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This page contains discussions that have been archived from Village pump (miscellaneous).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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Hello

Please note that Mario Camus died on 18 september according to spanish wikipedia. Thank you. --109.185.175.84 (talk) 11:58, 18 September 2021 (UTC)

Do you mean Mario Camus? - jc37 12:07, 18 September 2021 (UTC)

Greece John Doe

Could an admin who can provide deleted page history look into this? I noticed on the article List of formerly unidentified decedents, 2020–2029 that there was a closing ref tag missing from the section on Greece John Doe, but in trying to fix it I found it may have been a corruption occurring from a merger from a now deleted article, List of unidentified decedents in the United States. There was no way for me to recover the original citation to figure out what it was supposed to be, since most of it was missing — it had instead been replaced with the section's text occurring immediately before what had been added, namely that the victim has been identified but his identity has not been released to the public. I put a [citation needed] tag for the time being until we can fix it. That's all that needs done. Zeke, the Mad Horrorist (Speak quickly) (Follow my trail) 17:59, 18 September 2021 (UTC)

@Zeke, the Mad Horrorist: Articles with merged content shouldn't be deleted for attribution purposes. To this end, I've undeleted List of unidentified decedents in the United States and redirected it. It turns out that wouldn't have helped at all for your actual query, however. I managed to find the ref that was almost certainly meant here and added it. to the "formerly unidentified decedents" page. Also pinging Gourami Watcher, who made the merge. Graham87 10:01, 19 September 2021 (UTC)

Q

How can a new law be put into a policy?. Mohmad Abdul sahib 14:01, 18 September 2021 (UTC)

If there is a law that requires a policy change at Wikipedia, I'm sure the legal team will let us know. If you have a suggestion for a new policy, you can float your idea at the Idea Lab. RudolfRed (talk) 17:25, 18 September 2021 (UTC)

RudolfRed I have another question. I am working on translating this article Joy buzzer. But I don't understand what this means: (((the pen can be turned to make it release the point))). So explain to me what this means so that I can understand.Mohmad Abdul sahib 11:13, 19 September 2021 (UTC)

I'm not sure. The "point" may be the part that delivers the shock. Turning the pen would either hide or release it. Since that sentence is uncited, you may want to omit it from your translation. RudolfRed (talk) 19:53, 19 September 2021 (UTC)
I seems to me that it's referring to a retractable ballpoint pen mechanism. Some use a spring-type mechanism (activated by a button) to expose and retract the writing point (aka nib), while others use a screw-type mechanism (activated by twisting the pen body). The described "shocking pen" would use the screw-type mechanism for the actual pen part, while the button activates the shock. Anomie⚔ 12:25, 20 September 2021 (UTC)

Anomie Referring to me is more important than answering!, I wanted to make sure that the matter was correct, but I searched and did not find any information, so what is this type of commercial ballpoint pen called? I need to make sure because I have not found such a kind that does electrocution.Mohmad Abdul sahib 01:46, 21 September 2021 (UTC)

Backlog reduction drive: Album covers

Wikipedia:WikiProject Albums/Backlog elimination drive: Album covers is an attempt to reduce Category:Album infoboxes lacking a cover, which currently has 24,000 entries. Participation welcome! --Another Believer (Talk) 14:29, 22 September 2021 (UTC)

Patroltool

https://altilunium.github.io/patroltool/

It's en-wikipedia's last 1000 changes, but sorted by byte counts. Rtnf (talk) 09:57, 26 September 2021 (UTC)

How do you make keyboard letters

So I have created a new language, but I cant figure out how to make letters so I can type digitally. If you could help me with this that would be cool. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Dzh123j (talk • contribs) 22:39, 26 September 2021 (UTC)

This isn't really about Wikipedia. If your new language also includes new letters - even if you could type them somehow, no one else would have the ability to read them as they wouldn't be included in any font sets they had. To even think about adding new letters you may want to start with Unicode.org. — xaosflux Talk 11:06, 27 September 2021 (UTC)

Eduardo Behrentz

Hi there. What can I do to create this article? It has references, and what is written is well founded. The person in question is the current Vice Chancellor of the Universidad de los Andes, he has repeated his execution time in 2020 due to his work in the first period (2016-2018) and is a well-known columnist for the newspaper El Tiempo, the most important of Colombia. What else do I need to reference or add to show that the subject in question is indeed relevant? Thanks. — Preceding unsigned comment added by ChuchoVCJMuzik (talk • contribs) 19:08, 27 September 2021 (UTC)

Hello

Note that Bala V Balachandran died on 28 september according to Google. Thank you. --109.185.175.84 (talk) 07:09, 28 September 2021 (UTC)

Please post a note on the article's talk page, along with a published, reliable source, not a Google search result. RudolfRed (talk) 16:57, 28 September 2021 (UTC)

Black sea or African? requesting some article expansion support

Black sea or African users? Requesting visit to article Draft:Avret Esir Pazarları – an article about the state of non-elite common women slavery in Ottoman times. Draft is only 75% done 25% scope for expansion still remaining. If topic interests you please come on board and help the draft expansion. Feel free to pass on the message to users who might be interested.

Bookku, 'Encyclopedias = expanding information & knowledge' (talk) 08:42, 28 September 2021 (UTC)

Low-traffic fundraising campaign banner test - October 2021

Dear all,

This is just to briefly inform you that we will be running a low-traffic test during the first week of October.

What does this mean? This means that banners will be visible to some non-logged-in users throughout the whole 7 days. We will only be running them at a traffic level of 7%, which means readers have a small chance of seeing a banner on each pageview, and no readers will see continuous banners.

We're exploring this type of test format, as it allows us to take a better sample of the readership population. If you have any questions or comments please go to the Fundraising talk page JBrungs (WMF) (talk) 06:38, 29 September 2021 (UTC)

This seems to be the (huge) banner involved. How the money for the rich WMF helps to maintain Wikipedia's independence is not really clear, and why you need to insult the readers who don't give is equally unclear ("they simply look the other way"? Or they are your proverbial "poor child" who you wanted to give the sum of all knowledge, your actual target group, or perhaps they don't donate a few dollars, but countless hours of their time improving Wikipedia and help pay for the WMF employees and the third-party commercial spammers that get paid by the WMF (more than $400,000 for Trilogy Interactive LLC?), i.e. by us. It is debatable whether you even need the money, but at least do it in a less obtrusive and less offensive way. Fram (talk) 07:34, 29 September 2021 (UTC)

Movement Charter Drafting Committee - Community Elections to take place October 11 - 24

Hello all; I'm including the short version of this full announcement below. Please let me know if you have any questions. Xeno (WMF) (talk) 02:47, 21 September 2021 (UTC)

This is a short message with an update from the Movement Charter process. The call for candidates for the Drafting Committee closed September 14, and we got a diverse range of candidates. The committee will consist of 15 members, and those will be (s)elected via a 3-step process:

  • Election process for project communities to elect 7 members of the committee.
  • Selection process for affiliates to select 6 members of the committee.
  • Wikimedia Foundation process to appoint 2 members of the committee.

The community elections will take place between October 11 and October 24. The other process will take place in parallel, so that all processes will be concluded by November 1.

For the full context of the Movement Charter, its role, as well the process for its creation, please have a look at Meta. You can also contact us at any time on Telegram or via email (wikimedia2030@wikimedia.org). — Preceding unsigned comment added by Xeno (WMF) (talk • contribs) 02:47, 21 September 2021 (UTC)

Thanks to everyone who provided statements. Users may endorse those statements they feel are important at m:Special:MyLanguage/Movement Charter/Drafting Committee/Election Compass Statements until October 3rd.

Feel free to let me know if you have questions about this process. Xeno (WMF) (talk) 15:34, 29 September 2021 (UTC)

Dalelkhan_Sugirbayev#Descendants

Nusipkhan Konbay is a male. How can Dalelkhan Sugirbayev's son marry to Nusipkhan Konbay?--Kaiyr (talk) 09:00, 1 October 2021 (UTC)

Standardization of article titles involving Azerbaijani proper names

The Azerbaijani language has switched from Cyrillic to Latin script in 1992, and the new Latin-based Azerbaijani alphabet is being used locally. However, mainly because of accustomedness from the Cyrillic era, in English usage Azerbaijani personal or geographic proper names are routinely Anglicized, either directly from Azerbaijani or through the transliteration of the Russian spelling of the Azerbaijani noun, which often leads to those names becoming much more common in English-language sources. As a result, often an article about an Azerbaijani person/place which was started with the local spelling is moved to the Anglicized form once it becomes more known in English-speaking world.

Currently both forms can be seen in Wikipedia. While the Anglicized forms are more common, the local forms for lesser-known people and places aren't an uncommon sight either. I believe either the use of the local spelling or the method of Anglicization should be standardized. There are about five possible ways this could be dealt with as I see it:

  1. Don't enforce a standardized spelling policy:
  2. Use the local forms of the names only, including the uncommon Latin letter Ə:
    • This would mean Ilham Aliyev being renamed to İlham Əliyev, Vagif Mustafazadeh to Vaqif Mustafazadə ​and Kalbajar to Kəlbəcər, and Malxələf staying as Malxələf. With thousands of other Anglicized and more recognizable Azerbaijani names also being renamed, this is far from ideal.
  3. Use the previous Latin alphabet proposal from 1991, which used the letter Ä for Ə:
  4. Anglicize the names using the following rules: c → j, ç → ch, ə → a, ğ → gh, x → kh, İ/ı → I/i , q → g, ö → o, ş → sh, ü → u:
  5. Anglicize using the rules above, but Anglicize the suffix -zadə as -zadeh:
    • This would keep Vagif Mustafazadeh as is, while being the same as the previous one otherwise, which might be desirable.

While I like the option four, I don't know how to make this an official policy, and I want it to be discussed first. – anlztrk (talk) 09:30, 1 October 2021 (UTC)

Wikipedia's approach for things like this is typically just "follow what the sources say", so for article titles, we should be determining them by figuring out what's most common in sources. If the issue is contentious, it probably makes sense to have a wider discussion to decide on an approach; maybe host it at one of the MOS talk pages, add an RfC tag, and send invites to relevant wikiprojects. Aside from article titles, we should also be including alternative forms in the lead, and that might be relevant for discussion too. {{u|Sdkb}} talk 22:10, 3 October 2021 (UTC)

WP:ELECTCOM2021 self-nominations are open

Hello, just a reminder that editors are invited to nominate themselves to serve on the 2021 Arbitration Committee Electoral Commission until 23:59 October 8, 2021 (UTC). Thank you, — xaosflux Talk 15:16, 4 October 2021 (UTC)

Social media outage

Did yesterday's (5 October 2021) outage of Facebook and other social media have any effect on our traffic? I'm imagining the possibility that people who could not access their usual cyber-haunts might have visited WP instead. Roger (Dodger67) (talk) 08:37, 6 October 2021 (UTC)

Or perhaps it had the opposite effect. People who couldn't access their usual haunts might have temporarily given up on the Internet altogether. Of course the two effects could both have been in play, in which case it would be very difficult to say whether it had any effect without the right questions being asked (and answered truthfully) in a rigorous survey. I think that is unlikely to happen. Phil Bridger (talk) 16:32, 6 October 2021 (UTC)
Looks like it was a pretty ordinary Tuesday in the traffic data. --Yair rand (talk) 18:27, 6 October 2021 (UTC)

Your connection is not private

Don't know if this is where this comment goes. However, accessing Wikipedia with Chrome browser has been a problem since September 30. The following is the reason given: NET::ERR_CERT_DATE_INVALID. Judging from the numerous comments at Google Chrome Help, it's affecting many Chrome users. This is the explanation given when I click on Advanced:

"en.wikipedia.org normally uses encryption to protect your information. When Chrome tried to connect to en.wikipedia.org this time, the website sent back unusual and incorrect credentials. This may happen when an attacker is trying to pretend to be en.wikipedia.org, or a Wi-Fi sign-in screen has interrupted the connection. Your information is still secure because Chrome stopped the connection before any data was exchanged.
You cannot visit en.wikipedia.org right now because the website uses HSTS. Network errors and attacks are usually temporary, so this page will probably work later."

