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The Signpost: 31 January 2019

Administrators' newsletter – February 2019

News and updates for administrators from the past month (January 2019).

Administrator changes

added EnterpriseyJJMC89
readded BorgQueen
removed Harro5Jenks24GraftR. Baley

Interface administrator changes

removedEnterprisey

Guideline and policy news

  • A request for comment is currently open to reevaluate the activity requirements for administrators.
  • Administrators who are blocked have the technical ability to block the administrator who blocked their own account. A recent request for comment has amended the blocking policy to clarify that this ability should only be used in exceptional circumstances, such as account compromises, where there is a clear and immediate need.
  • A request for comment closed with a consensus in favor of deprecating The Sun as a permissible reference, and creating an edit filter to warn users who attempt to cite it.

Technical news

  • A discussion regarding an overhaul of the format and appearance of Wikipedia:Requests for page protection is in progress (permalink). The proposed changes will make it easier to create requests for those who are not using Twinkle. The workflow for administrators at this venue will largely be unchanged. Additionally, there are plans to archive requests similar to how it is done at WP:PERM, where historical records are kept so that prior requests can more easily be searched for.

Miscellaneous

  • Voting in the 2019 Steward elections will begin on 08 February 2019, 14:00 (UTC) and end on 28 February 2019, 13:59 (UTC). The confirmation process of current stewards is being held in parallel. You can automatically check your eligibility to vote.
  • A new IRC bot is available that allows you to subscribe to notifications when specific filters are tripped. This requires that your IRC handle be identified.

Today's Wikipedian 10 years ago

Awesome
Ten years!

--Gerda Arendt (talk) 07:39, 11 February 2019 (UTC)

Thank you, though it's hard to believe it's been that long... -- Black Falcon (talk) 18:51, 17 February 2019 (UTC)

The Signpost: 28 February 2019

Administrators' newsletter – March 2019

News and updates for administrators from the past month (February 2019).

Guideline and policy news

Technical news

  • A new tool is available to help determine if a given IP is an open proxy/VPN/webhost/compromised host.

Arbitration

  • The Arbitration Committee announced two new OTRS queues. Both are meant solely for cases involving private information; other cases will continue to be handled at the appropriate venues (e.g., WP:COIN or WP:SPI).
    • paid-en-wp@wikipedia.org has been set up to receive private evidence related to abusive paid editing.
    • checkuser-en-wp@wikipedia.org has been set up to receive private requests for CheckUser. For instance, requests for IP block exemption for anonymous proxy editing should now be sent to this address instead of the functionaries-en list.

Miscellaneous


Category redirects

Hi Black Falcon

The discussion at Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/JJMC89 bot III seems to me to involve you taking what seems to me be a very hard line against category redirects, so went to look at our deletion log to see what sort of redirects you were deleting and why.

I was astonished by what I saw.[1]

e.g. you deleted the Category:Azerbaijan–Palestine relations, which a redirect to Category:Azerbaijan–State of Palestine relations.

The rationale which you used involved no speedy deletion criterion.

This is a very surprising deletion, because "Foo-Palestine relations" is a perfectly reasonable entry for someone unfamiliar with our current nomenclature to use to categorise a topic. It's actually the title of the head article Azerbaijan–Palestine relations.

And the same applies to each of the other 86 subcats of Category:Bilateral relations of the State of Palestine: there should in each case be a category redirect from the variant without "State of Palestine" ... but in each case you deleted the redirect.

Why are you doing this? How does deletion of an unambiguous redirect help either readers or editors?

Moving down through your deletion log, I see that you deleted the cat redirect from Category:Centuries in Judaism to Category:Judaism by century. Again, why? It's unambiguous, and it's a perfectly reasonable search guess. So why delete it?

Please can you explain? --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 18:29, 24 March 2019 (UTC)

