This page is an archive of past discussions. 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.
Hey, thanks for your comment at the talk page of my Signpost piece. You're one of a few newbies I helped who went on to do great things here. I think a big difference between you and some of the other users I became paranoid about was ... vandalism-fighting was an activity that I'd always expected newbies to try their hand at. I'd helped out someone in a similar situation as recently as February this year and as far back as February 2007, so by the time I'd met you I knew what to do when I encountered someone trying to revert vandalism but not quite making it. What I found more difficult to deal with was people trying to add overlinking (or something that violated our Manual of Style), good-faith but unhelpful "copyediting", and unnecessary/unhelpful reference changes, which I noticed more and more as the years went on. If I'd encountered a situation such as yours six months ago, I'd like to hope the worst I would've done in addition is asking if you'd had any experience on other wikis. But maybe the newcomer tasks/homepage or something might have directed you to try your hand at something else, hopefully without unintentionally causing problems. I'm upset that all this happened too ... but it has and I have to deal with it the best I can. Graham87 (talk) 15:59, 30 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
@Graham87: Well, the worst that has happened was an established administrator blocking a new user for being "a returning user with an agenda", because of their familiarity with behind-the-scenes stuff. Consensus at ANI found the block was made poorly. That's a fairly extreme case, though, and one that I don't think you would've done, but I have seen time and time again new users being suspected as socks for being so familiar with things that most new users have never heard of. It's a reasonable assumption, as most socks do quack like that, but it can also be the case that the user simply did a lot of reading and lurking before registering. I myself became more active on Wikipedia in 2013 after about two years of editing Wikia, so I had familiarity with recent changes patrolling and edit reversions (or in other words, this wasn't my first rodeo, but it was my first big rodeo). I don't think 15-year-old me back then would've been able to handle the stress of being suddenly blocked for socking and having to explain that I wasn't one; most likely, I would've been driven off the project. Hindsight is 20/20, but you can never be too sure about the ripple effect your actions in the present will have on the future. —k6ka🍁 (Talk · Contributions) 21:34, 30 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Wow, I never knew about that situation before! I imagine I missed it because I skim-read AN/ANI by second-level heading (because I navigate that way with my screen reader) and I probably heard it say "Personal attacks and unfounded accusations by User:Delicious carbuncle", thought "I don't want to hear anything about that user", and moved on. Yeah, there's no way I would have blocked in that sort of situation; compare (and maybe contrast?) my dealings on this user talk page. @Tamzin:, I feel the need to ping you here, not just because you're mentioned but because you went on to become a good wikifriend of mine and gave me some advice that maybe I should have followed more closely. If only I had done my watchlist purge then ... but the nub of the issue (how I'd gotten in to this situation in the first place) involved one of the most private aspects of a Wikipedian's work, their watchlist ... which had gotten so relatively large, it was extremely hard to turn around that ship (and I viewed my admin status and my unusually broad watchlist as almost a part of my identity). I've probably said enough for now. Graham87 (talk) 07:00, 31 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Yeah, seeing ghosts (I feel like that should bluelink somewhere) is a real problem for people who've seen a lot of sox come and go. On my disclosures page, I quote Coren's apology statement, which has become a lodestar in my own time as an admin: don't delve too deeply and quickly in the back-office aspects of the project – it's rather seedy back there and you'll end up with a jaundiced view. Not unlike mine, I suppose. My own struggles with that tension led to my poem "The Sight", which in its penultimate stanza discusses situations where new users popped up, picked fights with me that could conceivably have been good-faith (e.g. "you got XYZ wrong in this article you wrote"), and then were revealed to be sox of people I'd blocked before. How do you AGF when there's lots of evidence that you shouldn't AGF? In the end my solution was to care less. A lot less. I still have The Sight. I spot new users who clearly aren't new and I think eh, I'll block them when they show their hands, or I won't because maybe they really are here to do good—either because they're not sox, or because they are but they're turning over a new leaf, in which case I frankly don't care.I do wish you'd taken my advice a few months ago, Graham, but I've been really impressed in everything I've seen from you since the desysop. You're clearly listening to the community's feedback in the exact way we want to see from admins. As a rule, I don't vote in RfAs anymore, but I would have been neutral in your RRfA: You're a great person, and a great admin in most regards, but I sort of spent a good chunk of my own admin career as a champion of accountability, and I wouldn't have been able to support someone who hadn't taken my accountability advice. But I'm glad it's stuck with you, and again, really thrilled with how you've handled things post-desysop. If you do run again in the future, at this point I'd be tempted to break my own rule just to vote support. I probably wouldn't, because I don't like breaking my own rules, but please take this at least as moral support, should the day come. ASCII smiley face.:) -- Tamzin[cetacean needed] (they|xe|🤷) 02:23, 1 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Note: All columns in this table are sortable, allowing you to rearrange the table so the articles most interesting to you are shown at the top. All images have mouse-over popups with more information. For more information about the columns and categories, please consult the documentation and please get in touch on SuggestBot's talk page with any questions you might have.
