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Administrators' newsletter – September 2018

News and updates for administrators from the past month (August 2018).

Administrator changes

added None
removed AsterionCrisco 1492KFKudpungLizRandykittySpartaz
renamed Optimist on the runVoice of Clam

Interface administrator changes

added AmorymeltzerMr. StradivariusMusikAnimalMSGJTheDJXaosflux

Guideline and policy news

  • 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.

Facto Post – Issue 16 – 30 September 2018

Facto Post – Issue 16 – 30 September 2018

The Editor is Charles Matthews, for ContentMine. Please leave feedback for him, on his User talk page.
To subscribe to Facto Post go to Wikipedia:Facto Post mailing list. For the ways to unsubscribe, see the footer.

The science publishing landscape

In an ideal world ... no, bear with your editor for just a minute ... there would be a format for scientific publishing online that was as much a standard as SI units are for the content. Likewise cataloguing publications would not be onerous, because part of the process would be to generate uniform metadata. Without claiming it could be the mythical free lunch, it might be reasonably be argued that sandwiches can be packaged much alike and have barcodes, whatever the fillings.

The best on offer, to stretch the metaphor, is the meal kit option, in the form of XML. Where scientific papers are delivered as XML downloads, you get all the ingredients ready to cook. But have to prepare the actual meal of slow food yourself. See Scholarly HTML for a recent pass at heading off XML with HTML, in other words in the native language of the Web.

The argument from real life is a traditional mixture of frictional forces, vested interests, and the classic irony of the principle of unripe time. On the other hand, discoverability actually diminishes with the prolific progress of science publishing. No, it really doesn't scale. Wikimedia as movement can do something in such cases. We know from open access, we grok the Web, we have our own horse in the HTML race, we have Wikidata and WikiJournal, and we have the chops to act.

Links

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The Signpost: 1 October 2018

Administrators' newsletter – October 2018

News and updates for administrators from the past month (September 2018).

Administrator changes

added JustlettersandnumbersL235
removed BgwhiteHorsePunchKidJ GrebKillerChihuahuaRami RWinhunter

Interface administrator changes

added Cyberpower678Deryck ChanOshwahPharosRagesossRitchie333

Oversight changes

removed Guerillero NativeForeigner SnowolfXeno

Guideline and policy news

Technical news

  • Partial blocks should be available for testing in October on the Test Wikipedia and the Beta-Cluster. This new feature allows admins to block users from editing specific pages and in the near-future, namespaces and uploading files. You can expect more updates and an invitation to help with testing once it is available.
  • The Foundations' Anti-Harassment Tools team is currently looking for input on how to measure the effectiveness of blocks. This is in particular related to how they will measure the success of the aforementioned partial blocks.
  • Because of a data centre test, you will be able to read but not edit the Wikimedia projects for up to an hour on 10 October. This will start at 14:00 (UTC). You might lose edits if you try to save during this time.

Arbitration

  • The Arbitration Committee has, by motion, amended the procedure on functionary inactivity.
  • The community consultation for 2018 CheckUser and Oversight appointments has concluded. Appointments will be made by October 11.
  • Following a request for comment, the size of the Arbitration Committee will be decreased to 13 arbitrators, starting in 2019. Additionally, the minimum support percentage required to be appointed to a two-year term on ArbCom has been increased to 60%. ArbCom candidates who receive between 50% and 60% support will be appointed to one-year terms instead.
  • Nominations for the 2018 Arbitration Committee Electoral Commission are being accepted until 12 October. These are the editors who help run the ArbCom election smoothly. If you are interested in volunteering for this role, please consider nominating yourself.

The Signpost: 28 October 2018

Facto Post – Issue 17 – 29 October 2018

Facto Post – Issue 17 – 29 October 2018

The Editor is Charles Matthews, for ContentMine. Please leave feedback for him, on his User talk page.
To subscribe to Facto Post go to Wikipedia:Facto Post mailing list. For the ways to unsubscribe, see the footer.

Wikidata imaged

Around 2.7 million Wikidata items have an illustrative image. These files, you might say, are Wikimedia's stock images, and if the number is large, it is still only 5% or so of items that have one. All such images are taken from Wikimedia Commons, which has 50 million media files. One key issue is how to expand the stock.

Indeed, there is a tool. WD-FIST exploits the fact that each Wikipedia is differently illustrated, mostly with images from Commons but also with fair use images. An item that has sitelinks but no illustrative image can be tested to see if the linked wikis have a suitable one. This works well for a volunteer who wants to add images at a reasonable scale, and a small amount of SPARQL knowledge goes a long way in producing checklists.

Gran Teatro, Cáceres, Spain, at night

It should be noted, though, that there are currently 53 Wikidata properties that link to Commons, of which P18 for the basic image is just one. WD-FIST prompts the user to add signatures, plaques, pictures of graves and so on. There are a couple of hundred monograms, mostly of historical figures, and this query allows you to view all of them. commons:Category:Monograms and its subcategories provide rich scope for adding more.

And so it is generally. The list of properties linking to Commons does contain a few that concern video and audio files, and rather more for maps. But it contains gems such as P3451 for "nighttime view". Over 1000 of those on Wikidata, but as for so much else, there could be yet more.

Go on. Today is Wikidata's birthday. An illustrative image is always an acceptable gift, so why not add one? You can follow these easy steps: (i) log in at https://tools.wmflabs.org/widar/, (ii) paste the Petscan ID 6263583 into https://tools.wmflabs.org/fist/wdfist/ and click run, and (iii) just add cake.

Birthday logo
Links

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Administrators' newsletter – November 2018

News and updates for administrators from the past month (October 2018).

Guideline and policy news

Technical news

  • Partial blocks is now available for testing on the Test Wikipedia. The new functionality allows you to block users from editing specific pages. Bugs may exist and can be reported on the local talk page or on Meta. A discussion regarding deployment to English Wikipedia will be started by community liaisons sometime in the near future.
  • A user script is now available to quickly review unblock requests.
  • The 2019 Community Wishlist Survey is now accepting new proposals until November 11, 2018. The results of this survey will determine what software the Wikimedia Foundation's Community Tech team will work on next year. Voting on the proposals will take place from November 16 to November 30, 2018. Specifically, there is a proposal category for admins and stewards that may be of interest.

Arbitration

  • Eligible editors will be invited to nominate themselves as candidates in the 2018 Arbitration Committee Elections starting on November 4 until November 13. Voting will begin on November 19 and last until December 2.
  • The Arbitration Committee's email address has changed to arbcom-en@wikimedia.org. Other email lists, such as functionaries-en and clerks-l, remain unchanged.

ArbCom 2018 election voter message

Hello, Jfdwolff. Voting in the 2018 Arbitration Committee elections is now open until 23.59 on Sunday, 3 December. All users who registered an account before Sunday, 28 October 2018, made at least 150 mainspace edits before Thursday, 1 November 2018 and are not currently blocked are eligible 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 2018 election, please review the candidates and submit your choices on the voting page. MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 18:42, 19 November 2018 (UTC)

Facto Post – Issue 18 – 30 November 2018

Facto Post – Issue 18 – 30 November 2018

The Editor is Charles Matthews, for ContentMine. Please leave feedback for him, on his User talk page.
To subscribe to Facto Post go to Wikipedia:Facto Post mailing list. For the ways to unsubscribe, see the footer.

