Hi, I contributed to a page for a public figure Alok Kejriwal few years back - the page has been deleted recently. I noticed that you restored this page in past whenever it was deleted. Could you please help me restore this page? Thanks in advance. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Saikatblogger (talk • contribs) 07:33, 4 June 2018 (UTC)[reply]
It is being planned to organize Wikigraphists Bootcamp in India, please fill out the survey form to help the organizers. Your responses will help organizers understand what level of demand there is for the event (how many people in your community think it is important that the event happens). At the end of the day, the participants will turn out to have knowledge to create drawings, illustrations, diagrams, maps, graphs, bar charts etc. and get to know to how to tune the images to meet the QI and FP criteria. For more information and link to survey form, please visit Talk:Wikigraphists Bootcamp (2018 India). MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 12:45, 15 January 2018 (UTC)[reply]
User:PhilKnight, Based on the directives given by WP:ARBPIA2, are we as editors of Wikipedia who wish to mention the location of a city, say, in Samaria (such as Havat Gilad), required to write West Bank as its geopolitical location/region, or can we simply write Judea and Samaria Area, based on either one of the six Administrative Districts of Israel? As for the name of the country, are we permitted to write "Israel", instead of "Palestinian territories", for places located on the former Jordanian side of the pre-1967 Demarcation lines between Israel and Jordan, known as the "West Bank"? The reason why I am asking you is because an article written by a former editor for Wikipedia had initially listed all of the towns in the country according to region as found in Districts of Israel, but then after six years, another editor came along and changed all regional locations to "West Bank" and "Palestinian territories." Is this proper procedure? If not, can we restore the original edit?Davidbena (talk) 03:42, 26 January 2018 (UTC)[reply]
An RfC has closed with a consensus that candidates at WP:RFA must disclose whether they have ever edited for pay and that administrators may never use administrative tools as part of any paid editing activity, except when they are acting as a Wikipedian-in-Residence or when the payment is made by the Wikimedia Foundation or an affiliate of the WMF.
Editors responding to threats of harm can now contact the Wikimedia Foundation's emergency address by using Special:EmailUser/Emergency. If you don't have email enabled on Wikipedia, directly contacting the emergency address using your own email client remains an option.
Technical news
A tagwill now be automatically applied to edits that blank a page, turn a page into a redirect, remove/replace almost all content in a page, undo an edit, or rollback an edit. These edits were previously denoted solely by automatic edit summaries.
Arbitration
The Arbitration Committee has enacted a change to the discretionary sanctions procedure which requires administrators to add a standardizededitnotice when placing page restrictions. Editors cannot be sanctioned for violations of page restrictions if this editnotice was not in place at the time of the violation.
Supporting Indian Wikipedia Program resource distribution
In 2017 - 2018, the Wikimedia Foundation and Google working in close coordination with the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS), Wikimedia India chapter (WMIN) and user groups will pilot a program encouraging Wikipedia communities to create locally relevant and high-quality content in Indian languages. This program (Code name: Project Tiger) will:
(a) Support active and experienced Wikipedia editors through the donation of laptops and stipends for internet access and
(b) Sponsor a language-based contest that aims to address existing Wikipedia content gaps.
The objective of the program is to provide laptops and internet stipends for existing editors who need support to contribute more actively. 50 basic model Acer Chromebooks and Internet stipends for 100 contributors are available for distribution. Provided resources are the sole property of the beneficiaries and should be used for the betterment of the movement.
If you're an active Wikimedian, and interested to receive support from this project, please apply. It will take around 10 minutes of your time, and will ask descriptive questions about your contribution to Indic Wikimedia projects.
Thanks for uploading File:Heavenly (Johnny Mathis album).jpg. The image description page currently specifies that the image is non-free and may only be used on Wikipedia under a claim of fair use. However, the image is currently not used in any articles on Wikipedia. If the image was previously in an article, please go to the article and see why it was removed. You may add it back if you think that that will be useful. However, please note that images for which a replacement could be created are not acceptable for use on Wikipedia (see our policy for non-free media).
Community ban discussions must now stay open for at least 24 hours prior to being closed.
A change to the administrator inactivity policy has been proposed. Under the proposal, if an administrator has not used their admin tools for a period of five years and is subsequently desysopped for inactivity, the administrator would have to file a new RfA in order to regain the tools.
A change to the banning policy has been proposed which would specify conditions under which a repeat sockmaster may be considered de facto banned, reducing the need to start a community ban discussion for these users.
Technical news
CheckUsers are now able to view private data such as IP addresses from the edit filter log, e.g. when the filter prevents a user from creating an account. Previously, this information was unavailable to CheckUsers because access to it could not be logged.
The edit filter has a new featurecontains_all that edit filter managers may use to check if one or more strings are all contained in another given string.
Bhadani (Gangadhar Bhadani) passed away on 8 February 2018. Bhadani joined Wikipedia in March 2005 and became an administrator in September 2005. While he was active, Bhadani was regarded as one of the most prolific Wikipedians from India.
