This is an archive of past discussions with User:Mike Peel. 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.
An RfC about the deletion of drafts closed with a consensus to change the wording of WP:NMFD. Specifically, a draft that has been repeatedly resubmitted and declined at AfC without any substantial improvement may be deleted at MfD if consensus determines that it is unlikely to ever meet the requirements for mainspace and it otherwise meets one of the reasons for deletion outlined in the deletion policy.
Starting on July 9, the WMF Security team, Trust & Safety, and the broader technical community will be seeking input on an upcoming change that will restrict editing of site-wide JavaScript and CSS to a new technical administrators user group. Bureaucrats and stewards will be able to grant this right per a community-defined process. The intention is to reduce the number of accounts who can edit frontend code to those who actually need to, which in turn lessens the risk of malicious code being added that compromises the security and privacy of everyone who accesses Wikipedia. For more information, please review the FAQ.
Syntax highlighting has been graduated from a Beta feature on the English Wikipedia. To enable this feature, click the highlighter icon () in your editing toolbar (or under the hamburger menu in the 2017 wikitext editor). This feature can help prevent you from making mistakes when editing complex templates.
IP-based cookie blocks should be deployed to English Wikipedia in July (previously scheduled for June). This will cause the block of a logged-out user to be reloaded if they change IPs. This means in most cases, you may no longer need to do /64 range blocks on residential IPv6 addresses in order to effectively block the end user. It will also help combat abuse from IP hoppers in general. For the time being, it only affects users of the desktop interface.
Miscellaneous
Currently around 20% of admins have enabled two-factor authentication, up from 17% a year ago. If you haven't already enabled it, please consider doing so. Regardless if you use 2FA, please practice appropriate account security by ensuring your password is secure and unique to Wikimedia.
Sweden report: SMVK upload; Swedish National Archives; Wikidata connects Swedish people / archives using Wikidata tool hub; Topographical register at the Swedish National Archives; LIBRIS XL - Bibframe 2.0 and open linked data
Do you have any suggestions? I found the link to the code that was developed before I started this project.
If you have any suggestions or ideas I would appreciate them!
@JenOttawa: I was wondering about that. It is running, and I did a manual run of it earlier this month to make sure it was running through to completion, but it doesn't seem to be finding any updates. I assume it should be? If you know of an example of one that needs updating, then I can try to do some debugging (or I might undo a previous example to see if the bot still picks that change up). Thanks. Mike Peel (talk) 14:22, 15 July 2018 (UTC)
@JenOttawa: Ah, I think this is because the code was looking for 'WITHDRAWN' in [1], which isn't present. I've removed that check, and the bot seems to be working OK now - it's found a few more that need updating at Alzheimer's disease as well. Sorry that it hasn't been working properly then! I'll set it re-running now, although it may have to wait until next week for a complete run-through. Thanks. Mike Peel (talk) 15:43, 18 July 2018 (UTC)
Hi Mike, thanks for taking a close look at the bot. I see the updates starting on the Aug version of the project page. @RexxS:, looks to be improved already! Is there a way to change the name of project page (i.e: remove August 2017) so volunteers will not get confused by the date. Thank you again!!!
Hi Mike, I think it would make sense to remove the unmarked updates from the previous Cochrane Update page. Since your bot will re-list all updates needed, we will decrease the chance that there are updates that have not already been performed on the list, which would potentially frustrate volunteers. Does this makes sense?JenOttawa (talk) 17:19, 18 July 2018 (UTC)
Looks great! I will take a closer look at the updates it is pulling tonight to verify their accuracy. It is now a nice list that I can start to recruit volunteers to help with. Your assistance is greatly appreciated! @RexxS:, if you noticed any errors in the new updates that are being pulled please let me know asap. I will be back online in a few hours to do a quality check as well. JenOttawa (talk) 18:20, 18 July 2018 (UTC)
The first check I did looks great! Article Alcoholism (edit) old review PMID:25836263 new review PMID:28822350 - 16:26, 18 July 2018 (UTC) is spot on! I will check a few more as well, but this looks great. Thank you again! JenOttawa (talk) 20:12, 18 July 2018 (UTC)
@JenOttawa: It's finished running through them and updating the report page now. The bot is rather busy with other tasks at the moment, so I'll wait a short while before getting the list of all uses as per the discussion below. Thanks. Mike Peel (talk) 15:34, 19 July 2018 (UTC)
Officially it is "bridging the gaps in knowledge", with Wikimania 2018 in Cape Town paying tribute to the southern African concept of ubuntu to implement it. Besides face-to-face interactions, Wikimedians do need their power sources.
Hackathon mentoring table wiring
Facto Post interviewed Jdforrester, who has attended every Wikimania, and now works as Senior Product Manager for the Wikimedia Foundation. His take on tackling the gaps in the Wikimedia movement is that "if we were an army, we could march in a column and close up all the gaps". In his view though, that is a faulty metaphor, and it leads to a completely false misunderstanding of the movement, its diversity and different aspirations, and the nature of the work as "fighting" to be done in the open sector. There are many fronts, and as an eventualist he feels the gaps experienced both by editors and by users of Wikimedia content are inevitable. He would like to see a greater emphasis on reuse of content, not simply its volume.
