This is an archive of past discussions about MediaWiki:Titleblacklist. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page.
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# Stop repeated creations of G1 word salads
.*mixing.*sailors.* # See https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?prefix=draft%3Amixing+sailors&title=Special%3AUndelete&fuzzy=1
Append this section with
.*rooster.*inversions.* # See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Sockpuppet_investigations/Gsthae_with_tempo!
Looks like Gsthae with tempo! is repeatedly using this title to create patent nonsense pages now - I think it would be a good idea to blacklist titles that consist of some combination of "rooster inversions".
I'm leaning towards decline. Fuzzy undelete of Draft:Rooster inversions currently shows all hits (there aren't any outside of draft), including two your pattern won't match. There's only been ten, and all are relatively recent: two created early January, two late January, one each in mid- and late February, and four spread out over the last two weeks. By way of comparison, Mixing Sailors has been over a hundred titles, in multiple namespaces, and has persisted at least eight years. Blacklisting now is likely to do more harm than good; they'll just work around it and the new variants will go unnoticed, like how Draft:Rooster-Inversions survived almost three months (because nobody was looking for the pattern yet) and how Draft:Mÿxing-Säïlors was crafted specifically to evade its pattern and lasted more than a month. —Cryptic06:53, 28 May 2023 (UTC)
Add the .webp file extension to # Prevent accidental creation of files with double extensions or unconventional spacingJonteemil (talk) 19:42, 22 July 2023 (UTC)
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I'll preface this by saying that I don't know if this, WP:EFR, or nowhere is the most appropriate venue for this. There appears to have been a recent TikTok trend involving a fictional 1980s horror movie named Zepotha. I am not entirely sure of the story behind it, but it seems like a user publicized the idea of spreading this nonexistent movie to promote their music. Since then, many IPs, new accounts, and in one case I have seen, an autoconfirmed account have created and edited hoax drafts (and userpages/project pages/mainspace articles). By my count, pages have been G3'd (or similar) at least 13 times in the past 24 hours. See Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Draft:Zepotha for some examples, but there are several more.
Given the fairly consistent disruption recently, this might be a candidate for title blacklisting. I am assuming the trend will be relatively short-lived (although who knows). A few of the pages have been salted, but obviously that is not an great option since people just keep creating differently titled pages. Blocks are also not an option since the disruption is distributed across multiple accounts and IPs who, for the most part, don't seem to be socks.
Note that if someone does go ahead with this, there have been some cases of (probably intentional) misspellings like Draft:Zapotha, so that might need to be accounted for to try to mitigate circumvention. —PlanetJuice (talk • contribs) 16:58, 13 August 2023 (UTC)
All of the pages the accounts on that SPI page have edited are in the list given by Liz on the SPI (and B3251 in the MFD; the lists are the same), except for Draft:Zepotha 3, User:Asoterria, and draft talk pages. None of the accounts have any live edits. List of existing and deleted pages (and deletion logs) matching /.*z[ae]potha.*/i, which includes everything in the SPI/MFD lists, the pair of Zepotha 3 pages, the Zapotha page, and a bunch more (but neither the user page nor Zephota, which was moved by its creator to Zepotha), is at quarry:query/75837.This isn't yet at the point where it would normally merit a title blacklisting, unless there's more pages/accounts I don't know about, but does look like it might get there pretty quickly. In particular, the currently-existing Draft:Zepotha seems perfectly reasonable as a draft, even though it wouldn't survive in mainspace with the sourcing it has. Since all the deletions happened on the 12th and 13th, I'm inclined to wait and see how persistent this is. —Cryptic02:25, 14 August 2023 (UTC)
This is probably unnecessary now and in hindsight was perhaps a bit premature. Disruption seems to have slowed down and moved to userpages and Draft:Zepotha, which now has ECP for the time being. Thanks for the advice. —PlanetJuice (talk • contribs) 01:50, 16 August 2023 (UTC)
