User talk:King of Hearts/Archive/2018/12
The Signpost: 1 December 2018
[edit]- From the editor: Time for a truce
- Special report: The Christmas wishlist
- Discussion report: Farewell, Mediation Committee
- Arbitration report: A long break ends
- Traffic report: Queen reigns for four weeks straight
- Gallery: Intersections
- From the archives: Ars longa, vita brevis
Administrators' newsletter – December 2018
[edit]News and updates for administrators from the past month (November 2018).
Administrator changes
Al Ameer son • Randykitty • Spartaz
Boson • Daniel J. Leivick • Efe • Esanchez7587 • Fred Bauder • Garzo • Martijn Hoekstra • Orangemike
Interface administrator changes
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
- Administrators and bureaucrats can no longer unblock themselves unless they placed the block initially. This change has been implemented globally. See also this ongoing village pump discussion (permalink).
- To complement the aforementioned change, blocked administrators will soon have the ability to block the administrator that placed their block to mitigate the possibility of a compromised administrator account blocking all other active administrators.
- Since deployment of Partial blocks on Test Wikipedia, several bugs were identified. Most of them are now fixed. Administrators are encouraged to test the new deployment and report new bugs on Phabricator or leave feedback on the Project's talk page. You can request administrator access on the Test Wiki here.
Arbitration
- Voting in the 2018 Arbitration Committee Elections is open to eligible editors until Monday 23:59, 3 December 2018. Please review the candidates and, if you wish to do so, submit your choices on the voting page.
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
- Shock Brigade Harvester Boris (Raymond Arritt) passed away on 14 November 2018. Boris joined Wikipedia as Raymond arritt on 8 May 2006 and was an administrator from 30 July 2007 to 2 June 2008.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
- Admins will not be able to unblock themselves if they are blocked by someone other than themselves. This is because it can cause damage if someone else takes over an admin account and other admins can't block them. If this is a problem for your community you can report it on Phabricator. You can also ask questions on Meta. There is a discussion on Phabricator about how to solve this if two admins fight with each other on a small wiki. [1]
- Small SVG images are now bigger when you see them in MediaViewer. [2]
- You can go to a section from the edit summary by clicking on the section name. Before this you had to click on the arrow. [3]
- When you jumped to a footnote that was referenced several times in an article it could be difficult to see where you were in the text. Now there are jump marks and highlights to help you find your way back. [4][5]
Changes later this week
- There is no new MediaWiki version this week.
Meetings
You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 5 December at 16:00 (UTC) and at 23:00 (UTC). See how to join.
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
16:12, 3 December 2018 (UTC)
Old decisions at SPI coming up recently.
[edit]Per Wikipedia:Sockpuppet_investigations/Jan_Blanicky/Archive#08_June_2014, of which you were the closing admin:
Recent events have made me relook at this. User:Heptapolein was found to be a sock of his and I am strongly suspecting Helveticus96 once again. Either that, or he is a meatpuppet. It's one or the other. Not only does he seem to have only one cause, "[The Czechia Initiative]", I have found a Facebook page showing that the user, who gives his name on Wikipedia as Vaclac Sulista, is a paid or COI editor. (You can clearly see "Vaclav Sulista" listed as a member of this organization whose mission is"...to institutionalize and practically adopt the one-word name of the country." Upon furthur investigation, Helveticus seems to have edits/created many articles that Blanicky and socks have a vested interest in, and themself are likely a paid contributor in relation to.(Blanicky runs the site for Vladimir Hirsch, for example, and even sourced the site as being authored by "J Blanicky," as well as having been accused of COI editing before, earlier this year.)
I'm asking to relook at this because of the afformentioned as well as a few other things. In the invesitgation on Heveticus96 you performed a checkuser at 12:38 pm([[6]]), and then at 12:57 pm, now-confirmed sockpuppet Askave (talk · contribs) states "["Yes, we agree ! All of us are the one !! [link to Czechia Initiave FB"]]). This seems to have gone unnoticed, and the case was closed within 24 hours and no comment made about it.
