:

  • Angela Yuriko Smith, American author and poet of over 15 books primarily in the horror and speculative fiction genres. Smith has also published a number of children's books. A former newspaper journalist for The Bay Beacon in Niceville, Florida and The Community News in Browns Mills, New Jersey, her prose and poetry have been published in several print and online publications, including the “Horror Writers Association's Poetry Showcase” vols. 1-3, “Christmas Lites” vols. 1-6 and the “Where the Stars Rise: Asian Science Fiction and Fantasy” anthology. Her first collection of poetry, “In Favor of Pain,” has been nominated for an 2017 Elgin Award. When not writing, she teaches creative writing at Northwest Florida State College. A member of the Horror Writer's Association and the Science Fiction Poetry Association. Angela Yuriko Smith's blog is at [1]. The Elgin nomination for "In Favor of Pain" by Angela Yuriko Smith: [2]. Angela Yuriko Smith's work on Amazon: [3]. Angela Yuriko Smith with Horror Writer's Association [4]

My bibliography is at: http://angelaysmith.com/books-by-angela-2/

Thank you for your consideration for this page. I appreciate the information Wikipedia provides and am a frequent user.

Angela Yuriko Smith (talk) 11:08, 19 July 2017 (UTC)Angela Yuriko Smith[reply]

References

  1. ^ http://angelaysmith.com/
  2. ^ http://www.sfpoetry.com/el/elgcand.html
  3. ^ https://www.amazon.com/Angela-Yuriko-Smith/e/B0053YHTO8/ref=sr_ntt_srch_lnk_1?qid=1500460085&sr=8-1
  4. ^ https://hwa46.wildapricot.org/Sys/PublicProfile/28388149/1683781
Hello Angela Yuriko Smith, thank you for commenting. I have looked at the deleted article, the links you provided, and sources I can find. I'm afraid that I cannot find sufficient coverage in independent reliable sources like books, newspapers and magazines (just in brief pieces in local press like [1]). I cannot say that notability has been demonstrated, so a restored article would be quickly deleted again. Compare to the kind of sourcing I found for Ethan Siegel or Dominic Frisby. I would be willing to restore the deleted text into your userspace and merge in your proposed text, but I will not place it back into the encyclopedia as an article as I do not believe it meets our requirements for biographies. Also bear in mind that for people who are not well known public figures, a Wikipedia article can be a bad thing. It will be at the top of Google searches and you will not control it. Fences&Windows 17:13, 19 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Following up on Dietary Inflammatory Index

It was created from here Inflammation

Text was published here[2] in Jan 2016.

Plagarism was added to Wikipedia in this edit[3]. Will just delete it all. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 03:42, 29 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Sorry, Doc James, but I cannot see that the entire text was copied from that article. You have not demonstrated what the copyright issue is. Could you explain this in more detail, please? Fences&Windows 22:25, 30 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]
If you look at this text[4]
"Based on a search of the literature from 1950 to the end of 2010, 45 parameters were identified among foods, nutrients, and other food components that were associated with six plasma inflammatory markers (IL-1β, IL-4, IL-6, IL-10, TNF-α and CRP). A specific inflammatory effect score for each food parameter was developed on the basis of the literature review and taking into account the quality and number of published papers (1,943 articles were reviewed and scored). For each study participant in a study, the dietary data is first linked to a global database that was developed based on 11 datasets from around the world (US – NHANES; UK – The National Diet & Nutrition Survey; Bahrain – National Nutrition Survey for Adult Bahrainis; Mexico – Mexican National Health and Nutrition Survey; Australia – National Nutrition Survey; South Korea – KNHANES; Taiwan – Nutrition and Health Survey in Taiwan; India – Indian Diet Study; New Zealand – National Nutrition Survey) and thus provides a robust estimate of the mean and the standard deviation of these 45 parameters.2 Each subject’s exposure relative to the “standard global mean” is expressed as a z-score that is derived by subtracting the “standard global mean” from the amount reported, and dividing this value by its standard deviation. To minimize the effect of “right skewing”, this value was then converted to a centered percentile score. The subject’s DII score was computed by multiplying these values by the specific article inflammatory effect score for each food parameter and then summing together all these 45 values according to the following formula, DII=b1*n1+b2*n2...........b45*n45, where bi refers to the literature-derived inflammatory effect score for each of the evaluated food parameter and ni refers to the food parameter-specific centered percentile, which were derived from the dietary data, per each i from 1 to 45."
Ref says " basis of a search of the literature from 1950 to the end of 2010, we identified forty-five food parameters among foods, nutrients and other food components that were associated with six plasma inflammatory markers (IL-1β, IL-4, IL-6, IL-10, TNF-α and CRP). We defined a specific DII score for each food parameter on the basis of the literature review and by taking into account the quality and number of published papers (1943 articles were reviewed and scored). For each study participant, the dietary data were first linked to a global database that was developed on the basis of eleven data sets from around the world and thus provides a robust estimate of the mean and the standard deviation of these forty-five parameters(16). Each subject’s exposure relative to the ‘standard global mean’ was expressed as a z-score that was derived by subtracting the ‘standard global mean’ from the amount reported and then dividing this value by its standard deviation. To minimise the effect of ‘right skewing’, this value was then converted to a centred percentile score. The subject’s DII score was computed by multiplying these values by the specific DII score for each food parameter and then summing together all these forty-five values according to the following formula, DII=b1× n1 + b2× n2 +……….. + b45× n45, where bi refers to the literature-derived inflammatory effect score for each of the evaluated food parameter and ni refers to the food parameter specific centred percentile, which were derived from the dietary data, per each i from 1 to 45."
Looking further Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 23:13, 30 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]
With that degree of issues in the original edit here[5] best to start over IMO. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 23:16, 30 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]

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Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 00:11, 1 August 2017 (UTC)[reply]

How Can I Write an Entry on a Subject "Protected from Creation"

Dear Fences and Windows: As you know from my history of editing, I research new religious movements and "cults," not only in Asia. I have recently created the entry Bnei Baruch. It is a large, if controversial, movement, and I did mention the controversies. Its founder, Michael Laitman, is also an interesting and controversial figure in the world of new religious movements. I had in mind to create a bibliographic page but found that the page was "deleted and protected from creation." I saw there were several attempts to post as a Wikipedia entry his promotional CV. These were no real entries suitable for Wikipedia, of course, but Laitman is surely a relevant public figure both in Israel and the US in the milieus of Kabbalah and esoteric Judaism, with some 150,000 followers. Of course, the entry should cover criticism and controversies as well. But I believe it should be created and am inquiring how one can request that the protection be removed. BestAidayoung (talk) 16:56, 6 August 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Hi Aidayoung, I suggest reading Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Bnei Baruch and Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Michael Laitman. These articles were both deleted in 2006 for being "self-promotional". So long as your new articles don't suffer from the problems listed in those debates, recreation should be OK. Draft a replacement at User:Aidayoung/Michael Laitman and I will check it. We should be able to get it posted. Fences&Windows 17:04, 6 August 2017 (UTC)[reply]
We may need to go to WP:DRV or speak to the admin who protected the page. For Laitman's bio, don't use any sources he wrote or by his organisation or followers. This looks useful:[6]. Fences&Windows 17:45, 6 August 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you Fences and Windows, I will read the material and prepare a draft as you suggest. I am familiar with the 2002 article by Blau in Haaretz and have mentioned it in my Bnei Baruch entry.Aidayoung (talk) 20:53, 6 August 2017 (UTC) Fences and Windows, I have returned to my Asian religions and wrote a couple of entries. I am still looking for material that would make the article on Laitman (if any) meaningful, in terms of adding something to what I already included in the Bnei Baruch entryAidayoung (talk) 15:24, 14 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Administrators' newsletter – September 2017

News and updates for administrators from the past month (August 2017).

Administrator changes

added Nakon • Scott
removed Sverdrup • Thespian • Elockid • James086 • Ffirehorse • Celestianpower • Boing! said Zebedee

Guideline and policy news

Technical news

  • You will now get a notification when someone tries to log in to your account and fails. If they try from a device that has logged into your account before, you will be notified after five failed attempts. You can also set in your preferences to get an email when someone logs in to your account from a new device or IP address, which may be encouraged for admins and accounts with sensitive permissions.
  • Syntax highlighting is now available as a beta feature (more info). This may assist administrators and template editors when dealing with intricate syntax of high-risk templates and system messages.
  • In your notification preferences, you can now block specific users from pinging you. This functionality will soon be available for Special:EmailUser as well.

Arbitration

  • Applications for CheckUser and Oversight are being accepted by the Arbitration Committee until September 12. Community discussion of the candidates will begin on September 18.
Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 17:35, 1 September 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Tommy Sotomayor article is being vandalized again

This article is being vandalized again, could you please put a temporary lock on it as you did once before so only registered users can edit it:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tommy_Sotomayor

Thank you! Neptune's Trident (talk) 02:12, 28 September 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Sure Neptune's Trident, I've indef protected it. I noticed there was a comment about his name on the talk page, would this sourcing be enough to verify it? [7][8] Fences&Windows 08:40, 28 September 2017 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, that sourcing should be enough to verify his name. Thanks again. Neptune's Trident (talk) 15:14, 28 September 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Article title move

Could you please move or change the title of this article? I don't believe it should be capitalized as it is now. The words on and the usually aren't capitalized in Wikipedia articles or film titles:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_On_The_Blackpool_Express

Thanks again!! Neptune's Trident (talk)

Hi Neptune's Trident, the official page has those words in caps.[9] I'm not sure on our TV title rules. You should be able to move it, provided a redirect doesn't exist. Fences&Windows 21:29, 29 September 2017 (UTC)[reply]
You are correct, thanks. Neptune's Trident (talk)

Administrators' newsletter – October 2017

News and updates for administrators from the past month (September 2017).

Administrator changes

added Boing! said Zebedee • Ansh666 • Ad Orientem
removed Tonywalton • AmiDaniel • Silence • BanyanTree • Magioladitis • Vanamonde93 • Mr.Z-man • Jdavidb • Jakec • Ram-Man • Yelyos • Kurt Shaped Box

Guideline and policy news

Technical news

Arbitration

  • Community consultation on the 2017 candidates for CheckUser and Oversight has concluded. The Arbitration Committee will appoint successful candidates by October 11.
  • A request for comment is open regarding the structure, rules, and procedures of the December 2017 Arbitration Committee election, and how to resolve any issues not covered by existing rules.
Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 17:23, 2 October 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Facto Post – Issue 5 – 17 October 2017

Facto Post – Issue 5 – 17 October 2017

Editorial: Annotations

Annotation is nothing new. The glossators of medieval Europe annotated between the lines, or in the margins of legal manuscripts of texts going back to Roman times, and created a new discipline. In the form of web annotation, the idea is back, with texts being marked up inline, or with a stand-off system. Where could it lead?

1495 print version of the Digesta of Justinian, with the annotations of the glossator Accursius from the 13th century

ContentMine operates in the field of text and data mining (TDM), where annotation, simply put, can add value to mined text. It now sees annotation as a possible advance in semi-automation, the use of human judgement assisted by bot editing, which now plays a large part in Wikidata tools. While a human judgement call of yes/no, on the addition of a statement to Wikidata, is usually taken as decisive, it need not be. The human assent may be passed into an annotation system, and stored: this idea is standard on Wikisource, for example, where text is considered "validated" only when two different accounts have stated that the proof-reading is correct. A typical application would be to require more than one person to agree that what is said in the reference translates correctly into the formal Wikidata statement. Rejections are also potentially useful to record, for machine learning.

As a contribution to data integrity on Wikidata, annotation has much to offer. Some "hard cases" on importing data are much more difficult than average. There are for example biographical puzzles: whether person A in one context is really identical with person B, of the same name, in another context. In science, clinical medicine require special attention to sourcing (WP:MEDRS), and is challenging in terms of connecting findings with the methodology employed. Currently decisions in areas such as these, on Wikipedia and Wikidata, are often made ad hoc. In particular there may be no audit trail for those who want to check what is decided.

Annotations are subject to a World Wide Web Consortium standard, and behind the terminology constitute a simple JSON data structure. What WikiFactMine proposes to do with them is to implement the MEDRS guideline, as a formal algorithm, on bibliographical and methodological data. The structure will integrate with those inputs the human decisions on the interpretation of scientific papers that underlie claims on Wikidata. What is added to Wikidata will therefore be supported by a transparent and rigorous system that documents decisions.

An example of the possible future scope of annotation, for medical content, is in the first link below. That sort of detailed abstract of a publication can be a target for TDM, adds great value, and could be presented in machine-readable form. You are invited to discuss the detailed proposal on Wikidata, via its talk page.

Links

Editor Charles Matthews. Please leave feedback for him.
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MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 08:46, 17 October 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Administrators' newsletter – November 2017

News and updates for administrators from the past month (October 2017).