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A recently added entry regarding NCircle Entertainment, a non-notable home video distributor, is overly broad — as currently written, it covers any word containing the letter n or N that precedes the word circle, e.g. Netcong Circle. I'd suggest changing the entry to .*N[\s-]?[Cc]ircle.* <casesensitive> to prevent only new articles about NCircle. –LaundryPizza03 (dc̄) 05:15, 22 August 2023 (UTC)
I agree (and should have looked at the diff instead of just the edit summary on my watchlist). Full list of matches here. I'll edit as soon as I have results for your pattern. —Cryptic05:37, 22 August 2023 (UTC)
OK, done. Results for your pattern here. @Ivanvector: - any problematic titles not in that list? I don't see any in your deletion logs, but I certainly haven't gone through all 7000-and-some entries in the first query. —Cryptic05:47, 22 August 2023 (UTC)
Thank you both for checking my sloppy work. I do try to test against edge cases and possible false positives but of course I can't think of everything, and this is a bit of a tough case on top of all that. Nothing problematic that I can see not being captured by your refined query, but it also doesn't need to catch entries for "NCircle Network Security" which seems to be a distinct topic, and "ncircle" on its own is fine. I had tried adding .*[E|e]ntertainment.* but then it seemed overly specific. The entry was meant to catch a UPE case that was repeatedly recreating NCircle Entertainment as well as multiple drafts and userspace pages with the same title (sometimes with a numeral in parenthesis, like how Windows renames duplicate files), so salting was not going to go far enough. Please adjust as you see fit, or if this can't be refined enough to be useful then I'll try salting some of the pages instead. Thanks again. Ivanvector (Talk/Edits) 14:45, 22 August 2023 (UTC)
I'm not concerned about the NCircle Security false positives, since they're all deleted and all long ago; and the most recent NCircle was related to the Entertainment company. Somewhat more bothered by it catching File:TKTNcircle.jpg and similar (despite that being even older); I might have tried something like .*\bn\W*circle.* (case-insensitive again) if I was blacklisting this de novo, but it wasn't worth bikeshedding LaundryPizza03's version while we were still blacklisting so many false positives. —Cryptic15:38, 22 August 2023 (UTC)
Zero-width joiner
I would suggest adding:
.*(?=.*[A-Za-z])(?=.*[\x{200C}\x{200D}]).* # Zero-width (non)joiner with Latin letter
Or, equivalently, if for some reason lookahead (?= ) doesn't work:
Not done it isn't clear what you want done. Please provide the exact text of the change you would like to make, as if you could edit the page yourself. — xaosfluxTalk14:51, 1 May 2023 (UTC)
These terms are closely related to the YouTube series Battle For Dream Island (BFDI), which are a salted topic due to repeated re-creation. Inanimate Insanity is a BFDI spin-off, and BFDI-esque content are called "object shows", which is not a notable concept. Catalk to me!06:21, 8 September 2023 (UTC)
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Per Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Log/2023 August 1#Category:Honorary citizens. Long story short: categories about honorary citizens have been created and deleted and created again and deleted again etc. since 2007, while there is a very strong consensus that these categories are en:WP:NONDEFINING and en:WP:OCAWARD. I think salting it would save Wikipedians a lot of time and energy in the future instead of having to track this down and rehash the same deletion discussions over and over we've been having for over 16 years, but always ended with the same result: deletion. Cheers, Nederlandse Leeuw (talk) 08:42, 9 August 2023 (UTC)
For the record, I directed Nederlandse Leeuw here in the closing statement for the linked discussion, on the grounds that they had requested salting but ordinary salting wouldn't work since the problem wasn't the same page being recreated but different pages with similar titles being recreated. The entry to add would be Category:.*honorary citizens.*, preferable with a custom error message explaining the problem, but I'm undecided as to whether it is actually necessary and would prefer an admin other than me make that call. * Pppery *it has begun...21:27, 9 August 2023 (UTC)
Please remove (?!(?:Talk:|(?:User|Wikipedia|File|MediaWiki|Template|Help|Category|Portal|Draft|TimedText|Module) talk:)).*\/Print <noedit|errmsg=titleblacklist-custom-print> from the title blacklist.