In 2017 – 2018, the Wikimedia Foundation and Google working in close coordination with the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS), Wikimedia India Chapter (WMIN) and user groups from India, are piloting a program encouraging Wikipedia communities to create locally relevant and high-quality content in Indian languages. This program will (a) support active and experienced Wikipedia editors through the donation of laptops and stipends for internet access and (b) sponsor a language-based contest that aims to address existing Wikipedia content gaps.
Phase (a) has been completed, during which active contributors were awarded laptops and internet stipends. Phase (b) will be a contest in which editors will come together and develop a writing contest focused on content gaps. Each month three individual prizes will be awarded to each community based on their contribution for the month. The prizes worth 3,000 INR, 2000 INR, and 1,000 INR, will be awarded to the top contributors for each month. The contest started at March 1, 2018, 0:00, and will end at May 31, 2018, 23:59 (IST). Useful links are as follows:
Administrators who have been desysopped due to inactivity are now required to have performed at least one (logged) administrative action in the past 5 years in order to qualify for a resysop without going through a new RfA.
Editors who have been found to have engaged in sockpuppetry on at least two occasions after an initial indefinite block, for whatever reason, are now automatically considered banned by the community without the need to start a ban discussion.
There will soon be a calendar widget at Special:Block, making it easier to set expiries for a specific date and time.
Arbitration
The Arbitration Committee is considering a change to the discretionary sanctions procedures which would require an editor to appeal a sanction to the community at WP:AE or WP:AN prior to appealing directly to the Arbitration Committee at WP:ARCA.
Miscellaneous
A discussion has closed which concluded that administrators are not required to enable email, though many editors suggested doing so as a matter of best practice.
The Foundations' Anti-Harassment Tools team has released the Interaction Timeline. This shows a chronologic history for two users on pages where they have both made edits, which may be helpful in identifying sockpuppetry and investigating editing disputes.
Hello there. The move that I requested from an administrator was Wembley Arena to The SSE Arena, Wembley (which redirects to the former). More people agreed with the move than disagree (see Talk:Wembley Arena) and thus I wanted to get this move finalised. Since my admin help request, someone has closed the discussion in favour of moving it, so I am kindly requesting if you could perform it now? Thank you! --MetrolandNW (talk) 13:01, 14 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Hi Paul, I looked but couldn't make head nor tails of what I was looking at. I'm sorry, but you're going to need to recruit an admin more technically proficient than me for this. I've restore the file with all of its editing history. PhilKnight (talk) 21:28, 30 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
A proposal is being discussed which would create a new "event coordinator" right that would allow users to temporarily add the "confirmed" flag to new user accounts and to create many new user accounts without being hindered by a rate limit.
Technical news
AbuseFilter has received numerous improvements, including an OOUI overhaul, syntax highlighting, ability to search existing filters, and a few new functions. In particular, the search feature can be used to ensure there aren't existing filters for what you need, and the new equals_to_any function can be used when checking multiple namespaces. One major upcoming change is the ability to see which filters are the slowest. This information is currently only available to those with access to Logstash.
When blocking anonymous users, a cookie will be applied that reloads the block if the user changes their IP. 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. This currently only occurs when hard-blocking accounts.
The block notice shown on mobile will soon be more informative and point users to a help page on how to request an unblock, just as it currently does on desktop.
There will soon be a calendar widget at Special:Block, making it easier to set expiries for a specific date and time.
Lankiveil (Craig Franklin) passed away in mid-April. Lankiveil joined Wikipedia on 12 August 2004 and became an administrator on 31 August 2008. During his time with the Wikimedia community, Lankiveil served as an oversighter for the English Wikipedia and as president of Wikimedia Australia.
I am the author of an article for which I think I was the editor who requested the deletion. I had inadvertently posted the article as a live article when my intention was to create a user page. I immediately requested the deletion to avoid posting the faulty, incomplete article as a live article. I changed Li Jian (museum curator) · (Deleted) to Li Jian (art curator)2017-12-06 20:20. If removing the deletion notice does not follow Wikipedia protocol, I understand why the notice on my record of articles written should remain. However, would it be possible to say "deleted by author's request" or something like that to indicate that the request for deletion was not made by somebody else?Mitzi.humphrey 19:49, 8 May 2018 (UTC)
Hello PhilKnight, you might be interested in the issue I am reporting as you have already been involved in it previously. It is about a bunch of IPs which are very likely (99%) related to an old acquaintance of en.wikipedia: a sock-puppet abuser who created about 50 socks to disrupt IPA transcriptions, obsessed especially with Italian names and words. The investigation I am referring to is the following: 84101e40247. The new IPs from which similar or identical edits have been done recently are the following: 95.235.116.126 (see: Loayur, Duelai, Ddgfs), 87.17.102.163 (see: Sasalikasty), 193.204.194.210 (see: Dyukpore), 79.30.8.179 (see: Vufroled), 5.90.255.50 (see: Ksyru), 79.49.65.250 (see: Fruial, Kilorty); it is also possible that there are some more, but for the moment these are enough to care about, right? I hope that you or someone else will take appropriate measures against this recidivous vandal! Thank you for reading :-)
198.46.84.16 (talk) 12:48, 25 May 2018 (UTC)[reply]
This editor has posted the same message to me and to Vanjagenije. I am dealing with it. I have also posted a message at User talk:198.46.84.16 about posting the same message to multiple administrators. The editor who uses the pseudonym "JamesBWatson" (talk) 15:17, 25 May 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Following a successful request for comment, administrators are now able to add and remove editors to the "event coordinator" group. Users in the event coordinator group have the ability to temporarily add the "confirmed" flag to new user accounts and to create many new user accounts without being hindered by a rate limit. Users will no longer need to be in the "account creator" group if they are in the event coordinator group.