Of note, Helveticus really picks up his editing in April 2016 within just weeks of Blanicky's two main accounts being banned in May. ([[7]]). I've also noticed via the "Editor Interaction analyser tool" that Helveticus has edited 26 of the same articles that Blanicky-linked socks have edited, notably the following, with some edits merely minutes apart, as in the case of some of the talk pages (mind you this is only via the English Wikipedia, not the Czech one or any of the others that the users are active at...:
- Talk:Czech Republic
- Josef Stehlík
- Talk:Name of the Czech Republic
- User talk:R9tgokunks (coming to Heptapolein's defence about "Czechia")
- František Peřina
- User talk:Heptapolein(coming to Heptapolein's defence with "Czechia" after user made personal attacks and had them deleted)
- User talk:Doremo (coming to Heptapolein's defence 38 minutes after his posts and making it seem like they don't both know they advocate for the same thing ([8]]))
- Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Incidents (coming to Askave's defence after more Czechia nonsense that Askave posted about Yopie (talk · contribs), wherin he mistakenly posts as an IP first, and then edits the IPs comment, telling Yopie to "stop crying like a small child")
- Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Narodil se Kristus pán (coming to Heptapolein's defence after I nominated thie article due to it being a copy of a then-featured article about a German carol)
- User talk:Mewulwe (to which Blanicky comes to his defence 5 hours later)
- Name of the Czech Republic (the big one they all focus on the most)
- Technical auxiliary battalions (helping Heptapolein with his edits here)
- User talk:The Banner (comes to Askave's defence)
- Wenceslaus I, Duke of Bohemia
- Czech Republic
- User:Neewi (along with Blanicky sock IP (195.113.211.10), helps correct spelling errors on now-confirmed Blanicky sock User:Neewi's page.([[9]]))
- Jan Dismas Zelenka
- User talk:Helveticus96 (seems to majorly screw up by first responding as Heptapolein([[10]]), then responding as Helevticus96([[11]])
- Music of the Czech Republic (Blanicky socks and he do the same edit 3 times)
- John of Nepomuk (performs the same edit as three other Blanicky socks)
- User talk:Yopie (2 Blanicky socks and Helveticus seem to love to bully Yopie, a user who doesn't even edit anymore.)
- Silesia (same edit as 2 Blanicky socks)
- Infant Jesus of Prague (same edit as Neewi)
- SK Slavia Prague (same edit as Neewi, again)
- České Budějovice (same goal as Blanicky IP)
- History of the Czech lands (same goal as Blanicky)
In addition, they have many of the same articles that they have created when compared transwiki-style.
- Helveticus created de:Mikuláš Medek, and Jan Blanicky created the English Mikuláš Medek
- Martina Sanollová, was created by Blanicky and deleted n 2018 as a user discovered he was a COI editor, and his sock Heptapolein recreated it in Sepetmeber. Meanwhile, the German version was created by Helveticus. ([[12]])
- Skrol, of which is another COI edit, was created by Jan Blanicky. the German version was created by Helveticus. ([[13]])
- R9tgokunks ⭕ 23:00, 3 December 2018 (UTC)
- If you think the new evidence warrants it, please file a new SPI on the same page. -- King of ♥ ♦ ♣ ♠ 02:56, 4 December 2018 (UTC)
- I did just that, with a major update as well. - R9tgokunks ⭕ 08:03, 4 December 2018 (UTC)
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Changes later this week
- The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 11 December. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 12 December. It will be on all wikis from 13 December (calendar).
Meetings
- You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 12 December at 16:00 (UTC). See how to join.
