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This page contains discussions that have been archived from Village pump (miscellaneous). Please do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to revive any of these discussions, either start a new thread or use the talk page associated with that topic.

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At least cry, at least shoot yourself ...

WP:MULTI. ―Mandruss ☎ 13:11, 30 December 2020 (UTC)

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Sorry to bother wikipedians, but I have an unsolvable problem. Recently I went to https://ilostat.ilo.org/topics/informality/ and downloaded the table "informal employment and informal sector" there, and there was a layout specifically for informal employment in the formal sector and informal employment in the informal sector. Today I go there to clarify links and there is no indicator. Just cry, even shoot, well, there is none in nature at all! Moreover, there is a description of the indicator, but it is generally absent in nature. Please, who knows where he is, please help! --Vyacheslav84 (talk) 15:04, 29 December 2020 (UTC)

@Vyacheslav84: See the replies to your other post at WP:RDH. Please only ask questions in one place. RudolfRed (talk) 02:11, 30 December 2020 (UTC)
The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Virtual Asia-Pacific Wikipedia 20 CentralNotice for regional editors

I have put in a request for a geo-targeted CentralNotice for a virtual Asia-Pacific Wikipedia 20 event on January 16. See the request on meta at m:CentralNotice/Request/WP20 Asia-Pacific.--Pharos (talk) 20:05, 2 January 2021 (UTC)

Sorry for disturbing...

Hello, can you help me at this article? Thank you. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Prof.Bilmiş (talk • contribs) 13:25, 4 January 2021 (UTC)

Stanford Article About Inauthentic Editing on Wikipedia

A Stanford Internet Observatory article titled "Inauthentic Editing: Changing Wikipedia to Win Elections and Influence People" discusses "one case of 'inauthentic editing'—where individuals targeted the Wikipedia pages of two contending politicians during the 2020 British Columbia (BC) general provincial election." (John Horgan and Andrew Wilkinson.) I thought I would share it here in case anyone else finds the perspective to be helpful. Best, Tony Tan · talk 17:58, 7 January 2021 (UTC)

Want to ask NASA a question?

Hello! I'm Ed Erhart, part of the Wikimedia Foundation's Communications department. (You might know me better as The ed17.)

Have you ever wanted to ask an astronaut a question about living in space or the science that's done on the International Space Station (ISS)? Or perhaps you're expanding an article on human spaceflight and can't find a citation for an important bit of information? We're looking for community input on questions to ask a NASA astronaut.

For Wikipedia's 20th birthday, coming up on 15 January, and 20 years of continuous occupation of the ISS, we're working with Modest Genius to broadcast an interview with that NASA astronaut. Suitable topics would include Wikipedia's coverage of astronautics, scientific contributions made by crewed spaceflight over the last twenty years, and plans for the next two decades of spaceflight. We'll select the best questions to put to the astronaut.

If you have questions to submit, please respond below or send them to me via email by Sunday, 10 January (UTC). Thank you! Ed Erhart (WMF) (talk) 22:51, 7 January 2021 (UTC)

Please do post any questions you have ASAP - I'm finalising the list this weekend and welcome community input. Modest Genius talk 12:24, 8 January 2021 (UTC)

Category of G7 nominations

This category is exclusively comprised of transclusions of the main AfD log, which by definition is not supposed to be deleted, and it does not even transclude the G7 template, nor even mention G7. JJP...MASTER![talk to] JJP... master? 13:27, 8 January 2021 (UTC)

That category looks empty to me? Majavah (talk!) 13:30, 8 January 2021 (UTC)
Majavah, it was not empty when I saw it for some reason, but it now is. JJP...MASTER![talk to] JJP... master? 13:37, 8 January 2021 (UTC)

Use of the word faculty in category names

There's a discussion ongoing at Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Log/2021 January 3#Category:University of Zagreb faculty about this topic, input would be welcome so we don't end up with yet another barely noticed no-consensus discussion. --Joy [shallot] (talk) 18:35, 12 January 2021 (UTC)

Discussion at Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals) § Proposal to change logo for 20th anniversary

 You are invited to join the discussion at Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals) § Proposal to change logo for 20th anniversary. — Wug·a·po·des​ 22:47, 13 January 2021 (UTC)

Looking for examples of good feedback on bad and mediocre articles

I'm working on a revamp of some of the instructions for student editors in Wiki Education courses, specifically for when they are assigned to either evaluate an article (as an early assignment to learn about Wikipedia article quality standards and think critically about content and sources) or to peer review a classmate's draft work. I want to include links to a collection of examples of the kinds of useful and substantive feedback they should be aiming for, and I want to cover a range of quality levels and article topics. It's easy to find good examples for really well-deleveloped articles (for example, in GA and FA reviews), but I'm having trouble finding a diverse range of examples of good feedback for articles in the Start to B range.

If you have examples of critical, substantive, useful feedback on articles that have a long way to go, please share some!--Sage (Wiki Ed) (talk) 21:09, 8 January 2021 (UTC)

@Sage (Wiki Ed): The permanent revisions at WP:VG/A#Quality scale are some nice sets (I do not know what the present quality is on those). I can also offer some of the articles I've worked on: Master_X_Master (needs updating both for time passage and for the reception from other sources even from the time that I wrote it), Call_to_Arms_(video_game) (similar), Quality_function_deployment for significantly lacking coverage (and indeed you could probably pick out several engineering topics that are lacking citations or sufficient coverage or both). --Izno (talk) 21:26, 8 January 2021 (UTC)
  • @Sage (Wiki Ed): If you monitor the Teahouse you'll come across editors asking for and receiving feedback on their articles fairly frequently. Much of it is "I want to make X [non-notable] page but it got declined at AfD; what do I do?", but the sort of feedback you're looking for is mixed in. {{u|Sdkb}} talk 16:29, 10 January 2021 (UTC)
    @Sage (Wiki Ed), you might ask the WP:AFC folks for examples of any work that they're particularly proud of. Most feedback there is just a brief boilerplate message, but sometimes a more substantial explanation happens. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 19:54, 15 January 2021 (UTC)

Login attemps

There have been over 2000 attempts to log in to my account in the last day. Usually, it is just a couple a week. Wondering if anyone else is seeing activity like this... --SamuelWantman 21:50, 9 January 2021 (UTC)

Sam, See WP:VPT#Obvious attempts at bruteforcing my password not being prevented -- RoySmith (talk) 21:57, 9 January 2021 (UTC)

Multiple accounts to hack my account (log in from 'other devices')

Over the last few days, I've gotten warnings about 'multiple failed login attempts from a new device' targeting my account on en wiki. Is there anything I can do besides what is described in Help:Two-factor authentication? I think my password is strong but is there a way to disable access to my account for some period from any new device? Can I get information on what device/IP attempted to access my account? (I'll also add that I've been a subject of wiki-related real-life harassment of which Trust&Safety and ArbCom are aware of, and this leads me to conclude - Ockham's razor - that said attempts are coming from an individual who received a site ban for similar activities). --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 02:57, 12 January 2021 (UTC)

No. Enabling 2FA and having a strong passphrase are the obly things. --Izno (talk) 03:06, 12 January 2021 (UTC)
@Piotrus, have you enabled the "Send password reset emails only when both email address and username are provided." item in Special:Preferences (first tab, scroll down)? Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 19:55, 15 January 2021 (UTC)
Whatamidoing (WMF), Yes, but the problem is different. Nobody is trying to reset my password, but apparently, someone is trying to log in to my account using some random(?) passwords. For password resets, I'd be told the IP that attempted to do so, but this information is not disclosed for wrong logins, which I find somewhat frustrating. Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 07:42, 16 January 2021 (UTC)
@Sam, RoySmith, and Whatamidoing (WMF): I became aware of this Phab task: [1]. I think commenting there and bumping it up is the most effective action to get something done. --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 02:25, 21 January 2021 (UTC)

20th Anniversary bling?

Is there anything like a commemorative badge or logo that we can place on our user pages to show "I was here"? Roger (Dodger67) (talk) 11:40, 16 January 2021 (UTC)

There are assorted images at Digital swag or the commons category Wikipedia20 digital swag pack — GhostInTheMachine talk to me 12:06, 16 January 2021 (UTC)
I've made a commemorative WP:Userbox at User:Dodger67/Wikipedia 20. Please feel free to use it or even make your own version. Roger (Dodger67) (talk) 19:51, 18 January 2021 (UTC)
Please see further discussion about the userbox at WT:20th anniversary#A celebratory userbox. -- Roger (Dodger67) (talk) 08:52, 20 January 2021 (UTC)

Jimbo auf deutsch

FYI, in an interview published by Der Spiegel on Jan. 11, Jimmy Wales was quoted as saying: "Wir würden nie eine Spende akzeptieren, die unsere redaktionelle Unabhängigkeit kompromittiert."
(English:) "We would never accept a (subsidy/gift/contribution) that compromised our editorial independence." (My trans.)
Presumably he said it in English, but the article is in German (and alas it's paywalled, too). – Sca (talk) 16:31, 16 January 2021 (UTC)

Sca I'm not sure why you've brought this here. There's nothing particularly remarkable about Jimbo simply stating the long standing position of the WMF and Wikipedia community. It's been a fundamental principle for about twenty years. Roger (Dodger67) (talk) 09:00, 20 January 2021 (UTC)
Of general interest as it shows Wiki's importance to the non-English-speaking world, too. (Spiegel was doing it because of our 20th anniversary.) – Sca (talk) 15:02, 20 January 2021 (UTC)

Categories for heroes/saviors

Are there categories for people who saved the life or someone else? Also for people who died while saving other people? For people like Emmanuel Mensah (soldier).

Not sure Category:Humanitarians apply for such cases because Category:Humanitarians might be about people who make donations, campaigns, and other things planned in time, for a cause, and not for people who get to act with courage spontaneously in unexpected situations.

Lucas Silverio Mendoza is another example. They both belong to some categories like: "Rescuers who saved human lives" - "People who died from saving others" and also "People who have streets named after them".

How about lists containing people like these two? Barecode (talk) 22:13, 18 January 2021 (UTC)

I could see such categories creating issues, because whether or not someone's actions saved someone else can be subjective, despite what hagiographies might have us believe. {{u|Sdkb}} talk 19:02, 22 January 2021 (UTC)

AfD infiltrated by extortionists

Here is how the scam works:

  1. Create a network of accounts, SOCKS or MEAT or whatever. Some legit looking, others throwaway.
  2. Nominate a BLP or Company for deletion.
  3. Contact the entity by email and say you will save it from deletion if they immediately pay you $$.
  4. When they question it, point to any Keep voters and claim it is one of your own trying to save it. You are helping them, can you help in return? But please, do not post or it will make things worse. etc..

Most of the time it will not work, but some times it will, that is enough if you live in a place where $100 is good money. I think there is evidence these extortionists are real and the AfD system can be/has been compromised. It's not worse than the low grade phone scam corruption we all deal with, in fact pretty similar. -- GreenC 23:01, 25 January 2021 (UTC)

@GreenC: Due to the nature of things, shouldn't this be reported via other channels (especially if you have solid evidence, so that among other things the responsible accounts can be banned)? RandomCanadian (talk / contribs) 23:08, 25 January 2021 (UTC)
  • If there is evidence, please share it. Blueboar (talk) 23:12, 25 January 2021 (UTC)
  • AfC has a disclaimer warning about possible scams. If they are common at AfD, too, perhaps it should likewise have a warning of some sort. Per above, I'd want to see some evidence of the problem, though. Also, we currently have multiple overlapping pages (forks!) that help out newcomers encountering AfD, so we need to consolidate those as part of fixing them up. {{u|Sdkb}} talk 03:28, 26 January 2021 (UTC)
  • Is there evidence for this? Both being attempted, and evidence for it succeeding on AfD and/or succeeding in terms of an appreciable number of extorted individuals/companies. If you want to submit evidence privately that's also good - ARBCOM can take a look at it and redistribute as needed if not within their remit. Nosebagbear (talk) 11:03, 27 January 2021 (UTC)
  • Yes there is evidence it has been submitted to the right place and it involves information that is privy. The question is how to identify more cases where it may be happening because the victims do not always come forward. My impression is they might be targeting (AfD'ing) articles with a known active COI editor, because they can easily contact this editor who has already expressed an interest in preserving their article but has been sanctioned (talk page only) due to their COI status. -- GreenC 16:01, 27 January 2021 (UTC)
  • AfDs that see an influx of new editors or arguments that are not based on policy or guidelines tend to be looked on with suspicion, so I don't see much likelihood of success for the extortionists. And anyone or any company that pays up must be pretty vain and/or incompetent, to say the least. I'm not shedding any tears over it. Phil Bridger (talk) 16:55, 27 January 2021 (UTC)

Moving Wikimania 2021 to a Virtual Event

Wikimania's logo.

Hello. Apologies if you are not reading this message in your native language. Please help translate to other languages.. Thank you!

Wikimania will be a virtual event this year, and hosted by a wide group of community members. Whenever the next in-person large gathering is possible again, the ESEAP Core Organizing Team will be in charge of it. Stay tuned for more information about how you can get involved in the planning process and other aspects of the event. Please read the longer version of this announcement on wikimedia-l.

ESEAP Core Organizing Team, Wikimania Steering Committee, Wikimedia Foundation Events Team, 15:15, 27 January 2021 (UTC)

Call for Feedback: Community-and-Affiliate Board Seats

Hi there! The WMF starts a Call for Feedback about community-and-affiliated seat selection processes, resulting from the recent approval of bylaws amendments. This call for feedback is going to start on Monday Feb 1 and will run until March 14.

Full details will be published on Monday at Call for Feedback:Community Board Seats. Discuss on the Talk page for general comments. Translated pages welcome discussions in multiple languages. If you are a user of Telegram, you can receive updates in the announcement Telegram group or join the discussion in this discussion Telegram group.

Furthermore we are organizing three different office hour sessions (for different time zones) on Tuesday, Feb 2 (see Call for Feedback:Community Board Seats). There we will introduce the call for feedback and will be available for any questions and comments.

We are looking for a broad representation of opinions. We welcome conversations in any language and in any channel. If you want us to organize a conversation or a meeting for your wiki project or your affiliate, please contact us. Best, JKoerner (WMF) (talk) 21:52, 27 January 2021 (UTC)

Project Grant Open Call

This is the announcement for the Project Grants program open call that started on January 11, with the submission deadline of February 10, 2021.
This first open call will be focussed on Community Organizing proposals. A second open call focused on research and software proposals is scheduled from February 15 with a submission deadline of March 16, 2021.

For the Round 1 open call, we invite you to propose grant applications that fall under community development and organizing (offline and online) categories. Project Grant funds are available to support individuals, groups, and organizations to implement new experiments and proven ideas, from organizing a better process on your wiki, coordinating a campaign or editathon series to providing other support for community building. We offer the following resources to help you plan your project and complete a grant proposal:

Program officers are also available to offer individualized proposal support upon request. Contact us if you would like feedback or more information.

We are excited to see your grant ideas that will support our community and make an impact on the future of Wikimedia projects. Put your idea into motion, and submit your proposal by February 10, 2021!

Please feel free to get in touch with questions about getting started with your grant application, or about serving on the Project Grants Committee. Contact us at projectgrants@wikimedia.org. Please help us translate this message to your local language. MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 08:01, 28 January 2021 (UTC)

Backlog at CAT:EDITREQ

I've been going through ESP and EEP requests, but now I just realised there's well over 100 entries on this one... Some additional hands on deck to clear this backlog would not be a bad idea. RandomCanadian (talk / contribs) 15:52, 24 January 2021 (UTC)

To clarify, the majority of those requests are for COI edits on unprotected pages. Semi-protect has about 21 requests and extended protect has about 8 requests. RudolfRed (talk) 17:38, 24 January 2021 (UTC)
I'm going to shamelessly bump this so it stays visible in case further people can see this and help deal with the backlog. RandomCanadian (talk / contribs) 02:47, 30 January 2021 (UTC)

Hello

Note that Tochinoumi Teruyoshi died on 29 january. Thank you. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 109.185.175.84 (talk) 11:05, 29 January 2021 (UTC)

Someone has updated the article. Thank you. Matt Deres (talk) 14:44, 29 January 2021 (UTC)

Protect Vajiralongkorn for IP edits?

Could an admin protect the Vajiralongkorn article against IP-edits? A lot of vandalism is going on. --FredTC (talk) 13:08, 30 January 2021 (UTC)

@FredTC: Done, although for future reference the better place to ask is at Wikipedia:Requests for page protection. the wub "?!" 17:25, 30 January 2021 (UTC)

Help with wikitables

I´m looking for someone who knows how wikitables work to fix one at Climate emergency declaration.

I´d like to fix the table placed in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_emergency_declaration#Countries_and_jurisdictions_that_have_declared_Climate_Emergency and improve it (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Climate_emergency_declaration#Let%C2%B4s_improve_the_table) Thank you very much, --Javiermes (talk) 11:30, 30 January 2021 (UTC)

I have made some fixes.[2] PrimeHunter (talk) 12:19, 30 January 2021 (UTC)
Thanks you very much! Good job!--Javiermes (talk) 11:52, 31 January 2021 (UTC)
@Javiermes, in the future, you may find it easier to edit the table contents (but not background coloring) with the visual editor. Try https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_emergency_declaration?veaction=edit Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 00:39, 2 February 2021 (UTC)

New Wikipedia Library Collections Available Now (February 2021)

Hello Wikimedians!

The TWL owl says sign up today!

The Wikipedia Library is announcing new free, full-access, accounts to reliable sources as part of our research access program. You can sign up to access research materials on the Library Card platform:

  • Taxmann – Taxation and law database
  • PNAS – Official journal of the National Academy of Sciences
  • EBSCO – New Arabic and Spanish language databases added

We have a wide array of other collections available, and a significant number now no longer require individual applications to access! Read more in our blog post.

Do better research and help expand the use of high quality references across Wikipedia projects!

This message was delivered via the Global Mass Message tool to The Wikipedia Library Global Delivery List.

--12:57, 1 February 2021 (UTC)

Bias

I will never donate to you when you post leftist opinions describing conservative representatives. Shame on you. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 68.206.24.157 (talk) 23:07, 3 February 2021 (UTC)

One edit

Please, check is this edit correct. I’m not sure in it. 217.117.125.88 (talk) 10:19, 4 February 2021 (UTC)

In general, discussions about the article content should go in the talk page (Talk:List of minor Old Testament figures, A–K) - unless this is intended for readers. — xaosflux Talk 14:35, 4 February 2021 (UTC)

Mass archiving of the Hong Kong Daily Press

I wonder if any Wikipedians are involved with projects to mass-archive publications? I found copies of the Hong Kong Daily Press online from 1941 on back.

This ties into Wikipedia as these articles can be used as sources in the future.

There are about 25K or so issues on the internet that I would like to see archived due to the unpredictability of the government in HK. Would any Wikimedians suggest some people who are willing to do this?

Thanks, WhisperToMe (talk) 17:35, 5 February 2021 (UTC)

Hey, coincidentally ran into this post, and I had a quick chat with archiveteam folks. They once tried to rescue it in 2019, but their cryptic URL structure and other internal stuff prevented them from finishing it. I heard someone is now trying to find a crack gentler way to do it, though. There's no guarantee it will succeed but I will try to keep you updated if it happens. — regards, Revi 21:50, 5 February 2021 (UTC)
@-revi: Ooh thanks for the info! I am definitely interested in updates WhisperToMe (talk) 22:03, 5 February 2021 (UTC)

Wiki Loves Folklore 2021 is back!

Please help translate to other languages.

You are humbly invited to participate in the Wiki Loves Folklore 2021 an international photography contest organized on Wikimedia Commons to document folklore and intangible cultural heritage from different regions, including, folk creative activities and many more. It is held every year from the 1st till the 28th of February.

You can help in enriching the folklore documentation on Commons from your region by taking photos, audios, videos, and submitting them in this commons contest.

Please support us in translating the project page and a banner message to help us spread the word in your native language.