I'm using Safari to access Wikipedia -- and I don't like using S for editing. I'm sure many Wikipedia readers and editors are encountering the Chrome browser problem. Pyxis Solitary (yak). L not Q. 13:24, 6 October 2021 (UTC)

@Pyxis Solitary: your browser and/or operating system may not be up to date. See https://letsencrypt.org/2021/10/01/cert-chaining-help.html for more information. — xaosflux Talk 13:28, 6 October 2021 (UTC)
Also see this cloud mailing list thread which discusses a different aspect of the same issue. -- RoySmith (talk) 13:46, 6 October 2021 (UTC)
[tangent] I've been thinking about web browsers recently. Apparently, over the next year, Apple is improving users' privacy by moving some Safari users to something similar a VPN (approximate geolocation will still work, but your IP will change occasionally, if I've understood the description correctly?), and I hear that Chrome has announced they'll stop telling websites that the browser is Chrome to improve privacy, too (it will interfere with device fingerprint abilities). This is going to make things more difficult for the CUs, but a movement with our values can hardly complain about internet-wide improvements to user privacy. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 15:40, 6 October 2021 (UTC)
Discussed on phab at phab:T289795. – SD0001 (talk) 10:44, 7 October 2021 (UTC)
For folks who aren't familiar with Phab, it's not a discussion forum. If you want to chat, please do it on wiki or in a relevant mailing list. Phab is more for collecting practical information (something that a coder would need to know to write a patch, so things like "That doesn't work in my browser", but not for general chat, asking for help understanding a situation, forming a consensus, etc.). Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 19:12, 8 October 2021 (UTC)
  • I figured it out. The root certificate DST Root CA X3 expired on September 30. It's causing a LOT of problems for many people, internationally. My browser is up to date. My date and time setting is correct. My OSX is not the latest but I have not had problems opening other websites (e.g. banks and credit cards). All I did to fix the problem was opened the DST Root CA X3 certificate and selected Always Trust. And here I am, using Chrome browser again. Thank you for responding to my concern! Pyxis Solitary (yak). L not Q. 23:22, 7 October 2021 (UTC)
Another one Wikipedia:Village_pump_(technical)#expired_SSL_certificate -- GreenC 01:06, 8 October 2021 (UTC)

Abdul Kabir

Anybody know how to place the Head of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan above the acting prime minister's entry, at the infobox of Acting Third Deputy Prime Minister Abdul Kabir bio? I've tried for hours, but wasn't able to accomplish the feat. It kept ending up underneath the prime minister's entry. My reason for attempting the edit, is because the 'head of the IEA' outranks the prime minister. Been trying to match its placement, with the infoboxes at Acting First Deputy Prime Minister Abdul Ghani Baradar & Acting Second Deputy Prime Minister Abdul Salam Hanafi bios. GoodDay (talk) 15:09, 9 October 2021 (UTC)

Take the lead!

Right folks, we're running this competition again after 5 long years - see Wikipedia:Take the lead! Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 12:34, 11 October 2021 (UTC)

The idea is to write an article about prohibiting alphabets in RF

--- In fact it means that to write Tatar language in latin is prohibited, and even punctuation of Chukchi language is regulated by RF government. 195.114.148.255 (talk) 05:32, 12 October 2021 (UTC)

Let's talk about the Desktop Improvements

Hello!

Have you noticed that some wikis have a different desktop interface? Are you curious about the next steps? Maybe you have questions or ideas regarding the design or technical matters?

Join an online meeting with the team working on the Desktop Improvements! It will take place on October 12th, 16:00 UTC on Zoom. It will last an hour. Click here to join.

Agenda

  • Update on the recent developments
  • Sticky header - presentation of the demo version
  • Questions and answers, discussion

Format

The meeting will not be recorded or streamed. Notes will be taken in a Google Docs file. The presentation part (first two points in the agenda) will be given in English.

We can answer questions asked in English, French, Polish, and Spanish. If you would like to ask questions in advance, add them on the talk page or send them to sgrabarczuk@wikimedia.org.

Olga Vasileva (the team manager) will be hosting this meeting.

Invitation link

We hope to see you! SGrabarczuk (WMF) 15:09, 4 October 2021 (UTC)

Hello! I'd like to remind that the meeting will happen today. You are welcome to join! SGrabarczuk (WMF) (talk) 15:13, 12 October 2021 (UTC)

Universal Code of Conduct Enforcement Draft Guidelines review still needs your ideas and opinions

Hello, this is a reminder that the Universal Code of Conduct Draft Enforcement Guidelines are open for local review and comment (comments may also be left on Meta, and at other local venues). The Drafting Committee will start working on revisions and improvement after October 17, so it will be helpful to provide thoughts before then.

There is also a newly-published abstract that provides an overview of the draft guidelines..

We are also hosting another conversation hour on October 15, 2021 03:00 and 14:00 UTC, as well as another functionary consultation October 7 18:00 UTC (tomorrow).

On behalf of the Drafting Committee, many thanks to everyone who has given ideas so far. We hope to hear from more of you - the Guidelines will be much stronger if more opinions are included. Xeno (WMF) (talk) 16:40, 6 October 2021 (UTC)

Universal Code of Conduct News – Issue 4

Universal Code of Conduct News
Issue 4, October 2021Read the full newsletter

Welcome to the fourth issue of Universal Code of Conduct News! This newsletter will help Wikimedians stay involved with the development of the new code and will distribute relevant news, research, and upcoming events related to the UCoC.

If you haven’t already, please remember to subscribe here if you would like to be notified about future editions of the newsletter, and also leave your username here if you’d like to be contacted to help with translations in the future.

  • Enforcement Draft Guidelines Review Wrap-up - The Universal Code of Conduct Enforcement Draft Guidelines Review will come to a close on 17 October 2021, after more than two months of extensive consultations. (continue reading)
  • Roundtable Discussions and Conversation Hours - Another successful roundtable session happened on September 18, 2021 to discuss the EDGR. One last conversation hour will be happening on October 15th, 2021. (continue reading)
  • Movement Charter Drafting Committee Elections - The Movement Charter Drafting Committee selection process has kicked off and will be open until October 25, 2021. Contributors to Wikimedia projects can elect their favorite candidates on to the committee. (continue reading)
  • New Direction for the Newsletter - As we round-up the consultation processes for the Universal Code of Conduct, the facilitation team is currently envisioning new directions for the newsletter. (continue reading)
  • Diff Blogs - Check out the most recent publications about the UCoC on Wikimedia Diff. (continue reading)

— Preceding unsigned comment added by Xeno (WMF) (talk • contribs) 03:14, 15 October 2021 (UTC)

WP:ELECTCOM2021 community endorsements

Hello, just a reminder that all editors are invited to provide feedback on the nominations to serve on the 2021 Arbitration Committee Electoral Commission until 23:59, 15 October 2021 (UTC). Thank you, — xaosflux Talk 08:24, 9 October 2021 (UTC)

What's wrong with Wikipedia editors..?

I still remember the days you all drafted Lil Nas X album. The editors say the album article should be drafted until there's an official announcement. While we all know Lil Nas X has already revealed the tracklist, it's still drafted WHILE the editors don't do the same to Adele's album. Now she only reveals the title AND its article has already been released. What's wrong with Wikipedia editors? Racism? Or homophobia? Should I complain Mr. Jimbo to solve this internalized homophobic/racism behaviour? -GogoLion (talk) 14:26, 13 October 2021 (UTC)

Never ascribe to malice what can be explained by less severe issues. Yes, we are inconsistent. Yes, the album was clearly notable before its release and should not have been moved back to draft. No, Adele still plays in a different league (established artists with multiple albums vs. newish artist without an album). But the wrong drafts get rejected and the wrong drafts get accepted all the time, without there being racism or homophobia involved. If you would notice a pattern with any of the editors that kept it out of the main space, then you can start accusing people of such things. Until then, such things are personal attacks and while I understand that you are pissed off about a poor decision, you should refrain from making such accusations. Oh, and it is considered best practice that you inform people when you are talking about their actions here. Fram (talk) 14:45, 13 October 2021 (UTC)

Fram, You talk like I didn't know there was any discussion before drafting. The Adele's album already discussed. YES IT EXISTS. But what the editors do? They want to keep it. Why? Because she is white. Yup, white and straight. And what about drafting discussion of the Lil Nas X's album? Did it exist? If it exists, what the editors say? Why they draft it? Why they don't accept official announcement from the artist (Lil Nas X, the black gay man)? Why you don'think this is not racism/homophobia? Can you explain? Where's the drafting discussion of Lil Nas X's album? -GogoLion (talk) 16:06, 13 October 2021 (UTC)

It's apparently no use talking to you, so don't expect me to respond any further. Fram (talk) 16:08, 13 October 2021 (UTC)

Fram, ok bye. I want to talk with another editor.

LivelyRatification what's good? -GogoLion (talk) 16:35, 13 October 2021 (UTC)

@GogoLion: you've now started casting aspersions. Do you have any evidence that the reasons for drafting one and not the other were related to the race or sexuality of the artists? You can't just assume it is the case, you must assume good faith first. —El Millo (talk) 16:48, 13 October 2021 (UTC)
Facu-el Millo, don't change the conversation. Let's speak it to the point. What's the reason?
-GogoLion (talk) 17:01, 13 October 2021 (UTC)
We don't know what the reason is, but you can't just jump to racism and homophobia because you can't think of anything else. You can start by linking to the discussion where the Montero draft was declined, see if some editors participated in both discussion, see if their arguments are logical or not, genuine or disingenuous. Rembember Wikipedia editors aren't just a big entity that all think and act the same way. If none of the editors participated in both discussions, then the racism–homophobia accusations likely won't be valid, at least not for this specific case. —El Millo (talk) 17:16, 13 October 2021 (UTC)
@GogoLion: I'm sorry but the hysteria surrounding musicians and their articles is frankly ridiculous, and something we keep seeing over and over. I think the core of your message is a good one (Wikipedia does have a systemic bias, there are editors who push homophobic/racist points of view) but what I see here, right now, is an angry person with their own bias trying to "shout the loudest". Is this really needed? Is this? I want to hear your complaints, but you need to calm down first. Please ~TNT (she/her • talk) 16:53, 13 October 2021 (UTC)
TheresNoTime, thank you for understanding me. You're the only one who understands that something is wrong in the Wikipedia editor circles.
-GogoLion (talk) 17:01, 13 October 2021 (UTC)
On another point, you GogoLion, are just as much a Wikipedia editor as anyone else, so you can make edits and argue for them if they are contested. Of course systemic bias exists, although it usually works in favour of Americans, even if they are black and gay, but in any particular case it may just be that nobody has got around to making the necessary edits, which is where you come in. It detracts from this process if you make unfounded accusations of homophobia and racism. Phil Bridger (talk) 17:37, 13 October 2021 (UTC)
Little to no idea why I was involved in this conversation but, sure, I'll give my two cents. Yes, systemic bias is a thing. Wikipedia in general is biased towards the Western industrialised world. If you're a white straight man you're much more likely to be viewed as notable than a black queer woman. That bias should very much be acknowledged and tackled. But from what I'm aware, the situation with the Montero draft article is that it simply didn't have enough detail to actually be reviewed.
As a fellow user said on Montero's talk page, "I agree that this album is plenty notable (possibly one of the most anticipated albums of the year, in fact)—but not enough of that coverage has been included in this draft yet, hence why it's yet not an article. A number of the Twitter and other primary sources need to be replaced first before it can be moved to the mainspace."
Are there underlying systemic factors that may have contributed to the article on Montero not being fleshed out as quickly than the one on 30? Of course. Does almost every Wikipedia editor, including me, have some level of bias underlying? Yep. Does that mean that the reason Lil Nas X's album page wasn't published earlier was because of racism among Wikipedia editors? I don't really think so. I'm not saying it wasn't a factor, but the reason that page stayed in the draftspace for so long is because it didn't meet Wikipedia's standards. --LivelyRatification (talk) 19:58, 13 October 2021 (UTC)

LivelyRatification, so people drafted the Lil Nas X album because they use Twitter for reference? This is weird... Look at Adele discography, they using Instagram as reference for Easy On Me but nobody cares about "is it acceptable or not?". Also, Lil Nas X's announcement also had official announcement from acceptable sources (one of them is People magazine) but the editors still make it as draft until it really been released. -GogoLion (talk) 21:05, 13 October 2021 (UTC)

@GogoLion: Firstly, yes, that page shouldn't use a source from Instagram. Thanks for pointing that out to me, I've now fixed it. I'm not saying that Montero had no reliable sources covering it, it definitely did, the issue is that the article didn't have as many. I was wrong in saying that the article didn't have enough primary sources, having now looked back at the revision history, but I still don't think that the article here (when it was rejected for the mainspace) was suitable. I do think that Montero should have been moved to the mainspace much earlier (it was moved about 2 days before release), but the issue to me was a lack of content - people not working on improving the article, basically. That is a problem, but it's a separate one from an issue of double standards. --LivelyRatification (talk) 21:27, 13 October 2021 (UTC)
@TheresNoTime: did you really mean to suggest that Wikipedia has a racist/homophobic bias? Doug Weller talk 14:00, 15 October 2021 (UTC)
@Doug Weller: Not at all.. I suggested that it has a systemic bias (but that's something we can only counter, not avoid), and mentioned that there certainly "are editors who push homophobic/racist points of view". Thankfully all the admins I know are adept at spotting people like that and showing them the door. ~TNT (she/her • talk) 17:20, 15 October 2021 (UTC)
@TheresNoTime: thanks, that's what I assumed you meant but I didn't want there to be any chance that User:GogoLion misunderstood you. I of course am one of those who show editors like that the door. Doug Weller talk 09:43, 16 October 2021 (UTC)

WikidataCon 2021

Hi all. I'm posting here as a co-curator of the 'Sister projects' track for WikidataCon 2021, which will take place online on 29-31 October 2021. The conference website is at [1].

Integration with Wikidata is a controversial topic here, and we would like to talk about both the pros and cons of Wikidata integration with the other Wikimedia projects during this conference. Whether you like Wikidata or not, please consider submitting a session proposal to explore the issues that you are most interested in.

