User:Pelagic/Journal/2020/07

July 2020.

Friday 31

https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimedia-l/2020-July/095271.html Introducing Diff blog.
meta:IRC office hours/Office hours 2020-06-04 Maggie Dennis on T&S

17:12 Fri 31, AEST

Wednesday 29

meta:Talk:Communications/Wikimedia brands/2030 movement brand project/Naming convention proposals#Renaming problems — objections to the use of "movement".
meta:Talk:Communications/Wikimedia brands/2030 movement brand project/Naming convention proposals#Hammer problem "If you hire marketers, you get brand value, renaming, etc. We are not selling anything. ... We are giving away the store, the goods and even the knowledge and good will - for free and all the time. We don't need a marketing solution." — Rmhermen.
meta:user:Sj/Memebrand

Tuesday 28

Rebranding

meta:User:Sj/Memebrand

Monday 27

Old tabs

~~I think these were related, but the tasks are closed one task is closed so is there any point updating?~~
- phab:T255834 Citations can't be inserted in the 2017WTE
- phab:T255785 Template insertion fails in 2017 wikitext editor (including citation templates via
  - I’d already cross-linked the items, just needed to mark the SD topic as resolved Done.
- https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Topic:Vopo92swmcdqr2fp
Renaming W?F. Has this gone quiet since the survey? I don’t see anything new on meta main. Tabs from earlier follow (yes I’ve had them hanging around for that long). I’d like to see some kind of timeline showing how this played out.
- meta:Community open letter on renaming/signatures
- Survey text: page, talk
- meta:Talk:Communications/Wikimedia brands/2030 movement brand project
- meta:Talk:Communications/Wikimedia brands/2030 movement brand project/Executive statement
- meta:Communications/Wikimedia brands/2030 movement brand project/Naming convention proposals/Legal commentary market research
- meta:CentralNotice/Request/Movement Brand naming proposals
- w:en:VPW#Branding event - 16 June and numerous subsections. Especially note w:en:VPW#A minor gesture of protest: W?F and Nathan’s post Katherine Maher is prominently referred to as the "CEO of Wikipedia" (with links).
- meta:Talk:Wikimedia Foundation Board noticeboard/Board Update on Branding
- meta:Talk:Communications/Wikimedia brands/2030 movement brand project/Naming convention proposals
- Wikimedia-l Board Update on Branding, N Tymkiv. Reply, Dan S. Et seq.
- Wikimedia-l Wikimedia Foundation proposal to call ourselves as the Wikipedia Network, Wikipedia Movement or simply Wiki
Wikimedia-l Treatment of newbies with mild CoI, A Mabbett.
Superprotect is gone, QGil and SJKlein. I think I was keeping this open not because of the superprotect thread, but because of the Carbon60/GT list archive.

Sunday 26

Not-so-short descriptions

Mikhail Gorbachev, "1985–1991 General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union"! What’s wrong with "Soviet leader"?

Hmm, Minerva search dropdown the lines wrap, but Timeless & Minerva related articles they are truncated. iOS app the search dropdown doesn’t wrap but is full width.

Old tabs

Hyperlink colours. phab:T221775 (Update link colors on iOS for improved UX and consistency), and see linked tasks. Also [http://www.colorwiki.com/wiki/