Kind regards,

Wiki loves Folklore International Team

MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 13:25, 6 February 2021 (UTC)

Hello

Please note that Samuel Vestey died on 4 february according to Google. Thank you. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 109.185.175.84 (talk) 16:10, 4 February 2021 (UTC)

To all wikipedians

Hello! I am currently conducting research with York University, To, ON, CA. The research project is focused on the effort made by Wikipedians to uphold Wikipedia as effective, legitimate and useful. If you are interested please just comment, if you have any ideas to contribute it would be greatly appreciated! — Preceding unsigned comment added by Reciprocal learning yute (talk • contribs) 02:08, 7 February 2021 (UTC)

Check your talk page. Elijahandskip (talk) 04:39, 7 February 2021 (UTC)
I would advise you to disclose your real name, and to link to a York University web page describing your research and its ethical basis, so readers can see that you're legitimate. "Please just comment" appears to be remarkably vague for academic research. Also please read Wikipedia:Ethically researching Wikipedia. Phil Bridger (talk) 10:07, 7 February 2021 (UTC)

New Russian Literature

Dear colleagues! From 25 January to 10 March 2021, Wikimedia RU is organising a thematic competition dedicated to the creation and expansion of Wikipedia articles about works of new Russian literature, derived works, as well as all significant authors writing in Russian after 1990. In nomination No. 2, articles in English are accepted. Read more about the rules of the competition on its official page. JukoFF (talk) 22:36, 7 February 2021 (UTC)

Need a current date template in mm/dd/yyyy format

Hello, I'm working on some edits, at one place I need a template that returns me the current date in mm/dd/yyyy format ( for example, 02/09/2021 for today, February 09, 2021) All existing date templates I found after extensive searching in Category:Date-computing_templates_based_on_current_time returns the month in words not in numerical digits. I request that someone please make a template to return the current date in mm/dd/yyyy format. Thank you! CX Zoom (talk) 16:47, 9 February 2021 (UTC)

@CX Zoom: You don't need a template for that. mw:Help:Extension:ParserFunctions##time is powerful. {{#time:m/d/Y}} gives 10/31/2024. PrimeHunter (talk) 17:25, 9 February 2021 (UTC)
@PrimeHunter: It worked great! Thanks!CX Zoom (talk) 17:38, 9 February 2021 (UTC)
  • @CX Zoom: Why do you want to use a date format which many Wikipedia readers will misinterpret? To me, in the UK, 02/09/2021 is the 2nd of September, and it's not provided for in MOS:DATE. The all-numeric yyyy-mm-dd, so 2021-02-09, is unambiguous and is allowed "Only where brevity is helpful (refs, tables, infoboxes, etc.)". PamD 18:03, 9 February 2021 (UTC)
  • @PamD: Hi, Actually I wanted to use this format because I was editing an US-related Timeline Template where the mm/dd/yyyy format was already mentioned as the date format. So, I had to use it. In reality, even I find it confusing given we here in India too use the dd/mm/yyyy format like the UK. Have a nice day. CX Zoom (talk) 18:13, 9 February 2021 (UTC)
  • @CX Zoom: Sounds as if it's time to change the template, as it's using a non-approved date format! Go for "yyyy-mm-dd", takes no more space and is unambiguous and allowed. PamD 18:57, 9 February 2021 (UTC)
  • @PamD: I'm relatively a very new editor here at Wikipedia, so I don't know about many rules. Plus, most American articles (even those edited by long time editors) use the mm/dd/yyyy format, so I'm kinda reluctant to challenge the status quo. CX Zoom (talk) 19:26, 9 February 2021 (UTC)
  • Looking at the template in your sandbox ... I can see you wouldn't want to try to fix anything, and it's all internal, not displayed, so I suppose it doesn't matter. But if you see any articles (whether by US editors or others) which use this horrible format visibly, please flag them up as in need of copy-editing, or let me know about them! Happy editing. PamD 20:53, 9 February 2021 (UTC)

Columns are not split

{{Div col|colwidth, {{Cast listing|, {{columns-list|colwidth - don't work anymore, why? The lists are not split anymore, this is bad. Can you provide a link to discuss this issue? 92.100.124.8 (talk) 01:18, 10 February 2021 (UTC)

Try asking at WP:VPT RudolfRed (talk) 04:18, 10 February 2021 (UTC)
92, what's your default zoom, resolution, browser, OS, and versions for the latter? I've seen a few reports of this. --Izno (talk) 04:35, 10 February 2021 (UTC)
This happens when I log in from my computer. When I use my mobile (desktop version) everything is fine. If other users have this problem as well, is it possible to fix it? 92.100.124.108 (talk) 17:05, 10 February 2021 (UTC)
To identify what the issue is, you likely need to give more info such as default zoom, monitor resolution, internet browser, operating system, and versions for the last few. Killiondude (talk) 18:27, 10 February 2021 (UTC)

First Weekly Report published - Call for Feedback: Community Board seats

Hi all, I want to announce the first weekly report for the Call for Feedback: Community Board seats is published.

The Call for Feedback about Community Board seats selection processes is happening February 1 and March 14. With the help of a team of community facilitators, we are organizing conversations and gathering feedback. During this call for feedback we publish weekly reports and we draft the final report that will be delivered to the Board. This report covers new activity February 1-7.

If you think anything relevant is missing, let us know in the Talk page and we will consider its inclusion in the next weekly report. Your feedback is welcome and appreciated.

Finally, it is not too late to join the conversation! Talk to you all soon! Best, JKoerner (WMF) (talk) 18:22, 11 February 2021 (UTC)

Feminism & Folklore 1 February - 31 March

Please help translate to other languages.

Greetings!

You are invited to participate in Feminism and Folklore writing contest. This year Feminism and Folklore will focus on feminism, women's biographies and gender-focused topics for the project in league with Wiki Loves Folklore gender gap focus with folk culture theme on Wikipedia. folk activities, folk games, folk cuisine, folk wear, fairy tales, folk plays, folk arts, folk religion, mythology, etc.

You can help us in enriching the folklore documentation on Wikipedia from your region by creating or improving articles centered on folklore around the world, including, but not limited to folk festivals, folk dances, folk music, women and queer personalities in folklore, folk culture (folk artists, folk dancers, folk singers, folk musicians, folk game athletes, women in mythology, women warriors in folklore, witches and witch-hunting, fairy tales and more. You can contribute to new articles or translate from the list of suggested articles here.

You can also support us in translating the project page and help us spread the word in your native language.

Learn more about the contest and prizes from our project page. Thank you.

Feminism and Folklore team,

Joy Agyepong (talk) 02:40, 16 February 2021 (UTC)

Second office hours - Call for Feedback: Community Board seats

Hi all, I want to announce the second office hours for the Call for Feedback: Community Board seats.

The Call for Feedback about Community Board seats selection processes is happening February 1 and March 14. With the help of a team of community facilitators, we are organizing conversations and gathering feedback. It is not too late to join the conversation! Talk to you all soon! Best, JKoerner (WMF) (talk) 22:52, 16 February 2021 (UTC)

WP:VP Abbreviations

(WP:VP is an abbreviated link to Wikipedia: Village Pump - may be just English wikipedia - unsure.)

I've just been reading a couple of posts on the Policy village pump and come across some abbreviations I don't know. POV is Point of View. What is SPA? But more to the point, there is no obvious link to a page that defines any and all abbreviations used on the village pump pages. Surely there should be such a page - and if there is it should be readily findable. -- SGBailey (talk) 17:50, 18 February 2021 (UTC)

It does take some getting used to. Generally you can type in WP:[abbreviation] to get to the page they are referencing. You can see Wikipedia:Wikipedia abbreviations for some help. You can also see Wikipedia:OMG for some fun. Killiondude (talk) 17:58, 18 February 2021 (UTC)

Presidential Unit Citation - Allowed to be worn by induviduals?

Can somebody please settle a discussion here: Talk:Eirik Kristoffersen#Awards, again--Znuddel (talk) 22:50, 19 February 2021 (UTC)

Designer Linus Bowman recently made a (likely controversial) YouTube critique of Wikipedia's logo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=deemTUM58cs. It's very well-informed for someone not a Wikipedian, and—agree or disagree—it's definitely well thought through. What do you all think? (Discovery credit to Geni earlier on Discord.) {{u|Sdkb}} talk 19:05, 30 January 2021 (UTC)

Sdkb, I agree with everything he says in that video. Vexations (talk) 19:28, 30 January 2021 (UTC)
BTW, People who prefer a different logo can do so by editing their common.css To get the W as the logo for example, add .mw-wiki-logo { background-image: url(https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5a/Wikipedia%27s_W.svg)} Vexations (talk) 20:41, 30 January 2021 (UTC)
Or hide the logo completely. Add this to your common.js — $('#p-logo').hide().removeAttr('id'); — GhostInTheMachine talk to me 15:43, 3 February 2021 (UTC)
I'm fine with the current logo as someone somewhere is always going to complain with any given alternative. - Knowledgekid87 (talk) 19:46, 30 January 2021 (UTC)
Yep. Hurts to say, but he is spot on — GhostInTheMachine talk to me 19:49, 30 January 2021 (UTC)
I don't agree with the video. In the modern world there seems to be this trope that everything has to follow current trends, and follow "branding". I disagree with that. Wikipedia is big enough not to have to follow trends. And I would give the producer of that video a couple of words of advice. Firstly the combination of hair style and hat, which are almost indistinguishable, make him look, frankly, silly, and secondly beards only suit people with "lived-in" faces (like mine), not the kind of baby faces that he has. I'm sure he would look much better without it. Phil Bridger (talk) 20:48, 30 January 2021 (UTC)
The logo probably appeals more to editors than readers. For a non-profit relying on huge numbers of volunteers, that's not so bad. PrimeHunter (talk) 22:58, 30 January 2021 (UTC)
Aside from everything Phil Bridger says, I refuse to take advice on image and style from someone who has such an abominable image at the top of their YouTube channel page https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCSb-xYOELhIqVr2n9s-b_4w --Khajidha (talk) 20:33, 31 January 2021 (UTC)
Was the second half of your comment really necessary? It was a well researched video of opinions. You don't have to agree with them, but commenting on someone's hair and beard seems way off the mark. ProcrastinatingReader (talk) 13:14, 3 February 2021 (UTC)
When someone is criticising our image, as he has a perfect right to do, we also have the right to criticise his image. Phil Bridger (talk) 18:41, 3 February 2021 (UTC)
That's not how Graham's hierarchy of disagreement works. The central point of his argument is the appearance and image of the designed logo. A criticism of his personal image is utterly irrelevant to refuting that point.--WaltCip-(talk) 15:55, 13 February 2021 (UTC)
That heirarchy is pretty good for matters of fact, such as the average density of Europa or who was on the throne when the Great Fire of London took place, but is not appropriate for matters of taste and opinion, such as this. Particularly in these times when anyone can easily publish anything on the Internet it is necessary to make a judgment about whether someone's opinion is worth listening to. I do not believe that that is the case with an identikit follower of hipster fashion. He may be right about what logo a small entrepreneurial startup that wants to make its mark should use (although I would argue even there that difference is more important than trendiness) but is certainly not when it comes to the logo of the world's foremost encyclopedia which does not have commercial considerations. We should not be following trends, but doing our own thing. Phil Bridger (talk) 17:09, 13 February 2021 (UTC)
No, just no. You've managed to—somehow—double the meaninglessness of your first comment with this recent one. Ever consider that if you want to be taken seriously, resorting to insult someone's physical appearance won't get you anywhere? Aza24 (talk) 03:41, 24 February 2021 (UTC)
He misses a couple of things (although they are secondary to his point). The globe is incomplete for a reason. There's also the issue that in a volunteer driven project its more important that the logo be seen as something we created (and thus have a degree of ownership over) than it be ideal from a branding design POV. The globe may not be ideal but its our not ideal.©Geni (talk) 11:09, 3 February 2021 (UTC)
He doesn't appear to deeply understand Wikipedia the project. (Just pick your language and forget it. That is not a major feature. ?? ) He also seems to be like one of those design students who occasionally link their school projects here. Change for change's sake because that is what pays his monthly rent. Rmhermen (talk) 14:24, 3 February 2021 (UTC)
Rmhermen,
Can you expand on this comment? I'm a monolinguist and in awe of people who can work in multiple languages, but I suspect I'm in the majority not the minority. While I do a tiny bit of work in other languages, 99.9% of the time I'm working in English. How does the fact that we have multiple languages distinguish us from virtually any multinational, from a publishing house that publishes the multiple languages, from a webpage that is available multiple languages etc. etc. I understand some pride how many languages we have but that's not connoted by the logo, it simply connotes there are multiple languages. Is this something about the project I'm missing? I thought his analogy to Starbucks and napkins was spot on — it's absolutely true that there are napkins in every store but how is that a distinguishing feature? S Philbrick(Talk) 18:00, 12 February 2021 (UTC)
Unlike webpages where each language version is a direct translation of a single text (perhaps even a computer translation), on Wikipedia, articles in different languages are written by different language communities with differing emphasis and differing local rules for subject matter importance, organization, suitability, etc. Topics don't even necessarily have one to one correspondence between languages. Notice, for instance, there is no interwiki link for cookie in the German language because there is no singular corresponding concept. Rmhermen (talk) 17:33, 14 February 2021 (UTC)
@Sphilbrick: about "I'm in the majority", it's kind of hard to measure (be abe to speak, to work, to be fluent, etc.) but around 50% of the World is at least bilingual. The big difference with other website or any published document is that Wikipedia is the most multilingual educational content of the World, ever. Wikipedia have 306+ languages, most website have 10 and even Google Translate has only 109 languages. Only the Bible has more languages than Wikipedia (704 langues for full translation, maybe soon Wikipedia will beat that ), followed by a small number of books (List of literary works by number of translations) in the same range as Wikipedia. This is maybe not the most important thing about Wikipedia (reading an encyclopedia your own language(s) seems important to me) but it's definitly unique and noteworthy. PS: I also liked the napkins analogy. Cheers, VIGNERON * discut. 20:06, 17 February 2021 (UTC)
  • It is perfectly fine that the current logo does not fit into a stripped-down minimalist sensibility of design "pureness". Boman may not have a deep understanding the WP project. This critique of the logo sounds like art-school-talk full of cliche's about what constitutes "good design". To better understand Bowman's own design sensibility and POV, I tried looking online but could not find anything, nor his design studio/company, or what his personal design sensibility is like. Please let me know if I missed something - it would be interesting to have a look. While watching the video, a credibility gap developed ... "the worst logo in the world", "it sucks" "it's horrible", "it fails", "it's finicky", "it's bad", "it's a shit show". These sophomoric (if not childish) critiques gave pause, but more questionable was that he dissed the logo on the fact "it was made by a 17 year old." So what? More power to 17 year old creative artists! Rock on! This is to be celebrated, esp. in the 20th anniversary of the project! It's a symbol of one of our core values: "anyone can contribute." Netherzone (talk) 15:43, 3 February 2021 (UTC)
He probably makes some good points if the video annoyed people here so much as to go and attack his looks. josecurioso ❯❯❯ Tell me! 00:54, 4 February 2021 (UTC)
From a branding perspective he does make reasonable points, but he fails to understand that as a volunteer-driven project we don't need or want outside designers to adjudicate over, or create, the logo that represents us. Also the lack of super-condensed meaning (sigil magic) compared to other web logos is a good thing. As a volunteer I don't want to be exposed to mind tricks designed to draw me back in. Regards, Zindor (talk) 10:41, 6 February 2021 (UTC)
Zindor, I'm not on board with this argument. I start by noting that when Linus summarized "the brief" he picked up on some points from the 20th anniversary celebration, but those points, at least the ones he selected, did not mention volunteerism. I agree that's a key element and it would be nice to incorporated alloy don't have a clue as to how to do that. However, acknowledging that the project is heavily dependent on volunteers does not translate into arguing that the branding should be created by volunteers. As an analogy, that would be like the WWF asserting that their key goal is preserving wildlife, and therefore their logo should be designed by animals. I don't see any inconsistency between emphasizing the dependence on volunteers, while hiring the best and the brightest to make that point. S Philbrick(Talk) 17:53, 12 February 2021 (UTC)
Sphilbrick, i think you've misunderstood my point. I'm not suggesting volunteering be a part of the logo, but that any group of volunteers would feel more empowered, invested and represented by a logo either designed by themselves collectively or by a member of their community. If our community really has a dearth of artistic prowess then I might concede that a designer should be hired to follow a brief created from community consensus, but I can't imagine that's the case. Right now the WMF has a rebranding initiative going on; I don't know if the logo is in the purvue of that but I do know that the community isn't being consulted. Kind regards, Zindor (talk) 19:48, 12 February 2021 (UTC)
  • That's troublingly persuasive. I frankly haven't given a lot of thought to the logo, but recognize that it tried to portray Wikipedia as not finished and available in many languages. I won't speak for Linus, but if you were here I I suspect he would say, "yes both of those are facts, but do they represent the key facts about the product?" And he persuasively shows that those are the key facts we want to emphasize. Lots of things are available in multiple languages, including the directions to set up my TV. What I consider choosing a TV brand based on many languages they support? of course not. Yes, the incomplete message is intended to contrast Wikipedia to the canonical bookshelf Britannica, but that was an interesting fact in 2001, not in 2021. Time for a rethink. And he even tells us how to do it.--S Philbrick(Talk) 17:47, 12 February 2021 (UTC)
  • The logo always seems to be misunderstood. The whole point of the globe being unfinished represents how Wikipedia itself will never be completed. We will always edit, always add, always take away, always aim for a complete whole without ever getting there. I know that online branding has changed and moved and matured down the years, but that doesn't mean we always have to follow the fashion. The globe is fine. doktorb wordsdeeds
  • According to Alexa, WP is only the 13th most visited site on the internet. Clearly we're failing to connect to an audience! I'm sure Linus has helped some of the top 12 right? </sarcasm> Matt Deres (talk) 20:22, 12 February 2021 (UTC)

This video is hard to take into consideration when he is directly blaming the Wikipedia community for their "incompetence" as to why the logo is the way that it is. And although i do agree not everyone is a professional at Wikipedia, that doesn't mean there aren't any professionals at all. I do agree the logo needs refinement, but I disagree that the logo is "bad" overall, and it's still iconic to this day. Another gripe I have with the video is the claims he's the majority of people when he says the logo is bad. I'm not against the argument, but without any substantial proof, it's just another attempt to seem like Wikipedia is out of touch with the community and blaming the logo because of it. I just do not agree with the approach. What's worst about the video is he gave vague advice but didn't give a hint as to how to tackle the problem.

With that said, It's a personal passion for me to study and review logo designs as a hobby. I don't think most of the points are I'm not against refining the logo or changing it. But if that topic is to come up, I think it would be more productive to not highlight that specific video and just the points. Based on my inspection of the logo, it continues to have an "early-internet" vibe, and it's not because of the graphic. The Word-mark aspect of the logo appears to be just the word "Wikipedia" with the W and A at slightly different font size and some minor modified spacing. The awkward spacing causes some issues with the W appears more separated from the rest of the text. I would even say that the font used is out-dated. These are just my opinions of course.Blue Pumpkin Pie (talk) 22:11, 12 February 2021 (UTC)

As someone who started using the internet before the the Web was a thing, I find your idea of "early" interesting. History of Wikipedia#Evolution of logo shows some of the changes through time of the logo but even the earliest is far more complex than actual early web design. Rmhermen (talk) 17:41, 14 February 2021 (UTC)
@Rmhermen: I'm referring to the text portion of the logo, not the graphic.Blue Pumpkin Pie (talk) 15:34, 16 February 2021 (UTC)

Favorite community wishlist items?

