User talk:RainCity471/Archive 1

Archive 1

Jackc143, you are invited to the Teahouse

Hi Jackc143! Thanks for contributing to Wikipedia. Be our guest at the Teahouse! The Teahouse is a friendly space where new editors can ask questions about contributing to Wikipedia and get help from peers and experienced editors. I hope to see you there! Theopolisme (I'm a Teahouse host) Visit the Teahouse This message was delivered automatically by your robot friend, HostBot (talk) 01:17, 22 June 2013 (UTC)

What to do with Zuo Shu Zhang?

Hi there,
I'm currently looking at this article and considering what to do with it. As I'm an incompetent newbie I'm not very sure about all the guidelines and such and don't want to make a decision on my own.
The article appears to be about a Chinese word that has no media coverage whatsoever (not many words do). I would like to think the content could be suitable for Wiktionary but I'm not sure about going ahead and placing the tag. I don't think deleting it would be the right option as it looks like it belongs in a dictionary.
To be honest, I'm not even sure about it being a word. Someone help please! Jackc143 (talk) 19:30, 2 July 2013 (UTC)

I think ideally one would need the entry on Wiktionary first - then the procedure at Wikipedia:Wikitionary#Soft_redirects_from_Wikipedia_to_a_sister_project can be used.  Ronhjones  ^(Talk) 21:49, 2 July 2013 (UTC)

At a glance it's not so much the word but a certain rank within the Qin bureaucracy. I would expect it to be more likely to have received coverage in textbooks on ancient Chinese history or peer-reviewed scholarly papers on that subject than in the media. A Google Books search for the Chinese term gave literally thousands of hits, but I can't read them myself. The romanized version only gave two hits, one of them in German, but they seem legit enough to me. At a glance "Zuo Shuzang" may be a more common transliteration; apparently the term roughly translates as "Chief of the Multitude on the Left", probably either a military rank for the commander of an army's wing or a ministerial rank akin to the Minister of the Left. Other sources describe the title as "minister", so the latter seems more likely. See for example here for a Han Dynasty rank of that name or here for Qin use. I don't think Wiktionary is the way to go; rather, we should expand the article. I'll rewrite it a little and add those sources. Huon (talk) 22:42, 2 July 2013 (UTC)

Dear both, thanks for your very prompt replies.

Ronhjones: You're quite right: the entry would have to be on Wikitionary first before adding a redirect.

Huon: You're quite right as well. The entry is about the Qin bureaucracy and there are sources existant in Google Books (I forgot to look there, my mistake). It does belong on Wikipedia but just had a misplaced notability tag. I'll try to be more careful now when checking the notability articles.

Thanks to both of you, Jackc143 (talk) 18:12, 3 July 2013 (UTC)

GA nominations

Hi, I started your page here. You can answer questions and so on there, or on my talk page, but with about 15 times as many watchers you may get "help" from people other than me there.--Gilderien Chat|List of good deeds 21:33, 13 July 2013 (UTC)

Teahouse talkback: you've got messages!

Hello, RainCity471/Archive 1. Your question has been answered at the Teahouse Q&A board. Feel free to reply there!
Please note that all old questions are archived after 2-3 days of inactivity. Message added by Mdebellis (talk) 12:31, 14 July 2013 (UTC). (You can remove this notice at any time by removing the {{teahouse talkback}} template).

GA nominations

Hi, I started your page here. You can answer questions and so on there, or on my talk page, but with about 15 times as many watchers you may get "help" from people other than me there.--Gilderien Chat|List of good deeds 21:33, 13 July 2013 (UTC)

I just wrote a short test on your page for you to complete. This is an open-book test, and feel free to take as long as you wish.--Gilderien Chat|List of good deeds 23:47, 20 July 2013 (UTC)

IMPORTANT: Username change

I'm currently considering a username change from Jackc143 to RainCity471, and I'll probably make a request at WP:CHUS soon. I'll be off-Wiki whilst the renaming is carried out, and I don't know how long it will take. Please leave any message on here as normal, and I'll reply as soon as I can. Sorry for any inconvenience. Jackc143 (talk) 17:12, 23 July 2013 (UTC)

Userspace clearout

As part of this I'm having to clear out all the accumulated junk in my userspace.

