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Help needed at Ks Wiki

Hello sir, Hope you are doing well. Actually we need help at ks.wiki as watchlist notice is not working properly. Can you have a look at it. I checked it from my account and it is not working however when i logged in with my bot account it works in desktop mode. Can you fix it so that we can view it in both modes. Thankyou. signed, Iflaq (talk) 06:00, 21 October 2021 (UTC)

@Iflaq: it displays for me, do you have your interface language set to ks? — xaosflux Talk 11:28, 21 October 2021 (UTC)
If not, that's probably the problem - because this is a hack in to your mediawiki message space. If you have a very popular other language (for example English) and you want those readers to see that, you could try to copy the contents of w:ks:MediaWiki:Watchlist-summary to w:ks:MediaWiki:Watchlist-summary/en. — xaosflux Talk 11:33, 21 October 2021 (UTC)
@Xaosflux Thankyou for your help. Actuall we have two scripts for ks wiki and I had selected the arabic one it was not displaying in that. Now i changed it and it working in both desktop and mobile view. Thankyou once again. signed, Iflaq (talk) 13:03, 21 October 2021 (UTC)

No creation possibility when module is missing

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T294187

Hello! :)

When a template is missing, you get a redlink for it (lately).

When a module is missing, you get a red script error that sends you nowhere. Why not have a redlink to create the missing module instead? I'm sure I'm not the first one who must have said that so I strongly believe there must be a phab-task somewhere for it. Any info? - Klein Muçi (talk) 11:01, 23 October 2021 (UTC)

@Klein Muçi: can you point me to a very simple example? (Preferably a sandbox that has only this one problem in an obvious way). — xaosflux Talk 22:41, 23 October 2021 (UTC)
Sure, here you go: Link - Klein Muçi (talk) 22:55, 23 October 2021 (UTC)
@Klein Muçi: I think that is just one of many errors that could be generated by that error handler so it doesn't have special wiki markup included. You may want to ask more over at mw:Extension talk:Scribunto/Lua reference manual first, or open a phab request for review under this project. — xaosflux Talk 01:01, 24 October 2021 (UTC)
Hmm... Interesting... I thought it would be a well-known problem around here. Thanks for the information! - Klein Muçi (talk) 01:10, 24 October 2021 (UTC)
@Klein Muçi: the #invoke module syntax is rarely used, except by people designing modules. Keep in mind that most volunteers are content editors, and even if you can get them to use a template - they have no clue about modules or LUA programming - and it's probably not worth trying to educate them in that instead of say writing or improving articles for your project. That error did used to just say missing and not also name it, but that was a fix that got added. I don't really think this is something that is worth special casing, but I'm not that much involved in scibunto so feel free to folow up. Best regards, — xaosflux Talk 01:54, 24 October 2021 (UTC)
No, I understand that. I just wanted it for my case, not for the average editor. 80% of my edits consist of copy-pasting templates and modules from EnWiki. In cases where many templates and modules are connected with each other for a specific function, before you would just get a generic error if one of them was missing. And that was an error I encountered much too often because of importation (not creation). "Lately" the software got smarter and, if a missing template was being transcluded, you'd get a clickable redlink with its name that allowed you to create it. This allows me to search for that name in EnWiki, import it and, if more templates were involved, you'd get their names redlinked in a row until you finished setting up the whole thing. It speeds up the process of having the creation page in 1 click instead of having to copy-paste the name in the search box and then start the creation. It's just 1 step faster but it helps when there are a lot of templates. Unfortunately there are always modules involved in this process and you don't get that behavior yet with modules. - Klein Muçi (talk) 02:15, 24 October 2021 (UTC)

Two-part RfA proposal

I started a discussion at Worm That Turned's talk page asking if he was planning to propose a two-part RfA in the next phase of the RfA review. I said I might be interested in making a proposal if he wasn't going to, but I realized I hadn't been giving enough thought to the anonymous vote portion of his proposal (as in my own two-part RfA proposals in the past, I proposed having the second part occur on-wiki as usual). Would you be willing to join the discussion to outline what technical work you foresee being needed to implement something like Worm That Turned's proposal? isaacl (talk) 20:43, 23 October 2021 (UTC)

Feedback request: Wikipedia proposals request for comment

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Tech News: 2021-43

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20:07, 25 October 2021 (UTC)

Boo!

Happy Halloween!
Hello Xaosflux:
Thanks for all of your contributions to improve Wikipedia, and have a happy and enjoyable Halloween!
    —usernamekiran • sign the guestbook • (talk) 21:33, 30 October 2021 (UTC)

IP blocking

Hello Xaos!

I'm in need of your expertise. Lately we've started to see a certain behavior in our community. Someone editing from different IPs comes and edits only small details of articles en masse, just enough to make them wrong. For example, dates are changed, or adjectives (from "big" to "small") or other types of measurements in numbers. It's pure vandalism but they use hopping IPs so... I'm not sure how to act on this case. Do you have any advice on this kind of situation?

As a side question, maybe not related to the subject above, how does IP range blocking works? I've never got to use that before. - Klein Muçi (talk) 15:04, 31 October 2021 (UTC)

On the first, not much you can do except to keep chasing them. If they are targeting multiple projects a short term global IP block can be added by stewards over at meta-wiki. We rely on multiple full-time antivandalism bots and abuse filters to combat that sort of stuff here, not to mention huge teams of recent changes patrolling editors. — xaosflux Talk 16:41, 31 October 2021 (UTC)
On the second, you can start by learning about Classless Inter-Domain Routing. Super quick example: if you had similar bad edits from 10.1.1.10, 10.1.1.50, 10.1.1.120, and 10.1.1.125 - you might assume that they are all somehow related and decide you want to block an entire range of addresses because the network they are coming from is causing problems. You could block "10.1.1.0/64" which would block 10.1.1.0 through 10.1.1.127. — xaosflux Talk 16:41, 31 October 2021 (UTC)
What are some/one antivandalism bots?
Thanks for the article! I have a question: What does "related" mean in this sense? Geographically related? They're sort of close physically with each other? And... Shouldn't it be "10.1.1.0/127" to block them until 10.1.1.127? I'm guessing it shouldn't be but it's a bit hard for me to understand why (even though I read the article). - Klein Muçi (talk) 23:16, 31 October 2021 (UTC)
The part after the / is a Subnetwork mask (subnet mask) - and in my example above that /64 should have been /25 (they range from /1 to /32 no idea what i was doing there!). Our most active av bot is ClueBot NG. — xaosflux Talk 23:32, 31 October 2021 (UTC)
First time seeing that bot. Thanks for your information! - Klein Muçi (talk) 00:50, 1 November 2021 (UTC)

RfA Reform 2021 Phase 2 has begun

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16:13, 31 October 2021 (UTC)

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Tech News: 2021-44

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  • There is a limit on the amount of emails a user can send each day. This limit is now global instead of per-wiki. This change is to prevent abuse. [3]

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20:27, 1 November 2021 (UTC)

Infobox person - Actor/Actress

Short question straight to the point: Why, among almost all other professions, only actors don't have their own infobox? - Klein Muçi (talk) 03:12, 8 November 2021 (UTC)

@Klein Muçi: we used to, see Wikipedia:Templates_for_discussion/Log/2010_August_20#Template:Infobox_actor. Also we have a long ugly history with "boxes" here on the English Wikipedia (I for the most part never got involved) - see Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2013-10-02/Arbitration report and many linked things to that if you want to know more about the "Infobox Wars". As far as recommendations for other projects go, not sure. I think many of the infoboxes have gotten overly complicated and make it hard for editors to support them unless you have many techncial specialists that have time for that. — xaosflux Talk 10:43, 8 November 2021 (UTC)
Hmm... I see...
I have turned my attention to them lately on my homewiki and changed around 20k settlement articles to follow the model used here after many of their individual infoboxes were merged into 1 for all kind of settlements. That makes it easier to maintain/update and I believe it makes Content Translation Tool more friendly towards infoboxes as well because that's usually the main thing it would fail on. (More than 90% of our new articles (un?)fortunately come from CTT and almost all of them are from EnWiki.)
When I went to deal with the one related to persons I was surprised to see that the actors' one was merged into it and all the other professions had their own. And I was further surprised to see that we had done the same as well. (Maybe it's been me who has done the change in the past and now can't remember. Didn't investigate.) I saw that as a "culture" it hadn't fully crystallized even here. Some of the infoboxes will go on and merge different concepts into one using a LONG list of parameters, some with on-off switches and then you'd have some other infoboxes that would be very narrow in the concepts they included. Not gonna lie, that frustrated me a bit.
It's been quite some years people here and there come and ask us "to update our old infoboxes" or "to make the infobox render just like it does on EnWiki" and we've always postponed that change because old and new infoboxes aren't on a 1:1 parameter correlation so there would be chaos among articles whenever that change happened. After postponing it for some years, I finally decided to take that step now (given that our new articles are coming ever more faster now because of CTT and it would hurt more in the future) and I'm trying to bring as little chaos as possible but it feels bad knowing that the whole infrastructure here is rather fragile/dynamic itself and can change again soon. To put it in other words, we usually come to EnWiki for setting up good standards to follow that give us security that they will last for a while so we won't have to keep reinventing the wheel every 2-3 months (that gets even more serious as a need when you consider that "we" is usually just 2 users in total) but in this case it didn't quite look like that was the case.
I don't know what's your stance on them but I really love infoboxes and in general our whole community identifies them as a core Wikipedia interface feature. (I checked the Angela Merkel article on DeWiki now from the link you gave me and it looked like what we'd immediately would identify as a "stub article" because of the lack of the infobox.) But it feels frustrating when you don't have a clear standard to follow because on one side you have all the different types of settlements merged into 1 and then on the other side you have different infoboxes for countries and US states, different infoboxes for different concepts related to music acts and genres, different wrappers ONLY used in some specific settlements in regard to France, etc. I myself am for having them mostly merged and utilized with "switch parameters" but I see that you have yet to make such decisions and apparently that's a thing we just need to learn to live with as well. - Klein Muçi (talk) 11:33, 8 November 2021 (UTC)
@Klein Muçi: Yup, each of these standards are community-specific. I think infoboxes are useful for readers and in general a good thing. Trying to maintain 1:1 technical parity with enwiki - is hard at best - and we have many things that would probably be done differently if we were a much smaller project - we have lots of "legacy" code/methods/etc that we have to drag around because updates are very difficult when for example a tweak to an infobox template may require editing tens of thousands of articles! My best advice is to look in to your editor capability - if you have a group of dedicated editors that want to maintain the tech side of templates - go for it, if not - perhaps be conservative. We have fallen in to the trap of not thinking "What if User:X" and especially "What if User:BOTx" quit tomorrow - especially when that DOES happen. And not just because User:X got bored, we've been around long enough to run in to the User:X died cause to the problem. Best wishes, — xaosflux Talk 12:04, 8 November 2021 (UTC)
Yes, exactly! And to be honest I don't hear a lot of people talking about this problem. There is a lot of discussion in regard to global templates/modules which would help with localization and global updates problems but I haven't happened to see even one in regard to "template was reworked, how do we fix the old parameters being used in thousands, and soon-inevitably-to-be-millions, pages/articles". I mean, not just discussions about specific cases but about finding technological solutions to mitigate the problem in general. Thanks for providing your insight though! Helpful as ever. :) - Klein Muçi (talk) 13:16, 8 November 2021 (UTC)
A settlement infobox mock
(talk page stalker) On enwiki, there is Primefac's bot that usually deals with this: Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/PrimeBOT 30. There have been similar tasks for more niche cases, like User:Monkbot/task 18: cosmetic cs1 template cleanup, although from a consensus basis those have been contentious.
I suspect if enwiki could rip it up and do it all over again, it would be done slightly differently and with a bit more consistency. Both from a technical aspect, but hopefully also from an aesthetic standpoint. eg I thought mw:Streamlined Infoboxes was a good design spec to modernise infoboxes. The current table design of {{Infobox}} is not particularly great with modern HTML standards, either. If it were to be done over again perhaps a concept of 'modules' could be implemented too (like the geography/population displays in the image on the right). I think in general infoboxes should generally have all the fancruft-y information removed, and probably they should present the information with a bit more variety than having a label/value format for everything. ProcrastinatingReader (talk) 13:47, 8 November 2021 (UTC)
@ProcrastinatingReader, thanks for providing the bots examples. I'll know where to ask for advice in the future if needed. However I think that if a definitive solution is ever to be found for this problem it would require a kind of infrastructure that allows for somewhat "automatic changes" in the pages that transclude the templates without utilizing bots. Maybe somehow putting parameters further "back-end", if that makes any sense whatsoever. - Klein Muçi (talk) 14:39, 8 November 2021 (UTC)
You will likely find yourself going down the wikidata vs local storage debate, including arguments about community and content governance the more you go that way - have fun with that in your community :D — xaosflux Talk 14:49, 8 November 2021 (UTC)
Yeah, I thought about Wikidata the moment I hit "Publish" in that message. But I'm a bit uninformed at that subject though. Is there any written guide that explains how Wikidata infoboxes generally work? - Klein Muçi (talk) 23:10, 8 November 2021 (UTC)
@Klein Muçi: you could try starting with Wikipedia:Wikidata#Inserting_Wikidata_values_into_Wikipedia_articles. — xaosflux Talk 23:58, 8 November 2021 (UTC)
Interesting... Apparently the infrastructure I explained above exists already... What happens if you "link" with a parser function to a property that doesn't exist (anymore) or has no values? - Klein Muçi (talk) 08:19, 9 November 2021 (UTC)
I think you get a null result - you'd have to play around with it, I haven't work on that part. — xaosflux Talk 11:29, 9 November 2021 (UTC)

Tech News: 2021-45

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  • Mobile IP editors are now able to receive warning notices indicating they have a talk page message on the mobile website (similar to the orange banners available on desktop). These notices will be displayed on every page outside of the main namespace and every time the user attempts to edit. The notice on desktop now has a slightly different colour. [4][5]

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20:35, 8 November 2021 (UTC)

Testwiki / mobile new message alert

Hey, can you restore my +sysop at testwiki again? It looks like, at long last, mobile IP editors can now get alerts, but I need an unblocked proxy to test this without exposing my IP. Easiest way is to override the global block myself. Suffusion of Yellow (talk) 18:59, 9 November 2021 (UTC)

@Suffusion of Yellow:  Done — xaosflux Talk 19:01, 9 November 2021 (UTC)
Thanks again! Suffusion of Yellow (talk) 19:02, 9 November 2021 (UTC)
Sigh. So it seems testwiki isn't displaying the alert for at all. Not on mobile, not on desktop, not with &safemode=1 or &useskin=monobook. But uiprop=hasmsg says it's there. Don't know of that's a bug or a feature. So, plan B: Can you enable editing from Special:Contribs/192.96.200.0/21 on enwiki? If you're not active when I'm done I'll ask someone else to reblock. Suffusion of Yellow (talk) 20:22, 9 November 2021 (UTC)
Replied there. — xaosflux Talk 21:18, 9 November 2021 (UTC)

Regex help - Edit filters

One of our edit filters is dedicated to vulgar words, as in many other projects. I've managed to perfect it enough that we have almost no vandalism at all in regard to that and a very low number of false positives. Having said that though, today I found out about an exploitation to it: S o m e o n e c a n j u s t w r i t e l i k e t h i s. Is there any smart way with regex to react to it without me having to pair each letter there with \s*? - Klein Muçi (talk) 20:23, 9 November 2021 (UTC)

@Klein Muçi: you can use an abusefilter function such as rmwhitespace/ccnorm/norm/etc on the input variable - see mw:Extension:AbuseFilter/Rules_format. — xaosflux Talk 21:20, 9 November 2021 (UTC)
For example in your w:sq:Speciale:AbuseFilter/11 you could wrap added_lines with norm(added_lines). Keep in mind there is always a trade off, some of those functions are "expensive" / slow. — xaosflux Talk 21:25, 9 November 2021 (UTC)
See Special:AbuseFilter/860 for one quick example. — xaosflux Talk 21:26, 9 November 2021 (UTC)
Can you guide me how I would utilize a function like that in [7]? So far I've only been able to work on the regex side. Apparently today is the day I start learning about that too. - Klein Muçi (talk) 21:55, 9 November 2021 (UTC)
Oh, I hadn't seen the example when I wrote that... - Klein Muçi (talk) 21:57, 9 November 2021 (UTC)
Can you take a look at my latest change there and see if it's good?
If it is, can you explain to me a bit better how's that supposed to work practically? The reason I say that is because I'm worried the filter will start malfunctioning in those regexes that are composed of expressions, not individual words and have space as part of them. If you have some free time, do take a look at our list of regexes where space is used in that filter. (Just CTRL+F "\s".)
So far I've been able to solve everything on my own using regex101 and fine tune it along the way but it's hard testing the added function's function because it's not regex per se. :P - Klein Muçi (talk) 22:16, 9 November 2021 (UTC)
Like, I'm not sure of the order of the operations. If a string is first checked towards regexes and if it fails, then it is checked towards the regexes with spaces removed, then I believe everything is fine. But if strings first get their spaces removed then they are checked towards the list of regexes and that's it, then I believe we'll have problems with some of the entities there because they're supposed to have space in them, as I said. :/ - Klein Muçi (talk) 22:24, 9 November 2021 (UTC)
@Klein Muçi: well you can separate the things, use the abusefilter function to wrap around input variables, that will happen before it attempts to match. Like in this:
match_words := "WORD1|WORD2|WORD3";
norm(added_lines) rlike match_words

The array gets built, the "added_lines" input is "norm"'ed, then the normed part is rliked. You can usually also be extra agressive with ()'s if you want to force something to happen in an order when you aren't sure of the order; e.g. norm(added_lines) rlike match_words could be (norm(added_lines)) rlike match_words. ()'s are "cheap". — xaosflux Talk 23:55, 9 November 2021 (UTC)