It has been ten years since the potential security problems were discovered, and they ought to have been fixed by now. Also, certain non-print templates are also locked such as Template:HD/print. Book namespace was disabled and the default MediaWiki print service were disabled for security reasons. AwesomeAasim23:49, 23 October 2023 (UTC)
Pinged TheDJ and Davidgothberg here to see if the security issues have been, in fact, fixed. In particular, while the book creator is inactive now the download-as-PDF function is still active - does it rely on /Print subpages? Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 08:41, 24 October 2023 (UTC)
This should be no problem to remove. The /print functionality was removed quite some time ago and is not going to return. And even before it was removed, I'm pretty sure this issue had been fixed already for a while. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 08:51, 24 October 2023 (UTC)
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Description of suggested change: the .*sssniperwolf.* entry doesn't seem to serve a purpose anymore because SSSniperWolf. — Alexis Jazz (talk or ping me) 22:03, 11 November 2023 (UTC)
Edit request 22 November 2023
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Hello, I am new to writing Wikipedia pages but I am not completely sure that this it the right page. I attempted to upload an image of the boyflux flag, which was named "boyflux.png" I was trying to upload this in my sandbox, however I just ended up with this message instead: "The file name you were trying to upload has been blacklisted because it is very common, uninformative, or spelled in ALLCAPS. Please go back and choose a better file name. When uploading files to Wikimedia Commons, please use a file name that describes the content of the image or media file you're uploading and is sufficiently distinctive that no-one else is likely to pick the same name by accident." I tried to change it's name to "boyfluxgenderidentity.png" but got the same message. I also do understand that I do have a past of vandalism however I've stopped doing that to wikipedia pages, and now will only edit them if I see errors, or would like to cite sources that are missing from them. Mrsimonst9969666 (talk) 18:08, 5 May 2023 (UTC)
It might be a bug, I could try to upload it if it doesn't work on your side. Which boyflux flag do you want? (There are a bunch of them, I guess probably this one? I'll have to check the license to see if it can be uploaded but I think it should) Chaotic Enby (talk) 07:00, 15 May 2023 (UTC)
I have same issue. I have same issue, even when i am trying to upload modified image with same filename it had before! Urmo123 (talk) 09:33, 7 December 2023 (UTC)
Blacklist annamalai
(Sorry everyone, my first request here, don't know how the system works; hope this informal approach will suffice.)
I'm requesting blacklisting of the string *annamalai*, either alone or in any combination with any other character(s), to prevent new page creation in the main and draft spaces.
Just .*annamalai.* is far too broad - current title hits in mainspace, plus it's a common surname. \bannamalai\b.*k|k.*\bannamalai\b from quarry:query/77802 isn't good enough either; still too many false positives and negatives. Maybe annamalai.*(\bk\b|kuppu)|(\bk\b|kuppu).*annamalai. And as I mentioned at ANI, it should exclude at least the talk: and wikipedia: namespaces. Maybe draft/draft talk: as well, or we could bless one of the existing drafts (there are currently at least three) and forbid any others. —Cryptic12:42, 12 December 2023 (UTC)
Thanks @Cryptic (and sorry, I meant to go back to ANI to say I'd opened this, but got sidetracked). As these editors have shown already, they are perfectly willing to spell the name differently, swap last and first name around, abbreviate either name with or without punctuation, etc. I've lost count of how many variations I've seen, and IIRC the only constant throughout has been 'annamalai'. I get that we can't create too general a block, if it then does more harm than good, but a narrow one just won't have the desired effect, I don't think.
I take it the rule will only consider the title, or can it made to peek into the draft/article contents also? As in, if the title has 'annamalai' and the contents include, say, this person's year of birth or name of their party, only then it would get blocked. -- DoubleGrazing (talk) 13:27, 12 December 2023 (UTC)
It can't look at the contents. The edit filter could, but that's much less efficient, has a greater chance of catastrophic false positives, is a much worse editing experience (it won't kick in until after someone writes up an article and tries to save it, instead of preventing creation in the first place), and it shouldn't be necessary in the first place. If we're still getting unnacceptable false positives after refining the regex all we can, we could add a custom error message; but I don't think that'll be necessary either. quarry:query/78646 will have matches on my pattern above in a few minutes, though this method can't be used to test namespace exclusions. —Cryptic13:38, 12 December 2023 (UTC)
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Edit request because I'm involved here. Omission of .* at the start is deliberate. Replace the start with (?!((draft|wikipedia)( talk)?:|talk:)) to allow draft: and draft talk: as well, though that's not my preference. —Cryptic13:58, 12 December 2023 (UTC)