WikiCite issue

GLAM ♥ data — what is a gallery, library, archive or museum without a catalogue? It follows that Wikidata must love librarians. Bibliography supports students and researchers in any topic, but open and machine-readable bibliographic data even more so, outside the silo. Cue the WikiCite initiative, which was meeting in conference this week, in the Bay Area of California.

Wikidata training for librarians at WikiCite 2018

In fact there is a broad scope: "Open Knowledge Maps via SPARQL" and the "Sum of All Welsh Literature", identification of research outputs, Library.Link Network and Bibframe 2.0, OSCAR and LUCINDA (who they?), OCLC and Scholia, all these co-exist on the agenda. Certainly more library science is coming Wikidata's way. That poses the question about the other direction: is more Wikimedia technology advancing on libraries? Good point.

Wikimedians generally are not aware of the tech background that can be assumed, unless they are close to current training for librarians. A baseline definition is useful here: "bash, git and OpenRefine". Compare and contrast with pywikibot, GitHub and mix'n'match. Translation: scripting for automation, version control, data set matching and wrangling in the large, are on the agenda also for contemporary library work. Certainly there is some possible common ground here. Time to understand rather more about the motivations that operate in the library sector.

Links

Account creation is now open on the ScienceSource wiki, where you can see SPARQL visualisations of text mining.

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The Signpost: 1 December 2018

Administrators' newsletter – December 2018

News and updates for administrators from the past month (November 2018).

Administrator changes

readded Al Ameer sonRandykittySpartaz
removed BosonDaniel J. LeivickEfeEsanchez7587Fred BauderGarzoMartijn HoekstraOrangemike

Interface administrator changes

removedDeryck Chan

Guideline and policy news

  • Following a request for comment, the Mediation Committee is now closed and will no longer be accepting case requests.
  • A request for comment is in progress to determine whether members of the Bot Approvals Group should satisfy activity requirements in order to remain in that role.
  • A request for comment is in progress regarding whether to change the administrator inactivity policy, such that administrators "who have made no logged administrative actions for at least 12 months may be desysopped". Currently, the policy states that administrators "who have made neither edits nor administrative actions for at least 12 months may be desysopped".
  • A proposal has been made to temporarily restrict editing of the Main Page to interface administrators in order to mitigate the impact of compromised accounts.

Technical news

Arbitration

Miscellaneous

  • In late November, an attacker compromised multiple accounts, including at least four administrator accounts, and used them to vandalize Wikipedia. If you have ever used your current password on any other website, you should change it immediately. Sharing the same password across multiple websites makes your account vulnerable, especially if your password was used on a website that suffered a data breach. As these incidents have shown, these concerns are not pure fantasies.
  • Wikipedia policy requires administrators to have strong passwords. To further reinforce security, administrators should also consider enabling two-factor authentication. A committed identity can be used to verify that you are the true account owner in the event that your account is compromised and/or you are unable to log in.

Obituaries


The Signpost: 24 December 2018

Facto Post – Issue 19 – 27 December 2018

Facto Post – Issue 19 – 27 December 2018

The Editor is Charles Matthews, for ContentMine. Please leave feedback for him, on his User talk page.
To subscribe to Facto Post go to Wikipedia:Facto Post mailing list. For the ways to unsubscribe, see the footer.

Learning from Zotero

Zotero is free software for reference management by the Center for History and New Media: see Wikipedia:Citing sources with Zotero. It is also an active user community, and has broad-based language support.

Zotero logo

Besides the handiness of Zotero's warehousing of personal citation collections, the Zotero translator underlies the citoid service, at work behind the VisualEditor. Metadata from Wikidata can be imported into Zotero; and in the other direction the zotkat tool from the University of Mannheim allows Zotero bibliographies to be exported to Wikidata, by item creation. With an extra feature to add statements, that route could lead to much development of the focus list (P5008) tagging on Wikidata, by WikiProjects.

Zotero demo video

There is also a large-scale encyclopedic dimension here. The construction of Zotero translators is one facet of Web scraping that has a strong community and open source basis. In that it resembles the less formal mix'n'match import community, and growing networks around other approaches that can integrate datasets into Wikidata, such as the use of OpenRefine.

Looking ahead, the thirtieth birthday of the World Wide Web falls in 2019, and yet the ambition to make webpages routinely readable by machines can still seem an ever-retreating mirage. Wikidata should not only be helping Wikimedia integrate its projects, an ongoing process represented by Structured Data on Commons and lexemes. It should also be acting as a catalyst to bring scraping in from the cold, with institutional strengths as well as resourceful code.

Links

Diversitech, the latest ContentMine grant application to the Wikimedia Foundation, is in its community review stage until January 2.

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Austal

Austral season's greetings
Tuck into this! We've made about three of these in the last few days for various festivities. Supermarkets are stuffed with cheap berries. Season's greetings! Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 03:41, 25 December 2018 (UTC)
Wow thanks mate @Casliber: JFW | T@lk 22:08, 27 December 2018 (UTC)

Merry Xmas

Merry Christmas and a Prosperous 2019!

Hello Jfdwolff, may you be surrounded by peace, success and happiness on this seasonal occasion. Spread the WikiLove by wishing another user a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year, whether it be someone you have had disagreements with in the past, a good friend, or just some random person. Sending you heartfelt and warm greetings for Christmas and New Year 2019.
Happy editing,

Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 06:18, 25 December 2018 (UTC)

Spread the love by adding {{subst:Seasonal Greetings}} to other user talk pages.

Thanks @Doc James:! JFW | T@lk 22:08, 27 December 2018 (UTC)

Administrators' newsletter – January 2019

News and updates for administrators from the past month (December 2018).

Guideline and policy news

  1. G14 (new): Disambiguation pages that disambiguate only zero or one existing pages are now covered under the new G14 criterion (discussion). This is {{db-disambig}}; the text is unchanged and candidates may be found in Category:Candidates for speedy deletion as unnecessary disambiguation pages.
  2. R4 (new): Redirects in the file namespace (and no file links) that have the same name as a file or redirect at Commons are now covered under the new R4 criterion (discussion). This is {{db-redircom}}; the text is unchanged.
  3. G13 (expanded): Userspace drafts containing only the default Article Wizard text are now covered under G13 along with other drafts (discussion). Such blank drafts are now eligible after six months rather than one year, and taggers continue to use {{db-blankdraft}}.