I'm sorry but I read your explanations quite some times and still am not sure how to separate the two cases in the practical sense. :/ Can you do the change using your global rights? I can replicate your example in other cases after that. (And fix whatever typos may be created accidently.) I just want to be able to follow the overall syntax. Our wiki is not that dynamic so even if you were totally new and messed up badly, there would hardly be any grave consequences in the first few hours (or days). - Klein Muçi (talk) 00:56, 10 November 2021 (UTC)
@Klein Muçi: which specific filter are you referring to? A clone of it can always be made in LOG ONLY mode, it still needs to be carefully watched to make sure it is not triggering on something like "every edit", but that is the general approach for adding filters to use. — xaosflux Talk 01:04, 10 November 2021 (UTC)
The one you've linked to above. Filter 11 on SqWiki. - Klein Muçi (talk) 01:06, 10 November 2021 (UTC)
It is late my time right now, so don't want to break anything when I'm not around - but will check back in. — xaosflux Talk 01:07, 10 November 2021 (UTC)
Whenever you have time. Thank you! :) - Klein Muçi (talk) 01:11, 10 November 2021 (UTC)
Yesterday apparently I had gotten this email: Abuse filter 11 you recently edited was throttled. First time ever I get an email like this. I wasn't sure what it exactly meant but from what I saw around, it was sent when an edit in the filter made it have a high catch rate, possibly implying an error, is that correct? Anyway, afraid of that, I reverted my change of the norm function completely. Hopefully you can reapply it later correctly. - Klein Muçi (talk) 08:55, 11 November 2021 (UTC)
@Klein Muçi: it means that it was working to hard, like I said "norm" is "expensive". I haven't had a chance to get back to this yet, a careful balance is needed. — xaosflux Talk 11:10, 11 November 2021 (UTC)
One way around that is to use multiple conditions, first checking for cheap things. See Special:AbuseFilter/260. It only starts checking for phrases if other things are also met. — xaosflux Talk 11:12, 11 November 2021 (UTC)
Given the delicate nature of edit filters, I'm reluctant to experiment further on my own, hope you can understand me. I'll wait for your help whenever you find some free time. At least, like it currently is, it's fine in most cases except for cases that deviate from the "norm" (like using spaces between words). - Klein Muçi (talk) 17:09, 11 November 2021 (UTC)
Hello! Sorry for the disturb! It's been around a week since I got back to this. We're still interested in getting your help. I just wanted to make sure you haven't forgotten. If you're busy, it's completely fine, we can wait. I just wanted to make sure this discussion wasn't forgotten/archived. If for any particular reason you find yourself unable to help, I'd appreciate it if you can guide me to some other user with the same global rights. - Klein Muçi (talk) 11:22, 17 November 2021 (UTC)
@Klein Muçi: sorry I've just been crazy busy, I archive my talk manually and very slowly :D — xaosflux Talk 11:52, 17 November 2021 (UTC)
Ah, okay then. If it's manual, we're good. :P :) - Klein Muçi (talk) 18:05, 17 November 2021 (UTC)

Bots deny

I reverted my reversion of your edit. I misread the name of the bot. --John Maynard Friedman (talk) 20:09, 11 November 2021 (UTC)

Thanks for your help resolving this. --John Maynard Friedman (talk) 16:41, 12 November 2021 (UTC)

Hello! I submitted popular pages report requests for some WikiProject Football related task forces last month (request 1, request 2), but no results apparent now. Maybe I have done something wrong, but I have no idea how to fix. Could you help me? Thanks. :) --Phikia (talk) 05:33, 12 November 2021 (UTC)

Sorry, I screwed up. I just read meta:Special:MyLanguage/Community Tech/Popular pages bot#Troubleshooting, and I found that the project names are incorrect:
Incorrect name → Correct name
"Football/Arsenal F.C. task force" → "Football/Arsenal task force"
"Football/Liverpool F.C. task force" → "Football/Liverpool task force"
"Football/Manchester United F.C. task force" → "Football/Manchester United task force"
"Football/Africa task force" → "Football/African football task force"
"Football/Argentina task force" → "Football/Argentine football task force"
"Football/Australia task force" → "Football/Australian soccer task force"
"Football/Brazil task force" → "Football/Brazilian football task force"
"Football/France task force" → "Football/French football task force"
"Football/India task force" → "Football/Indian football task force"
"Football/Ireland task force" → "Football/Irish football task force"
"Football/Netherlands task force" → "Football/Dutch football task force"
"Football/Scotland task force" → "Football/Scottish football task force"
"Football/United States and Canada task force" → "Football/American and Canadian soccer task force"
"Football/Wales task force" → "Football/Welsh football task force"
"Football/National teams task force" → "Football/national teams task force"
"Football/Season article task force" → "Football/season article task force"
Could you please help me fix these names? Thanks. --Phikia (talk) 06:02, 12 November 2021 (UTC)
 Done I have submitted an edit request on User talk:Community Tech bot/Popular pages config.json. Thanks! --Phikia (talk) 13:15, 12 November 2021 (UTC)

Tech News: 2021-46

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

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Problems

  • Sometimes, edits made on iOS using the visual editor save groups of numbers as telephone number links, because of a feature in the operating system. This problem is under investigation. [8]
  • There was a problem with search last week. Many search requests did not work for 2 hours because of a configuration error. [9]

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  • Recurrent item The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 16 November. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 17 November. It will be on all wikis from 18 November (calendar).

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22:05, 15 November 2021 (UTC)

Tech News: 2021-47

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20:01, 22 November 2021 (UTC)

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Admin/crat inactivity

Hey, Xaos! I'm back again without having formally finished the last discussion to ask for advice on another topic. We're discussing inactivity criteria in my homewiki for admin/crat removal. We started the discussion by proposing some arbitrary edit numbers. From there those plain edit numbers evolved into admin specific actions (that is protection, deletion, etc.) and from there the discussion evolved to other ways admins and crats help for example antivandalism blocks, Mediawiki page edits, JS/CSS pages for interface admins, edit filters... And at this point we're kinda lost. Because for most of the things said in the end it is very hard to gather stats from Special:Logs and, even if it wasn't we're not sure how we'd be able to do that. For example, if our limit was just regular 200 edits in a year, what are we supposed to do? Manually count the edits of each admin every year? That looks primitive and unsustainable in the long run, especially if the number of edits or admins grows. Now imagine if our criteria is made to account for your contributions even on what I wrote above... It would be a nightmare hunting down each edit on different logs for each admin/crat user for every year and counting by hand...

So... What does EnWiki do in this aspect? What criteria does it use if any? How does it gather data? Thanks in advance for every information you can provide! :)) - Klein Muçi (talk) 11:52, 26 November 2021 (UTC)

@Klein Muçi: our inactivity criteria for admins is extremely low (1 edit or logged entry - once a year) - so it is trivial to check, we have a bot do it, but only because we have over 1000 admins to go over. Our 'crat process is more complicated, but it is a 3-year cycle and also only requires 1 action - we do that manually. sqwiki's number of admins and crats are much lower, so a manual process is still probably the most efficient. For your size, my suggestion would be to do something like some other small (in # of admins) projects do:
  • Having 1 or 2 scheduled review periods a year, for example on 01-JANUARY and 01-JUNE.
  • Require your 'crats to be admins, don't make a separate criteria for them as there is likely not enough 'crat-only work to go around
  • Use only things that can be easily validated by anyone (e.g. don't use "deleted edits")
  • Use only things that are easy to count (don't use "edit to a page that had protection level-n")
  • Use a "Number of live edits" value and "number of publicly logged actions" value. (e.g. 100 edits and 10 logged actions)
    • Don't get picky on these (caring about namespaces of edits or type of action).
A collection of project's policies is available here: meta:Admin activity review/Local inactivity policies. Hope this helps. — xaosflux Talk 12:48, 26 November 2021 (UTC)
If you don't make a "big deal" about making admins, inactivity shouldn't be that hard. On enwiki, getting admin is quite hard - but we are a flagship project and our admins unfortunately have the ability to do things that can make off-project news to a wide audience. — xaosflux Talk 12:52, 26 November 2021 (UTC)
Thanks for the detailed answer! Yeah, we were more or less revolving around the no big deal thing. The problem is that we have "a lot" (that loses meaning when compared to what you might call "a lot" here) of admins and some crats that aren't active at all at the project and haven't been so for many months and for some, even years. (Or in the very rare cases that they have, they've done only really trivial 1-2 edits on the mainspace.) Because of this, users needing help have to try many times until they get a talkpage of an active admin and, most importantly, a lot of new volunteers are told that "we have a lot of admins currently so adding more would be unneeded for a small wiki" even though in reality there's at tops 3 people only who run everything and 2 of them are only editing once every few months.
Our understanding of the existing infrastructure was that admins would get demoted automatically by stewards if they started failing the 1 edit in 2 years criteria and we thought the problem would solve itself. We even thought that the Meta community has a kind of mechanism that would remove them automatically, without any kind of manual work involved. So our logic was to just make the criteria better defined. But, apparently, it doesn't work like that. Stewards, as far as I understand now, don't act on admins if there are local crats elected. And nothing automatic exists. It all depends on manual work. This was different from anything that we knew until now. And we're not sure how to act anymore because a) we were trying to evade the possibility of manual removal given that it may give rise to a lot of conflicts between crats and admins removed for power abuse b) as I said, we were trying to make a well defined criteria that could make a good distinction between an active admin and one who was just doing 2 edits per year to play the system and prolong its privileges, something that we don't know how to do anymore given that it is supposed that all the counting should be manual now, without any kind of help from gadgets. Klein Muçi (talk) 13:33, 26 November 2021 (UTC)
If your community makes an activity policy, stewards won't deal with it. Your crats are "normal" in that they can make but not remove admins, so stewards won't deal with adding admins but still will with removal. meta:Admin activity review covers that - and the policy is one action every 2 years. This is usually done once a year in January. A quick query shows:
user_name user_editcount user_registration Last edit Last log user_group
1l2l3k 20278 20170728164212 20190213020721 20190213020721 sysop
Tëfcí 17580 20081116104754 20211125205718 20191028133506 sysop
Euriditi 15924 20090812104406 20200807201923 20200803102156 sysop
Puntori 42538 20060416014942 20211007145956 20210222131816 sysop
Planeti 24056 20070512094509 20211124224008 20210813102700 sysop
AT44 5398 20090614111729 20211028180934 20210920132340 sysop
Olsi 5074 20100719132125 20210731211319 20211008115651 sysop
Liridon 46285 20080712212016 20211124132416 20211027141159 sysop
Βατο 12148 20170126220739 20211126152529 20211124132612 sysop
Klein Muçi 56924 20130516090012 20211126112853 20211125225141 sysop
  • You have 1 person (1l2l3k) that should get hit with that next year. If you make a more strict policy, you would place removal requests for stewards when needed. — xaosflux Talk 15:52, 26 November 2021 (UTC)
    So... If we set up a stricter policy, will stewards enforce it? For example, we say that the new criteria is 200 edits per year. Assume I'm an admin and fail to meet that quota, will stewards remove me? - Klein Muçi (talk) 15:58, 26 November 2021 (UTC)
    @Klein Muçi: yes, but. First, they will need to determine that your local policy was sufficiently created (it should be well advertised and well attended - as a relationship of your active community members). Second, they will not proactively seek out removals - but will then act upon requests at meta:Steward_requests/Permissions#Removal_of_access when presented. These are normally placed by local crats or admins asking for the action after whenever your periodic review is (even here on enwiki we only do a review once a month - though we could do one every second if we wanted to). Requests are normally actioned within a day. — xaosflux Talk 16:32, 26 November 2021 (UTC)
    Ah, so again we need to ask. How normal is asking periodically? For example, if I ask every year on 1 specific day, something like "please remove who needs to be removed". :P Is that a normal thing to do or will I get an answer like "you can do that yourself given that you have crat privileges"? - Klein Muçi (talk) 16:41, 26 November 2021 (UTC)
    @Klein Muçi: it is fine, it happens all the time - see for example the mlwiki ones here: meta:Special:PermaLink/21526756#Adv.tksujith@mlwiki. On sqlwiki bureaucrats don't have the ability to "remove" admin access - if they did, then the stewards would decline (as they do not act when a local community has the ability to) - but as they don't this is the proper process. — xaosflux Talk 18:21, 26 November 2021 (UTC)
    @Klein Muçi: - keep in mind: if you don't make a local policy, they will decline and say to wait for the AAR process - if you have a local policy you use this. — xaosflux Talk 18:22, 26 November 2021 (UTC)
    Yes, we're doing just that. That's why I asked. But... AFAIK, our crats CAN remove admins so... Will stewards still help us? Klein Muçi (talk) 19:41, 26 November 2021 (UTC)
    @Klein Muçi: They can't, see w:sq:Speciale:ListGroupRights to verify. This is normal for all but the most large projects. — xaosflux Talk 20:14, 26 November 2021 (UTC)
    What does this mean? If you do nothing at all, they will check once a year and remove those that are completely inactive for over 2 years. — xaosflux Talk 20:15, 26 November 2021 (UTC)
    Ooh... I didn't know that. I've just become a crat so... So the removal is on the stewards' side. And we have to set the policy. Last question: If we set up a new policy and do nothing, will they still remove the inactive admins following our new policy? - Klein Muçi (talk) 22:10, 26 November 2021 (UTC)
    @Klein Muçi: very likely:no. But the "we" would need to be everyone - because anyone can post a removal request at SRP, pointing to the inactive admin and pointing to the policy. Should no one at all actually do anything, provided you have 100% inactive admins for over 2 years: someone will raise a concern that your community is collapsed and it should be put back under AAR. — xaosflux Talk 23:35, 26 November 2021 (UTC)
    I understand. Thanks a lot for the explanations! I think I'm finally able to see the full picture now. - Klein Muçi (talk) 00:02, 27 November 2021 (UTC)
  • Side note, removing admins doesn't fix your problem of not having admins around. Your 10 admins is very far from "a lot" - if you are having large gross behavior issues like vandalism, etc: I suggest opting in to allowing Global sysops to act. Even a manual review of them twice a year should take <1 hour. — xaosflux Talk 15:56, 26 November 2021 (UTC)
    Uhm, assuming we want to take that route, where do we give explicit permission for that? (I assumed there was no need for permission for that.) - Klein Muçi (talk) 16:00, 26 November 2021 (UTC)
    Sorry, my bad - sqwiki already has Global Sysops enabled. Keep in mind, global sysops don't take care of routine editor-behavior type stuff - mostly just blatant vandalism. — xaosflux Talk 16:28, 26 November 2021 (UTC)

The Signpost: 29 November 2021

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Tech News: 2021-48

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Changes later this week

  • Recurrent item The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 30 November. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 1 December. It will be on all wikis from 2 December (calendar).

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

21:14, 29 November 2021 (UTC)

Technically clueless admin question

I should probably be able to figure this out myself, but... does Special:SecurePoll/vote/801 display the same content to eligible and ineligible voters? Maybe that's why I'm confused by his comment. --Floquenbeam (talk) 23:18, 29 November 2021 (UTC)

@Floquenbeam: in general - no. They should get a meaningful error message, even multiple of them (I just verified this). Example errors would be:
  • Sorry, you cannot vote. You need to have made at least 150 edits to vote in this election, you have made 21.
  • Sorry, your account on the English Wikipedia does not meet the voting requirements for this election.
  • Your account does not meet the requirements to vote in this election. If you believe you are receiving this message in error, please contact the election commissioners.
I expect that Buffs user should be getting the second one (though why they are not-in-list is outstanding). — xaosflux Talk 23:24, 29 November 2021 (UTC)
Thanks, I knew you'd know. That's a pretty smart page, then. Already smarter than at least one admin. It's odd Buffs isn't on the list, seems to meet all the criteria. My first thought was maybe the list did accidentally exclude anyone who was p-blocked at the time of list generation; I wonder if any other editors p-blocked at that time have been able to vote? Although if not, I'd have assumed one of them would have complained before. Anyway, I'll step aside, let the technically competent admins handle it, and watch with interest. --Floquenbeam (talk) 23:31, 29 November 2021 (UTC)
@Floquenbeam: I did p-block myself and was able to still get to the vote server, so I think that part is correct. Why they are missing from the rolls is another problem (though they should be getting that second message above). I'll keep chasing this over at Wikipedia_talk:Arbitration_Committee_Elections_December_2021/Coordination#Unable_to_vote...should_be_able.... Thank you for your help! — xaosflux Talk 23:35, 29 November 2021 (UTC)
But that's what I meant; maybe someone p-blocked at the time the list was created weren't added to the eligible voter list, whereas someone p-blocked after that would be. --Floquenbeam (talk) 23:36, 29 November 2021 (UTC)
@Floquenbeam: FYI, the bug has been identified and a suggested immediate fix has been proposed (up to 73 usernames appear to have been left off the rolls). — xaosflux Talk 13:53, 1 December 2021 (UTC)
Thanks for the note. If I understand right, I guessed correctly; maybe I'm only 90% technologically clueless? I'm surprised no one else reported it before Buffs. Anyway, good catch on the bug. While I'm here, you're doing a lot of work to keep this running smoothly - the ArbCom EC's own civil service (intended as a compliment, tho it could be taken otherwise) - just as in past years. Thank you. --Floquenbeam (talk) 14:50, 1 December 2021 (UTC)

Your draft article, Draft:Sequester (Web series)

Hello, Xaosflux. It has been over six months since you last edited the Articles for Creation submission or Draft page you started, "Sequester".