Generalising from the original quote: “When a conversation takes place in [somewhere] that is related to an existing thread on [elsewhere], point out the link … . Don’t try to move the conversation over while it’s in flight though [if the two venues have different modalities]. Instead, if anything new came out …, encourage the primary … participants to summarize it in a follow-up post … .” [1]
Scientists unlocked the secret of how these ultrablack fish absorb light
- News release: Scientists discover how deep-sea, ultra-black fish disappear
- Davis et al. Ultra-black Camouflage in Deep-Sea Fishes. Full text. Elsevier, but not paywalled? What gives? I guess Smithsonian paid to publish OA. Chiswick Chap beat me to it and created Camouflage#Ultra-blackness.
  - Species in taxonomic order: Eurypharynx pelecanoides, Melamphaes lugubris, Poromitra crassiceps, Cetominus sp., Anoplogaster cornuta, Oneirodes sp., Lampadena luminosa, Lampanyctus sp., Lepidophanes guentheri, Bassozetus compressus, Pseudoscopelus sp., Cyclothone acclinidens, Cyclothone sp., Sigmops elongatus, Astronesthes micropogon, Chauliodus macouni, Echiostoma barbatum, Eustomias hypopsilus, Eustomias schmidti, Eustomias sp., Idiacanthus antrostomus, Photostomias guernei, Stomias sp., Sagamichthys abei.
  - Species ordered by reflectance: Oneirodes sp., Idiacanthus antrostomus, Lampadena luminosa, Echiostoma barbatum, Sigmops elongatus, Eustomias hypopsilus, Eustomias schmidti, Pseudoscopelus sp., Eustomias sp., Eurypharynx pelecanoides, Lepidophanes guentheri, Lepidophanes guentheri, Poromitra crassiceps, Astronesthes micropogon, Bassozetus compressus, Photostomias guernei, Melamphaes lugubris; Cyclothone acclinidens, Chauliodus macouni.
[2] “URME is dedicated to protecting the public from surveillance and creating a safe space to explore our digital identities”. Oh, they’re not cyber-spooks, it's an "artistic intervention". Now the choice of language makes sense.

Saturday 25

Reply tool

w:nl:Overleg Wikipedia:Overleghulpmiddelen (many of the comments are in English)

Indications of signature in visual mode

Under w:nl:Overleg Wikipedia:Overleghulpmiddelen/Archief 2#Last call for the visual mode, I noticed that if you use the visual mode, it does not preview the signature. But when I switched to source mode I could see that signing was not nessecary. Maybe there can be a fine print, or the signature can be added by default in the preview in VM as well? Ciell 20 jun 2020 21:20 (CEST)

Phab tasks

phab:T254117 Consider revising Reply tool's automatic edit summary.
phab:T249391 Add support for customizing edit summaries for comments posted using Reply tool.

Tuesday 21

Limiting content width

How does the French saying go, "plus ça change..."? Or should that be déjà vu?

Vector Nueue

We can turn on New Vector via ?useskin=Vector&useskinversion=2. It makes a complete hash of section headings on iOS Safari.

Tuesday 14

phab:T249391 "Add support for customizing edit summaries for comments posted using Reply tool"
phab:T257280 "Adjust the location of the tools within visual mode's toolbar"
phab:T257888 "Invite feedback about revised toolbar location on mw.org"
phab:T252445 "Consider changing the presentation of the visual mode's editing toolbar" (I replied on this one, also want to check more of the linked tasks.)
phab:T257867"Adding/editing descriptions should modify the local article, not Wikidata - iOS task"

Thursday 9

Markdown and Wikitext

Markdown has some similar challenges as Wikitext when it comes to things like: misnested markup, embedded HTML, nesting block content (or detecting end-block), and round-tripping. CommonMark (help, spec) and vfmd (Vanilla Flavoured Markdown, intro, spec) both formulate tight specifications, but the solutions differ in some respects. (E.g. a paragraph followed by a heading with no blank line between.)

Bold, oblique, and spacey Japanese

Font engines might be capable of producing glyphs that are slanted or have thicker lines, but these don't look good in many scripts. So then how would HTML <em> and <strong> be rendered?

For Chinese characters and Japanese kanji, bold doesn’t really stand out from the surroundings. Oblique just looks weird; the equivalent of italic versus roman would be either (a) a brush-like font vs. a woodcut-like one, or (b) cursive versus non-cursive. To my mind, cursive kanji are visually more akin to western script fonts than to italics, but usage may be different. I’m not aware of them mixing cursive and normal fonts in a single text block the way we do with italics.