Of course, BHG. I deleted Category:Azerbaijan–Palestine relations, which redirected to Category:Azerbaijan–State of Palestine relations, because it was not unambiguous. "Palestine" and "State of Palestine" are not equivalent terms, and we should not leave it to bots to infer that someone who specified "Palestine" in fact intended "State of Palestine".
Regarding Category:Centuries in Judaism, I honestly do not remember my thought process at the time. With hindsight, I think it may have been because I saw you deleted Category:Centuries in animation and Category:Centuries in philosophy and simply followed suit, or it may have been because "X in Y" ≠ "Y by X", but both of these are after-the-fact guess as to my reasoning... unlike the Palestine one which I clearly remember. If you think Category:Centuries in Judaism and the others at Wikipedia:Categories_for_discussion/Log/2019_January_25#Categories_by_century are useful category redirects, I would be happy to undelete them. -- Black Falcon (talk) 18:57, 24 March 2019 (UTC)
What other entity could be referred to "Azerbaijan–Palestine relations"? The other meanings of Palestine doesn't conduct international relations.
You might have a point if the head articles were named differently, but when they use the undisambiguated title, it's bizarre to claim that the category redirect is intolerably ambiguous. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 20:03, 24 March 2019 (UTC)

The Signpost: 31 March 2019

CfD backlog

Perhaps you have already noticed that administrators' involvement in CfD closures is close to zero in the last few weeks. Would you be willing to close a number of discussions, especially the older ones? Marcocapelle (talk) 13:21, 10 February 2019 (UTC)

Boy, that's a long list... I'll take a crack at closing some of the oldest ones today. -- Black Falcon (talk) 16:36, 10 February 2019 (UTC)
Would you like doing some more closures? Marcocapelle (talk) 21:56, 12 February 2019 (UTC)
Certainly, it's just been a rather busy week for me. I'll devote some time this weekend to thinning the backlog. -- Black Falcon (talk) 04:27, 15 February 2019 (UTC)
There's still a backlog, including 4 discussions still open from January. So if you find a few minutes to close a few more, that'd be great! --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 22:49, 31 March 2019 (UTC)

Administrators' newsletter – April 2019

News and updates for administrators from the past month (March 2019).

Technical news

Arbitration

Miscellaneous

  • Two more administrator accounts were compromised. Evidence has shown that these attacks, like previous incidents, were due to reusing a password that was used on another website that suffered a data breach. If you have ever used your current password on any other website, you should change it immediately. All admins are strongly encouraged to enable two-factor authentication, please consider doing so. Please always practice appropriate account security by ensuring your password is secure and unique to Wikimedia.
  • As a reminder, according to WP:NOQUORUM, administrators looking to close or relist an AfD should evaluate a nomination that has received few or no comments as if it were a proposed deletion (PROD) prior to determining whether it should be relisted.

Ping

Did you get my mail? ◄ Sebastian 11:56, 26 April 2019 (UTC)

The Signpost: 30 April 2019

ArbCom 2019 special circular

Icon of a white exclamation mark within a black triangle
Administrators must secure their accounts

The Arbitration Committee may require a new RfA if your account is compromised.

View additional information

This message was sent to all administrators following a recent motion. Thank you for your attention. For the Arbitration Committee, Cameron11598 02:28, 4 May 2019 (UTC)

Administrator account security (Correction to Arbcom 2019 special circular)

ArbCom would like to apologise and correct our previous mass message in light of the response from the community.

Since November 2018, six administrator accounts have been compromised and temporarily desysopped. In an effort to help improve account security, our intention was to remind administrators of existing policies on account security — that they are required to "have strong passwords and follow appropriate personal security practices." We have updated our procedures to ensure that we enforce these policies more strictly in the future. The policies themselves have not changed. In particular, two-factor authentication remains an optional means of adding extra security to your account. The choice not to enable 2FA will not be considered when deciding to restore sysop privileges to administrator accounts that were compromised.

We are sorry for the wording of our previous message, which did not accurately convey this, and deeply regret the tone in which it was delivered.

For the Arbitration Committee, -Cameron11598 21:03, 4 May 2019 (UTC)

Administrators' newsletter – May 2019

News and updates for administrators from the past month (April 2019).

Guideline and policy news

Technical news

  • XTools Admin Stats, a tool to list admins by administrative actions, has been revamped to support more types of log entries such as AbuseFilter changes. Two additional tools have been integrated into it as well: Steward Stats and Patroller Stats.

Arbitration

  • In response to the continuing compromise of administrator accounts, the Arbitration Committee passed a motion amending the procedures for return of permissions (diff). In such cases, the committee will review all available information to determine whether the administrator followed "appropriate personal security practices" before restoring permissions; administrators found failing to have adequately done so will not be resysopped automatically. All current administrators have been notified of this change.
  • Following a formal ratification process, the arbitration policy has been amended (diff). Specifically, the two-thirds majority required to remove or suspend an arbitrator now excludes (1) the arbitrator facing suspension or removal, and (2) any inactive arbitrator who does not respond within 30 days to attempts to solicit their feedback on the resolution through all known methods of communication.