Administrator changes

added Longhair • Megalibrarygirl • TonyBallioni • Vanamonde93
removed Allen3 • Eluchil404 • Arthur Rubin • Bencherlite

Technical news

Arbitration

Obituaries

  • The Wikipedia community has recently learned that Allen3 (William Allen Peckham) passed away on December 30, 2016, the same day as JohnCD. Allen began editing in 2005 and became an administrator that same year.
Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 00:50, 2 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Facto Post – Issue 6 – 15 November 2017

Facto Post – Issue 6 – 15 November 2017

WikidataCon Berlin 28–9 October 2017

WikidataCon 2017 group photo

Under the heading rerum causas cognescere, the first ever Wikidata conference got under way in the Tagesspiegel building with two keynotes, One was on YAGO, about how a knowledge base conceived ten years ago if you assume automatic compilation from Wikipedia. The other was from manager Lydia Pintscher, on the "state of the data". Interesting rumours flourished: the mix'n'match tool and its 600+ datasets, mostly in digital humanities, to be taken off the hands of its author Magnus Manske by the WMF; a Wikibase incubator site is on its way. Announcements came in talks: structured data on Wikimedia Commons is scheduled to make substantive progress by 2019. The lexeme development on Wikidata is now not expected to make the Wiktionary sites redundant, but may facilitate automated compilation of dictionaries.

WD-FIST explained

And so it went, with five strands of talks and workshops, through to 11 pm on Saturday. Wikidata applies to GLAM work via metadata. It may be used in education, raises issues such as author disambiguation, and lends itself to different types of graphical display and reuse. Many millions of SPARQL queries are run on the site every day. Over the summer a large open science bibliography has come into existence there.

Wikidata's fifth birthday party on the Sunday brought matters to a close. See a dozen and more reports by other hands.

Links

Editor Charles Matthews. Please leave feedback for him.
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MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 10:02, 15 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]

ANI Experiences survey

The Wikimedia Foundation Community health initiative (led by the Safety and Support and Anti-Harassment Tools team) is conducting a survey for en.wikipedia contributors on their experience and satisfaction level with the Administrator’s Noticeboard/Incidents. This survey will be integral to gathering information about how this noticeboard works - which problems it deals with well, and which problems it struggles with.

The survey should take 10-20 minutes to answer, and your individual responses will not be made public. The survey is delivered through Google Forms. The privacy policy for the survey describes how and when Wikimedia collects, uses, and shares the information we receive from survey participants and can be found here:

If you would like to take this survey, please sign up on this page, and a link for the survey will be mailed to you via Special:Emailuser.

Thank you on behalf of the Support & Safety and Anti-Harassment Tools Teams, Patrick Earley (WMF) talk 18:24, 1 December 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Administrators' newsletter – December 2017

News and updates for administrators from the past month (November 2017).

Administrator changes

added Joe Roe
readded JzG
removed Ericorbit • Perceval • Thingg • Tristanb • Violetriga

Guideline and policy news

  • Following a request for comment, a new section has been added to the username policy which disallows usernames containing emoji, emoticons or otherwise "decorative" usernames, and usernames that use any non-language symbols. Administrators should discuss issues related to these types of usernames before blocking.

Technical news

Arbitration

Miscellaneous

  • Over the last few months, several users have reported backlogs that require administrator attention at WP:ANI, with the most common backlogs showing up on WP:SPI, WP:AIV and WP:RFPP. It is requested that all administrators take some time during this month to help clear backlogs wherever possible. It should be noted that AIV reports are not always valid; however, they still need to be cleared, which may include needing to remind users on what qualifies as vandalism.
  • The Wikimedia Foundation Community health initiative is conducting a survey for English Wikipedia contributors on their experience and satisfaction level with Administrator’s Noticeboard/Incidents. This survey will be integral to gathering information about how this noticeboard works (i.e. which problems it deals with well and which problems it struggles with). If you would like to take this survey, please sign up on this page, and a link for the survey will be emailed to you via Special:EmailUser.
Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 20:57, 2 December 2017 (UTC)[reply]

ArbCom 2017 election voter message

Hello, Fences and windows. Voting in the 2017 Arbitration Committee elections is now open until 23.59 on Sunday, 10 December. All users who registered an account before Saturday, 28 October 2017, made at least 150 mainspace edits before Wednesday, 1 November 2017 and are not currently blocked are eligible to vote. Users with alternate accounts may only vote once.

The Arbitration Committee is the panel of editors responsible for conducting the Wikipedia arbitration process. It has the authority to impose binding solutions to disputes between editors, primarily for serious conduct disputes the community has been unable to resolve. This includes the authority to impose site bans, topic bans, editing restrictions, and other measures needed to maintain our editing environment. The arbitration policy describes the Committee's roles and responsibilities in greater detail.

If you wish to participate in the 2017 election, please review the candidates and submit your choices on the voting page. MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 18:42, 3 December 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Facto Post – Issue 7 – 15 December 2017

Facto Post – Issue 7 – 15 December 2017

A new bibliographical landscape

At the beginning of December, Wikidata items on individual scientific articles passed the 10 million mark. This figure contrasts with the state of play in early summer, when there were around half a million. In the big picture, Wikidata is now documenting the scientific literature at a rate that is about eight times as fast as papers are published. As 2017 ends, progress is quite evident.

Behind this achievement are a technical advance (fatameh), and bots that do the lifting. Much more than dry migration of metadata is potentially involved, however. If paper A cites paper B, both papers having an item, a link can be created on Wikidata, and the information presented to both human readers, and machines. This cross-linking is one of the most significant aspects of the scientific literature, and now a long-sought open version is rapidly being built up.

The effort for the lifting of copyright restrictions on citation data of this kind has had real momentum behind it during 2017. WikiCite and the I4OC have been pushing hard, with the result that on CrossRef over 50% of the citation data is open. Now the holdout publishers are being lobbied to release rights on citations.

But all that is just the beginning. Topics of papers are identified, authors disambiguated, with significant progress on the use of the four million ORCID IDs for researchers, and proposals formulated to identify methodology in a machine-readable way. P4510 on Wikidata has been introduced so that methodology can sit comfortably on items about papers.

More is on the way. OABot applies the unpaywall principle to Wikipedia referencing. It has been proposed that Wikidata could assist WorldCat in compiling the global history of book translation. Watch this space.

And make promoting #1lib1ref one of your New Year's resolutions. Happy holidays, all!

November 2017 map of geolocated Wikidata items, made by Addshore

Links

To subscribe to Facto Post go to Wikipedia:Facto Post mailing list. For the ways to unsubscribe, see below.
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MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 14:54, 15 December 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Vandalism On Meade Skelton Article

This user has been posting consistent vandalism on the Meade Skelton article:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/108.28.145.23

You can see the vandalism here, can you please help deal with this unregistered user:

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Meade_Skelton_(singer)&action=history

This user has done this multiple times. Thanks! Neptune's Trident (talk) 16:41, 24 December 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Hi Neptune's Trident, I semi-protected the article and blocked the user for a week (before I realised the edit was a couple of weeks ago). Fences&Windows 19:19, 24 December 2017 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks for your help! Neptune's Trident (talk) 23:26, 24 December 2017 (UTC)[reply]
P.S. As you can see by this user's talk page they've been vandalizing this same page for months and have gotten repeated warnings to stop vandalizing:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:108.28.145.23

Thank you again! Neptune's Trident (talk) 23:28, 24 December 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Administrators' newsletter – January 2018

News and updates for administrators from the past month (December 2017).

Administrator changes

added Muboshgu
readded Anetode • Laser brain • Worm That Turned
removed None

Bureaucrat changes

readded Worm That Turned

Guideline and policy news

  • A request for comment is in progress to determine whether the administrator policy should be amended to require disclosure of paid editing activity at WP:RFA and to prohibit the use of administrative tools as part of paid editing activity, with certain exceptions.

Technical news

Arbitration

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 02:37, 3 January 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Rollback

I've been doing some edits at the Rapture article, but I noticed that an unregistered editor removed a whole section there and added some polemical material. Though, I'll try to assume good faith on that user's part, I worry that this article (because of its controversial nature) is likely to attract vandals. In order to properly curate the article, I was wondering if I could be granted rollback. I will use it only rarely and with restraint—in instances of obvious vandalism. Thanks, Garagepunk66 (talk) 04:40, 13 January 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Done! Fences&Windows 20:53, 14 January 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Facto Post – Issue 8 – 15 January 2018

Facto Post – Issue 8 – 15 January 2018

Metadata on the March

From the days of hard-copy liner notes on music albums, metadata have stood outside a piece or file, while adding to understanding of where it comes from, and some of what needs to be appreciated about its content. In the GLAM sector, the accumulation of accurate metadata for objects is key to the mission of an institution, and its presentation in cataloguing.

Today Wikipedia turns 17, with worlds still to conquer. Zooming out from the individual GLAM object to the ontology in which it is set, one such world becomes apparent: GLAMs use custom ontologies, and those introduce massive incompatibilities. From a recent article by sadads, we quote the observation that "vocabularies needed for many collections, topics and intellectual spaces defy the expectations of the larger professional communities." A job for the encyclopedist, certainly. But the data-minded Wikimedian has the advantages of Wikidata, starting with its multilingual data, and facility with aliases. The controlled vocabulary — sometimes referred to as a "thesaurus" as term of art — simplifies search: if a "spade" must be called that, rather than "shovel", it is easier to find all spade references. That control comes at a cost.

SVG pedestrian crosses road
Zebra crossing/crosswalk, Singapore

Case studies in that article show what can lie ahead. The schema crosswalk, in jargon, is a potential answer to the GLAM Babel of proliferating and expanding vocabularies. Even if you have no interest in Wikidata as such, simply vocabularies V and W, if both V and W are matched to Wikidata, then a "crosswalk" arises from term v in V to w in W, whenever v and w both match to the same item d in Wikidata.

For metadata mobility, match to Wikidata. It's apparently that simple: infrastructure requirements have turned out, so far, to be challenges that can be met.

Links

To subscribe to Facto Post go to Wikipedia:Facto Post mailing list. For the ways to unsubscribe, see below.
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MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 12:38, 15 January 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Administrators' newsletter – February 2018

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

Administrator changes

added None
removed Blurpeace • Dana boomer • Deltabeignet • Denelson83 • Grandiose • Salvidrim! • Ymblanter

Guideline and policy news

  • An RfC has closed with a consensus that candidates at WP:RFA must disclose whether they have ever edited for pay and that administrators may never use administrative tools as part of any paid editing activity, except when they are acting as a Wikipedian-in-Residence or when the payment is made by the Wikimedia Foundation or an affiliate of the WMF.
  • Editors responding to threats of harm can now contact the Wikimedia Foundation's emergency address by using Special:EmailUser/Emergency. If you don't have email enabled on Wikipedia, directly contacting the emergency address using your own email client remains an option.

Technical news

  • A tag will now be automatically applied to edits that blank a page, turn a page into a redirect, remove/replace almost all content in a page, undo an edit, or rollback an edit. These edits were previously denoted solely by automatic edit summaries.

Arbitration

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 00:51, 4 February 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Complex situation with SPA editor

Greetings Fences and windows. I chose you for this missive because you're the latest admin to edit WP:ADVOCACY. User:Unkledaddy2017 is an SPA editor, active since Sept 2017, editing only Kyle Snyder (wrestler). It's a well done article, but an over-the-top and unsupported superlative lead to the discovery of this editor's work. If you read my recent contribution to his Talk page, I think it sets forth the issues involved clearly. This is an unusual situation, so I thought it best to contact an an admin for input. If you reply, please do it here. Thanks and regards Tapered (talk) 06:30, 4 February 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Hi Tapered. You've done the right thing by discussing this at their talk page. You can also raise issues at Talk:Kyle Snyder (wrestler). What is the issue with their username? You can edit the article to remove WP:PEACOCK terms and improve the sourcing, and cut down the lead - it should summarise the content, not introduce new material. Alternatively, you can tag and explain the problems on the talk page. If they won't collaborate and start reverting, then add a note to the talk page and seek third opinions from Wikipedia:WikiProject Sports. p.s. Ivan Yarygin Memorial Grand Prix is a redlink and seems notable. Fences&Windows 19:02, 4 February 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Many thanks. Re the user name. Unkledaddy created for a single purpose for a human gives at least a hint of a possible familial relationship to the subject—hence my concern. It will take me a day or two to address the issue, but this is a start. Tapered (talk) 01:35, 5 February 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Proposed project might interest you

m:Grants:Project/ScienceSource for the full thing, wikiversity:Talk:WikiJournal User Group#Discussions with PMR about WikiJournal and Wikidata for the tactical side of how WikiJournal might be treated. Charles Matthews (talk) 11:34, 5 February 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Facto Post – Issue 9 – 5 February 2018

Facto Post – Issue 9 – 5 February 2018
m:Grants:Project/ScienceSource is the new ContentMine proposal: please take a look.

Wikidata as Hub

One way of looking at Wikidata relates it to the semantic web concept, around for about as long as Wikipedia, and realised in dozens of distributed Web institutions. It sees Wikidata as supplying central, encyclopedic coverage of linked structured data, and looks ahead to greater support for "federated queries" that draw together information from all parts of the emerging network of websites.

Another perspective might be likened to a photographic negative of that one: Wikidata as an already-functioning Web hub. Over half of its properties are identifiers on other websites. These are Wikidata's "external links", to use Wikipedia terminology: one type for the DOI of a publication, another for the VIAF page of an author, with thousands more such. Wikidata links out to sites that are not nominally part of the semantic web, effectively drawing them into a larger system. The crosswalk possibilities of the systematic construction of these links was covered in Issue 8.