List of subpages

Name	Action	Notes	Result
User:Jackc143/-note-afd-user (R)	CSD U1	Redirect created by typo during move. Will be deprecated after reorganisation.	Deleted
User:Jackc143/Articles in progress	CSD U1	Articles in progress system deprecated.	Deleted
User:Jackc143/Articles in progress/Graffiti	Repurposed as userspace banner	Some work done, therefore kept in history for reference.	Kept
User:Jackc143/Articles in progress/Graffiti/to do	CSD U1	Deprecated and largely generic to do list.	Deleted
User:Jackc143/Articles in progress/Kanthapuram A. P. Aboobacker Musalyar	CSD U1	Deprecated, next to now work done on it.	Deleted
User:Jackc143/Articles in progress/Robert Schumann	Repurposed as /About me	Some work done, therefore kept in history for reference.	Kept
User:Jackc143/Articles in progress/Robert Schumann/to do	CSD U1	Deprecated and largely generic to do list.	Deleted
User:Jackc143/Articles in progress/Sarah Palin	CSD U1	Deprecated, work was done directly in article space.	Deleted
User:Jackc143/Books/Wikipedia Guidelines	Keep	Will be developed soon.	Kept
User:Jackc143/Possibledelete-user	CSD U1	Deprecated, same as note-afd-user.	Deleted
User:Jackc143/common.js	Keep	Currently empty however there is no point in deleting.	Kept
User:Jackc143/deviating	CSD U1	Created to help me organise my work on articles in userspace. As I've decided to work on articles in mainspace only these are all deprecated.	Deleted
User:Jackc143/improverefs			Deleted
User:Jackc143/incorrect?			Deleted
User:Jackc143/note-afd-user	Keep CSD U1 (accidently)	Potentially useful for WP:WPNN. Accidently deleted, was half-baked and will start again when needed.restored by deleting sysop on request.	Deleted Un-deleted
User:Jackc143/notice-keeparticle (R)	CSD U1	Deprecated redirect.	Deleted
User:Jackc143/notice-keeparticle/doc (R)			Deleted
User:Jackc143/notice-notepass	Keep	Potentially useful for WP:WPNN.	Kept
User:Jackc143/notice-notepass/doc
User:Jackc143/remove	CSD U1	Created to help me organise my work on articles in userspace. As I've decided to work on articles in mainspace this is deprecated.	Deleted
User:Jackc143/reorg hds	CSD U1	Deprecated, was used earlier in userspace work.	Deleted
User:Jackc143/ros	CSD U1	Created to help me organise my work on articles in userspace. As I've decided to work on articles in mainspace this is deprecated.	Deleted
User:Jackc143/sandbox	Keep	Obviously.	Kept
User:Jackc143/see below	CSD U1	Created to help me organise my work on articles in userspace. As I've decided to work on articles in mainspace this is deprecated.	Deleted
User:Jackc143/to do	CSD U1	Deprecated, clone of {{to do}}.	Deleted
User:Jackc143/twinkleoptions.js	Keep	What else? Duh?	Kept

Italics and (R) denote a redirect. Redirects created by repurposing will be deleted as CSD U1.

Because of this I will also be extensively redesigning my userspace before the move. However, much of it will be filled with placeholders as I won't have the time to complete it. My talk page will be closed and the MiszaBot archiving setup will be disabled. Jackc143 (talk) 18:20, 27 July 2013 (UTC)

Disambiguation link notification for August 2

Hi. Thank you for your recent edits. Wikipedia appreciates your help. We noticed though that when you edited Gazetteer, you added a link pointing to the disambiguation page Chinese (check to confirm | fix with Dab solver). Such links are almost always unintended, since a disambiguation page is merely a list of "Did you mean..." article titles. Read the FAQ • Join us at the DPL WikiProject.

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Dab link removed. Jackc143 (talk) 10:57, 2 August 2013 (UTC), updated 19:26, 13 August 2013 (UTC)

Awating name-change

My request for change of username has been filed at WP:CHUS#Jackc143 → RainCity471. There is a large backlog however I will be offline untill the rename is completed. If you want to contact me please leave a message on my talk page and I will reply when I'm back online. As my Wikisource account has already been renamed, I will be working there instead. Jackc143 (talk) 17:12, 3 August 2013 (UTC) This thread will not be archived for 30 days.

Why isn't this ref working??

Hi, I'm working on Gazeteer and I've tried to insert a reference. There's an error message saying "Check |url scheme" but I checked the help and both URLs seem to be correct. Can someone help? Please?