You can find information about how to submit a session proposal at [2], and you can access the submission form at [3]. Please submit a session proposal through the Pretalx process so that we can review and schedule it appropriately - and make sure to mark it as a 'Sister projects' track proposal. Please note that we cannot accept a session outside of the Pretalx process. We also encourage you to submit talks to other tracks if you are interested!

Note that the deadline for submitting proposals is the 20th October - sorry for the short notice! Thanks. Mike Peel (talk) 19:44, 15 October 2021 (UTC)

I hope one of the topics that will be discussed at this conference will be: “Are WP and WD incompatible projects (and thus should NOT be integrated)?” Blueboar (talk) 19:59, 15 October 2021 (UTC)
@Blueboar: I encourage you to propose a presentation about that. Thanks. Mike Peel (talk) 20:07, 15 October 2021 (UTC)

Effect of Apple’s iCloud Private Relay

Hello!

Communities typically block edits from IP addresses that obscure individual users. Usually, it has been about “open proxies” or virtual private networks (VPNs). Now, there's a new Apple service called iCloud Private Relay that obscures the IP addresses of desktop and mobile users of the Safari browser.

As Apple users adopt this new service, we estimate that 3-5% of all logged-in and logged-out editors will have these obscured IP addresses. If we don't change anything, they may be blocked within a few months. This wiki may be severely affected. A lot of people editing here use the Safari browser. Next, other browser providers may do the same. The problem will grow.

The communities, users with advanced MediaWiki permissions, the Wikimedia Foundation and others need to work together. We all need to decide how the security of the wikis can be maintained. At the same time, the pathways to editing should remain open for all good-faith participants.

Read more on Apple iCloud Private Relay. Answer the questions and comment on its talk page.

Thank you!

SGrabarczuk (WMF) (talk) 21:34, 18 October 2021 (UTC)

Please, also see meta:Talk:Apple iCloud Private Relay, where a few of us are discussing this, including serious concerns about the above messaging. MarioGom (talk) 23:07, 18 October 2021 (UTC)

Movement Strategy Implementation Grants have been re-launched to support Movement Strategy plans

Movement Strategy Implementation Grants provide resources and support for implementing strategy plans and ideas. The Movement Strategy and Governance team is available to provide support. Learn more. Xeno (WMF) (talk) 15:53, 21 October 2021 (UTC)

"Movement Strategy Implementation Grants support projects that take the current state of a Movement Strategy Initiative and push it one step forward. This way, all initiatives are implemented collectively one step at a time, from research and planning to development and launch. " That... doesn't really make sense. If you want to "collectively" implement them one step at a time, then all initiatives first need to take step 1, then all need to take step 2, and so on. However, the grants are for one initiative at a time. So, which is it? Fram (talk) 16:02, 21 October 2021 (UTC)

While each grant is meant to refer to a specific initiative, taken as a whole the goal is to move initiatives a step forward from where they are now (not necessarily the same steps, as some initiatives are further along than others - links to detailed examples are now available). Xeno (WMF) (talk) 16:31, 21 October 2021 (UTC)
Thanks for replying, and of course the goal is to move initiatives a step forward, but that doesn't mean that "all initiatives are implemented collectively" at all, but that each initiative is implemented individually (as each grant is for one initiative separately normally). I'm sorry, but I really loathe such management speak which sounds good but which is either meaningless or wrong. Fram (talk) 17:03, 21 October 2021 (UTC)
I think here the term is intended to refer to all the grantees working towards the common overall goal of implementing the initiatives together (as multiple grants can be working on the same initiative). Xeno (WMF) (talk) 17:19, 21 October 2021 (UTC)

Anyone have anything on the early history of talk pages?

I'm doing some research for something. Interested in knowing where the conventions came from, when we ditched horizontal rules in favor of level-2 headings, and so on. I recall reading something about this years ago, but of course can't find it. Enterprisey (talk!) 08:07, 15 October 2021 (UTC)

@Enterprisey: not sure, but a place to start may be whenever the "new section" control was added to the interface. — xaosflux Talk 14:28, 15 October 2021 (UTC)
@Enterprisey: Per WikiBlame, the "new section" feature was first mentioned at Wikipedia:Talk pages in July 2003; the above-linked edit replaced advice about horizontal rules with a mention of the comment-posting feature. This among other things was new to MediaWiki, which was then still known the Phase III software (along with the TOC and section editing) per this announcement. Graham87 08:35, 16 October 2021 (UTC)
Also see the old page at Wikipedia:Software updates and its talk page. Graham87 08:41, 16 October 2021 (UTC)
Thank you both for the pointers. Enterprisey (talk!) 00:18, 17 October 2021 (UTC)

Before talk pages.Moxy- 01:11, 17 October 2021 (UTC)

Someone should write up a whole history of talk pages, including their initial adoption and expansion of use, the differing conventions, the bots (Sinebot, the archive bots...), the whole collection of gadgets that were put together, the brief experiments with LiquidThreads, and the more recent Talk pages project. Also the customizations on different wikis, the MassMessage systems and their impacts, the things with the tabs, signatures and their customizations and policies, namespaces, Echo and the old Orange Bar o' Doom, processes that were built up, talk templates, policies, etc. (Sounds like it would be best placed on Meta.) --Yair rand (talk) 04:22, 19 October 2021 (UTC)
@Enterprisey, have you seen mw:Talk pages consultation 2019/Discussion tools in the past?
Anyone who was around (or has looked into it) is welcome to expand the page. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 02:46, 20 October 2021 (UTC)
Sounds like a possible doctoral thesis for some energetic and enterprising student :-) MarnetteD|Talk 02:50, 20 October 2021 (UTC)
Thank you very much! That's exactly what I was looking for. Could use some more information, but there's one way to fix that... :) Enterprisey (talk!) 04:32, 21 October 2021 (UTC)
I couldn't tell you when they were dropped, but the horizontal rules are a conventions we took from UseModWikis before us (Meatball and/or C2 wikis), which had mixed-mode pages that included the talk discussion directly on them. --Izno (talk) 14:57, 23 October 2021 (UTC)

Voting to elect members to the Movement Charter drafting committee is now open (October 12 - 24)

Voting to elect members to the Movement Charter drafting committee is now open. In total, 70 Wikimedians are running for 7 seats in these elections.

Voting is open from October 12 to October 24, 2021.

We are piloting a voting advice application for this election. It helps show which candidates hold positions similar to the choices entered.

According to the set up process, the committee will initially consist of 15 members in total. 7 members elected in this process, 6 members selected by Wikimedia affiliates, and 2 members appointed by the Wikimedia Foundation. Up to 3 additional members may be appointed by the committee, and steps may be taken to replace members as needed.

More details and the voting link is on Meta.

Please feel free to let me know if you have any questions about this process.

Xeno (WMF) (talk) 17:15, 12 October 2021 (UTC) (Movement Strategy & Governance Team, Wikimedia Foundation)

← As a gentle reminder, the voting period is about halfway through, and will be closing about 6 days from now. Xeno (WMF) (talk) 13:15, 19 October 2021 (UTC)

May I nominate an article to become a good article with persian references?

Guys, I'm thinking to prepare these three articles for Good Article nomination but something is a puzzle to me. As the title of my section clearly shows, May I nominate an article to become a good article with persian references? I want to translate the persian version to english because I think there are not that much about these three articles in english. Ab Pakhsh, Bushehr Province, Bushehr Rohalamin (talk) 19:39, 26 October 2021 (UTC)

You may, but please be prepared to cope with the pushback that you are likely to receive from editors who don't understand that policy. Phil Bridger (talk) 19:58, 26 October 2021 (UTC)

Talk to the Community Tech

Read this message in another language

Hello!

We, the team working on the Community Wishlist Survey, would like to invite you to an online meeting with us. It will begin on 27 October (Wednesday) at 14:30 UTC on Zoom, and will last an hour. Click here to join.

Agenda

  • Become a Community Wishlist Survey Ambassador. Help us spread the word about the CWS in your community.
  • Update on the disambiguation and the real-time preview wishes
  • Questions and answers

Format

The meeting will not be recorded or streamed. Notes without attribution will be taken and published on Meta-Wiki. The presentation (all points in the agenda except for the questions and answers) will be given in English.

We can answer questions asked in English, French, Polish, Spanish, German, and Italian. If you would like to ask questions in advance, add them on the Community Wishlist Survey talk page or send to sgrabarczuk@wikimedia.org.

Natalia Rodriguez (the Community Tech manager) will be hosting this meeting.

Invitation link

We hope to see you! SGrabarczuk (WMF) (talk) 23:00, 22 October 2021 (UTC)

We're starting in 15 minutes! SGrabarczuk (WMF) (talk) 14:14, 27 October 2021 (UTC)

Color of "You have new messages" alert for IP editors

See MediaWiki talk:Common.css § Orange bar of doom now peach bar of doom. Johnuniq (talk) 01:24, 30 October 2021 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Take_the_lead!

Now is the time to make some leads in articles with crappy leads for a chance to win prizes and help all mobile users! See Wikipedia:Take_the_lead! - starting in a matter of hours....Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 18:12, 31 October 2021 (UTC)

Meet the new Movement Charter Drafting Committee members

The Movement Charter Drafting Committee election and selection processes are complete.

The committee will convene soon to start its work. The committee can appoint up to three more members to bridge diversity and expertise gaps.

If you are interested in engaging with Movement Charter drafting process, follow the updates on Meta and join the Telegram group.

With thanks from the Movement Strategy and Governance team. Xeno (WMF) (talk) 16:27, 1 November 2021 (UTC)

POTD for 10/31/2021

The picture, a lithograph, is a very poor example of what it presumably illustrates. There is no shoulder in it. It was a real stretch to choose that text for that picture.Wis2fan (talk) 03:49, 1 November 2021 (UTC)

The discussion for featured pictures occurs at Wikipedia:Featured picture candidates. The more people who participate the better the selection of images becomes. You can contribute there to help prevent what you see as poor judgement. Jason Quinn (talk) 17:24, 2 November 2021 (UTC)

Many of these pictures are of U.S. Treasury secretaries. Who cares about these non-entities? Surely there are people who have made real contributions to the world whose pictures could be featured here. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2001:569:57C1:DD00:79DD:79EE:AF23:796C (talk) 06:24, 2 November 2021 (UTC)

This is the encyclopedia that anyone can edit. We are always in need of extra help. You can help too, including discussing what pictures become featured. See Wikipedia:Featured picture candidates for discussion. I recommend creating an account and watching how the discussion works for a while and then try adding your thoughts. Jason Quinn (talk) 17:21, 2 November 2021 (UTC)

The importance of using quotes for references is WAY understated

For many years I've been an editor focused mostly on improving existing articles rather than writing new articles. In particular I like to do a lot of the dirty, unglamorous work of checking references and improving them. One thing I've come to believe is that references without specific pages and quotes are half-useless. For one, because our articles are in continual flux, over time references tend to drift way from the sentences they support. BUT it's practically impossible to notice this unless you are absurdly familiar with the reference. Another problem is that people are really bad at keeping meaning the same when rewording statements. Many times I check a reference, spending the time to track down the specific text, only to discover "hey, the Wikipedian either didn't understand the text or distorted its meaning". Very very few editors are checking references once they are inserted. The page and quote parameters dramatically help solve these problems. It makes it MUCH less time consuming to check a source. AND at an instant, all editors can check that the Wikipedia text aligns with the meaning of the source text. In my opinion, we need to get all editors to agree to ALWAYS use the page and quote parameters if possible. The only time they should not be used is when it doesn't make sense because the Wikipedia statements are a synthesis of what's said in a much larger body of text. Jason Quinn (talk) 03:08, 8 October 2021 (UTC)

You are correct, and thanks. Particularly in contentious topics, quotes are needed in references to spell out the point. Unfortunately, another class of wikignome goes around removing "cruft". Johnuniq (talk) 22:59, 8 October 2021 (UTC)
@Jason Quinn: It's a pleasure to at last find another editor who actually looks at the references. I've found a quotation in an article that did not appear in the work cited which had been in the article for six years, and a mis-attribution (which should have been obvious to anyone who had read the first page of the book quoted) that was 12 years old. I must admit I don't always use a quotation in a reference, but considering the points you make I shall try to do so more often. I also try to use chapter names/numbers as well for citations from books, as this make it easier to check against references to a different edition to the one I have available. DuncanHill (talk) 23:20, 8 October 2021 (UTC)
Just to give a contrary opinion… I have found that when a quote is provided in a citation, we should question it. All too often that quote has been taken out of context. It is a favorite tactic of POV pushers. Blueboar (talk) 23:34, 8 October 2021 (UTC)
Agreed that a quote by itself doesn't solve all collaboration issues. I myself have not found the problem you mention to be a common occurrence. But I do mostly edit non-controversial topics where there's little reason or motivation to pull such tricks. Even if it's true that this is sometimes done, it still helps because it leaves actionable evidence of a editor's intent to mislead. So again, quotes are good. Jason Quinn (talk) 05:43, 9 October 2021 (UTC)
I usually think that quotes are excessive for fair use, and so are a copyright infringement. But certainly pages should be included for anything big that may need to be combed through. Also I would encourage a reference on each sentence. Then it is less likely to be split by subsequent additions. Graeme Bartlett (talk) 03:55, 9 October 2021 (UTC)
Where did you get that idea from? It's totally untrue. If you don't believe me, take the US Copyright Office's word for it:

Under the fair use doctrine of the U.S. copyright statute, it is permissible to use limited portions of a work including quotes, for purposes such as commentary, criticism, news reporting, and scholarly reports. There are no legal rules permitting the use of a specific number of words, a certain number of musical notes, or percentage of a work. Whether a particular use qualifies as fair use depends on all the circumstances. See, Fair Use Index, and Circular 21, Reproductions of Copyrighted Works by Educators and Librarians.