In accordance with our policy that Wikipedia is not for the indefinite hosting of material deemed unsuitable for the encyclopedia mainspace, the draft has been deleted. If you plan on working on it further and you wish to retrieve it, you can request its undeletion. An administrator will, in most cases, restore the submission so you can continue to work on it.

Thanks for your submission to Wikipedia, and happy editing. Liz Read! Talk! 20:08, 30 November 2021 (UTC)

@Liz: I think this was really meant for Nobo71. — xaosflux Talk 21:36, 30 November 2021 (UTC)
That is correct. I have undeleted it though. Jay (talk) 08:34, 1 December 2021 (UTC)

Administrators' newsletter – December 2021

News and updates for administrators from the past month (November 2021).

Administrator changes

removed A Train • Berean Hunter • Epbr123 • GermanJoe • Sanchom • Mysid

Technical news

  • Unregistered editors using the mobile website are now able to receive notices to indicate they have talk page messages. The notice looks similar to what is already present on desktop, and will be displayed on when viewing any page except mainspace and when editing any page. (T284642)
  • The limit on the number of emails a user can send per day has been made global instead of per-wiki to help prevent abuse. (T293866)

Arbitration


Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 17:25, 3 December 2021 (UTC)

Infoboxes

Yet another infoboxes thread...

Hello! :) Can you help me understand something: What does class mean in infoboxes, sometimes used beside label and data?

Secondly, can you help me understand how the Parent(s) part works in {{Infobox person}}? I got confused by its multinested structure.

I'm localizing in Albanian some of the EnWiki infoboxes as you may remember but now I find out that apart from what we've discussed earlier, they also have an added "problem" in regard to internationalization: Most entries are technically designed to make way for English and American spellings, a technical infrastructure which doesn't make sense when localized in other languages so it's harder to treat it as "source, basic code" (like we've learned to usually do with EnWiki templates) when they've already been "flavored" (specialized) in English. Distinguishing between singulars and plurals is again too flavored [Name(s)] in English, a structure which breaks on other languages, but that usually doesn't intersect with the technical aspect. - Klein Muçi (talk) 12:08, 4 December 2021 (UTC)

Gonna send you to Template talk:Infobox on this one - that box code has become to bloated over time I'm not spending the hours it would take to unravel it :) — xaosflux Talk 16:19, 4 December 2021 (UTC)
Okay, no problem. Thank you! :) - Klein Muçi (talk) 22:28, 4 December 2021 (UTC)

Feedback request: Wikipedia policies and guidelines request for comment

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Tech News: 2021-49

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Problems

  • MediaWiki 1.38-wmf.11 was scheduled to be deployed on some wikis last week. The deployment was delayed because of unexpected problems.

Changes later this week

  • Recurrent item The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 7 December. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 8 December. It will be on all wikis from 9 December (calendar).
  • At all Wikipedias, a Mentor Dashboard is now available at Special:MentorDashboard. It allows registered mentors, who take care of newcomers' first steps, to monitor their assigned newcomers' activity. It is part of the Growth features. You can learn more about activating the mentor list on your wiki and about the mentor dashboard project.
  • Advanced item The predecessor to the current MediaWiki Action API (which was created in 2008), action=ajax, will be removed this week. Any scripts or bots using it will need to switch to the corresponding API module. [10]
  • Advanced item An old ResourceLoader module, jquery.jStorage, which was deprecated in 2016, will be removed this week. Any scripts or bots using it will need to switch to mediawiki.storage instead. [11]

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

21:58, 6 December 2021 (UTC)

Sign-off needed on this month's Bots Newsletter before I send it out

I've just finished Wikipedia:Bots/News/202112; let me know if there's anything I have missed, or if it is good to go (have also left a message on WT:Bots/News and Headbomb's talk page). jp×g 02:11, 7 December 2021 (UTC)

Administrators will no longer be autopatrolled

A recently closed Request for Comment (RFC) reached consensus to remove Autopatrolled from the administrator user group. You may, similarly as with Edit Filter Manager, choose to self-assign this permission to yourself. This will be implemented the week of December 13th, but if you wish to self-assign you may do so now. To find out when the change has gone live or if you have any questions please visit the Administrator's Noticeboard. 20:07, 7 December 2021 (UTC)

Bots Newsletter, December 2021

Bots Newsletter, December 2021
BRFA activity by month

Welcome to the eighth issue of the English Wikipedia's Bots Newsletter, your source for all things bot. Maintainers disappeared to parts unknown... bots awakening from the slumber of æons... hundreds of thousands of short descriptions... these stories, and more, are brought to you by Wikipedia's most distinguished newsletter about bots.

Our last issue was in August 2019, so there's quite a bit of catching up to do. Due to the vast quantity of things that have happened, the next few issues will only cover a few months at a time. This month, we'll go from September 2019 through the end of the year. I won't bore you with further introductions — instead, I'll bore you with a newsletter about bots.

Overall

  • Between September and December 2019, there were 33 BRFAs. Of these, Green checkmarkY 25 were approved, and 8 were unsuccessful (Dark red X symbolN2 3 denied, Blue question mark? 3 withdrawn, and Expired 2 expired).

September 2019

Look! It's moving. It's alive. It's alive... It's alive, it's moving, it's alive, it's alive, it's alive, it's alive, IT'S ALIVE!
  • Green checkmarkY Monkbot 16, DannyS712 bot 60, Ahechtbot 6, PearBOT 3, Qbugbot 3 · Dark red X symbolN2 DannyS712 bot 5, PkbwcgsBot 24 · Blue question mark? DannyS712 bot 61, TheSandBot 4
  • TParis goes away, UTRSBot goes kaput: Beeblebrox noted that the bot for maintaining on-wiki records of UTRS appeals stopped working a while ago. TParis, the semi-retired user who had previously run it, said they were "unlikely to return to actively editing Wikipedia", and the bot had been vanquished by trolls submitting bogus UTRS requests on behalf of real blocked users. While OAuth was a potential fix, neither maintainer had time to implement it. TParis offered to access to the UTRS WMFLabs account to any admin identified with the WMF: "I miss you guys a whole lot [...] but I've also moved on with my life. Good luck, let me know how I can help". Ultimately, SQL ended up in charge. Some progress was made, and the bot continued to work another couple months — but as of press time, UTRSBot has not edited since November 2019.
  • Article-measuring contest resumed: The list of Wikipedians by article count, which had lain dead for several years, was triumphantly resurrected by GreenC following a bot request.

October 2019

November 2019

Now you're thinking with portals.

December 2019

In the next issue of Bots Newsletter:
What's next for our intrepid band of coders, maintainers and approvers?

  • What happens when two bots want to clerk the same page?
  • What happens when an adminbot goes hog wild?
  • Will reFill ever get fixed?
  • What's up with ListeriaBot, anyway?
  • Python 3.4 deprecation? In my PyWikiBot? (It's more likely than you think!)

These questions will be answered — and new questions raised — by the January 2022 Bots Newsletter. Tune in, or miss out!

Signing off... jp×g 04:29, 10 December 2021 (UTC)

(You can subscribe or unsubscribe from future newsletters by adding or removing your name from this list.)

ygm

Hello, Xaosflux. Please check your email; you've got mail!
It may take a few minutes from the time the email is sent for it to show up in your inbox. You can remove this notice at any time by removing the {{You've got mail}} or {{ygm}} template.

- CorbieVreccan ☊ ☼ 20:06, 11 December 2021 (UTC)

Talk pages

Hello! I have a kind of strange question.

MajavahBot deals with our archiving processes. It's set to autoarchive all talkpages in all namespaces. Nonetheless there are times when the bot fails because of old discussions or vandalisms cases, all of which don't have signatures which make the bot fail to notice them. Is there a way how we could set up a query to find pages that "suffer" from these kind of cases? We'd like to delete them somehow. I've asked Majavah but he wasn't able to help. - Klein Muçi (talk) 19:38, 13 December 2021 (UTC)

@Klein Muçi: not really, and also that setup seems quite wasteful. For example, w:sq:Portal diskutim:Sanxhaku has a tiny discussion on it, is it actually better to make an archive and move it there to make anyone wanting to read about that page have one more click to follow? A multi-bot option you could do would be to have someone run a signature bot (we have User:SineBot), to chase all edits made to talk pages that don't appear to have signatures and have it add an "unsigned" signature block. Then your archive bot would just work as is. Many of your new talk pages may also just be speedy deletion candidates, or editors that are very lost an in need of help. Having your community members patrol your New Pages feed should help find those (e.g. look at these). — xaosflux Talk 20:02, 13 December 2021 (UTC)
I think that still wouldn't work because MajavahBot requires discussions to be on specific sections. Because, if not, then that discussion would have been archived already given that signatures are alright. - Klein Muçi (talk) 20:25, 13 December 2021 (UTC)

Tech News: 2021-50

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent changes

  • There are now default short aliases for the "Project:" namespace on most wikis. E.g. On Wikibooks wikis, [[WB:]] will go to the local language default for the [[Project:]] namespace. This change is intended to help the smaller communities have easy access to this feature. Additional local aliases can still be requested via the usual process. [12]

Changes later this week

  • Recurrent item The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 14 December. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 15 December. It will be on all wikis from 16 December (calendar).

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

22:26, 13 December 2021 (UTC)

Secure poll options

Thanks for looking into options for making use of Secure poll for RfA elections. Whether or not they get the go-ahead, now or in the future, it's good to know what choices are potentially available. I hope you have made/will make enough progress so that there is more information available for future discussions. isaacl (talk) 17:25, 15 December 2021 (UTC)

@Isaacl: with zhwiki wanting it too (although they have a very delicate CU issue) work won't be completely abandoned - we should have it back working on testwiki soon. — xaosflux Talk 18:10, 15 December 2021 (UTC)

WP:AN

Should that read 2021 elections. Amortias (T)(C) 23:36, 15 December 2021 (UTC)

@Amortias: already fixed, thank you. — xaosflux Talk 23:37, 15 December 2021 (UTC)

Help me!

Could you please delete my minerva.js page, I had an error, I import a script, but some of th functions of that script doesn't work. Thanks. —Ctrlwiki • talk • 23:45, 15 December 2021 (UTC)

@Ctrlwiki:  Done — xaosflux Talk 23:46, 15 December 2021 (UTC)`
Thanks. Additional question, what will happen if I leave blank my .js subpages? —Ctrlwiki • talk • 23:50, 15 December 2021 (UTC)
@Ctrlwiki: it should just be ignored, when I want mine to do "nothing" I just put an empty comment on it like this: Special:PermaLink/1004869452. — xaosflux Talk 00:17, 16 December 2021 (UTC)

Tech News: 2021-51

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Tech News

  • Because of the holidays the next issue of Tech News will be sent out on 10 January 2022.

Recent changes

  • Queries made by the DynamicPageList extension (<DynamicPageList>) are now only allowed to run for 10 seconds and error if they take longer. This is in response to multiple outages where long-running queries caused an outage on all wikis. [13]

Changes later this week

  • There is no new MediaWiki version this week or next week.

Future changes

  • The developers of the Wikipedia iOS app are looking for testers who edit in multiple languages. You can read more and let them know if you are interested.
  • Advanced item The Wikimedia Cloud VPS hosts technical projects for the Wikimedia movement. Developers need to claim projects they use. This is because old and unused projects are removed once a year. Unclaimed projects can be shut down from February. [14]

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

22:04, 20 December 2021 (UTC)

Merry Christmas!

CAPTAIN RAJU(T) is wishing you a Merry Christmas!

This greeting (and season) promotes WikiLove and hopefully this note has made your day a little better. Spread the WikiLove by wishing another user a Merry Christmas, whether it be someone you have had disagreements with in the past, a good friend, or just some random person. Happy New Year!

Spread the Christmas cheer by adding {{subst:Xmas3}} to their talk page with a friendly message.

Diff as asked

[15] Doug Weller talk 14:08, 23 December 2021 (UTC)

@Doug Weller: I haven't been able to duplicate your report yet, this is what I'm seeing:
  1. Go to a user talk page
  2. Use Discussion tools (both "reply" link or "new section" link)
  3. Get the dt input box
  4. Put in something that should trigger the abuse filter, such as {{subst:alert|covid}} ~~~~
  5. See the Abuse Filter warning message
  6. Click "add topic" or "reply" again, page is saved
Are these the steps you are using, or something different? — xaosflux Talk 14:41, 23 December 2021 (UTC)
I don't see the Abuses Filter warning message. Doug Weller talk 14:56, 23 December 2021 (UTC)
I just tried Twinkle on my page, that works. Doug Weller talk 14:58, 23 December 2021 (UTC)
@Doug Weller: could you try leaving one for me to see if it was just some one-off? The Abuse Filter that provides those warnings is not perfect, during busy times it may skip defaulting the action (edit) to process as if it wasn't there. — xaosflux Talk 15:06, 23 December 2021 (UTC)


This is a standard message to notify contributors about an administrative ruling in effect. It does not imply that there are any issues with your contributions to date.

You have shown interest in COVID-19, broadly construed. Due to past disruption in this topic area, a more stringent set of rules called discretionary sanctions is in effect. Any administrator may impose sanctions on editors who do not strictly follow Wikipedia's policies, or the page-specific restrictions, when making edits related to the topic.

For additional information, please see the guidance on discretionary sanctions and the Arbitration Committee's decision here. If you have any questions, or any doubts regarding what edits are appropriate, you are welcome to discuss them with me or any other editor.

Doug Weller talk 15:21, 23 December 2021 (UTC)

@Doug Weller: did you get the warning? — xaosflux Talk 16:15, 23 December 2021 (UTC)
No warning. Doug Weller talk 16:23, 23 December 2021 (UTC)
2021-12-23T15:21:39: Doug Weller (talk | contribs | block) triggered filter 602, performing the action "edit" on User talk:Xaosflux. Actions taken: Tag; Filter description: Arbitration discretionary sanctions alerts (details | examine | diff)
2021-12-23T15:21:29: Doug Weller (talk | contribs | block) triggered filter 602, performing the action "edit" on User talk:Xaosflux. Actions taken: Warn; Filter description: Arbitration discretionary sanctions alerts (details | examine)
@Doug Weller: hmmm there is a 10second time gap there too, from when you tried to save the first time, what happened, if anything? It looks like the filter caught you, warned you, then you proceeded with the save. — xaosflux Talk 16:27, 23 December 2021 (UTC)
I'll try again. Doug Weller talk 16:32, 23 December 2021 (UTC)


This is a standard message to notify contributors about an administrative ruling in effect. It does not imply that there are any issues with your contributions to date.

You have shown interest in COVID-19, broadly construed. Due to past disruption in this topic area, a more stringent set of rules called discretionary sanctions is in effect. Any administrator may impose sanctions on editors who do not strictly follow Wikipedia's policies, or the page-specific restrictions, when making edits related to the topic.

For additional information, please see the guidance on discretionary sanctions and the Arbitration Committee's decision here. If you have any questions, or any doubts regarding what edits are appropriate, you are welcome to discuss them with me or any other editor.

Doug Weller talk 16:33, 23 December 2021 (UTC)

There's a delay but I see nothing, and of course it's a duplicate warning. There always seems to be a delay though. Your turn? Doug Weller talk 16:33, 23 December 2021 (UTC)
@Doug Weller: ok so you click the button, there is a "delay" and then it just goes through? Or you click, there is a delay and it doesn't happen - then you click the button again? Are you using a desktop or mobile interface? Which skin are you using? Are you using a script to make the edit, or just doing it manually? — xaosflux Talk 16:50, 23 December 2021 (UTC)
Actually I think I have to click twice. No script, desktop interface, Vector. Doug Weller talk 17:03, 23 December 2021 (UTC)
@Doug Weller: you have many personal userscript running, can you try to deactivate the scripts in User:Doug Weller/common.js, User:Doug_Weller/vector.js, and meta:User:Doug Weller/global.js - then see if the problem is still occurring? If it resolves it, you can try turning scripts on in batches to see if you can determine which one it is. — xaosflux Talk 17:35, 23 December 2021 (UTC)


This is a standard message to notify contributors about an administrative ruling in effect. It does not imply that there are any issues with your contributions to date.

You have shown interest in COVID-19, broadly construed. Due to past disruption in this topic area, a more stringent set of rules called discretionary sanctions is in effect. Any administrator may impose sanctions on editors who do not strictly follow Wikipedia's policies, or the page-specific restrictions, when making edits related to the topic.

For additional information, please see the guidance on discretionary sanctions and the Arbitration Committee's decision here. If you have any questions, or any doubts regarding what edits are appropriate, you are welcome to discuss them with me or any other editor.

Doug Weller talk 17:51, 23 December 2021 (UTC)

No change, greyed out but then I had to click again. Shall I reinstate my scripts? Doug Weller talk 17:51, 23 December 2021 (UTC)
@Doug Weller: go ahead, I'll open a phab ticket - not sure what the fix for this is going to be. — xaosflux Talk 18:09, 23 December 2021 (UTC)

Hi!

Is there any way to retrieve old deleted discussions on my talk pages, cause I want to add them on my archive talk page, but I don't know how to retrieve them. Thanks in advance. Ctrlwiki • 06:04, 27 December 2021 (UTC)

@Ctrlwiki: hello, I checked your talk page - nothing has been "deleted", just versioned over. You can look at the page at any point in time by going to your page history (just click on the timestamp) - then you can click on "edit this page" and copy-paste the text to your archive. Best regards, — xaosflux Talk 11:31, 27 December 2021 (UTC)
Thanks. Ctrlwiki • 12:50, 27 December 2021 (UTC)

The Signpost: 28 December 2021

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 21:09, 28 December 2021 (UTC)

RFA 2021 Completed

The 2021 re-examination of RFA has been completed. 23 (plus 2 variants) ideas were proposed. Over 200 editors participated in this final phase. Three changes gained consensus and two proposals were identified by the closers as having the potential to gain consensus with some further discussion and iteration. Thanks to all who helped to close the discussion, and in particular Primefac, Lee Vilenski, and Ymblanter for closing the most difficult conversations and for TonyBallioni for closing the review of one of the closes.

