This is an archive of past discussions with User:Insertcleverphrasehere. 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.
Hello! Voting in the 2021 Arbitration Committee elections is now open until 23:59 (UTC) on Monday, 6 December 2021. 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.
Unregistered editors using the mobile website are now able to receive notices to indicate they have talk page messages. The notice looks similar to what is already present on desktop, and will be displayed on when viewing any page except mainspace and when editing any page. (T284642)
The limit on the number of emails a user can send per day has been made global instead of per-wiki to help prevent abuse. (T293866)
The already authorized standard discretionary sanctions for all pages relating to the Horn of Africa (defined as including Ethiopia, Somalia, Eritrea, Djibouti, and adjoining areas if involved in related disputes), broadly construed, have been made permanent.
Merry Christmas, Insertcleverphrasehere! Or Season's Greetings or Happy Winter Solstice! As the year winds to a close, I would like to take a moment to recognize your hard work and offer heartfelt gratitude for all you do for Wikipedia. May this Holiday Season bring you nothing but joy, health and prosperity. Onel5969TT me20:26, 23 December 2021 (UTC)
Scripts++ Newsletter – Issue 22
Hello everyone, and welcome to the 22nd issue of the Wikipedia Scripts++ Newsletter. This issue will be covering new and updated user scripts from the past seven months (June through December 2021).
Got anything good? Tell us about your new, improved, old, or messed-up script here!
Featured script
LuckyRename, by Alexis Jazz, is this month's featured script. LuckyRename makes requesting file moves easier, and automates the many steps in file moving (including automatic replacement of existing usage). Give it a shot!
Updated scripts
SD0001: hide-reverted-edits has been updated to take into account changes in reversion tools like Twinkle and RedWarn.
ClaudineChionh: SkinSwitcher (a fork and update of Eizen's script) provides an options menu/toolbox/toolbar allowing users to view a given page in MediaWiki's default skins.
Wikipedia:User scripts/Ranking is a sortable table of Wikipedia's thousand-or-so most commonly used scripts; it includes their author, last modification date, installation count, and sometimes a short description.
Toolhub is a community managed catalog of software tools used in the Wikimedia movement. Technical volunteers can use Toolhub to document the tools that they create or maintain. All Wikimedians can use Toolhub to search for tools to help with their workflows and to create lists of useful tools to share with others.
draft-sorter sorts AfC drafts by adding WikiProject banners to their talk pages. It supersedes User:Enterprisey/draft-sorter, adding a few features and fixing some bugs.
BooksToSfn adds a portlet link in Visual Editor's source mode editing, in main namespace articles or in the user's Sandbox. When clicked, it converts one {{cite book}} inside a <ref>...</ref> tag block into an {{Sfn}}.
diffedit enables editing directly from viewing a diff "when, for instance, you notice a tiny mistake deep into an article, and don't want to edit the entire article and re-find that one line to fix that tiny mistake".
warnOnLargeFile warns you if you're about to open a very large file (width/height >10,000px or file size >100 MB) from a file page.
QuickDiff (by OneTwoThreeFall at Fandom) lets you quickly view any diff link on a wiki, whether on Recent Changes, contribs pages, history pages, the diff view itself, or elsewhere. For more information, view its page on Fandom.
talkback creates links after user talk page links like this: |C|TB (with the first linking to the user's contributions, and the latter giving the option of sending a {{talkback}} notice). It also adds a [copy] link next to section headers.
diff-link shows "copy" links on history and contributions pages that copy an internal link to the diff (e.g., Special:Diff/1026402230) to your clipboard when clicked.
auto-watchlist-expiry automatically watchlists every page you edit for a user-definable duration (you can still pick a different time using the dropdown, though).
generate pings generates the wikitext needed to ping all members of a category, up to 50 editors (the limit defined by MediaWiki).
share ExpandTemplates url allows for easy sharing of your inputs to Special:ExpandTemplates. It adds a button that, when clicked, copies a shareable URL to your exact invocation of the page, like this. Other editors do not need to have this script installed in order to access the URL generated.
show tag names shows the real names of tags next to their display names in places such as page revision histories or the watchlist.
ColourContrib color-codes the user contributions page so that pages you've edited last are sharply distinguished from pages where another editor was the last to edit the page.