— US Copyright Office FAQ
While I'm not a copyright lawyer or anything, I've read multiple pamphlets on Fair Use from the Library of Congress so I have pretty good idea what's allowed and what isn't. I've never once seen a quote parameter used on Wikipedia that could realistically be considered a copyright violation. You should consider striking your comment. While you may have thought this, it's false. Feel free to start adopting using quotes in your references. Jason Quinn (talk) 05:36, 9 October 2021 (UTC)
I standby my comment. Although US law permits quoting under fair use, this is an international encyclopedia, where this kind of copying is less allowed. For Wikipedia fair use fules, the use should be minimal. Graeme Bartlett (talk) 05:55, 9 October 2021 (UTC)
Wikipedia is hosted in the US. US Copyright applies to Wikipedia so quotes on Wikipedia are perfectly legal. It's true that US copyright law does not apply outside the US and some countries have more restrictive copyright law. Users, for their legal protection, should always comply with the laws of the countries which from they edit. Any user from such a lousy country that they cannot even quote a sentence or two from a source in an academic work should refrain from using the quote parameter. I'm unaware of any such country in the free world but if such countries exist, the Wikimedia Foundation should also be blocking them from accessing Wikipedia since it would open itself to litigation there. And it should also be preventing those users from even being able to edit at all for their own protection. It seems to me your concern is completely theoretic and non-issue in practice. Please set me straight by making it concrete. Which countries do you have in mind where using small (one, two or few) sentence quotes would expose users to legal accountability? Your country appears to allow fair use, so I don't see what's stopping you from adding quotes. (Just to be certain, I'm talking about the |quote= parameter in cite templates here, which is usually only used for very small quotes. I'm not talking about {{Blockquote}} which is normally used for larger quotes.) You make a good point to mention international copyright laws but despite trying my best, I am completely failing to see your concerns are valid. Jason Quinn (talk) 15:25, 9 October 2021 (UTC)
I don't object to quotations but I do object to quotations in citations. Sometimes quotations in citations simply overwhelm what is supposed to be a list of citations that support the en.wiki article text. This kind of citation is, to me, unacceptable. If you believe that a quotation from a source is important to an article, by all means quote it. You can quote the text directly in the article text using <blockquote>...</blockquote> (or {{blockquote}} or other appropriate template) or you can create a separate footnotes section to hold quoted text. Wherever you put the quoted text, cite it at that location; don't put the quotation in the citation. Quoted text should have a citation; citations should not have quoted text.
—Trappist the monk (talk) 16:08, 9 October 2021 (UTC)
Interesting exchange, quite peaceful. Thanks to all. BeenAroundAWhile (talk) 17:06, 9 October 2021 (UTC)
Here, here. I concur with Trappist the monk. —¿philoserf? (talk) 03:37, 4 November 2021 (UTC)
Here is an example of cited quotations in a separate section but not in citations: Hayao Miyazaki § Notes.
—Trappist the monk (talk) 22:45, 9 October 2021 (UTC)
Hi, Trappist. I think you are conflating two things: the legality of using quotes in citations and the good judgement in how |quote= is used. The example you gave is a remarkably ugly usage of the quote parameter. But it's under no serious risk being guilty of a copyright violation. That particular citation should have been improved by being split into several. I would agree that editors should try quote the minimal amount of text necessary, in part to keep such quotes from being overwhelming as you say. But since the quotes I'm discussing really aren't part of the "article proper", there's no need to use them directly via blockquote or direct quoting. These quotes aren't meant to be read unless a reader wants to check the veracity of the main text. As I argued at the start of the thread, the value in using |quote= is to maintain the integrity of the article. I don't think the assertion that "citations should not have quoted text" follows from the argument presented. Jason Quinn (talk) 03:52, 10 October 2021 (UTC)
A relevant comment about extensive quoting from User:Moonriddengirl, here - fair use content must be transformative, and we cannot use quotes to supercede the source.Nigel Ish (talk) 17:20, 9 October 2021 (UTC)
The purpose of |quote= material is to support other material in an article. This effectively guarantees it is being used transformatively. In the discussion thread you linked, Moonriddengirl also worries about the market value of the copyright work being impacted as per section 107 of the Copyright Code. That too is an important legal aspect to consider but ultimately nothing to worry about. Even taken in isolation, a defense attorney should be able to easily defend against such a claim. But that doesn't even matter; focusing on just that aspect alone is a case of not seeing the forest for the trees in US copyright law: Broad latitude is given to people to use copyright material for educational/research and non-profit purposes and we fall under those umbrellas. I looked at the specific version of the article they were worried about. It's completely fine by normal application of Fair Use. Jason Quinn (talk) 03:16, 10 October 2021 (UTC)
US copyright law has a multi-pronged test of fair use, and it is entirely possible to violate fair use with a quotation if it fails on those fronts. If the quote takes the heart and substance of the original work and the article does not advance the dialogue, for instance. And while you may be speaking about reasonable use of the parameter, we have had editors who have tucked entire newspaper articles into the quote field. NOLO has a nice, brief overview of the matter written by Richard Stim. All that said, I myself have made use of the quote parameter for verification. It just needs to be part of a balanced approach. --Moonriddengirl (talk) 20:43, 19 October 2021 (UTC)
This right here: There are four parts of a fair use defense review in US Courts and a court will review all four parts, not any one part in isolation (see for example the SCOTUS ruling on Google LLC v. Oracle America, Inc.). Hence while we can argue an academic use of a quote, a full requote of a copyrighted work (particularly one made for commercial purposes) will likely be a problem. But one or two sentences of a full article likely is not. --Masem (t) 21:03, 19 October 2021 (UTC)
@Moonriddengirl: Sorry for belated reply. I missed your reply. Of course it's possible to violate fair use via the quote parameter, eg, by overquoting; but that in no way undermines the importance of using the quote parameter the way it is intended to be used. So I don't see the point of your argument, which is presumably to downplay the importance of using |quote=. Using the same reasoning a person might argue "It's possible to violate copyright by editing Wikipedia and therefore Wikipedia shouldn't exist, even though I've used it myself." I have edited probably 100,000 cite templates and have yet to come across an example like what you claim. They must be exceedingly rare. Using something so rare to establish a "balanced approached" seems to be applying undue weight to them. Generally speaking nothing more should be quoted than necessary to support the text in the article proper. I am promoting more extensive usage of quote, under the assumption, of course, that it's not being abused, which would be pretty obvious in practice. Jason Quinn (talk) 08:20, 23 October 2021 (UTC)
Jason Quinn, I'm not intending to bury my point. You shouldn't have to presume what I mean. As I noted, I myself have used the quote parameter and advocate for a balanced approach. Let me give you an example like the one I claim. Years ago, the publishers of the DSM manuals reached out to Wikimedia about the verbatim copying of diagnostic descriptions. One diagnostic description was copied per article. So, the article on "borderline personality disorder" for instance (not checking to see if that was indeed one of the articles due to limited time) quoted verbatim the DSM criteria. Their arguments was that, across Wikipedia, the usage of these quotes was taking a substantial part of their work in a way that harmed its market value. The Foundation lawyers who are charged to defend Wikipedia from frivolous action agreed. The quotes were removed. It is not always obvious in practice when issues occur, because the average person is unlikely not be familiar with the four parts of fair use, as User:Masem notes. By all means, we should make use of supporting quotations. As I noted, I have done it myself. But solid judgement must be brought to bear on when a quotation is used transformatively or not and when the usage exceeds or does not fit with the fair use tests. Also, let's avoid strawmen. "A person might argue" can be utilized in the opposite direction as well. :D I have dealt with editors who have required substantial amounts of copyright cleanup because they copied excessively into the quote parameter. When one writes a sentence and supports it with a paragraph or multiple paragraphs and does so repeatedly, we have a problem. Is this a common problem? Thankfully, no - or it was not. But we need to ensure that people understand that putting supporting quotations into the quote parameter does not free them from the burden of creating an overall transformative article or according with the fair use provisions. --Moonriddengirl (talk) 14:20, 28 October 2021 (UTC)
Quotes are very useful for verification. Verification is so rarely done, anything to reduce the friction. They also help mitigate (not eliminate) link rot when a link dies and no archive URL exists, a quote will seem like a god send - of course someone could fake a quote but usually it's a misinterpretation of the quote, concluding something the quote doesn't say. Should be done for unusual, surprising or contentious material, or something unique to one source unlikely to be found elsewhere. -- GreenC 17:37, 9 October 2021 (UTC)
Absolutely! Link rot is one of the situations where quotes are particularly helpful. Sometimes it's ONLY through the quotes that references are able to be rescued. A search for the quote discovers "oh, the reference still exists, it just changed domains" and you can then repair the citation and add other information to help in the future. Jason Quinn (talk) 04:01, 10 October 2021 (UTC)
For online sources, I often try to add archive links even when they are live. This solves link rot problems. Page numbers should always be present for book citations, but I think we shouldn't apply the same hard rule for quotes. I think quotes are more useful when: 1) the use of the source has been repeatedly disputed or 2) the source is hard to access. There are articles with excessive quotes in references, where each sentence has a paragraph quote in a reference to a short online article, even for the simplest trivia, and the result can look ridiculous. MarioGom (talk) 10:25, 31 October 2021 (UTC)
100% agreed. Coincidentally, I gave a talk today at WikiConference North America where I mentioned this. Enterprisey (talk!) 06:40, 10 October 2021 (UTC)
@Enterprisey: Just watched your talk. Thanks for that. I found your "Gap of Despair" diagram interesting. We lose a lot of new editors because they unknowingly jump right into the hard editing of the upper stairs that can get them in trouble. The thing I wanted to say is there's another dimension to the learning curve that is not policy-related but social: new editors are unwisely drawn to edit hot button topics. It's a double whammy: 1) they are making poor edits (because they are inexperienced) and 2) tons of watching eyes are ready to pounce on them for even small mistakes. In an ideal world, the "Gap is Despair" is spanned by the "Bridge of Common Sense" where users understand the value of taking baby steps before wading into challenging editing environments. It would perhaps make sense if certain topics could be flagged to warn new users "Hey, successfully editing of this topic may require in-depth understanding of policy." before they even start typing. Jason Quinn (talk) 15:14, 10 October 2021 (UTC)
Thanks. I agree with everything you're saying. I'd like to get a group brainstorming on both ideas (breaking up editing into smaller tasks, and showing alerts when new users try to use the editor to do things that don't seem good, like adding unsourced sentences or citing social media) at some point. Enterprisey (talk!) 06:53, 12 October 2021 (UTC)
@Enterprisey: if you create a project page for such brainstorming, please ping me to it. I've long had thoughts about this wrt translation from other Wikipedias. Mathglot (talk) 18:41, 16 October 2021 (UTC)
@Mathglot and everyone else, I just started Wikipedia:Making editing easier 2021. Enterprisey (talk!) 00:14, 17 October 2021 (UTC)

Agree with User:Jason Quinn's original comment. Graeme, you can put aside your concerns about copyright infringement in text included in |quote= params inside {{citation}} templates and {{blockquote}}s and safely use quotations to your heart's content. I assume you've used Google books before and perhaps added some content to an article based on what you read in snippet or preview mode there. As you've no doubt noticed, although Google books that are available in preview mode only provide a fraction of the book content for open viewing, there are frequently runs of several consecutive pages available, and even whole chapters are not rare. While the copyright status of this open display was not always clear, it is now; it was decided in 2015 as fair use under U.S. copyright law.[1] I'm not recommending that you copy an entire page, or a book chapter from Google books into a citation or a blockquote; even if U.S. law on fair use approves, Wikipedia guidelines would not. But in deciding whether to use |quote= and how much text you may place into it while improving an article at Wikipedia, U.S. copyright law regarding fair use is not a factor. Mathglot (talk) 18:27, 16 October 2021 (UTC)

  • Y'know, instead of copying and pasting text from the source and making our copyright editors sad, you could just include a few words from the beginning and end of the specific text that's being referenced (however many words are needed to uniquely identify the text). Then have a little widget to grab the source, look for the text, and pull it up. Enterprisey (talk!) 22:46, 19 October 2021 (UTC)
  • Just wanted to endorse the OP. Excellent and correct position. Hyperbolick (talk) 10:37, 23 October 2021 (UTC)

References

  1. ^ Lewis, Danny (October 20, 2015). "Google Books Isn't Copyright Infringement". Smithsonian Magazine. Retrieved October 16, 2021.