The following proposals gained consensus and have all been implemented:

  1. Revision of standard question 1 to Why are you interested in becoming an administrator? Special thanks to xaosflux for help with implementation.
  2. A new process, Administrative Action Review (XRV) designed to review if an editor's specific use of an advanced permission, including the admin tools, is consistent with policy in a process similar to that of deletion review and move review. Thanks to all the editors who contributed (and are continuing to contribute) to the discussion of how to implement this proposal.
  3. Removal of autopatrol from the administrator's toolkit. Special thanks to Wugapodes and Seddon for their help with implementation.

The following proposals were identified by the closers as having the potential to gain consensus with some further discussion and iteration:

  1. An option for people to run for temporary adminship (proposal, discussion, & close)
  2. An optional election process (proposal & discussion and close review & re-close)

Editors who wish to discuss these ideas or other ideas on how to try to address any of the six issues identified during phase 1 for which no proposal gained are encouraged to do so at RFA's talk page or an appropriate village pump.

A final and huge thanks all those who participated in this effort to improve our RFA process over the last 4 months.

This is the final update with no further talk page messages planned.

01:47, 30 December 2021 (UTC)

Fluxbot

Hello, I removed the bot flag of Fluxbot at the Spanish Wikipedia since it hasn't edited for more than a year, which is the minimum activity required by policy. If needed, you can request it again at es:WP:BOT/A. Thank you for your work. -sasha- (talk) 13:33, 30 December 2021 (UTC)

Hyphenation

Hello. My belated answer for your question, is to have a line-break instead of a hyphenated word. --Mahmudmasri (talk) 23:53, 1 January 2022 (UTC)

@Mahmudmasri: a single "long word" can still exceed the bounds of that box, would you want it to create some sort of horizontal scroll control? — xaosflux Talk 23:57, 1 January 2022 (UTC)
I don't imagine that happening in the current boundaries, but that will be better than adding hyphens. --Mahmudmasri (talk) 00:03, 2 January 2022 (UTC)
@Mahmudmasri: since this is coming from upstream, you can file a feature request to change that form if you would like. — xaosflux Talk 01:02, 2 January 2022 (UTC)
Thanks for the info. --Mahmudmasri (talk) 22:50, 2 January 2022 (UTC)

Hello again. On this page, from my desktop or mobile, on Minerva skin, on all browsers, I see auto-hyphenation, despite disabling them twice! Inspecting the element, I see the following code is the reason: 

#mw-mf-diffarea {
word-wrap: break-word
-webkit-hyphens: auto
}

--Mahmudmasri (talk) 17:13, 6 January 2022 (UTC)

@Mahmudmasri: Overriding that with:
#mw-mf-diffarea {
-webkit-hyphens: none !important;
hyphens: none !important;
}
seems to work for me, you may be running in to specificity conflicts. — xaosflux Talk 17:43, 6 January 2022 (UTC)
Which browser did you use? --Mahmudmasri (talk) 17:54, 6 January 2022 (UTC)
@Mahmudmasri:, Waterfox where I did see the combined CSS being delivered, with the more specific one taking precedence, I didn't do a network capture but it seems that it is being delivered sent (after I added that specific #mw-mf-diffarea snippette above to my common.css). — xaosflux Talk 18:01, 6 January 2022 (UTC)
Thanks dear. I tried your code and did some cleanup, and now it seems to work. --Mahmudmasri (talk) 18:08, 6 January 2022 (UTC)

Administrators' newsletter – January 2022

News and updates for administrators from the past month (December 2021).

Guideline and policy news

  • Following consensus at the 2021 RfA review, the autopatrolled user right has been removed from the administrators user group; admins can grant themselves the autopatrolled permission if they wish to remain autopatrolled.

Arbitration

Miscellaneous

  • The functionaries email list (functionaries-en@lists.wikimedia.org) will no longer accept incoming emails apart from those sent by list members and WMF staff. Private concerns, apart from those requiring oversight, should be directly sent to the Arbitration Committee.
Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 00:25, 3 January 2022 (UTC)

January 2021

Hi! Why the move protection on my userpage has gone already, I thought it will automatically unprotected in March 2022? Thanks. Ctrlwiki • 06:45, 4 January 2022 (UTC)

@Ctrlwiki: as for the "why" - it looks like a combination of redirects and moves associated with your account rename left the protection on the original page, User:Clipred. I've re-added move protection on your new page with the same expiration. Best regards, — xaosflux Talk 11:20, 4 January 2022 (UTC)

How we will see unregistered users

Hi!

You get this message because you are an admin on a Wikimedia wiki.

When someone edits a Wikimedia wiki without being logged in today, we show their IP address. As you may already know, we will not be able to do this in the future. This is a decision by the Wikimedia Foundation Legal department, because norms and regulations for privacy online have changed.

Instead of the IP we will show a masked identity. You as an admin will still be able to access the IP. There will also be a new user right for those who need to see the full IPs of unregistered users to fight vandalism, harassment and spam without being admins. Patrollers will also see part of the IP even without this user right. We are also working on better tools to help.

If you have not seen it before, you can read more on Meta. If you want to make sure you don’t miss technical changes on the Wikimedia wikis, you can subscribe to the weekly technical newsletter.

We have two suggested ways this identity could work. We would appreciate your feedback on which way you think would work best for you and your wiki, now and in the future. You can let us know on the talk page. You can write in your language. The suggestions were posted in October and we will decide after 17 January.

Thank you. /Johan (WMF)

18:13, 4 January 2022 (UTC)

Special:History/User:DJCA/vector.js

It has been a while, but as a tip, you can add a (non-multiline) regexp like $ → \n//</nowiki> if you need to append something and the "prepend/append" option is already in use for prepending. ~~~~
User:1234qwer1234qwer4 (talk) 19:28, 5 January 2022 (UTC)

Feedback request: Wikipedia technical issues and templates request for comment

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Tech News: 2022-02

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent changes

Changes later this week

  • Recurrent item The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 11 January. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 12 January. It will be on all wikis from 13 January (calendar).

Events

  • Community Wishlist Survey 2022 begins. All contributors to the Wikimedia projects can propose for tools and platform improvements. The proposal phase takes place from 10 January 18:00 UTC to 23 January 18:00 UTC. Learn more.

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01:22, 11 January 2022 (UTC)

Delete

Kindly delete these subpages of mine: Ctrlwiki/sandbox, Ctrlwiki/redwarnRules.json, Ctrlwiki/redwarnConfig.js and Ctrlwiki/common.js. Thanks. Ctrlwiki • 13:23, 11 January 2022 (UTC)

@Ctrlwiki:  Done — xaosflux Talk 13:57, 11 January 2022 (UTC)
Thank you! Ctrlwiki • 13:58, 11 January 2022 (UTC)

Feedback request: Wikipedia proposals request for comment

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Template:Ivory messagebox

Why did you bump this to FP a couple years ago with only 10^5 transclusions? We have more complex templates more widely-transcluded than this one out and about with lesser protection (Module:Navbox is one such off the cuff hanging out at TE, and yes, I've thought about bumping that one, but no-one has abused their access). Izno (talk) 09:16, 12 January 2022 (UTC)

@Izno: I don't exactly remember, it is now at over 10^6 though; only thought is that perhaps it was also used in a system message at the time. With 0 edit requests since protection it does seem to be a fairly "stable" template though, so I'm not super worried about it being over protected as impact to other editors isn't presenting. If you want to lower it to TPOT, go ahead. — xaosflux Talk 10:54, 12 January 2022 (UTC)

Nomination for merger of Template:ACE2021 discussion

Template:ACE2021 discussion has been nominated for merging with Template:ACE discussion. You are invited to comment on the discussion at the template's entry on the Templates for discussion page. Thank you. Izno (talk) 06:03, 15 January 2022 (UTC)

Feedback request: Wikipedia proposals request for comment

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"causes the image to overlap the text"

[24] in what browser, operating system, yadda yadda? Izno (talk) 19:43, 17 January 2022 (UTC)

@Izno: seems to only be breaking when the sysop-show section is showing; Win10 Chrome/Mozilla/Edge. — xaosflux Talk 19:50, 17 January 2022 (UTC)
I don't see an image overlapping the text at any resolution on Win10 Firefox current. Izno (talk) 02:19, 18 January 2022 (UTC)
I see it in Vector though (not Timeless). Sigh. I think it's because I set a min-width on a flex element and Timeless has some helper CSS (somewhere) that takes care of any issues. Which is coincidentally the skin I'm trying to fix with the min-width (i.e. that images in flex elements are a little sad at times on both Minerva and Timeless). I'll have to sort the details later. Izno (talk) 02:24, 18 January 2022 (UTC)

Tech News: 2022-03

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent changes

Changes later this week

  • Recurrent item The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 18 January. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 19 January. It will be on all wikis from 20 January (calendar).

Events

  • Community Wishlist Survey 2022 continues. All contributors to the Wikimedia projects can propose for tools and platform improvements. The proposal phase takes place from 10 January 18:00 UTC to 23 January 18:00 UTC. Learn more.

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19:54, 17 January 2022 (UTC)

Watchlist

Hey, Xaos! In almost 9 years of experience that I have on wiki I've almost never used the watchlist actively. During all that time, every page that I have ever loaded/seen has been put on my watchlist. My idea has always been that they would somehow get removed automatically after a specific time had been reached but apparently that is not the case? Recently I thought that the watchlist feature is one that I would like to know how to use and incorporate in my everyday wikiediting so I was wondering if you had some general advices for me given that I value your information. I know almost nothing about it except that it helps me get information about new edits and possible vandalisms on my emails some times. 2 or 3 times I've wanted to empty the whole list and start fresh, only watchlisting the articles I'd be interested in but then I've thought that that would remove some of my "admin surveillance power". Given that at my early days, I've used my account to do some bot edits on almost every article there was back then, 90% of articles on SqWiki are already on my watchlist and sometimes that helps me catch vandalism with my email notifications. That also makes it a bit useless for me personally as a normal user on wiki. I thought about emptying it partially but I don't know how to do that and what exactly to remove. Removing old pages that I've spent many days without interacting with would be ideal I think, a function I thought it was already built-in, what is called half-watchlist on Mediawiki, but I don't know how to do that. So, any advice you may give me on it will be really appreciated. :) - Klein Muçi (talk) 16:34, 18 January 2022 (UTC)

@Klein Muçi: so you can "bulk edit" your watch list using Special:EditWatchlist/raw. In the last year "temporary" watching was added, but there is no bulk update tool for expiration values. I'm not aware of any WMF projects that have any extensions about auto-purging watchlists. What I use WL for the most as an admin are:
  • All noticeboards I care about
  • Process pages (such as WP:PERM) that I regular attend to
  • The user pages of anyone I've sent a warning to or blocked (Usually with short expiry option)
  • Any pages I've had to protect because of disputes, as there will often be follow up on their talk pages (Usually with expiry of the protection)
  • Templates/modules/mediawiki pages I normally work on maintaining
  • The talk pages of other admins that I work with regularly
— xaosflux Talk 17:17, 18 January 2022 (UTC)
@Xaosflux, thank you! I meant this: mw:Help:Watchlist_expiry. Is that possible on Wikipedias? Is that possible to have as a preference so each page I edit/review/etc. becomes watchlisted with a specific expiration date automatically instead of being watchlisted indefinitely like it currently is? Is it possible so I set an expiration date for all my thousand pages (10.168 pages without counting the talk pages) that are currently on my watchlist? Do you foresee anything that can go wrong if I were to do that? - Klein Muçi (talk) 01:00, 19 January 2022 (UTC)
@Klein Muçi: Watchlist expiry should work on all WMF wikipedia's (I just tested it on sqwiki). There is no webui method to add expiries to your existing watched items (you could write a script and use the watch api I suppose), see phab:T259863 for a feature request to enable this. Also, watchlists are known to get buggy when they get big (e.g. phab:T41510) I suggest you trim your WL to around 5000 or under. When watching a page you can set it, the default is forever and you can't currently change the default (but see phab:T265716 for a feature request on that). — xaosflux Talk 02:32, 19 January 2022 (UTC)
@Xaosflux, so short answer: Currently I can only set expiration dates manually to new pages. Thank you then! As always, pretty informative! :) - Klein Muçi (talk) 02:44, 19 January 2022 (UTC)
@Klein Muçi: you can "unwatch" and then re-watch the existing pages if you want to put an expiry on them, using the webui. — xaosflux Talk 10:25, 19 January 2022 (UTC)
@Xaosflux, yes but I wanted to do that automatically from the preferences. But apparently that's part of the Phab-World already so... - Klein Muçi (talk) 10:41, 19 January 2022 (UTC)
@Klein Muçi: if it something that only needs to be run on-demand, someone might be able to make a script for it. What are some parameters you'd like to see in such, for example:
  1. Fetch my watchlist
  2. For each item in the watchlist, fetch the last revision date of the page, and associated talk page. Use the most recent.
  3. Remove entries from watchlist, where revision date is older than some period.
Something like that? — xaosflux Talk 11:02, 19 January 2022 (UTC)
But yes, if you want to have the Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-watchlist ("Add pages and files I ... to my watchlist") have some expiry in preferences, that would require software development to add that preference. — xaosflux Talk 11:02, 19 January 2022 (UTC)
When I started the conversation, I wanted both of those things but yesterday I started bulk-editing manually the watchlist and removed some pages that I deemed uninteresting. After a while I saved and saw that the number had gone from +10k to 9k. So I decided I can do that manually in 2-3 days, a thing that I'm supposing needs only to happen once every some years so... That leaves me with only the automatic expiration date in preferences which you say requires backend changes. - Klein Muçi (talk) 11:26, 19 January 2022 (UTC)
Yup, feel free to file a feature request, and/or put it on the meta:Community Wishlist Survey 2022. — xaosflux Talk 14:00, 19 January 2022 (UTC)

Special:Random

Quick, straightforward question: Does the aforementioned page take you to any random page or any random article? I've always understood it to be any random article but Wikipedia:Special:Random insists on "page" even though the description makes you think it is referring to the main space only. - Klein Muçi (talk) 22:39, 19 January 2022 (UTC)

  • @Klein Muçi: sooooo, the question may seem easy, but the like usual, the answer is not :) Special:Random returns a random page, of pages that are in the $wgContentNamespaces array of namespaces. By default this is namespace:0, which on the WMF Wikipedias is called (article). enwiki hasn't added anything extra to that, so our local documentation should probably be updated (feel free to) on Wikipedia:Special:Random. (FYI: sqwiki has NOT changed this either). Other projects may add additional namesapces, and not all projects call their mainspace pages "articles". Hope that helps! — xaosflux Talk 23:08, 19 January 2022 (UTC)
    Thanks a lot! Yes, it does help. To give some context, the reason I asked is because almost all special pages use "page" but some of they refer to every page in every namespace and some of them only refer to pages in the mainspace, hence articles. I've been dealing with translations of those terms lately (TranslateWiki and Gerrit) and I wanted to be sure where to put "artikuj" (articles in Albanian) because apparently I had made some mistakes in the past, for example, translating Special:ShortPages as the place where all the short articles are listed and then finding out that that page included other namespaces as well. - Klein Muçi (talk) 23:23, 19 January 2022 (UTC)

Partial blocks (again) and Twinkle

When I block users, I usually use Twinkle. I've never pblocked anyone. However, in this instance, I want to pblock an editor from editing a particular page for one week for violating 3RR. I started to use Twinkle, and even with the ?s for help, I got confused as to what boxes to check and what information to put in the text boxes (and I couldn't even find violating 3RR as the reason, just edit warring). Thanks for any help.--Bbb23 (talk) 15:00, 22 January 2022 (UTC)

@Bbb23: In Twinkle, select:
  • Block user (on)
  • Partial block (on)
  • Add block template (on)
  • Preset: (Edit warring)
  • Talk page template (Edit warring)
  • Expiry: As needed
  • Specific pages to block: Put Pagename here.
That's the best fit I can see in Twinkle. Or you can just use Special:Block and do everything manually. Hope that helps? — xaosflux Talk 01:26, 23 January 2022 (UTC)
It does indeed; thanks! One other question, though: whether I use Twinkle or the standard block form, do I leave autoblock checked?--Bbb23 (talk) 01:43, 23 January 2022 (UTC)
@Bbb23: I wouldn't normally use autoblock for a single-page pblock, if someone is block evading they prob should be site blocked at that point; but it should be fine - we normally would have left it on for full blocks. — xaosflux Talk 01:47, 23 January 2022 (UTC)
That was my sense too, but I wanted to make sure I wasn't missing anything. Thanks again.--Bbb23 (talk) 01:50, 23 January 2022 (UTC)

Private Request

Hello! Sent you an email today with a private question. Thanks in advance! DrDrago1337 (talk) 02:49, 23 January 2022 (UTC)

@DrDrago1337: replied by email. — xaosflux Talk 09:06, 23 January 2022 (UTC)

ORES

Hello! Through your help, I was able to have a better grasp of the watchlist concept and how it works. I'm still removing unnecessary titles from it and I was able to bring the number down from 10 000 to 3500. I suspect I'll end it at 3000 and I hope that expiration dates at preferences will be added soon so it doesn't get out of control again and that I'm actually able to use it. (There was a wish for that in this year's list. - Fingers crossed!)

