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Administrators' newsletter - February 2017

News and updates for administrators from the past month (January 2017). This first issue is being sent out to all administrators, if you wish to keep receiving it please subscribe. Your feedback is welcomed.

Administrator changes

NinjaRobotPirate • Schwede66 • K6ka • Ealdgyth • Ferret • Cyberpower678 • Mz7 • Primefac • Dodger67
Briangotts • JeremyA • BU Rob13

Guideline and policy news

Technical news

  • When performing some administrative actions the reason field briefly gave suggestions as text was typed. This change has since been reverted so that issues with the implementation can be addressed. (T34950)
  • Following the latest RfC concluding that Pending Changes 2 should not be used on the English Wikipedia, an RfC closed with consensus to remove the options for using it from the page protection interface, a change which has now been made. (T156448)
  • The Foundation has announced a new community health initiative to combat harassment. This should bring numerous improvements to tools for admins and CheckUsers in 2017.

Arbitration

Obituaries

  • JohnCD (John Cameron Deas) passed away on 30 December 2016. John began editing Wikipedia seriously during 2007 and became an administrator in November 2009.
Discuss this newsletter • Subscribe • Archive

13:37, 1 February 2017 (UTC)

February 15: WikiWednesday Salon and Skill-Share NYC

Wednesday February 15, 7pm: WikiWednesday Salon and Skill-Share NYC

You are invited to join the Wikimedia NYC community for our monthly "WikiWednesday" evening salon (7-9pm) and knowledge-sharing workshop at Babycastles gallery by 14th Street / Union Square in Manhattan.

Featuring special guest presentations on WikiProject La Guardia and Wagner Archives, WikiProject Metropolitan Museum of Art, Wiki Loves the Dominican Republic, and more.

We will include a look at the organization and planning for our chapter, and expanding volunteer roles for both regular Wikipedia editors and new participants.

We will also follow up on plans for recent and upcoming edit-a-thons, and other outreach activities.

We welcome the participation of our friends from the Free Culture movement and from all educational and cultural institutions interested in developing free knowledge projects.

After the main meeting, pizza/chicken/vegetables and refreshments and video games in the gallery!

7:00pm - 9:00 pm at Babycastles gallery, 137 West 14th Street

We especially encourage folks to add your 5-minute lightning talks to our roster, and otherwise join in the "open space" experience! Newcomers are very welcome! Bring your friends and colleagues! --Pharos (talk) 22:17, 9 February 2017 (UTC)

P.S. Get ready now for Black WikiHistory Month Weekend:

(You can subscribe/unsubscribe from future notifications for NYC-area events by adding or removing your name from this list.)

Admins outing editors

The edits must be suppressed, including the checkuser results. QuackGuru (talk) 18:11, 10 February 2017 (UTC)

@QuackGuru: You effectively undermined any chance of being able to do this when you went to multiple places and announced that this had occurred. It should have be raised privately or at the appropriate venue and certainly not on high traffic policy talk pages or around on user talk pages of prominent editors. As a result, suppressing any trace of this information involves edits made by dozens of other editors and lengthy discussions. It is no longer a realistic possibility without drawing even more attention to the situation. Mkdw talk 01:03, 11 February 2017 (UTC)
Agree with Mkdw. In addition, and noting that this seems an odd venue for this discussion - @QuackGuru: the edits don't meet the oversight criteria (listed here). They may well be a breach of privacy and/or demonstrate a disregard of WP:VALIDALT but it has not been credibly suggested that either pseudonym is "personal information" in the terms of the oversight policy, and the edits certainly don't fit within any of the other criteria.
If you disagree, then the best place to raise this is via an email to the oversight team where the issue can be given broader consideration without compounding any privacy concern. -- Euryalus (talk) 01:21, 11 February 2017 (UTC)