Gamers notability

Hi, does English wikipedia have relevance criteria/notability criteria for professional gamers and internet personalities like tiktokers and youtubers? And can i get a link if so? --JOestby (talk) 11:09, 5 November 2021 (UTC)

As far as I know there are no separate criteria for such people, just the general notability guideline, the notability guideline for people and, if applicable, our policy on biographies of living people. Phil Bridger (talk) 15:42, 5 November 2021 (UTC)
Yes, speaking for the video game project, while we do outline sources that we consider reliable for such content at WP:VG/S, we don't have special notability factors for gamers; they have to meet the GNG or an appropriate NBIO criteria. --Masem (t) 15:48, 5 November 2021 (UTC)

Looking for something

I found a major issue with a particular article, but it’s talk page was so dead the last discussion wrapped up in 2007. I also noticed that people have tried to fix this major issue already but have been stopped by bots for changing the article too much. I wanted to know if there was a place to discuss cases like these, where you won’t attract anything by posting on the talk page but if you post it in this theoretical place their attention would be directed towards that lonely article for a hot minute. Givemesomesteviewonder (talk) 11:45, 6 November 2021 (UTC)

The talk page of the article would be the correct place to raise this issue, regardless of how "dead" it is. Although, since you already made a post, discussing your issue here would be fine as well. SkyWarrior 20:19, 6 November 2021 (UTC)
If you are referring to Chynna Phillips then I hardly think that any update is "urgent". If you have a reliable source for what you want to say then you can update it yourself, and if not then you are relying on someone else to find a reliable source, which could take many years. Phil Bridger (talk) 21:04, 6 November 2021 (UTC)

A random question

In cleaning out a bunch of unused templates, I've found a lot of new articles accidentally created in the Template namespace. I have no idea how this happens, since WP:CREATE handles a lot of the nitty gritty of article creation. Anyone have any theories? Ten Pound Hammer • (What did I screw up now?) 01:50, 7 November 2021 (UTC)

Maybe the creator or somebody else got the link syntax wrong and first made a red link with {{Wanted title}} instead of [[Wanted title]]. PrimeHunter3 (talk) 07:31, 7 November 2021 (UTC)

English fundraising banners to start at the end of November

Dear all,

Next month, on the 30th of November, the Wikimedia Foundation will be launching its annual fundraising banner campaign on English Wikipedia in Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The campaign will run throughout December. I will be in touch again closer to the time with more details. In the meanwhile we are still running banner tests so you might already see banners around if you are not logged in.

We are always looking for ways to improve our campaigns and appreciate your feedback regarding banner messages and design.

  • If you have specific ideas to share, please feel invited to add them to the fundraising meta talk page.
  • If you need to report a bug or technical issue, please create a phabricator ticket.
  • If you see a donor on a talk page, VRT or social media having difficulties in donating, please refer them to donate(at)wikimedia.org

Additionally, this year we are testing a new message for a subset of recurring donors to let them know that they can create a Wikipedia account (and get involved in editing if they are interested). After creating their account, they will get directed to Growth features, which are a new onboarding experience for new editors that have been in trial here in English Wikipedia. We also tell them that by creating this account and staying logged in, they will avoid seeing fundraising banners during the campaign in December. This option will not be sent to a large set of donor emails but you might see some new faces around trying out the Growth features.

If you have any questions, please contact me.

Best wishes,

JBrungs (WMF) (talk) 11:18, 28 October 2021 (UTC)

Hi Nosebagbear
Based on signup statistics from a similar email campaign recently undertaken in Latin American countries for the Spanish Wikipedia, we expect that this email will result in <600 new accounts, and only a portion of those will begin to edit, over the course of about two weeks since the email is sent. This is statistically insignificant in the context of the ‘organic’ account creation rate on English Wikipedia and therefore we don’t believe this will cause any identifiable impact on existing content patrollers’ workflows. JBrungs (WMF) (talk) 10:40, 1 November 2021 (UTC)
@JBrungs (WMF): hi there. It wasn't out of concern we'd find it disruptive! I've no issue with the plan, I was just interested to know how you made the Growth platform to allocate them into the "growth tools on" portion of new editors rather than just 25% of them Nosebagbear (talk) 11:23, 1 November 2021 (UTC)
Hi @Nosebagbear,
Just a quick follow up on this. The people who receive the email and are suggested to sign up will get a dedicated link (you can see it here) which will force direct them to the Growth features. I hope this helps. Best, JBrungs (WMF) (talk) 08:30, 5 November 2021 (UTC)
  • Additionally, this year we are testing a new message for a subset of recurring donors to let them know that they can create a Wikipedia account (and get involved in editing if they are interested). – Such a message should be the entirety of the fundraising banner. On the English Wikipedia, it doesn't affect us whether the fundraising banner income is raised or not. It does affect us that we have been haemorraging volunteers for the last 10 years. Everybody I speak to in real life about the issue feels guilty, or like they are doing their bit, based on whether they are donating money to Wikipedia—they have no idea that what Wikipedians actually want is their labour (not necessarily tons of it, just a little help here and there goes a long way). Nor, of course, do any of them understand what the money is put towards, because of the deliberately melodramatic fundraising lies about "paying for server space". — Bilorv (talk) 14:15, 2 November 2021 (UTC)
    @Bilorv, here's a link to monthly active editor counts for the last 10 years. I think you might be surprised by the shape of that curve. If we are losing any group, it's the newbies, not the folks who make enough edits that we can recognize their names. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 21:57, 3 November 2021 (UTC)
    This information isn't central to the point I made, Whatamidoing (WMF), so though I dispute that your data is accurately interpreted here and I'm not surprised by a graph I've seen before, I won't go into that as I don't feel it is a counterargument to "we need new people to join Wikipedia at a higher rate". If I understand correctly that your point is that we need to retain (i.e. stop biting) newbies at a much higher rate then I completely agree, but that's additional, not a substitute. If you're trying to suggest we need money more than volunteers then I couldn't disagree more. — Bilorv (talk) 22:54, 3 November 2021 (UTC)
    My point is that the English Wikipedia no longer has a problem with declining editor counts. We did have that problem for about four years, starting in 2007 (aligning with the creation of first high-volume anti-vandalism bots – there was suddenly much less work for a large group of editors), but we do not have that problem any longer. The story about editor loss may never die, and certainly I miss some individual editors, but the number of active editors at this wiki has been roughly stable since shortly before you created your account. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 17:25, 4 November 2021 (UTC)
    Thank you for these helpful statistics. I had a vague idea in the back of my head that Wikipedia was losing active editors, and I’m glad to hear that I’m mistaken. Now we just need to stabilize our number of admins... but that’s a question for a different page. —pythoncoder (talk | contribs) 03:50, 9 November 2021 (UTC)

Botsdeny?

I'm sure I didn't dream it... I could swear there used to be a template telling specific bots to stay away. Qwerfjkl (bot) has just trampled over the article Ordinal indicator because it is unaware of the use-mention distinction in the article. It is necessary to write 1<sup>st</sup> to write about that style of ordinal indicator; 1st is a different style. I have reverted but no doubt it will be back. So how do I fend it off? --John Maynard Friedman (talk) 20:13, 9 November 2021 (UTC)

{{bots}}
—Trappist the monk (talk) 20:16, 9 November 2021 (UTC)
Rats, I almost had it. (bots|deny=). Thank you. --John Maynard Friedman (talk) 20:24, 9 November 2021 (UTC)
@John Maynard Friedman: lets follow up at User talk:Qwerfjkl seems like something is still wrong. — xaosflux Talk 18:06, 11 November 2021 (UTC)

Hourly page view statistics?

Anyone got anything on how page views vary per hour? I'd be happy with something showing the sum of page views for all pages on a 24-hour cycle, so I could distribute the daily page views using the same pattern. I'm looking to see how many people viewed various pages during specific intervals of minutes/hours as part of User:Enterprisey/AIV analysis - I'm looking to answer "how many people viewed these pages while they were being vandalized at high speed". Enterprisey (talk!) 07:43, 10 November 2021 (UTC)

That data would make it to easy to identify behaviour of specific users on low visit count of pages. If you have specific ideas, try approaching the analytics they have access to a lot more data than is publicly available. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 15:39, 11 November 2021 (UTC)
Thanks for the pointer! Will try. Enterprisey (talk!) 09:27, 12 November 2021 (UTC)

Pictures of your kids?

Is it OK to put portraits of one's minor children on one's userpage? Keeping in mind that you can't prove it's really your kid. Of course, that's true of all portraits. But these are minors... might be that a proof ticket should be required? Asking. And I mean, even if you took the photo (and have the copyright), the subject didn't consent to be published because they can't... but guardian's rights probably allow it?

I couldn't find anything saying its not OK, not at Wikipedia:User pages or Wikipedia:Protecting children's privacy which would be the place I think. That page says children themselves should not post their "date of birth, first and last name, current age, relative or family information, the location (including the country, state, province, city, county, or district) in which they currently live or have previously lived, their current school and grade level, email address, phone number, home address, or the address of a location they attend or visit regularly", but:

  • It doesn't mention pictures, and
  • It doesn't say your guardian shouldn't do these things.

So... good to go? Maybe I'm overthinking this? Herostratus (talk) 08:58, 12 November 2021 (UTC)

I wouldn't given the amount of data harvesting that third party sites do from here and also of how powerful image recognition software is these days. Your kids, your choice. - X201 (talk) 09:15, 12 November 2021 (UTC)
^ concur Enterprisey (talk!) 09:27, 12 November 2021 (UTC)
I concur as well. It wouldn't be a good idea, but I don't think we need to write a rule against it. {{u|Sdkb}} talk 21:25, 12 November 2021 (UTC)
The question is why would you want to? Why give vandals and tendentious editors an outlet to engage in further harassment?--WaltCip-(talk) 17:21, 12 November 2021 (UTC)
Definitely would avoid clear, identifable pictures of non-public figure minors for reasons above. On the other hand, a far-away shot of kids playing in a public area such as on a playground (eg File:Perivoj_Zrinskih,_Čakovec_-_tobogani_na_dječjem_igralištu.jpg would be fine (consent is not required for public shots like that), and if you're wanting to utilize your kids to help provide that type of free content to show children's activities, that would be reasonable. But again, you want to avoid clear identifable images. --Masem (t) 17:39, 12 November 2021 (UTC)
Herostratus Do you have a concern about a particular user or a particular image on a user page? Or is this a question about something that hasn't happened but that you imagine might one day happen? If it is the former, talk to the user. If you have done that and still have concerns, contact WMF Trust & Safety. If it is the latter, the answer is that users are free to put images on their user page within the guidelines of WP:USER. That includes images of their minor children. Please sign my guestbook (talk) 19:58, 12 November 2021 (UTC)
Please sign my guestbook, yes I came across a user who has a portrait of his kid on his userpage, and I engaged him, asked him about it, and he was like "enh I'm good fam", so that's why I ask. It's a large portrait, but there's nothing wrong about the picture itself, so naw I don't want to escalate to Trust & Safety.
I didn't actually want to escalate but was unsure if people would think I should. My personal opinion is that it's kind of marginal at least, and I know how edgy the Foundation is about anything to do with minors, is all. But it seems like the consensus is "I wouldn't do it, but it's allowed" and so fine, I can go back to writing articles. Herostratus (talk) 21:38, 12 November 2021 (UTC)
This is far from my area of expertise but think I've seen some real life controversy about parents putting photos of their children online. Given the sheer amount of stock photos of children around - many of which are going to be even more widely seen than photos on a Wikipedia page - I don't think society has decided that this is Always A Bad Thing, though. However stock photos usually do not include any other personally identifying information, while a Wikipedia page may include one's real name. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 11:26, 13 November 2021 (UTC)

I've come to notice that some articles that I've created, or worked on, at times very noticeably spike in numbers of daily viewers. I assume this is because a link to the page was posted in some highly frequented site, such as a forum, social media or maybe a youtube video. I'm curious to know if it's possible to know where viewers are arriving from, and not, if it's possible to implement such a functionality. I think it would be interesting.Wareno (talk) 20:58, 4 November 2021 (UTC)

I recently spotted an enormous spike to an article I'd written on an obscure topic, Cairngorm Plateau disaster.[4] I did a Google search for the title and immediately found a rather good new Youtube video.[5] Turning somewhat to your question, I know when an external client makes an html request, the receiving web server software can log the client address. But I suppose the record would be kept confidential on privacy grounds. Thincat (talk) 22:57, 5 November 2021 (UTC)
@Wareno: User:HostBot/Social media traffic report is probably the closest thing to what you're asking. It tracks 150 or so of the articles with the most traffic from social media. Unfortunately, it's officially unmaintained, but at the moment it's still working. Vahurzpu (talk) 07:05, 7 November 2021 (UTC)
Thanks, that's interesting and I did not know about that functionality, though I was thinking more along the lines of a pie-chart that allowed us to see if the most recent users had arrived via another wikipedia page, browser search or via links in some site.Wareno (talk) 16:51, 9 November 2021 (UTC)
@Wareno: This can be tracked via HTTP referer info on Wikipedia servers -- I imagine this is how HostBot gets its data. However, I don't know to what degree WP will allow tools to use this data. In addition, the data isn't perfect because the browser can spoof or simply not send referer info. Daß Wölf 21:22, 14 November 2021 (UTC)
m:Research:Wikipedia clickstream may help. Unfortunately there's no easy interface but if you're prepared to download about 2 Gb of data and write software to process it then you can find out where readers came from. This will be either the title of another Wikipedia page or a general description such as "external link" or "sister project". The counts are monthly and only routes with 10+ clicks are listed (so if only 9 visitors to Ant clicked on Wasp last month, the pairing won't appear.) Certes (talk) 23:06, 14 November 2021 (UTC)