For Japanese kana, katakana is used like italics for foreign words and onomatopœa, and hiragana is "normal" text like roman. But they have separate code points like western capitals and unlike western italics. (Also there are big differences in glyph shapes kata vs. hira, like for caps vs. lc. To get the same effect in English we would typeset foreign words like KATAKANA in small caps, thus.)

Also, "proper" Japanese typesetting and handwriting doesn’t put spaces between words. But are there conventions for not splitting words across line breaks? That would be similar to how we hyphen-split words between not within syllables, which requires knowledge of the language (either lexical or phonological).

These issues become important if you have a markup syntax that applies bold/italics and/or depends on spaces.[3] Note mention of emphasis dots and overlines here. If you click the "B" on the little toolbar it adds the ** markers instead of <b> or <strong> [4] – the UI matters. (Those and similar were what got me thinking about this.)

MediaWiki editing widgets give special prominence to [B] and [I] buttons. This makes sense for English, but, for example, maybe the Japanese community would prefer a button for furigana? Which toolbar buttons can be customised by wiki admins?

Tuesday 7

Wikimedia Space

[Wikimedia-l] Next steps on Wikimedia Space (thread started Feb 18); m:Talk:Wikimedia Space.

Some interesting comments on that meta talk page about the phrase "safe spaces".

“Building new walled gardens at the expense of onboarding” – James Salsman Feb 20 [5]

Comments from Risker about problems with TwitFace and Meta, and there being hundreds of "on-wiki" venues. Some very quotable sections there.[6] [Addendum 9 Jul: There was an earlier post where someone used the term TwitFaceTube or similar – I am so going to adopt that.]

Background: I hadn’t heard of Space until some time late 2019 or early 2020 when a W?Fer said discussion on an issue should happen there rather than on Meta. At the time I was taken aback at the continual tendency of Foundation and Affiliate types to use anything but our own MediaWiki software (movement strategy was being developed on GDocs at the time also). I tried going there but Discuss-Space failed to work on iOS10. Then within what seemed like only weeks, they announced shutdown. Fast forward to now, I encountered Discourse as part of setting up a Linux server at work, and discovered today that's what Discuss-Space ran on.

Monday 6

[Wikimedia-l] Snøhetta and Wikimedia [7] (Jan), [8] (Feb, includes comments of WMF staff being fearful of talking to communities).

[Wikimedia-l] Cross-project promotion of Nordicism and white supremacist racial myths [9]

ICANN’s subsequent official summary of the comment period – which the organization’s board is said to have used to make a determination – did not reflect that strength of feeling, however, and gave almost equal weight to those in favor of the proposal as those against. Internet world despairs as non-profit .org sold for $$$$ to private equity firm, price caps axed, The Register. Sound familiar?

Sunday 5

Pepperoni

I found this characterisation by Dan Szymborski on the mailing-list archive [10]:

Imagine I'm driving with three friends in my car and we're deciding where to go for dinner. They all say "anything but pizza." I respond, "well, I have the keys and you're in my car, so it's pizza."
After some grumbling, I tell them that their opinions are important and that they can pick the toppings for their pizzas. Well, not pick the toppings, but they can choose between "pepperoni," "extra pepperoni" or "half-pepperoni."
Naturally, there's some consternation about why I'm doing this and how that's not exactly a choice. Then I remind them that I'm still picking the toppings too, but their input on whether we get pepperoni, extra pepperoni, or half-pepperoni is super-valuable and will be taken into consideration.

— (23:46 Sun 05, AEST)

Other stuff

m:Friendly space policies, m:Talk:Black Lives Matter#Scientific racism

Wikimedia-l: [11] Butch Bustria, Sun Jun 21 06:29:39 UTC 2020. [12] Nataliia Tymkiv, Mon Jun 22 00:43:21 UTC 2020. Surely the board members were already aware of the ongoing shitstorm, and weren't just responding to the mailing list?