As was posted earlier on VPT, we're participating in Outreachy/GSoC, which means that students will be paid to work on some of our bugs or feature requests. If anyone has a community wishlist item that hasn't yet been done but would be very impactful, please let me know (here or on my talk page). Unfortunately, I can't mentor anything involving PHP or MediaWiki extensions (because I know next to nothing about the former), but I can do stuff involving new tools, bots, or user scripts. If you would also like to get involved as a mentor (i.e. project manager - see this guide), that would be most appreciated, and would make the project much more likely to be "accepted" and actually have someone work on it. Enterprisey (talk!) 09:11, 22 February 2021 (UTC)

I know you said no PHP/MediaWiki extensions, but in case someone is reading this who is willing to do those I have two pet projects I'd like to see: I've been pushing to get meta:Community Wishlist Survey 2021/Admins and patrollers/Implement deferred changes done for a while. A lot of the code is already done, but I think code review will be the bigger issue. The abusefilter does a lot of work in combating spam, vandalism and abuse. This would allow it to be used more strategically in response to BLP issues and whatnot. I do, however, sympathise with Nosebagbear's concerns that they mentioned in regards to the UI of pending changes, and that may need to be improved.
I think meta:Community Wishlist Survey 2021/Mobile and apps/Mobile editnotices is probably quite helpful, too. The stack of code for editnotices is a mess. I think that code could do better. A lot of IP/casual editors especially are mobile now, and often on controversial topics (Death of Sushant Singh Rajput, for example) make unhelpful edits. If we could communicate a message, that would be helpful. It would also pave the door to possibly revamping the WP:AWAREness system to work on an editnotice-basis.
More urgent than both is to fix mobile users not getting talk page notifications and block messages, but I hope/suspect WMF will fix that. ProcrastinatingReader (talk) 10:42, 22 February 2021 (UTC)

Choices for Main Page (in English)

I love Wikipedia, depend on it, and support it, and the Main Page is my home page. I read it every day. I understand why you have, for example, sports information, even though I don't care about sports. But over time, the choice of articles seems to dwell too heavily on a few obscure topics. I think most of us have seen more than enough about the administrators of Georgetown University and about Indonesian cinema. Thanks! Curmudgeonly Pedant (talk) 20:19, 11 February 2021 (UTC)

Feel free to help us make new content to feature on the main page! That's the only way to ensure you get what you want. :^) --Izno (talk) 20:59, 11 February 2021 (UTC)

Besides adding that there's also been enough about the Australian military, I take issue with Izno's comment that implies the problem (or what I see as a problem) is my fault. I cannot be the case that the three topics I've mentioned are so heavily represented among new content that whoever chooses what to feature has no choice but to include them so often.Curmudgeonly Pedant (talk) 16:38, 14 February 2021 (UTC)

It is the case. Or more accurately its less new content and more new content submitted for Did you know. What you are seeing is that there are a few people who specialise in those areas and write new articles at a level that meets the Did you know standards. Everything submitted to Did you know that meets the requirements (mostly being new enough and big enough) will be featured on the main page.©Geni (talk) 16:42, 14 February 2021 (UTC)
@Curmudgeonly Pedant When readers/editors/users complain about something not being good enough, experienced editors often respond with comments like the one above. It may be seen as a little snarky, but it is absolutely true. The solution is for you - yes, you - to improve something else to that high standard and help drown out the others. Too much Australian military in the DYK? Go ahead and improve/create so many articles on barnacles, spy satellites, and extra-solar planets that nobody else has to be in that situation again. You'll see it on the help desk as well: why isn't there an article on X? Why is the article on Y so bad? The answer is the same. Everything here was created by people who 1) saw something that needed fixing and 2) went ahead and fixed it. You're at step one. Step two is easier than you think. You've already made a few edits; just keep going. Matt Deres (talk) 18:35, 14 February 2021 (UTC)

Curmudgeonly Pedant has pointed out a very valid problem that too much of the content on the Main Page is chosen to satisfy editors as opposed to readers. There's no reason that we have to restrict ourselves to drawing DYKs from new articles (which means that some topics will always make outsized appearances because specialist editors will nominate their own new work), or that we couldn't take a harder stance about TFAs with recent similar precedents or the flood of sports ITN items. Dismissing that concern with "well then go create some articles yourself" is not only patronizing (people should be allowed to point out problems without becoming obligated to solve them) but misses the point. Yes, we'd always like new contributors, but unless contributors become more evenly distributed across content areas (which won't happen anytime soon), the problem won't solve itself. We need to start putting readers first and designing the main page to interest them, rather than just using it to reward ourselves with prominent placement for our work. {{u|Sdkb}} talk 21:42, 14 February 2021 (UTC)

As a follow-up question to Curmudgeonly Pedant, I'd be curious which sections of the main page you're following and are noticing this in. They each operate very differently.
Also, courtesy pinging @Izno, Geni, and Matt Deres: in case you want to respond. {{u|Sdkb}} talk 21:45, 14 February 2021 (UTC)
chosen to satisfy editors as opposed to readers If in fact you mean "satisfy the general requirements that we have for all articles, desiring not to showcase articles that don't", sure. I am not dismissing the concern; I am indicating that there is a fix already available to the person in question--hence why I used the word ensure. He literally can be the person to change what is featured on the main page. Changing how our processes works in any significant fashion so as to highlight articles which don't meet some fairly low but arbitrary bars is about as likely as your tangent about content diversity. Anything else refuses to acknowledge the realities of how our main page works, which is also patronizing. --Izno (talk) 21:50, 14 February 2021 (UTC)
Izno, it seems I didn't articulate well above what kinds of changes I'd want to see made to the way the main page operates, as what you're responding to isn't what I'm suggesting. I agree that we need to maintain some basic quality standards before featuring content. But we have plenty of high quality content that we could be featuring but aren't because of all the other rules that shape what we choose for the main page, many of which we take for granted because they've become so ingrained. I don't see content diversity as a tangent here, as the issue that has been brought up is precisely that our main page content lacks diversity. {{u|Sdkb}} talk 22:20, 14 February 2021 (UTC)
Using bits of the main page as a motivator for editors is I'd argue a reasonable use of the page. ITN and OTD are reader facing. FA and FP are a mix (standards are too high to be relevant to most editors but that is fine). DYK motivates at least a subset of editors by providing something to aim for with standards most editors can reach.©Geni (talk) 15:57, 15 February 2021 (UTC)
This is a perennial issue, and this FAQ about it was begun in 2007. Art LaPella (talk) 03:04, 15 February 2021 (UTC)

Friends, I'm delighted that my comment didn't just fall into a hole. I'm also humbled to think more about how much work by dedicated people, at many levels, goes into the main page (and all of Wikipedia): I've been badly trained as an American consumer, and I'll just take this opportunity to thank everyone who contributes to this vitally important project. I poked around enough to find out that Wikipedia editors identify Featured Articles/Pictures (no further process information found) and then two individuals choose the Featured Article of the Day; once these two became real people in my mind, well, if one of them has a fondness for Georgetown University and the other for the Australian military, I'll accept that as the price of admission; similarly for the Featured Picture skewing towards Indonesian cinema. However, I would speculate, contrary to some of the comments above, that it is not the case that there are just so many outstanding articles/pictures on these three topics written/photographed that the (unexplained) process of nominations for Featured status and then the choice of main page placement give proportional representation to all topics. And finally, yes, I should ping everyone who has commented on this thread, and I looked up how to do so; the very complete article was not composed for someone who is new to editing Wikipedia, although I'm sure it's clear as day to all of you; this may be a good example of how difficult it is for us newbies to get involved.Curmudgeonly Pedant (talk) 14:27, 15 February 2021 (UTC)

When it comes to potential articles to run as Today's Featured Article, this is what we currently have to work with (excluding the rare occasions where we re-run something that's already appeared on the main page before, in which case this is what we have to work with); it has nothing to do with "whoever selects the articles having a particular fondness for [whatever topic you happen to feel is over-represented]". Short of abolishing the quality standards for what appears on the main page (which aren't—contrary to your claims—some secret process, but explained here), the advice you've already been given is correct; if you feel a topic is underrepresented, make sure the articles on that topic meet the quality standards and they'll duly appear on the main page. ‑ Iridescent 15:21, 15 February 2021 (UTC)

What exactly are we hoping to resolve with this discussion?--WaltCip-(talk) 21:00, 17 February 2021 (UTC)

WaltCip, I'd phrase it as trying to get the main page content more aligned with what readers will find interesting. {{u|Sdkb}} talk 21:22, 17 February 2021 (UTC)
WaltCip,what I think most of the comments here were intended to do is to educate me. For example, Iridescent pointed me to the process by which articles become featured articles, which I would never have found on my own. The point I take away from the discussion, which I think can now be closed and purged/archived/whatever, is that we who are primarily consumers of Wikipedia have no idea of the processes that have been developed to maintain the caliber of articles and that to maintain the standards requires a fair amount of procedures, a.k.a. bureaucracy, to the point where a significant amount of learning is required to understand what happens "under the hood". Let's all agree that the system is meritocratic rather than democratic, and that's okay.Curmudgeonly Pedant (talk) 22:07, 17 February 2021 (UTC)

Hi Curmudgeonly Pedant! I understand your main concern here. Unfortunately, this problem is a perpetual problem. If we were to focus on reader's interest, then we should consider that most readers are from Anglophone countries, causing us to only include materials that are well known to anglophone countries in the mainpage, thus completely going against one of our current goals in Wikipedia. But I'm thinking about something in the middle, probably non-specific country articles are proper enough to satisfy readers but still in line with countering bias. Do you consider biology topics interesting enough to appear in the mainpage? Regards, Jeromi Mikhael 16:57, 18 February 2021 (UTC)

It'd be interesting to have an "interesting page of the day" module, where editors could nominate any page, and it'd have to meet a minimum quality threshold but the primary criterion would be that it's interesting or unusual. {{u|Sdkb}} talk 18:23, 18 February 2021 (UTC)
Sdkb, that would be a job fit for DYK. If that's the case then we should either a) remove the time limits or b) emphasize more on its "interesting" part than its "content". As far as I could see, regulars in DYK exercise more scrutiny on the content instead of the interest. I think we could draw a conclusion or analyze what is interesting to readers by looking at WP:DYKSTATS. Regards, Jeromi Mikhael 00:50, 19 February 2021 (UTC)
You are, as the saying goes, always free to select articles that are interesting to you and get them up to FA status so they can enjoy the limelight. Or at least up to DYK-worth so they get a bit more notice. That's what other people did. Seeing your work on the main page is also a nice feeling; it gives editors a reward for their hard work and it promotes the idea of quality being important. Matt Deres (talk) 01:46, 19 February 2021 (UTC)
@Matt Deres: That perspective is exactly what I was responding to above, so I'll be more blunt this time. It is closed-minded to take as a given that the main page should continue to operate as it currently does, and it is not useful to suggest individual work will solve a systemic problem, as by definition it won't. {{u|Sdkb}} talk 04:01, 19 February 2021 (UTC)
@Sdkb: *rubs head* Ok, fine, if that's the case. How about if we set up a survey and put it as a banner to see what our readers want? Have we tried doing that before? Regards, Jeromi Mikhael 07:16, 19 February 2021 (UTC)
Another, more direct solution from me. You've linked unusual articles in your reply. How about if we set up a project dedicated to the improvement of articles in WP:UNUSUAL and awards users who do such things? Regards, Jeromi Mikhael 07:23, 19 February 2021 (UTC)

As an aside, can we please refrain from displaying articles with vulgar language on the front page? The DIY section that details the Reddit username "DeepFuckingValue" seems unnecessary. There are many children that use this sight, not to mention it looks unprofessional. TalkingOrder 12:27, 19 February 2021 (CST)

@TalkingOrder: That's something that's been proposed and fiercely debated in the past. The view of many editors is that WP:NOTCENSORED applies. I think you're right that it's an area where the preferences of editors and readers diverge, but beyond that it's a separate enough question that if you want to discuss it further, I'd suggest reading some of the history (lmk if you need help finding it) and then opening a separate thread. {{u|Sdkb}} talk 20:10, 19 February 2021 (UTC)
Wikipedia has a long history of vulgar content on the main page, for example Fuck (film) was TFA on March 1, 2014. I doubt this will change anytime soon, nor should it. Elliot321 (talk | contribs) 03:48, 22 February 2021 (UTC)
What are we protecting children from? That the word "Fuck" exists? We aren't nannies, and we don't legislate computer usage. Reality is frequently vulgar.--WaltCip-(talk) 18:46, 24 February 2021 (UTC)

Porfirije

It was jarring to look at the main page one day, see a picture of Porfirije in the news, and then the next day see him ten years younger and in a very bad mood. I'm just saying. --Guy Macon (talk) 14:42, 21 February 2021 (UTC)

You could have brought this up at WP:ERRORS.--WaltCip-(talk) 18:43, 24 February 2021 (UTC)

Call for Feedback: Community Board seats - Midpoint update

Hi all, I am writing here to let you know a few things:

  1. The third weekly report is now available for the Call for Feedback: Community Board seats.
  2. This is the middle of the Call for Feedback, which means we are halfway through! If you have not joined the conversation, please do so. The facilitation team does not want to miss hearing your feedback.
  3. For the second half of the Call for Feedback the plan is to promote further discussion around four topics that need disentanglement: regional quotas, candidates' skills, vetting of candidates, and the connection of Board elections with the Global Council and the Regional Hubs.

Do reach out if you have any questions or comments. Best, JKoerner (WMF) (talk) 13:55, 25 February 2021 (UTC)

Is there any way to execute javascript files in user pages?

I wonder if its possible to execute javascript in Wikipedia user pages, so that I can stop my user page from being able to be vandalised with a solution like putting wgRestrictionEdit:["4D4850"]; or something else to cause protection. Please can someone tell me if executable javascript is usable in the user namespace? 4D4850 (talk) 23:04, 25 February 2021 (UTC)

No. If your user page is being vandalized, you can request an admin to protect it at WP:RFPP. --Izno (talk) 23:28, 25 February 2021 (UTC)
@4D4850: No, see Cross-site scripting. If you could do that, you'd have full control of the other user's account. For example, if an admin visited your page, you would be able to use the script to block people or vandalize the main page or maybe even trick them into giving you their password. What you put in in User:4D4850/common.js will work only for yourself, but for the same reason, you shouldn't put anything you don't trust on that page. Suffusion of Yellow (talk) 05:43, 26 February 2021 (UTC)
I think it's worth also mentioning that there is a filter in place which will prevent any non-autoconfirmed user from editing any user page which is not 'theirs'. This will cut out 99% of any attempted vandalism, which is likely to be minimal anyway if you're not regularly dealing with vandals. I put 'theirs' in scare quotes because these are just community pages which anyone might want to edit, for example to fix a category which is messing up something else, or perhaps make some other improvement. This is a wiki after all. -- zzuuzz (talk) 06:02, 26 February 2021 (UTC)
Thanks for pointing that out, @Suffusion of Yellow:. I just realized that if that was possible, it would allow someone to become a "Wikipedia Dictator" (put in quotes because that is just what I'm calling it), thus rendering Wikipedia failing horribly at it's goal of being an open to edit repository of human knowledge, although now I think about it, someone could reasonably use the if autoconfirmed templateThis is the problem to make Wikipedia unable to be read by IPs, which would also be bad. 4D4850 (talk) 15:10, 26 February 2021 (UTC)

Wikifunctions logo contest

Hello. Please help to choose a design concept for the logo of the new Wikifunctions wiki. Voting starts today and will be open for 2 weeks. If you would like to participate, then please learn more and vote now at Meta-Wiki. Thank you! --Quiddity (WMF)

01:47, 2 March 2021 (UTC)

Retrieving my old Wiki identity

I have been working with Wiki for several years (see User:Beebuk). Lately, I have had to give up my old computer and begin on a new one, and, when I tried to log into Wikipedia, I was told that either my user name or my password was wrong (even though I had a written record of both). After much searching, I discovered that, according to my account information, my user name is listed, not as Beebuk, but as Rfstorey. When I tried to change it to Beebuk, I only ended up with a new account, as evidenced by my signature, in red, at the end of this query. How in the world can I retrieve my old identity? Beebuk (talk) 22:09, 4 March 2021 (UTC)

Yikes. Please ignore the above. My wife just solved my problem. Beebuk 01:21, 5 March 2021 (UTC)

Apparent solution: [3]

Important lessons:

  • Keep at least three copies of your password file in three different locations that won't be destroyed by the same fire, flood, computer failure etc. Combine things like a printout in a safety deposit box a thumb drive, and cloud storage.
  • Encrypt any copies of your password file that may not be secure (in the cloud, at your methhead cousin's house, etc. AES Crypt is a good choice for this. Also encrypt a test file with the same master password and practice remembering the master password by decrypting the test file once a week.

--Guy Macon (talk) 01:29, 5 March 2021 (UTC)

Dumb question: you had the Rfstorey username in 2009? [4] --Guy Macon (talk) 01:35, 5 March 2021 (UTC)

Password guessing against my account

There were several attempts in the last few hours to guess my password. This is usually directed against a large number of accounts. Just a heads up. ☆ Bri (talk) 19:41, 3 March 2021 (UTC)

If this is on other apps that have 2fa get a titan key so your account can only be opened by that key its a physical usb thing. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2603:9004:915:7000:1C50:6220:1437:9C88 (talk) 20:11, 9 March 2021 (UTC)

Four panel discussions - Call for Feedback: Community Board seats final sprint

The final sprint

The Facilitation team invites you to a round of panel sessions March 12 - 14 in the last days of the Call for feedback: Community Board seats.

We are confirming guests and times, and we are updating the wiki pages accordingly. Expect 90-minute sessions with video recording: 45 minutes for a panel to dive deep into possible scenarios followed by 45 minutes to continue the conversation with open mic for all participants. You can share your questions and comments now on the panel Talk pages. Best, JKoerner (WMF) (talk) 20:44, 5 March 2021 (UTC)

I just commented at Talk:List of Wikipedia mobile applications (section: F-Droid or Google Play?) about the opportunity of including a link to F-Droid,s version of the official app (besides Google Play's) on the main page (I mean https://www.wikipedia.org/).

I am leaving the suggestion there, as it is also a consistency issue between that article and the main page, but I am not sure if/where I have to report specifically for changes to the main page.194.230.155.139 (talk) 14:57, 14 March 2021 (UTC)

Wikidata churning

I believe this is the complaints section? For another illustration of how broken Wikidata is, consider COSI which is showing a not-very-helpful error ("Lua error in Module:Mapframe at line 379: attempt to perform arithmetic on local 'lat_d' (a nil value)") in the infobox. That error was caused by a 9 March 2021 edit by DeltaBot at Wikidata: diff ("move claim coordinate location (P625) -> headquarters location (P159)"). In other words, an article here using the optimistic {{Wikidatacoord}} to get coordinates from Wikidata will break if something decides the coordinates actually should be called something else. Presumably, from the point of view of the Wikidata design, the error is the fault of the enwiki template which should know to try getting coordinates from each of the dozen different places where they might be applied, now or in the future. Johnuniq (talk) 09:12, 15 March 2021 (UTC)

Same at Akita University of Art and Joetsu University of Education. Johnuniq (talk) 09:25, 15 March 2021 (UTC)
COSI fixed by swapping to {{WikidataCoord_hqlocation}}, but the university infoboxes seem to have the coord handling embedded in the template. Now, we could just swap that, but what if some other places haven't had the coords moved on Wikidata... ƒirefly ( t · c ) 10:06, 15 March 2021 (UTC)

I just spent a long time working out why five articles are displaying "No value was provided for longitude" errors: 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + 5. It's because d:Q21578 had the same bot edit to rename the coordinates entry. @Sdkb: As the author of Template:U.S. News top 10, I was going to drop the problem on you when I worked out the problem. What can be done? Johnuniq (talk) 06:19, 18 March 2021 (UTC)

Johnuniq, ugh. I complained to Wikidata. It looks like they're hopefully going to sort it out. If you want it solved immediately for that particular template, change the lines with {{wikidata|property|raw|page={{{1}}}|coord}} here so that they accept coordinates that are qualifiers of P159 rather than just given as P625. {{u|Sdkb}} talk 07:21, 18 March 2021 (UTC)

Call for volunteers to join national juries of Wiki Loves Africa

Hello

I summarized our need and the rationale here c:Commons talk:Wiki Loves Africa 2021/jury. In short, last year, some national teams have asked for help from Commonists (from other countries !) to join the selection juries. We would wholeheartedly welcome a handfull of volunteers, speaking either of those languages: English, Arabic and French. I am sharing with you last year list of local teams who run a selection process Commons:Wiki Loves Africa 2020/National winners. I think that this year they will be less numerous though, but they will be from these countries pool. Add your name if you have super skills in photography and if you are willing to help ! Thanks in advance Anthere (talk) 13:09, 17 March 2021 (UTC)

Discussion at Wikipedia_talk:Manual of Style about the capitalisation of internet

Information icon There is currently a discussion on the Manual of Style talk page about whether or not to capitalise internet when referring to the Internet; if you wish to participate, please see Wikipedia_talk:Manual of style#The capitalisation of "Internet" (referring to the global interconnected network generally used today). Thank you. DesertPipeline (talk) 13:00, 19 March 2021 (UTC)

Information icon There is currently a discussion at MediaWiki talk:Linkshere regarding adding a link to LinkCount to the WhatLinksHere special page, any feedback about the tool is also welcome. See MediaWiki talk:Linkshere#Protected edit request on 8 March 2021 to participate. Thank you. – BrandonXLF (talk) 17:58, 19 March 2021 (UTC)

Call for review, comment and discuss my PhD thesis on Wikimedia movement

Hello,

Just a short message to call people interested to review, comment and discuss my PhD thesis on Wikimedia movement. All the best, Lionel Scheepmans ✉ Contact (French native speaker) 19:28, 19 March 2021 (UTC)

Hi Lionel! I think it might help if you paste an abstract here for us consider before clicking through. Anything interesting and enticing you can pull out of your findings? --EpochFail (talk • contribs) 19:59, 19 March 2021 (UTC)
Good idea @EpochFail, the abstract is on the beginning of the research and I put it below again :
Summary
In the shadow of the Wikipedia project, which celebrated its twentieth anniversary at the beginning of 2021, a social movement has developed that is practically unknown to the public and which is called "The Wikimedia Movement". Very little publicized, both by the press and by scientific literature, this social movement nevertheless takes care of nearly a thousand websites and brings together several hundred intercultural organizations spread over more than 70 nations.
Extremely cosmopolitan, but also very revolutionary in its values and practices, the Wikimedia movement is such an original social phenomenon that it had to be made visible and understandable to everyone. The present work therefore attempts to respond to this need on the basis of numerous digital archives, 10 years of participant observation and the implementation of innovative ethnographic practices.
At the heart of its mission, the Wikimedia Movement imagines a world in which every human being can freely share the sum of all knowledge. This vision of the world will undoubtedly have inspired the purpose of this research work, since beyond human knowledge and in the respect of a tradition specific to prospective anthropology, it is also the future of the university and of the globalized and digitalized society that is at stake.
Chapter by chapter, this research work first provides a practical and methodological context before embarking on the discovery of an organization so vast and complex that it is easy to get lost in the absence of an initial overview. We then approach the prehistory of the webspace which will allow us to better situate the movement in relation to its origins and its stakes, but also with the aim of assimilating a minimum of knowledge on the digital space in which the major part of the Wikimedia activities take place.
Then comes a monographic fresco, so dear to anthropologists, which allows us to give body and life to this singular human, global and digital adventure. We discover the history of the Wikimedia movement, its actors, its culture, and then conclude with a lesson that helps us imagine the global and digital society of tomorrow, of which the Wikimedia movement could be the avant-garde reflection.
Sincerely, Lionel Scheepmans ✉ Contact (French native speaker) 20:06, 19 March 2021 (UTC)

How can we know the anniversary of the Spanish Wikipedia?