All in all, some very neat scripts were written in these last few months. Hoping to see many more in the next issue -- drop us a line on the talk page if you've been writing (or seeing) anything cool and good. Filling in for DannyS712, this has been jp×g. Take care, and merry Christmas! jp×g07:30, 24 December 2021 (UTC)
Following consensus at the 2021 RfA review, the autopatrolled user right has been removed from the administrators user group; admins can grant themselves the autopatrolled permission if they wish to remain autopatrolled.
The functionaries email list (functionaries-enlists.wikimedia.org) will no longer accept incoming emails apart from those sent by list members and WMF staff. Private concerns, apart from those requiring oversight, should be directly sent to the Arbitration Committee.
If you read the COIN your intitial concerns appear to have good foundation. I'd actually determined to go neutral on the AfD before I'd read additional entries at the COIN the the timings would tend to imply a linage. I avoid putting boards like COIN/ANI etc on my watchlist due to distractions, and tend to poll them. Thankyou. 21:40, 19 January 2022 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Djm-leighpark (talk • contribs)
The user group oversight will be renamed suppress in around 3 weeks. This will not affect the name shown to users and is simply a change in the technical name of the user group. The change is being made for technical reasons. You can comment in Phabricator if you have objections.
The Reply Tool feature, which is a part of Discussion Tools, will be opt-out for everyone logged in or logged out starting 7 February 2022. Editors wishing to comment on this can do so in the relevant Village Pump discussion.
Hello! I wanted to drop a quick note for all of our AFC participants; nothing huge and fancy like a newsletter, but a few points of interest.
AFCH will now show live previews of the comment to be left on a decline.
The template {{db-afc-move}} has been created - this template is similar to {{db-move}} when there is a redirect in the way of an acceptance, but specifically tells the patrolling admin to let you (the draft reviewer) take care of the actual move.
A RfC is open to discuss prohibiting draftification of articles over 90 days old.
Technical news
The deployment of the reply tool as an opt-out feature, as announced in last month's newsletter, has been delayed to 7 March. Feedback and comments are being welcomed at Wikipedia talk:Talk pages project. (T296645)
Welcome to the twentieth newsletter from the Growth team!
The Growth team's objective is to work on software changes that help retain new contributors in Wikimedia projects.
Suggested edits
As of February, 300,000 suggested edits have been completed since the feature was first deployed in December 2019.
Add a link is the team's first structured task, deployed in May 2021. It has improved outcomes for newcomers. The team is now working on a second iteration based on community feedback and data analysis. Improvements will include: improved algorithmic suggestions, guardrails to prevent too many similar links to be added, and clearer encouragement for users to continue making edits. After adding these improvements, we will deploy this task to more Wikipedias.
Add an image is the second structured task built by our team. It was deployed in November 2021 to four pilot Wikipedias. This is a more challenging task for newcomers. However, it adds more value to articles (so far, over 1,000 images have been added). We are currently learning from communities and from the data on what is working well and what needs improvements. The project page contains links to interactive prototypes. We are very interested to hear your thoughts on this idea as we build and test the early versions. We will soon deploy this task to more Wikipedias as a test.
"Add a link" and "Add an image" now both have a limitation on how many of these tasks newcomers can do per day. It is meant to discourage careless newcomers from making too many problematic edits.
Positive reinforcement
Over the last two years, the Growth team has focused on building suggested edits: easy tasks for newcomers to start with. We have learned with this experience that these tasks help many newcomers to make their first edits. Now, the team is starting a new project : "positive reinforcement". Its goal is to make newcomers proud of their editing and to make them want to come back for more of them. With the positive reinforcement project, we are considering three kinds of features:
Impact stats: give newcomers the ability to see how many people read the articles they edit.
Leveling up: encourage newcomers to progress from easier tasks to harder tasks.
Personalized praise: encourage mentors and other editors to "thank" and award newcomers for good work.
This project is just beginning, and we hope for community thoughts on the direction. We know that things can wrong if we offer the wrong incentives to newcomers, so we want to be careful. Please visit the talk page to help guide the project!
News for mentors
The mentor dashboard is available at all wikis. It helps mentors see who their mentees are and keep track of their activity. It is automatically activated where a list of mentors has been created. If you need assistance to create a list of mentors, please contact us.
The mentor dashboard has a new module: settings. It is now possible for mentors to define their status (active or away). They can specify the volume of questions they want to receive, and they can claim mentees in an easier way. It is also possible for mentors to quit, which will automatically reassign their mentees to other mentors.