<ref name=OED>{{cite web|title=Definition of gazetteer in English|url=http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/gazetteer?q=Gazetteer|work=Oxford English Dictionary|publisher=Oxford University Press|accessdate=13 August 2013|archiveurl=13 August 2013|archivedate=http://www.webcitation.org/6IqdTFjzx}}</ref>

You switched archiveurl and archivedate. It should look like this:

<ref name=OED>{{cite web|title=Definition of gazetteer in English|url=http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/gazetteer?q=Gazetteer|work=Oxford English Dictionary|publisher=Oxford University Press|accessdate=13 August 2013|archivedate=13 August 2013|archiveurl=http://www.webcitation.org/6IqdTFjzx}}</ref>

~HueSatLum 19:57, 13 August 2013 (UTC)

I'll also note that the url can be pruned to http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/gazetteer . Dru of Id (talk) 19:59, 13 August 2013 (UTC)

Oops. Thanks to both of you! RainCity471 (Jackc143) [talk] 20:06, 13 August 2013 (UTC)

Business marketing

Hi again. Just wanted to let you know why I removed the {{copyedit}} tag from the article: I was all set to tackle it when I saw your hidden text. Stfg has made the excellent suggestion to remove the tag when "claiming" an article to avoid conflicts with other copyeditors. Are you planning to sign up for the September drive? It's a friendly competition, if you like them. All the best, Miniapolis 19:43, 9 September 2013 (UTC)

Hi. I understand about the tag thing: I'll do it next time. Sorry!

I just have one question about the drive: does my copyedit on Business marketing count, because I started it before i joined the drive, but while the drive was on? Thanks, RainCity471^{report my errors}_{list of failures} 16:21, 10 September 2013 (UTC)

You should count it, since you started it in September. Thanks for your help and all the best, Miniapolis 01:38, 11 September 2013 (UTC)

I'll do that as soon as I've finished the one I'm on. Thanks for all your help! RainCity471^{report my errors}_{list of failures} 17:28, 11 September 2013 (UTC)

Suggestion for Copy editing

I suggest that you consider some short and easy copyedits, such as Humemodern or Midnite Mine (tricky) or a South Asia one like Shahwani. Learn to do the South Asian ones, and you can build up your count of articles.--DThomsen8 (talk) 18:54, 13 September 2013 (UTC)

I think you're probably right: I've tried a few but I've not got anywhere so far. Thanks! RainCity471^{report my errors}_{list of failures} 19:02, 13 September 2013 (UTC)

Pace my friend DThomsen8, I would recommend not choosing articles that have been tagged just this month or last. There is a high risk that they will get deleted or substantially modified when people spot things like promotional tone, and then your work will be wasted. Articles tagged longest ago are often very difficult, but you'll be able to find plenty tagged in the first half of this year, and there are fewer risks of wasted effort with those. Cheers, --Stfg (talk) 13:02, 14 September 2013 (UTC)

You are qute right about my choices, Stfg, but RainCity471 is a GOCE newbie, who needs to get some easy ones done before he tackles long, hard ones, and they are more easily found in recent dates. --DThomsen8 (talk) 15:24, 14 September 2013 (UTC)

I understand the reasoning of both of you. I guess the best option is just for me to read articles carefully before starting. Thanks, RainCity471^{report my errors}_{list of failures} 21:06, 14 September 2013 (UTC)

Wikimania 2014

• "Wikimania 2014 London". Wikimania 2014 in City of London. I plan to be there, direct from Philadelphia. --DThomsen8 (talk) 19:05, 13 September 2013 (UTC)

Thanks for letting me know. I'm generally very busy a lot of the time, but I'll think about it. Thanks, RainCity471^{report my errors}_{list of failures} 21:06, 14 September 2013 (UTC)

September 2013

Hello, I'm BracketBot. I have automatically detected that your edit to Humemodern may have broken the syntax by modifying 2 "{}"s. If you have, don't worry: just edit the page again to fix it. If I misunderstood what happened, or if you have any questions, you can leave a message on my operator's talk page.

List of unpaired brackets remaining on the page:

• Vintage Furniture Repair and Restoration |publisher=Humemodern.com |date= |accessdate=2013-09-10}}{{ </ref> {{cn span|date=September 2013|text=The company received plaudits in the wake of [[Hurricane

Thanks, BracketBot (talk) 19:34, 13 September 2013 (UTC)

A cup of tea for you!