SuggestBot picks articles in a number of ways based on other articles you've edited, including straight text similarity, following wikilinks, and matching your editing patterns against those of other Wikipedians. It tries to recommend only articles that other Wikipedians have marked as needing work. We appreciate that you have signed up to receive suggestions regularly; your contributions make Wikipedia better — thanks for helping!
A request for comment is open to discuss whether admins should be advised to warn users rather than issue no-warning blocks to those who have posted promotional content outside of article space.
Technical news
The Nuke feature also now provides links to the userpage of the user whose pages were deleted, and to the pages which were not selected for deletion, after page deletions are queued. This enables easier follow-up admin-actions.
Note: All columns in this table are sortable, allowing you to rearrange the table so the articles most interesting to you are shown at the top. All images have mouse-over popups with more information. For more information about the columns and categories, please consult the documentation and please get in touch on SuggestBot's talk page with any questions you might have.
SuggestBot picks articles in a number of ways based on other articles you've edited, including straight text similarity, following wikilinks, and matching your editing patterns against those of other Wikipedians. It tries to recommend only articles that other Wikipedians have marked as needing work. We appreciate that you have signed up to receive suggestions regularly; your contributions make Wikipedia better — thanks for helping!
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Weekly highlight
The Single User Login system is being updated over the next few months. This is the system which allows users to fill out the login form on one Wikimedia site and get logged in on all others at the same time. It needs to be updated because of the ways that browsers are increasingly restricting cross-domain cookies. To accommodate these restrictions, login and account creation pages will move to a central domain, but it will still appear to the user as if they are on the originating wiki. The updated code will be enabled this week for users on test wikis. This change is planned to roll out to all users during February and March. See the SUL3 project page for more details and a timeline.
Updates for editors
On wikis with PageAssessments installed, you can now filter search results to pages in a given WikiProject by using the inproject: keyword. (These wikis: Arabic Wikipedia, English Wikipedia, English Wikivoyage, French Wikipedia, Hungarian Wikipedia, Nepali Wikipedia, Turkish Wikipedia, Chinese Wikipedia) [1]
One new wiki has been created: a Wikipedia in Tigre (w:tig:) [2]
View all 35 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, there was a bug with updating a user's edit-count after making a rollback edit, which is now fixed. [3]
Updates for technical contributors
Wikimedia REST API users, such as bot operators and tool maintainers, may be affected by ongoing upgrades. Starting the week of January 13, we will begin rerouting some page content endpoints from RESTbase to the newer MediaWiki REST API endpoints for all wiki projects. This change was previously available on testwiki and should not affect existing functionality, but active users of the impacted endpoints may raise issues directly to the MediaWiki Interfaces Team in Phabricator if they arise.
Toolforge tool maintainers can now share their feedback on Toolforge UI, an initiative to provide a web platform that allows creating and managing Toolforge tools through a graphic interface, in addition to existing command-line workflows. This project aims to streamline active maintainers’ tasks, as well as make registration and deployment processes more accessible for new tool creators. The initiative is still at a very early stage, and the Cloud Services team is in the process of collecting feedback from the Toolforge community to help shape the solution to their needs. Read more and share your thoughts about Toolforge UI.
For tool and library developers who use the OAuth system: The identity endpoint used for OAuth 1 and OAuth 2 returned a JSON object with an integer in its sub field, which was incorrect (the field must always be a string). This has been fixed; the fix will be deployed to Wikimedia wikis on the week of January 13. [4]
Many wikis currently use Cite CSS to render custom footnote markers in Parsoid output. Starting January 20 these rules will be disabled, but the developers ask you to not clean up your MediaWiki:Common.css until February 20 to avoid issues during the migration. Your wikis might experience some small changes to footnote markers in Visual Editor and when using experimental Parsoid read mode, but if there are changes these are expected to bring the rendering in line with the legacy parser output. [5]
Note: All columns in this table are sortable, allowing you to rearrange the table so the articles most interesting to you are shown at the top. All images have mouse-over popups with more information. For more information about the columns and categories, please consult the documentation and please get in touch on SuggestBot's talk page with any questions you might have.
SuggestBot picks articles in a number of ways based on other articles you've edited, including straight text similarity, following wikilinks, and matching your editing patterns against those of other Wikipedians. It tries to recommend only articles that other Wikipedians have marked as needing work. We appreciate that you have signed up to receive suggestions regularly; your contributions make Wikipedia better — thanks for helping!
_without_national_boundaries.svg)