You deserve this

The Checkuser's Barnstar
I'm not giving you this barnstar because of the sockpuppets that you've blocked as a checkuser; rather, I award you this barnstar because you've unblocked an editor with an undisclosed alternate account due to privacy concerns who quite clearly had not engaged in any inappropriate uses of alternative accounts to violate the socking policy. I'm relieved that there are people like you among the small group of arbitrators and checkusers who are willing to overturn an unjustified block by another checkuser.
I really can't emphasize enough how much I appreciate you for dissenting from an unfair/unjust decision of another checkuser (as opposed to engage in groupthink) as well as your actions in this particular case (I'm not going to link to it for the sake of the privacy of the person involved).
Thanks again. Seppi333 (Insert 2¢) 21:51, 10 February 2017 (UTC)
And if Seppi hadn't beaten me to it, I would have said much the same thing. (Actually, I wouldn't want to be too hard on the blocking checkuser, though. The blockee made a mistake, and the blocker made a mistake. People make mistakes, often in good faith.) --Tryptofish (talk) 01:17, 11 February 2017 (UTC)
@Seppi333 and Tryptofish: Thank you both. Seppi333, thanks again for the kind words, but I don't believe that one checkuser (or administrator) disagreeing with another's decision on review is nearly so rare as you seem to think. The whole unblock-review process exists precisely for that reason; it would be pointless if it always resulted in rubber-stamp agreement with the blocking admin. And if you still don't believe that admins disagree constantly, I sentence you to spend an hour a day for the next week reading through the archives of AN and ANI. Best regards, Newyorkbrad (talk) 18:39, 11 February 2017 (UTC)

WP:TIDYBOT and PRETTYBOT

...it occurs to me[1] that the word "cosmetic" as used in the policy is misleading... paradoxically [defined] as one that does not affect the appearance of the output page, but only the markup page.