Hello, I am a Wikipedian of the Spanish Wikipedia. We have been arguing at our village pump for weeks because we cannot agree on the date of our 20th anniversary. Some say May 11, others May 18, others May 20 ... and others directly want to celebrate the entire month of May. I appeal to the English Wikipedia for help...! Isn't there a way that we can clearly know the precise day? Thanks. –El Mono Español (talk) 13:36, 18 March 2021 (UTC)

Looks like the disagreement is about whether to consider the "founding" to be when the website was established (May 11) or when the first people showed up to write articles (more than a week later). Interesting question, but I don't think people here will know any better than people there. --Yair rand (talk) 15:02, 18 March 2021 (UTC)
Wikipedia:Village_pump_(technical)/Archive_187#The_French_Wikipedia's_birthdate may be interesting, but I otherwise agree with Yair rand. Izno (talk) 15:20, 18 March 2021 (UTC)
Unfortunately the earliest Spanish Wikipedia database dump with history appears to be from May 2003, so it won't be useful here. Graham87 08:02, 19 March 2021 (UTC)
Alright, thank you for your advices. I thought that was "official" in some way. I think in this case we will put it to vote.–El Mono Español (talk) 02:13, 21 March 2021 (UTC)

Should ORES be aggressive to catch vandalism or should ORES be less aggressive to be nice to newcomers?

Imagine you’ve just spent 10 minutes working on what you earnestly thought would be a helpful edit to your favorite article. You click that bright blue “Publish changes” button for the very first time, and you see your edit go live! Weeee! But 10 seconds later, you refresh the page and discover that your edit has been reverted.

Actually, an AI system - called ORES- has contributed to the judgement of hundreds of thousands of edits on Wikipedia. ORES is a machine learning system that automatically predicts edit and article quality to support editing tools in Wikipedia.

I'm exploring strategies for tuning ORES predictions about quality and vandalism to your needs and I'd like to work with you. I am are looking for editors to discuss the values of Wikipedia as it relates to ORES.

If you are interested in participating, please fill out the short survey below. Thanks! https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSe7itK8GM6Y7vgWdtcFXXnsJ8iWe9ysjQI8S1KVtomfonbkxw/viewform --EpochFail (talk • contribs) 19:58, 19 March 2021 (UTC)

User:EpochFail: Wouldn't it be better to provide a page on Wikipedia for this survey, rather than doing it with an external site? The fact it's a Google site doesn't help matters, but I don't know of any ethical survey sites anyway. DesertPipeline (talk) 08:04, 20 March 2021 (UTC)
User:EpochFail: I am bad at pinging :( DesertPipeline (talk) 08:05, 20 March 2021 (UTC)
DesertPipeline, good question. Do you have an example of a survey based on a page that we try to replicate? --EpochFail (talk • contribs) 14:17, 21 March 2021 (UTC)
User:EpochFail: I'm not quite sure what the layout of this is since I avoid Google sites like the plague, but my suggestion, which I hope would work for you, would be to have a page with subheadings where people can put a response under the subheading (which might be a question) that they agree with. What do you think? DesertPipeline (talk) 02:48, 22 March 2021 (UTC)
@EpochFail: Is this related to the anti-vandalism bots like Cluebot or is it something else? RudolfRed (talk) 20:46, 20 March 2021 (UTC)
RudolfRed, I don't think that ClueBot uses ORES right now, but the highlighting in RecentChanges does, WP:Huggle does, and a bunch of other tools also use ORES in various ways. --EpochFail (talk • contribs) 14:13, 21 March 2021 (UTC)
From my observations, ORES is tuned fine. Izno (talk) 17:56, 21 March 2021 (UTC)
What kinds of questions are you asking? I mean, yes, ideally ORES catches all the vandalism and don't catch any false positives, I think everyone agrees on that. In a realistic world that's more difficult in practice, but seems mostly a technical matter? How can content editors help here? ProcrastinatingReader (talk) 18:26, 21 March 2021 (UTC)
ProcrastinatingReader Good question! We can tune the model to, for example, catch more vandalism but also have more false positives. On the other hand, we can tune the model to catch less vandalism but have far fewer false positives. We can even use some cleverness to tune the model to be strict with anonymous editors but more lax with newly registered editors. All of these choices have trade-offs in the amount of edits that need to be reviewed for vandalism and the potential harms that might affect good-faith editors who get caught by the algorithm by chance. There are limits to what we can do technically, so we're really interested in making sure the community of editors have control over how these trade-offs are chosen and applied. --EpochFail (talk • contribs) 20:48, 22 March 2021 (UTC)

Request for comment on the naming of Category:Faculty by university or college and its subcategories

Please see Category talk:Faculty by university or college#Request for comment on naming. --Joy [shallot] (talk) 15:33, 22 March 2021 (UTC)

Discussion at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Usability § RfC: Visual changes to the new article editnotice

 You are invited to join the discussion at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Usability § RfC: Visual changes to the new article editnotice. The discussion is a little old, but a related edit request was just declined with advice to seek further input, so additional participation is needed. {{u|Sdkb}} talk 18:22, 22 March 2021 (UTC)

How to get rid of a Wikimedia user page

I blocked User:Ayuel Monykuch Arop a while ago and found I couldn't delete the user page even though it constitutes advertising. Other than replacing it with a template - and I can't find a suitable one - I don't know what to do about it. Deb (talk) 10:59, 20 March 2021 (UTC)

Deb: Redirect the local user page to the local talk page. –xenotalk 11:50, 20 March 2021 (UTC)
Good idea, thanks. Deb (talk) 12:33, 20 March 2021 (UTC)
@Deb: I'm assuming you were asking about a global user page, if so you can nominate the global page for deletion on the meta-wiki (it is at meta:User:Ayuel_Monykuch_Arop) if it violates the meta-wiki CSD criteria (meta:WM:CSD) (likely G7 or G8). — xaosflux Talk 13:58, 23 March 2021 (UTC)

Commons: Picture of the year competition.

Does anyone know when the Commons Picture of the year competition for 2020 will get started? (COM:POTY) I haven't asked there as COM:POTY doesn't seem to have a talk page. -- SGBailey (talk) 08:17, 21 March 2021 (UTC)

Just go to your link, click on Discussion, and follow the soft redirect. It will take you here. 22:21, 21 March 2021 (UTC)
I was looking for a tab named "talk" - so "Discussion" passed me by! Thank you MD. -- SGBailey (talk) 13:16, 23 March 2021 (UTC)

Launch of WikiProject Sweep

 You are invited to join the discussion at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Sweep § Project launch. This new project aims to comprehensively review every article created in Wikipedia's early days to ensure basic conformity to modern standards. {{u|Sdkb}} talk 04:16, 24 March 2021 (UTC)

Call for Feedback: Community Board seats - Main Report draft comment period

Questions? Comments?

We have concluded the Call for Feedback: Community Board seats. Thank you everyone who participated.

During the Call for Feedback period from February 1 to March 14, a team of 10 facilitators organized open and inclusive community discussions to gather feedback about ideas for trustee selection processes for community-and-affiliate Board seats. Some facilitators had a regional focus; some had a language focus. The intention was for the combined facilitation team to obtain a fair representation of the movement’s diversity and create a report for the Board. The facilitation team used the Weekly Reports as the main source of information to create the main report.

A draft of the Call for Feedback: Community Board seats main report is now available. It will be available for community comment until Monday, March 29.

After the community comment period the facilitation team will send the main report to the Board. The feedback in the main report informs the Board’s decision about these potential changes to trustee selection processes, procedures, and tools to meet the goals of the Board.

Please reach out if you have any questions or comments. Best, JKoerner (WMF) (talk) 13:47, 24 March 2021 (UTC)

I don't like the recent trend of moving new articles to draft space

Wikipedia has always grown organically. Many articles have grown from stubs to FA's. Moving articles out of main space doesn't seem very conducive to this, but this is being done at an accelerating rate recently.

OK I admit my stub for Winner Take All (1975 film)] wasn't much, but it was a start. It was something that could be built on, there were plenty of notable actors etc involved. There's a clear WP:RECENTISM bias in wikipedia in that relatively obscure films from the 70s have difficulty finding internet sources while recent films have no such problems. It seems to me this trend of ghettoising new articles is yet another discouragement to new editors (as well as a bit insulting to more experienced editors). Could we slow down the moving to draft space trend? MaxBrowne2 (talk) 11:42, 26 March 2021 (UTC)

On the other hand, an editor who has been here since 2007 should perhaps know better than to create unsourced one-liner articles. Fram (talk) 12:00, 26 March 2021 (UTC)
It's not about me in particular and not asking for sympathy. What about Bishop's Gambit? That got moved out of main space despite citing several books. Telling someone their new article is unfit for wikipedia instead of just letting it grow and get improved is not very motivating. MaxBrowne2 (talk) 12:17, 26 March 2021 (UTC)
At the time Bishop's Gambit was moved it did not cite a single source; there was only a "further reading" section, which seemed targeted more towards the King's_Gambit. Matt Deres (talk) 12:41, 26 March 2021 (UTC)
I don't like draft space either, but I have to agree with Fram here. {{subst:prod|Unsourced substub not demonstrating notability}} is the other immediatist alternative to draftifying for Winner Take All. —Kusma (t·c) 13:01, 26 March 2021 (UTC)
  • Max, the entire point of Draftspace is to be LESS harsh to new editors than we used to be. Before we created Draftspace, an article that did not meet our basic standards was quickly deleted (talk about discouragement for new editors!) With Draftspace, we give new editors a second chance... a chance to learn, and IMPROVE their work, and bring their articles up to our minimum standards... so that once it gets moved to (or back to) Mainspace, it WON’T be immediately deleted. Blueboar (talk) 12:21, 26 March 2021 (UTC)
    It seems easier to me to pass AFD (where other editors will possible help improving the article) than get a draft accepted (reviewers will demand things from the author who then has to do these things on their own, followed by a long wait for reviews after each submission). Drafts are not being edited collaboratively enough. Asking for permission to create or mainspace an article is very antithetical to the wiki principle. When I talk to new editors, I tell them to avoid draft space and AfC. —Kusma (t·c) 12:49, 26 March 2021 (UTC)
Moving to draft space is kind of a de facto deletion and just as discouraging for new editors. MaxBrowne2 (talk) 12:38, 26 March 2021 (UTC)
It is far better than outright deletion of their material via PROD or AFD. It gives them a chance to work and improve the article if its not in a state to be in mainspace yet. --Masem (t) 13:06, 26 March 2021 (UTC)
Do we have any data for how many editors actually work to improve the article in Draft space, rather than simply being discouraged and stopping editing? I wouldn't be surprised if the effect on that user is largely the same as deletion. Sam Walton (talk) 13:17, 26 March 2021 (UTC)
You'd want to compare that as well as editor retention - how many editors stay after their first article was deleted/draftified. --Masem (t) 14:09, 26 March 2021 (UTC)
I'm pretty sure the message they're getting is "your article is crap, come back when you've learned how to write an article". And 99% of them can't be bothered. Please reverse this moving to draft space, bite the newbies trend. MaxBrowne2 (talk) 14:14, 26 March 2021 (UTC)
And what message does the alternative (ie deletion) give? We wouldn’t even keep that 1%. Blueboar (talk) 14:58, 26 March 2021 (UTC)
It would be helpful to have data instead of anecdotes (my opposition to draft space is grounded more in editing philosophy and anecdotes than in hard data). We have many tools to help us bite newbies and I don't know which one of them is the most effective (and several of them exist because they are necessary defense mechanisms against various forms of abuse). —Kusma (t·c) 14:46, 26 March 2021 (UTC)
Sure do a scientific study of why newbies run the hell away when they get an unfriendly reception. Moving an article to draft space is like saying "go back to the drawing board, junior!". What we should be saying is "how can we improve this article?". MaxBrowne2 (talk) 14:53, 26 March 2021 (UTC)
We're fighting the mentality of instant gratification that has persistent since the Endless September - new editors want to jump in and contribute without spending the time lurking to understand how we operate or the processes we follow. Since we've decided long ago we don't want half-baked articles (stubs lacking sourcing or signs of notability), we have to be reactive but at least give the benefit of the doubt that the topic can be improved, and after drafting give advice for these editors of where to look for help and information. This is usually contrary to the "instant gratification" mantra in the first place and we'll lose editors regardless, no matter how good our advice and support is, but this should be far better than if we just deleted articles and tell them "come back and try again". --Masem (t) 15:37, 26 March 2021 (UTC)
The four-month backlog of WP:AFC says to me that we may be overdoing our fight against instant gratification a bit. —Kusma (t·c) 16:33, 26 March 2021 (UTC)
You can call it "anecdotal" and demand "evidence", or you can use common sense and understanding of human behaviour and psychology. Moving newly created articles to draft space is WP:BITEy. MaxBrowne2 (talk) 23:04, 26 March 2021 (UTC)
We certainly aren't going to change the practice based on a minor discussion on WP:VPM. If you sincerely believe that the practice should be banned, you are welcome to formulate an {{RFC}}. I anticipate snow-closure against your position. Otherwise, you should move on rather than taking what is clearly an agitated tone with multiple experienced editors. Izno (talk) 23:40, 26 March 2021 (UTC)
Very arrogant response. Please don't misrepresent me, I'm not proposing anything be banned or whatever. I'm just commenting on a recent trend in wikipedia culture which I don't like. We're losing editors constantly and not replenishing them, and this practice is contributing to it. Imagine being a new editor and being subjected to this. MaxBrowne2 (talk) 00:41, 27 March 2021 (UTC)
Max, You keep missing the point... Imagine being a new editor and having your article outright deleted - with no opportunity to improve it. That’s where we were before we created Draftspace. We created Draftspace as a way to be less BITEY. Blueboar (talk) 00:58, 27 March 2021 (UTC)
Problem is you're too invested in the wikipedia culture and don't know what it looks like from the outside, or appreciate basic human psychology. Getting told "your article is not fit for publication" is a slap in the face for anyone. MaxBrowne2 (talk) 02:05, 27 March 2021 (UTC)
They are going to get that slap either way... but at least with Draftspace we soften it, saying “While your article is not YET fit for publication, you can IMPROVE it so that it BECOMES fit for publication”. Blueboar (talk) 13:07, 27 March 2021 (UTC)
Blueboar, draftifying is indeed a softer slap than speedy deletion. But we usually draftify only things that do not meet the WP:CSD. So it becomes draftify versus AFD, and I would argue AFD is more helpful to the newbie overall: the discussion usually is more about the suitability of the topic than the quality of the article, topic experts are notified via deletion sorting (I usually read all AFDs related to Germany, for example), sometimes there is WP:HEY style cleanup. And draftifying is still an option as an AFD outcome. But unlike speedy draftifying by NPPers, it is not a single editor decision, but a several day discussion where multiple editors can participate. —Kusma (t·c) 19:47, 27 March 2021 (UTC)
WP is no long some experiment or the like. The recent announcement of the way the Foundation plans to commercialize WP's work to Google and others shows how serious WP has become. To that end, we do expect articles on WP to be useable now, and not just nice things that may be improved in time. Maybe ten years ago we'd have tolerated significantly undersourced articles as long as some sign of importance was there, but that period's long behind us, and we expect new editors to be aware that this is a serious (TM) work now. Now, if we have a legitimate problem of articles in a half-decent state but maybe not fully meeting notability, but still a decent start with a reasonable likelihood to improve and certainly using decent sources, that's no reason to draftify, but that's not the situation I'm reading into here. --Masem (t) 03:04, 27 March 2021 (UTC)
I agree with the main thrust of the original poster. Why not make more use of accepting the article ('cause it's a good one for WP) and then making suggestions for improvement on the Talk page . . . or, actually improving the article where it is needed? Best wishes. BeenAroundAWhile (talk) 04:05, 27 March 2021 (UTC)
BeenAroundAWhile, one problem is that, without the threat of deletion or similar, "suggestions for improvement" easily turn into thirteen-year backlogs when not actioned. We need to be friendly and an exciting place to contribute for new editors, but we need them to work to our sourcing standards, and we need to teach them how to do that. —Kusma (t·c) 20:05, 27 March 2021 (UTC)
I accept that WP has more policies than the United Nations- and for some folk that is the fun of WP but I wondered how long it would be before someone would need to talk about threats and sanctions. WP is a voluntary, cooperative project that needs to welcome new editors. To someone who has hasn't spend years watching these debates- someone who is new and testing the water, deletion and having your experiment put in Draft is the same. I have several proposals that will immediately be rubbished which is another face of the same problem- the mindset that passive aggression and threats is the only way to succeed.
Firstly, that newbies are exempted from deletion and draftification for one month- but their article is tagged to show the general reader that this article is not of wikipedias normal high standard, and analysis and help is offered. After a month the article is reevaluated as a new page and is deleted ig needed.
Secondly all our warning boxes are rewritten with four levels of messages- triggered by an extra parameter 'tone=' default that will be 'mild' or 'moderate' or 'severe' or 'professional'. Mild will be welcoming are offer help, moderate will just explain the mistake and a possible solution, severe will be pretty much as it is now aggressive, alienating and ineffective! Professional would be sort of message I would expect from a peer.
Thirdly there is a software solution. At the moment, if you attempt to save without a edit summary, you get a warning and the save is blocked. Do the same for missing <ref> tags-block the save. Crude but not devastating.
My message is simple- think of it from the newbie POV, think of it from the POV of a newbie that speaks another variety of English. Use WP:AGF and ask what is the best way we can support them. Drafts is a way of switching them off for ever. Drafts work well with a classroom of students- but not in the wild.ClemRutter (talk) 22:22, 27 March 2021 (UTC)
Sdkb I believed you asked me to raise this editor retention problem here-I hope this is sufficient and progresses.ClemRutter (talk) 22:30, 27 March 2021 (UTC)

Flags for Bulgaria and South Korea at the Olympics

This is a duplicate (triplicate?) of a post in the "best" location, Template talk:FlagIOC. If you have further info or input on this situation, please feel free to join in the conversation. Primefac (talk) 11:44, 30 March 2021 (UTC)

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Hello! Is it possible for you to correct errors regarding flags of Bulgaria and South Korea and also Spain at the Olympic Games. In the 1948 Winter Olympics the Bulgarian flag should be that from 1948 until 1967 regarding that they changed the flag three days prior to the games. South Korea used the variant until 1948 in both the 1948 Summer and Winter Olympics because they changed flag in October of that year. In the 1984 Summer and Winter Olympics they used the flag until 1984 on both occasions until they changed flag in October of that year. Spain's flag at the 1980 Olympics should be the Spanish Olympic Committee flag and not the Olympic flag. Check sources and see what you find out. Sincerely yours, Sondre --80.212.169.236 (talk) 20:40, 26 March 2021 (UTC)

Hi Sondre, and thanks for pointing out those errors! Could you give us the names of the specific articles where you are spotting the incorrect flags? I'm guessing that they are probably relying on {{Flag}}, a quite complex template. Fixing the data used for that template could resolve the issue not just for those articles but for others as well. I'll put a message at that template's talk page and see if we can find anyone who can help. {{u|Sdkb}} talk 21:05, 26 March 2021 (UTC)
If it's the Olympics, it's likely {{flagIOC}}, but either way ping me when someone posts an article link. Primefac (talk) 21:13, 26 March 2021 (UTC)
Moved from User talk:Sdkb/Archive 4 § Articles where i spot the incorrect flags
 – Courtesy pinging Primefac. {{u|Sdkb}} talk 16:38, 29 March 2021 (UTC)
Hello! I meant the articles for Summer and Winter Olympics. In the 1948 Winter Olympics for example Bulgaria used the flag from 1948 until 1967 they changed to that flag three days prior to the games. South Korea's flag at the 1948 Winter Olympics they used the 1945 flag until October of that year and they also used the same flag at the Summer Olympics. South Korea used the 1949 flag at the 1984 Summer Olympics and Winter Olympics until they changed flags in October of that year.
Sincerely yours, Sondre --80.212.169.236 (talk) 09:57, 29 March 2021 (UTC)
Hello! The articles which i spot the wrong flags is in the countrys own article for the specific Olympic Games. en:Bulgaria at the 1948 Winter Olympics, en:South Korea at the 1948 Winter Olympics, en:South Korea at the 1948 Summer Olympics, en:Spain at the 1980 Summer Olympics, en:South Korea at the 1984 Winter Olympics and en:South Korea at the 1984 Summer Olympics.
Yours sincerely, Sondre --80.212.169.236 (talk) 10:13, 29 March 2021 (UTC)
The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Unpaywall

Sailing moose just told me about Unpaywall, which is a browser extension that lets you locate free versions of paywalled scholarly articles. Just spreading the word about what looks like an amazingly useful tool. If you belong to a wikiproject that works on academic research topics, please let them know about this. -- RoySmith (talk) 14:51, 31 March 2021 (UTC)

A caution is that while this can be helpful in finding and using those sources one's self, some results from Unpaywall should likely not be linked, though we can still cite completely, as there are copyright issues at play. For example, papers that end up at academia.edu or researchgate.net, even if uploaded by the author of the paper, are technically copyright violations with respect to the journal publisher. You can still create a full citation , but I would not include a url and accessdate to these versions on WP. This is not saying all results from Unpayall are necessary impossible to link, just care should be used. --Masem (t) 14:56, 31 March 2021 (UTC)
Masem, For sure, our citations should still just be to the doi. The rerouting (yeah, I know, copyright != censorship) takes place entirely on the browser side. -- RoySmith (talk) 16:53, 31 March 2021 (UTC)
Also probably worthwhile to remind editors that your free Wikipedia account includes access to the Wikipedia Library Card platform where several academic publishers have granted access to their collections for free for WP editors. It doesn't include all major publishers, but a good chunk are there. --Masem (t) 16:59, 31 March 2021 (UTC)

Suggestion for banner ads

I just want to put a suggestion to whoever is in-charge of putting the banner/ads which we see occasionally. Which is the right venue?


