Hello, and welcome to the December newsletter, a quarterly digest of Guild activities since September. If you no longer want this newsletter, you can unsubscribe at any time; see below. If you'd like to be notified of upcoming drives and blitzes, and other GOCE activities, the best method is to add our announcements box to your watchlist.
Election news: The Guild's coordinators play an important role in the WikiProject, making sure nearly everything runs smoothly and on time. Editors in good standing (unblocked and without sanctions) are invited to nominate themselves or another editor to be a Guild coordinator (with their permission, of course) until 23:59 on 15 December (UTC). The voting phase begins at 00:01 on 16 December and runs until 23:59 on 31 December. Questions may be asked of candidates at any stage in the process. Elected coordinators will serve a six-month term from 1 January through 30 June.
Drive: In our September Backlog Elimination Drive, 67 editors signed up, 39 completed at least one copy edit, and between them they edited 682,696 words comprising 507 articles. Barnstars awarded are here.
Blitz: The October Copy Editing Blitz saw 16 editors sign-up, 15 of whom completed at least one copy edit. They edited 76,776 words comprising 35 articles. Barnstars awarded are here.
Drive: In our November Backlog Elimination Drive, 432,320 words in 151 articles were copy edited. Of the 54 users who signed up, 33 copy edited at least one article. Barnstars awarded are posted here.
Blitz: The December Blitz will begin at 00:00 on 15 December (UTC) and will end on 21 December at 23:59. Sign up here. Barnstars awarded will be posted here.
Progress report: As of 22:12, 7 December 2024 (UTC), GOCE copy editors have completed 333 requests since 1 January, and the backlog of tagged articles stands at 2,401 articles.
Thank you all again for your participation; we wouldn't be able to achieve what we have without you! Cheers from your GOCE coordinators, Dhtwiki, Miniapolis, Mox Eden and Wracking.
To stop receiving GOCE newsletters, please remove your name from our mailing list.
Question from Eotb112022 (22:06, 13 December 2024)
Hello, any chance you could review a draft I have created that was declined to be moved into wiki-space and help me out? I don't necessarily understand all of the reasons that it was declined. I understand I need more credible references, but other than that could you give me feedback on any other improvements? The draft is for public figure George Bebbington. --Eotb112022 (talk) 22:06, 13 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Hi Eotb112022. Sorry for the late response, there are 4 different criteria to satisfy for your most important sources (and you only need about three of those most important sources, but they must meet all four criteria). As you've mentioned yourself, the sources must be reliable — a lot of the time, this is judged on a case by case basis, but there are general rules. For biographical articles on living persons, the criteria tend to be especially strict, and tabloidy publications like Digital Spy might not be considered entirely suitable. The sources that make up the core of your article must also be significant (in-depth), independent (not interviews or mostly quotes) and secondary (contain analysis, evaluation or interpretation of the facts by the source, which is the journalist for news sources).
Text–source integrity is also something very important to pay attention to, for example, "Ex on the Beach is back – but with a new twist", currently your second inline citation is used to support being a cast member of a show, but does not, as far as I can tell, actually mention Bebbington. You should remove it and replace it with one of the other references. Alpha3031 (t • c) 07:28, 18 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Hello again, no worries I appreciate the reply!
I've combed through citations, linking reused links, interviews not conducted by journalists, removing irrelevant citations with better sources.
Hi Eotb112022, I do want to clarify that it's not only about who conducts the interview. In order to meet all 4 criteria, an interview would typically need parts written by the journalist (and not just the answers to interview questions) in order to be independent in terms of the content. That independent content needs to be or have analysis, evaluation, interpretation, or synthesis in order to be considered secondary. The secondary parts need to have enough depth that you can write most of an article with around three of those sources.
Being by a journalist from a reputable news organisation is enough to be reliable in most cases, but your core sources need to meet the other three criteria as well. Once you have three or four core sources (or two, sometimes), you can use less detailed or independent sources to fill out the rest of the article of course, but the first thing you should do is find and identify your three core sources.