Technical news

  • Starting on December 13, the Wikimedia Foundation security team implemented new password policy and requirements. Privileged accounts (administrators, bureaucrats, checkusers, oversighters, interface administrators, bots, edit filter managers/helpers, template editors, et al.) must have a password at least 10 characters in length. All accounts must have a password:
  1. At least 8 characters in length
  2. Not in the 100,000 most popular passwords (defined by the Password Blacklist library)
  3. Different from their username
User accounts not meeting these requirements will be prompted to update their password accordingly. More information is available on MediaWiki.org.
  • Blocked administrators may now block the administrator that blocked them. This was done to mitigate the possibility that a compromised administrator account would block all other active administrators, complementing the removal of the ability to unblock oneself outside of self-imposed blocks. A request for comment is currently in progress to determine whether the blocking policy should be updated regarding this change.
  • {{Copyvio-revdel}} now has a link to open the history with the RevDel checkboxes already filled in.

Arbitration

Miscellaneous

  • Accounts continue to be compromised on a regular basis. Evidence shows this is entirely due to the accounts having the same 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.
  • Around 22% of admins have enabled two-factor authentication, up from 20% in June 2018. If you haven't already enabled it, please consider doing so. Regardless of whether you use 2FA, please practice appropriate account security by ensuring your password is secure and unique to Wikimedia.

The Signpost: 31 January 2019

Facto Post – Issue 20 – 31 January 2019

Facto Post – Issue 20 – 31 January 2019

The Editor is Charles Matthews, for ContentMine. Please leave feedback for him, on his User talk page.
To subscribe to Facto Post go to Wikipedia:Facto Post mailing list. For the ways to unsubscribe, see the footer.

Everything flows (and certainly data does)

Recently Jimmy Wales has made the point that computer home assistants take much of their data from Wikipedia, one way or another. So as well as getting Spotify to play Frosty the Snowman for you, they may be able to answer the question "is the Pope Catholic?" Possibly by asking for disambiguation (Coptic?).

Amazon Echo device using the Amazon Alexa service in voice search showdown with the Google rival on an Android phone

Headlines about data breaches are now familiar, but the unannounced circulation of information raises other issues. One of those is Gresham's law stated as "bad data drives out good". Wikipedia and now Wikidata have been criticised on related grounds: what if their content, unattributed, is taken to have a higher standing than Wikimedians themselves would grant it? See Wikiquote on a misattribution to Bismarck for the usual quip about "law and sausages", and why one shouldn't watch them in the making.

Wikipedia has now turned 18, so should act like as adult, as well as being treated like one. The Web itself turns 30 some time between March and November this year, per Tim Berners-Lee. If the Knowledge Graph by Google exemplifies Heraclitean Web technology gaining authority, contra GIGO, Wikimedians still have a role in its critique. But not just with the teenage skill of detecting phoniness.

There is more to beating Gresham than exposing the factoid and urban myth, where WP:V does do a great job. Placeholders must be detected, and working with Wikidata is a good way to understand how having one statement as data can blind us to replacing it by a more accurate one. An example that is important to open access is that, firstly, the term itself needs considerable unpacking, because just being able to read material online is a poor relation of "open"; and secondly, trying to get Creative Commons license information into Wikidata shows up issues with classes of license (such as CC-BY) standing for the actual license in major repositories. Detailed investigation shows that "everything flows" exacerbates the issue. But Wikidata can solve it.

Links

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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.

User:Hitler

Hi, I reported the above account to ARV, but HBC AIV helperbot5 removed it claiming you have blocked it. I re-added the account to ARV but the same thing happened. JACKINTHEBOXTALK 09:35, 15 February 2019 (UTC)

@JackintheBox: This does not come up in the block log. I suspect I would have blocked him in 2004 and it might therefore not be recorded. Keep me updated. JFW | T@lk 10:02, 15 February 2019 (UTC)
OK. JACKINTHEBOXTALK 10:04, 15 February 2019 (UTC)

If this is the first article that you have created, you may want to read the guide to writing your first article.

You may want to consider using the Article Wizard to help you create articles.

A tag has been placed on Hypovolemic shock requesting that it be speedily deleted from Wikipedia. This has been done under section G12 of the criteria for speedy deletion, because the page appears to be an unambiguous copyright infringement. This page appears to be a direct copy from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK470382/. For legal reasons, we cannot accept copyrighted text or images taken from other web sites or printed material, and as a consequence, your addition will most likely be deleted. You may use external websites or other printed material as a source of information, but not as a source of sentences. This part is crucial: say it in your own words. Wikipedia takes copyright violations very seriously and persistent violators will be blocked from editing.

If the external website or image belongs to you, and you want to allow Wikipedia to use the text or image — which means allowing other people to use it for any reason — then you must verify that externally by one of the processes explained at Wikipedia:Donating copyrighted materials. The same holds if you are not the owner but have their permission. If you are not the owner and do not have permission, see Wikipedia:Requesting copyright permission for how you may obtain it. You might want to look at Wikipedia's copyright policy for more details, or ask a question here.

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. CASSIOPEIA(talk) 08:25, 27 February 2019 (UTC)

Facto Post – Issue 21 – 28 February 2019

Facto Post – Issue 21 – 28 February 2019

The Editor is Charles Matthews, for ContentMine. Please leave feedback for him, on his User talk page.
To subscribe to Facto Post go to Wikipedia:Facto Post mailing list. For the ways to unsubscribe, see the footer.

What is a systematic review?

Systematic reviews are basic building blocks of evidence-based medicine, surveys of existing literature devoted typically to a definite question that aim to bring out scientific conclusions. They are principled in a way Wikipedians can appreciate, taking a critical view of their sources.

PRISMA flow diagram for a systematic review

Ben Goldacre in 2014 wrote (link below) "[...] : the "information architecture" of evidence based medicine (if you can tolerate such a phrase) is a chaotic, ad hoc, poorly connected ecosystem of legacy projects. In some respects the whole show is still run on paper, like it's the 19th century." Is there a Wikidatan in the house? Wouldn't some machine-readable content that is structured data help?

File:Schittny, Facing East, 2011, Legacy Projects.jpg
2011 photograph by Bernard Schittny of the "Legacy Projects" group

Most likely it would, but the arcana of systematic reviews and how they add value would still need formal handling. The PRISMA standard dates from 2009, with an update started in 2018. The concerns there include the corpus of papers used: how selected and filtered? Now that Wikidata has a 20.9 million item bibliography, one can at least pose questions. Each systematic review is a tagging opportunity for a bibliography. Could that tagging be reproduced by a query, in principle? Can it even be second-guessed by a query (i.e. simulated by a protocol which translates into SPARQL)? Homing in on the arcana, do the inclusion and filtering criteria translate into metadata? At some level they must, but are these metadata explicitly expressed in the articles themselves? The answer to that is surely "no" at this point, but can TDM find them? Again "no", right now. Automatic identification doesn't just happen.

Actually these questions lack originality. It should be noted though that WP:MEDRS, the reliable sources guideline used here for health information, hinges on the assumption that the usefully systematic reviews of biomedical literature can be recognised. Its nutshell summary, normally the part of a guideline with the highest density of common sense, allows literature reviews in general validity, but WP:MEDASSESS qualifies that indication heavily. Process wonkery about systematic reviews definitely has merit.