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I request to make an image that is a screenshot of Hobartville from Google Maps, as it says the page needs more images on the Community portal. I want to do this to become more experienced and trusted as an editor. Oo-rah! the marines are here (talk) 17:47, 8 January 2024 (UTC)
Fix for the "nine consecutive capital letters" entry in userspace
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Description of suggested change:
I'm not sure exactly how this would be done, but could someone edit this to make it so that the filter .*\p{Lu}(\P{L}*\p{Lu}){9}.* <casesensitive | moveonly> # Disallows moves with more than nine consecutive capital letters allows moves in userspace that include someone's username if it matches that filter? I can't move my user subpages anywhere because I (foolishly) chose a username with all capital letters. LOOKSQUARE (👤️·🗨️) talk21:35, 13 January 2024 (UTC)
I can't help but notice that some of the blacklisted terms are either quite obscure or pretty much outdated as of 2024. I get why topics like BFDI and [blatantly offensive terms] are blacklisted. However, I don't fully understand how seemingly random and not-so-obvious terms like .*chaos.{0,5}ashington.* and .*,,+.* <moveonly> (and their variations) get blacklisted, especially those lacking any rationale. What are the rationales behind a lot of the "obscure" and unusual blacklisted terms (such as those already mentioned) and whether some of them should remain blacklisted at this moment? AlphaBeta135talk15:47, 6 April 2024 (UTC)
Usually because some specific spammer in the past tried unusually hard to create an article with that title. For the chaos entries the target appears to have been Wikipedia:Sockpuppet investigations/Jude Enemy. Since that specific SPI has no hits in over a decade it's probably safe to remove, but what's the point? The punctuation entry you listed is related to Grawp according to the comment a few entries below it, but in any case two commas in a row is never a valid title so there's no reason to remove it. There are definitely some other removables of the first sort, and some more where the blacklisting has failed, i.e there's still a blacklist entry trying to stop the creation of Ryan Hampton (writer), which was created circa 2019 and survived AfD. * Pppery *it has begun...19:40, 6 April 2024 (UTC)
.*janhvi.*kapoor.* # Repeated recreation for promotional purposes. Article is salted, but salting tends to inspire work-around articles. (Janhvi Kapoor)
BU Rob13 is the name of a user who has since courtesy vanished. It's probably not needed years later, but is harmless.
I have no idea what the purpose of "ge orrg" is - it dates back to 2008 and can probably be removed, but is also unlikely to appear in a valid title and hence harmless
'H' is presumably a Grawp remnant of some sort and can probably be removed.
"Mixing Sailors" is exactly what it says on the tin. Whatever this is has apparently been going on for years, i.e Mixing Sailors (created 2010), Mixing.Sailors (created 2015), Mixing×Sailors (created 2017). There have been evasions like Draft:Mïxing/Saïlors as recently as 2023 so I think it still servers a purpose.
Untold News was trying to stop spam on a specific organization, deleted as Untold News, Draft:Untold News, etc. I probably would not have blacklisted this with so few deletions, but it still makes sense.
.*alisha.*panwar.* added by MER-C in 2017) - the subject it is targeting now exists as Aalisha Panwar after being accepted by Missvain at AfC.
.*janhvi.*kapoor.* # Repeated recreation for promotional purposes. Article is salted, but salting tends to inspire work-around articles. added by Cyphoidbomb in 2018 - the subject it is targeting now exists at Janhvi Kapoor, which was only ever extended-confirmed protected and has been stable as an article since 2019.
Is there any reason these rules shouldn't be deleted? They make it harder to create talk page archives, deletion discussions, etc. and provide no apparent additional value. The last one also matches many people other than the intended target. * Pppery *it has begun...00:00, 18 May 2024 (UTC)
I wouldn't say "failed", the point isn't to stop the articles ever being created, just to stop the sockpuppets repeatedly recreating unsuitable pages. If they've been created by someone in good faith and also reviewed before being moved over the salted titles, in my view that's what's supposed to happen and so the rules were actually successful. One thing though: I would carefully check the histories of the articles created after salting to ensure there's not a hijacked article in the history, that's a common way of evading salting and history splits/merges may be necessary. Otherwise I say go ahead and remove the entries, they're no longer needed. Ivanvector (Talk/Edits) 12:11, 18 May 2024 (UTC)
Per MOS:CURLY, we should almost always use straight quotes in titles. There are currently ~20 articles with curly quotes in the title, and for a while I was moving one every few days to use the proper symbol, indicating that the rule is being rampantly ignored. I suggest we enforce it by adding ’ (which seems to be much more common than the other characters) to the title blacklist, with a custom error message and possibly with restrictions on namespace. Thoughts? * Pppery *it has begun...04:43, 31 March 2024 (UTC)
I recognize I'm late to the discussion, but I would like to raise an objection—redirects.