  • NYB, there is a historical reason that it is referred to as WP:COSMETICBOT rather than WP:WIKIMARKUPTIDYBOT or the seemingly-more-fathomable WP:CHANGESWHICHCHANGENOTHINGBOT. Consider the tools such as html tidy (fix invalid HTML 'code'), CSSTidy (fix/reformat/compress CSS 'code'), and the much older c.1967+ pretty printer ("any of various stylistic formatting conventions to text files, such as source code, markup, and similar kinds of content"). The article continues: "Proper code formatting makes it easier to read and understand. Different programmers often prefer different styles of formatting, such as the use of code indentation and whitespace or positioning of braces. A code formatter converts source code from one format style to another." Emphasis added!  :-)
  • Yobot is, among many other tasks, a wiki-markup-pretty-printer-and-code-formatter, which applies specific coding conventions. These are used in almost all large programming projects, with various degrees of draconian-ism and various degrees of tool support (aka "bots") which coercively enforce the conventions. There are heated discussions amongst programmers and other people that utilize the end result of their programming, around the best coding conventions, the need for any coding conventions, whether the coding conventions improve the software or not, whether the coding conventions improve the bottom line or not, and so on. See also, browser wars, desktop wars, unix wars, editor wars, and to some degree also endianness and Blu-Ray vs. HD DVD. In the wikipedia context, compare with WP:EDITWAR and to some degree the pathological version thereof, WP:HALLOFLAME.
  • Specifically, in the enWiki case, Yobot converts valid markup which produces working pages, into equally valid markup which produces the same (or nearly the same) equally valid working webpage, from the readership's perspective... but makes the wiki-markup Look Bettah cosmetically/aesthetically, according to some programmer-oriented ideal of wiki-markup-beautification. Hence: cosmetic change, a change which makes the wiki-markup look aesthetically better, but otherwise does not have appreciable impact on the project. Removal of reader-invisible underscores, is such a cosmetic change, as is straight-de-duplication of wikilinks, although the latter possibly has some infinitesimal server-kitteh-performance-benefit.
  • The most prickly topic of the arbcase, conversion from a redirect-template-name, to the canonical name of the 'main' template (i.e. the name selected as canonical by the template devs and bot devs at the time!) is another case where the readership notices no difference, although there *could* be a significant boost to pageview-pageload-performance if thousand or millions of such changes were implemented, is still a pretty-printing coding-convention sort of thing at heart. All such things, are about making changes which impact editors and their brains, especially template-devs and bot-devs who deal with templates all day long and don't memorize every redirect -- quite literally, template-redirect-bypass-surgery operations like Yobot's, are a benign sort of "brainwashing" which allows template devs to just concentrate on knowing what the main canonically-named template does, and cleanse their brains of non-canonical redirect-names.
  • Whether the use of 'pretty-printing' terminology by white males in the 1960s mainframe and engineering workstation era, as a means of bot-enforced groupthink slash tech-oriented speech correctness, is indicative of sexism or genderism of any sort, is a subject on which I shall remain silent, as too tangential. Before my maximized-astonishment-wikilinks and exponentially mixed metaphors, explaining the beauty-n-hygiene related aspects of cosmetic edits, get too far off the beaten track and lost in the woods thus thereby unable to see the forest for the trees, I will remain, 47.222.203.135 (talk) 17:09, 11 February 2017 (UTC)
Thank you for the background. To respond to just one of your points, I understand that a "cosmetic edit" makes a cosmetic-only (or "formal") change to the markup page but with no visible (or audible) effect on the output page. The paradox, such as it is, is that we are defining a "cosmetic edit" primarily by the effects it does not have rather than effects it does have. This confused me when I first read through the request for arbitration, and while I've long since figured it out for myself, my question was whether it might confuse others as well. Regards, Newyorkbrad (talk) 18:35, 11 February 2017 (UTC)
  • It is a confusing term, absolutely. That said, the reason I posted the background stuff here, was because I saw you suggesting that maybe an alternative term would more precisely describe the intended class-of-edits. You are wrong methinks  :-)
  • Saying 'cosmetic' is confusing-bordering-on-paradoxical, yes, but I believe it will be nigh-impossible to get the terminology truly correct, not least because there are at least three kinds of output-stuff which matters to the readership: screenreader output for the vision-impaired (which keys primarily off raw HTML output), mobile-view output for smartphones and tablets and other small-screen devices (I've made edits which are "cosmetic" to PC-based readership but crucial to mobile-based readership), and the traditional en.wikipedia.org/wiki webpages (which *can* also at the individual reader's option be viewed on a tablet/smartphone... but is only by default offered to larger-screen-devices like laptops and desktops).
  • Furthermore, as alluded to above, there are some kinds of "cosmetic" edits which have an impact on page-rendering-time or on page-loading-time. In other words, there is a class of "cosmetic" edits which are server-optimizations or browser-optimizations, that improve sitewide performance. There are also edits such as the change from HTTP over to HTTPS which seem "cosmetic" but are in fact directly related to enduser-privacy, at least in theory. (In practice using HTTPS is not sufficient but that is another discussion for another day.) And then there are a bunch of inherently drama-causing coding-convention-related edits... but these are a necessary evil, see User_talk:Rich_Farmbrough for some enumerated examples, unicode-vs-html-entity, simple spelling errors, et cetera ad infinitum.
  • Although it definitely makes sense to sharpen up the contents of the page, and to carefully identify exactly what is meant by WP:COSMETICBOT, that methinks is a more crucial goal than changing the terminology. After all, having dealt with many confused people at AfD who just flat don't understand why THEY are not considered 'Reliable sources' about their OWN biography/band/business/etc, I have a pretty dim view of "convenient natural language analogy" names for PAG-pages. It is true that WP:COSMETICBOT sounds like a robot which applies mascara (either to humans or to itself... that part is unclear). But it is also true that, no matter *what* terminology we give the policy-page, the subject is complex and not easy to pin down. I would rather see people work to pin down a firm enWiki-specific definition of 'cosmetic edit' (and then explain right at the top that 'cosmetic edit' is a bit paradoxical which will clue people in to tread carefully), rather than switch to some well-meaning alternative terminology... which will cause sociological friction and switching-costs, but is unlikely to perfectly capture this complex topic-matter. 47.222.203.135 (talk) 00:13, 12 February 2017 (UTC)
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