Kevin the Carrot

The UK arm of retailer Aldi is running online ads featuring mocked-up images of a Wikipedia article about their advertising mascot Kevin the Carrot. (imgur mirror). I think it's part of a lengthy Christmas advertising campaign (because apparently it's Christmas here in Britain...) It's perhaps a good idea if a few people watchlist that (red) article. -- Finlay McWalter··–·Talk 00:59, 9 November 2021 (UTC)

Draft:Kevin the Carrot is being cultivated. Certes (talk) 19:27, 15 November 2021 (UTC)

Template:Series overview

In the “Series overview”, “Originally aired” is divided into “First aired” and “Last aired”. Is it possible to combine several “info” into a similar cell in the header of the template? Jolf Staler (talk) 16:00, 10 November 2021 (UTC)

This is best discussed in the talk page of the template or perhaps in the templates section of the Television WikiProject — GhostInTheMachine talk to me 19:33, 10 November 2021 (UTC)
@Jolf Staler, what's an example of two cells that you want to combine? Enterprisey (talk!) 23:22, 10 November 2021 (UTC)
@Enterprisey, Region 1, Region 2, Region 4 in "DVD release dates" — Jolf Staler (talk) 08:07, 11 November 2021 (UTC)
Yeah, not sure which article that's referring to. Perhaps the two talk pages GhostInTheMachine linked would have more knowledgeable people. Enterprisey (talk!) 01:11, 17 November 2021 (UTC)

ACE2021

Thank you to the nominees for volunteering!. — xaosflux Talk 10:43, 18 November 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.

As a reminder, For the 2021 ArbCom elections, eligible users are invited to submit a nomination statement for the Arbitration Committee elections at the elections page. There are about 60 hours remaining to self-nominate. — xaosflux Talk 12:17, 14 November 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.

I'm writing an essay about Wikipedia and I was hoping I could get some editors to answer the question "Why do you edit?" Thank you!

I'm really sorry if I'm doing something wrong. I've never used the "Village Pump" before so if this is the wrong use for it then I apologize. TubbDoose (talk) 01:33, 16 November 2021 (UTC)

@TubbDoose: If you want some statistics on editor motivations, there's plenty available. See for example this chart, and lots of sources at m:Research:Codex/Motivations_of_contributors#References. --Yair rand (talk) 08:35, 16 November 2021 (UTC)
Thank you! That chart really helps I'll make sure to include it! Although for the essay it says I need "primary data" (which they describe as data that I collect myself) so if you could tell me what your reason for editing is I could technically claim I interviewed you XD. Thank you for the chart though! TubbDoose (talk) 09:37, 16 November 2021 (UTC)
Try Quora or Reddit and ask about motivation. OR modify this search over user pages https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?search=user%3A+%22my+motivation%22&title=Special:Search&profile=advanced&fulltext=1&ns4=1
Wakelamp d[@-@]b (talk) 06:25, 18 November 2021 (UTC)
Oh cool! I think I might write code to search for that (and related phrases) and put the sentences where the phrase shows up into a spreadsheet. Then I can categorize them or something. Thanks! TubbDoose (talk) 17:47, 18 November 2021 (UTC)

Donations suggestion: Advertise

Put out spot commercials to increase donations. You should tout your benefits, encourage or shame people into donations, underline ease of giving, and very briefly highlight significant donors. Advertise on TV (for us oldsters with lots of cash -we love free stuff we can trust and we feel guilty about it) and on serious social media. Make a snappy slogan: "Not Fake News", or whatever. Hire a firm on commission (no, not me). Keep in mind psychology studies say people will share only if it's not anonymous; And, hiring professional for-profit fund raisers will net you way more than otherwise. You could try a time-limited experiment to help re-assure your volunteers that you're not sullying their work. Good Luck! — Preceding unsigned comment added by EricDKins (talk • contribs) 17:35, 18 November 2021 (UTC)

  • People already get pissed off as it is when a banner pops up at the top of their screen with the coffee mug analogy (coffee sure has gotten expensive nowadays). Going commercial won't help that.--WaltCip-(talk) 17:59, 18 November 2021 (UTC)
I've looked at a lot of Form 990s when updating articles on non-profits, and there are plenty of them that spend more money on outside for-profit fundraising companies than they actually end up taking in in donations from those campaigns. --Ahecht (TALK
PAGE) 18:40, 18 November 2021 (UTC)
The WMF already plans a time-limited campaign from 30 November to 31 December, when it will add banners to Wikipedia soliciting donations to the WMF. As hinted in the last sentence, there is a risk that some valued editors might feel less inclined to contribute if they started to feel like unpaid employees of a commercial venture. Certes (talk) 19:13, 18 November 2021 (UTC)

Radical changes

Hello, all. Hundreds of editors have been using the [reply] button from the Wikipedia:Talk pages project. You can try it now, on this page, by clicking this link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(miscellaneous)?dtenable=1 That link will give you several fun new tools, including a [subscribe] button. Go ahead; click it, and then subscribe here. You can even change the section heading, and it will still remember that you want to get Special:Notifications for every new comment that gets posted to this section. (It won't bother you about typo fixes or that sort of thing; for those, check your watchlist.)

If you click that link, or if visit Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-betafeatures and turn on "Discussion tools", you'll see a new little [reply] button after each comment. When you click that, you get a little box to type your message in. It automatically signs your comments and counts all the ::::colons for you. You can choose between visual and wikitext source modes; the source mode comes with a live preview of your message. Both versions let you type @ and get a list of editors who previously commented in this section, just in case you want to ping anyone.

During the last month, the [reply] tool has been used about 10,000 times here at the English Wikipedia. It's been used almost half a million times total, across all wikis since the beginning. The mw:Editing team is almost ready to offer this tool by default for all editors at the English Wikipedia. But I wanted to stop by and ask again:

NB that if you turn on the Beta Feature, you get [reply] plus the New Discussion tool plus [subscribe] plus (soon) some other things. Only the little [reply] tool is ready to be deployed to everyone. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 05:34, 9 November 2021 (UTC)

Personally, I like it (the beta feature) a lot, including the easier pings. As an added bonus, it seems to bypass edit conflicts as well. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 17:11, 9 November 2021 (UTC)
Yes, it automatically resolves most edit conflicts. This is a very good thing on busy pages. I see occasional complaints about this. Sometimes, if two editors reply at the same time, and they say approximately the same thing, then the second editor feels embarrassed. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 17:16, 11 November 2021 (UTC)
@Whatamidoing (WMF) Yeah, I got into a bit a trouble with that, where I posted a reply that looked like I had been trying to make an end-run around what an adminsitrator had said because I was replying to a stale version of the page. A warning that the page had been edited since you loaded it would be helpful. --Ahecht (TALK
PAGE) 19:03, 17 November 2021 (UTC)
This all seems rather wonderful and I enjoyed my play with it, thank you Whatamidoing (WMF). I did have a slight problem in that it appeared to lose One Click Archiver, which I have also come to like. I am rubbish at all this stuff so I may have messed something up, plus this may be the wrong place to comment ... so, apologies if I am out of line and/or being stupid but ... can you please advise on this? Cheers DBaK (talk) 19:51, 9 November 2021 (UTC)
It's not meant to interfere with any script or gadget, including the One-Click Archiver. I did hear of someone saying that if you use the [subscribe] button, then using the One-Click Archiver seems to generate duplicate notifications (you get notified about a new comment once when someone posts the comments, plus a second time when the thread is archived later). I wonder if anyone else is having this problem? Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 17:15, 11 November 2021 (UTC)
Thank you Whatamidoing (WMF) – I must have another look, as I may just be doing something stupid/wrong. That would be unsurprising. If I do need to discuss it further, is this the right place or would you rather I came to you more directly or took it to some other page, or what? Just whatever works best for people, would be nice to know. Cheers DBaK (talk) 11:45, 12 November 2021 (UTC)
OK well I have now, emboldened by the above, turned it all back on and yes it all works like a charm! Thank you. So either I was just deluded (>99%) or there was something really wrong which is now better (<1%). Either way, I am happy with it again. Thanks @Whatamidoing (WMF) et al. Cheers DBaK (talk) 12:11, 12 November 2021 (UTC)
I'm glad that you got it working. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 04:44, 18 November 2021 (UTC)
While I remember this: @Tkarcher at the German-language Wikipedia posted a code you can add to Special:MyPage/common.js if you want to replace the "reply" label with something else:
// compact "Reply" links
$( ".ext-discussiontools-init-replylink-reply" ).text('💬');
This will replace the default [reply] with [💬] You can put whatever text or emoji you want where the 💬 is in the second line. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 17:22, 11 November 2021 (UTC)
Found the emoji also stands out from the wall of text, a visual landmark to end of posts. --GreenC 04:48, 18 November 2021 (UTC)
I also added $( ".ext-discussiontools-init-replylink-bracket" ).text(''); which loses the [ brackets ] and looks a little cleaner — GhostInTheMachine talk to me 11:19, 19 November 2021 (UTC)
  • Whatamidoing (WMF) The button should not be there next to comments that are archived using Template:Archive top and similar. Second thing: some talk pages are factored in a novel way or the discussion is justifiably split in different sections, some being for replies and some not, i.e. there are scenarios where the reply button would appear, but it really wouldn't be the proper place to reply -- instead the proper place would have been somewhere else, or possibly nowhere (Arbitration talk pages). An administrator should be able to decide to switch off the reply button on a specific talk page. — Alalch Emis (talk) 18:28, 12 November 2021 (UTC)
    @Alalch Emis, Whatamidoing (WMF) Agreed, reply links should not appear on pages flagged with __NOEDITSECTION__ (which includes any pages using the archive templates). --Ahecht (TALK
    PAGE    ) 19:08, 17 November 2021 (UTC)
    The devs are considering a specific magic word like __NOREPLYLINKS__ for that scenario.
    There is also the challenge of voting-type discussions. There are several possible ways to address that problem, including manually changing the indentation level (and type), or building a proper voting tool. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 04:25, 18 November 2021 (UTC)

Help, I'm confused

First off, please tell me if this question belongs somewhere else. I wasn't sure on where to ask, so it's here.

There are some articles ( Among Us, *cough cough*), that make it so you can't even edit the talk page. I'm so confused on why this is because while it's limited to established users it still means people like me who aren't signed in can't do anything. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 68.50.116.194 (talk) 20:32, 19 November 2021 (UTC)

The article (and talk page) has been semi-protected by an administrator, so only confirmed accounts can edit (IP editors can not edit). This is usually done to prevent consistent vandalism or other disruptive editing. Blueboar (talk) 21:25, 19 November 2021 (UTC)

about Illinois Central West Line

It seems that the tracks from the crossover of CTA lines to Halsted St Station (near 26th st, demolished) still exists, and it is a part of Illini and Saluki's route.

PS: That means that St. Charles Air Line starts from the crossover of CTA lines and ends to Halsted Street station.--Johnson.Xia (talk) 00:07, 20 November 2021 (UTC)

Very big pages

Some time ago, I raised the issue of pages with too much content, or markup. I worked to reduce the worst excesses. Some editors wiki-lawyered over the meaning of WP:TOOBIG, or argued that their pet pages wore somehow special exemptions.

I have just checked Special:LongPages again, and we now have 93 pages with over 400,000 bytes of markup, and 1756 with over 350,000 bytes.

For example, even my pretty punchy Dell XPS laptop is struggling to render 2021 in mammal paleontology, which has 290,852 bytes. Goodness knows how readers on mobile cope. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 20:51, 28 October 2021 (UTC)

FWIW, that page loads in about a second on my iPhone SE. Vexations (talk) 21:32, 28 October 2021 (UTC)
Yup… no delay on my mobile. Blueboar (talk) 00:49, 29 October 2021 (UTC)
WP:TOOBIG is just an informal guideline, not a policy or hard rule, so "special exemptions" are not needed to not apply it to a particular article. RudolfRed (talk) 00:25, 29 October 2021 (UTC)
QED. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 10:20, 29 October 2021 (UTC)
Andy, it's been a long time since I last time talked to a dev about this problem, but if memory serves, I think the size of the page, as rendered, was a bigger problem than the size of the wikitext as stored in the database. A heavily formatted page of 100,000 bytes (e.g., with many links and citations) is bigger than 100,000 bytes of plain text. One website that I checked said that 2021 in mammal paleontology loads about 600 KB. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 22:13, 3 November 2021 (UTC)
Do we think that pages that render as 600Kb are acceptable? Do we have a page, equivalent to Special:LongPages, that lists the largest pages as rendered? Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 22:21, 7 November 2021 (UTC)
Iridescent pointed out this site which tries to estimate how "expensive" [in terms of how much money it costs to produce a page on mobile] a given page is. I don't think it can be used for a mass check, though.