I've been a longstanding editor and it doesn't reflect well that I myself don't know where to post this. Ugog-public (talk) 04:09, 31 March 2021 (UTC)

@Ugog-public: See meta:CentralNotice/Request, I believe. {{u|Sdkb}} talk 16:30, 31 March 2021 (UTC)
Will check Sdkb, thanks! Ugog-public (talk) 06:22, 1 April 2021 (UTC)

Should Wikipedia:Wikipe-tan have an admin template on it?

Should Wikipedia:Wikipe-tan have an admin template placed on her article due to User:Xaosflux/Requests for adminship/Wikipe-tan? (Oinkers42) (talk) 23:14, 1 April 2021 (UTC)

A way to archive Youtube scripts?

I was just curious if there was a website out there that maybe doesn't preserve the video format, but the content of the videos. Videos are harder to archive so i was curious if there was an alternative out there.Blue Pumpkin Pie (talk) 13:19, 2 April 2021 (UTC)

For some videos you can see the transcript (though it lacks speakers and is often the result of machine's interpretation). But then saving and archiving that is harder. It is likely better to use the "quote" of the cite templates to cite the key part that you need to have present for sourcing. --Masem (t) 13:24, 2 April 2021 (UTC)

Template:Modern Honda vehicles

This template need some rework. The Type row made this template weird.--John123521 (Talk-Contib.) 14:24, 2 April 2021 (UTC)

John123521, I remove that second column that made the template weird. Looking through the edit history I noticed that some of the timespans for products were shifted in earlier edits (perhaps due to the extra column) so those might need to be looked over. – BrandonXLF (talk) 07:20, 3 April 2021 (UTC)

NEW Challenge page

It’s Wikipedia:Wikipedia Challenges, I have a BFDI-related one and you can suggest your own. Another Wiki User the 2nd (talk) 20:02, 2 April 2021 (UTC)

April Fool Day nonsense

It is time we ended this nonsense. It was all very well when wikipedia started, but now wikipedia is serious. No other encyclopedia runs close to the influence wikipedia has. Also, the April Fool Day fun is restricted to a very few countries and many users of wikipedia will have no idea what it is about. (originally posted at the Teahouse) --Bduke (talk) 02:01, 2 April 2021 (UTC)

Is this about the "featuring" of Groundhog Day? If so, I thought that the way it was done was an attempt at wit that unfortunately didn't work. I'm all in favour of what I think is the regular pattern: the "straight" featuring of an article that might, especially on 1 April, be mistaken for hoax, but that is actually not a hoax at all. The featuring of Groundhog Day looked like a well-meant exception to this, and unfortunately a dud. (For one thing, if you have to exclaim [April Fools!] within your foolery, something has gone very wrong.) -- Hoary (talk) 02:20, 2 April 2021 (UTC) PS I should have said "Groundhog Day (film)". -- Hoary (talk) 12:27, 2 April 2021 (UTC)
No, it is about making a serious of silly alterations to many articles on April 1st which are later corrected. See Wikipedia:April Fools which I have just found. Your comment however indicates the problem. I live in Australia and earlier in my life in the UK. I have no idea what Groundhog Day is and you have no idea what April Fools Day is. So neither should be used for joke alterations to articles for a brief time. --Bduke (talk) 02:34, 2 April 2021 (UTC)
I have a pretty good idea what April/All Fools' Day is. Being in Japan was no bar to my hearing of, or viewing, Groundhog Day. And it seems to be known in Australia, too (example). From time to time I encounter the "featuring" of an article whose subject is utterly unknown to me: an excellent example would be the Honan Chapel, "featured" today. Wikipedia invites me to educate myself about it. If any article has been tampered with as part of this "nonsense", then I don't understand how your or my knowledge of its subject should be a factor in whether we disapprove of (or condemn) the tampering. You point to Wikipedia:April Fools, but this is merely a list of lists; as you view Wikipedia:April Fools/April Fools' Day 2021, could you please point to two or three items that were problematic, and say what the problem was? -- Hoary (talk) 06:45, 2 April 2021 (UTC)
My main point is that we should not be mucking about with articles, even if they are rapidly corrected. You may know about April Fools' Day. You suggest that people in Australia know about Groundhog Day. Maybe some do, but I have never heard of it. April Fools' Day is not well known in Australia, but I remember it because I lived in UK for 50 years. Wikipedia is now serious business. No other encyclopedias are getting a look in these days. When we started 20 years or so ago, it was all fun and not serious, but it has become serious and we need to take that into account. I've been editing wikipedia for 15 years or so, and I have seen how it's importance has grown. Jokey stuff that was OK 15 years ago is not OK now. --Bduke (talk) 07:52, 2 April 2021 (UTC)
Wikipedia:Rules for Fools says: "April Fools' Day jokes are a controversial practice on Wikipedia. Such jokes must be kept out of mainspace and should be tagged with {{humor}} or similar templates." Are you suggesting a stricter rule, stricter attempts at enforcing it, omitting odd/misleading main page content, or something else? PrimeHunter (talk) 09:52, 2 April 2021 (UTC)
I understand the gist of what you're saying, Bduke, but I'm unconvinced, because you haven't deigned to give a single example of inappropriate levity. As for me, I didn't notice any. Realizing that it was 1 April and thinking that the "featured" article might be something odd (exploding whale or whatever), I (unusually) looked at the top page and noticed that it was Groundhog Day (the film, not the event) -- and that was all. You haven't heard of Groundhog Day, I haven't heard, or have barely heard, of most of the films, pop songs, anime, etc that are "featured" -- and so what? Yes, Groundhog Day received silly edits during 1 April; I believe that it's normal for articles to receive silly edits whatever the day during which they are featured. Do you have a suggestion? -- Hoary (talk) 12:27, 2 April 2021 (UTC)
Main page joke was fine ....but agree this junk takes up time for editors to deal with. Fake articles summited for review, offensive edit notices, joke move requests, fake RFC's, fake bot requests.--Moxy- 12:45, 2 April 2021 (UTC)
Bduke, I'm sympathetic to your overall point that Wikipedia needs to behave responsibly to avoid accidentally spreading misinformation during April 1, and I'm particularly irked at DYK's continued use of misleading hooks that do exactly that. But it's not just a binary between undisclosed jokes in article-space (clear consensus in opposition) and jokes in WP-space with disclosure notices (clear consensus to support)—the giant discussion at WP:AF3 covered many gray areas. Until you respond to the question that Hoary and others have asked you here, it's not clear what you are seeking. {{u|Sdkb}} talk 16:29, 5 April 2021 (UTC)

Discrepancy between the preview from Google and the page itself

When "Curtido" is searched in google, the wikipedia preview says the country of Origin is Mexico, but in the page itself on Wikipedia it says El Salvador. I have no idea how to correct this. Just reporting it — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2601:280:4100:6140:55DB:A9C:79A8:F3D7 (talk) 09:51, 4 April 2021 (UTC)

The Google Knowledge Graph pulls information from many sources, it can often look like it is coming from Wikipedia when it is not. If there is a problem with what Google is showing, you need to report it to Google. RudolfRed (talk) 23:16, 4 April 2021 (UTC)
Wikidata also has El Salvador, so assuming that that's the correct value, it seems the error is not coming from us. {{u|Sdkb}} talk 16:18, 5 April 2021 (UTC)

Universal Code of Conduct – 2021 consultations

Universal Code of Conduct Phase 2

The Universal Code of Conduct (UCoC) provides a universal baseline of acceptable behavior for the entire Wikimedia movement and all its projects. The project is currently in Phase 2, outlining clear enforcement pathways. You can read more about the whole project on its project page.

Drafting Committee: Call for applications

The Wikimedia Foundation is recruiting volunteers to join a committee to draft how to make the code enforceable. Volunteers on the committee will commit between 2 and 6 hours per week from late April through July and again in October and November. It is important that the committee be diverse and inclusive, and have a range of experiences, including both experienced users and newcomers, and those who have received or responded to, as well as those who have been falsely accused of harassment.

To apply and learn more about the process, see Universal Code of Conduct/Drafting committee.

2021 community consultations: Notice and call for volunteers / translators

From 5 April – 5 May 2021 there will be conversations on many Wikimedia projects about how to enforce the UCoC. We are looking for volunteers to translate key material, as well as to help host consultations on their own languages or projects using suggested key questions. If you are interested in volunteering for either of these roles, please contact us in whatever language you are most comfortable.

To learn more about this work and other conversations taking place, see Universal Code of Conduct/2021 consultations.

-- Xeno (WMF) (talk)

20:45, 5 April 2021 (UTC)

English Wikipedia Request for comment: Universal Code of Conduct application

Further to the above, I've opened an RfC at Wikipedia:Universal Code of Conduct/2021 consultation, and community comments are invited. Xeno (WMF) (talk) 22:40, 5 April 2021 (UTC)

Global bot policy changes

Hello!

According to the list, your wiki project is currently opted in to the global bot policy. As such, I want to let you know about some changes that were made after the global RfC was closed.

  • Global bots are now subject to a 2 week discussion, and it'll be publicized via a MassMessage list, available at Bot policy/New global bot discussion on Meta. Please subscribe yourself or your wiki if you are interested in new global bots proposals.
  • For a bot to be considered for approval, it must demonstrate it is welcomed in multiple projects, and a good way to do that is to have the bot flag on at least 5 wikis for a single task.
  • The bot operator should make sure to adhere to the wiki's preference as related to the use of the bot flag (i.e., if a wiki doesn't want a bot to use the flag as it edits, that should be followed).

Thank you for your time.

Best regards,
—Thanks for the fish! talk•contribs 18:48, 6 April 2021 (UTC)

Thanks for closing the discussion Tks4Fish. ProcrastinatingReader (talk) 18:59, 6 April 2021 (UTC)
Note for the record that the English Wikipedia only allows global bots to update interwiki links without local approval. All other global bots must be approved at WP:BRFA before running here. See Wikipedia:Global rights policy#Global bots. Anomie⚔ 00:53, 7 April 2021 (UTC)

Best thing to do if you want to make a requested move but feel afraid there will be too many votes to oppose

Look at Talk:Emily Brooke. I just posted in that talk page a message and I want to know if anyone has opinions about it. (Please make only comments that would be valid with ANY requested move that one might want to propose but that they're too afraid there will be lots of oppose votes.) Georgia guy (talk) 21:41, 7 April 2021 (UTC)

@Georgia guy: we only disambiguate between topics covered on Wikipedia. I'd recommend seeing if you could write an article on the singer Emily Brooke first, then proposing the move (or doing it boldly and disambiguating). Elli (talk | contribs) 22:54, 7 April 2021 (UTC)
It is likewise true that I worry that if I do so the article will be put on Afd with many delete votes. Georgia guy (talk) 23:50, 7 April 2021 (UTC)
I would suggest that having such a worry may indicate that you have doubts that the subject meets Wikipedia standards for notability. Why not start a draft in userspace or draftspace and see what sources you can bring together? BD2412 T 00:35, 8 April 2021 (UTC)

Be careful about April Fool's Articles

As I type these words, it is April 1 2021, which is Maundy Thursday in 2021. It is also April Fool's Day. Can I therefore ask all Recent Changes Watchers to be especially vigilant of newly created articles today, as some of them might be hoaxes as April Fool's Day jokes. There was a very famous hoax in which Panorama declared that spaghetti grows on trees - it was an April Fool's Day joke. If it was not Panorama, it might have been Horizon. Rollo August (talk) 16:57, 1 April 2021 (UTC)

All right I shall confess that when I was editing Wikipedia under the name Vorbee (I have a new laptop now) I did create a joke article on a made-up pop group called "Heidegger Returns to Ontology" on April 1. This was deleted almost immediately as a mild celebration of April Fool's Day. Rollo August (talk) 21:30, 8 April 2021 (UTC)

Dennis F. Rasmussen

Dennis F. Rasmussen needs an advertisement-like hatnote (puffery)

.... 0mtwb9gd5wx (talk) 21:21, 6 April 2021 (UTC)
Like so, 0mtwb9gd5wx? The page was not protected so you could have done it yourself. – Finnusertop (talk ⋅ contribs) 13:50, 11 April 2021 (UTC)
I did not know how to find the template, who would have thought {{Puffery}} ...
.... 0mtwb9gd5wx (talk) 16:38, 11 April 2021 (UTC)

Community Resilience & Sustainability office hour April 17 15:00 UTC

Hi all! The Community Resilience & Sustainability team at the Wikimedia Foundation is hosting an office hour led by its Vice President Maggie Dennis. Topics within scope for this call include Movement Strategy coordination (recently transferred to CR&S), Trust and Safety (and the Universal Code of Conduct), Community Development, and Human Rights. Come with your questions or feedback, and let’s talk! You can also send us your questions in advance.

The meeting will be on April 17 at 15:00 UTC check your local time.

You can check all the details on Meta. Hope to see you there!

Best, JKoerner (WMF) (talk) 20:37, 8 April 2021 (UTC)

I attempted to help a user to add citations, but existing Help for Citations is not a How To tutorial

See User_talk:Uni3993#Citations_needed. Perhaps the help pages need more material on the How to add the citation. The existing documentation for citations is a step up in skills needed, when compared to the Help tutorial. --Ancheta Wis   (talk | contribs) 00:02, 15 April 2021 (UTC)

I point new editors to User:Nick Moyes/Easier Referencing for Beginners. Schazjmd (talk) 00:14, 15 April 2021 (UTC)
Thank you, I will update my message to the user. --Ancheta Wis   (talk | contribs) 00:28, 15 April 2021 (UTC)

Google and orphan articles

I learned something today: it looks very much like Google does not index orphan articles. Either that, or there's some other explanation why Christ Community Health Services is not in Google's index after a month in main space. This article was created by a Wiki Education student as a user subpage on 11 February, and moved to main space on 15 March. In my experience, Google finds and indexes new Wikipedia articles in minutes or hours. It cannot be an aberration that one month later, this article is still not in their index.

Note that it is not the case that Google is unaware of the url; on the contrary, clearly it is aware of it, and has multiple in-links to it in their index. A targeted site search at wikipedia.org returns nine total pages at Wikipedia with the exact phrase "Christ Community Health Services", but the article itself is not among them, although it would clearly be the most relevant result, if indexed. The search results are eight Category pages, including Category:Orphaned articles from March 2021, as well as the non-category page Wikipedia:WikiProject Politics/New articles. Since it's not that Google doesn't know about the page; it must be that the article doesn't meet the criteria for appearing in the index (or at the very least, in their query results, which practically speaking is the same thing). (It may be that soon there will be ten pages in the search results, once Google sees this page and indexes it. Somebody please note the timestamp, when you first notice that.)

I'd ask that readers here not de-orphan the article for a few days, in order to give other interested users here the ability to observe and verify this first, and to comment if they wish to. Thanks, Mathglot (talk) 19:56, 19 April 2021 (UTC)

I'm not so sure that readers here should be asked not to do that. Surely it is up to Google what does or does not get shown, and that is no concern of Wikipedia editors? We get eonough people blaming Wikipedia for what Google does without such encouragement. Phil Bridger (talk) 20:05, 19 April 2021 (UTC)
@Phil Bridger:, I certainly can't control what you do; this is merely a recommendation, so that others are able to verify that what I'm saying is accurate, and that the article is, in fact, not in the Google index. You may de-orphan the article if you choose, and then leave others to wonder if I simply made a mistake in observation or search, or perhaps invented this for some strange reason.
However, I don't understand your comment about "blaming Wikipedia" for what Google does. Of course it is up to Google what they do or don't include in the index; indeed, I find it entirely reasonable for a search algorithm to avoid indexing web pages with no in-links. That may have to do with their PageRank algorithm, or any number of other reasons, but that's out of scope for this discussion. Nobody is blaming anybody, here; I'm merely bringing to the attention of the community an interesting fact about Google search results, which, if better known, might help in the future in answering questions such as this student user question at Wiki Education content expert User:Ian (Wiki Ed)'s talk page, or other similar questions. Thanks, Mathglot (talk) 20:24, 19 April 2021 (UTC)
Note, this page would have been on no-index until it was reviewed, which only occurred a few days ago (Special:Redirect/logid/117137675). — xaosflux Talk 02:04, 20 April 2021 (UTC)
How does it get on no-index? Oh, and I see that this page now comes up #2 for that search. Mathglot (talk) 09:00, 21 April 2021 (UTC)

Mass-deletion/cleanup discussion

Main page: Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard § Large batch deletion probably needed (Azerbaijan)
see also further down this page

Several thousand articles exist for purported places in Azerbaijan that were mass-created in a problematic way from GEOnet. We have had similar problems with Iran articles (see earlier on the same noticeboard) and California articles (see Wikipedia:Reliability of GNIS data and Wikipedia:WikiProject California/GNIS cleanup task force) and have quite a number of areas not even tackled yet (e.g. "Corner" articles in the U.S. state of Virginia that were probably once the sites of marker trees for land surveys, that Wikipedia is declaring to be human communities). A discussion of which articles we do not trust to be fundamentally accurate in the context that they give to readers/editors, and whether and what to mass-delete, is on-going on the Administrators' main noticeboard. Uncle G (talk) 02:15, 11 April 2021 (UTC)

Mass-deletion/cleanup discussion

Main pages: Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard § Azerbaijan articles created by Carlossuarrez46, and Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard § Armenian articles created by Carlossuarez46

Several thousand articles exist for purported places in Azerbaijan and Armenia that were mass-created in a problematic way from GEOnet. We have had similar problems with Iran articles (see earlier on the same noticeboard) and California articles (see Wikipedia:Reliability of GNIS data and Wikipedia:WikiProject California/GNIS cleanup task force) and have quite a number of areas not even tackled yet. A discussion of which articles we do not trust to be fundamentally accurate in the context that they give to readers/editors, and whether and what to mass-delete; as well as ways to filter out the good articles, and any articles that are simply duplicates because places have been renamed; is on-going on the Administrators' main noticeboard.

We are also, please note, on the cusp of mass-deleting a couple of hundred articles from the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh/Republic of Artsakh area that were mass-created with a notice that they could not be found otherwise than from the source GEOnet database. If you have any concerns, now is the time to speak up.

Uncle G (talk) 06:09, 22 April 2021 (UTC)

Resolution about the upcoming Board elections

Community-and-Affiliate Board Seats

Hi All! The Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees met last week to decide on a plan for the 2021 Board elections. The Board Governance Committee created this proposal, based on the Call for Feedback about Community Board Seats. Please check the related announcement for details. Best, JKoerner (WMF) (talk) 16:24, 22 April 2021 (UTC)

About testing StructuredCategories in the English Wikipedia

Hello,

I developed a Gadget that generates a link to a structured description of a given Wikimedia category based on the commonly used Wikidata statements to efficiently define its direct members. Please find the description of the Gadget at d:Wikidata:Structured Categories and its JavaScript source code at meta:MediaWiki:Gadget-StructuredCategories.js. I invite you to test it by inserting this code to Special:MyPage/common.js: mw.loader.load('//meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=MediaWiki:Gadget-StructuredCategories.js&action=raw&ctype=text/javascript');

Yours Sincerely,

--Csisc (talk) 14:16, 16 April 2021 (UTC)

  • Sigh... yet another undiscussed attempt to import Wikidata items into WP? Ok... let’s discuss... Why should we want to use this? What is the goal of this gadget? Is there a problem it is attempting to resolve? Blueboar (talk) 11:11, 21 April 2021 (UTC)
  • Blueboar: That's certain. This has been explained in d:Wikidata:Structured Categories. To summarize, the tool does not aim to import Wikidata items into Wikipedia. Instead, it generates a link for a SPARQL query that returns the mostly used Wikidata statements to describe the direct members of a Wikipedia Category like Category:Arabic languages. This solves many matters in Wikidata and Wikipedia as clearly stated in d:Wikidata:Structured Categories#Principles. --Csisc (talk) 16:14, 21 April 2021 (UTC)
    • Could you explain what it does (and why it does it) without all the tech jargon (some of us have no idea what a SPARQL is) ... perhaps with an example? Blueboar (talk) 16:47, 21 April 2021 (UTC)
    • Blueboar: The tool allows you to get what is inside a Category. This can be important when the Category is not described or assigned to parent categories. This is also useful for non-speakers of the language to understand what is in the Category. Another fact is that the description shows you how to describe new category members in Wikidata. --Csisc (talk) 22:34, 21 April 2021 (UTC)
      • I must be missing something, because I don't see a need to do any of that. If I want to see what is inside a category, I would just look at the category page itself. And I don't really care about how Wikidata describes a category (I only care how WP describes it). Oh well... never mind. Blueboar (talk) 00:05, 22 April 2021 (UTC)
        • Blueboar: The link is featured in the Category Page itself. So, you need to go to the Category Page to see what is going on. Concerning the tool, it can be a need for someone. It depends on the work of every user. Thank you. --Csisc (talk) 12:27, 23 April 2021 (UTC)

Peshawar vs Peshawar

Hello,

Someone can check the modification in this page; Peshawar, Afghanistan (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views).
I think most vandalism come from pakistani people who modified it to sample Peshawar, KP article.