While looking at the preferences for the watchlist, I also stumbled upon some dedicated to ORES. I only vaguely know that the acronym is related to the recent changes filters. Can you tell me more about it? Or about the filters of the recent changes in general. I've only used those to turn on and off the bot edits when I was working as a bot operator. I believe that's the only "traditional concept" that I haven't fully utilized up until now beside the watchlist functionality. - Klein Muçi (talk) 00:30, 24 January 2022 (UTC)

@Klein Muçi: ORES is a machine learning system that attempts to score the quality of edits. It runs as an extension server-side. You can read all about it here: mw:ORES. It looks like it originally came to sqwiki in 2017 (c.f. w:sq:Wikipedia:Kuvendi/Arkivi_19#Some_updates_about_⧼eri-rcfilters-beta-label⧽). — xaosflux Talk 02:01, 24 January 2022 (UTC)
@Xaosflux, thank you! I activated it. It's actually really helpful if put on the highest setting. Got some vandalisms easily. - Klein Muçi (talk) 08:06, 24 January 2022 (UTC)
Side information: I finished working with my watchlist and I went from +10k pages to 2450 pages. This goes to show how much that change is needed for wikignomes/maintainers. - Klein Muçi (talk) 08:25, 24 January 2022 (UTC)
@Klein Muçi: they can quickly get out of hand! I disabled the "automatically add" options and only manually add now. — xaosflux Talk 10:45, 24 January 2022 (UTC)

Edit filters

Do you know if there is an edit filter that can protect against edits like this: [26] without much false positives? - Klein Muçi (talk) 09:54, 24 January 2022 (UTC)

@Klein Muçi: I don't think so, since ''''' is valid code to start a bold,italic section. We have a "large string without spaces" filter - but only target IP's and only at 50 characters of non-spaced text: Special:AbuseFilter/231. — xaosflux Talk 10:54, 24 January 2022 (UTC)
The idea was to protect against any kind of edit that follows the general pattern "insert random characters in the middle of words", a feat that might be too hard for machines I believe. But I thought that maybe it could protect against some specific kind of characters that are rather rare to be found in the middle of the words, for example 2 dots, 2 commas, etc. Or even the code for bold/italic if it's in the middle of a word (without spaces from both sides)? Or specific cases of repeated characters like "hahahahaha". - Klein Muçi (talk) 11:17, 24 January 2022 (UTC)
@Klein Muçi: it is hard to avoid FP's on these, but see Special:AbuseFilter/135 and Special:AbuseFilter/1163 for some examples we have to look for repeating vandalism. — xaosflux Talk 11:35, 24 January 2022 (UTC)
Ah, I've already imported one of those. Well then, looks like I'll have to protect manually. :P Thank you! :) - Klein Muçi (talk) 12:03, 24 January 2022 (UTC)

Sorry for accidentally deleting your response

Hey

Sorry for accidentally deleting your response, I'll re add my answer and reply to yours now.

Thanks

John Cummings (talk) 17:00, 24 January 2022 (UTC)

Tech News: 2022-04

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Changes later this week

  • Recurrent item The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 25 January. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 26 January. It will be on all wikis from 27 January (calendar).
  • The following languages can now be used with syntax highlighting: BDD, Elpi, LilyPond, Maxima, Rita, Savi, Sed, Sophia, Spice, .SRCINFO.
  • You can now access your watchlist from outside of the user menu in the new Vector skin. The watchlist link appears next to the notification icons if you are at the top of the page. [27]

Events

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21:37, 24 January 2022 (UTC)


Feedback request: Wikipedia proposals request for comment

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Blocks: MAC addresses

Straightforward question: Can we see and block MAC addresses?

From what I've read around I'm 99% sure that we can't but thought I'd ask anyway. - Klein Muçi (talk) 03:30, 30 January 2022 (UTC)

@Klein Muçi: SHORT Answer: No, MAC addresses are not transmitted across the internet. A little bit more info: It is possible that a local network operator could forward that information as a miscellaneous header (an X- header), though that is almost never done and we don't have X-header blocking functionality. "MAC blocks" are something you might see at the initial access point, such as store that blocks certain or only allows connections from certain MAC's on their wifi. — xaosflux Talk 09:44, 30 January 2022 (UTC)
That's what I thought. Thank you! :) - Klein Muçi (talk) 11:00, 30 January 2022 (UTC)

The Signpost: 30 January 2022

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 20:22, 30 January 2022 (UTC)

Email notifications - Phabricator

When I add a wikipage on my watchlist, I get notified with an email if it gets changed. However, if I don't open that page anymore, I don't get notified with emails for other changes in the same page.

When I subscribe to a Phabricator task, I get notified with an email if it gets changed. If i don't check that change, I still get notified for other changes in that task (or group of tasks, depending on the case) until I select to mute notifications or remove myself as a subscriber.

Would it be better if it was the same standard in both systems? I feel strongly like it would but I'm rather new to Phabricator so maybe veterans' experience may differ from mine and there may be reasons "emails never stop". What do you think? - Klein Muçi (talk) 01:10, 31 January 2022 (UTC)

@Klein Muçi: no, here is why: Phab is meant to be a conversation platform among other things, it is low volume enough to be able to echo updates to email. Watchlist is primarily meant as a way for you to keep track of certain wikipages - of which the primary use is content and pages can sometimes be rapidly updated. To prevent mail flooding, once you get that mail notice, they are suspended until you check the page. Think of the thousands of users that could watch a page and never come back - it could easily get out of control. If you do want to keep an eye on your watched pages off-wiki without using the user interfaces you might want to look in to Wikipedia:Syndication. By setting up an RSS link to your watchlist, your RSS client will periodically poll all the watchlist changes. This is purely read-only. — xaosflux Talk 11:02, 31 January 2022 (UTC)
I was thinking that. I still think though there has to be a middle ground somehow. Lately I've been getting flooded by Phab emails. All I did was read some random tasks just out of curiosity and commented on some talk page discussion tasks, mostly to give ideas or report very minor "bugs". Then I went on and I subscribed to the good new tasks project (given that I've just started to work with Mediawiki) and that sent things on a different level. Now I get emails about every comment on every taks of that project, which, given its nature, has A LOT, most of which are in the chat like manner ("Can someone help me how to start working on this task? Yes, I can. What's your problem? Well, how do I start? You need to do this, and this and..."). I feel like there should be some email/notification options regarding these kind of users like me, which they can use until they mature.
I'm actually good with wiki email notifications but I got curious in the RSS feed. I've never dealt with a RSS feed before, I'm not even sure how they would look like. Can you give me any practical examples in regard to that? I tried reading everything there was on-wiki related to web syndication. - Klein Muçi (talk) 12:05, 31 January 2022 (UTC)
For the most part you can do RSS reading for free, as mediawiki provides the RSS server component (the feed). A super quick-start might look like this:
  1. Get someone to do the heavy-lifting for you. I've had good luck with Feedly. Sign up on their website. The directions below will assume you used Feedly.
  2. Go to Special:ResetTokens and record (or generate/regenerate if needed) your Atom RSS token. This is secret. Anyone with this token can READ your watchlist feed (they can't do anything else, but they could use it to determine your watchlist value - or could make high-speed disruptive reads "as you").
  3. Click the "+" on the left pane (Follow new sources), put in a string like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=feedwatchlist&wlowner=Xaosflux&wltoken=ThisIsWhereYouPutThatLongTokenValue
  4. Look at the feed and see what it does in Feedly.
  5. You can install the Feedly app and set up notifications,etc as you want on say a mobile device.
These things can be done without Feedly, that was just an example. Depending on the RSS Client you use, you can just have it read directly from the wiki. — xaosflux Talk 14:53, 31 January 2022 (UTC)

Tech News: 2022-05

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent changes

  • If a gadget should support the new ?withgadget URL parameter that was announced 3 weeks ago, then it must now also specify supportsUrlLoad in the gadget definition (documentation). [28]

Changes later this week

  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 1 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 2 February. It will be on all wikis from 3 February (calendar).

Future changes

  • A change that was announced last year was delayed. It is now ready to move ahead:
    • The user group oversight will be renamed suppress. This is for technical reasons. This is the technical name. It doesn't affect what you call the editors with this user right on your wiki. This is planned to happen in three weeks. You can comment in Phabricator if you have objections. As usual, these labels can be translated on translatewiki (direct links are available) or by administrators on your wiki.

Events

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

17:41, 31 January 2022 (UTC)

Bots Newsletter, January 2022

Bots Newsletter, January 2022
BRFA activity by month

Welcome to the ninth issue of the English Wikipedia's Bots Newsletter, your source for all things bot. Vicious bot-on-bot edit warring... superseded tasks... policy proposals... these stories, and more, are brought to you by Wikipedia's most distinguished newsletter about bots.

After a long hiatus between August 2019 and December 2021, there's quite a bit of ground to cover. Due to the vastness, I decided in December to split the coverage up into a few installments that covered six months each. Some people thought this was a good idea, since covering an entire year in a single issue would make it unmanageably large. Others thought this was stupid, since they were getting talk page messages about crap from almost three years ago. Ultimately, the question of whether each issue covers six months or a year is only relevant for a couple more of them, and then the problem will be behind us forever.

Of course, you can also look on the bright side – we are making progress, and this issue will only be about crap from almost two years ago. Today we will pick up where we left off in December, and go through the first half of 2020.

Overall
In the first half of 2020, there were 71 BRFAs. Of these, Green checkmarkY 59 were approved, and 12 were unsuccessful (with Dark red X symbolN2 8 denied, Blue question mark? 2 withdrawn, and Expired 2 expired).

January 2020

A python
A python
A python
0.4 pythons
Yeah, you're not gonna be able to get away with this anymore.

February 2020

Speaking of WikiProject Molecular Biology, Listeria went wild in February

March 2020

April 2020

Listeria being examined

Issues and enquiries are typically expected to be handled on the English Wikipedia. Pages reachable via unified login, like a talk page at Commons or at Italian Wikipedia could also be acceptable [...] External sites like Phabricator or GitHub (which require separate registration or do not allow for IP comments) and email (which can compromise anonymity) can supplement on-wiki communication, but do not replace it.

May 2020

We heard you like bots, so we made a bot that reports the status of your bots, so now you can use bots while you use bots

June 2020

A partial block averted at the eleventh hour for the robot that makes Legos

Conclusion

  • What's next for our intrepid band of coders, maintainers and approvers?
  • Will Citation bot ever be set free to roam the project?
  • What's the deal with all those book links that InternetArchiveBot is adding to articles?
  • Should we keep using Gerrit for MediaWiki?
  • What if we had a day for bots to make cosmetic edits?

These questions will be answered — and new questions raised — by the February 2022 Bots Newsletter. Tune in, or miss out!

Signing off... jp×g 23:22, 31 January 2022 (UTC)

(You can subscribe or unsubscribe from future newsletters by adding or removing your name from this list.)

Feedback request: Wikipedia policies and guidelines request for comment

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Importer and Interface administrator

I see that you are an importer and an interface administrator. What is it? And how do you become one? Does it also need high experience? I also want to help out if I can. ItcouldbepossibleTalk 05:39, 2 February 2022 (UTC)

(talk page stalker)@Itcouldbepossible: its a technical area. Just a question. Do you posses good coding skills at JavaScript, Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), JSON etc and understand version control like git? If not, then I think you are not ready yet. 2402:3A80:1C40:3C80:3A2:48C1:B873:F067 (talk) 08:59, 2 February 2022 (UTC)
More to the point, intadmin is quite possibly the most sensitive and powerful usergroup there is, so the trust required to become one is quite high, in addition to requiring one to be a regular admin. See WP:INTADMIN for details; the long and short of it is: don't worry about usergroups, just edit and improve the encyclopedia however you can. User rights will come as they come. Writ Keeper ⚇♔ 09:07, 2 February 2022 (UTC)
@Itcouldbepossible: as they noted above, don't really worry about these things right now. There are LOTS of places to start helping though! If you don't have any specific topics you are interested in to write or improve articles about you can look in to the backlogs of work needed in all areas; You could also ask the SuggestBot to leave you suggestions from time to time. Happy editing, — xaosflux Talk 10:34, 2 February 2022 (UTC)

Change of user rights

Hi Xaosflux. Nice to meet you here. I see that you changed my user rights from confirmed user to auto confirmed user. Can I ask the reason. Thanking you. Gardenkur (talk) 02:17, 3 February 2022 (UTC)

@Gardenkur: hello, your account is "autoconfirmed" already, so "confirmed" was redundant. "Confirmed" is only needed for brand-new accounts (under 4 days old with under 10 edits) and is used in special cases such as people attending a training session or edit-a-thon. I did notice that your "extended confirmed" flag had been revoked by Deb - you can follow up with them for what you have to do to have that restored. — xaosflux Talk 02:23, 3 February 2022 (UTC)

Hi Xaosflux. Thanks a lot for your reply and prompt response. I checked with Deb and he only placed me in confirmed user. However if you want me to do anything more kindly guide me. Also I see that you have grown fast in short time, kindly keep guiding so that I can make Wikipedia grow in quality and audience as fast as possible. Thanking you again. Gardenkur (talk) 02:37, 3 February 2022 (UTC)

@Gardenkur: that appears to have been an error, as that 'confirmed' group does nothing. I left a note on their talk page. — xaosflux Talk 10:28, 3 February 2022 (UTC)

Hi Xaosflux. A big thanks again. Nice to start association with you here. Gardenkur (talk) 10:45, 3 February 2022 (UTC)

Administrators' newsletter – February 2022

News and updates for administrators from the past month (January 2022).

Guideline and policy news

Technical news

  • The user group oversight will be renamed suppress in around 3 weeks. This will not affect the name shown to users and is simply a change in the technical name of the user group. The change is being made for technical reasons. You can comment in Phabricator if you have objections.
  • The Reply Tool feature, which is a part of Discussion Tools, will be opt-out for everyone logged in or logged out starting 7 February 2022. Editors wishing to comment on this can do so in the relevant Village Pump discussion.

Arbitration

Miscellaneous

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 03:02, 3 February 2022 (UTC)

Text added as footer

Hello! It's been quite some years I edit with wikitext and I consider myself enough flexible in it and today I was encountered with a situation I didn't know how to solve.

My community has created this project in Commons. If I wanted the text in both columns (subpages) to be more or less aligned, how would I do that? Is there a way, for example, to separate the contact info from the body of the text in that column and put it in the end of the column/subpage as a footer? Putting text as footer looks a rather simple concept but when I thought about it I was made aware that I actually don't know of any way how to achieve that. (I mean, beside filling the template with 100 {{Clear}} templates.) - Klein Muçi (talk) 22:36, 5 February 2022 (UTC)

Looks like you are using tables, well - you can put a table inside of another table - would that do it? Keep in mind screen alignment is hard because you can never tell what screen dimensions your reader may use. — xaosflux Talk 00:00, 6 February 2022 (UTC)
Can you give me a concrete example in a sandbox page how that would work? I've never been good with tables. :/ Even if alignment can't be reached, I thought that putting a bit of space beside the other sections and the contact info could be aesthetically better. I could be wrong... - Klein Muçi (talk) 00:04, 6 February 2022 (UTC)
@Klein Muçi: I added some line breaks to commons:Commons:Gara e fotografisë së ushqimit tradicional shqiptar - 2022/Përshkrimi and it pushed it down, feel free to revert. Help:Table has lots of table examples. Look at the example here: Help:Table#Combined use of COLSPAN and ROWSPAN, perhaps you do a single spanning row across the bottom for that. — xaosflux Talk 00:09, 6 February 2022 (UTC)
So there is no other way beside adding empty space. (And beside creating empty tables.) Well, thank you. I added some more line breaks between that and the tutorial video above and it seems better. Given that you solved this problem, perhaps you have any advice even on this case: https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Commons:Village_pump/Technical&oldid=627992743#General_technical_help
Don't worry much if you're busy as I believe someone from Commons will eventually help me anyway. - Klein Muçi (talk) 00:24, 6 February 2022 (UTC)

Question

I am wondering if what will happen if someone who is trying to create an account but the name he chosen is already existed in Wikipedia? –Ctrlwiki (talk) 13:48, 7 February 2022 (UTC)

@Ctrlwiki: normally, this would be disallowed - even if the username is on another project (e.g. the German Wikipedia, the Spanish Wiktionary, Commons). Additionally, they should be given the error from this message: MediaWiki:Userexists. — xaosflux Talk 14:48, 7 February 2022 (UTC)

Tech News: 2022-06

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent changes

  • English Wikipedia recently set up a gadget for dark mode. You can enable it there, or request help from an interface administrator to set it up on your wiki (instructions and screenshot).
  • Category counts are sometimes wrong. They will now be completely recounted at the beginning of every month. [29]

Problems

Changes later this week

  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 8 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 9 February. It will be on all wikis from 10 February (calendar).