Wikipedia:External links speaks of them as kept "minimal, meritable, and directly relevant to the article." Here Wikidata finds more of a function. On viaf.org one can type a VIAF author identifier into the search box, and find the author page. The Wikidata Resolver tool, these days including Open Street Map, Scholia etc., allows this kind of lookup. The hub tool by maxlath takes a major step further, allowing both lookup and crosswalk to be encoded in a single URL.

Links

To subscribe to Facto Post go to Wikipedia:Facto Post mailing list. For the ways to unsubscribe, see below.
Editor Charles Matthews, for ContentMine. Please leave feedback for him. Back numbers are here.
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MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 11:50, 5 February 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Meade Skelton Page Being Vandalized Again

Hello, this page about singer Meade Skelton is, once again, being vandalized by trolls and unregistered editors, please see the recent history:

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Meade_Skelton_(singer)&action=history

If you can be of any assistance with stopping this vandalism please help, thanks! Neptune's Trident (talk) 18:21, 26 February 2018 (UTC)[reply]

I don't think that content was "vandalism". It's debatable whether the content belonged, but it seems to be verifiable that Skelton did make both that blog post (he didn't deny it in a Reddit AMA [10]) and that YouTube video. He's not a well-known singer and the press coverage in the article and that I can find is all local; as his article is a magnet for controversy, might deletion be the best option here? Fences&Windows 18:59, 26 February 2018 (UTC)[reply]
I don't know. He has minimal references. That's all I could find. I'll leave it up to you whether to delete it or not. At this point I don't mind either way. Neptune's Trident (talk) 21:30, 26 February 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Could you please help with this unregistered user who continues to post these comments on the Meade Skelton article, they are poorly formatted and and there to attack the subject:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/108.28.145.23

Or just remove the article. Thanks! Neptune's Trident (talk) 23:40, 27 February 2018 (UTC)[reply]

I warned the editor and semi-protected the page for one year. Fences&Windows 23:54, 27 February 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks very much! Neptune's Trident (talk)
My apologies for continuing to bother you about this but another user, Fairfaxunderground, is reverting the same poorly formatted updates to the Meade Skelton article, as you can see in this history link:‎
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Meade_Skelton_(singer)&action=history
Neptune's Trident (talk) 17:05, 1 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Administrators' newsletter – March 2018

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

Administrator changes

added Lourdes†
removed AngelOfSadness • Bhadani • Chris 73 • Coren • Friday • Midom • Mike V
† Lourdes has requested that her admin rights be temporarily removed, pending her return from travel.

Guideline and policy news

  • The autoconfirmed article creation trial (ACTRIAL) is scheduled to end on 14 March 2018. The results of the research collected can be read on Meta Wiki.
  • Community ban discussions must now stay open for at least 24 hours prior to being closed.
  • A change to the administrator inactivity policy has been proposed. Under the proposal, if an administrator has not used their admin tools for a period of five years and is subsequently desysopped for inactivity, the administrator would have to file a new RfA in order to regain the tools.
  • A change to the banning policy has been proposed which would specify conditions under which a repeat sockmaster may be considered de facto banned, reducing the need to start a community ban discussion for these users.

Technical news

  • CheckUsers are now able to view private data such as IP addresses from the edit filter log, e.g. when the filter prevents a user from creating an account. Previously, this information was unavailable to CheckUsers because access to it could not be logged.
  • The edit filter has a new feature contains_all that edit filter managers may use to check if one or more strings are all contained in another given string.

Miscellaneous

Obituaries

  • Bhadani (Gangadhar Bhadani) passed away on 8 February 2018. Bhadani joined Wikipedia in March 2005 and became an administrator in September 2005. While he was active, Bhadani was regarded as one of the most prolific Wikipedians from India.
Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 03:00, 2 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Facto Post – Issue 10 – 12 March 2018

Facto Post – Issue 10 – 12 March 2018

Milestone for mix'n'match

Around the time in February when Wikidata clicked past item Q50000000, another milestone was reached: the mix'n'match tool uploaded its 1000th dataset. Concisely defined by its author, Magnus Manske, it works "to match entries in external catalogs to Wikidata". The total number of entries is now well into eight figures, and more are constantly being added: a couple of new catalogs each day is normal.

Since the end of 2013, mix'n'match has gradually come to play a significant part in adding statements to Wikidata. Particularly in areas with the flavour of digital humanities, but datasets can of course be about practically anything. There is a catalog on skyscrapers, and two on spiders.

These days mix'n'match can be used in numerous modes, from the relaxed gamified click through a catalog looking for matches, with prompts, to the fantastically useful and often demanding search across all catalogs. I'll type that again: you can search 1000+ datasets from the simple box at the top right. The drop-down menu top left offers "creation candidates", Magnus's personal favourite. m:Mix'n'match/Manual for more.

For the Wikidatan, a key point is that these matches, however carried out, add statements to Wikidata if, and naturally only if, there is a Wikidata property associated with the catalog. For everyone, however, the hands-on experience of deciding of what is a good match is an education, in a scholarly area, biographical catalogs being particularly fraught. Underpinning recent rapid progress is an open infrastructure for scraping and uploading.

Congratulations to Magnus, our data Stakhanovite!

Links

3D printing
To subscribe to Facto Post go to Wikipedia:Facto Post mailing list. For the ways to unsubscribe, see below.
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Administrators' newsletter – April 2018

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

Administrator changes

added 331dot • Cordless Larry • ClueBot NG
removed Gogo Dodo • Pb30 • Sebastiankessel • Seicer • SoLando

Guideline and policy news

  • Administrators who have been desysopped due to inactivity are now required to have performed at least one (logged) administrative action in the past 5 years in order to qualify for a resysop without going through a new RfA.
  • Editors who have been found to have engaged in sockpuppetry on at least two occasions after an initial indefinite block, for whatever reason, are now automatically considered banned by the community without the need to start a ban discussion.
  • The notability guideline for organizations and companies has been substantially rewritten following the closure of this request for comment. Among the changes, the guideline more clearly defines the sourcing requirements needed for organizations and companies to be considered notable.
  • The six-month autoconfirmed article creation trial (ACTRIAL) ended on 14 March 2018. The post-trial research report has been published. A request for comment is now underway to determine whether the restrictions from ACTRIAL should be implemented permanently.

Technical news

Arbitration

  • The Arbitration Committee is considering a change to the discretionary sanctions procedures which would require an editor to appeal a sanction to the community at WP:AE or WP:AN prior to appealing directly to the Arbitration Committee at WP:ARCA.

Miscellaneous

  • A discussion has closed which concluded that administrators are not required to enable email, though many editors suggested doing so as a matter of best practice.
  • The Foundations' Anti-Harassment Tools team has released the Interaction Timeline. This shows a chronologic history for two users on pages where they have both made edits, which may be helpful in identifying sockpuppetry and investigating editing disputes.
Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 01:23, 2 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Facto Post – Issue 11 – 9 April 2018

Facto Post – Issue 11 – 9 April 2018

The 100 Skins of the Onion

Open Citations Month, with its eminently guessable hashtag, is upon us. We should be utterly grateful that in the past 12 months, so much data on which papers cite which other papers has been made open, and that Wikidata is playing its part in hosting it as "cites" statements. At the time of writing, there are 15.3M Wikidata items that can do that.

Pulling back to look at open access papers in the large, though, there is is less reason for celebration. Access in theory does not yet equate to practical access. A recent LSE IMPACT blogpost puts that issue down to "heterogeneity". A useful euphemism to save us from thinking that the whole concept doesn't fall into the realm of the oxymoron.

Some home truths: aggregation is not content management, if it falls short on reusability. The PDF file format is wedded to how humans read documents, not how machines ingest them. The salami-slicer is our friend in the current downloading of open access papers, but for a better metaphor, think about skinning an onion, laboriously, 100 times with diminishing returns. There are of the order of 100 major publisher sites hosting open access papers, and the predominant offer there is still a PDF.

Red onion cross section

From the discoverability angle, Wikidata's bibliographic resources combined with the SPARQL query are superior in principle, by far, to existing keyword searches run over papers. Open access content should be managed into consistent HTML, something that is currently strenuous. The good news, such as it is, would be that much of it is already in XML. The organisational problem of removing further skins from the onion, with sensible prioritisation, is certainly not insuperable. The CORE group (the bloggers in the LSE posting) has some answers, but actually not all that is needed for the text and data mining purposes they highlight. The long tail, or in other words the onion heart when it has become fiddly beyond patience to skin, does call for a pis aller. But the real knack is to do more between the XML and the heart.

Links

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MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 16:25, 9 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Orphaned non-free image File:Islamic Party of Britain logo.jpg

⚠
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Note that any non-free images not used in any articles will be deleted after seven days, as described in section F5 of the criteria for speedy deletion. Thank you. --B-bot (talk) 17:21, 22 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Administrators' newsletter – May 2018

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

Administrator changes

added None
removed Chochopk • Coffee • Gryffindor • Jimp • Knowledge Seeker • Lankiveil • Peridon • Rjd0060

Guideline and policy news

  • The ability to create articles directly in mainspace is now indefinitely restricted to autoconfirmed users.
  • A proposal is being discussed which would create a new "event coordinator" right that would allow users to temporarily add the "confirmed" flag to new user accounts and to create many new user accounts without being hindered by a rate limit.

Technical news

  • AbuseFilter has received numerous improvements, including an OOUI overhaul, syntax highlighting, ability to search existing filters, and a few new functions. In particular, the search feature can be used to ensure there aren't existing filters for what you need, and the new equals_to_any function can be used when checking multiple namespaces. One major upcoming change is the ability to see which filters are the slowest. This information is currently only available to those with access to Logstash.
  • When blocking anonymous users, a cookie will be applied that reloads the block if the user changes their IP. 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. This currently only occurs when hard-blocking accounts.
  • The block notice shown on mobile will soon be more informative and point users to a help page on how to request an unblock, just as it currently does on desktop.
  • There will soon be a calendar widget at Special:Block, making it easier to set expiries for a specific date and time.

Arbitration

Obituaries

  • Lankiveil (Craig Franklin) passed away in mid-April. Lankiveil joined Wikipedia on 12 August 2004 and became an administrator on 31 August 2008. During his time with the Wikimedia community, Lankiveil served as an oversighter for the English Wikipedia and as president of Wikimedia Australia.
Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 07:05, 2 May 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Facto Post – Issue 12 – 28 May 2018

Facto Post – Issue 12 – 28 May 2018

ScienceSource funded

The Wikimedia Foundation announced full funding of the ScienceSource grant proposal from ContentMine on May 18. See the ScienceSource Twitter announcement and 60 second video.

A medical canon?

The proposal includes downloading 30,000 open access papers, aiming (roughly speaking) to create a baseline for medical referencing on Wikipedia. It leaves open the question of how these are to be chosen.

The basic criteria of WP:MEDRS include a concentration on secondary literature. Attention has to be given to the long tail of diseases that receive less current research. The MEDRS guideline supposes that edge cases will have to be handled, and the premature exclusion of publications that would be in those marginal positions would reduce the value of the collection. Prophylaxis misses the point that gate-keeping will be done by an algorithm.

Two well-known but rather different areas where such considerations apply are tropical diseases and alternative medicine. There are also a number of potential downloading troubles, and these were mentioned in Issue 11. There is likely to be a gap, even with the guideline, between conditions taken to be necessary but not sufficient, and conditions sufficient but not necessary, for candidate papers to be included. With around 10,000 recognised medical conditions in standard lists, being comprehensive is demanding. With all of these aspects of the task, ScienceSource will seek community help.

Links

OpenRefine logo, courtesy of Google
To subscribe to Facto Post go to Wikipedia:Facto Post mailing list. For the ways to unsubscribe, see below.
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MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 10:16, 28 May 2018 (UTC)[reply]

File:Online Journal of Current Clinical Trials logo.png

Hi, I'm RonBot, a script that checks new non-free file uploads. I have found that the subject image that you recently uploaded was more than 5% in excess of the Non-free content guideline size of 100,000 pixels. I have tagged the image for a standard reduction, which (for jpg/gif/png/svg files) normally happens within a day. Please check the reduced image, and make sure that the image is not excessively corrupted. Other files will be added to Category:Wikipedia non-free file size reduction requests for manual processing. There is a full seven-day period before the original oversized image will be hidden; during that time you might want to consider editing the original image yourself (perhaps an initial crop to allow a smaller reduction or none at all). A formula for calculation the desired size can be found at WP:Image resolution, along with instructions on how to tag the image in the rare cases that it requires an oversized image (typically about 0.2% of non-free uploads are tagged as necessarily oversized). Please contact the bot owner if you have any questions, or you can ask them at Wikipedia talk:Non-free content. RonBot (talk) 17:17, 31 May 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Administrators' newsletter – June 2018

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

Administrator changes

added None
removed Al Ameer son • AliveFreeHappy • Cenarium • Lupo • MichaelBillington

Guideline and policy news

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

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 20:59, 1 June 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Your submission at Articles for creation: John George Smyth (1815–1869) has been accepted

John George Smyth (1815–1869), which you submitted to Articles for creation, has been created.
The article has been assessed as Start-Class, which is recorded on the article's talk page. You may like to take a look at the grading scheme to see how you can improve the article.

You are more than welcome to continue making quality contributions to Wikipedia. If your account is more than four days old and you have made at least 10 edits you can create articles yourself without posting a request. However, you may continue submitting work to Articles for Creation if you prefer.