Links

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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


Facto Post – Issue 22 – 28 March 2019

Facto Post – Issue 22 – 28 March 2019

The Editor is Charles Matthews, for ContentMine. Please leave feedback for him, on his User talk page.
To subscribe to Facto Post go to Wikipedia:Facto Post mailing list. For the ways to unsubscribe, see the footer.

When in the cloud, do as the APIs do

Half a century ago, it was the era of the mainframe computer, with its air-conditioned room, twitching tape-drives, and appearance in the title of a spy novel Billion-Dollar Brain then made into a Hollywood film. Now we have the cloud, with server farms and the client–server model as quotidian: this text is being typed on a Chromebook.

File:Cloud-API-Logo.svg
Logo of Cloud API on Google Cloud Platform

The term Applications Programming Interface or API is 50 years old, and refers to a type of software library as well as the interface to its use. While a compiler is what you need to get high-level code executed by a mainframe, an API out in the cloud somewhere offers a chance to perform operations on a remote server. For example, the multifarious bots active on Wikipedia have owners who exploit the MediaWiki API.

APIs (called RESTful) that allow for the GET HTTP request are fundamental for what could colloquially be called "moving data around the Web"; from which Wikidata benefits 24/7. So the fact that the Wikidata SPARQL endpoint at query.wikidata.org has a RESTful API means that, in lay terms, Wikidata content can be GOT from it. The programming involved, besides the SPARQL language, could be in Python, younger by a few months than the Web.

Magic words, such as occur in fantasy stories, are wishful (rather than RESTful) solutions to gaining access. You may need to be a linguist to enter Ali Baba's cave or the western door of Moria (French in the case of "Open Sesame", in fact, and Sindarin being the respective languages). Talking to an API requires a bigger toolkit, which first means you have to recognise the tools in terms of what they can do. On the way to the wikt:impactful or polymathic modern handling of facts, one must perhaps take only tactful notice of tech's endemic problem with documentation, and absorb the insightful point that the code in APIs does articulate the customary procedures now in place on the cloud for getting information. As Owl explained to Winnie-the-Pooh, it tells you The Thing to Do.

Links

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MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 11:45, 28 March 2019 (UTC)

The Signpost: 31 March 2019

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.

Facto Post – Issue 23 – 30 April 2019

Facto Post – Issue 23 – 30 April 2019

The Editor is Charles Matthews, for ContentMine. Please leave feedback for him, on his User talk page.
To subscribe to Facto Post go to Wikipedia:Facto Post mailing list. For the ways to unsubscribe, see the footer.

Completely clouded?
Cloud computing logo

Talk of cloud computing draws a veil over hardware, but also, less obviously but more importantly, obscures such intellectual distinction as matters most in its use. Wikidata begins to allow tasks to be undertaken that were out of easy reach. The facility should not be taken as the real point.

Coming in from another angle, the "executive decision" is more glamorous; but the "administrative decision" should be admired for its command of facts. Think of the attitudes ad fontes, so prevalent here on Wikipedia as "can you give me a source for that?", and being prepared to deal with complicated analyses into specified subcases. Impatience expressed as a disdain for such pedantry is quite understandable, but neither dirty data nor false dichotomies are at all good to have around.

Issue 13 and Issue 21, respectively on WP:MEDRS and systematic reviews, talk about biomedical literature and computing tasks that would be of higher quality if they could be made more "administrative". For example, it is desirable that the decisions involved be consistent, explicable, and reproducible by non-experts from specified inputs.

What gets clouded out is not impossibly hard to understand. You do need to put together the insights of functional programming, which is a doctrinaire and purist but clearcut approach, with the practicality of office software. Loopless computation can be conceived of as a seamless forward march of spreadsheet columns, each determined by the content of previous ones. Very well: to do a backward audit, when now we are talking about Wikidata, we rely on integrity of data and its scrupulous sourcing: and clearcut case analyses. The MEDRS example forces attention on purge attempts such as Beall's list.

Links

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MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 11:27, 30 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 02:52, 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


Invitation to join the Fifteen Year Society

Dear Jfdwolff/Archive 38,

I'd like to extend a cordial invitation to you to join the Fifteen Year Society, an informal group for editors who've been participating in the Wikipedia project for fifteen years or more. ​

Best regards, Urhixidur (talk) 15:12, 9 May 2019 (UTC)

Notice

The file File:Doxparam chemical structure.png has been proposed for deletion because of the following concern:

unused, low-res, no obvious use

While all constructive contributions to Wikipedia are appreciated, pages may be deleted for any of several reasons.

You may prevent the proposed deletion by removing the {{proposed deletion/dated files}} notice, but please explain why in your edit summary or on the file's talk page.

Please consider addressing the issues raised. Removing {{proposed deletion/dated files}} will stop the proposed deletion process, but other deletion processes exist. In particular, the speedy deletion process can result in deletion without discussion, and files for discussion allows discussion to reach consensus for deletion.

This bot DID NOT nominate any file(s) for deletion; please refer to the page history of each individual file for details. Thanks, FastilyBot (talk) 01:00, 14 May 2019 (UTC)

Facto Post – Issue 24 – 17 May 2019

Facto Post – Issue 24 – 17 May 2019
Text mining display of noun phrases from the US Presidential Election 2012

The Editor is Charles Matthews, for ContentMine. Please leave feedback for him, on his User talk page.
To subscribe to Facto Post go to Wikipedia:Facto Post mailing list. For the ways to unsubscribe, see the footer.
Semantic Web and TDM – a ContentMine view

Two dozen issues, and this may be the last, a valediction at least for a while.

It's time for a two-year summation of ContentMine projects involving TDM (text and data mining).

Wikidata and now Structured Data on Commons represent the overlap of Wikimedia with the Semantic Web. This common ground is helping to convert an engineering concept into a movement. TDM generally has little enough connection with the Semantic Web, being instead in the orbit of machine learning which is no respecter of the semantic. Don't break a taboo by asking bots "and what do you mean by that?"

The ScienceSource project innovates in TDM, by storing its text mining results in a Wikibase site. It strives for compliance of its fact mining, on drug treatments of diseases, with an automated form of the relevant Wikipedia referencing guideline MEDRS. Where WikiFactMine set up an API for reuse of its results, ScienceSource has a SPARQL query service, with look-and-feel exactly that of Wikidata's at query.wikidata.org. It also now has a custom front end, and its content can be federated, in other words used in data mashups: it is one of over 50 sites that can federate with Wikidata.

The human factor comes to bear through the front end, which combines a link to the HTML version of a paper, text mining results organised in drug and disease columns, and a SPARQL display of nearby drug and disease terms. Much software to develop and explain, so little time! Rather than telling the tale, Facto Post brings you ScienceSource links, starting from the how-to video, lower right.

ScienceSourceReview, introductory video: but you need run it from the original upload file on Commons
Links for participation

The review tool requires a log in on sciencesource.wmflabs.org, and an OAuth permission (bottom of a review page) to operate. It can be used in simple and more advanced workflows. Examples of queries for the latter are at d:Wikidata_talk:ScienceSource project/Queries#SS_disease_list and d:Wikidata_talk:ScienceSource_project/Queries#NDF-RT issue.