Miscellaneous


The Signpost: 31 May 2019

Administrators' newsletter – June 2019

News and updates for administrators from the past month (May 2019).

Administrator changes

removed AndonicConsumed CrustaceanEnigmamanEuryalusEWS23HereToHelpNv8200paPeripitusStringTheory11Vejvančický

CheckUser changes

removed Ivanvector

Guideline and policy news

  • An RfC seeks to clarify whether WP:OUTING should include information on just the English Wikipedia or any Wikimedia project.
  • An RfC on WT:RfA concluded that Requests for adminship and bureaucratship are discussions seeking to build consensus.
  • An RfC proposal to make the templates for discussion (TfD) process more like the requested moves (RM) process, i.e. "as a clearinghouse of template discussions", was closed as successful.

Technical news

  • The CSD feature of Twinkle now allows admins to notify page creators of deletion if the page had not been tagged. The default behavior matches that of tagging notifications, and replaces the ability to open the user talk page upon deletion. You can customize which criteria receive notifications in your Twinkle preferences: look for Notify page creator when deleting under these criteria.
  • Twinkle's d-batch (batch delete) feature now supports deleting subpages (and related redirects and talk pages) of each page. The pages will be listed first but use with caution! The und-batch (batch undelete) option can now also restore talk pages.

Miscellaneous


The June 2019 Signpost is out!

Administrators' newsletter – July 2019

News and updates for administrators from the past month (June 2019).

Administrator changes

removed 28bytesAd OrientemAnsh666BeeblebroxBoing! said ZebedeeBU Rob13Dennis BrownDeorDoRDFloquenbeam1Flyguy649Fram2GadfiumGB fanJonathunderKusmaLectonarMoinkMSGJNickOd MishehuRamaSpartazSyrthissTheDJWJBscribe
1Floquenbeam's access was removed, then restored, then removed again.
2Fram's access was removed, then restored, then removed again.

Guideline and policy news

  • In a related matter, the account throttle has been restored to six creations per day as the mitigation activity completed.

Technical news

  • The Wikimedia Foundation's Community health initiative plans to design and build a new user reporting system to make it easier for people experiencing harassment and other forms of abuse to provide accurate information to the appropriate channel for action to be taken. Community feedback is invited.

Miscellaneous


The Signpost: 31 July 2019

Administrators' newsletter – August 2019

News and updates for administrators from the past month (July 2019).

Guideline and policy news

Arbitration

Miscellaneous

  • Following a research project on masking IP addresses, the Foundation is starting a new project to improve the privacy of IP editors. The result of this project may significantly change administrative and counter-vandalism workflows. The project is in the very early stages of discussions and there is no concrete plan yet. Admins and the broader community are encouraged to leave feedback on the talk page.
  • The new page reviewer right is bundled with the admin tool set. Many admins regularly help out at Special:NewPagesFeed, but they may not be aware of improvements, changes, and new tools for the Curation system. Stay up to date by subscribing here to the NPP newsletter that appears every two months, and/or putting the reviewers' talk page on your watchlist.

    Since the introduction of temporary user rights, it is becoming more usual to accord the New Page Reviewer right on a probationary period of 3 to 6 months in the first instance. This avoids rights removal for inactivity at a later stage and enables a review of their work before according the right on a permanent basis.


A tag has been placed on Category:Croatia football club templates requesting that it be speedily deleted from Wikipedia. This has been done under section C1 of the criteria for speedy deletion, because the category has been empty for seven days or more and is not a disambiguation category, a category redirect, a featured topics category, under discussion at Categories for discussion, or a project category that by its nature may become empty on occasion.

If you think this page should not be deleted for this reason, you may contest the nomination by visiting the page and clicking the button labelled "Contest this speedy deletion". This will give you the opportunity to explain why you believe the page should not be deleted. However, be aware that once a page is tagged for speedy deletion, it may be deleted without delay. Please do not remove the speedy deletion tag from the page yourself, but do not hesitate to add information in line with Wikipedia's policies and guidelines. Liz Read! Talk! 02:43, 4 August 2019 (UTC)

@Liz: Thank you for notifying me. The category became empty after this edit removed its sole member. I will not contest the deletion for now but have requested clarification at Category talk:Croatia football club navigational boxes. -- Black Falcon (talk) 04:42, 5 August 2019 (UTC)

The Signpost: 30 August 2019

Administrators' newsletter – September 2019

News and updates for administrators from the past month (August 2019).