Thank you for helping improve Wikipedia!

Eastmain (talk • contribs) 11:11, 27 June 2018 (UTC)[reply]

John George Smyth (1815–1869)

I have accepted and expanded your draft of John George Smyth (1815–1869), but I have a question about his political party. Could you please look at my note at Talk:John George Smyth (1815–1869)? Comment by Eastmain

Hi Eastmain, thank you so much. I'd meant to revisit this and dig out some more biographical details, so I'm grateful that you picked up the baton! I'm not sure if he swapped to the Peelites later, I'll keep looking. I found a short bio of him on the Internet Archive, see page talk. Fences&Windows 06:30, 28 June 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Facto Post – Issue 13 – 29 May 2018

Facto Post – Issue 13 – 29 May 2018
The Editor is Charles Matthews, for ContentMine. Please leave feedback for him, on his User talk page.
To subscribe to Facto Post go to Wikipedia:Facto Post mailing list. For the ways to unsubscribe, see the footer.
Back numbers are here.
Respecting MEDRS

Facto Post enters its second year, with a Cambridge Blue (OK, Aquamarine) background, a new logo, but no Cambridge blues. On-topic for the ScienceSource project is a project page here. It contains some case studies on how the WP:MEDRS guideline, for the referencing of articles at all related to human health, is applied in typical discussions.

Close to home also, a template, called {{medrs}} for short, is used to express dissatisfaction with particular references. Technology can help with patrolling, and this Petscan query finds over 450 articles where there is at least one use of the template. Of course the template is merely suggesting there is a possible issue with the reliability of a reference. Deciding the truth of the allegation is another matter.

This maintenance issue is one example of where ScienceSource aims to help. Where the reference is to a scientific paper, its type of algorithm could give a pass/fail opinion on such references. It could assist patrollers of medical articles, therefore, with the templated references and more generally. There may be more to proper referencing than that, indeed: context, quite what the statement supported by the reference expresses, prominence and weight. For that kind of consideration, case studies can help. But an algorithm might help to clear the backlog.

Evidence pyramid leading up to clinical guidelines, from WP:MEDRS
Links
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MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 18:19, 29 June 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Administrators' newsletter – July 2018

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

Administrator changes

added Pbsouthwood • TheSandDoctor
readded Gogo Dodo
removed Andrevan • Doug • EVula • KaisaL • Tony Fox • WilyD

Bureaucrat changes

removed 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.
Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 19:22, 3 July 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Facto Post – Issue 14 – 21 July 2018

Facto Post – Issue 14 – 21 July 2018
The Editor is Charles Matthews, for ContentMine. Please leave feedback for him, on his User talk page.
To subscribe to Facto Post go to Wikipedia:Facto Post mailing list. For the ways to unsubscribe, see the footer.
Back numbers are here.
Plugging the gaps – Wikimania report

Officially it is "bridging the gaps in knowledge", with Wikimania 2018 in Cape Town paying tribute to the southern African concept of ubuntu to implement it. Besides face-to-face interactions, Wikimedians do need their power sources.

Hackathon mentoring table wiring

Facto Post interviewed Jdforrester, who has attended every Wikimania, and now works as Senior Product Manager for the Wikimedia Foundation. His take on tackling the gaps in the Wikimedia movement is that "if we were an army, we could march in a column and close up all the gaps". In his view though, that is a faulty metaphor, and it leads to a completely false misunderstanding of the movement, its diversity and different aspirations, and the nature of the work as "fighting" to be done in the open sector. There are many fronts, and as an eventualist he feels the gaps experienced both by editors and by users of Wikimedia content are inevitable. He would like to see a greater emphasis on reuse of content, not simply its volume.

If that may not sound like radicalism, the Decolonizing the Internet conference here organized jointly with Whose Knowledge? can redress the picture. It comes with the claim to be "the first ever conference about centering marginalized knowledge online".

Plugbar buildup at the Hackathon
Links
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MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 06:10, 21 July 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Disambiguation link notification for July 30

Hi. Thank you for your recent edits. An automated process has detected that when you recently edited Stanley Burgess, you added a link pointing to the disambiguation page National Portrait Gallery (check to confirm | fix with Dab solver). Such links are usually incorrect, since a disambiguation page is merely a list of unrelated topics with similar titles. (Read the FAQ • Join us at the DPL WikiProject.)

It's OK to remove this message. Also, to stop receiving these messages, follow these opt-out instructions. Thanks, DPL bot (talk) 09:12, 30 July 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Administrators' newsletter – August 2018

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

Administrator changes

added Sro23
readded KaisaL • Ymblanter

Guideline and policy news

  • After a discussion at Meta, a new user group called "interface administrators" (formerly "technical administrator") has been created. Come the end of August, interface admins will be the only users able to edit site-wide JavaScript and CSS pages like MediaWiki:Common.js and MediaWiki:Common.css, or edit other user's personal JavaScript and CSS. The intention is to improve security and privacy by reducing the number of accounts which could be used to compromise the site or another user's account through malicious code. The new user group can be assigned and revoked by bureaucrats. Discussion is ongoing to establish details for implementing the group on the English Wikipedia.
  • Following a request for comment, the WP:SISTER style guideline now states that in the mainspace, interwiki links to Wikinews should only be made as per the external links guideline. This generally means that within the body of an article, you should not link to Wikinews about a particular event that is only a part of the larger topic. Wikinews links in "external links" sections can be used where helpful, but not automatically if an equivalent article from a reliable news outlet could be linked in the same manner.

Technical news

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 01:31, 5 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Facto Post – Issue 15 – 21 August 2018

Facto Post – Issue 15 – 21 August 2018
The Editor is Charles Matthews, for ContentMine. Please leave feedback for him, on his User talk page.
To subscribe to Facto Post go to Wikipedia:Facto Post mailing list. For the ways to unsubscribe, see the footer.
Back numbers are here.
Neglected diseases
Anti-parasitic drugs being distributed in Côte d'Ivoire
What's a Neglected Disease?, ScienceSource video

To grasp the nettle, there are rare diseases, there are tropical diseases and then there are "neglected diseases". Evidently a rare enough disease is likely to be neglected, but neglected disease these days means a disease not rare, but tropical, and most often infectious or parasitic. Rare diseases as a group are dominated, in contrast, by genetic diseases.

A major aspect of neglect is found in tracking drug discovery. Orphan drugs are those developed to treat rare diseases (rare enough not to have market-driven research), but there is some overlap in practice with the WHO's neglected diseases, where snakebite, a "neglected public health issue", is on the list.

From an encyclopedic point of view, lack of research also may mean lack of high-quality references: the core medical literature differs from primary research, since it operates by aggregating trials. This bibliographic deficit clearly hinders Wikipedia's mission. The ScienceSource project is currently addressing this issue, on Wikidata. Its Wikidata focus list at WD:SSFL is trying to ensure that neglect does not turn into bias in its selection of science papers.

Links
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MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 13:23, 21 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]

A bowl of strawberries for you!

is love strawberries for fences and windows Mathis1301255 (talk) 14:06, 21 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Administrators' newsletter – September 2018

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

Administrator changes

added None
removed Asterion • Crisco 1492 • KF • Kudpung • Liz • Randykitty • Spartaz
renamed Optimist on the run → Voice of Clam

Interface administrator changes

added Amorymeltzer • Mr. Stradivarius • MusikAnimal • MSGJ • TheDJ • Xaosflux

Guideline and policy news

  • Following a "stop-gap" discussion, six users have temporarily been made interface administrators while discussion is ongoing for a more permanent process for assigning the permission. Interface administrators are now the only editors allowed to edit sitewide CSS and JavaScript pages, as well as CSS/JS pages in another user's userspace. Previously, all administrators had this ability. The right can be granted and revoked by bureaucrats.

Technical news

  • Because of a data centre test you will be able to read but not edit the wikis for up to an hour on 12 September and 10 October. This will start at 14:00 (UTC). You might lose edits if you try to save during this time. The time when you can't edit might be shorter than an hour.
  • Some abuse filter variables have changed. They are now easier to understand for non-experts. The old variables will still work but filter editors are encouraged to replace them with the new ones. You can find the list of changed variables on mediawiki.org. They have a note which says Deprecated. Use ... instead. An example is article_text which is now page_title.
  • Abuse filters can now use how old a page is. The variable is page_age.

Arbitration

  • The Arbitration Committee has resolved to perform a round of Checkuser and Oversight appointments. The usernames of all applicants will be shared with the Functionaries team, and they will be requested to assist in the vetting process. The deadline to submit an application is 23:59 UTC, 12 September, and the candidates that move forward will be published on-wiki for community comments on 18 September.
Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 23:23, 2 September 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Facto Post – Issue 16 – 30 September 2018

Facto Post – Issue 16 – 30 September 2018
The Editor is Charles Matthews, for ContentMine. Please leave feedback for him, on his User talk page.
To subscribe to Facto Post go to Wikipedia:Facto Post mailing list. For the ways to unsubscribe, see the footer.
Back numbers are here.
The science publishing landscape

In an ideal world ... no, bear with your editor for just a minute ... there would be a format for scientific publishing online that was as much a standard as SI units are for the content. Likewise cataloguing publications would not be onerous, because part of the process would be to generate uniform metadata. Without claiming it could be the mythical free lunch, it might be reasonably be argued that sandwiches can be packaged much alike and have barcodes, whatever the fillings.

The best on offer, to stretch the metaphor, is the meal kit option, in the form of XML. Where scientific papers are delivered as XML downloads, you get all the ingredients ready to cook. But have to prepare the actual meal of slow food yourself. See Scholarly HTML for a recent pass at heading off XML with HTML, in other words in the native language of the Web.

The argument from real life is a traditional mixture of frictional forces, vested interests, and the classic irony of the principle of unripe time. On the other hand, discoverability actually diminishes with the prolific progress of science publishing. No, it really doesn't scale. Wikimedia as movement can do something in such cases. We know from open access, we grok the Web, we have our own horse in the HTML race, we have Wikidata and WikiJournal, and we have the chops to act.

Links
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MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 17:57, 30 September 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Administrators' newsletter – October 2018

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

Administrator changes

added Justlettersandnumbers • L235
removed Bgwhite • HorsePunchKid • J Greb • KillerChihuahua • Rami R • Winhunter

Interface administrator changes

added Cyberpower678 • Deryck Chan • Oshwah • Pharos • Ragesoss • Ritchie333

Oversight changes

removed Guerillero • NativeForeigner • Snowolf • Xeno

Guideline and policy news

Technical news

  • Partial blocks should be available for testing in October on the Test Wikipedia and the Beta-Cluster. This new feature allows admins to block users from editing specific pages and in the near-future, namespaces and uploading files. You can expect more updates and an invitation to help with testing once it is available.
  • The Foundations' Anti-Harassment Tools team is currently looking for input on how to measure the effectiveness of blocks. This is in particular related to how they will measure the success of the aforementioned partial blocks.
  • Because of a data centre test, you will be able to read but not edit the Wikimedia projects for up to an hour on 10 October. This will start at 14:00 (UTC). You might lose edits if you try to save during this time.

Arbitration

  • The Arbitration Committee has, by motion, amended the procedure on functionary inactivity.
  • The community consultation for 2018 CheckUser and Oversight appointments has concluded. Appointments will be made by October 11.
  • Following a request for comment, the size of the Arbitration Committee will be decreased to 13 arbitrators, starting in 2019. Additionally, the minimum support percentage required to be appointed to a two-year term on ArbCom has been increased to 60%. ArbCom candidates who receive between 50% and 60% support will be appointed to one-year terms instead.
  • Nominations for the 2018 Arbitration Committee Electoral Commission are being accepted until 12 October. These are the editors who help run the ArbCom election smoothly. If you are interested in volunteering for this role, please consider nominating yourself.
Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 20:13, 5 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Facto Post – Issue 17 – 29 October 2018

Facto Post – Issue 17 – 29 October 2018
The Editor is Charles Matthews, for ContentMine. Please leave feedback for him, on his User talk page.
To subscribe to Facto Post go to Wikipedia:Facto Post mailing list. For the ways to unsubscribe, see the footer.
Back numbers are here.
Wikidata imaged

Around 2.7 million Wikidata items have an illustrative image. These files, you might say, are Wikimedia's stock images, and if the number is large, it is still only 5% or so of items that have one. All such images are taken from Wikimedia Commons, which has 50 million media files. One key issue is how to expand the stock.

Indeed, there is a tool. WD-FIST exploits the fact that each Wikipedia is differently illustrated, mostly with images from Commons but also with fair use images. An item that has sitelinks but no illustrative image can be tested to see if the linked wikis have a suitable one. This works well for a volunteer who wants to add images at a reasonable scale, and a small amount of SPARQL knowledge goes a long way in producing checklists.

Gran Teatro, Cáceres, Spain, at night

It should be noted, though, that there are currently 53 Wikidata properties that link to Commons, of which P18 for the basic image is just one. WD-FIST prompts the user to add signatures, plaques, pictures of graves and so on. There are a couple of hundred monograms, mostly of historical figures, and this query allows you to view all of them. commons:Category:Monograms and its subcategories provide rich scope for adding more.

And so it is generally. The list of properties linking to Commons does contain a few that concern video and audio files, and rather more for maps. But it contains gems such as P3451 for "nighttime view". Over 1000 of those on Wikidata, but as for so much else, there could be yet more.