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

21:15, 7 February 2022 (UTC)

Talk page

I am planning to create a user talk page archive of mine, but the current discussions on my talk page are the only discussions I can archive, because I have already removed my old discussions on my talk page, and they hard to retrieve. Is it ok? —Ctrlwiki (talk) 11:49, 8 February 2022 (UTC)

@Ctrlwiki: yes, so long as you make your archive pages with copy-paste you can pretty much do anything you want there. Some people don't bother to archive certain things, like newsletters, some do - up to you. — xaosflux Talk 14:38, 8 February 2022 (UTC)
Thanks for the answer. Additional question, how to add an interlanguage page link in an article within English Wikipedia. For example, an English Wikipedia article has a Korean Wikipedia article version, how to add its link on the English one. An article for example, Squid Game, all its other languages version are listed on languages section. I hope you understand my question cause I cannot find any Wikipedia help page on how to do it. —Ctrlwiki (talk) 10:45, 9 February 2022 (UTC)
@Ctrlwiki: Squid Game already as an IW link to w:ko:오징어_게임, on the left sidebar there is a list, you may need to expand it, at the bottom it says "edit links". See Help:Interwiki linking for more on this topic. — xaosflux Talk 10:55, 9 February 2022 (UTC)

One small bug

Hi, thanks so much for renaming my account :)! But I have a small bug, not related to my username. I reported it on the Village pump, but it was removed. Im assuming it was because i was supposed to report it on [insert place you report bugs here] thingy which I forgot the name off... But I need an email adress, which I dont have... I was wondering if you could report this? It's basically the popup on the notification screen with buttons to the sandbox, ect. not taking me anywhere, and the popup hides if I tap on it. If it helps, I use an Amazon Kindle. L10nM4st3r (talk) 12:44, 8 February 2022 (UTC)

@L10nM4st3r: you can report to WP:VPT and someone may take it from there. If you are using the default Kindle browser, it may not have support for certain web functions - and if you are using a very old version of it we are unlikely to try to change our web software to try to make it work with an outdated device. Try installing the current version of Chrome on your Kindle and see if it improves. — xaosflux Talk 14:41, 8 February 2022 (UTC)
Okay, thnx! My kindle is new (or is recently bought at least) I will look up WP:VPT. -- L10nM4st3r (talk) 14:50, 8 February 2022 (UTC)
Actually, they didn't remove my old post... It was sent to the bottom of the page. I'm not used to recent at bottom as I've seen mostly recent at top. I removed my old bug report. The new one may actually be better to understand. And has more info. -- L10nM4st3r (talk) 15:38, 8 February 2022 (UTC)

Users contributions on mobile

(not AMC) users contributions on mobile has been changed. The users contributions style on mobile is now the same as the users contributions style in Advance mobile. How to change it? cause I don't like it. —Ctrlwiki (talk) 01:09, 11 February 2022 (UTC)

@Ctrlwiki: I'm not sure, but see Wikipedia:Village_pump_(technical)#User_contribution_style_has_changed_on_mobile_version where others are talking about that. — xaosflux Talk 10:59, 11 February 2022 (UTC)

Copyvio discussion for Glaucium calycinum

Hello! I just thought I would drop by, as an article you mentioned at the village pump, Glaucium calycinum, was just blanked for perceived copyvio issues. The user who did so wasn't sure where to take the discussion from this point, and I would obviously like to dispute the accusation, so I was wondering if you would be able to give us a hand. I don't think the article was the best I've written by any means (I very rarely rely on one source - I guess this is a sign from the WikiGods to never do that again) but if it warrants removal because of copyvio, pretty much every other taxon article I've written would fall under that same category. So, a bit of a big deal for me. Thanks, appreciate the assistance. Best wishes, Fritzmann (message me) 21:44, 13 February 2022 (UTC)

Hi @Fritzmann2002:, I'm not really the best in that realm; I only mentioned that article as an example of the general notability guideline not needling lots of sources, many others are better in the copyvio field. One solid defense against copyvio is if the sources used are public domain though, so be sure to check on that. — xaosflux Talk 21:53, 13 February 2022 (UTC)

Tech News: 2022-07

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent changes

  • Purging a category page with fewer than 5,000 members will now recount it completely. This will allow editors to fix incorrect counts when it is wrong. [30]

Changes later this week

  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 15 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 16 February. It will be on all wikis from 17 February (calendar).
  • Advanced item In the AbuseFilter extension, the rmspecials() function has been updated so that it does not remove the "space" character. Wikis are advised to wrap all the uses of rmspecials() with rmwhitespace() wherever necessary to keep filters' behavior unchanged. You can use the search function on Special:AbuseFilter to locate its usage. [31]

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

19:17, 14 February 2022 (UTC)

Thanks for removing the WikiBreak Enforcer.

Thanks @Xaosflux for removing the WikiBreak Enforcer. You're the best @Xaosflux!!! ||EBotsEle| |Botɵtalk|| 23:11, 18 February 2022 (UTC)

Testwiki, again

Hey, can you restore my testwiki access again? I want to test something with AbuseFilter blocks. Suffusion of Yellow (talk) 20:34, 20 February 2022 (UTC)

+2 — xaosflux Talk 20:58, 20 February 2022 (UTC)
Thanks, sent you an email about this. Suffusion of Yellow (talk) 22:03, 20 February 2022 (UTC)

Tech News: 2022-08

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent changes

  • Special:Nuke will now provide the standard deletion reasons (editable at MediaWiki:Deletereason-dropdown) to use when mass-deleting pages. This was a request in the 2022 Community Wishlist Survey. [32]
  • At Wikipedias, all new accounts now get the Growth features by default when creating an account. Communities are encouraged to update their help resources. Previously, only 80% of new accounts would get the Growth features. A few Wikipedias remain unaffected by this change. [33]
  • You can now prevent specific images that are used in a page from appearing in other locations, such as within PagePreviews or Search results. This is done with the markup class=notpageimage. For example, [[File:Example.png|class=notpageimage]]. [34]
  • There has been a change to the HTML of Special:Contributions, Special:MergeHistory, and History pages, to support the grouping of changes by date in the mobile skin. While unlikely, this may affect gadgets and user scripts. A list of all the HTML changes is on Phabricator.

Events

Changes later this week

  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 22 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 23 February. It will be on all wikis from 24 February (calendar).

Future changes

  • The software to play videos and audio files on pages will change soon on all wikis. The old player will be removed. Some audio players will become wider after this change. The new player has been a beta feature for over four years. [35][36]
  • Toolforge's underlying operating system is being updated. If you maintain any tools there, there are two options for migrating your tools into the new system. There are details, deadlines, and instructions on Wikitech. [37]
  • Administrators will soon have the option to delete/undelete the associated "talk" page when they are deleting a given page. An API endpoint with this option will also be available. This was a request from the 2021 Wishlist Survey.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

19:11, 21 February 2022 (UTC)

Question from Xaosflux (18:08, 22 February 2022)

test --— xaosflux Talk 18:08, 22 February 2022 (UTC)

Temporary confirmed rights on my alt

Hey! I noticed that you gave my alt temporary confirmed rights. May I ask why you made it temporary? ― Blaze WolfTalkBlaze Wolf#6545 21:23, 25 February 2022 (UTC)

Just so you know, I'm fine with temporary, I'm just curious as to why you only made it temporary. ― Blaze WolfTalkBlaze Wolf#6545 21:25, 25 February 2022 (UTC)
Hi @Blaze Wolf Because you said you wanted that account to actually make test edits, once it makes 6 edits it will become autoconfirmed - then we won't have to clean it up and manually removed the redundant 'confirmed' group. If for some reason it expires before you make 6 edits, feel free to ping me here. — xaosflux Talk 21:53, 25 February 2022 (UTC)
Ah alright. Sounds good. I'm probably going to request it be extended-confirmed as well since I'm going to use it to test out WP:UV once it's released to the general public in beta (probably meaning RW will still be preferred to use but UV is available for normal people to test), which requires me to be extended-confirmed in order to get the full functionality. ― Blaze WolfTalkBlaze Wolf#6545 22:02, 25 February 2022 (UTC)
@Blaze Wolf  Done — xaosflux Talk 00:13, 26 February 2022 (UTC)

The Signpost: 27 February 2022

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 20:22, 27 February 2022 (UTC)

Tech News: 2022-09

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent changes

  • When searching for edits by change tags, e.g. in page history or user contributions, there is now a dropdown list of possible tags. This was a request in the 2022 Community Wishlist Survey. [38]
  • Mentors using the Growth Mentor dashboard will now see newcomers assigned to them who have made at least one edit, up to 200 edits. Previously, all newcomers assigned to the mentor were visible on the dashboard, even ones without any edit or ones who made hundred of edits. Mentors can still change these values using the filters on their dashboard. Also, the last choice of filters will now be saved. [39][40]
  • The user group oversight was renamed suppress. This is for technical reasons. You may need to update any local references to the old name, e.g. gadgets, links to Special:Listusers, or uses of NUMBERINGROUP.

Problems

  • The recent change to the HTML of tracking changes pages caused some problems for screenreaders. This is being fixed. [41]

Changes later this week

  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 1 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 2 March. It will be on all wikis from 3 March (calendar).

Future changes

  • Working with templates will become easier. Several improvements are planned for March 9 on most wikis and on March 16 on English Wikipedia. The improvements include: Bracket matching, syntax highlighting colors, finding and inserting templates, and related visual editor features.
  • If you are a template developer or an interface administrator, and you are intentionally overriding or using the default CSS styles of user feedback boxes (the classes: successbox, messagebox, errorbox, warningbox), please note that these classes and associated CSS will soon be removed from MediaWiki core. This is to prevent problems when the same class-names are also used on a wiki. Please let us know by commenting at phab:T300314 if you think you might be affected.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

22:58, 28 February 2022 (UTC)

Test mms

This is a test mms. MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 19:30, 1 March 2022 (UTC)

Administrators' newsletter – March 2022

News and updates for administrators from the past month (February 2022).

Guideline and policy news

Technical news

Arbitration

Miscellaneous

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 01:47, 2 March 2022 (UTC)

Delete

please delete this. Ctrlwiki/redwarnRules.json and Ctrlwiki/redwarnConfig.js —Ctrlwiki (talk) 08:02, 2 March 2022 (UTC)

@Ctrlwiki:  Done — xaosflux Talk 10:32, 2 March 2022 (UTC)
Thanks. —Ctrlwiki (talk) 10:33, 2 March 2022 (UTC)

@Xaosflux: Please delete these two pages again, and since I've been creating those pages over and over again, you may have the right to lock the creation of these pages. —Ctrlwiki (talk) 10:12, 18 March 2022 (UTC)

@Ctrlwiki just put {{db-author}} on them and a patrolling admin will take care of it. — xaosflux Talk 12:22, 18 March 2022 (UTC)

I'm confused

Why did you review my mobile alt account user page? Toad40 (talk) 20:28, 3 March 2022 (UTC)

@Toad40 I didn't. I marked it patrolled (log entry) because it seemed to not need speedy deletion. — xaosflux Talk 21:17, 3 March 2022 (UTC)

Oh ok, I was confused at first because in my "Your Notices" tab, it said you reviewed my page. Have a good day! Toad40 (talk) 21:20, 3 March 2022 (UTC)

@Toad40 all newly created pages are "unpatrolled" (unless you are an established editor with a special flag) - this is most important for "articles", but it applies to all pages. You can read more about the patrol feature here: Wikipedia:New pages patrol/patrolled pages. In general if any page you create is "reviewed" or "patrolled" and not also nominated for deletion, it is a good thing. Best regards, — xaosflux Talk 21:35, 3 March 2022 (UTC)

Feedback request: Wikipedia policies and guidelines request for comment

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Tech News: 2022-10

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Problems

  • There was a problem with some interface labels last week. It will be fixed this week. This change was part of ongoing work to simplify the support for skins which do not have active maintainers. [42]

Changes later this week

  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 8 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 9 March. It will be on all wikis from 10 March (calendar).

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21:15, 7 March 2022 (UTC)

RevDel request ==== Invitation to join the Fifteen Year Society

Dear Xaosflux/Archive43,

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, Chris Troutman (talk) 16:58, 16 October 2020 (UTC)

 Done — xaosflux Talk 16:59, 16 October 2020 (UTC)

Hey, just sent you an email re the above. Thanks! Tony Fox (arf!) 02:06, 8 March 2022 (UTC)

@Tony Fox: thanks for the note, handled. — xaosflux Talk 10:49, 8 March 2022 (UTC)

Hellow

Hi, I no longer use the "pending changes reviewer" permission, please remove this permission from my account, thanks. I am a recent changes patroller, even though I'm using mobile, maybe you have a suggestion tool that I can use to patroll recent changes using mobile fast, thanks. —Ctrlwiki (talk) 12:54, 8 March 2022 (UTC)

@Ctrlwiki removed, should you want it again just post over at WP:PERM. I don't have any good suggestions for RCP tools on mobile, but ask over at Wikipedia talk:Recent changes patrol and they may have some suggestions. — xaosflux Talk 13:34, 8 March 2022 (UTC)
Thanks. —Ctrlwiki (talk) 23:55, 8 March 2022 (UTC)

Precious anniversary

Precious
Six years!

--Gerda Arendt (talk) 06:48, 10 October 2020 (UTC)


Invitation to join the Fifteen Year Society

Dear Xaosflux/Archive43,

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, Chris Troutman (talk) 16:58, 16 October 2020 (UTC)

 Done — xaosflux Talk 16:59, 16 October 2020 (UTC)

Some baklava for you!

Welcome to Project Spaceflight! Let me know if there's anything I can do to help. :) --Neopeius (talk) 01:55, 29 October 2020 (UTC)


A barnstar for you!

The Special Barnstar
This is to show appreciation for aiding me to solve my problem. Celestina007 (talk) 19:20, 17 April 2021 (UTC)

epic

Love and appreciation
you rock ThatsW1cked (talk) 16:54, 28 May 2021 (UTC)

A barnstar for you!

The Special Barnstar
For spending the time to answer my persistent questions at Wikipedia:Village Pump (Technical). ―Qwerfjkltalk 21:25, 7 July 2021 (UTC)


Precious anniversary

Precious
Seven years!

--Gerda Arendt (talk) 07:34, 10 October 2021 (UTC)

A barnstar for you!

The Barnstar of Diligence
For your ever continuing help towards my technical requests and the SqWiki community in general. Thank you! Klein Muçi (talk) 12:40, 20 October 2021 (UTC)


Nat 20 for the Alignment Userboxes

Nat 20
I just wanted to thank you for designing the alignment userboxes! Have a good one! Born of Iron (talk) 19:56, 18 November 2021 (UTC)


Thank you

Your Opinion is More Important than You Think Barnstar
For your opinions at my ANI thread. Your opinion means alot to me, so I will review all my edits from now on. Rlink2 (talk) 15:46, 25 January 2022 (UTC)


I'm sorry

Thank-you again, so much, for your kind words and noticing what I do here. But, this appears a lost cause and I am cognisant that our time is best spent tending to the content, rather than debating pointlessly. I will not receive any benefit from criticism of my perceived lack of content creation. If I have not had a good article in 16 years, it is unlikely to be forthcoming. I hope you do not feel tarnished for nominating me. Ifnord (talk) 03:35, 13 March 2022 (UTC)

Not at all! See longer reply on your talk. — xaosflux Talk 11:59, 13 March 2022 (UTC)

Edit Tags question

Hello, I was wondering if you knew about any steps that would need to be taken to get an edit tag added for a userscript? Such as creating a discussion on a specific page, (WP:VPR, WP:EFN, ect..) or just to contact an administrator (or specific userright holder) about this. Since there is no documentation that I could find on prerequisites or how to achieve this. Thanks, Terasail[✉️] 18:28, 14 March 2022 (UTC)

@Terasail we don't have a very strict policy on this. We have very few of these that are script related and I'd oppose making one for something like a single-user script. Ultimately, tags utility is for other people searching for edits with said tag - so there should be a good reason why. If it is specific to an edit filter, than EFN is a good place; else WP:AN should suffice. You should be able to explain why adding such a tag would be good for the project as a whole. Hope that helps? — xaosflux Talk 18:42, 14 March 2022 (UTC)
Yes thanks, I was not thinking of requesting just now just looking for appropriate steps if I was to take this further later. Terasail[✉️] 18:46, 14 March 2022 (UTC)

Tech News: 2022-11

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent changes

  • In the Wikipedia Android app it is now possible to change the toolbar at the bottom so the tools you use more often are easier to click on. The app now also has a focused reading mode. [43][44]

Problems

  • There was a problem with the collection of some page-view data from June 2021 to January 2022 on all wikis. This means the statistics are incomplete. To help calculate which projects and regions were most affected, relevant datasets are being retained for 30 extra days. You can read more on Meta-wiki.
  • There was a problem with the databases on March 10. All wikis were unreachable for logged-in users for 12 minutes. Logged-out users could read pages but could not edit or access uncached content then. [45]

Changes later this week

  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 15 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 16 March. It will be on all wikis from 17 March (calendar).
  • When using uselang=qqx to find localisation messages, it will now show all possible message keys for navigation tabs such as "View history". [46]
  • Access to Special:RevisionDelete has been expanded to include users who have deletelogentry and deletedhistory rights through their group memberships. Before, only those with the deleterevision right could access this special page. [47]
  • On the Special:Undelete pages for diffs and revisions, there will be a link back to the main Undelete page with the list of revisions. [48]

Future changes

Events

  • The Wikimedia Hackathon 2022 will take place as a hybrid event on 20-22 May 2022. The Hackathon will be held online and there are grants available to support local in-person meetups around the world. Grants can be requested until 20 March.