As an example, the page Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (with the curly mark; redirects to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland) received about 48 pageviews in the 90 days before 28 June 2024. I'd say that's more than enough people to accomodate. They're finding the page by using the curly apostrophe, and that means that the redirects are useful. If the redirects don't exist, then a user will simply be shown a confusing and unhelpful 404 page.
On the date of 31 May 2024's featured article highlight, where the page Hundred Years' War was linked to (although it was not the featured article itself), there were 209 pageviews of the redirect with the curly mark (Hundred Years’ War), even though the redirect itself was not linked to. I don't know exactly what this means, but the redirect here is also clearly very useful.
Many of the redirects do already exist, but for future articles (and several current articles) they may not. That means that users have to ask someone with permissions to create the page, which, unfortunately, people usually don't take time to do, meaning that the redirect doesn't get created, meaning THE END OF THE WORLD!
The Wikipedia search bar converts curly marks to straight marks (just like how it's case-insensitive) if needed, but if an exact match exists instead (such as a redirect) it will take the user there instead; so some of these pageviews might have been okay even without the redirects. However, links and direct URLs are not converted, resulting in the confusion I was talking about earlier.
I suggest that the protection level for the ’ mark should at least be leveled down to allow autoconfirmed users to create the page, so that redirects with curly apostrophes can be created. — gabldotink [ talk | contribs | global account ]21:07, 28 June 2024 (UTC)
Star Mississippi made a reference to salting in the SPI, but I don't think that anything was ever salted; this gave me an idea to ask for action here. I think that there was significant discussion, with multiple editors expressing concern over this activity. From where I see it, blacklisting should be a net positive. Thanks for considering. —Alalch E.14:46, 21 July 2024 (UTC)
I misread the logs and thought @CactusWriter had SALTed it.
The legitimate Aleksandar Trajkovski article greatly limits what we're able to do here without interfering with its talk page archives and other subpages, and (more hypothetically) nominations for deletion. (Lots of other titles containing "Trajkovski", too.) I suppose we could blacklist everywhere except in the talk and Wikipedia namespaces. Trying to look for disambiguators would be futile.Initial analysis here. Are the draft pages (deleted) and/or user pages (not deleted) problematic? Anything whose creation should have been prevented that doesn't show up on that list? —Cryptic15:58, 21 July 2024 (UTC)
There's been a Cyrillic-titled draft at Draft:Александар Саша Трајковски, so perhaps what should also be prevented, that is not in the list, are the following: Mainspace page with titles including Александар Саша Трајковски, Александар С. Трајковски, Саша Трајковски. In general, variations without "Aleksandar", i.e. Saša Trajkovski, Sasha Trajkovski and Саша Трајковски seem plausible to me.Creation of drafts and user pages is not a real concern in my view. Blacklisting everywhere except in talk and project would be great, and blacklisting only in mainspace seems OK to me as well.(Side note: the oldest page in the list is from 2010). —Alalch E.17:24, 21 July 2024 (UTC)
The first two non-Aleksandar variations are caught by the sa\w+a\b alternative. Cyrillic titles would have to be blacklisted separately, and since false positives are less harmful here - we can handle edit requests to create redirects, which is all they should ever be - they can be covered with something like (Александар|Саша).*Трајковски. Blacklisting in mainspace only is difficult, since the match is done on the full page title and mainspace titles are defined by not having any of a long list of other namespaces' prefixes; but easy enough to allow Draft: in addition to the Talk: and Wikipedia: and Wikipedia talk: mentioned in the description of my query. —Cryptic17:57, 21 July 2024 (UTC)
Request preemptive creation protection of "American Communist Party"
After a unanimous vote for deletion. The same author of the deleted page has started recreating the same content in different titles. Ahri Boy (talk) 01:48, 27 July 2024 (UTC)
That regex won't match any of your redlinks (nor any other pages that have been created, whether existing or deleted). quarry:query/85144 shows hits for Wikipedia talk:discord\/talk.*. No strong position on the merits, but they do look slim to me. —Cryptic04:01, 27 July 2024 (UTC)
[tT] isn't needed either; the regexes here are case-insensitive.Having looked at the deleted content, this looks like the sort of abuse that'll just move to a different title. See Wikipedia:Salting is usually a bad idea. That said, still I don't have a strong objection if some other admin wants to do this. —Cryptic04:16, 27 July 2024 (UTC)
Don't think this is that useful, those disrupters will just create a different title - and I'd rather have them create nonsense buried there where it is easy to find, delete, and block them. — xaosfluxTalk11:44, 27 July 2024 (UTC)