Go on. Today is Wikidata's birthday. An illustrative image is always an acceptable gift, so why not add one? You can follow these easy steps: (i) log in at https://tools.wmflabs.org/widar/, (ii) paste the Petscan ID 6263583 into https://tools.wmflabs.org/fist/wdfist/ and click run, and (iii) just add cake.

Birthday logo
Links
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MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 15:01, 29 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]

The ANI close

In the event you are interested, I have asked Swarm on his TP to modify his close. Atsme✍🏻📧 20:30, 30 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Administrators' newsletter – November 2018

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

Guideline and policy news

Technical news

  • Partial blocks is now available for testing on the Test Wikipedia. The new functionality allows you to block users from editing specific pages. Bugs may exist and can be reported on the local talk page or on Meta. A discussion regarding deployment to English Wikipedia will be started by community liaisons sometime in the near future.
  • A user script is now available to quickly review unblock requests.
  • The 2019 Community Wishlist Survey is now accepting new proposals until November 11, 2018. The results of this survey will determine what software the Wikimedia Foundation's Community Tech team will work on next year. Voting on the proposals will take place from November 16 to November 30, 2018. Specifically, there is a proposal category for admins and stewards that may be of interest.

Arbitration

  • Eligible editors will be invited to nominate themselves as candidates in the 2018 Arbitration Committee Elections starting on November 4 until November 13. Voting will begin on November 19 and last until December 2.
  • The Arbitration Committee's email address has changed to arbcom-en@wikimedia.org. Other email lists, such as functionaries-en and clerks-l, remain unchanged.
Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 07:18, 3 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]

ArbCom 2018 election voter message

Hello, Fences and windows. Voting in the 2018 Arbitration Committee elections is now open until 23.59 on Sunday, 3 December. All users who registered an account before Sunday, 28 October 2018, made at least 150 mainspace edits before Thursday, 1 November 2018 and are not currently blocked are eligible to vote. Users with alternate accounts may only vote once.

The Arbitration Committee is the panel of editors responsible for conducting the Wikipedia arbitration process. It has the authority to impose binding solutions to disputes between editors, primarily for serious conduct disputes the community has been unable to resolve. This includes the authority to impose site bans, topic bans, editing restrictions, and other measures needed to maintain our editing environment. The arbitration policy describes the Committee's roles and responsibilities in greater detail.

If you wish to participate in the 2018 election, please review the candidates and submit your choices on the voting page. MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 18:42, 19 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Happy Adminship

Happy Adminship Anniversary!

Have a very happy adminship anniversary on your special day!
Best wishes, A 10 fireplane (talk) 06:43, 23 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]
A 10 fireplane (talk) 06:43, 23 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks User:A 10 fireplane, I had no idea as it was 9 years ago! Fences&Windows 09:41, 23 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]
No problem thank you for all your contributions. Hope to see you for many more years to come. A 10 fireplane (talk) 14:26, 23 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]


I need your help

Hi! can you please check out this Florian Munteanu case. I've seen plenty of pages here on Wikipedia with actors who played a single role in a movie. I don't understand why some people complain. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2A01:4F8:1C17:530D:0:0:0:1 (talk) 14:17, 24 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Because the article was deleted via a unanimous deletion discussion, Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Florian Munteanu, I can't restore it. There are other pages for actors with single roles, but see WP:OTHER. I suggest you put together a comprehensive biography of him based on as many reliable sources (not tabloids or blogs) as you can find in your sandbox. Once you've put in as much detail and sources as you can, go to Wikipedia:Deletion review. Refer to WP:GNG and WP:NACTOR when justifying why he should have a bio. Fences&Windows 20:08, 24 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Facto Post – Issue 18 – 30 November 2018

Facto Post – Issue 18 – 30 November 2018
The Editor is Charles Matthews, for ContentMine. Please leave feedback for him, on his User talk page.
To subscribe to Facto Post go to Wikipedia:Facto Post mailing list. For the ways to unsubscribe, see the footer.
Back numbers are here.
WikiCite issue

GLAM ♥ data — what is a gallery, library, archive or museum without a catalogue? It follows that Wikidata must love librarians. Bibliography supports students and researchers in any topic, but open and machine-readable bibliographic data even more so, outside the silo. Cue the WikiCite initiative, which was meeting in conference this week, in the Bay Area of California.

Wikidata training for librarians at WikiCite 2018

In fact there is a broad scope: "Open Knowledge Maps via SPARQL" and the "Sum of All Welsh Literature", identification of research outputs, Library.Link Network and Bibframe 2.0, OSCAR and LUCINDA (who they?), OCLC and Scholia, all these co-exist on the agenda. Certainly more library science is coming Wikidata's way. That poses the question about the other direction: is more Wikimedia technology advancing on libraries? Good point.

Wikimedians generally are not aware of the tech background that can be assumed, unless they are close to current training for librarians. A baseline definition is useful here: "bash, git and OpenRefine". Compare and contrast with pywikibot, GitHub and mix'n'match. Translation: scripting for automation, version control, data set matching and wrangling in the large, are on the agenda also for contemporary library work. Certainly there is some possible common ground here. Time to understand rather more about the motivations that operate in the library sector.

Links
Account creation is now open on the ScienceSource wiki, where you can see SPARQL visualisations of text mining.
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MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 11:20, 30 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Administrators' newsletter – December 2018

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

Administrator changes

readded Al Ameer son • Randykitty • Spartaz
removed Boson • Daniel J. Leivick • Efe • Esanchez7587 • Fred Bauder • Garzo • Martijn Hoekstra • Orangemike

Interface administrator changes

removedDeryck Chan

Guideline and policy news

  • Following a request for comment, the Mediation Committee is now closed and will no longer be accepting case requests.
  • A request for comment is in progress to determine whether members of the Bot Approvals Group should satisfy activity requirements in order to remain in that role.
  • A request for comment is in progress regarding whether to change the administrator inactivity policy, such that administrators "who have made no logged administrative actions for at least 12 months may be desysopped". Currently, the policy states that administrators "who have made neither edits nor administrative actions for at least 12 months may be desysopped".
  • A proposal has been made to temporarily restrict editing of the Main Page to interface administrators in order to mitigate the impact of compromised accounts.

Technical news

Arbitration

Miscellaneous

  • In late November, an attacker compromised multiple accounts, including at least four administrator accounts, and used them to vandalize Wikipedia. If you have ever used your current password on any other website, you should change it immediately. Sharing the same password across multiple websites makes your account vulnerable, especially if your password was used on a website that suffered a data breach. As these incidents have shown, these concerns are not pure fantasies.
  • Wikipedia policy requires administrators 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.

Obituaries

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 03:36, 3 December 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Facto Post – Issue 19 – 27 December 2018

Facto Post – Issue 19 – 27 December 2018
The Editor is Charles Matthews, for ContentMine. Please leave feedback for him, on his User talk page.
To subscribe to Facto Post go to Wikipedia:Facto Post mailing list. For the ways to unsubscribe, see the footer.
Back numbers are here.
Learning from Zotero

Zotero is free software for reference management by the Center for History and New Media: see Wikipedia:Citing sources with Zotero. It is also an active user community, and has broad-based language support.

Zotero logo

Besides the handiness of Zotero's warehousing of personal citation collections, the Zotero translator underlies the citoid service, at work behind the VisualEditor. Metadata from Wikidata can be imported into Zotero; and in the other direction the zotkat tool from the University of Mannheim allows Zotero bibliographies to be exported to Wikidata, by item creation. With an extra feature to add statements, that route could lead to much development of the focus list (P5008) tagging on Wikidata, by WikiProjects.

Zotero demo video

There is also a large-scale encyclopedic dimension here. The construction of Zotero translators is one facet of Web scraping that has a strong community and open source basis. In that it resembles the less formal mix'n'match import community, and growing networks around other approaches that can integrate datasets into Wikidata, such as the use of OpenRefine.

Looking ahead, the thirtieth birthday of the World Wide Web falls in 2019, and yet the ambition to make webpages routinely readable by machines can still seem an ever-retreating mirage. Wikidata should not only be helping Wikimedia integrate its projects, an ongoing process represented by Structured Data on Commons and lexemes. It should also be acting as a catalyst to bring scraping in from the cold, with institutional strengths as well as resourceful code.

Links
Diversitech, the latest ContentMine grant application to the Wikimedia Foundation, is in its community review stage until January 2.
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MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 19:08, 27 December 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Administrators' newsletter – January 2019

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

Guideline and policy news

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

Technical news

  • Starting on December 13, the Wikimedia Foundation security team implemented new password policy and requirements. Privileged accounts (administrators, bureaucrats, checkusers, oversighters, interface administrators, bots, edit filter managers/helpers, template editors, et al.) must have a password at least 10 characters in length. All accounts must have a password:
  1. At least 8 characters in length
  2. Not in the 100,000 most popular passwords (defined by the Password Blacklist library)
  3. Different from their username
User accounts not meeting these requirements will be prompted to update their password accordingly. More information is available on MediaWiki.org.
  • Blocked administrators may now block the administrator that blocked them. This was done to mitigate the possibility that a compromised administrator account would block all other active administrators, complementing the removal of the ability to unblock oneself outside of self-imposed blocks. A request for comment is currently in progress to determine whether the blocking policy should be updated regarding this change.
  • {{Copyvio-revdel}} now has a link to open the history with the RevDel checkboxes already filled in.

Arbitration

Miscellaneous

  • Accounts continue to be compromised on a regular basis. Evidence shows this is entirely due to the accounts having the same password that was used on another website that suffered a data breach. If you have ever used your current password on any other website, you should change it immediately.
  • Around 22% of admins have enabled two-factor authentication, up from 20% in June 2018. If you haven't already enabled it, please consider doing so. Regardless of whether you use 2FA, please practice appropriate account security by ensuring your password is secure and unique to Wikimedia.
Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 21:38, 1 January 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Facto Post – Issue 20 – 31 January 2019

Facto Post – Issue 20 – 31 January 2019
The Editor is Charles Matthews, for ContentMine. Please leave feedback for him, on his User talk page.
To subscribe to Facto Post go to Wikipedia:Facto Post mailing list. For the ways to unsubscribe, see the footer.
Back numbers are here.
Everything flows (and certainly data does)

Recently Jimmy Wales has made the point that computer home assistants take much of their data from Wikipedia, one way or another. So as well as getting Spotify to play Frosty the Snowman for you, they may be able to answer the question "is the Pope Catholic?" Possibly by asking for disambiguation (Coptic?).

Amazon Echo device using the Amazon Alexa service in voice search showdown with the Google rival on an Android phone

Headlines about data breaches are now familiar, but the unannounced circulation of information raises other issues. One of those is Gresham's law stated as "bad data drives out good". Wikipedia and now Wikidata have been criticised on related grounds: what if their content, unattributed, is taken to have a higher standing than Wikimedians themselves would grant it? See Wikiquote on a misattribution to Bismarck for the usual quip about "law and sausages", and why one shouldn't watch them in the making.

Wikipedia has now turned 18, so should act like as adult, as well as being treated like one. The Web itself turns 30 some time between March and November this year, per Tim Berners-Lee. If the Knowledge Graph by Google exemplifies Heraclitean Web technology gaining authority, contra GIGO, Wikimedians still have a role in its critique. But not just with the teenage skill of detecting phoniness.

There is more to beating Gresham than exposing the factoid and urban myth, where WP:V does do a great job. Placeholders must be detected, and working with Wikidata is a good way to understand how having one statement as data can blind us to replacing it by a more accurate one. An example that is important to open access is that, firstly, the term itself needs considerable unpacking, because just being able to read material online is a poor relation of "open"; and secondly, trying to get Creative Commons license information into Wikidata shows up issues with classes of license (such as CC-BY) standing for the actual license in major repositories. Detailed investigation shows that "everything flows" exacerbates the issue. But Wikidata can solve it.

Links
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MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 10:53, 31 January 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Administrators' newsletter – February 2019

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

Administrator changes

added Enterprisey • JJMC89
readded BorgQueen
removed Harro5 • Jenks24 • Graft • R. Baley

Interface administrator changes

removedEnterprisey

Guideline and policy news

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

Technical news

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

Miscellaneous

  • Voting in the 2019 Steward elections will begin on 08 February 2019, 14:00 (UTC) and end on 28 February 2019, 13:59 (UTC). The confirmation process of current stewards is being held in parallel. You can automatically check your eligibility to vote.
  • A new IRC bot is available that allows you to subscribe to notifications when specific filters are tripped. This requires that your IRC handle be identified.
Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 02:15, 4 February 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Facto Post – Issue 21 – 28 February 2019

Facto Post – Issue 21 – 28 February 2019
The Editor is Charles Matthews, for ContentMine. Please leave feedback for him, on his User talk page.
To subscribe to Facto Post go to Wikipedia:Facto Post mailing list. For the ways to unsubscribe, see the footer.
Back numbers are here.
What is a systematic review?

Systematic reviews are basic building blocks of evidence-based medicine, surveys of existing literature devoted typically to a definite question that aim to bring out scientific conclusions. They are principled in a way Wikipedians can appreciate, taking a critical view of their sources.