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22:06, 14 March 2022 (UTC)

Mass message

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T303939

Hello, Xaosflux! :)

I have a question: How can I send a mass message to all the reviewers in SqWiki that have been active this last month? Is that even possible? - Klein Muçi (talk) 12:40, 15 March 2022 (UTC)

There is no way to automatically target them, however there are only 30 of them according to quarry:query/63112, so you could build a mass message list from that pretty quickly. — xaosflux Talk 13:14, 15 March 2022 (UTC)
Forgot to ping you: @Klein Muçi:. — xaosflux Talk 13:15, 15 March 2022 (UTC)
I see. Maybe a new feature needs to be requested to be added to one of the 2 special pages that list users (Special:List/ActiveUsers) that fuses their functions. Would plain merging them be better? Anyway, thank you for the query! Can you perhaps change it so it removes bots from the results? The reason I ask is because maybe I use that again in the future. I saw that CommonsDelinker was included in the results. Also, a naive question: Is there any way to filter through homewikis maybe? The message won't have much meaning to reviewers that are from the global community and don't understand Albanian. - Klein Muçi (talk) 01:49, 16 March 2022 (UTC)
@Klein Muçi maybe, my SQL is a bit rusty, I did update that query to also include bots (but now it will have all the bots - though you will be able to see them). I'm not sure about homewiki - but if these people shouldn't be reviewing stuff on sqwiki you could remove them from the group. Also, homewiki can be wrong so it's not good in this situation and could be deceptive, for example here is one of the sqwiki sysops, whose homewiki is enwiki: w:sq:Speciale:CentralAuth/Euriditi). As far as targeting "massmessage" to "members of a group" you could request a feature for that. — xaosflux Talk 10:58, 16 March 2022 (UTC)
Right, I'll do that. Before that happens though, what are the steps I should be taking now? Let's say I created somewhere the list of the users I want to send the message to. Where do I feed that list? Do I need to create it as a wikipage somewhere? - Klein Muçi (talk) 13:02, 16 March 2022 (UTC)
@Klein Muçi see WP:MMS. On sqwiki, you can create a simple list using w:sq:Speciale:CreateMassMessageList to make it easy as well. I suggest you first create one on a user subpage, add yourself to it, then test with w:sq:Speciale:MassMessage. — xaosflux Talk 13:28, 16 March 2022 (UTC)
Thank you very much for the detailed guidance! Was able to send the message correctly. :) - Klein Muçi (talk) 14:20, 16 March 2022 (UTC)

Edit filters - page titles

Hello! We have an edit filter for profanities in content and one for profanities in the edit summaries, both copied from EnWiki. Do these filters also protect against page titles, that is new articles that can be created with profanities as titles just for vandalism reasons? - Klein Muçi (talk) 12:36, 19 March 2022 (UTC)

@Klein Muçi I know I typed out a LONG answer to this, but must have forgot to save! In short, bad page titles are mostly handled by the Global title black and augmented by local blacklists such as MediaWiki:Titleblacklist. Page title examination in abusefilters requires looking at additional variables. — xaosflux Talk 17:15, 19 March 2022 (UTC)
Do you have any such examples that deals with titles in abusefilters here? Somehow I don't think that Titleblacklist should have overly complex regexes like the one we're currently using in the edit filter for profanities and we'd like to have the same list for titles, content and summaries. - Klein Muçi (talk) 17:51, 19 March 2022 (UTC)
@Klein Muçi hmm not really, in general the titleblack uses regex and is much faster (as otherwise you have to fire the abuse filter on every edit since "create" isn't an action in AF. We have a few private ones on metawiki, but only when there is also other things (e.g. a page creation that should be prevented if the title matches something and there is also something else like a string in the body). — xaosflux Talk 19:55, 19 March 2022 (UTC)
I see. Can you take a look at our black list I just created then, especially the last 2 entries which I imported from the edit filters, and see if everything seems normal then? - Klein Muçi (talk) 03:17, 20 March 2022 (UTC)
I tried it with incognito as an IP editor and so far it has 2 problems:
  1. Some titles are getting through which means that the regex isn't working as expected (as it works with edit filters). I can give you an example of things that go through that normally shouldn't if you want.
  2. The associated error messages show the full regex which shows the full list of vulgar words which is not a desired effect + makes the privacy of edit filters a bit useless considering that the lists may be the same. Any way to show only the name of the section, for example "vulgar words"? (You'll understand better once you take a look at our current list and messages.) Or should I remove that variable altogether from the message? - Klein Muçi (talk) 04:35, 20 March 2022 (UTC)
Actually, I saw that I had added accidently a dot in front of the 2 regexes, currently removed. If I remove that, they don't work at all. I'm doing something wrong. - Klein Muçi (talk) 05:14, 20 March 2022 (UTC)
@Klein Muçi see mw:Extension:TitleBlacklist for some documentation, and links to some helpful regex resources. Start small, test carefully. In general, almost all lines should be wrapped in .* ... .* unless you are targeting a namespace name or something very specific. Unlike abusefilters, the inputs will always only be one single line - so you don't have to look for newlines or certain word boundaries. — xaosflux Talk 09:46, 20 March 2022 (UTC)
Thanks a lot! The word boundaries part solved everything. I have only one problem now remaining which is regex related, not with the extension per se.
How do I match cat and/or catfish without having to write them twice. Is there a way? For example, I know how to match cat or caty without having to write them twice: caty? What if there is more than 1 optional letter? How do we act in that case? - Klein Muçi (talk) 13:10, 20 March 2022 (UTC)
@Klein Muçi TBL is cheap, multiple lines are probably OK. But you may need to look at word boundries again, I'm assuming you would NOT want to catch "catch" but what about "zcat" or "catz" - you have to be careful with very short strings. — xaosflux Talk 15:09, 20 March 2022 (UTC)
No, the question was mostly directed towards general regex knowledge. I want to know how to utilize that (if a way exists) because it might be useful in other cases as well. Can we use: \bCat(fish)?\b to do what I want to do? I guess not.
Also, what happens with cases which are blocked from going on? Do they get registered somewhere like in the case of edit filters? Again, I guess not, eh? - Klein Muçi (talk) 15:21, 20 March 2022 (UTC)
@Klein Muçi not yet, see phab:T68450 for work on enabling the logging. I'm not sure on that expression. — xaosflux Talk 17:19, 20 March 2022 (UTC)
I see. Well thank you! As always very informative! :) - Klein Muçi (talk) 18:08, 20 March 2022 (UTC)
Since we're at it... Can you give me some information about the practices you have for Mediawiki:Spam-blacklist? Are additions in it often temporary or permanent? How often does it change? Would it be wise if I copy-pasted its content into SqWiki and kept the lists synchronized? - Klein Muçi (talk) 19:02, 20 March 2022 (UTC)
@Klein Muçi I don't deal with it extensively, but you can read about our practices at MediaWiki talk:Spam-blacklist Most smaller projects don't do much with it except for when sources in their project language are being used, and otherwise just rely on the Global spam blacklist. If something is bad enough that it is hitting many projects, it should go on the GSBL - not be copied around from local project to local project. — xaosflux Talk 20:27, 20 March 2022 (UTC)
Thank you! - Klein Muçi (talk) 03:37, 21 March 2022 (UTC)

Merge accounts

Regarding my denied request for extended confirmed status it was for reasons not connected with wikipedia that I opted for an alternate account. The email address for both accounts is same. Anyway, my question is: Is there any way to merge both accounts, and retain the current username. Thank you for your time-- Abdul Muhsy talk 16:58, 19 March 2022 (UTC)

From the global request page: Global User Account Merges are not possible. As such, we will not accept any request to merge user accounts as it is technically impossible at this moment to do so. Such mergers, should they become available, will almost surely have a public log of the action - not to mention being able to see both histories, making it defeat the CLEANSTART purpose. If you want to publicly declare your account relationships, we can move the EC flag from the old account to the new one. — xaosflux Talk 17:18, 19 March 2022 (UTC)

arch

"Yes of course Xaosflux uses Arch" [FBDB] ~TNT (talk • she/her) 10:52, 20 March 2022 (UTC)

Really, anything that supports Lynx will do! — xaosflux Talk 10:57, 20 March 2022 (UTC)


Tech News: 2022-12

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

New code release schedule for this week

  • There will be four MediaWiki releases this week, instead of just one. This is an experiment which should lead to fewer problems and to faster feature updates. The releases will be on all wikis, at different times, on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. You can read more about this project.

Recent changes

Future changes

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16:00, 21 March 2022 (UTC)

oi

can i be blocked The drywall (talk) 16:18, 23 March 2022 (UTC)

@The drywall forever? — xaosflux Talk 16:19, 23 March 2022 (UTC)
2 months The drywall (talk) 16:20, 23 March 2022 (UTC)
OK, have a nice break. — xaosflux Talk 16:23, 23 March 2022 (UTC)


The Signpost: 27 March 2022

  • Eyewitness Wikimedian, Vinnytsia, Ukraine: War diary
* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 20:52, 27 March 2022 (UTC)

Extended right

@Xaosflux: I Know it's earlier that I'm asking for extended rights, frankly say lots of page have extended protected so I can't edit that pages , If you think my edits are constructive then give the right. Thanks :-) Swesdent (talk) 9:24, 28 March 2022 (UTC)

@Swesdent: less than 1% of pages are ECP, I suggest you start with editing other pages for now. — xaosflux Talk 16:04, 28 March 2022 (UTC)

Nomination for merger of Template:Priorxfd

Template:Priorxfd has been nominated for merging with Template:Old RfD list. You are invited to comment on the discussion at the template's entry on the Templates for discussion page. Thank you. 2pou (talk) 17:48, 28 March 2022 (UTC)

Tech News: 2022-13

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent changes

  • There is a simple new Wikimedia Commons upload tool available for macOS users, Sunflower.

Changes later this week

  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 29 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 30 March. It will be on all wikis from 31 March (calendar).
  • Some wikis will be in read-only for a few minutes because of regular database maintenance. It will be performed on 29 March at 7:00 UTC (targeted wikis) and on 31 March at 7:00 UTC (targeted wikis). [53][54]

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19:53, 28 March 2022 (UTC)

Feedback request: Wikipedia proposals request for comment

Your feedback is requested at Wikipedia:Reliable sources/Noticeboard on a "Wikipedia proposals" request for comment. Thank you for helping out!
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Tech News: 2022-14

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Problems

  • For a few days last week, edits that were suggested to newcomers were not tagged in the Special:RecentChanges feed. This bug has been fixed. [55]

Changes later this week

  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 5 April. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 6 April. It will be on all wikis from 7 April (calendar).
  • Some wikis will be in read-only for a few minutes because of a switch of their main database. It will be performed on 7 April at 7:00 UTC (targeted wikis).

Future changes

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

21:00, 4 April 2022 (UTC)

Tech News: 2022-15

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent changes

  • There is a new public status page at www.wikimediastatus.net. This site shows five automated high-level metrics where you can see the overall health and performance of our wikis' technical environment. It also contains manually-written updates for widespread incidents, which are written as quickly as the engineers are able to do so while also fixing the actual problem. The site is separated from our production infrastructure and hosted by an external service, so that it can be accessed even if the wikis are briefly unavailable. You can read more about this project.
  • On Wiktionary wikis, the software to play videos and audio files on pages has now changed. The old player has been removed. Some audio players will become wider after this change. The new player has been a beta feature for over four years. [57][58]

Changes later this week

  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 12 April. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 13 April. It will be on all wikis from 14 April (calendar).

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

19:43, 11 April 2022 (UTC)

New administrator activity requirement

The administrator policy has been updated with new activity requirements following a successful Request for Comment.

Beginning January 1, 2023, administrators who meet one or both of the following criteria may be desysopped for inactivity if they have:

  1. Made neither edits nor administrative actions for at least a 12-month period OR
  2. Made fewer than 100 edits over a 60-month period

Administrators at risk for being desysopped under these criteria will continue to be notified ahead of time. Thank you for your continued work.

22:53, 15 April 2022 (UTC)

Password reset

Because I'm wondering if your Wikipedia account doesn't have an email address, anyone can change its password because there is no email address. —Princess Faye (my talk) 03:52, 18 April 2022 (UTC)

Or if you forget your Wikipedia account password, and there is no email address attached to that account, and you can't provide an email address in Special:PasswordReset, the results, you can no longer change your password, correct? —Princess Faye (my talk) 03:52, 18 April 2022 (UTC)

@Princess Faye I think this got answered on the other page? In short: If you do not set an email address on your account, Special:PasswordReset will not work. It might look like it works (so that an attacker can't use it to guess your email address) but it will not work. As such it is strongly encouraged that you set an email address. In Special:Preferences, you may disable the "email" function from other users (Allow other users to email me option) - so that your email is only usable for password resets as well. — xaosflux Talk 09:57, 18 April 2022 (UTC)
Thanks really helpful. What are the disadvantages when you don’t have an email address in your Wikipedia account, other than not being able to reset the password. —Princess Faye (my talk) 10:02, 18 April 2022 (UTC)
@Princess Faye: you can not send or receive email messages to/from other users (via Special:EmailUser); it is possible that an abuse filter could be trigger on this (none of the 299 filters here on the English Wikipedia use this parameter, but another project could). — xaosflux Talk 10:10, 18 April 2022 (UTC)
Another thing, there are two options in Special:PasswordReset, when an attacker enters the username of an account (and that account does not have an email address) in Special: PasswordReset, and he entered his personal email address, can he change the password of that account? —Princess Faye (my talk) 10:25, 18 April 2022 (UTC)
@Princess Faye No, if you enter an email address that doesn't match the one on the account (and if there is no email address on the account it will never match) it doesn't work. It will "appear" that it does something, but it won't. This is so you can't use the reset form as on oracle. If it said "that's not the right email" for a wrong email, an attacker could just use the form over and over to try to guess your private email address. — xaosflux Talk 10:31, 18 April 2022 (UTC)
So for example, I am an attacker and I tried to open someone's account using Special:PasswordReset, and because his account does not have an email address, I typed his username in the username option, and I put my personal email address in the Email address option. It won't work, am I right? —Princess Faye (my talk) 10:49, 18 April 2022 (UTC)
Correct, that would be a huge security hole if it allowed for that! It will have the same output if you put the right or wrong email in, else you would be able to use it to guess the email address too. — xaosflux Talk 13:35, 18 April 2022 (UTC)
Sorry for joining in but is that really the right way to solve that security concern? I remember I've had this same discussion as above with many users who forgot their password and were really confused when it said that an email had been sent but they weren't getting any email (because, in fact, they hadn't put an email to begin with). Can't that be reworded to something more neutral like "if you have put the same email in your preferences, you'll get a message soon". This is a very bad conditional sentence but just to give the idea. - Klein Muçi (talk) 10:59, 20 April 2022 (UTC)
@Klein Muçi: the prompt can be localized, here is what our says:
You have requested a password reset.

If the information submitted is valid, a password reset email will be sent. If you haven't received an email, we recommend that you visit the reset password help page or try again later. You can only request a limited number of password resets within a short period of time. Only one password reset email will be sent per valid account every 24 hours in order to prevent abuse.

The details you submitted are:

    Username: username

Return to Main Page.
— xaosflux Talk 12:55, 20 April 2022 (UTC)
Ah, I see. Apparently it is a problem only for us. Can you provide the corresponding message name I should search for in TranslateWiki? Klein Muçi (talk) 14:27, 20 April 2022 (UTC)
@Klein Muçi we are using the default verbiage (no localization) so yes, you may want to check on translations. Most of the messages related to that can be seen here. I think the last update tech-side to these was from phab:T249730 - making sure the messages were consistent. — xaosflux Talk 14:32, 20 April 2022 (UTC)
Thank you! Will update accordingly. - Klein Muçi (talk) 14:35, 20 April 2022 (UTC)

You've got mail!

Hello, Xaosflux. Please check your email; you've got mail!
Message added 18:52, 18 April 2022 (UTC). It may take a few minutes from the time the email is sent for it to show up in your inbox. You can remove this notice at any time by removing the {{You've got mail}} or {{ygm}} template.

Steel1943 (talk) 18:53, 18 April 2022 (UTC)

Tech News: 2022-16

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Changes later this week

  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 19 April. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 20 April. It will be on all wikis from 21 April (calendar).
  • Some wikis will be in read-only for a few minutes because of a switch of their main database. It will be performed on 19 April at 07:00 UTC (targeted wikis) and on 21 April at 7:00 UTC (targeted wikis).
  • Administrators will now have the option to delete/undelete the associated "Talk" page when they are deleting a given page. An API endpoint with this option is also available. This concludes the 11th wish of the 2021 Community Wishlist Survey.
  • On selected wikis, 50% of logged-in users will see the new table of contents. When scrolling up and down the page, the table of contents will stay in the same place on the screen. This is part of the Desktop Improvements project. [59]
  • Message boxes produced by MediaWiki code will no longer have these CSS classes: successbox, errorbox, warningbox. The styles for those classes and messagebox will be removed from MediaWiki core. This only affects wikis that use these classes in wikitext, or change their appearance within site-wide CSS. Please review any local usage and definitions for these classes you may have. This was previously announced in the 28 February issue of Tech News.

Future changes

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23:11, 18 April 2022 (UTC)

hey

remove this guys tpa user:John adams is a stinky poopoo head Quident (talk) 15:53, 20 April 2022 (UTC)

@Quident to report a user issue, please see WP:AN/I. I reverted your mass-requesting of this to individual admins. — xaosflux Talk 15:56, 20 April 2022 (UTC)
thanks :] Quident (talk) 15:56, 20 April 2022 (UTC)

The Signpost: 24 April 2022

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Tech News: 2022-17

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent changes

  • On many wikis (group 1), the software to play videos and audio files on pages has now changed. The old player has been removed. Some audio players will become wider after this change. The new player has been a beta feature for over four years. [64][65]

Changes later this week

  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 26 April. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 27 April. It will be on all wikis from 28 April (calendar).
  • Some wikis will be in read-only for a few minutes because of a switch of their main database. It will be performed on 26 April at 07:00 UTC (targeted wikis).
  • Some very old browsers and operating systems are no longer supported. Some things on the wikis might look weird or not work in very old browsers like Internet Explorer 9 or 10, Android 4, or Firefox 38 or older. [66]

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22:54, 25 April 2022 (UTC)

Feedback request: Wikipedia proposals request for comment

Your feedback is requested at Wikipedia talk:Requests for adminship on a "Wikipedia proposals" request for comment. Thank you for helping out!
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New Page Patrol on its last legs from Jimbo's talk page

It occurs to me that if the community stops bullying and banning the editors doing the work, that some of these backlogs wouldn't be as bad. But when they top editors all end up with targets on their backs, you end up with backlogs. I can think of a couple editors that would be helping with that if they were still allowed to edit.173.71.200.195 (talk) 18:00, 28 April 2022 (UTC)

I'm not really interested in this, I have plenty of other backlogs I'm working on. — xaosflux Talk 18:01, 28 April 2022 (UTC)
No doubt. My point was there are only so many editors doing the work. When someone gets pushed out that's doing thousands of edits a day or even a week, it has an impact. 173.71.200.195 (talk) 18:03, 28 April 2022 (UTC)

Tech News: 2022-18

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent changes

  • On all remaining wikis (group 2), the software to play videos and audio files on pages has now changed. The old player has been removed. Some audio players will become wider after this change. The new player has been a beta feature for over four years. [67][68]

Changes later this week

  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 3 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 4 May. It will be on all wikis from 5 May (calendar).