Please be aware that this is a research project in development, and may have outages for planned maintenance. That will apply for the next few days, at least. The ScienceSource wiki main page carries information on practical matters. Email is not enabled on the wiki: use site mail here to Charles Matthews in case of difficulty, or if you need support. Further explanatory videos will be put into commons:Category:ContentMine videos.


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MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 18:52, 17 May 2019 (UTC)

Rheumatoid arthritis

Dear Jfdwolff,

"NBME is not an authoritative source on this"

- I believe they are an authoritative source on this in the united states. They mark the board exams. They control who gets to become a doctor. I believe that they must therefore be an authoritative source in medicine in order to validate physicians. If they are not considered an authoritative source then we cannot trust american doctors because they would be getting approved by an organization that doesn't know what they are doing.

"needs an academic source"

- I agree, my reference to my source comes from a practice exam question that I did. I think it would be great if the NBME made public all of their data that is used in questions.

"this paragraph already discusses type III hypersensitivity"

- Yes however it does not provide the reader with absolute certainty on what the correct answer should be on an exam. As a medical student, there needs to be a resource that provides absolute certainty regarding literature and I believe Wikipedia can be the open source solution to that need. Having multiple sources, especially the ones that mark the board exams will help the reader come to the correct answer when it is needed most (on the board exams). This does raise an even deeper question however. Does having a PhD in rheumatology mean that you'll provide better care than someone who has more experience working with patients? Probably not. Ultimately I would like to see the eradication of the NBME and all exams in all areas of life that require hands on abilities vs purely mental ability.

I believe that the rheumatoid arthritis article needs to include what the NBME wants for completeness sake. I will find a better reference hopefully that includes rheumatoid as a Type III HS, however I will be including the fact that the NBME also believes this. The fact that the NBME wants you to put this answer on tests is important information for american students to know and is therefore not irrelevant information, unless we consider american medical students irrelevant. I would be glad to discuss this with you and the NBME as I am not a fan of the NBME or exams in general.

Thank you,

Frozenranger (talk) 04:26, 17 May 2019 (UTC)

@Frozenranger: You'd better start a discussion on Talk:Rheumatoid arthritis so other editors can express their view. JFW | T@lk 10:15, 19 May 2019 (UTC)

Mayday mayday

Hi JD, you probably don't remember me but we interacted a few times around a million years ago. What with you being a doc and all, I thought of you immediately when I saw a bit of a train-wreck developing at Scar and concerning the contributions of Bruce.m.philp666]. It is the usual thing: expert rocks up, contributes, doesn't get how it works, gets the treatment. I can't quite bear to watch as I fear that I know how it ends despite everyone's good faith efforts. If you had a moment to look in I would be massively grateful (bribery, corruption etc all cheerfully offered) as you might be able to save the situation. However, I know that you are busy and I do not want to add more pressure to the joys of NHS and other life, so please don't worry if you can't make it. Thanks and all good wishes DBaK (talk) 17:57, 20 May 2019 (UTC)

@DisillusionedBitterAndKnackered: Thanks for the heads up. I have left a message on prof's talk page. JFW | T@lk 20:24, 20 May 2019 (UTC)
Thank you so much. I greatly appreciate it. Cheers DBaK (talk) 21:11, 20 May 2019 (UTC)
Ermmm - this is either a coincidence (assuming GF), or it's another policy someone doesn't quite get: User:Burnsurgeonuk - if it's the same person then we have a potential train wreck and WP embarrassment. Unless it doesn't continue and/or it is not the same person ... I'm on a self-enforced break so I'm out of here, sorry. Good luck! Cheers 2A01:4C8:103C:91DE:4970:B71A:F3CC:8967 (talk) 17:31, 23 May 2019 (UTC)

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


Membership renewal

You have been a member of Wiki Project Med Foundation (WPMEDF) in the past. Your membership, however, appears to have expired. As such this is a friendly reminder encouraging you to officially rejoin WPMEDF. There are no associated costs. Membership gives you the right to vote in elections for the board. The current membership round ends in 2020.


Thanks again :-) The team at Wiki Project Med Foundation---Avicenno (talk) 05:34, 11 June 2019 (UTC)

Hi. We're into the last five days of the Women in Red World Contest. There's a new bonus prize of $200 worth of books of your choice to win for creating the most new women biographies between 0:00 on the 26th and 23:59 on 30th November. If you've been contributing to the contest, thank you for your support, we've produced over 2000 articles. If you haven't contributed yet, we would appreciate you taking the time to add entries to our articles achievements list by the end of the month. Thank you, and if participating, good luck with the finale!

This can be archived. JFW | T@lk 21:35, 11 June 2019 (UTC)

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


Skin turgor listed at Redirects for discussion

An editor has asked for a discussion to address the redirect Skin turgor. Since you had some involvement with the Skin turgor redirect, you might want to participate in the redirect discussion if you wish to do so. Steel1943 (talk) 06:41, 2 July 2019 (UTC)

Pro Gay themed Classical Talmudical and Torah sages?

Hi Dr. Wolf, please see: Talk:Timeline of LGBT Jewish history#Allegations that Torah true classical scholars supported and implied pro gay themes and memes is ludicrous. What do you say? IZAK (talk) 23:37, 2 July 2019 (UTC)

Notice

The article Allan Ropper has been proposed for deletion because it appears to have no references. Under Wikipedia policy, this biography of a living person will be deleted after seven days unless it has at least one reference to a reliable source that directly supports material in the article.

If you created the article, please don't be offended. Instead, consider improving the article. For help on inserting references, see Referencing for beginners, or ask at the help desk. Once you have provided at least one reliable source, you may remove the {{prod blp/dated}} tag. Please do not remove the tag unless the article is sourced. If you cannot provide such a source within seven days, the article may be deleted, but you can request that it be undeleted when you are ready to add one. Wgolf (talk) 03:10, 5 July 2019 (UTC)

Wgolf Thanks for the heads up. This guy is easily verifiable, notable and passes the "professor test". His writings are highly cited including on Wikipedia itself. I have now added a reference and contested the PROD. More to come when I find time to expand it a bit more. JFW | T@lk 06:25, 5 July 2019 (UTC)

Reverts on COPD

Hello Jdwolff - I don't understand your reverts of info on Genetics section of COPD page - you say one is primary but is linked to NHLBI page and the other is clearly linked and described on Clinical trials page - it is ongoing why not mention it? There is another link that I was going to enter relevant to lung anatomy and branch variations from Science titled COPD risk:Clues from the tree branches. For future editing is material from NHLBI not acceptable? Thank you --Iztwoz (talk) 09:45, 7 July 2019 (UTC)

Iztwoz Perhaps we should be discussing this on the talk page, as per WP:BRD.
Ongoing trials are generally not notable in medicine articles, unless the results are very widely anticipated to be significantly practice-changing. Generally speaking a secondary source is required to demonstrate this.
As for the lung anatomy study, it requires a proper secondary source and not a press release. JFW | T@lk 09:49, 7 July 2019 (UTC)

Categorization question

Hi, please see the discussion at Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Log/2019 July 7#Category:New Christians (conversos) that is trying to determine how best to classify Conversos/Marranos/Anusim. New Christians or Crypto-Jews or both. Your WP:EXPERT input would help the discussion. Thanks, IZAK (talk) 22:54, 10 July 2019 (UTC)

The Signpost: 31 July 2019

Notice

The file File:Lip telangiectases in HHT.jpg has been proposed for deletion because of the following concern:

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While all constructive contributions to Wikipedia are appreciated, pages may be deleted for any of several reasons.