We are working on an ability for a mentee to opt-out (and back in) to having a mentor.
Previously, in the table that displays mentees activity, the filters displayed all mentees, even the ones with zero edits or lots of edits. We have changed this so that only mentees with between 1 and 500 edits are visible by default. Mentors can change this value in their filters.
Some wikis have created userboxes that mentors can display on the user pages. If your wiki has one, please link it to Wikidata!
Scaling
Previously, at most Wikipedias, only 80% of newcomers were getting the Growth features. This was done for experimentation, to have a control group. We have changed this setting. Now 100% of new accounts at all Wikipedias get the Growth features (except a few, kept as test wikis). We invite communities to update their onboarding documentation and tutorials. Please include the Growth features in it. To help you, we have created an help page that can be translated and adapted to your wiki.
How to help
Do you have questions about the Growth features? This translatable FAQ contains answers to the most common questions about the Growth team work. We regularly update it.
Interface translations are important for newcomers. Please help for your language, by translating or copyediting interface translations for the Growth features.
Hello - my name is Susan Gerbic (Sgerbic) and I'm writing to you because at some point you joined Wikipedia:WikiProject Skepticism. This might have been months ago - or even years ago. With the best of intentions the project was created years ago, and sadly like many WikiProjects has started to go dormant. A group of us are attempting to revitalize the Skepticism project, already we have begun to clean up the main page and I've just redone the participant page. No one is in charge of this project, it is member directed, which might have been the reason it almost went dormant. We are attempting to bring back conversations on the talk page and have two subprojects as well, in the hopes that it might spark involvement and a way of getting to know each other better. One was created several years ago but is very well organized and a lot of progress was made, Wikipedia:WikiProject Skepticism/Skeptical organisations in Europe. The other I created a couple weeks ago, it is very simple and has a silly name Wikipedia:WikiProject Skepticism/Skepticism Stub Sub-Project Project (SSSPP). This sub-project runs from March 1 to June 1, 2022. We are attempting to rewrite skepticism stubs and add them to this list. As you can see we have already made progress.
The reason I'm writing to you now is because we would love to have you come back to the project and become involved, either by working on one of the sub-projects, proposing your own (and managing it), or just hanging out on the talk page getting to know the other editors and maybe donate some of your wisdom to some of the conversations. As I said, no one is in charge, so if you have something in mind you would like to see done, please suggest it on the talk page and hopefully others will agree. Please add the project to your watchlist, update your personal user page showing you are a proud member of WikiProject Skepticism. And DIVE in, this is what the work list looks like [1] frightening at first glance, but we have already started chipping away at it.
The Wikipedia:WikiProject Skepticism/Participants page has gone though a giant change - you may want to update your information. And of course if this project no longer interests you, please remove your name from the participant list, we would hate to see you go, but completely understand.
Access to Special:RevisionDelete has been expanded to include users who have the deletelogentry and deletedhistory rights. This means that those in the Researcher user group and Checkusers who are not administrators can now access Special:RevisionDelete. The users able to view the special page after this change are the 3 users in the Researcher group, as there are currently no checkusers who are not already administrators. (T301928)
When viewing deleted revisions or diffs on Special:Undelete a back link to the undelete page for the associated page is now present. (T284114)
Following an RfC, a change has been made to the administrators inactivity policy. Under the new policy, if an administrator has not made at least 100 edits over a period of 5 years they may be desysopped for inactivity.
A public status system for WMF wikis has been created. It is located at https://www.wikimediastatus.net/ and is hosted separately to WMF wikis so in the case of an outage it will remain viewable.
Arbitration
Remedy 2 of the St Christopher case has been rescinded following a motion. The remedy previously authorised administrators to place a ban on single-purpose accounts who were disruptively editing on the article St Christopher Iba Mar Diop College of Medicine or related pages from those pages.
At the time of the last newsletter (No.26, September 2021), the backlog was 'only' just over 6,000 articles. In the past six months, the backlog has reached nearly 16,000, a staggering level not seen in several years. A very small number of users had been doing the vast majority of the reviews. Due to "burn-out", we have recently lost most of this effort. Furthermore, several reviewers have been stripped of the user right for abuse of privilege and the articles they patrolled were put back in the queue.
Several discussions on the state of the process have taken place on the talk page, but there has been no action to make any changes. The project also lacks coordination since the "position" is vacant.