Future changes

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19:32, 2 May 2022 (UTC)

You've got mail!

Hello, Xaosflux. Please check your email; you've got mail!
Message added 00:58, 6 May 2022 (UTC). It may take a few minutes from the time the email is sent for it to show up in your inbox. You can remove this notice at any time by removing the {{You've got mail}} or {{ygm}} template.

interstatefive  (talk) - just another roadgeek 00:58, 6 May 2022 (UTC)

@InterstateFive thank you, done. — xaosflux Talk 10:31, 6 May 2022 (UTC)

Feedback request: Wikipedia policies and guidelines request for comment

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The Signpost: 24 April 2022

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User talk archive

Hello, I know its normally advised against changing how people do things in their own userspace but would it be ok to add an archive bot to a users talk when it is overly large? Example: User:PutriAmalia1991 has a talk page over 2m bytes and it is stopping mms deliveries and showing up at Special:Log/massmessage. It also takes a hot second to load the page because of its size. Thanks, Terasail[✉️] 13:54, 27 March 2022 (UTC)

@Terasail I would not set up an archive bot in this sort of situation. As this user is mostly inactive - they probably shouldn't be getting most MMS's - senders should ensure that their lists are current and useful. All that being said, I suggest this course of action: Create something like User_talk:PutriAmalia1991/Archive 1, manually copy-paste archive everything from say last year and back, and leave them a user talk to let them know what you did. You can also inform them about how they can set up an archive bot if they want. If they complain, revert you, etc - just let it go. — xaosflux Talk 15:16, 27 March 2022 (UTC)
Ah, ok thanks. Just thought I should check since I don't really want to mess around with userspace which isn't mine but 2m size is just far too much. Terasail[✉️] 16:07, 27 March 2022 (UTC)

Redirects

Hello! I was wondering something about redirect pages.

Through the years things start to change a lot in dynamic places such as Wikipedia. Many redirect pages may stop to serve their function for different reasons. What happens with them? Do you have any knowledge to share on this phenomenon? Like, what may be the most common reasons a redirect page stops being useful, how and when do we query them and what do we do with them after finding them.

I was inspired by talk pages. If you remember, some years ago you helped me locate all the talk pages of pages that had been deleted in SqWiki which were were basically hidden by common eyes. It took a while to delete them all. Now we're (Mediwiki guys) talking of finally having an option to also delete the accompanying talk pages if we so want. I was thinking that the same thing happens with redirects when, for different reasons, the page they redirect to gets deleted. - Klein Muçi (talk) 16:01, 31 March 2022 (UTC)

@Klein Muçi if you are talking about content redirects ("articles") the general rule of thumb we use is 'Wikipedia:Redirects are cheap'. Basically, if they are even useful for one reader, let it be - so I'd strongly discourage deleting redirects just because they don't look useful if they have a valid target. I think you are asking about "broken" redirects - that is redirects to redlinks. Those are almost universally useless and should be deleted or repaired, you can find them at Special:BrokenRedirects. — xaosflux Talk 16:15, 31 March 2022 (UTC)
Yes, I was mostly talking to broken redirects. I had forgotten we had a special page for that. But I also meant the other redirects, for example, in these cases:
We have the extreme policy: DO NOT CREATE ARTICLES
We also have a shortcut to it called: DONT
Eventually, throughout the years, that policy evolves and evolves so much that it is even renamed to the extreme opposite: CREATE ARTICLES and the "do not create articles" part is rendered to a mere 1 sentence in one of the 20 sections in that page of the sort: "Do not create articles which have been previously just deleted."
When we look back at the redirect "DONT" at this point, it looks sort of strange and... eventually may be forgotten altogether?
Another example is in redirects with typos. These are common when new users create pages with typos in the title and want to correct them. Not having any special rights, this leaves behind a redirect.
How do we act in these cases? Do we still apply the "redirects are cheap" logic? - Klein Muçi (talk) 16:37, 31 March 2022 (UTC)
Funny enough, I just read WP:COSTLY. - Klein Muçi (talk) 16:43, 31 March 2022 (UTC)
I'm not sure how you would programmatically deal with old non-article redirects that go to valid targets. For moves: (e.g. DONT->Don'tDoThis) now goes to DONT->DoThis); Ideally you maintained attribution and moved Don'TDoThis to DoThis, making DONT a doubleredirect, which would end up in in Special:DoubleRedirects. Double redirects SHOULD get fixed.
For articles, in general if something is a plausible typo or search term, we leave it - if it helps one reader find the article then it was useful. These can also be very useful with non romantic scripts from other languages and the transliterations are reported differently in source materials (e.g. Volodymyr Zelenskyy / Volodymyr Zelensky / Vladimir Zelenskiy). — xaosflux Talk 17:05, 31 March 2022 (UTC)
We likely would prefer "A reader could find this article" vs "a reader doesn't like that we have a redirect in a transliteration they disapprove of". — xaosflux Talk 17:08, 31 March 2022 (UTC)
I see. So there is no way to automatically deal with those cases. I do think the technical infrastructure of redirects could use a small boost these days because they've become an important part of our work and yet they're all, more or less, just pseudo-articles, "bugs" of the software we started utilizing as features many years ago. Same logic applies to disambiguation pages I believe. (Using more-than-needed harsh language above with the bug part.)
Last question: Is there any global bot working on deleting broken redirects? I know there is one for double redirects. - Klein Muçi (talk) 17:13, 31 March 2022 (UTC)
No, and there probably won't be. (a) it would need delete access everywhere - good luck with that! (b) it is programmatically tricky to know if 'delete' is the best option for a broken redirect, perhaps the target shouldn't have been deleted, or the redirect should be retargeted. — xaosflux Talk 17:23, 31 March 2022 (UTC)
Thank you! Insightful as ever. - Klein Muçi (talk) 17:29, 31 March 2022 (UTC)

Clock question

Hi Xaosflux! I stole your clock thing on your userpage a while back for my user page—I hope you don't mind :) I think my version of it might be off, but I'm not sure what's wrong with the code, do you have any ideas? Best – Aza24 (talk) 22:51, 3 April 2022 (UTC)

@Aza24: I absoluteness don't mind - is it sometimes "slow"? That's prob because it is all wikitext, and the page can be cached. purging the page it displays on should force a refresh. You could also try mw:MediaWiki talk:Gadget-UTCLiveClock.js (available in "Gadgets" as Add a clock to the personal toolbar that displays the current time in UTC and provides a link to purge the current page (documentation)). — xaosflux Talk 23:03, 3 April 2022 (UTC)
That is most helpful, thank you! – Aza24 (talk) 02:06, 6 April 2022 (UTC)

IP range block

Hello, Xaos! It's been literal years now that we've been plagued by 1 IP vandal who comes and changes dates and places to articles. We're keeping it at bay as much as we can with individual blocks and page protections but it just keeps coming back and I would hate making all our articles semi-protected just because of that one person. Can you take a look at my latest blocks here (you can look at that link, can you?) and help me determine what kind of range I should be blocking to get rid of it for a bit? It's the 79.106.211.X one. - Klein Muçi (talk) 18:09, 4 April 2022 (UTC)

@Klein Muçi the (now expired) block you made here seems like a good one to try again, not overly broad. — xaosflux Talk 18:13, 4 April 2022 (UTC)
Thank you! Can you also show me of some places where I can re-read about IP ranges? I want to refresh my knowledge on it and how to better calculate ranges. - Klein Muçi (talk) 18:20, 4 April 2022 (UTC)
Subnetwork , see also the chart at Classless_Inter-Domain_Routing#IPv4_CIDR_blocks — xaosflux Talk 18:25, 4 April 2022 (UTC)
Thanks! - Klein Muçi (talk) 18:48, 4 April 2022 (UTC)

Hello! I have a very specific question about the navigation popups gadget. We have an identical importation of that gadget from here. It works good. However when I hover over rollback links on Special:RecentChanges, I get a preview popup of the page, same as what I would get if I was to hover over its title. I was hoping to get the default tooltip explaining what a rollback actually is and does. Is this considered an intended behavior from the gadget? Would it make sense to ask for having a way for it to not interfere in that aspect and just show the tooltip normally or would that be completely on the reverse end of the gadget's scope? If it would, wouldn't it make more sense that it showed something else, not the page itself unchanged? I get the same behavior when hovering over "Pending change" on S:RecentChanges (the same questions can apply here). But I don't get the same behavior when hovering over the diff link or the revisions one in the same page. I also don't get a popup at all when hovering over the "Block" link beside a user's name. Instead I get what I believe to be the default tooltip, which maybe is a good thing? - Klein Muçi (talk) 12:19, 6 April 2022 (UTC)

@Klein Muçi I don't think it is purposeful behavior, just default behavior of figuring out something to show when hovering a link to a page. feel free to discuss improvements at Wikipedia talk:Tools/Navigation popups. — xaosflux Talk 15:30, 7 April 2022 (UTC)
Okay, I'll do. :) - Klein Muçi (talk) 00:42, 8 April 2022 (UTC)

Request for edits

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T277883

Hi Xaosflux, it appears that the log for pending changes reviews changed from Special:AdvancedReviewLog to Special:Log/review. Been told it's due to https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T277883 on discord. Can you update the links on Special:PendingChanges and Template:Pending Changes backlog-defcon? Thank you! Justiyaya 15:14, 7 April 2022 (UTC)

@Justiyaya think I got them both, let me know if you see any problems. — xaosflux Talk 15:28, 7 April 2022 (UTC)
Thank you so much :D Justiyaya 15:31, 7 April 2022 (UTC)

Administrators' newsletter – April 2022

News and updates for administrators from the past month (March 2022).

Guideline and policy news

Technical news

  • Access to Special:RevisionDelete has been expanded to include users who have the deletelogentry and deletedhistory rights. This means that those in the Researcher user group and Checkusers who are not administrators can now access Special:RevisionDelete. The users able to view the special page after this change are the 3 users in the Researcher group, as there are currently no checkusers who are not already administrators. (T301928)
  • When viewing deleted revisions or diffs on Special:Undelete a back link to the undelete page for the associated page is now present. (T284114)

Arbitration

Miscellaneous

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 18:14, 7 April 2022 (UTC)

Tables

Hello, is there any way to create tables without the table lines? Like have the information formatted as being in a table but without any real cells. - Klein Muçi (talk) 11:02, 20 April 2022 (UTC)

@Klein Muçi: sure, for example:
Cell-1 Cell-2
Cell-3 Cell-4
See Help:Table for a LOT more on this. — xaosflux Talk 12:58, 20 April 2022 (UTC)
Thank you! Is it possible to only remove the outer outlining/the frame of the table while keeping every line that makes up cells? I've tried searching for "outline" at the page you gave me but I wasn't successful. - Klein Muçi (talk) 14:26, 20 April 2022 (UTC)
@Klein Muçi probably, but I'm not sure of the classes/parameters - you can try following up at Help talk:Table, it may be some sort of complicated combination of styles and div wrappers, possibly something you could make in to a template - certainly not a mess of code you'd want in articles (because other editors would easily break it - especially if using visualeditor. — xaosflux Talk 14:38, 20 April 2022 (UTC)
Oh, no. It's for the user page of my bot. Here. I just want to remove the outer outlining because it seems bad with the overall page outline while preserving the cells inside (tried removing those but it made the text unreadable). Any easy advice you can provide or should I go to Help talk:Table? - Klein Muçi (talk) 14:44, 20 April 2022 (UTC)
@Klein Muçi for a very manual way, you can apply styling PER CELL, for example see w:sq:Special:PermaLink/2443057. You have to NOT use the "wikitable" class, because that already has the styling. There may be better ways to do this, but I don't have time to look in to it right now. — xaosflux Talk 15:02, 20 April 2022 (UTC)
Eh, I understood that after your first example here. Thank you for providing the sandbox example! It is close to what I had in mind but still it is lacking the lines in some of the cells in the right side. I'll ask in the talk page you mentioned. - Klein Muçi (talk) 15:12, 20 April 2022 (UTC)
@Klein Muçi I didn't built it our all the way, you can add some "border-right: 1px solid darkgray;"'s in there to make the right side :) There has to be a better way then styling each cell, I just haven't done this in a while! — xaosflux Talk 15:15, 20 April 2022 (UTC)

Updates to bureaucrat minimum activity requirements

Hello Xaosflux.

Following a discussion at the Bureaucrats' noticeboard, the minimum activity requirements for bureaucrats have been updated to also include the the recently updated minimum editing requirements for administrators (i.e. at least 100 edits every 5 years). This will be enforced beginning in January 2023. Should you no longer wish to volunteer as a bureaucrat you may request removal at SRP and.or let us know at WP:BN.

Best regards, MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 12:37, 22 April 2022 (UTC)

RfA proposal

Regarding this edit: just fyi, the commenter was reflecting on how they use the remaining time displayed, and wasn't proposing to remove it. isaacl (talk) 15:26, 23 April 2022 (UTC)

RfA

Where good editors go to be driven off the project. -Ad Orientem (talk) 23:09, 23 April 2022 (UTC)

@Ad Orientem thanks for the note, note sent. — xaosflux Talk 23:27, 23 April 2022 (UTC)

John Kaippallil

Hi @Xaosflux:, Can I create a draft article (AFC) for John Kaippallil? I ask you this because only administrator can edit or create this page, whereas Brookie protected this page as full protection for indefinite you can check here. I left this message to your talk page beacuse you are the last user to edit on Brookie's user page. Please kindly respond my query. Thank you! Fade258 (talk) 08:38, 30 April 2022 (UTC)

Hi @Fade258, I think it is OK if you want to create a userspace draft (e.g. User:Fade258/John Kaippallil) for this topic; and should a new page patroller support the creation we can lift the create protection on that page when the draft is accepted. (They can post at WP:RFPP to have it removed at that time). Please keep in mind, that an article on this topic was previously deleted following a discussion at Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/John_Kaippallil. You should first review that, then Wikipedia:Notability (people) - as the prior deletion was primarily about lack of notability of the subject. — xaosflux Talk 08:59, 30 April 2022 (UTC)
Thank you for your quick response as I know that this page was deleted through the AFD process and I am aware about the Wikipedia: Notability (people). But still someone had already created the draft and deleted several times see here Xaosflux. Thank you! Fade258 (talk) 09:12, 30 April 2022 (UTC)
@Fade258 the deletions in the Draft namespace were just redirects when a blocked user moved that draft previously, I wouldn't be too worried about that part. If you are the only one working on the potential new article, I'd suggest developing it in your usersandbox instead of draft space. Put {{Userspace draft}} on the top and submit that way when ready. — xaosflux Talk 09:42, 30 April 2022 (UTC)
@Xaosflux:, Thank you for your valuable time and words. Fade258 (talk) 09:45, 30 April 2022 (UTC)

Is this okay?

The diff and link above should be self-explanatory as to what happened. From my perspective, the revert was almost a knee-jerk action. It looked to me like the equivalent of a user removing a complaint about themself at ANI. The vandalism warning was because the blanking of the RfA wasn't inadvertent based on the edit summary, which looked, in light of the retirement, like a diva departure (I really don't know why 力 is retiring). Still, even then, it was overkill on my part.

I saw the first reaction by J947 last night, but I was on my tablet and hate editing from it, so I figured I'd wait until this morning. I was surprised, though, by the statement "unless I've missed some change RfAs can be and have been courtesy blanked – it's common practice". I poked around to see if there's any policy or guideline on this and couldn't find anything. In practice, though, is it true? And if it is, wouldn't a crat blank it after a request from the candidate rather than the candidate doing it themself?

Ironically, normally I wouldn't have even noticed the blanking because once an RfA is closed, I take it off my watchlist. Apparently in this instance I forgot (and paid for my absentmindedness).

Thanks for any guidance.--Bbb23 (talk) 13:12, 30 April 2022 (UTC)

Hi @Bbb23, in this specific case I'd say ignore that page now and move on - you have better things to work on; and that candidate is likely not doing themselves any favors for a future run with their edits there. Blanking closed RfA's is not a 'common practice', but it's not really causing any harm to Wikipedia. Since you asked, I don't think your templated vandalism-only warning communication was the most effective way to communicate with that editor, but I don't think someone else "striking" it is either. Where to go now? On reflection, if you changed your mind about that vandalism warning, leaving a very short note about that on that user talk could be useful. Else, walk away from the entire situation. I can't see anything helpful coming out of bringing this to ANI for example. Best regards, — xaosflux Talk 14:17, 30 April 2022 (UTC)
Thanks. Everything you say makes sense (as usual). As I implied, I too think the vandalism warning was wrong, but I don't think the user much cares, at least not at this point; if they ever complain later (unretiring, which so often happens), I'll apologize then. Frankly, I don't want to edit the user's Talk page now because it is clear that a certain editor is watching it. Curiosity question: if you had seen the blanking by the user, would you have taken any action?--Bbb23 (talk) 16:02, 30 April 2022 (UTC)
@Bbb23 probably not in this case, mostly because the discussion was already 4 months old. If it was something like a pagemove without some really good explanation - then for sure I would have. — xaosflux Talk 17:15, 30 April 2022 (UTC)

Bureaucrat Chat

Your input is requested at the freshly-created bureaucrat chat. Useight (talk) 03:08, 2 May 2022 (UTC)

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