Future changes
- New accounts will need passwords that are at least 8 characters long. Admins, interface admins, bureaucrats, oversighters, CentralNotice admins, global renamers, check users, stewards and some other user groups will need passwords that are at least 10 characters long. This is because an attacker could cause damage to the wikis if they took over these accounts. [14][15]
- When you hover over a footnote it will show you the reference as a pop-up. This is so you don't have to jump down to the bottom of the page to see a reference. This will happen in 2019. Some wikis already have gadgets that do this. You will be able to turn it off. [16]
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
17:33, 10 December 2018 (UTC)
December 19: WikiWednesday Salon and Skill-Share NYC
[edit]| December 19, 7pm: WikiWednesday Salon and Skill-Share NYC | |
|---|---|
  You are invited to join the Wikimedia NYC community for our monthly "WikiWednesday" evening salon (7-9pm) and knowledge-sharing workshop at Fordham University's Lincoln Center campus in Manhattan, near Columbus Circle. Is there a project you'd like to share? A question you'd like answered? A Wiki* skill you'd like to learn? Let us know by adding it to the agenda. We will also follow up on plans for recent and upcoming edit-a-thons, museum and library projects, education initiatives, and other outreach activities.
We especially encourage folks to add your 5-minute lightning talks to our roster, and otherwise join in the "open space" experience! Newcomers are very welcome! Bring your friends and colleagues! --Wikimedia New York City Team 03:22, 13 December 2018 (UTC) | |
(You can subscribe/unsubscribe from future notifications for NYC-area events by adding or removing your name from this list.)
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Tech News
- Because of the holidays the next issue of Tech News will be sent out on 7 January 2019.
Recent changes
- Some templates that show notices about the content of the page will now be shown on the mobile website. In many cases they were hidden before. [17][18]
- Admins can no longer unblock themselves, except for self-blocks. A blocked admin can block the user who blocked them but no one else. This is so no one can block all admins on a wiki without being stopped. [19]
- The ParserMigration extension has been removed. It compared the result of two versions of the MediaWiki wikitext parsing pipeline. It was used when we moved to the Remex parsing library instead of Tidy.
Problems
<ref>tags can use parameters such as "name" or "group". For example<ref name="adams" group="books">. If a<ref>tag has more than two parameters all parameters are ignored. You don't get a warning that they don't work. This will soon be fixed. [20]
Changes later this week
- The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 18 December. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 19 December. It will be on all wikis from 20 December (calendar).
Meetings
- You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 19 December at 16:00 (UTC). See how to join.
Future changes
- The Wikimedia Foundation Android app team are working on making it easier to edit on mobile phones. You can read more about these plans. If you have an Android phone and speak at least two languages you can help testing in English. Tell Dchen (WMF) you want to be part of the testing by writing on her talk page or email her.
-
tiles.wmflabs.organdwma.wmflabs.orgwill stop working. They have no maintainers and run an old operating system. Tools which use it could stop working. This includes the mapnik gadget, hill shading, and hike and bike layers. New maintainers could help out and keep it going. [21]
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
20:34, 17 December 2018 (UTC)
Daniel L. Feldman
[edit]Hi there! I'd like to revive the Daniel L. Feldman posting I started a long time ago, would love to finish it. Some of the sources I'd use:
https://www.jjay.cuny.edu/faculty/daniel-l-feldman https://www.amazon.com/Daniel-L.-Feldman/e/B001KE9Y8Y%3Fref=dbs_a_mng_rwt_scns_share https://www.nytimes.com/1998/09/16/nyregion/the-1998-campaign-congress-weiner-is-victor-over-katz-in-bid-to-replace-schumer.html
Do you have to approve that? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Yankeefan2225 (talk • contribs) 22:28, 19 December 2018 (UTC)
- You'll need more substantial coverage to meet our notability guidelines. -- King of ♥ ♦ ♣ ♠ 08:33, 21 December 2018 (UTC)
The Signpost: 24 December 2018
[edit]- From the editors: Where to draw the line in reporting?
- News and notes: Some wishes do come true
- In the media: Political hijinks
- Discussion report: A new record low for RfA
- WikiProject report: Articlegenesis
- Arbitration report: Year ends with one active case
- Traffic report: Queen dethroned by U.S. presidents
- Gallery: Sun and Moon, water and stone
- Blog: News from the WMF
- Humour: I believe in Bigfoot
- Essay: Requests for medication
- From the archives: Compromised admin accounts – again