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This bot DID NOT nominate any file(s) for deletion; please refer to the page history of each individual file for details. Thanks, FastilyBot (talk) 01:00, 2 August 2019 (UTC)

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.


Today's Wikipedian 10 years ago

Awesome
Ten years!

--Gerda Arendt (talk) 05:23, 4 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


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.

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) 00:03, 19 November 2019 (UTC)

The Signpost: 29 November 2019

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


Season's Greetings!


Faithful friends who are dear to us
... gather near to us once more.

May your heart be light

and your troubles out of sight,

now and in the New Year.

SandyGeorgia (Talk) 02:15, 23 December 2019 (UTC)

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

Administrators' newsletter – February 2020

News and updates for administrators from the past month (January 2020).

Guideline and policy news

  • Following a request for comment, partial blocks are now enabled on the English Wikipedia. This functionality allows administrators to block users from editing specific pages or namespaces rather than the entire site. A draft policy is being workshopped at Wikipedia:Partial blocks.
  • The request for comment seeking the community's sentiment for a binding desysop procedure closed with wide-spread support for an alternative desysoping procedure based on community input. No proposed process received consensus.

Technical news

  • Twinkle now supports partial blocking. There is a small checkbox that toggles the "partial" status for both blocks and templating. There is currently one template: {{uw-pblock}}.
  • When trying to move a page, if the target title already exists then a warning message is shown. The warning message will now include a link to the target title. [1]

Arbitration

  • Following a recent arbitration case, the Arbitration Committee reminded administrators that checkuser and oversight blocks must not be reversed or modified without prior consultation with the checkuser or oversighter who placed the block, the respective functionary team, or the Arbitration Committee.

Miscellaneous



Shivas Ha'amim

Hi Dr. Wolff. I just started to write an article about Shivas Ha'amim and it was just a stub when it was suddenly moved to Draft:Seven Nations (Bible). Can you help out. Thanks. IZAK (talk) 00:42, 3 February 2020 (UTC)

Hi @IZAK:, looks like the problem has been solved by DGG. JFW | T@lk 14:35, 3 February 2020 (UTC)

Happy First Edit Day!

Happy First Edit Day, Jfdwolff, from the Wikipedia Birthday Committee! Have a great day! Bobherry Talk Edits 02:49, 24 February 2020 (UTC)

Happy First Edit Day!

Happy First Edit Day, Jfdwolff, from the Wikipedia Birthday Committee! Have a great day! CAPTAIN RAJU(T) 16:55, 24 February 2020 (UTC)

The Signpost: 1 March 2020

Administrators' newsletter – March 2020

News and updates for administrators from the past month (February 2020).

Guideline and policy news

  • Following an RfC, the blocking policy was changed to state that sysops must not undo or alter CheckUser or Oversight blocks, rather than should not.
  • A request for comment confirmed that sandboxes of established but inactive editors may not be blanked due solely to inactivity.

Technical news

  • Following a discussion, Twinkle's default CSD behavior will soon change, most likely this week. After the change, Twinkle will default to "tagging mode" if there is no CSD tag present, and default to "deletion mode" if there is a CSD tag present. You will be able to always default to "deletion mode" (the current behavior) using your Twinkle preferences.

Miscellaneous



Thank you for being one of Wikipedia's top medical contributors!

please help translate this message into your local language via meta
The 2019 Cure Award
In 2019 you were one of the top ~300 medical editors across any language of Wikipedia. Thank you from Wiki Project Med for helping bring free, complete, accurate, up-to-date health information to the public. We really appreciate you and the vital work you do! Wiki Project Med Foundation is a thematic organization whose mission is to improve our health content. Consider joining here, there are no associated costs.

Thanks again :-) -- Doc James along with the rest of the team at Wiki Project Med Foundation 18:35, 5 March 2020 (UTC)

Notice

The file File:Thiopurine methyltransferase.png has been proposed for deletion because of the following concern:

unused, low-res, no obvious use

While all constructive contributions to Wikipedia are appreciated, pages may be deleted for any of several reasons.

You may prevent the proposed deletion by removing the {{proposed deletion/dated files}} notice, but please explain why in your edit summary or on the file's talk page.

Please consider addressing the issues raised. Removing {{proposed deletion/dated files}} will stop the proposed deletion process, but other deletion processes exist. In particular, the speedy deletion process can result in deletion without discussion, and files for discussion allows discussion to reach consensus for deletion.

This bot DID NOT nominate any file(s) for deletion; please refer to the page history of each individual file for details. Thanks, FastilyBot (talk) 01:00, 15 March 2020 (UTC)

The Signpost: 29 March 2020

Administrators' newsletter – April 2020

News and updates for administrators from the past month (March 2020).

Guideline and policy news

  • There is an ongoing request for comment to streamline the source deprecation and blacklisting process.

Technical news

Arbitration

Miscellaneous

  • The WMF has begun a pilot report of the pages most visited through various social media platforms to help with anti-vandalism and anti-disinformation efforts. The report is updated daily and will be available through the end of May.

The Signpost: 26 April 2020

Administrators' newsletter – May 2020

News and updates for administrators from the past month (April 2020).

Administrator changes

removed GnangarraKaisershatnerMalcolmxl5

CheckUser changes

readded Callanecc

Oversight changes

readded HJ Mitchell

Guideline and policy news

Technical news

Miscellaneous


The Signpost: 31 May 2020

Administrators' newsletter – June 2020

News and updates for administrators from the past month (May 2020).

Administrator changes

added CaptainEekCreffettCwmhiraeth
removed Anna FrodesiakBuckshot06RonhjonesSQL

CheckUser changes

removed SQL

Guideline and policy news

Arbitration

  • A motion was passed to enact a 500/30 restriction on articles related to the history of Jews and antisemitism in Poland during World War II (1933–45), including the Holocaust in Poland. Article talk pages where disruption occurs may also be managed with the stated restriction.

Controversial requested move of Jews

Hi Dr. Wolff, hope all goes well. Please take a look at Talk:History of the Jews in Abkhazia#Requested move 5 June 2020. Thank you. IZAK (talk) 19:17, 5 June 2020 (UTC)

FAR

Would you please take a look at Wikipedia talk:Featured article review/Huntington's disease/archive1? WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:22, 6 June 2020 (UTC)

The Signpost: 28 June 2020

Administrators' newsletter – July 2020

News and updates for administrators from the past month (June 2020).