Wikilove message originally left by Dthomsen8 at 12:43, 14 September 2013 (UTC) was migrated to User:RainCity471/source/Barnstars at 21:12, 2 November 2013 (UTC)

Humemodern

I made a new section for easy discussion purposes. Take a look at Humemodern again, and see the many Wikilinks I added. Strictly speaking, Wikilinks fall under cleanup, not copyediting, but I do all the improvements I can when doing GOCE drive articles. Bespoke is a British term for clothing, and should be changed. Notice that spelling mistakes are seen with red underlining, which you should find and correct when copyediting. You should do the Bracketbot fix. Easy to have it happen, but easy to fix.

Never copyedit an article tagged for PROD or AfD deletion. They should be flagged with {{GOCEreviewed}} instead, with the copyedit removed. Weak or very short articles which may be tagged for deletion are also to be skipped.--DThomsen8 (talk) 15:54, 14 September 2013 (UTC)

Thanks for mentioning this. I get your point about Wikilinks: we don't strictly need to sort them but it takes barely any effort and is worth doing. Spelling: I see about getting it right. If we don't, then we make ourselves look like idiots. I use Firefox and don't get any red lines, but I can copy-paste into Libreoffice to check. I've done the BracketBot fix, which I thought I did before but I obviously didn't. Sorry

I understand about no copyediting of PRODed or AFDed articles. I probably wouldn't copyedit any articles with {{notability}} either; would PROD/AFD instead. Thanks for all your advice, RainCity471^{report my errors}_{list of failures} 21:06, 14 September 2013 (UTC)

Disambiguation link notification for September 16

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Fruit preserves

Hi, The content I removed from the fruit preserves page is uncited, and also inaccurate. I looked up fruit spread, as I was holding a jar of Smucker's strawberry fruit spread and wanted to know what the difference between fruit spread, jam, and jelly was. The fruit preserve page claimed that fruit spreads do not contain sugar, but Smucker's Fruit Spread does. Sorry I did not explain this in the edit, I will do so next time. 24.214.217.36 (talk) 05:21, 28 September 2013 (UTC)

Thanks for taking the time to tell me. I didn't restore the content, but I saw the revert and placed a message on your talk page about it. The reverting editor might have seen "Tag: section blanking" and decided to revert, despite the removed section only being one unreferenced line. I've added a {{citation needed}} tag to the statement, as our general policy is to tag possibly wrong information before removing it.

The page has been semi-protected because of vandalism and repeated removal of huge parts of the article (nothing to do with you). Once the protection is removed on the 4th October, you are more than welcome to edit the article.

I'm sorry for any mis-judgement on my part; feel free to remove the notice from your talk. Best wishes, RainCity471 08:16, 28 September 2013 (UTC)

The article is right- according to Smucker's, their fruit spread is not sweetened with sugar, it uses fruit juice and other to sweeten it. Yes there is sugar, but it is not added - the only sugar in the product is what occurs naturally. --Jeremy (blah blah • I did it!) 10:56, 28 September 2013 (UTC)

http://www.smuckers.com/products/fruit-spreads/natural/natural-strawberry-fruit-spread-1305 If you look in the ingredients list, sugar is there. I think the term fruit spread may just be a catch-all term. 24.214.217.36 (talk) 19:06, 28 September 2013 (UTC)

Maybe a good thing to do would be look through the refs in the article (maybe with google books). I know nothing about jam and am really bad at referencing, so I probably can't help there. Best wishes RainCity471 00:05, 29 September 2013 (UTC)

Disambiguation link notification for September 30

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WP:GOCE September backlog drive question

Hi there. I see that you did some copy edits for our September drive. I am currently tallying up everything, and I noticed that you added "no credit" to most of your entries. Can you explain what your intention was with those? I'm not sure if you're saying you didn't want to get those counted at all, or there was something else intended. I'm going to count them for now, but let me know when you can. Thanks! —Torchiest ^talk_edits 02:48, 2 October 2013 (UTC)

Hi, I added them because they weren't from the old copyedit categories or the request page. I sort of nicked it of DThomsen8.