Hello everyone, and welcome to the 26th issue of the Wikipedia Scripts++ Newsletter, covering all our favorite new and updated user scripts since 1 August 2024. At press time, over 94% of the world has legally fallen prey to the merry celebrations of "Christmas", and so shall you soon. It's been a quiet 4 months, and we hope to see you with way more new scripts next year. Happy holidays! Aaron Liu (talk) 05:06, 25 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Got anything good? Tell us about your new, improved, old, or messed-up script here!
Featured script
Very useful for changelist patrollers, DiffUndo, by Nardog, is this edition's featured script. Taking inspiration from WP:AutoWikiBrowser's double-click-to-undo feature, it adds an undo button to every line of every diff from "show changes", optimizing partial reverts with your favorite magic spell and nearly fulfilling m:Community Wishlist/Wishes/Partial revert undo.
Miscellaneous
Doğu/Adiutor, a recent WP:Twinkle/WP:RedWarn-like userscript that follows modern WMF UI design, is now an extension. However, its sole maintainer has left the project, which still awaits WMF mw:code stewardship (among some audits) to be installed on your favorite WMF wikis.
DannyS712, our former chief editor, has ascended to MediaWiki and the greener purpley pastures of PHP with commits creating Special:NamespaceInfo and the __EXPECTUNUSEDTEMPLATE__ magic word to exclude a template from Special:UnusedTemplates! I wonder if Wikipedia has a templaters' newsletter...
BilledMammal/Move+ needs updating to order list of pages handle lists of pages to move correctly regardless of the discussion's page, so that we may avoid repeating fiasco history.
Andrybak/Unsigned helper forks Anomie/unsignedhelper to add support for binary search, automatic edit summaries after generating the {{unsigned}} template, support for {{undated}}, and support for generating while syntax highlighting is on.
Polygnotus/Move+ updates BilledMammal's classic Move+ to add automattic watchlisting of all pages—except the target page(s)—changed while processing a move.
Hi Dr. Anant kumar tiwari, if you're writing an article for the first time, you don't have to worry about putting it in any specific categories. I would recommend submitting things through the Wikipedia:Articles for creation process, as there will be a reviewer that usually sorts the article into some relevant categories for you as part of the process. Even once the article is published into the main article space, there is still time to add more categories that are relevant, and people who go around doing exactly that.
Hi Mahmoud Jama, you can find a guide on how to write your first article at Help:Your first article. However, if there aren't any existing published sources, such as news articles about this hacker, it is unlikely we would be able to host such an article on Wikipedia. You can still collect all the evidence you have and post it somewhere on the internet to share with your friends, and there are many free blogging services for example that you can use to do this, but Wikipedia has specific content requirements. Alpha3031 (t • c) 06:36, 31 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
This award is given in recognition to Alpha3031 for conducting 253 article reviews in 2024. Thank you so much for all your excellent work. Keep it up! Hey man im josh (talk) 18:18, 8 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I reverted an edit with a user called Kcstc4 (please refer to "User talk:Kcstc4" and her edit history), and she has taken it personally. I haven't turned it into an edit war, and I'm trying to reach a resolution, but I don't know if that's going to work, in which case it will need dispute resolution. I've never done this, and don't know how to go about it. Any suggestions? --Ormewood (talk) 00:32, 9 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Hi Ormewood. I've taken a look at the discussion, and it seems like you have actually been editing Wikipedia longer than I have! In any case, I see no issues with your actions, and your idea of seeking a third opinion at WP:3O is a good one (though since I have reverted Kcstc4 that would no longer be an option for this specific dispute). Alternatively, the Wikipedia:Biographies of living persons/Noticeboard is another place to get help. Alpha3031 (t • c) 12:32, 13 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Thank you. Hopefully this will be all that's necessary. I don't like being in the position of having to override an angry person who made an edit in good faith.
I have been editing for a long time, yes, but mostly minor edits, and not all that frequently, so when I step even slightly beyond that I tend to be in the dark about many of Wikipedia ’s policies. I still lack experience in a lot of areas, and I still need advice.