IP-based cookie blocks should be deployed to English Wikipedia in 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.
The Wikimedia Foundation's Anti-Harassment Tools team will build granular types of blocks in 2018 (e.g. a block from uploading or editing specific pages, categories, or namespaces, as opposed to a full-site block). Feedback on the concept may be left at the talk page.
It is now easier for blocked mobile users to see why they were blocked.
Arbitration
A recent technical issue with the Arbitration Committee's spam filter inadvertently caused all messages sent to the committee through Wikipedia (i.e. Special:EmailUser/Arbitration Committee) to be discarded. If you attempted to send an email to the Arbitration Committee via Wikipedia between May 16 and May 31, your message was not received and you are encouraged to resend it. Messages sent outside of these dates or directly to the Arbitration Committee email address were not affected by this issue.
Hello PhilKnight I hope you don't mind but I came across your name on the Wikproject Companies page and am in need of some advice on the topic. I have been through a series of disputes with another editor regarding content on business webpages, primarily regarding "Awards received" of multiple business articles. I don't want to get into the details of the dispute with the editor, we are attempting to discuss it on the talk pages. (Though many are sleepy articles and don't get a lot of traffic for consensus building.) However, the fundamental disagreement spreads across multiple articles and asks "is listing awards to a company is inherently promotional?" Is there a relevant forum where I can begin this discussion (or where it has already been discussed) such that a larger consensus might be reached? Thanks Dbsseven (talk) 23:26, 6 June 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Hi Dbsseven, I'd suggest that you hold a discussion on the Wikiproject Companies talk page to establish a wider consensus. PhilKnight (talk) 20:46, 8 June 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Need a page completely deleted...
I was trying to create a template to include some css using the new templatestyles tag... template page is Template:CSSCounter and I mistakenly created "Template:CSSCounter/style.css" instead of style*s*.css. So rather than making a new styles.css I just renamed it without realizing that *creating* a page with that name is treated differently than moving a page to that name. That is, I see that there is a different editor when editing a properly created styles.css than a regular content page...
I figured if the page was deleted and I recreated it, it would be created properly as a .css page, but when I try now, all I get is the content editor.
I guess I could start again with a different template page, but I thought I'd better ask for help to fix it before I compounded the problem. :P
OK, yes, you're right. That doesn't seem to work. I'm trying to implement the new functionality of the 'templatestyles' tag as per Wikipedia:TemplateStyles; do you know how to create pages so that they are interpreted as css? The examples provided just *have* pages that are interpreted as css with the implication that they are just created normally (they can be edited like any other page albeit a different editor pops up as I mentioned). — Preceding unsigned comment added by Shaav (talk • contribs) 23:45, 2 July 2018 (UTC)[reply]
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.
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.
I'm involved in a moderately long IRC discussion regarding the block at: User_talk:Leaderboard
While a rename would be an easy solution, they are a significant contributor and administrator at wiki books, so I think telling them to ask for a rename is a bit unfair. I feel differently if leaderboard were in active project but it is defunct. I believe discussion is about to start at AN, but I wanted to bring your attention to the issue. I'm inclined to on block with the caveat that they not promote their web browser should it ever be reinvigorated, but I don't like to unblock without checking with someone who has weighed in on the block decision.--S Philbrick(Talk)19:44, 24 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Following a "stop-gap" discussion, six users have temporarily been made interface administrators while discussion is ongoing for a more permanent process for assigning the permission. Interface administrators are now the only editors allowed to edit sitewide CSS and JavaScript pages, as well as CSS/JS pages in another user's userspace. Previously, all administrators had this ability. The right can be granted and revoked by bureaucrats.
Technical news
Because of a data centre test you will be able to read but not edit the wikis for up to an hour on 12 September and 10 October. This will start at 14:00 (UTC). You might lose edits if you try to save during this time. The time when you can't edit might be shorter than an hour.
Some abuse filter variables have changed. They are now easier to understand for non-experts. The old variables will still work but filter editors are encouraged to replace them with the new ones. You can find the list of changed variables on mediawiki.org. They have a note which says Deprecated. Use ... instead. An example is article_text which is now page_title.
Abuse filters can now use how old a page is. The variable is page_age.
Arbitration
The Arbitration Committee has resolved to perform a round of Checkuser and Oversight appointments. The usernames of all applicants will be shared with the Functionaries team, and they will be requested to assist in the vetting process. The deadline to submit an application is 23:59 UTC, 12 September, and the candidates that move forward will be published on-wiki for community comments on 18 September.