PRISMA flow diagram for a systematic review

Ben Goldacre in 2014 wrote (link below) "[...] : the "information architecture" of evidence based medicine (if you can tolerate such a phrase) is a chaotic, ad hoc, poorly connected ecosystem of legacy projects. In some respects the whole show is still run on paper, like it's the 19th century." Is there a Wikidatan in the house? Wouldn't some machine-readable content that is structured data help?

File:Schittny, Facing East, 2011, Legacy Projects.jpg
2011 photograph by Bernard Schittny of the "Legacy Projects" group

Most likely it would, but the arcana of systematic reviews and how they add value would still need formal handling. The PRISMA standard dates from 2009, with an update started in 2018. The concerns there include the corpus of papers used: how selected and filtered? Now that Wikidata has a 20.9 million item bibliography, one can at least pose questions. Each systematic review is a tagging opportunity for a bibliography. Could that tagging be reproduced by a query, in principle? Can it even be second-guessed by a query (i.e. simulated by a protocol which translates into SPARQL)? Homing in on the arcana, do the inclusion and filtering criteria translate into metadata? At some level they must, but are these metadata explicitly expressed in the articles themselves? The answer to that is surely "no" at this point, but can TDM find them? Again "no", right now. Automatic identification doesn't just happen.

Actually these questions lack originality. It should be noted though that WP:MEDRS, the reliable sources guideline used here for health information, hinges on the assumption that the usefully systematic reviews of biomedical literature can be recognised. Its nutshell summary, normally the part of a guideline with the highest density of common sense, allows literature reviews in general validity, but WP:MEDASSESS qualifies that indication heavily. Process wonkery about systematic reviews definitely has merit.

Links
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MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 10:01, 28 February 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Administrators' newsletter – March 2019

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

Guideline and policy news

Technical news

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

Arbitration

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

Miscellaneous

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 21:12, 4 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

MfD nomination of Wikipedia:Article Incubator/Userbox

Wikipedia:Article Incubator/Userbox, a page which you created or substantially contributed to, has been nominated for deletion. Your opinions on the matter are welcome; you may participate in the discussion by adding your comments at Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Wikipedia:Article Incubator/Userbox and please be sure to sign your comments with four tildes (~~~~). You are free to edit the content of Wikipedia:Article Incubator/Userbox during the discussion but should not remove the miscellany for deletion template from the top of the page; such a removal will not end the deletion discussion. Thank you. UnitedStatesian (talk) 03:28, 11 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Facto Post – Issue 22 – 28 March 2019

Facto Post – Issue 22 – 28 March 2019
The Editor is Charles Matthews, for ContentMine. Please leave feedback for him, on his User talk page.
To subscribe to Facto Post go to Wikipedia:Facto Post mailing list. For the ways to unsubscribe, see the footer.
Back numbers are here.
When in the cloud, do as the APIs do

Half a century ago, it was the era of the mainframe computer, with its air-conditioned room, twitching tape-drives, and appearance in the title of a spy novel Billion-Dollar Brain then made into a Hollywood film. Now we have the cloud, with server farms and the client–server model as quotidian: this text is being typed on a Chromebook.

File:Cloud-API-Logo.svg
Logo of Cloud API on Google Cloud Platform

The term Applications Programming Interface or API is 50 years old, and refers to a type of software library as well as the interface to its use. While a compiler is what you need to get high-level code executed by a mainframe, an API out in the cloud somewhere offers a chance to perform operations on a remote server. For example, the multifarious bots active on Wikipedia have owners who exploit the MediaWiki API.

APIs (called RESTful) that allow for the GET HTTP request are fundamental for what could colloquially be called "moving data around the Web"; from which Wikidata benefits 24/7. So the fact that the Wikidata SPARQL endpoint at query.wikidata.org has a RESTful API means that, in lay terms, Wikidata content can be GOT from it. The programming involved, besides the SPARQL language, could be in Python, younger by a few months than the Web.

Magic words, such as occur in fantasy stories, are wishful (rather than RESTful) solutions to gaining access. You may need to be a linguist to enter Ali Baba's cave or the western door of Moria (French in the case of "Open Sesame", in fact, and Sindarin being the respective languages). Talking to an API requires a bigger toolkit, which first means you have to recognise the tools in terms of what they can do. On the way to the wikt:impactful or polymathic modern handling of facts, one must perhaps take only tactful notice of tech's endemic problem with documentation, and absorb the insightful point that the code in APIs does articulate the customary procedures now in place on the cloud for getting information. As Owl explained to Winnie-the-Pooh, it tells you The Thing to Do.

Links
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MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 11:45, 28 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Nomination of Fasouri Watermania for deletion

A discussion is taking place as to whether the article Fasouri Watermania is suitable for inclusion in Wikipedia according to Wikipedia's policies and guidelines or whether it should be deleted.

The article will be discussed at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Fasouri Watermania until a consensus is reached, and anyone, including you, is welcome to contribute to the discussion. The nomination will explain the policies and guidelines which are of concern. The discussion focuses on high-quality evidence and our policies and guidelines.

Users may edit the article during the discussion, including to improve the article to address concerns raised in the discussion. However, do not remove the article-for-deletion notice from the top of the article. User:Ceyockey (talk to me) 23:39, 29 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Administrators' newsletter – April 2019

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

Technical news

Arbitration

Miscellaneous

  • Two more administrator accounts were compromised. Evidence has shown that these attacks, like previous incidents, were due to reusing a password that was used on another website that suffered a data breach. If you have ever used your current password on any other website, you should change it immediately. All admins are strongly encouraged to enable two-factor authentication, please consider doing so. Please always practice appropriate account security by ensuring your password is secure and unique to Wikimedia.
  • As a reminder, according to WP:NOQUORUM, administrators looking to close or relist an AfD should evaluate a nomination that has received few or no comments as if it were a proposed deletion (PROD) prior to determining whether it should be relisted.
Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 21:57, 7 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Facto Post – Issue 23 – 30 April 2019

Facto Post – Issue 23 – 30 April 2019
The Editor is Charles Matthews, for ContentMine. Please leave feedback for him, on his User talk page.
To subscribe to Facto Post go to Wikipedia:Facto Post mailing list. For the ways to unsubscribe, see the footer.
Back numbers are here.
Completely clouded?
Cloud computing logo

Talk of cloud computing draws a veil over hardware, but also, less obviously but more importantly, obscures such intellectual distinction as matters most in its use. Wikidata begins to allow tasks to be undertaken that were out of easy reach. The facility should not be taken as the real point.

Coming in from another angle, the "executive decision" is more glamorous; but the "administrative decision" should be admired for its command of facts. Think of the attitudes ad fontes, so prevalent here on Wikipedia as "can you give me a source for that?", and being prepared to deal with complicated analyses into specified subcases. Impatience expressed as a disdain for such pedantry is quite understandable, but neither dirty data nor false dichotomies are at all good to have around.

Issue 13 and Issue 21, respectively on WP:MEDRS and systematic reviews, talk about biomedical literature and computing tasks that would be of higher quality if they could be made more "administrative". For example, it is desirable that the decisions involved be consistent, explicable, and reproducible by non-experts from specified inputs.

What gets clouded out is not impossibly hard to understand. You do need to put together the insights of functional programming, which is a doctrinaire and purist but clearcut approach, with the practicality of office software. Loopless computation can be conceived of as a seamless forward march of spreadsheet columns, each determined by the content of previous ones. Very well: to do a backward audit, when now we are talking about Wikidata, we rely on integrity of data and its scrupulous sourcing: and clearcut case analyses. The MEDRS example forces attention on purge attempts such as Beall's list.

Links
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MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 11:27, 30 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]

ArbCom 2019 special circular

Icon of a white exclamation mark within a black triangle
 Administrators must secure their accounts

The Arbitration Committee may require a new RfA if your account is compromised.

View additional information

This message was sent to all administrators following a recent motion. Thank you for your attention. For the Arbitration Committee, Cameron11598 02:41, 4 May 2019 (UTC) Template:Z152[reply]

Administrator account security (Correction to Arbcom 2019 special circular)

ArbCom would like to apologise and correct our previous mass message in light of the response from the community.

Since November 2018, six administrator accounts have been compromised and temporarily desysopped. In an effort to help improve account security, our intention was to remind administrators of existing policies on account security — that they are required to "have strong passwords and follow appropriate personal security practices." We have updated our procedures to ensure that we enforce these policies more strictly in the future. The policies themselves have not changed. In particular, two-factor authentication remains an optional means of adding extra security to your account. The choice not to enable 2FA will not be considered when deciding to restore sysop privileges to administrator accounts that were compromised.

We are sorry for the wording of our previous message, which did not accurately convey this, and deeply regret the tone in which it was delivered.

For the Arbitration Committee, -Cameron11598 21:03, 4 May 2019 (UTC) Template:Z83[reply]

Administrators' newsletter – May 2019

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

Guideline and policy news

Technical news

  • XTools Admin Stats, a tool to list admins by administrative actions, has been revamped to support more types of log entries such as AbuseFilter changes. Two additional tools have been integrated into it as well: Steward Stats and Patroller Stats.

Arbitration

  • In response to the continuing compromise of administrator accounts, the Arbitration Committee passed a motion amending the procedures for return of permissions (diff). In such cases, the committee will review all available information to determine whether the administrator followed "appropriate personal security practices" before restoring permissions; administrators found failing to have adequately done so will not be resysopped automatically. All current administrators have been notified of this change.
  • Following a formal ratification process, the arbitration policy has been amended (diff). Specifically, the two-thirds majority required to remove or suspend an arbitrator now excludes (1) the arbitrator facing suspension or removal, and (2) any inactive arbitrator who does not respond within 30 days to attempts to solicit their feedback on the resolution through all known methods of communication.

Miscellaneous

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 00:37, 5 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Facto Post – Issue 24 – 17 May 2019

Facto Post – Issue 24 – 17 May 2019
Text mining display of noun phrases from the US Presidential Election 2012
The Editor is Charles Matthews, for ContentMine. Please leave feedback for him, on his User talk page.
To subscribe to Facto Post go to Wikipedia:Facto Post mailing list. For the ways to unsubscribe, see the footer.
Back numbers are here.
Semantic Web and TDM – a ContentMine view

Two dozen issues, and this may be the last, a valediction at least for a while.

It's time for a two-year summation of ContentMine projects involving TDM (text and data mining).

Wikidata and now Structured Data on Commons represent the overlap of Wikimedia with the Semantic Web. This common ground is helping to convert an engineering concept into a movement. TDM generally has little enough connection with the Semantic Web, being instead in the orbit of machine learning which is no respecter of the semantic. Don't break a taboo by asking bots "and what do you mean by that?"

The ScienceSource project innovates in TDM, by storing its text mining results in a Wikibase site. It strives for compliance of its fact mining, on drug treatments of diseases, with an automated form of the relevant Wikipedia referencing guideline MEDRS. Where WikiFactMine set up an API for reuse of its results, ScienceSource has a SPARQL query service, with look-and-feel exactly that of Wikidata's at query.wikidata.org. It also now has a custom front end, and its content can be federated, in other words used in data mashups: it is one of over 50 sites that can federate with Wikidata.

The human factor comes to bear through the front end, which combines a link to the HTML version of a paper, text mining results organised in drug and disease columns, and a SPARQL display of nearby drug and disease terms. Much software to develop and explain, so little time! Rather than telling the tale, Facto Post brings you ScienceSource links, starting from the how-to video, lower right.

ScienceSourceReview, introductory video: but you need run it from the original upload file on Commons
Links for participation

The review tool requires a log in on sciencesource.wmflabs.org, and an OAuth permission (bottom of a review page) to operate. It can be used in simple and more advanced workflows. Examples of queries for the latter are at d:Wikidata_talk:ScienceSource project/Queries#SS_disease_list and d:Wikidata_talk:ScienceSource_project/Queries#NDF-RT issue.

Please be aware that this is a research project in development, and may have outages for planned maintenance. That will apply for the next few days, at least. The ScienceSource wiki main page carries information on practical matters. Email is not enabled on the wiki: use site mail here to Charles Matthews in case of difficulty, or if you need support. Further explanatory videos will be put into commons:Category:ContentMine videos.

If you wish to receive no further issues of Facto Post, please remove your name from our mailing list. Alternatively, to opt out of all massmessage mailings, you may add Category:Wikipedians who opt out of message delivery to your user talk page.
Newsletter delivered by MediaWiki message delivery

MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 18:52, 17 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Administrators' newsletter – June 2019

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

Administrator changes

removed Andonic • Consumed Crustacean • Enigmaman • Euryalus • EWS23 • HereToHelp • Nv8200pa • Peripitus • StringTheory11 • Vejvančický

CheckUser changes

removed Ivanvector

Guideline and policy news

  • An RfC seeks to clarify whether WP:OUTING should include information on just the English Wikipedia or any Wikimedia project.
  • An RfC on WT:RfA concluded that Requests for adminship and bureaucratship are discussions seeking to build consensus.
  • An RfC proposal to make the templates for discussion (TfD) process more like the requested moves (RM) process, i.e. "as a clearinghouse of template discussions", was closed as successful.

Technical news

  • The CSD feature of Twinkle now allows admins to notify page creators of deletion if the page had not been tagged. The default behavior matches that of tagging notifications, and replaces the ability to open the user talk page upon deletion. You can customize which criteria receive notifications in your Twinkle preferences: look for Notify page creator when deleting under these criteria.
  • Twinkle's d-batch (batch delete) feature now supports deleting subpages (and related redirects and talk pages) of each page. The pages will be listed first but use with caution! The und-batch (batch undelete) option can now also restore talk pages.