Guideline and policy news

Technical news

Arbitration


Nomination for merging of Template:OMIM2

Template:OMIM2 has been nominated for merging with Template:OMIM. You are invited to comment on the discussion at the template's entry on the Templates for discussion page. Thank you. Tom (LT) (talk) 09:32, 20 July 2020 (UTC)

Parkinson's FAR

I have nominated Parkinson's disease for a featured article review here. Please join the discussion on whether this article meets featured article criteria. Articles are typically reviewed for two weeks. If substantial concerns are not addressed during the review period, the article will be moved to the Featured Article Removal Candidates list for a further period, where editors may declare "Keep" or "Delist" the article's featured status. The instructions for the review process are here. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 18:45, 29 July 2020 (UTC)

Administrators' newsletter – August 2020

News and updates for administrators from the past month (July 2020).

Administrator changes

added Red Phoenix
readded EuryalusSQL
removed JujutacularMonty845RettetastMadchester

Oversight changes

readded GB fan
removed KeeganOpabinia regalisPremeditated Chaos

Guideline and policy news


The Signpost: 2 August 2020

You might wanna weigh in as this article being buffed for FAC. I have raised some concerns at Talk:Complete_blood_count#Comments_from_Cas_Liber_whose_ears_were_burning after being pinged. You probably order a few more CBCs than I do....Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 21:29, 28 June 2020 (UTC)

@Casliber: Sorry I haven't had time yet. But will have a look at some point! JFW | T@lk 14:51, 5 July 2020 (UTC)
Thanks for offering to help! Things are starting to move quickly - I've been working on the article quite a bit over the past month or so, and Sandy's said it's ready for FAC, but I would like to get as many eyes on it as possible before I take the plunge. Would appreciate your expertise... Thanks, Spicy (talk) 00:57, 5 August 2020 (UTC)

Hi, Jfw; Spicy may feel reluctant to ping you, so a reminder from me to revisit Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/Complete blood count/archive1 :) Once you are satisfied, I am a Support.

Also, you haven't signed up for Wikipedia:WikiProject Medicine/Newsletter ... a new endeavor by Ajpolino, which (among other things) is fueling the re-invigoration of "your" project. All the best, SandyGeorgia (Talk) 14:42, 17 August 2020 (UTC)

Expertscape

Hello Dr. de Wolff,

We would like to have Expertscape included as a listing in Wikipedia, as many of the experts that we profile are often listed and will refer to the website in their pages. That said, we have no ability when it comes to submitting a page for review, but have been advised to invite reviewers. Would you be able to review and advise us on our submission, and perhaps encourage other WikiMedicine reviewers to weigh in?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Draft:Expertscape

We view ourselves as a more objective alternative to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._News_%26_World_Report_Best_Hospitals_Rankings, as our expert directory is driven entirely by the data in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PubMed. We recognize that there are limitations to using only publications, which we recognize here https://expertscape.com/help/gen_limitations, but it has proven to be an excellent objective resource for patients and referring physicians. (And it is evidently used extensively for grant applications and other recognition.)

Any advice or assistance would be appreciated.

Brendan B4chex11 (talk) 14:47, 25 August 2020 (UTC)

@B4chex11: Probably best if you put this on WT:MED as I am unfamiliar with the topic. JFW | T@lk 14:49, 25 August 2020 (UTC)

Will do that. Thank you. B4chex11 (talk) 14:54, 25 August 2020 (UTC)

The Signpost: 30 August 2020

Administrators' newsletter – September 2020

News and updates for administrators from the past month (August 2020).

Administrator changes

added Eddie891
removed AngelaJcw69Just ChillingPhilg88Viajero

CheckUser changes

readded SQL

Guideline and policy news

Arbitration


WikiProject Medicine Newsletter – September 2020

Issue 4—September 2020


WikiProject Medicine Newsletter


Greetings! A relatively quiet month yields a shorter newsletter. The featured section is taking the month off, but please continue to drop comments and ideas at the newsletter talk page. Here is what's happening this month:

Newly recognized content

Willis J. Potts nom. Larry Hockett, reviewed by Ajpolino
Niacin nom. David notMD, reviewed by Ajpolino
Prostate nom. Tom (LT), reviewed by Dunkleosteus77
Ureter nom. Tom (LT), reviewed by Dunkeosteus77






Nominated for review

Complete blood count nom. Spicy
Parkinson's disease at featured article review. Discussion here
Anatomical terms of location nom. Tom (LT)
Antibiotic sensitivity testing nom. Tom (LT), under review by Larry Hockett
Endell Street Military Hospital nom. G. Moore and Dormskirk
Marie Wittman nom. Pi.1415926535, under review by The Most Comfortable Chair
Horace Smithy nom. Larry Hockett
Charles Bingham Penrose nom. Larry Hockett
Louise Bourgeois Boursier nom. Doug Coldwell
Injector pen nom. Berchanhimez

News from around the site

  • A few restrictions on signatures are being gently phased in to make signatures consistently machine-identifiable. This will enable the development of new talk page tools (and fix some holes in our current tools). Affected editors (~ 900 at English Wikipedia) will be contacted. You can see if you're on the naughty list here.

Discussions of interest

For a list of ongoing discussions in WP:MED-tagged articles, see Wikipedia:WikiProject Medicine/Discussions
Also, a reminder to see Article Alerts for a list of medicine-related AfDs, CfDs, merge discussions, and more!

Discuss this issue

You are receiving this because you added your name to the WikiProject Medicine mailing list. If you no longer wish to receive the newsletter, please remove your name.

Ajpolino (talk) 02:38, 3 September 2020 (UTC)

The Signpost: 27 September 2020

The Signpost: 27 September 2020

Administrators' newsletter – September 2020

News and updates for administrators from the past month (September 2020).

Administrator changes

added AjpolinoLuK3
readded Jackmcbarn
removed Ad OrientemHarejLidLomnMentoz86Oliver PereiraXJaM
renamed There'sNoTimeTheresNoTime

Guideline and policy news

Technical news

Arbitration

Miscellaneous


WikiProject Medicine Newsletter - October 2020

Issue 5—October 2020


WikiProject Medicine Newsletter


Greetings! This month celebrates our second (I think) new medicine FA in 2020, a handful of newly reviewed GAs, and of course another month without major on-wiki disaster. The newsletter's featured section is off again, but please continue to drop comments and ideas at the newsletter talk page. Here is what's new this month:

Newly recognized content

Complete blood count nom. Spicy, his first FA!
Beulah Ream Allen nom. SusunW, reviewed by Esculenta
Antibiotic sensitivity testing nom. Tom (LT), reviewed by Larry Hockett and Spicy
Marie Wittman nom. Pi.1415926535, reviewed by The Most Comfortable Chair
Injector pen nom. Berchanhimez, reviewed by Tom (LT)









Nominated for review

Parkinson's disease now a featured article removal candidate. Discussion here
Anatomical terms of location nom. Tom (LT), under review by ArnabSaha
Endell Street Military Hospital nom. G. Moore and Dormskirk, under review by Amitchell125
Horace Smithy nom. Larry Hockett
Charles Bingham Penrose nom. Larry Hockett
Louise Boursier nom. Doug Coldwell
Ulcerative colitis nom. Rytyho usa, under review by Tom (LT)
Transmission of COVID-19 nom. Investigatory
Seminal vesicles nom. Tom (LT)
Vitamin K nom. David notMD
Intravenous therapy nom. Berchanhimez
Intramuscular injection nom. Berchanhimez
Homeopathy nom. Aircorn

News from around the site

Discussions of interest

For a list of ongoing discussions in WP:MED-tagged articles, see Wikipedia:WikiProject Medicine/Discussions
Also, a reminder to see Article Alerts for a list of medicine-related AfDs, CfDs, merge discussions, and more!