In the last 30 days, only 100 reviewers have made more than 8 patrols and only 50 have averaged one review a day. There are currently 812 New Page Reviewers, but about a third have not had any activity in the past month. All 848 administrators have this permission, but only about a dozen significantly contribute to NPP.
This means we have an active pool of about 450 to address the backlog. We cannot rely on a few to do most of the work as that inevitably leads to burnout. A fairly experienced reviewer can usually do a review in a few minutes. If every active reviewer would patrol just one article per day, the backlog would very quickly disappear.
If you have noticed a user with a good understanding of Wikipedia notability and deletion, do suggest they help the effort by placing {{subst:NPR invite}} on their talk page.
If you are no longer very active on Wikipedia or you no longer wish to be part of the New Page Reviewer user group, please consider asking any admin to remove you from the list. This will enable NPP to have a better overview of its performance and what improvements need to be made to the process and its software.
To opt-out of future mailings, please remove yourself here. Sent 05:17, 23 May 2022 (UTC)
Buidhe, it just involves re-running the queries that I ran a while back (on my quarry page). Then copying that data onto wikipedia (I remember that I just used Copy-Replace in a word doc to transfer it into a wikitable).
Administrators using the mobile web interface can now access Special:Block directly from user pages. (T307341)
The IP Info feature has been deployed to all wikis as a Beta Feature. Any autoconfirmed user may enable the feature using the "IP info" checkbox under Preferences → Beta features. Autoconfirmed users will be able to access basic information about an IP address that includes the country and connection method. Those with advanced privileges (admin, bureaucrat, checkuser) will have access to extra information that includes the Internet Service Provider and more specific location.
Hi, I'm Bruxton. I wanted to let you know that I saw the page you reviewed, Liam Öhgren, and have marked it as unreviewed. If you have any questions, please ask them on my talk page. Thank you.
(Message delivered via the Page Curation tool, on behalf of the reviewer.)
At the time of the last newsletter (No.27, May 2022), the backlog was approaching 16,000, having shot up rapidly from 6,000 over the prior two months. The attention the newsletter brought to the backlog sparked a flurry of activity. There was new discussion on process improvements, efforts to invite new editors to participate in NPP increased and more editors requested the NPP user right so they could help, and most importantly, the number of reviews picked up and the backlog decreased, dipping below 14,000[a] at the end of May.
Since then, the news has not been so good. The backlog is basically flat, hovering around 14,200. I wish I could report the number of reviews done and the number of new articles added to the queue. But the available statistics we have are woefully inadequate. The only real number we have is the net queue size.[b]
In the last 30 days, the top 100 reviewers have all made more than 16 patrols (up from 8 last month), and about 70 have averaged one review a day (up from 50 last month).
While there are more people doing more reviews, many of the ~730 with the NPP right are doing little. Most of the reviews are being done by the top 50 or 100 reviewers. They need your help. We appreciate every review done, but please aim to do one a day (on average, or 30 a month).
Backlog drive
A backlog reduction drive, coordinated by buidhe and Zippybonzo, will be held from July 1 to July 31. Sign up here. Barnstars will be awarded.
TIP – New school articles
Many new articles on schools are being created by new users in developing and/or non-English-speaking countries. The authors are probably not even aware of Wikipedia's projects and policy pages. WP:WPSCH/AG has some excellent advice and resources specifically written for these users. Reviewers could consider providing such first-time article creators with a link to it while also mentioning that not all schools pass the GNG and that elementary schools are almost certainly not notable.
Misc
There is a new template available, {{NPP backlog}}, to show the current backlog. You can place it on your user or talk page as a reminder:
Very high unreviewed pages backlog: 15651 articles, as of 18:00, 28 December 2024 (UTC), according to DatBot
There has been significant discussion at WP:VPP recently on NPP-related matters (Draftification, Deletion, Notability, Verifiability, Burden). Proposals that would somewhat ease the burden on NPP aren't gaining much traction, although there are suggestions that the role of NPP be fundamentally changed to focus only on major CSD-type issues.
If you have noticed a user with a good understanding of Wikipedia notability and deletion, suggest they help the effort by placing {{subst:NPR invite}} on their talk page.
If you are no longer very active on Wikipedia or you no longer wish to be part of the New Page Reviewer user group, please consider asking any admin to remove you from the list. This will enable NPP to have a better overview of its performance and what improvements need to be made to the process and its software.
To opt-out of future mailings, please remove yourself here.