Miscellaneous

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 09:48, 8 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Administrators' newsletter – July 2019

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

Administrator changes

removed 28bytes • Ad Orientem • Ansh666 • Beeblebrox • Boing! said Zebedee • BU Rob13 • Dennis Brown • Deor • DoRD • Floquenbeam1 • Flyguy649 • Fram2 • Gadfium • GB fan • Jonathunder • Kusma • Lectonar • Moink • MSGJ • Nick • Od Mishehu • Rama • Spartaz • Syrthiss • TheDJ • WJBscribe
1Floquenbeam's access was removed, then restored, then removed again.
2Fram's access was removed, then restored, then removed again.

Guideline and policy news

  • In a related matter, the account throttle has been restored to six creations per day as the mitigation activity completed.

Technical news

  • The Wikimedia Foundation's Community health initiative plans to design and build a new user reporting system to make it easier for people experiencing harassment and other forms of abuse to provide accurate information to the appropriate channel for action to be taken. Community feedback is invited.

Miscellaneous

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 21:19, 1 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Administrators' newsletter – August 2019

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

Guideline and policy news

Arbitration

Miscellaneous

  • Following a research project on masking IP addresses, the Foundation is starting a new project to improve the privacy of IP editors. The result of this project may significantly change administrative and counter-vandalism workflows. The project is in the very early stages of discussions and there is no concrete plan yet. Admins and the broader community are encouraged to leave feedback on the talk page.
  • The new page reviewer right is bundled with the admin tool set. Many admins regularly help out at Special:NewPagesFeed, but they may not be aware of improvements, changes, and new tools for the Curation system. Stay up to date by subscribing here to the NPP newsletter that appears every two months, and/or putting the reviewers' talk page on your watchlist.

    Since the introduction of temporary user rights, it is becoming more usual to accord the New Page Reviewer right on a probationary period of 3 to 6 months in the first instance. This avoids rights removal for inactivity at a later stage and enables a review of their work before according the right on a permanent basis.

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 19:23, 3 August 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Administrators' newsletter – September 2019

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

Administrator changes

added Bradv • Chetsford • Izno
readded Floquenbeam • Lectonar
removed DESiegel • Jake Wartenberg • Rjanag • Topbanana

CheckUser changes

removed Callanecc • LFaraone • There'sNoTime

Oversight changes

removed Callanecc • Fox • HJ Mitchell • LFaraone • There'sNoTime

Technical news

  • Editors using the mobile website on Wikipedia can opt-in to new advanced features via your settings page. This will give access to more interface links, special pages, and tools.
  • The advanced version of the edit review pages (recent changes, watchlist, and related changes) now includes two new filters. These filters are for "All contents" and "All discussions". They will filter the view to just those namespaces.

Arbitration

Miscellaneous

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 00:37, 7 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Disambiguation link notification for September 12

Hi. Thank you for your recent edits. An automated process has detected that when you recently edited Egg and chips, you added a link pointing to the disambiguation page Tommies (check to confirm | fix with Dab solver). Such links are usually incorrect, since a disambiguation page is merely a list of unrelated topics with similar titles. (Read the FAQ • Join us at the DPL WikiProject.)

It's OK to remove this message. Also, to stop receiving these messages, follow these opt-out instructions. Thanks, DPL bot (talk) 08:03, 12 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Administrators' newsletter – October 2019

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

Guideline and policy news

  • Following a discussion, a new criterion for speedy category renaming was added: C2F: One eponymous article, which applies if the category contains only an eponymous article or media file, provided that the category has not otherwise been emptied shortly before the nomination. The default outcome is an upmerge to the parent categories.

Technical news

  • As previously noted, tighter password requirements for Administrators were put in place last year. Wikipedia should now alert you if your password is less than 10 characters long and thus too short.

Arbitration

Miscellaneous

  • The Community Tech team has been working on a system for temporarily watching pages, and welcomes feedback.
Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 11:55, 2 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Editor vandalizing Wikipedia

This editor, listed in the links below, is vandalizing Wikipedia articles, see link below, they have added content in the caption section of the infobox of the article in the first link, I've removed it yet I've included a cut and paste of it as well, please help, thanks. Neptune's Trident (talk) 15:38, 11 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Presler

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Scott_Presler&diff=920621381&oldid=919540480

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/64.124.229.146

Thanks for reverting. I've warned them and deleted the edit - and removed it here. You may get a quicker response at WP:AIV. Fences&Windows 23:19, 11 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Administrators' newsletter – November 2019

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

Guideline and policy news

  • A related RfC is seeking the community's sentiment for a binding desysop procedure.

Arbitration

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 21:15, 3 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]

ArbCom 2019 election voter message

Hello! Voting in the 2019 Arbitration Committee elections is now open until 23:59 on Monday, 2 December 2019. All eligible users are allowed to vote. Users with alternate accounts may only vote once.

The Arbitration Committee is the panel of editors responsible for conducting the Wikipedia arbitration process. It has the authority to impose binding solutions to disputes between editors, primarily for serious conduct disputes the community has been unable to resolve. This includes the authority to impose site bans, topic bans, editing restrictions, and other measures needed to maintain our editing environment. The arbitration policy describes the Committee's roles and responsibilities in greater detail.

If you wish to participate in the 2019 election, please review the candidates and submit your choices on the voting page. If you no longer wish to receive these messages, you may add {{NoACEMM}} to your user talk page. MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 00:09, 19 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Happy Adminship Anniversary!

Happy Adminship Anniversary!

Have a very happy adminship anniversary on your special day!

Best wishes, CAPTAIN RAJU(T) 12:28, 23 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks. Wow, 10 years. Fences&Windows 20:42, 23 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]

m:Meetup/Cambridge/42, 14 December

If you're available that afternoon, it would be good to see you there. Charles Matthews (talk) 20:08, 29 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Charles Matthews, possibly. Thanks for the note! Fences&Windows 11:19, 30 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Its about the 100 of edits made by Sitush in a matter of days on Kayastha. Look at its edit history. Its about the personal attack and harassment by Sitush on Kayastha talk page, which has now been mysteriously emptied. Its about the principles of being free and fair. Devputra Darshan (talk) 19:02, 22 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Administrators' newsletter – December 2019

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

Administrator changes

added EvergreenFir • ToBeFree
removed Akhilleus • Athaenara • John Vandenberg • Melchoir • MichaelQSchmidt • NeilN • Youngamerican • 😂

CheckUser changes

readded Beeblebrox
removed Deskana

Interface administrator changes

readded Evad37

Guideline and policy news

Technical news

Arbitration

Miscellaneous

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 02:47, 2 December 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Disambiguation link notification for December 7

An automated process has detected that when you recently edited Jennifer Arcuri, you added a link pointing to the disambiguation page Orange County (check to confirm | fix with Dab solver).

(Opt-out instructions.) --DPL bot (talk) 07:42, 7 December 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Happy First Edit Day!

Happy First Edit Day!

Have a very happy first edit anniversary!

From the Birthday Committee, CAPTAIN RAJU(T) 13:51, 27 December 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Happy First Edit Day!

Hey, Fences and windows. I'd like to wish you a wonderful First Edit Day on behalf of the Wikipedia Birthday Committee!
Have a great day! PATH SLOPU 16:36, 27 December 2019 (UTC)[reply]


Administrators' newsletter – January 2020

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

Guideline and policy news

Arbitration

Miscellaneous

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 20:06, 4 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Administrators' newsletter – February 2020

News and updates for administrators from the past month (January 2020).

Guideline and policy news

  • Following a request for comment, partial blocks are now enabled on the English Wikipedia. This functionality allows administrators to block users from editing specific pages or namespaces rather than the entire site. A draft policy is being workshopped at Wikipedia:Partial blocks.
  • The request for comment seeking the community's sentiment for a binding desysop procedure closed with wide-spread support for an alternative desysoping procedure based on community input. No proposed process received consensus.

Technical news

  • Twinkle now supports partial blocking. There is a small checkbox that toggles the "partial" status for both blocks and templating. There is currently one template: {{uw-pblock}}.
  • When trying to move a page, if the target title already exists then a warning message is shown. The warning message will now include a link to the target title. [11]

Arbitration

  • Following a recent arbitration case, the Arbitration Committee reminded administrators that checkuser and oversight blocks must not be reversed or modified without prior consultation with the checkuser or oversighter who placed the block, the respective functionary team, or the Arbitration Committee.

Miscellaneous


Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 15:05, 1 February 2020 (UTC)[reply]

A barnstar for you!

The Barnstar of Diligence
"Let's Go Kick Some Butt"


And Lo! It was kicked  :) ——SN54129 09:57, 5 February 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Nomination for deletion of Template:Article Incubator

Template:Article Incubator has been nominated for deletion. You are invited to comment on the discussion at the template's entry on the Templates for discussion page. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 18:28, 16 February 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Administrators' newsletter – March 2020

News and updates for administrators from the past month (February 2020).

Guideline and policy news

  • Following an RfC, the blocking policy was changed to state that sysops must not undo or alter CheckUser or Oversight blocks, rather than should not.
  • A request for comment confirmed that sandboxes of established but inactive editors may not be blanked due solely to inactivity.

Technical news

  • Following a discussion, Twinkle's default CSD behavior will soon change, most likely this week. After the change, Twinkle will default to "tagging mode" if there is no CSD tag present, and default to "deletion mode" if there is a CSD tag present. You will be able to always default to "deletion mode" (the current behavior) using your Twinkle preferences.

Miscellaneous


Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 11:20, 2 March 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Administrators' newsletter – April 2020

News and updates for administrators from the past month (March 2020).

Guideline and policy news

  • There is an ongoing request for comment to streamline the source deprecation and blacklisting process.

Technical news

Arbitration

Miscellaneous

  • The WMF has begun a pilot report of the pages most visited through various social media platforms to help with anti-vandalism and anti-disinformation efforts. The report is updated daily and will be available through the end of May.
Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 07:00, 1 April 2020 (UTC)[reply]

User Bhavyar19

Hi Fences & Windows. You blocked Bhavyar19 (talk · contribs) a couple of days ago for edits made to circle. 360° and parent. It seems now that the block has expired he is back to his old ways, see Talk:Latitude (https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Latitude&diff=950667695&oldid=857276872) and Talk:Latitude (https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Latitude&diff=950667695&oldid=857276872). I'm slightly wary of deleting user input from talk pages, but I'm not sure that I believe these to be genuine questions or suggestions. Would you mind having a quick look please? Thanks, Martin of Sheffield (talk) 08:27, 13 April 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks, Martin of Sheffield. Kinu got in first with an indef block. Perhaps harsh for talk page comments, but I doubt Bhavyar was going to be constructive. Fences&Windows 11:08, 13 April 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Template for deletion/discussion

Nomination for deletion of Template:The People's Choice (political party)/meta/color

Template:The People's Choice (political party)/meta/color has been nominated for deletion. You are invited to comment on the discussion at the template's entry on the Templates for discussion page. doktorb wordsdeeds 14:44, 1 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Hey. At some point in the ancient past you were either involved in the creation of the above template, or the successful AfD for the party's article's deletion. I've just put the template up on TfD so am letting editors involved at some point, even fleetingly in most cases, just in case you want to chip in the discussion. Cheers. doktorb wordsdeeds 14:44, 1 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Administrators' newsletter – May 2020

News and updates for administrators from the past month (April 2020).

Administrator changes

removed Gnangarra • Kaisershatner • Malcolmxl5

CheckUser changes

readded Callanecc

Oversight changes

readded HJ Mitchell

Guideline and policy news

Technical news

Miscellaneous

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 01:19, 2 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Kartikeya Gummakonda and Ramya Pandian

I have created drafts for both the articles. The pages can be moved from drafts into articles only by administrators. Can you look at the drafts? --TamilMirchi

Hi TamilMirchi, it's not only admins who work on assessing drafts. Draft:Ramya Pandian was already declined as needing more sources. An article about her was deleted in 2018 following a deletion debate, so you need to write a solid article to get this draft approved. Tips: include as many reliable sources as you can find, e.g. [12]; avoid gossip sites; cite every sentence and every fact; interviews can be used as sources, but don't count for proving notability; any non-Indian sources you can find will help with showing notability; you can use Tamil-language sources about her; you might want to create ta:ரம்யா பாண்டியன்; include dates and authors in the references.
For Draft:Kartikeya Gummakonda, fix typos like "poitive" and include more sources like [13]. Read through all your sources and pick out every relevant fact and include it and cite the source. Fences&Windows 21:09, 17 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Another page that I created (Gouri G Kishan) was moved to a draft. Kindly tell me how I should improve the article and make the review faster. --TamilMirchi
When seeking advice, TamilMirchi, please link to the relevant pages, i.e. Draft:Gouri G Kishan and Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Gouri Kishan. Also, sign using ~~~~ at the end of your posts. I can't tell what state the article was in when the AfD closed because of all the moves. Have you included all the sources linked to in that deletion debate? Her biographical details, such as where she's from, age, school and university are missing - this may help: [14]. Write an article to be proud of, not one that will just be acceptable. Fences&Windows 21:59, 24 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks. Is the draft better now? Also, if you don't mind can you merge the histories of Draft:Gouri G. Kishan to Draft:Gouri G Kishan. Thank you. --TamilMirchi (talk) 00:40, 25 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]
That’s better, thanks. Moved live and tidied up: Gouri G. Kishan. Fences&Windows 22:19, 25 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks, Kartikeya Gummakonda is now an article. Is Draft:Ramya Pandian better now? TamilMirchi (talk) 20:50, 23 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Sitush, out of control.