If that may not sound like radicalism, the Decolonizing the Internet conference here organized jointly with Whose Knowledge? can redress the picture. It comes with the claim to be "the first ever conference about centering marginalized knowledge online".
Plugbar buildup at the Hackathon
Links
ScienceSource focus list (shortcut WD:SSFL on Wikidata), project to tag a first-pass open access medical bibliography on Wikidata, and also overcome the systematic biases in the medical literature by curation.
EditGroups can now revert batches which created items. These items are deleted in the revert batch. This feature is only available to administrators but other users can easily request revert from the tool.
populationWDvsOSM: a new script that compares the population in OSM place nodes and boundary relations with Wikidata
user:Lakokat is back to adminship, congratulations!
Terminator, a tool by Magnus Manske that finds Wikidata items that lack a label, description, or article in a specific language, has now a version 2 (blog post)
Further work on supporting Senses on Lexemes - specifically persistent IDs for Senses and preventing the deletion of the last Gloss of a Sense (phabricator:T198032, phabricator:T198199)
Adjusted colors of the Query Service UI to be more in line with Wikimedia style guide (phabricator:T192235, Thanks abian!)
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Which is simpler and doesn't fall over when #property: returns something, but {#invoke:WikidataIB |getValue returns nothing. Any use? --RexxS (talk) 13:03, 27 July 2018 (UTC)
@RexxS: Thanks! The first one looks useful, although I'm less sure about the second. It'll probably be most useful on Commons, since {{Infobox}} already includes the same functionality (and I've been using {{If first display both}} to do something similar for displaying references in the infoboxes here). Thanks. Mike Peel (talk) 19:03, 3 August 2018 (UTC)
The second one was a bit of an afterthought. It might find use when we have a particular exception to a general rule, like displaying USA (or nothing) instead of United States. Cheers --RexxS (talk) 09:27, 4 August 2018 (UTC)
List of all Cochrane Reviews in Wikipedia right now
@JenOttawa: It's easy to regenerate it (I just re-run a script), but is it OK if we wait for the bot to complete the main update first? It's also running tasks on other wikis, and I don't want to overload it. :-) Thanks. Mike Peel (talk) 06:27, 19 July 2018 (UTC)
Quick update: it ran out of memory on my raspberry pi, so I'll set it running next week on a more powerful computer. Thanks. Mike Peel (talk) 08:53, 21 July 2018 (UTC)
@JenOttawa: Sorry, I forgot to run this in the last few days, and I'm now travelling again. :-( I might get chance to run it early next week, otherwise it'll be around the 4th before I can do so. The bot should automatically run the general update on the 1st August, let me know if anything looks odd with it. Thanks. Mike Peel (talk) 22:46, 26 July 2018 (UTC)
@JenOttawa: Looks like the computer running the bot crashed a couple of days ago. I'll restart it and run the scripts when I'm back on Friday. Thanks. Mike Peel (talk) 13:00, 1 August 2018 (UTC)
@JenOttawa: I'm back, so the bot's running the update now. One minor hickup that it didn't recognize "Done" rather than "done", that's now been fixed. I've also re-run the uses page, but I can't save it to the wiki page - instead it's available here. Thanks. Mike Peel (talk) 18:54, 3 August 2018 (UTC)
Thanks for keeping tabs on all of this. The bot update looks great from what I could see. I will check out the new page as well. This is very very helpful. Thank you again! JenOttawa (talk) 18:59, 3 August 2018 (UTC)
After a discussion at Meta, a new user group called "interface administrators" (formerly "technical administrator") has been created. Come the end of August, interface admins will be the only users able to edit site-wide JavaScript and CSS pages like MediaWiki:Common.js and MediaWiki:Common.css, or edit other user's personal JavaScript and CSS. The intention is to improve security and privacy by reducing the number of accounts which could be used to compromise the site or another user's account through malicious code. The new user group can be assigned and revoked by bureaucrats. Discussion is ongoing to establish details for implementing the group on the English Wikipedia.
Following a request for comment, the WP:SISTER style guideline now states that in the mainspace, interwiki links to Wikinews should only be made as per the external links guideline. This generally means that within the body of an article, you should not link to Wikinews about a particular event that is only a part of the larger topic. Wikinews links in "external links" sections can be used where helpful, but not automatically if an equivalent article from a reliable news outlet could be linked in the same manner.
Technical news
The WMF Anti-Harassment Tools team is seeking input on the second set of wireframes for the Special:Block redesign that will introduce partial blocks. The new functionality will allow you to block a user from editing a specific set of pages, pages in a category, a namespace, and for specific actions such as moving pages and uploading files.