Administrator changes

added BradvChetsfordIzno
readded FloquenbeamLectonar
removed DESiegelJake WartenbergRjanagTopbanana

CheckUser changes

removed CallaneccLFaraoneThere'sNoTime

Oversight changes

removed CallaneccFoxHJ MitchellLFaraoneThere'sNoTime

Technical news

  • Editors using the mobile website on Wikipedia can opt-in to new advanced features via your settings page. This will give access to more interface links, special pages, and tools.
  • The advanced version of the edit review pages (recent changes, watchlist, and related changes) now includes two new filters. These filters are for "All contents" and "All discussions". They will filter the view to just those namespaces.

Arbitration

Miscellaneous


I have unreviewed a page you curated

Hi, I'm Barkeep49. I wanted to let you know that I saw the page you reviewed, Alexander II Magnet School (Macon, Georgia), and have marked it as unpatrolled. 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.

Barkeep49 (talk) 04:04, 8 September 2019 (UTC)

Hi

Hello Samkelourhhhh (talk) 09:28, 9 September 2019 (UTC)

Hello to you, too. -- Black Falcon (talk) 04:32, 10 September 2019 (UTC)

Thanks

Black Falcon, I wanted to thank you for the time and consideration you gave my candidacy and for the effort and thought you put into your neutral vote. The role of NPP in encouraging new editors is an important one and I thank you for the feedback you've offered to me in this regard and will keep it in mind as I continue my new page efforts. Should you have further thoughts or feedback in the future, please know my door is always open. Best, Barkeep49 (talk) 22:55, 11 September 2019 (UTC)

The speedy keep was because the nominator demonstrated a lack of awareness that any other method of searching existed, which is completely at variance with WP:RKEEP. Nominations that are made in significant error are routinely speedy kept, because consensus is a matter of relying on informed, sensible voting, not merely raw numbers of votes.

To answer your question: some people reach pages by clicking links (the section header), others reach pages by clicking URLs from other websites (<a>"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_south_guangxi">Wikipedia</a>), or by entering the page title in the browser's URL bar, and all of these methods are case-sensitive. We have many years of precedent for keeping redirects that are entirely uncapitalised if capitalisation is the only variant, and deleting this one merely because "the search will find it" would be grossly at variance with nearly 20 years of XFDs. Nyttend (talk) 02:41, 22 September 2019 (UTC)

AfroCine: Join the Months of African Cinema this October!

Greetings!

After a successful first iteration of the “Months of African Cinema” last year, we are happy to announce that it will be happening again this year, starting from October 1! In the 2018 edition of the contest, about 600 Wikipedia articles were created in at least 8 languages. There were also contributions to Wikidata and Wikimedia commons, which brought the total number of wikimedia pages created during the contest to over 1,000.

The AfroCine Project welcomes you to October, the first out of the two months which have been dedicated to creating and improving content that centre around the cinema of Africa, the Caribbean, and the diaspora. Join us in this global edit-a-thon, by helping to create or expand articles which are connected to this scope. Also remember to list your name under the participants section.

On English Wikipedia, we would be recognizing participants in the following manner:

  • Overall winner (1st, 2nd, 3rd places)
  • Diversity winner
  • Gender-gap fillers

For further information about the contest, the recognition categories and how to participate, please visit the contest page here. For further inquiries, please leave comments on the contest talkpage or on the main project talkpage. See you around :).--Jamie Tubers (talk) 00:50, 30 September 2019 (UTC)

The Signpost: 30 September 2019

Administrators' newsletter – October 2019

News and updates for administrators from the past month (September 2019).

Guideline and policy news

  • Following a discussion, a new criterion for speedy category renaming was added: C2F: One eponymous article, which applies if the category contains only an eponymous article or media file, provided that the category has not otherwise been emptied shortly before the nomination. The default outcome is an upmerge to the parent categories.

Technical news

  • As previously noted, tighter password requirements for Administrators were put in place last year. Wikipedia should now alert you if your password is less than 10 characters long and thus too short.

Arbitration

Miscellaneous

  • The Community Tech team has been working on a system for temporarily watching pages, and welcomes feedback.

Why can't we just merge?