See sitush's activity on kayastha article and its talk page. Need to control him. Devputra Darshan (talk) 17:34, 21 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Replied on your talk. Fences&Windows 10:49, 22 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Its about the 100 of edits made by Sitush in a matter of days on [Kayastha]]. Check the edit history. Its about the multiple personal attacks and harassment on multiple users by Sitush on Kayastha talk page, which has now been mysteriously emptied. Its about the principles of being free and fair. Devputra Darshan (talk) 19:04, 22 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Devputra Darshan, please take this to WP:ANI, providing diffs and detailed evidence. Fences&Windows 23:42, 22 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]
The account is just another in a long line of CU-confirmed Sitush harassment accounts. It gave me an opportunity to weed out some sleeper accounts, so I suppose there's a plus side to the petulant ranting here.-- Jezebel's Ponyobons mots 23:51, 22 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks, Jezebel's Ponyo. I was AGF, but this was not unexpected. Fences&Windows 19:35, 23 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Orphaned non-free image File:Democratic Left (UK) logo.gif

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Thanks for uploading File:Democratic Left (UK) logo.gif. The image description page currently specifies that the image is non-free and may only be used on Wikipedia under a claim of fair use. However, the image is currently not used in any articles on Wikipedia. If the image was previously in an article, please go to the article and see why it was removed. You may add it back if you think that that will be useful. However, please note that images for which a replacement could be created are not acceptable for use on Wikipedia (see our policy for non-free media).

Note that any non-free images not used in any articles will be deleted after seven days, as described in section F5 of the criteria for speedy deletion. Thank you. --B-bot (talk) 17:37, 27 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Administrators' newsletter – June 2020

News and updates for administrators from the past month (May 2020).

Administrator changes

added CaptainEek • Creffett • Cwmhiraeth
removed Anna Frodesiak • Buckshot06 • Ronhjones • SQL

CheckUser changes

removed SQL

Guideline and policy news

Arbitration

  • A motion was passed to enact a 500/30 restriction on articles related to the history of Jews and antisemitism in Poland during World War II (1933–45), including the Holocaust in Poland. Article talk pages where disruption occurs may also be managed with the stated restriction.
Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 13:27, 1 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Orphaned non-free image File:Free Scotland Party 2.gif

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⚠

Thanks for uploading File:Free Scotland Party 2.gif. The image description page currently specifies that the image is non-free and may only be used on Wikipedia under a claim of fair use. However, the image is currently not used in any articles on Wikipedia. If the image was previously in an article, please go to the article and see why it was removed. You may add it back if you think that that will be useful. However, please note that images for which a replacement could be created are not acceptable for use on Wikipedia (see our policy for non-free media).

Note that any non-free images not used in any articles will be deleted after seven days, as described in section F5 of the criteria for speedy deletion. Thank you. --B-bot (talk) 17:32, 28 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Administrators' newsletter – July 2020

News and updates for administrators from the past month (June 2020).

Guideline and policy news

Technical news

Arbitration

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 10:25, 1 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for letting me know ....

about the NYTimes article. I'll just mention that The Signpost had a lot of the same info, but was not mentioned in the NYTimes. That doesn't mater of course. unless somebody were to question my article's reliability. Thanks again. Smallbones(smalltalk) 16:42, 29 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Hi Smallbones, maybe I have a bad memory but I'm not sure what NYT article this refers to. Fences&Windows 20:18, 30 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Oh, you mean the Sapan Desai exposé. I did go to the article to see if it existed yet and whether the NYT article was used there or at Surgisphere, and I was pleased to see the bio article in place, citing the NYT. I sent you "thanks" for recreating the article. Fences&Windows 20:23, 30 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]
(EC)I thought you added it to Sapan Desai! The article is here. It's a wonderful article on the subject with all the details others missed, but a month behind The Guardian and other papers. Just what's needed sometimes though. Smallbones(smalltalk) 20:31, 30 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Yep, that's the one Smallbones. The NYT did the legwork of speaking to former colleagues - proper journalism is still alive! Fences&Windows 22:23, 30 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Administrators' newsletter – August 2020

News and updates for administrators from the past month (July 2020).

Administrator changes

added Red Phoenix
readded Euryalus • SQL
removed Jujutacular • Monty845 • Rettetast • Madchester

Oversight changes

readded GB fan
removed Keegan • Opabinia regalis • Premeditated Chaos

Guideline and policy news

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 08:20, 1 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Administrators' newsletter – September 2020

News and updates for administrators from the past month (August 2020).

Administrator changes

added Eddie891
removed Angela • Jcw69 • Just Chilling • Philg88 • Viajero

CheckUser changes

readded SQL

Guideline and policy news

Arbitration

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 09:56, 2 September 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Administrators' newsletter – September 2020

News and updates for administrators from the past month (September 2020).

Administrator changes

added Ajpolino • LuK3
readded Jackmcbarn
removed Ad Orientem • Harej • Lid • Lomn • Mentoz86 • Oliver Pereira • XJaM
renamed There'sNoTime → TheresNoTime

Guideline and policy news

Technical news

Arbitration

Miscellaneous

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 10:42, 1 October 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Copying within Wikipedia

Thanks for identifying the source of the material in your edit.

This type of edit does get picked up by Copy Patrol and a good edit summary helps to make sure we don't accidentally revert it. However, for future use, would you note the best practices wording as outlined at Wikipedia:Copying_within_Wikipedia? In particular, adding the phrase "see that page's history for attribution" helps ensure that proper attribution is preserved.

I've noticed that this guideline is not very well known, even among editors with tens of thousands of edits, so it isn't surprising that I point this out to some veteran editors, but there are some t's that you need to be crossed.S Philbrick(Talk) 12:16, 10 October 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Noted, I'll make a note about referring to the source history in future. Fences&Windows 12:47, 10 October 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Administrators' newsletter – November 2020

News and updates for administrators from the past month (October 2020).

Guideline and policy news

Technical news

Arbitration

Miscellaneous

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 11:51, 1 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Happy Adminship Anniversary!

Happy Adminship Anniversary!

Have a very happy adminship anniversary on your special day!

Best wishes, CAPTAIN RAJU(T) 12:05, 23 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

ArbCom 2020 Elections voter message

Hello! Voting in the 2020 Arbitration Committee elections is now open until 23:59 (UTC) on Monday, 7 December 2020. All eligible users are allowed to vote. Users with alternate accounts may only vote once.

The Arbitration Committee is the panel of editors responsible for conducting the Wikipedia arbitration process. It has the authority to impose binding solutions to disputes between editors, primarily for serious conduct disputes the community has been unable to resolve. This includes the authority to impose site bans, topic bans, editing restrictions, and other measures needed to maintain our editing environment. The arbitration policy describes the Committee's roles and responsibilities in greater detail.

If you wish to participate in the 2020 election, please review the candidates and submit your choices on the voting page. If you no longer wish to receive these messages, you may add {{NoACEMM}} to your user talk page. MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 01:33, 24 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Administrators' newsletter – December 2020

News and updates for administrators from the past month (November 2020).

Administrator changes

removed Andrwsc • Anetode • GoldenRing • JzG • LinguistAtLarge • Nehrams2020

Interface administrator changes

added Izno

Guideline and policy news

Technical news

Arbitration

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 02:37, 1 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Steve Coy

Hello! could you please unlock this? I need to make a DAB page for the two Steve Coys: the other one is an artist in Detroit, and part of Hygienic Dress League Corporation. I'm not experienced on making DABs, so let me know if there is a method other than what I suggest. Thanks. Possibly (talk) 05:41, 14 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Hi Possibly, I added a hatnote to Dead or Alive (band) as I think the band is probably the primary usage. If you get consensus that there should be a disambiguation page or that either or both Steve Coy is notable, I can unlock it. Fences&Windows 12:36, 14 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks very much. Is it normal to keep a page protected from editing for eight years? Possibly (talk) 14:56, 14 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Possibly, indefinite create protection is described at WP:SALT. That bio was inappropriately recreated multiple times and there were BLP issues. However, as it's possible one or both of them may be independently notable I've relaxed the protection in this case. Fences&Windows 12:02, 15 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Thank you kindly. Possibly (talk) 05:00, 16 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Administrators' newsletter – January 2021

News and updates for administrators from the past month (December 2020).

Guideline and policy news

Technical news

Arbitration

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 00:07, 5 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Regarding my Topic Ban

I have questions (not many) but I don't know how to safely ask them now. Do you have any suggestions? Thank you. Kire1975 (talk) 15:31, 8 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]

You can ask here, Kire1975, I won’t consider clarifying this to be a breach and I'm happy you reached out to discuss this. Note that I added a partial block for the band and their albums. Fences&Windows 17:57, 8 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks. I'm happy you're happy I reached out. First question, how do you know all the stories about the one who should not be named harassing inexperienced editors and bullying people with ANI reports like this one were made by "disgruntled blocked users"? Kire1975 (talk) 20:35, 8 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Hi Kire1975, one post you highlighted was about a justly indefinitely blocked editor and the complaint was about [redacted] editing talk page notices - very weak stuff. Whether or not literally all the comments were from blocked editors is not material. If you feel you genuinely have a case to make about [redacted]'s behaviour being sanctionable - which I doubt - you may make it once at ANI as an exception to your interaction ban and I will recuse myself from involvement so you get a fresh hearing, but I would advise against this. Revisiting this dispute will not help you return to productive editing: there are over 6 million other articles out there. Fences&Windows 21:11, 8 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Hi, how are you? Why ever would you doubt me? I did ask for an interaction ban against both [redacted] and Dwid hellion, so I guess you could say the discussion is still open despite the red lettering at the top of the post sayind do not edit.
Did you happen to catch where I posted about him accusing me of reinserting the word monthly while tagginng it as overly detailed five minutes after I removed the word monthly never to be seen again on the page? He then badgered me about it here and here, three weeks later here. And then when I finally figured out that the word monthly was removed by me five minutes before the first time he harassed me about it, I posted the info on the Integry (band) take page here, he then used that as a gotcha to contradict what I said about dropping the stick three weeks ago in the ANI post. WP:GASLIGHT calls this reality denial, baseless contradiction, misdirection. The whole point of it is to sow doubt and discord. [redacting other questions, trying to limit them to one at a time as I've been threatened again] Kire1975 (talk) 03:34, 9 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Kire1975, it's okay to discuss your topic bans here with the blocking admin but you are trashing the editor you have an interaction ban with. This is not discussing the ban but discussing an editor. I suggest you condense your comments and focus on the parameters of your ban and not on Guy or you could be facing a block. Liz Read! Talk! 06:58, 9 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Liz: I asked Fences and windows for a safe space to discuss this matter. Now I am receiving more threats of banning while waiting almost 24 hours for this so-called "clarity" I was promised. How can anyone discuss the topic ban without discussing the accuser and his motivations? If attempting to impeach the credibility of the accuser is just more evidence of guilt, what are my options? I have now redacted the name of the one who must not be named but I have to link to to the edits he made to show Fences and windows what I'm talking about. Censoring even the ability to present evidence is just strange. Kire1975 (talk)
"discussion of a user's conduct or history is not in itself a personal attack." See WP:AVOIDYOU. Kire1975 (talk) 14:12, 9 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Kire1975, because you're topic banned from this band and its members, you don't need an interaction ban either way. Guy Macon is also not going to bother you and you're not going to get sanctioned for discussing this here. I did look at what you said at ANI and I am afraid I was convinced that it was your actions and words that were the problem, not anyone else - this did not hinge on whether or not you added the word "monthly", but rather your general approach. "Trouting" is light-hearted, not a personal attack. Responding to a dispute with another editor by finding outside criticism is not proportionate - Guy Macon has been a lightning rod for negative comments (to quote him, "I have been so active in the areas of pseudoscience and attempting to reform the WMF, both of which resulted in a lot of people being pissed off at me for writing things like WP:CANCER and WP:YWAB or for opposing the use of The Daily Mail as a source"), but I did not find any of what you linked to relevant to the issue at hand. You say "Impeaching the credibility of your accusers is the most basic form of defending yourself in a debate"; although WP:BOOMERANG is not uncommon, you can't rely on it as a tactic. See WP:NOTTHEM, which is about appealing blocks but the principles stand. You're not showing any insight into why this did not go your way. Fences&Windows 14:18, 9 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Okay, thanks, one of my next questions was going to be "Per [15]:"conditions should be given by which the user can demonstrate rehabilitation and a return to normal editing." What are they?" Showing insight into why this did not go my way is one. Anything else?
Also, is it safe to unredact the later questions I just redacted here. It seems we both edited at about the same time. Kire1975 (talk) 14:35, 9 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Go ahead and unredact your earlier comments here. If you can edit other articles and talk pages without signs of breaching BLP policy or making personal attacks, then in keeping with the "standard offer" you can appeal the topic ban in six months. Fences&Windows 15:03, 9 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]
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