Thanks, --Anas1712 (talk) 15:32, 23 April 2021 (UTC)

 Done, thanks--Ymblanter (talk) 20:44, 23 April 2021 (UTC)

New users declaring COIs to redlinked articles

I count at least five editors who, in the past 24 hours, have created userpages that consist solely of {{UserboxCOI|<some redlink>}} (a different redlink in each case). Is there a reason for that sort of thing to happen organically? (Not linking the users because I don't want to bite any newcomers if there is in fact a good explanation. If there isn't, I'll post to an enforcement board.) -- Tamzin (they/she) | o toki tawa mi. 03:14, 22 April 2021 (UTC)

It could be due to a class editing Wikipedia, where an instructor has told students what to do. Or it could be a sock farm of a paid editor. You could check if there is a pattern in usernames. You could check the redlinks, eg are they names of professors, or companies, or non-notable actors? If they are deleted pages then it could be checked closer. Graeme Bartlett (talk) 00:45, 23 April 2021 (UTC)
It's users following Wikipedia:Article wizard/HowToDiscloseCOI but omitting Draft: in the parameter. That's perfectly understandable considering they are asked to post the template before starting the draft and seeing it gets Draft: in the name. See e.g. Special:Contributions/Bradrave who posted {{UserboxCOI|1=OWLSTAR}} before creating Draft:OWLSTAR. We should modify the instructions. PrimeHunter (talk) 00:40, 24 April 2021 (UTC)
Ah okay. I had a suspicion it was something like that. I was trying to suss out a pattern per Graeme's comment and really couldn't find one. Glad I held off on ANI/SPI. Thanks. 😀 (Also I am heartbroken that someone has claimed the stage name OWLSTAR before I could. /j) -- Tamzin (they/she) | o toki tawa mi. 01:37, 24 April 2021 (UTC)

Country data Bahamas

Hello! Can you look at the country data template for Bahamas?. Can you correct or add new variants to the template?. The 1869 variant should be Flag of the Bahamas (1869–1904).svg. And can you add the 1964 variant to the template that is Flag of the Bahamas (1964–1973).svg. Yours sincerely, Sondre --80.212.169.236 (talk) 10:23, 25 April 2021 (UTC)

Country data Saint Lucia

Hello! Can you correct the variants for the Saint Lucia country data template?. The 1875 variant should be Flag of Saint Lucia (1875-1939).svg and the 1939 variant should be Flag of Saint Lucia (1939-1966).svg. Yours sincerely, Sondre --80.212.169.236 (talk) 10:25, 25 April 2021 (UTC)

Unwanted apparent addition to Vietnamese Wikipedia

Not sure where else to ask about this. Got an email this morning that appears to suggest I have been welcomed to the Vietnamese Wikipedia, which is baffling as a) I am not Vietnamese b) I have never to my knowledge visited the Vietnamese version of WP and c) I do not speak the language. The latter point prevents me from confirming what is happening nor eliminating it, but the message I received takes me to this link: [5] which sure looks like a welcome message of some sort, including my user name, and the notification was emailed to the email address I associate with my WP account. What happened here, and how do I get rid of it? Concerned I may have been compromised although if so this is a weird way to go about that. Are the other projects in the habit of randomly welcoming users from the English WP and creating user pages they haven't asked for? If so it's the first time I've experienced this in my over 10 years on WP. Echoedmyron (talk) 23:02, 30 April 2021 (UTC)

You might get a better answer at WP:VPT. The question is what triggered a welcome on your talk page at viwiki (vi:User talk:Echoedmyron) when vi:Special:Contributions/Echoedmyron shows no contributions. It happens and there is no security issue. I think that an article from here might be imported there, and if you had edited the enwiki article, your name would appear in the history of the imported article at viwiki. Perhaps that could trigger a welcome? However, your contributions there are empty. Johnuniq (talk) 00:16, 1 May 2021 (UTC)
@Echoedmyron: the logs on viwiki show you had an account creation event (w:vi:Special:Redirect/logid/37112229) a couple of days ago, they have a bot that welcomes new users that likely picked that up. Automatic account creation can occur if you visit any link on their site while globally logged in, it is fairly easy to do - in some cases your browser may do it for you by prefetching things behind links on a page here. You have connected to many projects that you may not be aware of as well, see Special:CentralAuth/Echoedmyron. — xaosflux Talk 00:41, 1 May 2021 (UTC)
@Xaosflux: Thanks for that pointer, that actually tracks. I was reading a thread on a noticeboard which linked to a page on viwiki and clicked the link without thinking much of it. Comparing the timestamp in the log at Special:CentralAuth/Echoedmyron to my browser history syncs perfectly. Bizarre that this results in a welcome and an account creation but I suppose that means it's relatively harmless. Thanks. Echoedmyron (talk) 00:58, 1 May 2021 (UTC)
Also one of the reasons we don't run a "welcome bot" here on enwiki every time an account gets "created"! — xaosflux Talk 01:02, 1 May 2021 (UTC)
@Echoedmyron: See also meta:Welcoming policy. Discussion there died out without anything happening, but you're not the only who has been confused by this. You can disable email alerts at Special:GlobalPreferences#mw-prefsection-echo, then re-enable alerts at any wikis where you actually want them. Suffusion of Yellow (talk) 03:47, 1 May 2021 (UTC)

Invitation for Wikipedia Pages Wanting Photos 2021

Hello there,

We are inviting you to participate in Wikipedia Pages Wanting Photos 2021, a global contest scheduled to run from July through August 2021.

Participants will choose among Wikipedia pages without photo images, then add a suitable file from among the many thousands of photos in the Wikimedia Commons, especially those uploaded from thematic contests (Wiki Loves Africa, Wiki Loves Earth, Wiki Loves Folklore, etc.) over the years.

In its first year (2020), 36 Wikimedia communities in 27 countries joined the campaign. Events relating to the campaign included training organized by at least 18 Wikimedia communities in 14 countries.

The campaign resulted in the addition of media files (photos, audios and videos) to more than 90,000 Wikipedia articles in 272 languages.

Wikipedia Pages Wanting Photos (WPWP) offers an ideal task for recruiting and guiding new editors through the steps of adding content to existing pages. Besides individual participation, the WPWP campaign can be used by user groups and chapters to organize editing workshops and edit-a-thons.

The organizing team is looking for a contact person to coordinate WPWP participation at the Wikimedia user group or chapter level (geographically or thematically) or for a language WP. We’d be glad for you to reply to this message, or sign up directly at WPWP Participating Communities.

Please feel free to contact Organizing Team if you have any query.

Kind regards,
Tulsi
Communication Manager
Wikipedia Pages Wanting Photos Campaign
— Tulsi Bhagat [ contribs | talk ] 06:46, 2 May 2021 (UTC)

Is there a Discord server to chat about Wikipedia?

I frequently use Discord to chat regarding various subjects. I'm aware that there's an IRC chat for Wikipedia, but is there a Discord server as well? Félix An (talk) 13:20, 2 May 2021 (UTC)

Unofficially: WP:Discord. –xenotalk 13:23, 2 May 2021 (UTC)

Who are the Election Volunteers in your community?

Do you want to be an Election Volunteer?

Would you like to get more people taking part in the Wikimedia Foundation’s Board of Trustees election?

The Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees announced the plan for the 2021 Board elections. That plan includes outreach and communication support for the Board elections. The Board election facilitators will:

  • Inform communities of the trustee selection process
  • Invite communities to engage in voting
  • Encourage people representing emerging Wikimedia communities to run as candidates

Voter turnout in prior elections was about 10% globally. It was better in communities with volunteer election support. Some of those communities reached over 20% voter turnout. We know we can get more voters to help assess and promote the best candidates, but to do that, we need your help.

We are looking for volunteers to serve as Election Volunteers. Election Volunteers should have a good understanding of their communities. The facilitation team sees Election Volunteers as doing the following:

  • Promote the election in their communities’ channels
  • Organize discussions about the election in their communities
  • Translate messages for their communities

Who are the Election Volunteers to connect your community with this movement effort? Is it you? Or someone you know? Check out more details about Election Volunteers and add your name next to the community you will support in this table or get in contact with a facilitator. We aim to have at least one Election Volunteer for Wiki Projects in the top 30 for eligible voters. Even better if there are two or more sharing the work.

Best, JKoerner (WMF) (talk) 19:51, 3 May 2021 (UTC)

Is it acceptable to make multiple cosmetic changes to existing articles without substantially changing content?

There is a case where a user is making cosmetic changes to articles, inserting {{ndash}} in place of -, or changing phrasing in articles without substantially adding or removing content (which is also not correcting outright grammatical errors or not outright making sentences clearer/more concise). I checked the manual of style at Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style#En_dashes, for example, relating to ndashes and it states that either HTML or ndash forms can be used.

There could be an argument where the likes of {{ndash}} is preferable to -, for example, or one could argue certain phrasing uses fewer words than another. At the same time there's an argument which a series of edits which do not significantly add or remove content, and/or which don't improve the article (as in not actually correcting outright grammatical errors or unclear phrasing) but merely add to an edit count may cause increased blockage on watchlists.

So it is a good general practice to make multiple minor cosmetic changes to articles? WhisperToMe (talk) 23:57, 20 April 2021 (UTC)

WhisperToMe, As long as the changes they're making are reasonable, there's absolutely nothing wrong with it. Worrying about which kind of dash gets used doesn't excite me, but some people feel it's worth fixing and if those small improvements are how they want to contribute to improving the encyclopedia, more power to them. -- RoySmith (talk) 00:23, 21 April 2021 (UTC)
There are places where our MOS indicates that an en-dash is correct and a regular dash or hyphen is incorrect, such as with date ranges and year ranges (see MOS:DATERANGE). In cases like that it is absolutely proper to make that edit. Wikipedia benefits from having a professional level of internal consistency of appearance. BD2412 T 00:29, 21 April 2021 (UTC)
  • Just don’t edit war over it. That is more disruptive than having the “wrong” kind of dash. Blueboar (talk) 01:00, 21 April 2021 (UTC)
  • The relevant policy is WP:COSMETICBOT: Cosmetic changes to the wikitext are sometimes the most controversial, either in themselves or because they clutter page histories, watchlists, and/or the recent changes feed with edits that are not worth the time spent reviewing them. Such changes should not usually be done on their own, but may be allowed in an edit that also includes a substantive change. Like the others say, don't edit war over it. But anyone making mass cosmetic changes without consensus can be blocked. Hawkeye7 (discuss) 01:55, 21 April 2021 (UTC)
    • @Hawkeye7: Even though it's a bot policy I'm presuming it applies to human users too WhisperToMe (talk) 02:03, 21 April 2021 (UTC)
      WhisperToMe's original question was not specific on this point. Our Bot policy covers the operation of all bots and automated scripts used to provide automation of Wikipedia edits, whether completely automated, higher speed, or simply assisting human editors in their own work. This has been read broadly in the past. You can see the problem; without consensus, one editor could be changing things one way, and another changing them the opposite way, and even if they were not edit warring against each other, they would still be disruptively cluttering page histories and watchlists. Hawkeye7 (discuss) 03:38, 21 April 2021 (UTC)
    • WP:COSMETICBOT primarily applies to changes to the wikitext that do not change anything visible to the reader. I suppose it could hypothetically extend to miniscule visible changes like substituting one kind of dash for another if there is no policy preference in place and if the dashes are so similar that they are not really distinguishable to the naked eye. If changes in phrasing are in some sense controversial, you might ask the editor to gain consensus for making that change going forward, but that is definitely outside the realm of WP:COSMETICBOT, since we are then talking about changes that effect the reader experience of the article. BD2412 T 06:07, 21 April 2021 (UTC)
  • Is the account a newbie who is not yet extended confirmed? If so this could be someone getting an account to the point where it is qualified to edit articles that are extended confirmed protected. More generally I'd be inclined to ask them why they are doing specific edits that look to you to be "changing phrasing in articles without substantially adding or removing content". It may be that to them this is an important change, perhaps it works in more versions of English or auto translates more accurately. ϢereSpielChequers 06:28, 21 April 2021 (UTC)
The editor is Skews Peas and you can check out their edits yourself here. there aren't many of then, and pretty much any article edit will be demonstrative. None of the circumstances mentioned by WereSpielChequers are in effect. They are merely changes for the sake of making changes. Beyond My Ken (talk) 06:15, 22 April 2021 (UTC)
If the balance of changes is just going from something the MOS prefers to another thing the MOS prefers then changes may be pointless. If it goes from something not preferred by the MOS to something that is, then the edits should be encouraged. However there is one case where the meaning of the paragraph may be changed and there are concerns over that: See the proposed changes at Hitler's Willing Executioners at Talk:Hitler's Willing Executioners. WhisperToMe (talk) 07:13, 22 April 2021 (UTC)
  • My answer is twofold: 1) People should probably not do that and 2) There should never ever ever EVER ever ever ever. NEVER. And I can't emphasize this enough, NEVER, be any attempt to sanction a good-faith user for doing so, so long as they aren't violating other policies, like edit warring. We don't have to punish everyone for doing things that we don't like, and in cases like this where there is no harm, let them go. There's bigger fish to fry. --Jayron32 13:31, 22 April 2021 (UTC)
    I haven't looked at their edits in detail, but as a general answer, if somebody is doing something which can be done better with some existing tool, a positive step forward might be a polite note, "Hi, I noticed you've been doing X. You might want to take a look at ThisNiftyTool, which makes doing X easier". -- RoySmith (talk) 13:50, 22 April 2021 (UTC)
    I agree wholeheartedly. Taking a friendly tone and offering help is how we should all, always be interacting. There's far too many people who's only interaction with others is "You're breaking a rule. Stop it or we'll block you". It's the greatest problem with the Wikipedia community as a whole, and the main reason why editor retention is a problem. Especially for people who aren't doing anything wrong. --Jayron32 13:55, 22 April 2021 (UTC)
  • I will make the comment, that if I see {{ndash}} I would change it to –, as you see what you get. Few will be using Windows 95 with no unicode support any more. There are even more obscure templates around producing simple unicode character combinations that some people use that most editors will no know. The user under discussion has what they are doing on their user page (even if it is unclear). Graeme Bartlett (talk) 00:06, 23 April 2021 (UTC)
That's pretty much what WikiGnomes do. As for the specific issue with ndashes, as long as it's in accord with policy, fine. If, however, they are doing it large scale, then open a discussion with them. Ask them why they are doing it and what benefits they perceive from the change. Take it from there. Assume good faith. They surely think they are doing the right thing. It's also your prerogative to try to convince they otherwise if you think it is more disruptive than beneficial. Jason Quinn (talk) 14:02, 24 April 2021 (UTC)

The user User:Skews Peas is now blocked as a sock, so I think this discussion is over. WhisperToMe (talk) 17:19, 4 May 2021 (UTC)

Update/shameless plug of WP:UPSD, a script to detect unreliable sources

It's been about 14 months since this script was created, and since its inception it became one of the most imported scripts (currently #54, with 286+ adopters).

Since last year, it's been significantly expanded to cover more bad sources, and is more useful than ever, so I figured it would be a good time to bring up the script up again. This way others who might not know about it can take a look and try it for themselves. I would highly recommend that anyone doing citation work, who writes/expands articles, or does bad-sourcing/BLP cleanup work installs the script.

The idea is that it takes something like

  • John Smith "Article of things" Deprecated.com. Accessed 2020-02-14. (John Smith "[https://www.deprecated.com/article Article of things]" ''Deprecated.com''. Accessed 2020-02-14.)

and turns it into something like

It will work on a variety of links, including those from {{cite web}}, {{cite journal}} and {{doi}}.

Details and instructions are available at User:Headbomb/unreliable. Questions, comments and requests can be made at User talk:Headbomb/unreliable. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 13:08, 25 April 2021 (UTC)

  • The script is great for identifying where a deprecated source is being used... but (as the script description itself notes) it is not great at determining whether a specific citation to the deprecated source is allowable. Remember that deprecation is NOT a “ban”. While we generally should not cite a deprecated source, there are rare exceptions where doing so is appropriate (for example, when citing it as a primary source for an attributed opinion). Sources always need to be examined in context. Blueboar (talk) 13:20, 25 April 2021 (UTC)
@Xeno: As long as something is identified as an unreliable source, it doesn't particularly care if something is a hoax, disinformation, quack nonsense, twitter stuff, or what have you. So while it doesn't specifically focus on disinformation, it probably catches a lot by virtue of identifying most social media sites, and plus whatever's been flagged as unreliable at WP:RSN and such. I agree that a link at that page would be useful, so I'll add one when I've got a chance. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 16:06, 2 May 2021 (UTC)

First Community Affairs Committee office hour on May 13

Come talk with the Community Affairs Committee!

Hello, all. The Board of Trustees’ Community Affairs Committee (CAC) is hosting its first office hour on May 13, 2021 at 19:00 UTC.

The CAC is a new Board of Trustees committee established to assess, explore and address current and future community-related efforts. The Committee's Charter lists its full responsibilities, with the first 3 being a priority for this coming year. As part of our commitment to foster better communications with the Wikimedia Movement Community, and based on feedback received from community members requesting more availability from the Board of Trustees, the CAC will be hosting its first Office hours.

All the details are on Meta. Send registration requests and questions to: askcac@wikimedia.org. Please help us spread the word by sharing this message with your local / online communities. Hoping to see as many of you as possible! Best, JKoerner (WMF) (talk) 20:43, 4 May 2021 (UTC)

Join in the Community Call on Universal Code of Conduct Enforcement (15 & 29 May)

The Universal Code of Conduct project facilitation team will be hosting round-table discussions for Wikimedians to talk together about how to enforce the Universal Code of Conduct on 15 and 29 May 2021 at 15:00 UTC.

The calls will last between 60 and 90 minutes, and will include a 5-10 minute introduction about the purpose of the call, followed by structured discussions using the key enforcement questions. The ideas shared during the calls will be shared with the committee working to draft an enforcement policy. Please sign up ahead of time to join. In addition to these calls, input can still be provided on the key questions at local discussions or on Meta in any language.

Thanks to everyone who has contributed to the Universal Code of Conduct 2021 consultations so far. Xeno (WMF) (talk) 19:13, 4 May 2021 (UTC)

(Cross posted from here)

Wikipedia is hemorrhaging editors and falling apart

As I have pointed out elsewhere, the English Wikipedia is hemorrhaging active editors and the ones who remain are unable to hold back the tide of vandalism, misinformation, and bad writing that is overwhelming the Wikipedia project.

I just caught and fixed this vandalism that has been in the lead paragraph of the article on the United States Department of Health and Human Services for 9 years. (The error is obvious to anyone with experience in American health care law; the agency is always referred to as HHS, not the Health Department.) I regularly run into similar vandalism in many other less important articles but do not have the time or energy to fix them all. I am pleased to see that the Wikimedia 2030 project seems to be trying to address Wikipedia's long-term problems but they really need to hurry up. --Coolcaesar (talk) 04:42, 29 April 2021 (UTC)

If this edit (which doesn't seem to be vandalism) is 9 years old, it hardly says anything about the current state of affairs. In fact editing levels are stable, and the content is slowly improving. If you think the Wikimedia 2030 project is about anything like this, you are likely to be badly disappointed. Johnbod (talk) 04:49, 29 April 2021 (UTC)
This is why Wikipedia works: a desire to fix what is broken. If Wikipedia were not broken, would Wikipedia exist? - GreenC 05:36, 29 April 2021 (UTC)
Wikipedia is plainly not hamorrhaging editors. If anything, the numbers are trending slightly in the opposite direction. – Teratix ₵ 06:39, 29 April 2021 (UTC)
@Coolcaesar, what makes you conclude that the edit in question is actually vandalism, and not, say, an honest mistake? Wikipedia:Vandalism begins: On Wikipedia, vandalism has a very specific meaning: editing (or other behavior) deliberately intended to obstruct or defeat the project's purpose, which is to create a free encyclopedia. What evidence do you have that adding this incorrect name was deliberately intended to harm the encyclopedia? WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:13, 6 May 2021 (UTC)

Wondering how to get second/third opinions on a proposed edit

To whom it may concern,

Good faith newbie editor here trying to create a relatively uncomplicated entry on a subject that is red-linked. Unsure as to where and how to get help. Having fulfilled WIKI: BLOP guidelines and provided over 5 reliable, independent and verifiable sources article still rejected on somewhat confusing grounds, someone please help, Morayce (talk) 18:36, 5 May 2021 (UTC)

Morayce (talk) 18:36, 5 May 2021 (UTC)

Morayce, please go to the Teahouse. {{u|Sdkb}} talk 22:21, 5 May 2021 (UTC)

Is there anyway I can speak to a Arabic-speaking WIkipedian?