I didn't realise they would cause confusion. Sorry, RainCity471 18:17, 2 October 2013 (UTC)

GOCE September drive barnstar

Wikilove message originally left by Diannaa at 12:43, 14 September 2013 (UTC) was migrated to User:RainCity471/source/Barnstars at 21:12, 2 November 2013 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #83

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

• Discussions
  • Closed: Restructure of minor user rights
  • Lua enhancements discussion
• Events/Press/Blogs
  • Wikidata IRC Office hour on Wednesday November 13th in #wikimedia-office
  • On November 10th, Gerard Meijssen will discuss Wikidata at the Wikimedia Diversity Conference
  • Lydia makes a guest appearance at the Metric and activities meeting to discuss Wikidata's growth
• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • Wikisource deployment planned to start January 13th, 2014, see the coordination page here
  • Magnus discusses Wikidata items and Wikipedia entries
• Did you know?
  • Newest properties: BIBSYS identifier, Arts & Architecture Thesaurus ID, criterion used, including, excluding
  • Newest task forces: Athletics task force
  • You can now thank users for their contributions on Wikidata
• Development
  • Sitelinks in diff views now link to the article
  • Bene* worked on adding a table of contents to item pages (bugzilla:44876)
  • More work on badges by mlazowik
  • Creating and removing claims with references and qualifiers now show full diffs
  • Fixed invalid diffs which display 'diff=0' as a parameter (bugzilla:49434)
  • Fixed cases where diff pages arew caches and display in incorrect languages (bugzilla:55667)
  • Added ability to ignore conflicts in merge items API module
  • Worked on adding the datatype in the json output
  • Fix validation of wbsetreference
  • Wikibase Query now listens to entity changes of Wikibase Repo
• Open Tasks for You
  • Update, expand and translate d:Wikidata:Introduction to make it easier for newcomers to understand what Wikidata is all about.
  • Improve biology, help out the Molecular biology task force.
  • Help fix formatting and value issues for a property.
  • Build a bot for one of the "bot requests".
  • Hack on one of these.

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Global message delivery 21:50, 8 November 2013 (UTC)

Disambiguation link notification for November 15

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VisualEditor newsletter for November 2013

Since the last newsletter, the VisualEditor team has worked on some feature changes, major infrastructure improvements to make the system more stable, dependable and extensible, some minor toolbar improvements, and fixing bugs.

A new form parsing library for language characters in Parsoid caused the corruption of pages containing diacritics for about an hour two weeks ago. Relatively few pages at the English Wikipedia were affected, but this created immediate problems at some other Wikipedias, sometimes affecting several dozen pages. The development teams for Parsoid and VisualEditor apologize for the serious disruption and thank the people who reported this emergency at Wikipedia:VisualEditor/Feedback and on the public IRC channel, #mediawiki-visualeditor.

There have been dozens of changes since the last newsletter. Here are some of the highlights:

• Accidental deletion of infoboxes and other items: You now need to press the Delete or ← Backspace key twice to delete a template, reference or image. The first time, the item becomes selected, and the second time, it is removed. The need to press the delete key twice should make it more obvious what you are doing and help avoid accidental removals of infoboxes and similar (bug 55336).
• Switch from VisualEditor to the wikitext editor: A new feature lets you make a direct, one-way editing interface change, which will preserve your changes without needing to save the page and re-open it in the wikitext editor (bug 50687). It is available in a new menu in the action buttons by the Cancel button (where the "Page Settings" button used to be). Note that this new feature is not currently working in Firefox.
• Categories and Languages are also now directly available in that menu. The category suggestions drop-down was appearing in the wrong place rather than below its input box, which is now fixed. An incompatibility between VisualEditor and the deployed Parsoid service that prevented editing categories and language links was fixed.
• File:, Help: and Category: namespaces: VisualEditor was enabled for these namespaces the on all wikis (bug 55968), the Portal: and Viquiprojecte: namespaces on the Catalan Wikipedia (bug 56000), and the Portal: and Book: namespaces on the English Wikipedia (bug 56001).
• Media item resizing: We improved how files are viewed in a few ways. First, inline media items can now be resized in the same way that has been possible with block ones (like thumbnails) before. When resizing a media item, you can see a live preview of how it will look as you drag it (bug 54298). While you are dragging an image to resize it, we now show a label with the current dimensions (bug 54297). Once you have resized it, we fetch a new, higher resolution image for the media item if necessary (bug 55697). Manual setting of media item sizes in their dialog is nearly complete and should be available next week. If you hold down the ⇧ Shift key whilst resizing an image, it will now snap to a 10 pixel grid instead of the normal free-hand sizing. The media item resize label now is centered while resizing regardless of which tool you use to resize it.
• Undo and redo: A number of improvements were made to the transactions system which make undoing and redoing more reliable during real-time collaboration (bug 53224).
• Save dialogue: The save page was re-written to use the same code as all other dialogs (bug 48566), and in the process fixed a number of issues. The save dialog is re-accessible if it loses focus (bug 50722), or if you review a null edit (bug 53313); its checkboxes for minor edit, watch the page, and flagged revisions options now layout much more cleanly (bug 52175), and the tab order of the buttons is now closer to what users will expect (bug 51918). There was a bug in the save dialog that caused it to crash if there was an error in loading the page from Parsoid, which is now fixed.
• Links to other articles or pages sometimes sent people to invalid pages. VisualEditor now keeps track of the context in which you loaded the page, which lets us fix up links in document to point to the correct place regardless of what entry point you launched the editor from—so the content of pages loaded through /wiki/Foobar?veaction=edit and /w/index.php?title=Foobar&veaction=edit both now have text links that work if triggered (bug 48915).
• Toolbar links: A bug that caused the toolbar's menus to get shorter or even blank when scrolled down the page in Firefox is now fixed (bug 55343).
• Numbered external links: VisualEditor now supports Parsoid's changed representation of numbered external links (bug 53505).
• Removed empty templates: We also fixed an issue that meant that completely empty templates became impossible to interact with inside VisualEditor, as they didn't show up (bug 55810).
• Mathematics formulae: If you would like to try the experimental LaTeX mathematics tool in VisualEditor, you will need to opt-in to Beta Features. This is currently available on Meta-wiki, Wikimedia Commons, and Mediawiki.org. It will be available on all other Wikimedia sites on 21 November.
• Browser testing support: If you are interested in technical details, the browser tests were expanded to cover some basic cursor operations, which uncovered an issue in our testing framework that doesn't work with cursoring in Firefox; the Chrome tests continue to fail due to a bug with the welcome message for that part of the testing framework.
• Load time: VisualEditor now uses content language when fetching Wikipedia:TemplateData information, so reducing bandwidth use, and users on multi-language or multi-script wikis now get TemplateData hinting for templates as they would expect (bug 50888).
• Reuse of VisualEditor: Work on spinning out the user experience (UX) framework from VisualEditor into oojs-ui, which lets other teams at Wikimedia (like Flow) and gadget authors re-use VisualEditor UX components, is now complete and is being moved to a shared code repository.
• Support for private wikis: If you maintain a private wiki at home or at work, VisualEditor now supports editing of private wikis, by forwarding the Cookie: HTTP header to Parsoid ($wgVisualEditorParsoidForwardCookies set to true) (bug 44483). (Most private wikis will also need to install Parsoid and node.js, as VisualEditor requires them.)

Looking ahead:

• VisualEditor will be released to some of the smaller Wikipedias on 02 December 2013. If you are active at one or more smaller Wikipedias where VisualEditor is not yet generally available, please see the list at VisualEditor/Rollouts.
• Public office hours on IRC to discuss VisualEditor with Product Manager James Forrester will be held on Monday, 2 December, at 1900 UTC and on Tuesday, 3 December, at 0100 UTC. Bring your questions. Logs will be posted on Meta after each office hour completes.
• In terms of feature improvements, one of the major infrastructure projects affects how inserting characters works, both using your computer's built-in Unicode input systems and through a planned character inserter tool for VisualEditor. The forthcoming rich copying and pasting feature was extended and greater testing is currently being done. Work continues to support the improved reference dialog to quickly add citations based on local templates.

If you have questions or suggestions for future improvements, or if you encounter problems, please let everyone know by posting a note at Wikipedia:VisualEditor/Feedback. Thank you! Whatamidoing (WMF) 22:05, 20 November 2013 (UTC)

Disambiguation link notification for November 22

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Air supremacy (check to confirm | fix with Dab solver)

added links pointing to Surrender, Eastern front, Industrial, America and Militant

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VisualEditor newsletter • 19 December 2013

Since the last newsletter, the VisualEditor team has worked on some toolbar improvements, fixing bugs, and improving support for Indic languages as well as other languages with complex characters. The current focus is on improving the reference dialog and expanding the new character inserter tool.