Why can't you just merge the categories into the right categories? SpinnerLaserz (talk) 04:12, 15 October 2019 (UTC)

@SpinnerLaserz: It is not necessary to merge to Category:World Heritage Sites, as the articles are all already in more specific country-level subcategories of Category:World Heritage Sites. -- Black Falcon (talk) 04:15, 15 October 2019 (UTC)
If you nominate the World Heritage Site by religion for deletion or merge, then what is this category (Category:Hindu World Heritage Sites)? You should have nominated this too. SpinnerLaserz (talk) 04:17, 15 October 2019 (UTC)
You're right, I missed that one. I will nominate it for deletion momentarily. -- Black Falcon (talk) 04:19, 15 October 2019 (UTC)
Do you think that being angry on a discussion will make it worse because I saw Place Clichy making an angry comment (which I believed it may relate to the WP:KEEPCOOL but there is no rules for it though but he or she needs to calm down). I created these categories because for obvious reasons. Just take a look at the supporters on a conflict (At the Yemeni Civil War, you can see that North Korea supported it due to reports by the UN and the Congo crisis, you can see China's name and the First Indochina War where you can see both the United States's and China's name). Also regarding the proxy wars involving the United States, Russia and China, I told WP:MILHIST for anyone to edit because, these article may be not perfect and are not ready to be published yet. SpinnerLaserz (talk) 16:15, 15 October 2019 (UTC)
To what comment are you referring? Maybe I just missed it, but I did not see an angry comment by Place Clichy in that discussion. He did state that he "do[es] not find much logic" in these categories, but that comment contains criticism of the categories, not anger. -- Black Falcon (talk) 05:48, 16 October 2019 (UTC)

Precious anniversary

Precious
Two years!

--Gerda Arendt (talk) 21:31, 26 October 2019 (UTC)

The Signpost: 31 October 2019

Administrators' newsletter – November 2019

News and updates for administrators from the past month (October 2019).

Guideline and policy news

  • A related RfC is seeking the community's sentiment for a binding desysop procedure.

Arbitration


ArbCom 2019 election voter message

Hello! Voting in the 2019 Arbitration Committee elections is now open until 23:59 on Monday, 2 December 2019. 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.

If you wish to participate in the 2019 election, please review the candidates and submit your choices on the voting page. If you no longer wish to receive these messages, you may add {{NoACEMM}} to your user talk page. MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 00:05, 19 November 2019 (UTC)

Google Code-In 2019 is coming - please mentor some documentation tasks!

Hello,

Google Code-In, Google-organized contest in which the Wikimedia Foundation participates, starts in a few weeks. This contest is about taking high school students into the world of opensource. I'm sending you this message because you recently edited a documentation page at the English Wikipedia.

I would like to ask you to take part in Google Code-In as a mentor. That would mean to prepare at least one task (it can be documentation related, or something else - the other categories are Code, Design, Quality Assurance and Outreach) for the participants, and help the student to complete it. Please sign up at the contest page and send us your Google account address to google-code-in-admins@lists.wikimedia.org, so we can invite you in!

From my own experience, Google Code-In can be fun, you can make several new friends, attract new people to your wiki and make them part of your community.

If you have any questions, please let us know at google-code-in-admins@lists.wikimedia.org.

Thank you!

--User:Martin Urbanec (talk) 21:58, 23 November 2019 (UTC)

The Signpost: 29 November 2019

Hi. Not sure what happened there. Got a notice from WP a short while ago that someone had requested a PW reset, so have just changed my password. I checked this page earlier today (due to the Mizzle entry), but don't think I took any action on it. Certainly didn't within the last hour. Onel5969 TT me 03:06, 30 November 2019 (UTC)

No worries, and no harm done. I assumed it was just a stray click or something along those lines. Cheers, -- Black Falcon (talk) 04:48, 30 November 2019 (UTC)

Administrators' newsletter – December 2019

News and updates for administrators from the past month (November 2019).

Administrator changes

added EvergreenFirToBeFree
removed AkhilleusAthaenaraJohn VandenbergMelchoirMichaelQSchmidtNeilNYoungamerican😂

CheckUser changes

readded Beeblebrox
removed Deskana

Interface administrator changes

readded Evad37

Guideline and policy news

Technical news

Arbitration

Miscellaneous


The Signpost: 27 December 2019

Administrators' newsletter – January 2020

News and updates for administrators from the past month (December 2019).

Guideline and policy news

Arbitration

Miscellaneous


The Signpost: 27 January 2020