I really need some help as I don't speak the Arabic language, so what I am asking is for someone who speaks Arabic to correct a problem at the Arabic Wikipedia. SpinnerLaserzthe2nd (talk) 15:29, 6 May 2021 (UTC)

SpinnerLaserzthe2nd, Try asking on Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Arabic -- RoySmith (talk) 15:41, 6 May 2021 (UTC)
I have noticed that Arabic speakers are rather thin on the ground here. There seems to be no problem finding someone who understands Polish or Bengali or Hebrew or German or Japanese or Spanish or Russian, but I think you will find it difficult to find anyone who knows Arabic. Phil Bridger (talk) 17:15, 6 May 2021 (UTC)
Avicenno, Meno25, Mervat, Dyolf77, can any of you help @SpinnerLaserzthe2nd with this question? WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:02, 6 May 2021 (UTC)
The local embassy is probably a good place to ask as well, so I'm wondering why SpinnerLaserzthe2nd reverted their own edit there. –xenotalk 23:29, 6 May 2021 (UTC)
I don't know how use the embassy. SpinnerLaserzthe2nd (talk) 23:40, 6 May 2021 (UTC)
Exactly the way you did, except add a header and wait for a response. –xenotalk 00:25, 7 May 2021 (UTC)
w:ar:تصنيف:مستخدم_en are arwiki users that have a "native English" babel box; you could look for one with recent edits. — xaosflux Talk 23:42, 6 May 2021 (UTC)
Category:User ar-N are enwiki users that have "native Arabic" babel boxes as well, same as above. — xaosflux Talk 00:37, 7 May 2021 (UTC)
Hi, @WhatamIdoing and SpinnerLaserzthe2nd: I am an Admin on Arabic Wikipedia. SpinnerLaserzthe2nd, your edits were reverted twice. The first time was because they lacked sources. The secong because the editor who reverted you was confused about your edit. I have restored the article to the last version by you. Best wishes. --Meno25 (talk) 02:07, 7 May 2021 (UTC)
Thank you. Are you going to do the rest of the characters? Because all of the information on the "كوكوتاما" article has been incorrect. Please translate this article for correcting the characters section on the Arabic Wikipedia. SpinnerLaserzthe2nd (talk) 02:13, 7 May 2021 (UTC)
Hi, @WhatamIdoing and SpinnerLaserzthe2nd:. I will ask one of my wikipedia education program students to translate this article for you. Regards--Avicenno (talk) 22:10, 7 May 2021 (UTC)
Can you tell your student to translate the English version into the Arabic version because the characters section contains information about chcacters that has nothing to do with the show? Thanks. SpinnerLaserzthe2nd (talk) 22:11, 7 May 2021 (UTC)

Am having trouble locating a cited reference

At Oliver Cromwell's head...I also asked about this issue at PBS's user talk since they had edited the article but thought maybe getting some more eyes on my dilemma could be helpful.

A source was added to the Oliver Cromwell's head article by PeterSymonds here (in 2009) and adjusted in 2014 here (in 2014). The article or book is referred to in a book published in 2014 - Severed: A History of Heads Lost and Heads Found written by Frances Larson. In the book's Sources section the reference is mentioned in the "Prologue:Oliver Cromwell's Head" subsection as:

Henry Howarth, 'The Embalmed Head of Oliver Cromwell', Archaeological Journal, 1911, pp 237-253.

I've been trying to fix up the Harvard cite issues at the Oliver Cromwell's head article but I've run into a severe problem with this source...it doesn't seem to exist (or at least I cannot find it). The Archaeological Data Service website which holds the archives for The Royal Archaeological Institute/The Archaeological Journal (the RAI is the organization which publishes the Journal) has no results for H. Howarth or Henry Howarth or any article under the title of The Embalmed Head of Oliver Cromwell.
So, here is the issue:

  • There is an article with the title An Account of the Embalmed Head of Oliver Cromwell at Shortlands House, Kent, written by Sir James Edward Alexander and published by The Glasgow Archaeological Society in 1870, found here in Google Books and here at Jstor.

Unfortunately the PeterSymonds account seems to have gone dormant so I can't ask him where he got the info but it bothers me that I have been unable to find where it came from. Frances Larson does refer to this Howarth content and to it being published by an "Archaeological Journal" located in London but why can't I find it?!? I need some help here - maybe someone reading this can find the actual source material or maybe the sources have somehow possibly gotten mangled in the telling and re-telling of history and sources?...I dunno! Help! Thanks, Shearonink (talk) 17:35, 10 May 2021 (UTC)

A little research turns up Henry Hoyle Howorth as a possibility. The dates are right, and our article on him says that he was an amateur archaeologist who was published in journals. So there's a thread to pull and see if it turns something up. --Jayron32 18:14, 10 May 2021 (UTC)
This article here at Atlas Obscura cites the article as H.H. Howarth, and it has a link, which is Here is the original article. It starts on page 237. --Jayron32 18:18, 10 May 2021 (UTC)
Jayron32 Oh bless you! Thank you for putting me out of my misery - I think this might be it. I'll take a look - Shearonink (talk) 18:21, 10 May 2021 (UTC)
I see that the actual title of the actual paper is "The Head of Oliver Cromwell", that the author is Henry Howorth...looks like the author of the one book I found the info in 1)didn't get the title of her source right (no "Embalmed") and 2)didn't get the name of the reference's author right either (no A in Howorth). Shearonink (talk) 18:28, 10 May 2021 (UTC)
Geebus. Slight correction... No WONDER I couldn't find the "article"! The content in question is located under "Proceedings at Meetings" and is not listed separately in the Table of Contents. A point of trivia is that both the Cromwell head held by the Wilkinson family and the purported/discredited mummified head seen at the Ashmolean Museum were present at the meeting and were seen by the members of the Archaeological Institute on that date...I suppose it could be the only time they were together in one place. There were two papers presented at the meeting. The first was the Reverend Wilkinson who presented his great-grandfather's "A Narrative of the Circumstances concerning the Head of Oliver Cromwell" along with some personal reminiscences of his family's association with the skull on pages 233 through 236. Sir Howorth was the Chairman of the Society and presented a paper with the title of "The Head of Oliver Cromwell" that is on pages 237-251.
Thanks again for finding the info and the source. All is well...now all I have to do is fix the harv cites at the article. Heh - Joy joy. Shearonink (talk) 19:04, 10 May 2021 (UTC)

Sports player articles?

There seem to be an awful lot of sports player articles on Wikipedia, and many of them are quite non-notable. Why is there an article on Tracy Baker for example, when, in contrast, WP:PROF makes it exceedingly difficult for the average professor to have an article? Praemonitus (talk) 03:18, 5 May 2021 (UTC)

Praemonitus, systemic bias, that's why. {{u|Sdkb}} talk 22:22, 5 May 2021 (UTC)
Also, it's really hard to find sources for an average professor that weren't directly written by and/or published by the professor, the professor's employer, or the professor's close colleagues. Imagine that you want to write an article about Alice Expert, a professor at Big U. Now imagine that you can't cite anything (including scholarly papers) written by Alice, anything from the university's publicity department, anything on Big U's website, or anything from her résumé. What sources do you have left? Usually nothing, in my experience.
By contrast, when you set the same rules for professional athletes, you have lots of sources left: the athlete's hometown media, local, regional, and national news reports, sports magazines, sports television shows, sports websites, record books, and maybe even a book published about the team. WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:24, 6 May 2021 (UTC)
WP:NACADEMIC criterion 5 (endowed chairs) is the secret key for professors, in my experience. If you go to their bio page and it says "Jimmy Wales Professor of Wikipedia Studies" rather than just "Professor of Wikipedia Studies", you're good to go and don't have to worry about media coverage. It works better for institutions rich enough to endow their professorships, though. When you do need to find GNG coverage, a review of their book in an academic publication is often the best bet. {{u|Sdkb}} talk 07:12, 7 May 2021 (UTC)
Yes, I know that. But @Sdkb, how do you write the article? Just write whatever the prof wanted you to hear, because we don't need no stinkin' Wikipedia:Independent sources for professors? WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:03, 10 May 2021 (UTC)
Most of these articles are destined to be WP:Permastubs containing only basic biographical details. Someone's birth date, education, and position are pretty intrinsically neutral. If their book has gotten a negative review or something, that can of course be mentioned, but many of these pages never get to the point where they're detailing book reception, either positive or negative. {{u|Sdkb}} talk 06:53, 11 May 2021 (UTC)
WP:NBASE, that's why. If you play in one professional game, you are "presumed notable." The same is true for a bunch of other sports. It's crazy, but there you go. There was a recent discussion of adjusting WP:NSPORT on its talk page if you fancy a long read. Chuntuk (talk) 09:58, 6 May 2021 (UTC)
Chuntuk, Why is it crazy? I knew nothing about Tracy Baker before I read the article but I enjoyed reading it, and almost certainly enjoyed it more than reading about the average professor. S Philbrick(Talk) 00:38, 7 May 2021 (UTC)
Sphilbrick It's crazy because it drives a coach and horses through the GNG. Mr Baker would not be considered notable if his one day in the sun had occurred in any other field of endeavour. You may have enjoyed reading it, but how is it any more entertaining than this: "Trace Lee "Tracy" Baker (November 7, 1891 – March 14, 1975) was a professor of something at the university of Boston. He was born in Pendleton, Oregon, and studied at the University of Washington, where he played college baseball for the Huskies in 1910. Baker's only paper was published on June 19, 1911: a study of things. Baker served in the US Army during World War I. He died in Placerville, California, at the age of 83." Actually, Baker is nowhere near the most egregious example - we know things about his biography, and what he did in his one game. There are much worse "presumed notable" cases - go see how much enjoyment you can glean from this one: William Barker (Surrey cricketer) Chuntuk (talk) 07:05, 7 May 2021 (UTC)
The comparison of sportspeople and professors is an interesting one. In addition to WhatamIdoing's very valid point (that all sources are too close to the prof to use), there's another difference: academics are usually notable for what they've done, and if it's notable, it has a page of its own already. Sportspeople won't usually feature on the page about their sport unless they've done something truly shattering, far more important than merely playing in a top-level game. Given that an academic already has a page about what they did, there's no point in having a page about the person themselves, unless there's something interesting to write on it. People like Richard Feynman qualify for sheer life-interest, copiously documented. Historical figures like Rosalind Franklin qualify because of their background, their place in bigger history, the things that can be written about their family circumstances, and their roles in the dilemmas of the time (in Franklin's case, for example, the proper recognition of women in science). But I had a quick look at a more up-to-date, and typical example of an academic, in a subject close to my heart: False Discovery Rate. This subject is very closely associated with the names of Yoav Benjamini and Hochberg, who developed the whole concept. False discovery rates are very widely used, very important, and of broad interest; they well merit a big Wikipedia page. But poor Hochberg doesn't have a page at all, and Benjamini's is merely 6 lines summarised from his online CV and his GoogleScholar results, tacked onto his citations (as text without links). In my mind Benjamini is an important figure in statistics because of his work, but his personal page doesn't (yet) add much, and this is the dilemma for academics. It would be churlish to accuse Benjamini of not being notable; false discovery rates are definitely as dramatic as appearing in an international football match. But if the problem with sportspeople is that passing Wikipedia's criteria for notability doesn't actually make them interesting, the problem with professors is that doing something notable doesn't automatically make for a good page about the person. It's a tricky one. Elemimele (talk) 20:48, 10 May 2021 (UTC)
@Elemimele, let me say that I love your username. Palindromes are satisfying.
The people in your example are listed at False discovery rate#Literature. Do we really need to say more about them? Or maybe we should just redirect the links to that page, so that people who wanted to know about these scholars' works would actually learn about the false discovery rate? WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:11, 10 May 2021 (UTC)
The public is more interested in athletes than in professors. The media and publishers know this so there are more independent sources about them. If you are a professional athlete then it means people will pay to see you or your team and then some of them also want to read about you. Yoav Benjamini may be a significant professor but he only got 182 page views in the past 30 days and he is currently active. Tracy Baker got 81 but he was active 110 years ago. PrimeHunter (talk) 00:16, 11 May 2021 (UTC)

On Wikipedia, nearly every professional athlete in every professional sport is notable. When nearly everyone is notable, no one is notable - it is a catalog or database. Thus we mock them in conversations like this which are perennial. -- GreenC 01:10, 11 May 2021 (UTC)

How should the COVID-19 pandemic be handled in article history sections?

Since the beginning of the pandemic, there have been editors adding lines to e.g. amusement parks or colleges saying e.g. In March 2020, it shut down operations due to the COVID-19 pandemic. For a while, the clear path was to revert these additions as obvious inappropriate recentism. We're not fully through the pandemic yet, but it's gone on long enough that it seems like it may ultimately be seen as more of a mini historical era and warrant brief mention the same way we might have a sentence in a history section describing how an institution navigated WW2. To the extent that it's possible to comment on a generalized issue (which I realize is limited), where do you all stand on this question? It ties in to some broader editorial philosophy questions about how to balance the huge reader demand for more current information with the encyclopedic objective of writing for the long term. {{u|Sdkb}} talk 21:41, 5 May 2021 (UTC)

Some of this was significant, either because the place is so big (e.g., Disney's amusement parks) or because it had such an effect on the business (any business that closed due to COVID problems). I imagine that a brief mention would be appropriate. A mention that ties it to the larger context, such as "Fun Park closed for 11 months during the pandemic, causing a loss of $2M in revenue for the one year but resulting in a significant increase in population size for the endangered roller-coaster insect" or "Big U kept the dorms open during the pandemic. This has been blamed for the unusually high number of deaths in the surrounding communities", would be better than just "It was open" or "It closed". WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:30, 6 May 2021 (UTC)
Agree and nice examples! haha -- {{u|Gtoffoletto}}  talk 08:53, 11 May 2021 (UTC)

Duplicate article

Sorry if I'm on the wrong place for this, it's my first time using the community pages and I wasn't sure where to approach for this, but I thought it was better to give it a shoot and give notice of this than to let the interface intimidate me from doing it.

I was looking at Category of Lists of proposals and discovered that the page List of proposed Amendments to the US Constitution is almost a carbon copy of List of proposed amendments to the United States Constitution, with what few differences it has being product of copying an earlier version of the page. The latter was created in 2004, while the former was a draft created in 2020 which was approved 5 days ago. Maybe I'm missing something, but I think there's no reason for this duplicate to exist. BirdCities (talk) 21:38, 10 May 2021 (UTC)

BirdCities, when you find a newly-created article that duplicates an existing article, you can submit it for speedy deletion under criteria A10. I've nominated the new article for CSD now. Schazjmd (talk) 21:50, 10 May 2021 (UTC)
I see, thank you! BirdCities (talk) 22:14, 10 May 2021 (UTC)
Just for completeness, sometimes you will find duplicate articles that have both been around for a while. This is one of the cases where the articles should be merged. The steps to handle a merger are given at Wikipedia:Merging. Jason Quinn (talk) 13:37, 13 May 2021 (UTC)

Popularity of editing methods

Which method is the most popular for editing? Is it the visual editor or the wikitext editor? --Heymid (contribs) 02:46, 13 May 2021 (UTC)

@Whatamidoing (WMF): are these statistics published regularly somewhere? — xaosflux Talk 13:28, 13 May 2021 (UTC)
@Xaosflux, I doubt that they're published regularly, but at this wiki, VisualEditor is about 10% of all non-bot edits in the mainspace. The other ~90% of edits include edits via AWB, Twinkle, HotCat, WikEd, unflagged bots (such as User:XLinkBot), etc. There is no reliable method of figuring out which of the other 90% were "manual" edits in any of the older wikitext editors.
If you are looking specifically at newcomers (<100 edits), about a third of edits to articles at the English Wikipedia use VisualEditor. The percentage is higher (closer to half for newcomers) if you look at all Wikipedias instead of just this one. IMO this is probably due to differences in the mw:Single edit tab system. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 05:02, 14 May 2021 (UTC)

OTRS ticket template migration

Hello, please see the bot request Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/VRTS Migration Bot regarding the migration of OTRS templates visible in articles and files. Thank you. --Krd 10:09, 15 May 2021 (UTC)

Fake news from muslimmirror

  • muslimmirror dot com /eng/probable-mention-of-a-covid-19-like-pandemic-in-the-quran/ (don't bother visiting. the title says enough)
  • muslimmirror dot com /eng/call-for-investigation-into-bill-gates-crimes-against-humanity-and-medical-malpractice/

I'm not linking this trash to avoid any unnecessary exposure. Quote from the post about Gates: Gates, UNICEF & WHO have already been credibly accused of intentionally sterilizing Kenyan children through the use of a hidden HCG antigen in tetanus vaccines. (for anyone who is curious, try Reuters)

The problem is that this site is used as a source in dozens of articles. Shouldn't we just blacklist this garbage? — Alexis Jazz (talk or ping me) 13:37, 8 May 2021 (UTC)

@Beetstra: Does muslimmirror.com qualify for local or global blacklisting? Per Alexis Jazz above, the titles in the OP say enough to justify it and there have been numerous attempts to promote related fake science over many years, most notably at WP:Jagged 85 cleanup. Johnuniq (talk) 01:34, 9 May 2021 (UTC)
Johnuniq, if the link is not obviously spammed we generally need community consensus. Does not need to be a full RfC, just a couple of editors that agree that the site is totally useless and should never be linked to, and that constant cleanup is a total waste of time. Then just report to blacklist,  Defer to Local blacklist. Dirk Beetstra T C 11:21, 9 May 2021 (UTC)
Beetstra, Johnuniq I've requested local blacklisting as you suggested. — Alexis Jazz (talk or ping me) 15:34, 9 May 2021 (UTC)
Can someone please comment/vote on MediaWiki talk:Spam-blacklist#muslimmirror.com? — Alexis Jazz (talk or ping me) 19:05, 16 May 2021 (UTC)

Notice about a new WikiProject Proposal

This is a friendly notice about a proposal to have yearly based WikiProjects. You can find the proposal by clicking here. Feel free to drop your opinion about it. Elijahandskip (talk) 14:11, 17 May 2021 (UTC)

Who are the Election Volunteers in your community?

Do you want to be an Election Volunteer?

UPDATE: Friends, I'm posting this here again because we're looking for more volunteers to cover more parts of the community. Thanks for hearing this message again.

Would you like to get more people taking part in the Wikimedia Foundation’s Board of Trustees election?

The Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees announced the plan for the 2021 Board elections. That plan includes outreach and communication support for the Board elections. The Board election facilitators will:

  • Inform communities of the trustee selection process
  • Invite communities to engage in voting
  • Encourage people representing emerging Wikimedia communities to run as candidates

Voter turnout in prior elections was about 10% globally. It was better in communities with volunteer election support. Some of those communities reached over 20% voter turnout. We know we can get more voters to help assess and promote the best candidates, but to do that, we need your help.

We are looking for volunteers to serve as Election Volunteers. Election Volunteers should have a good understanding of their communities. The facilitation team sees Election Volunteers as doing the following:

  • Promote the election in their communities’ channels
  • Organize discussions about the election in their communities
  • Translate messages for their communities

Who are the Election Volunteers to connect your community with this movement effort? Is it you? Or someone you know? Check out more details about Election Volunteers and add your name next to the community you will support in this table or get in contact with a facilitator. We aim to have at least one Election Volunteer for Wiki Projects in the top 30 for eligible voters. Even better if there are two or more sharing the work.

Best, JKoerner (WMF) (talk) 19:59, 21 May 2021 (UTC)

About Signatures...

How do I create a cool signature with out having to keep copying and pasting stuff on pages? On another wiki called Inkipedia, which is a independent wiki outside of fandom, the users are allowed to create their own signature pages with something like: User:CoolGuy27/sig and then type {{User:CoolGuy27/sig}} on talk pages. Thank you in advance.

--Yaxops (talk) 16:50, 24 May 2021 (UTC)

You can set your custom sig in the preferences and then type four tildes (~~~~) every time you need to sign. You should type four tildes to sign anyway (will render default sig). Please find the Teahouse for basic questions about editing Wikipedia. Best, Usedtobecool ☎️ 17:09, 24 May 2021 (UTC)

Thank you sorry I didn't use teahouse. Yaxops (talk) 17:11, 24 May 2021 (UTC)

You're welcome, and please, no worries. I didn't mean to criticise; was rather going for "for future reference"; new editors can hardly be faulted for not finding the exact venue for their purpose in a complex and disorganised project like this, before they've had an opportunity to have the first conversation. Regards! Usedtobecool ☎️ 17:24, 24 May 2021 (UTC)

How does this look?: Yaxops Banter 17:32, 24 May 2021 (UTC) and also I know you were not criticizing, I'm over apologetic.

@Yaxops: by convention, your signature placement should always go at the end of your comment. As far as feedback, the Yellow color is very hard to read against a light background, but otherwise it is fine. See more tips on signatures here: WP:SIGNATURE. — xaosflux Talk 17:45, 24 May 2021 (UTC)

Okay thank you. I reused that signature from another wiki which is has a black back round so I'll change it. Thank you. Yaxops Banter 17:48, 24 May 2021 (UTC)

@User:Xaosflux hows this one:Yaxops Banter 17:53, 24 May 2021 (UTC)

@Yaxops: seems fine. — xaosflux Talk 17:59, 24 May 2021 (UTC)

What is vvikipedla.com?