There have been dozens of changes since the last newsletter. Here are some of the highlights:

• Rich copying and pasting is now available. If you copy text from another website, then character formatting and some other HTML attributes are preserved. This means, for example, that if you copy a pre-formatted suggested citation from a source like this, then VisualEditor will preserve the formatting of the title in the citation. Keep in mind that copying the formatting may include formatting that you don't want (like section headings). If you want to paste plain, unformatted text onto a page, then use Control+⇧ Shift+V or ⌘ Command+⇧ Shift+V (Mac).
• Auto-numbered external links like [1] can now be edited just like any other link. However, they cannot be created in VisualEditor easily.
• Several changes to the toolbar and dialogs have been made, and more are on the way. The toolbar has been simplified with a new drop-down text styles menu and an "insert" menu. Your feedback on the toolbar is wanted here. The transclusion/template dialog has been simplified. If you have enabled mathematical formula editing, then the menu item is now called the formula editor instead of LaTeX.
• There is a new character inserter, which you can find in the new "insert" menu, with a capital Omega ("Ω"). It's a very basic set of characters. Your feedback on the character inserter is wanted here.
• Saving the page should seem faster by several seconds now.
• It is now possible to access VisualEditor by manually editing the URL, even if you are not logged in or have not opted in to VisualEditor normally. To do so, append ?veaction=edit to the end of the page name. For example, change https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random?veaction=edit to open a random page in VisualEditor. This is intended to support bug testing across multiple browsers, without requiring editors to login repeatedly.

Looking ahead: The transclusion dialog will see further changes in the coming weeks, with a simple mode for single templates and an advanced mode for more complex transclusions. The new character formatting menu on the toolbar will get an arrow to show that it is a drop-down menu. The reference dialog will be improved, and the Reference item will become a button in the main toolbar, rather than an item in the Insert menu.

If you have questions or suggestions for future improvements, or if you encounter problems, please let everyone know by posting a note at Wikipedia:VisualEditor/Feedback. Thank you! Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 20:38, 19 December 2013 (UTC)

VisualEditor newsletter for Janaury 2014

Since the last newsletter, the VisualEditor team has worked mostly minor features and fixing bugs. A few significant bugs include working around a bug in CSSJanus that was wrongly flipping images used in some templates in right-to-left (RTL) environments (bug 50910) a major bug that meant inserting any template or other transclusion failed (bug 59002), a major but quickly resolved problem due to an unannounced change in MediaWiki core, which caused VisualEditor to crash on trying to save (bug 59867). This last bugs did not appear on any Wikipedia. Additionally, significant work has been done in the background to make VisualEditor work as an independent editing system.

As of today, VisualEditor is now available as an opt-out feature to all users at 149 active Wikipedias.

• The character inserter tool in the "Insert" menu has a very basic set of characters. The character inserter is especially important for languages that use Latin and Cyrillic alphabets with unusual characters or frequent diacritics. Your feedback on the character inserter is requested. In addition to feedback from any interested editor, the developers would particularly like to hear from anyone who speaks any of the 50+ languages listed under Phase 5 at mw:VisualEditor/Rollouts, including Breton, Mongolian, Icelandic, Welsh, Afrikaans, Macedonian, and Azerbaijani.
• meta:Office hours on IRC have been heavily attended recently. The next one will be held this coming Wednesday, 22 January at 23:00 UTC.
• You can now edit some of the page settings in the "options" dialog – __NOTOC__ and __FORCETOC__ as selection (forced on, forced off, or default setting; bugs 56866 and 56867) and __NOEDITSECTION__ as a checkbox (bug 57166).
• The automated browser tests were adjusted to speed them up and bind more correctly to list items in lists, and updated to a newer version of their ruby dependencies. You can monitor the automated browser tests' results (triggered every twelve hours) live on the server.
• Wikipedia:VisualEditor/User guide was updated recently to show some new and upcoming features.

Looking ahead: The character formatting menu on the toolbar will get a drop-down indicator next Thursday. The reference and media items will be the first two listed in the Insert menu. The help menu will get a page listing the keyboard shortcuts. Looking further out, image handling will be improved, including support for alignment (left, right, and center) and better control over image size (including default and upright sizes). The developers are also working on support for editing redirects and image galleries.

Subscriptions to this newsletter are managed at Wikipedia:VisualEditor/Newsletter. Please add or remove your name to change your subscription settings. If you have questions or suggestions for future improvements, or if you encounter problems, please let everyone know by posting a note at Wikipedia:VisualEditor/Feedback. Thank you! Whatamidoing (WMF) 20:03, 17 January 2014 (UTC)