Regarding rendered size, the only thing that comes to mind is Category:Pages where post-expand include size is exceeded but I am not sure that "rendered size"="post-expand include size" (Whatamidoing (WMF)) and of course it has a high threshold. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 10:38, 8 November 2021 (UTC)

I suspect that setting a threshold would require making decisions about human values, rather than objective facts. The higher the limit, the worse for some purposes. The lower the limit, the more pages you have to load to have access to the same information.
But for comparison purposes, Wedding dress (which has a lot of pictures) is around 900 KB, and User:Pigsonthewing is about 540 KB. If those feel reasonable, then – from the sole metric of loading size, and excluding all other considerations – 2021 in mammal paleontology is probably reasonable, too. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 05:20, 9 November 2021 (UTC)
If speed it not the main issue, then what is the benefit of splitting? is to just that are very long to page through? Could we leave it all on the same page, but have each year separated into a collapsible session? We do something like episode lists in a series??? OR are we better creating a new type of List where the data is storied in [[[Wikidata]] ??Wakelamp d[@-@]b (talk) 07:30, 18 November 2021 (UTC)
  • I have noticed that wiki pages are sent (by wikipedia web servers) in compressed format, so a 300kB wiki source may be sent as a 60..70kB compressed content whose compressed HTML size could be around 180kB and uncompressed HTML code could be more than 1MB and this without counting all scripts, style sheets and images related to that page.
I guess that the occasional small delay might be due to many factors, i.e.:
- the establishment of a new encrypted connection when web traffic is very high;
and/or
- retrieval of wiki/HTML content from a DB (database) by a web application behind web servers;
and/or
- the compression being made by some web application after last edit of wiki source page;
and/or
- the decompression of HTML code by browser (i.e. from 180kB to 1100kB).
First time I retrieved the above mentioned page 2021 in mammal paleontology (I was logged in), it took almost 5 seconds to see the first visual rendering, subsequent complete retrievals of the page (i.e. by pressing CTRL-F5 in browser page), took less than 1 second to show the page and 1.6 seconds to finish the download of all page objects (such as scripts, style sheets, images, etc.), these results were obtained using a 7Mbit Internet line (which nowadays is considered very slow) and a medium speed PC (single CPU, etc.).
Much worst was the retrieval of 2019 in mammal paleontology (for the first time) which took more than 6 seconds between the sending of the request and the complete download and render of that page; of course the second time I retrieved the whole page + all of its related objects (scripts, images, etc.) it took much less time, around 2 seconds.
In practice it is clear that if sometimes it takes much more than 1 second to see a big page then it depends on Internet, wikipedia web servers / web applications / web cache / DB retrieval / compression of the content (I am just guessing), etc.
Talking about the impact of slow response in user (web) interfaces, see also wiki article about responsiveness.
I also suspect that web caching of wiki pages and some other objects could be improved noticeably, althought it does not look like to be too bad right now (it looks like that some efforts have been done); anyway caching matters a lot when your website has to manage millions of users because without proper caching policies your website will never scale up enough to avoid these kind of delays (also due to a lot of traffic load).
Besides what has already been suggested by other commenters, here are my hints:
- verify the cacheability level of wiki pages, their scripts and style sheets (technical thing for software engineers and webmasters);
- when a user is logged in (and maybe is trying to edit a wiki page), add an automatic warning message (about page too big) on top of wiki pages whose wiki source (or resulting HTML code) is bigger than a certain threshold, let's say 400kB .. 450kB for wiki source and 1.4MB .. 1.6MB for HTML code;
- if possible add a link to edit only the summary of each wiki page (top of page before first section) so that edits of entire articles are decreased.
In conclusion, I don't think that big wiki pages may slow down the visual rendering of pages because their HTML structure is usually simple enough to not make things too complicated for browsers; instead there might be some other technical issues about caching of wiki pages and heavy load conditions of wiki servers where most big content cannot be retrieved fastly unless it is already in some cache.
Last but not least, often, big wiki pages are big not only because of too much text content (explanations about the topic) but also because of hundreds or thousands of link references shown in section "References" at the end of the page. Maybe something should be done about this too. Ade56facc 17:18, 10 November 2021 (UTC)
  • If the problem is "too big" for the users device to handle (for whatever reason) and "too big" to (easily) edit (for whatever reason), then the solution may be in how we present and handle the data. Our present policy would dictate A parent-daughter article construction to deal with and reduce large articles but each daughter must be a stand-alone article. Obviously this isn't working for Special:LongPages articles. I observe that many of theses are lists or list-like. A solution that occurs to me might lie in how we deliver information in large articles. Rather than all at once, it is delivered as a skeleton structure, fleshed-out "on demand". I have more thoughts on how this might be done but I will leave it at that for now. Regards, Cinderella157 (talk) 12:08, 8 November 2021 (UTC)
You Dell should be Fast at loading. I suggest try and use a different browser and see if the speed changes Wakelamp d[@-@]b (talk) 07:31, 18 November 2021 (UTC)
I am not so sure that we can assume that everybody can buy/pay a new computer if a Wikipedia page is too large for them. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 10:37, 18 November 2021 (UTC)

I am currently stumbling through the Wikipedia:Editor's index to Wikipedia and I'm noticing many broken links therein. Is there a broken link checking tool that could be used on the page to, en mass, identify the broken links? Deicas (talk) 04:37, 21 November 2021 (UTC)

English fundraising banner campaign to start next week

Dear all,

Next week, on the 30th of November, the Wikimedia Foundation will be launching its annual fundraising banner campaign on English Wikipedia in Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The campaign will run throughout December. I will be in touch again on the campaign start day and throughout December.

We are always looking for ways to improve our campaigns and appreciate your feedback regarding banner messages and design.

  • If you have specific ideas to share, please feel invited to add them to the fundraising meta talk page.
  • If you need to report a bug or technical issue, please create a phabricator ticket.
  • If you see a donor on a talk page, VRT or social media having difficulties in donating, please refer them to donate(at)wikimedia.org

If you have any questions, please contact me.

Best wishes, JBrungs (WMF) (talk) 11:23, 23 November 2021 (UTC)

Current editor retention statistics?

Hi all. I was reading File:Enwp retention vs active editors.png for some reason. Would we happen to have a more-recent version? I don't think the official statistics website tracks such a number. (Maybe the WMF Growth Team has it?) Enterprisey (talk!) 08:28, 21 November 2021 (UTC)

@Enterprisey File:Editor_Retention_Update.png --Ahecht (TALK
PAGE) 20:14, 26 November 2021 (UTC)

Long-term abuse purge

WP:Long-term abuse has its uses, I've found a few of the pages there helpful at identifying socks, but beyond a certain point there's a genuine WP:BEANS issue with specific LTA pages. Over the last couple years I've blanked several of people who'd either died or gone inactive, since I saw a couple really lame copycats who clearly got ideas from LTA, and LTA isn't supposed to be a shrine to vandals. Plus, keeping unnecessary names and details there just makes it harder to find what you're looking for. Is there some way to put together a detailed review of what still belongs there and what can be blanked or deleted? The Blade of the Northern Lights (話して下さい) 22:23, 16 November 2021 (UTC)

What we really need is a separate private wiki for this. Something that not anyone can sign up for, but nowhere near as restricted as checkuser.wikimedia.org. Suffusion of Yellow (talk) 22:30, 16 November 2021 (UTC)
I'd like that, for sure. In the interim LTA still needs to be winnowed down a lot, but I like your idea as well. The Blade of the Northern Lights (話して下さい) 13:31, 18 November 2021 (UTC)
I'm okay with winnowing down pages that are no longer useful (i.e. where the person has stopped), but there are several active LTA editors where documentation is useful to refer to. --Jayron32 13:40, 18 November 2021 (UTC)
Yeah, it would be useful if we could place this sort of information on pages visible only to autoconfirmed or EC users. Perhaps an idea for the upcoming Community Wishlist Survey :) Daß Wölf 19:09, 20 November 2021 (UTC)
I don't think it would require any sort of software modification, so long it's a new wiki. Private wikis are already a thing, so all we would need is consensus to create it. Now private pages on a public wiki would require significant amount on effort (as implied at [6]) so developer time is probably best spent elsewhere. Suffusion of Yellow (talk) 19:16, 20 November 2021 (UTC)
That sounds like a good idea, but still leaves us with the problem of how to handle old logs and discussions. There are a lot of block log entries and similar which have LTA links, and breaking all those in a migration effort is going to create a giant headache of its own. The Blade of the Northern Lights (話して下さい) 23:49, 21 November 2021 (UTC)
A WP:SOFTREDIRECT could be left behind, I guess. Suffusion of Yellow (talk) 23:58, 21 November 2021 (UTC)
That would probably work pretty well, actually. Just as long as the old LTA pages can be easily redirected I could see that being effective; the only thing would be to make sure we find all the shortcuts so those go to the right place too, as much as I want to deny recognition I also don't want to make it unnecessarily difficult to review an unblock request if there happens to be a genuine mistake. The Blade of the Northern Lights (話して下さい) 05:45, 22 November 2021 (UTC)

If you want the pages to only be accessible to admins, you could delete them? DS (talk) 15:56, 29 November 2021 (UTC)

Petition to add Robert Mikelsons to the list of serial rapists

I can't do this since the article is semi-protected, so I'm asking if any user could do it. Mikelsons' exclusion seems like a big hole in the list. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 181.22.80.189 (talk) 20:04, 26 November 2021 (UTC)

Have you raised this issue on the list's talk page? —A little blue Bori v^_^v Jéské Couriano 20:12, 26 November 2021 (UTC)
Yeah, like a month. Nobody answer. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 181.22.80.189 (talk) 20:15, 26 November 2021 (UTC)
It might have helped if you'd posted on the list's talk page, instead of on Portal talk: Coffee and Talk:Main page. DS (talk) 16:05, 29 November 2021 (UTC)

Talk to the Community Tech: The future of the Community Wishlist Survey

Hello!

We, the team working on the Community Wishlist Survey, would like to invite you to an online meeting with us. It will take place on 30 November (Tuesday), 18:00 UTC on Zoom, and will last an hour. Click here to join.

Agenda

  • Changes to the Community Wishlist Survey 2022. Help us decide.
  • Become a Community Wishlist Survey Ambassador. Help us spread the word about the CWS in your community.
  • Questions and answers

Format

The meeting will not be recorded or streamed. Notes without attribution will be taken and published on Meta-Wiki. The presentation (all points in the agenda except for the questions and answers) will be given in English.

We can answer questions asked in English, French, Polish, Spanish, German, and Italian. If you would like to ask questions in advance, add them on the Community Wishlist Survey talk page or send to sgrabarczuk@wikimedia.org.

Natalia Rodriguez (the Community Tech manager) will be hosting this meeting.

Invitation link

We hope to see you! SGrabarczuk (WMF) (talk) 20:03, 26 November 2021 (UTC)

The English banner fundraising campaign starts today

Dear all,

We are launching the Wikimedia Foundation’s annual English banner fundraising campaign later today. This means that if you are not logged into your Wikipedia account and are based in Australia, Canada, Ireland, the UK, the US, or New Zealand, you will see our fundraising banners on Wikipedia. The campaign will be running throughout December but we may adjust impression rates or take the banners down at certain points in December. I will be in touch on a regular basis and provide you all with updates on the campaign and answer any questions that arise here or on the fundraising meta talk page. I am aiming at posting the first update on the 7th of December. In the meanwhile:

  • If you have specific ideas to share, please feel invited to add them to the fundraising meta talk page.
  • If you need to report a bug or technical issue, please create a phabricator ticket.
  • If you see a donor on a talk page, VRT or social media having difficulties in donating, please refer them to donate(at)wikimedia.org

Thank you all very much for your support and understanding during the campaign and thank you for making Wikipedia an incredible resource for everyone.

Best wishes, JBrungs (WMF) (talk) 13:01, 30 November 2021 (UTC)

You can read more about the campaign in this newspiece. JBrungs (WMF) (talk) 06:50, 1 December 2021 (UTC)

Would there be interest in a bot that makes a "watchlist" just for recently-edited pages?

I feel like I've seen requests for this over the years, but the issue is always that it would be prohibitively expensive, API-wise, to have a bot emulating the effects of Special:Watchlist on user subpages. It occurred to me recently, though, that that wouldn't be the case if you just had a bot periodically update a given user subpage with links to pages they've edited recently; Special:RecentChangesLinked for that page would then function identically to a watchlist for those pages, meaning the bot wouldn't have to actually update on each edit. I got this idea after realizing I could use Special:RecentChangesLinked/User:Tamzin/spihelper log to track SPIs I've been involved in. This would be the same principle.