Discuss this issue

You are receiving this because you added your name to the WikiProject Medicine mailing list. If you no longer wish to receive the newsletter, please remove your name.

Ajpolino (talk) 00:54, 4 October 2020 (UTC)

Multiple sclerosis Featured article review

I have nominated Multiple sclerosis for a featured article review here. Please join the discussion on whether this article meets featured article criteria. Articles are typically reviewed for two weeks. If substantial concerns are not addressed during the review period, the article will be moved to the Featured Article Removal Candidates list for a further period, where editors may declare "Keep" or "Delist" the article's featured status. The instructions for the review process are here. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 14:39, 9 October 2020 (UTC)

October harvest

thank you --Gerda Arendt (talk) 23:06, 30 October 2020 (UTC)

Administrators' newsletter – November 2020

News and updates for administrators from the past month (October 2020).

Guideline and policy news

Technical news

Arbitration

Miscellaneous


The Signpost: 1 November 2020

WP:MED Newsletter - November 2020

Issue 6—November 2020


WikiProject Medicine Newsletter


Greetings. This month marks the return of the project's long-dormant collaboration of the month! With some luck and effort, perhaps we can keep it going. I hope you're all finding ways to remain sane during another tumultuous month. Ready or not, here is what's happening around the project:

Newly recognized content

Seminal vesicles nom. Tom (LT), reviewed by Berchanhimez
Endell Street Military Hospital nom. G. Moore and Dormskirk, reviewed by Amitchell125
Horace Smithy nom. Larry Hockett, reviewed by Ajpolino
UPMC Children's Hospital of Pittsburgh nom. Andrew nyr, reviewed by HickoryOughtShirt?4
Intravenous therapy nom. Berchanhimez, reviewed by Tom (LT)
Vitamin K nom. David notMD, reviewed by Tom (LT)
Homeopathy nom. Aircorn, review by Berchanhimez

Nominated for review

Parkinson's disease now a featured article removal candidate. Discussion here
Alzheimer's disease Notice of impending featured article review is at the talk page. Anatomical terms of location nom. Tom (LT), under review by ArnabSaha and Aircorn
Charles Bingham Penrose nom. Larry Hockett
Louise Boursier nom. Doug Coldwell
Intramuscular injection nom. Berchanhimez
Blood culture nom. Spicy
Late onset congenital adrenal hyperplasia nom. Maxim Masiutin

News from around the site

Discussions of interest

For a list of ongoing discussions in WP:MED-tagged articles, see Wikipedia:WikiProject Medicine/Discussions
Also, a reminder to see Article Alerts for a list of medicine-related AfDs, CfDs, merge discussions, and more!

Discuss this issue

You are receiving this because you added your name to the WikiProject Medicine mailing list. If you no longer wish to receive the newsletter, please remove your name.

Ajpolino (talk) 20:56, 5 November 2020 (UTC)

ArbCom 2020 Elections voter message

Hello! Voting in the 2020 Arbitration Committee elections is now open until 23:59 (UTC) on Monday, 7 December 2020. 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.

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The Signpost: 29 November 2020

Administrators' newsletter – December 2020

News and updates for administrators from the past month (November 2020).

Administrator changes

removed AndrwscAnetodeGoldenRingJzGLinguistAtLargeNehrams2020

Interface administrator changes

added Izno

Guideline and policy news

Technical news

Arbitration


WikiProject Medicine Newsletter - December 2020

Issue 7—December 2020


WikiProject Medicine Newsletter


Hello. I hope this newsletter finds you well. For those struggling to focus on writing articles during these tumultuous times, you are not alone. For those stuck at home with more time and energy to dedicate to the encyclopedia, all the more power to you. There is – as always – lots to do. Here is what's happening around the project:

Newly recognized content

Intramuscular injection nom. Berchanhimez, reviewed by Bibeyjj














Nominated for review

Buruli ulcer nom. Ajpolino
Anatomical terms of location nom. Tom (LT), under review by ArnabSaha and Aircorn
Charles Bingham Penrose nom. Larry Hockett
Louise Boursier nom. Doug Coldwell
Blood culture nom. Spicy
Late onset congenital adrenal hyperplasia nom. Maxim Masiutin
Friedreich's ataxia nom. Akrasia25
Fish allergy nom. David notMD, under review by Bibeyjj
Kivu Ebola epidemic nom. Ozzie10aaaa
UPMC Presbyterian nom. Andrew nyr
Crown (anatomy) nom. Bibeyjj
Alzheimer's disease Notice of impending featured article review at talk.
Management of multiple sclerosis Notice of impending FAR at talk.
Major depressive disorder Notice of impending FAR at talk.

News from around the site

Discussions of interest

For a list of ongoing discussions in WP:MED-tagged articles, see Wikipedia:WikiProject Medicine/Discussions
Also, a reminder to see Article Alerts for a list of medicine-related AfDs, CfDs, merge discussions, and more!

A WP:MED editor pulls yet another unsourced stub from the pile, thrilled by its immense potential.

Backlog of the month
This month I'm trying out a new element of the newsletter – a backlog of the month. The WikiProject Medicine template is on the talk page of 44,944 articles, of which 18,111 have some kind of maintenance tag on them, indicating problems large or small. Each month, I'll highlight some small task to get you out of your normal editing focus and chip away at the project's massive maintenance backlogs. I'll aim for tasks that can be worked on in small chunks, perhaps on days when you can't focus on big problems, or have 15 minutes to burn at your computer.

The first backlog of the month will be the 410 medicine articles that cite no sources. These tend to be lower-traffic topics. Some just need verification that the topic actually exists, along with a quick reference. Others are best redirected to more substantial pages, or even brought to AfD. Feel free to scroll through the list for topics that interest you, or just start at the top. This feature will last as long as folks are interested enough to engage with it. If you see backlogs that would be a good fit, post them here. Thanks all, and happy referencing!

Discuss this issue

You are receiving this because you added your name to the WikiProject Medicine mailing list. If you no longer wish to receive the newsletter, please remove your name.

Ajpolino (talk) 01:34, 3 December 2020 (UTC)

Greetings of the season

Happy holidays
Dear Jacob,

For you and all your loved ones,

"Let there be mercy".


Wishing you health,
peace and happiness
this holiday season and
in the coming year.

SandyGeorgia (Talk) 00:09, 25 December 2020 (UTC)