Being handled at duplicate posting on WP:AN. — xaosflux Talk 14:59, 26 May 2021 (UTC)

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Is it a phishing site? It's even referenced by some Wikipedia articles: [6]. Sasha1024 (talk) 14:24, 26 May 2021 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Wikipedia, a hobby for people who know a lot about nothing & nothing about a lot of things

I won’t bother anymore doing any good faith editing. Leave the laughable errors where they lie, I say. As a person with specialist knowledge, if I see an obvious error, I correct it. I don’t if the statement is more spin or opinion as I’m not visiting the page to engage in arguments, just to check names, dates and similar facts or to use the long-lat link to view a precise location on Google Maps. However, whatever I change is immediately changed back by someone who knows nothing about the topic, citing “lack of sources”. This includes when I have read the cited sources and simply note they don’t actually say what the previous writer claims. Rather than follow the existing cited link to see if I am correct, a Wiki-nerd would rather restore the error. I hated typing up (yes, on a typewriter) the footnotes and bibliography for my undergraduate essays but this is all you really want to read, isn’t it? You are not interested in the actual essay, only the citations. Apparently, to correct laughable errors in one’s area of expertise, one has to also spend the time first becoming a Wiki nerd, specializing solely in Wikipedia. I spent decades slowly developing specialist knowledge but learning computer programs and similar online procedures as I enter my seventh decade is a waste of my time as software and social media change every few months and I then have to start over. In the end it seems that on Wikipedia, the generalist trumps the specialist, the young edit the old, and your pages are dominated by those who know nothing except how to properly edit Wikipedia. Enjoy your hobby. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 159.2.35.250 (talk) 11:14, 26 May 2021 (UTC)

If you're referring to this edit from your IP and this subsequent edit when you say "This includes when I have read the cited sources and simply note they don’t actually say what the previous writer claims. Rather than follow the existing cited link to see if I am correct, a Wiki-nerd would rather restore the error.", that's not what actually happened. You identified that the quote wasn't in the linked source, and someone found an archived copy of the source from before the quote was removed and updated the reference to refer to that copy. Anomie⚔ 11:29, 26 May 2021 (UTC)
You may have edited from other IP addresses or an account but I examined all edits at Special:Contributions/159.2.35.250. None of them have been reverted. The only partial revert was the correct addition of an archive url with the quote in the article. PrimeHunter (talk) 12:49, 26 May 2021 (UTC)

Yes, after I “yelled” at you. Also, the anachronistic use of “Blue Max” pre-WWI continues so I correct it when I see it. Sometimes it’s reversed, sometimes not. Most recently, placing von Clausewitz at the Battle of Göhrde was removed, despite the contents of Wiki page on the Russo-German Legion. In short, enjoy your hobby, which is not publishing encyclopedic knowledge but publishing Wikipedia as an end in itself. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 159.2.35.250 (talk • contribs)

Please don't assume that only young people edit Wikipedia. I am well into my seventh decade and I know that there are many people of about my age and older who do so. The issue is that we need references to support what is said here, because the same open model that allows subject-matter experts to edit also allows people who are here to push a particular viewpoint or to market something to edit. We have no way of telling who is who without reliable sources. Phil Bridger (talk) 17:47, 26 May 2021 (UTC)

This lacks common sense. Do two minutes of research before changing it back, even just within Wikipedia. If someone says Carl von Clausewitz was a commander at the Battle of Göhrde (as Chief of Staff of the Russo-German Legion), assume he was in fact just that. What’s the risk? Why would I lie? It’s not like I’m going in and adding Israel to a list of countries committing ethnic cleansing, ethno-chauvinism, and breaches of international law. That would be controversial even if true, and should be watched for closely. Your approach just preserves the status quo, even if it is laughably wrong. For example, look at the page for “Seven Days to the River Rhine”. Some yahoo has listed several Western European Communist Party leaders as “Commanders & Leaders” of the Warsaw Pact forces. They weren’t. There is no source cited. This is just someone’s political spin. The Red Army did not take George Marchais into its confidence. He had no role in formulating this Plan. But if I change this, you’ll just change it back so why bother. I could go upstairs, pull the book off the shelf, and cite Donald Stoker, “Clausewitz: His Life and Work”, Oxford University Press, chapter 8, pages 185-187, but how do you know that’s not also a lie? What strikes me is the complete lack of subject-matter knowledge of the Wiki person determining that the content must not change. You have built a system destined to deliver uninformed and static content. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 159.2.35.250 (talk • contribs)

If you have specialist knowledge, then you'll know where to search for a reliable source that supports what you're saying. You can't just ask for other editors to trust that what you're saying is true without any reliable source to back it up. Verifiability is a core principle of Wikipedia. —El Millo (talk) 22:20, 26 May 2021 (UTC)
"Why would I lie?" Why would anyone lie? Why do vandals exist? Maybe no ill intent exists but you 'learned' something based on an unreliable source yourself? That's why we need sources. If you say X, we want to be able to verify that X is indeed the case. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 22:21, 26 May 2021 (UTC)

Actually, you don’t verify content, only changes. Go look at the example I just gave (“Seven Days to the River Rhine”). This joke will now stand until the end of time under your careful watch. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 159.2.35.250 (talk • contribs)

How hard is it to provide an actual reliable source for your claims? Have you tried to find any? —El Millo (talk) 23:24, 26 May 2021 (UTC)

To prove a negative? Can you prove you are not a CIA agent? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 159.2.35.250 (talk) 23:37, 26 May 2021 (UTC)

Do you have an actual question, or are you just here because you cannot understand that encyclopaediae require published sources and the onus is on you to provide said published sources? —A little blue Bori v^_^v Jéské Couriano 23:43, 26 May 2021 (UTC)
Weren't you talking about Carl von Clausewitz being a commander at the Battle of Göhrde, and how we should just assume he was in fact just that if you say so? —El Millo (talk) 23:45, 26 May 2021 (UTC)

I gave you a source above — Donald Stocker’s book — but also asked, how do you know I didn’t make that up? If I’m a lying vandal, why would I draw the line at fake sources? Doing lying vandals have a moral code that stops them from falsifying sources?

Here’s a crazy idea. Before you delete something that common sense says looks at least plausible, open another tab on your browser and Google “von Clausewitz battle of Göhrde“. There you will immediately see (no scrolling, no digging) three pages pages confirming he was in fact a commander at Göhrde.

If so, don’t go to the trouble of editing the page. Just leave it alone because it seems to be right. You do know what Google is, don’t you? The first search page on Google turns up this:

“This Week's Discovery: Eleonore Prochaska, the legendary woman who fought against Napoleon dressed as a man, did serve under Clausewitz. She was wounded and died in the Battle of Göhrde, the same battle Clausewitz, as chief of staff for Wallmoden Corps, planned and led troops. After Göhrde, Clausewitz was promoted to a full colonel.”

OR

“Clausewitz spent the rest of 1813 and the campaign of 1814 serving with the Russo-German Legion, the unit he was originally appointed to raise in 1812. In 1813 this legion was part of Wallmoden's corps, itself part of Bernadotte's Army of the North. Wallmoden had a mixed force, mainly made up of levies or recent volunteers, with a small core of regular troops. It was used on the campaign around Hamburg. During this period Clausewitz commanded at the Action of the Göhrde (16 September 1813), a minor Allied victory in which a French force under General Marc-Nicolas-Louis Pécheux was forced to retreat into Hamburg.”

OR

“As a Russian officer he superin tended the formation of the Landwehr of East Prussia, and in the campaign of 1813 served as chief of staff to Count Wallmoden. He conducted the fight at Göhrde, and after the armistice, with Gneisenau's permission, published an account of the campaign (Der Feldzug von 1813 bis zum Waffenstillstand, Leipzig, 1813).”

The point is, deleting something is a conscious decision to suppress new information, preserving an omission. Over time, you are advancing ignorance, not knowledge. Make a little effort or do nothing at all is what I’m saying. If you don’t know, do nothing. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 159.2.35.250 (talk) 00:13, 27 May 2021 (UTC)

We can only evaluate the situation if you say which page you are talking about. I examined all edits to Battle of the Göhrde since 2014 and Clausewitz hasn't been removed or mentioned. PrimeHunter (talk) 10:23, 27 May 2021 (UTC)

Okay, it’s there now. Let’s see if it stays. :| — Preceding unsigned comment added by 159.2.35.250 (talk) 15:57, 27 May 2021 (UTC)

Join the new Regional Committees for Grants

Dear all,

We hope this message finds you well and safe. The COVID 19 situation continues to affect many of us across the globe and our thoughts are with everyone affected. We are also aware that there are several processes currently in progress that demand volunteer time and we do not want to add more work to anyone's plate.

We do want to draw your attention to our new Regional Committees for Grants though as they are an opportunity for you to have an active say in the future of our Movement!

📣 So today, we invite you to join our new Regional Committees for Grants! 📣

We encourage Wikimedians and Free Knowledge advocates to be part of the new Regional Committees that the WMF Community Resources team is setting up as part of the grants strategy relaunch [7]. You will be a key strategic thought partner to help understand the complexities of any region, provide knowledge and expertise to applicants, to support successful movement activities, and make funding decisions for grant applications in the region.

👉Find out more on meta [8].

Regional Committees will be established for the following regions:

  • Middle East and Africa
  • SAARC [9] region (Includes Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, the Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka)
  • East, Southeast Asia, and Pacific (ESEAP) region
  • Latin America (LATAM) and The Caribbean
  • United States and Canada
  • Northern and Western Europe
  • Central and Eastern Europe (CEE)

👉All details about the Committees and how to apply can be found on meta [10]. Applications have to be submitted by June 4, 2021!

If you have any questions or comments, please use the meta discussion page [11].

Please do share this announcement widely with your Network.

Best wishes,

JBrungs (WMF) (talk) 06:22, 21 May 2021 (UTC) on behalf of the Community Resources Team

Cross-posted from WP:VPWMF. –xenotalk 13:04, 28 May 2021 (UTC)

CatTrack is back up after over a year

Just in case someone wanted to know. It tracks category sizes over time. {{CatTrack}} and toolforge:apersonbot/cat-track for more. Enterprisey (talk!) 00:24, 23 May 2021 (UTC)

Neat, thank you! SQLQuery me! 04:19, 24 May 2021 (UTC)
Cool! EpicPupper (talk) 06:53, 30 May 2021 (UTC)

Hey all...it's Core Contest time again (finally)

Wikipedia:The Core Contest will be running again from June 1, in case anyone wants to flex their writing muscles :) Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 03:49, 31 May 2021 (UTC)

Simplify your signature

Moved from Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals) § Simplify your signature
 – {{u|Sdkb}} talk 17:43, 30 May 2021 (UTC)

I do not propose a change of policies. I propose that you simplify your signature.
(Background: Earlier today, User:Jorm explained to me on Wikipedia talk:Signatures how confusing our signature system is for newbies. Are the people with red/green/orange signatures moderators? Or what does the colour coding mean? Why does the response to a post signed 苦思馬 start with {{re|Kusma}}? Confusion about any of these points can cost us potential editors. According to Jorm, it is a widespread problem).
Please do not ask anyone else personally to change their signature, as they might be quite attached to it. Just simplify your signature if you can. Do it for the newbies. Thank you. —Kusma (talk) 22:18, 27 May 2021 (UTC)

How and why is that a major need? Pink Saffron (talk) 00:52, 28 May 2021 (UTC)
See the rant by Jorm in Wikipedia talk:Signatures#Focus on: non-Latin script. TL;DR: Jorm, the former WMF designer responsible for (among other things) the design of Flow, relates that user studies showed that over half of new users encountering talk pages ran away in terror, many upon merely seeing the diversity of signatures used in talk pages then more when they looked at the wikitext and became horribly confused. Anomie⚔ 02:27, 28 May 2021 (UTC)
'Studies' which, unfortunately, nobody else can read. But I'm sure we can just trust Jorm (that Jorm) that coloured signatures are the "most confusing thing to any new user". – Joe (talk) 11:58, 28 May 2021 (UTC)
I think there is a lot of truth in the hyperbole there. I don't know (and have no ability to find out) which of the many possible stumbling points throws a potential Wikipedian off on their newbie journey. While Flow was unsuitable as a replacement for current discussion pages in Wikipedia because it didn't allow full wikitext, lowering the bar of entry for discussion pages should be an area where we can work together with WMF staff and others who have spent more time thinking about this. —Kusma (talk) 13:16, 28 May 2021 (UTC)
Yeah I recommend this be moved to Wikipedia:Village pump (idea lab) or Wikipedia:Village pump (miscellaneous)—there's no clearly stated "proposal" present. The point of the proposals forum is to present a... proposal that people can express support or opposition for. Aza24 (talk) 01:01, 28 May 2021 (UTC)
It seems Kusma was looking for a highly watched forum to send a message to editors. So that leaves: the policy/proposal village pumps, AN, a central notice/watchlist banner (following consensus). VPM/VPI have nowhere near as many watchers. And I suppose you never know which direction a discussion goes. ProcrastinatingReader (talk) 11:19, 28 May 2021 (UTC)
Could write an article for The Signpost.... — xaosflux Talk 12:40, 28 May 2021 (UTC)
Ah, that's a good idea. Although, if there's an article then including data, such as the study mentioned above, would probably be good to include. Perhaps Whatamidoing (WMF) may know if there's any relevant research, possibly from the Wikipedia:Talk pages project. ProcrastinatingReader (talk) 13:13, 28 May 2021 (UTC)
All of the recent research, including mw:Talk pages consultation 2019/New user tests, indicates that newcomers are confused by talk pages. However, I don't think that any of the recent research has asked about colorful/decorative signatures, and I don't remember seeing unusual signature styles on any of the sample talk pages I've personally seen in the tests done during the last year or so.
As a passing point, if you have a custom signature, or if you care about this issue, please make sure that it's not causing Special:LintErrors or otherwise broken. Eventually, most sigs that produce bad HTML will be disabled. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 01:40, 3 June 2021 (UTC)
Wanting visibility isn't a valid reason to ignore a page's usage guidelines. We're in a catch-22 here, where other village pump pages won't get watchers until we require editors to use them as appropriate. I've moved this to VPM. {{u|Sdkb}} talk 17:47, 30 May 2021 (UTC)
If you think that helps. It is a proposal that you can support by simplifying your signature or just ignore, so I thought "proposals" was best. Just for a highly watched page, I'd go for the inofficial village pump :) —Kusma (talk) 21:33, 30 May 2021 (UTC)
  • No thanks, I'm happy with my signature. — xaosflux Talk 12:33, 28 May 2021 (UTC)
  • If we look at the welcome messages that we give people, and the number of people who we have to teach about the importance of ending any talk page post with ~~~~, it is pretty obvious that the most bizarre and impenetrable barrier we have to newbies on the desktop environment is the need to find the tilda key and use it to generate a signature. I don't recall any occasion I have used the tilda other than signing my username on Wikipedia. Learning about the tilda key may actually be a bigger, if less upsetting comprehension gulf for new editors than having to deal with edit conflicts. Yet the devs won't change things for newbies to default all newbies to autosign on talkpages. Presumably they like that barrier against non techies editing. Colourful signatures by contrast are entirely optional, you get a simple blue one by default. ϢereSpielChequers 19:40, 28 May 2021 (UTC)
    Most of the editing tools to have a "signature" button, I certainly find pressing ~ quicker then navigating with my mouse to click on it, but @WereSpielChequers: perhaps the new user guidance could more clearly show that as an option? — xaosflux Talk 11:05, 29 May 2021 (UTC)
  • Can I tack on two related proposals here?
    1. Make the default signature include a link to the user's contributions;
    2. Enable a function for administrators (or maybe 'crats or intadmins) to reset a specified user's signature to the default. (The only way we can currently prevent disruption from a user's unsuitable signature is to fully block them from editing, and we don't get consensus for that because it's way heavy-handed)
I'm not going to write out full proposals right now, I just think these are both good ideas for obvious reasons. Ivanvector (Talk/Edits) 11:16, 29 May 2021 (UTC)
  • It's worth mentioning (and Kusma already linked the page as a whole) that there's already a guideline against long signatures, including signatures with long markup, at WP:SIGLEN. —Nizolan (talk · c.) 22:26, 29 May 2021 (UTC)
    @Nizolan, SIGLEN could be enforced in software, if you all wanted that. Just start a new topic at mw:Talk:New requirements for user signatures. If you convince the devs (might not be difficult?), then I'm willing to make the official proposal. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 01:43, 3 June 2021 (UTC)
  • There's a trade-off with the benefits of signatures as a meatball:FrontLawn. Complicated signatures may confuse newbies, but they also show newbies that we are real people with tastes and quirks---they add some life to an otherwise bland sea of black, white, and blue. Even signatures (partially) in other languages can encourage some newbies (even while they may confuse others). They show non-native English speakers that their contributions are still welcome here, and highlight editors who can help them in their native language without the newbie needing to find all the right Babel categories. I don't think the OP needs to be seen as an either-or situation, just be mindful of the trade-offs, especially if you find yourself working with newbies a lot. — Wug·a·po·des​ 23:18, 29 May 2021 (UTC)
  • My particular pet peeve is signatures that don't include the username in a recognizable way. When I'm reading a thread, It's confusing when you can't tell who's who because the usernames and visible signatures don't match. -- RoySmith (talk) 23:47, 29 May 2021 (UTC)
  • Personally I just have to ask how telling every user to simplify their signature, without any nuance on whether their signature is either already simple or its complexity serves a purpose, can possibly be less intrusive or problematic than asking a few particularly troublesome ones to change theirs individually. It's kind of like a "polite notice" - you can't dictate something as being non-pushy. Nosebagbear (talk) 13:40, 30 May 2021 (UTC)
    A message to everyone is easier to ignore than an individual one, so I hoped it would offend fewer people. It's more of a tree hugging hippie idea than a well crafted political campaign, and it is probably a few years too late. If I wanted to campaign, I'd probably try to get the new discussion/reply features moved from opt-in beta to default for new users, which would mitigate a few of the problems, hopefully without introducing too many others. —Kusma (talk) 22:04, 30 May 2021 (UTC)
    You can't have that until the mw:parser cache is stable. Supposedly this is a couple of weeks away, and then I've promised it to the ~24 wikis that participated in the A/B test first. (Given Ops' worries about the parser cache, I don't think they'll let us flip it on for everyone on the same day.) But it'll probably happen here before September. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 01:48, 3 June 2021 (UTC)
  • I have typed quite a lot over the past few weeks over this, and I think this new section might need context..
  • We had Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/IncidentArchive1068#User:DeNoel's sig which went on many different tangents and ups, downs and roundabouts. Then this led to Wikipedia talk:Signatures which is an ongoing, sprawling, occasionally bad tempered talkpage conference with many different tangents, which has led to User:Rhododendrites/signature rfc drafting this draft RFC. I suspect this could be, as the newspaper industry has it, a story which "runs and runs" doktorb wordsdeeds 18:38, 30 May 2021 (UTC)
@Doktorbuk: I think the link you want is Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/IncidentArchive1068#User:DeNoel's sig. (Feel free to delete this post after editing yours - I was wary of doing so myself). PamD 21:38, 30 May 2021 (UTC)
Thanks Pam :) doktorb wordsdeeds 23:51, 30 May 2021 (UTC)
  • There is some truth to it being confusing. For people using screen reader tech, some signatures would be a nightmare. For people with colour-blindnesses or other visual disabilities, some may be unreadable. But points made above about people with another language or about not being a sea of boring text are also important. Anecdotally, when I started it wasn't difficult to understand what was happening with the signatures. Yeah, it can be hard to follow a conversation if the reply and the signature are using different names, but that's why we use indenting. In the case of non-Latin character names, maybe people genuinely should just learn out that sometimes names get Romanized. We should of course allow non-English characters, and the ability to express individuality. But readability and accessibility should also be considered - it sounds like this part is a nightmare to discuss, so I perhaps won't give my thoughts on that for now. To me, signatures were easy, BUT changes to the talk page link were... confusing. The talk page/user page situation was already hard to swallow, so people renaming or messing around with that one absolutely did not help me to understand. I would love if people left that one the hell alone - sorry to people who changed theirs, I deeply understand the desire, but I really really found it difficult to understand initially. (Note: when interpreting my anecdotes, I already had some experience with signatures used in a similar way with similar - although less - variability.) --Xurizuri (talk) 08:40, 31 May 2021 (UTC)

Downloading a dump of short texts only version of the article

Hello,

Can I download a dump that contains only texts, with only the first section of the article, like in here [12]?

If no, will it be problematic to download thousands of articles (one article at a time)?

Thank you! רן כהן (talk) 07:14, 31 May 2021 (UTC)

@רן כהן: You might want to take a look at the "mini" version of Kiwix dumps. EpicPupper (talk) 16:21, 31 May 2021 (UTC)
I need plaintext. How can I convert zim to txt? I saw I can maybe convert zim to txt using this [13] but the link to zimlib is broken (404) רן כהן (talk) 17:51, 31 May 2021 (UTC)
רן כהן, WP:DUMP — Alexis Jazz (talk or ping me) 18:20, 31 May 2021 (UTC)
Hi, sorry but I couldn't understand how can I do it. I didn't see any conversion option from zim to txt or an option to download only text in the wiki DUMP site. Thank you! רן כהן (talk) 03:09, 1 June 2021 (UTC)
If you follow the instructions you get the full wikitext for all articles from *pages-articles-multistream.xml.bz2. You'd have to create a program yourself to extract only the first sections from that. There is also *abstract.xml.gz which is more compact and contains just page abstracts but it seems slightly broken. — Alexis Jazz (talk or ping me) 06:20, 1 June 2021 (UTC)
I don't think I can use the multistream. I need PLAINTEXT, even beyond images or tables. For instance, the string "I am a [boy]" is not plaintext, but the string "I am a boy" is.
And abstract.xml.gz is indeed slightly broken and I rather not use it. רן כהן (talk) 07:02, 1 June 2021 (UTC)
רן כהן, what do you need it for, anyway? We could perhaps make better suggestions if we knew what you need it for. — Alexis Jazz (talk or ping me) 07:20, 1 June 2021 (UTC)
I am developing a game that revolves around the articles. The game needs the articles to be in plain text.
Right now I turn the articles into plain text using gazillion REGEXes, but they not always work perfectly, so been wondering whether I could simply look on the wiki as plaintext to begin with. רן כהן (talk) 08:23, 1 June 2021 (UTC)
רן כהן: There is an API option: Example. It's also built into my CLI tool wikiget eg. wikiget -p -w 'Feudalism' There is also an API to retrieve only the lead section. -- GreenC 03:15, 3 June 2021 (UTC)
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