I'm bringing this up here at VPM, rather than VPT, because it's not really a question of how to make it. I already have an idea of how to code the bot in a manner that would pass BRFA, and can explain those details to anyone interested in doing it themself (since I won't have time to for a month or two, probably). What I'd like to know, though, is if this is something that the editor-base at large would be interested in. I know I'd use it, because I'm the kind of person who often checks their contribs and looks for ones that aren't "current", rather than using my watchlist, but I don't know how common a tendency that is. -- Tamzin[cetacean needed] (she/they) 23:07, 1 December 2021 (UTC)

I achieve something similar by watchlisting pages I edit for a week or a month. Sadly, there is no way to make this the default; it is necessary to change the duration from "permanent" to "1 week" manually for each edit. Certes (talk) 23:30, 1 December 2021 (UTC)
That, and also the issue that in practice, you can't have a lot of long-term watched pages without it drowning out those short-term ones. I enjoy having a few thousand permanently-watched pages. When I'm more active, it's nice to check in on them. For instance, I watch some pages that tend to get vandalized every few months in subtle ways that RCPers often miss—low-profile trans and non-binary people's biographies, for instance. But if I'm editing a bit less, and I really just want to keep an eye on any plates I already have spinning, I turn to just monitoring my own contribs, but that system is far from perfect. Hence my interest in the above. Should I consider you someone who'd be interested in this, Certes? -- Tamzin[cetacean needed] (she/they) 23:43, 1 December 2021 (UTC)
Like you, I effectively have two watchlists: one transient (did someone improve or undo my recent contribution? did the vandal I just reverted return?) and one permanent (topics that interest me or are vandal magnets). They're merged on Special:Watchlist, with transients marked by a clock. I keep meaning to add JavaScript to change my watch duration to 1 week by default, but would be interested in alternatives. Certes (talk) 23:53, 1 December 2021 (UTC)
@Certes: follow phab:T25014 for development request for auto-watching edited pages. — xaosflux Talk 00:19, 2 December 2021 (UTC)

Film article with outdated plot vs new plot with flaws

Im came by here and want to ask about a question relating about questioning or objecting if it is correct or wrong on the edit that is once proper but then revert due to copyediting. 122.11.214.200 (talk) 08:16, 27 November 2021 (UTC)

It would help if you asked the question - your statement is vague and unclear as to what exactly you're trying to say. Popperman99 (talk)

Collateral Search Gold

Non-contextual words in a document resulted in a search result from google:

  • Marilyn Monroe comes to visit Einstein (Rutger_Hauer)
  • the search: site:www.uscis.gov/sites/default/files/document/foia/
    • may have things of interest, any idea which talk pages to mention this?
0mtwb9gd5wx (talk) 00:23, 4 December 2021 (UTC)

Low views - recent record

I notice that the overall daily pageviews have not exceeded the 250 million mark since 12 September. This is by far the longest period below that mark since the current stats began in 2015. They are still falling - 222 M for the 10th. Johnbod (talk) 02:36, 12 November 2021 (UTC)

Increased indoor activity likely predicts increased online activity. It seems to roughly peak and trough based on weather temps in the northern hemisphere. Reaching a low around now. This year has been unusually warm on average. As it will go nearly every year, winter/fall/spring are getting shorter from global warming. -- GreenC 04:37, 12 November 2021 (UTC)
This makes no sense at all, even without the obvious contradiction between your first bit and the rest. November is usually one of the busier periods, with a short drop for Thanksgiving. You will find the academic calendar has a bigger effect than temperatures. Johnbod (talk) 00:15, 13 November 2021 (UTC)
30 day moving average, removed weekday/weekend fluctuations. The big spike is March 2020
  • @GreenC and Johnbod: Try a zero-base for the graph to put this in proportion. The results are (right). The English Wikipedia back to 2015 seems fairly constant around 250 million. There's a bit of seasonality with a slight drop in the summer. This year it doesn't seem to be bouncing back so much but it doesn't seem to be a big deal, given the historical volatility. If there's a reason, the pandemic is most likely to be a factor.
Some other languages are shown for comparison. They seem even flatter.
Andrew🐉(talk) 20:04, 14 November 2021 (UTC)
Thanks, but I'm not convinced. This format also makes consistent drops below 250 million easy to spot. Previously, they have been brief, and in high summer (northern). Not so this year, & I don't really see why the pandemic should hit now. The first lockdown wave took us to the highest views of these figures. We shall see. Johnbod (talk) 20:10, 14 November 2021 (UTC)
The pandemic seems to have shaken people out of their rut as the lockdowns, furloughs and layoffs have caused them to change their habits and lifestyle. For example, I was reading today that it's hard to get a taxi now as many drivers have moved on to steadier work. This may have effects on work-related topics. For example, when I checked the readership for an article I wrote – Perfect is the enemy of good – I found that it halved at the weekend – down from 500/day to 250. For another article I wrote – The Great British Bake Off – the readership varies widely during the year, rising dramatically when a new season starts – ranging from 3,000 to 16,000 per day. So, the overall siteviews are a composite of many such different cycles. Andrew🐉(talk) 20:30, 14 November 2021 (UTC)
Andrew, if you hadn't realized how day of the week affected views on work/homework subjects, try Logarithm. Johnbod (talk) 17:49, 20 November 2021 (UTC)
I've uploaded another graph using the siteviews data, adjusted for small-period fluctuations. It does seem that there's been a slight dropoff in traffic compared to previous years, following the massive March 2020 boom due to the pandemic. On another note, I'm a little surprised that WP as one of Top 10 websites online doesn't even get a billion views a day -- are these unique views only? Daß Wölf 17:09, 15 November 2021 (UTC)
Nice job! This entirely confirms my point that previous annual extended lows were in the northern summers. We are now below the 2021 summer low, & apparently heading downwards. Whether you call this a "slight dropoff" is a matter of taste I suppose; just reading off the graph we now seem to be some 20% lower than this time last year. Where next, I wonder? Johnbod (talk) 17:49, 20 November 2021 (UTC)
Thanks. Calling it "slight" might've been an understatement, that's true. The numbers are currently a little lower than the trough of (northern) Summer 2020. I wonder if the causes are similar to the slump in Autumn 2017 that came roughly a year after Brexit and the Trump election, which were both followed by spikes. Was it general fatigue from the 24/7 news cycle, or growth and strengthening beliefs of the luddite crowd? Anti-vaccination protests are currently very popular in my area. Daß Wölf 19:22, 20 November 2021 (UTC)
P.S. I wonder what was behind the October 2019 spike. Daß Wölf 19:22, 20 November 2021 (UTC)
There usually seems to be a post-summer peak, which I generally interpret as "back-to-college with new courses". Oddly, the timing isn't that consistent. But that rise not happening this year is what's odd/worrying. Johnbod (talk) 19:36, 20 November 2021 (UTC)
@Johnbod, Andrew Davidson, and GreenC: Apparently, the Sept/Oct 2019 rise may have been caused by bot traffic, as I've been informed by MKampurath (WMF). There's an indepth analysis at the phabricator [7]. In that case the lower numbers this year are probably a little less worrying. Daß Wölf 18:16, 2 December 2021 (UTC)
Just want to remind anyone looking at this that Correlation does not imply causation and that global warming, outdoor activity, academic calendars, and any other world events may or may not all have a effect on Wikipedia activity. Popperman99 (talk) — Preceding undated comment added 17:05, 3 December 2021 (UTC)
It looks like a WMF analyst is working on a (so far non-public) task to "Investigate declining pageviews" on Wikimedia sites overall (see also), so perhaps there will be an update in the monthly audience metrics report for November.
As noted above, it can be tricky to visually distinguish seasonal ups and downs from more fundamental changes. Short of an actual statistical time series analysis (or using stats software to produce a seasonal decomposition plot [8]), a simple, useful option is to plot the data year-over-year for several years (example).
Regards, HaeB (talk) 13:51, 4 December 2021 (UTC)

Problem with Wikipedia: Requested articles

If one goes to Wikipedia: Requested articles, and clicks on the link "Biography", one will see that most of the names are in red wikilinks. However, today I made a request for an article on Scott Erickson, the visual artist. The link was in blue, because there are already articles on people with that name in Wikipedia. None of these, however, were on the person for whom I am requesting an article. Seeing the link in blue may have confused Wikipedians, as it may have led to people thinking there was already an article on the visual artist called Scott Erickson. How can we stop the problem of unintentional blue wikilinks at Wikipedia: Requested articles?YTKJ (talk) 12:56, 4 December 2021 (UTC)

Maybe qualify the new request as Scott Erickson (artist)? — GhostInTheMachine talk to me 16:37, 4 December 2021 (UTC)

IP's = trolls?

From my experience, iP's making certain edits are a lot more likely to be reverted than a well-established registered user in good standing making the same edits. This is unfair. Just because you're an IP doesn't mean drastic reformulations are bad, worse, incorrect or incomplete. --2A02:AA1:1009:3306:BDA3:4FD1:9B42:F7FD (talk) 18:49, 26 November 2021 (UTC)

Your general premise seems spurious and difficult to prove. I'd be interested to see examples of those reverted good-faith edits that you are mentioning. Generally if an edit is reverted, it is assessed based on the quality of the edit and not of the editor itself. You are also more likely to be reverted if you are editing in a contentious field or a rapidly developing current event. WaltCip-(talk) 17:17, 28 November 2021 (UTC)
@WaltCip: I think it's a significantly more complex then that. On the one hand IP edits, and more generally those by non-ac (and given our increasing complexity often many non-ec) accounts are just flatly more likely to have problems, broken formatting, missing citations, misunderstanding our basic purpose, etc. On the other hand there are edits made by IPs that would not be reverted if an established user made them.
This occurs for a few reasons, first all non-ac edits are more likely to be reviewed, indeed ec editors are essentially invisible to most edit filters, and the more people that see your edit the more likely it is someone will disagree with the change. Second is heuristics, if I'm unsure if an edit is good or bad in an area I'm unfamiliar with I may make the decision of whether or not to revert based solely on the username, because otherwise the time needed to assess will increase sharply. Finally there's the issue of social capital, Wugapodes has written on the topic extensively and can explain it better than I, but in short reverts have a social cost, and that cost depends to a considerable degree on who you are reverting. The social cost of reverting IPs is usually minimal; the user probably doesn't know how to use bring the dispute to the concern of a larger audience, hence you can often make a series of objectively bad reverts without anyone noticing. With someone who's been around a bit the considerations shift, you may have to engage in a talk page conversation, it's more likely the revert will be brought to the attention of a wider audience, and a fair chance the revert will be remembered. With a truly established user you now not only have to concern yourself with how they will respond in the long-term, but also their friends, and if some of those people have +sysop the cost considerations grow further still.
Anyway, I don't know if anyone has tried to tease all these details apart, but it's possible that Whatamidoing (WMF) has some data the WMF has collected on this issue. Regards, 91.221.17.220 (talk) 19:51, 30 November 2021 (UTC)
Largely agree with anon. If you want a sense of good faith IPs getting reverted checkout recent changes filtered to include likely good edits in mainspace made by IPs that were reverted. Includes, for example, this edit adding links to other articles which was reverted with a citation to WP:OVERLINK despite that section having very little to do with what actually got linked. — Wug·a·po·des​ 23:06, 30 November 2021 (UTC)
I don't have data myself, but I remember being told that mw:ORES research evaluated this, and they found that, for whatever details they were measuring, not being logged into a registered account was the strongest predictor of whether an edit would be reverted. @EpochFail would be able to tell you much more. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 19:15, 6 December 2021 (UTC)
We did some analysis around this. See https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3449130 for a paper discussing the effects of algorithmic flagging on revert rates. There's a breakdown for IP editors. I don't think we have a good general assessment of the quality of edits by anonymous editors. But using the dataset that is used to train ORES, we can get a rough approximation. See https://labels.wmflabs.org/campaigns/enwiki/4/?tasks= for the raw data. Edits are labeled as "damaging": true if they caused some harm and "goodfaith": false if the harm appears to be intentional. You'd need to write a script to look up the details of each revision to find out if the editor was anon and the data is from 2015 so it is a little old, but it should be informative. I'll try to find some time to dig around, but someone else please feel free to beat me to it. --EpochFail (talk • contribs) 00:27, 7 December 2021 (UTC)
One other thing worth mentioning is m:Research:Anonymous_phenomena -- a project I proposed but never got the time/resources to complete. Still, there's a good review of some of the discussion of the nature and qualities of anonymous editors in there. --EpochFail (talk • contribs) 00:28, 7 December 2021 (UTC)

MF DOOM

I’m not donating any more money until MF DOOM is spelled properly in all caps on his page. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2600:8801:1B84:AE00:D0EF:76C6:2CBE:7308 (talk) 19:40, 4 December 2021 (UTC)

Replied at Wikipedia:Teahouse#Question. PrimeHunter (talk) 20:38, 4 December 2021 (UTC)
<SSRwork>Read the FAQ. This issue is closed.</SSRwork> —A little blue Bori v^_^v Jéské Couriano 21:24, 11 December 2021 (UTC)

Missing Information on a Wikipedia Page

I’m kinda new here and wasn’t sure how to edit Rose Leslie‘s page correctly, so I decided to just let you guys know, that rose Leslie is also narrating in the audible audiobook: “Carmilla” by Sheridan Le Fanu. If I picked the wrong category to address the issue, please let me know where to point out things like that. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Ruby Glimmberg (talk • contribs) 13:53, 12 December 2021 (UTC)

I'll reply at your talkpage. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 22:45, 12 December 2021 (UTC)

English fundraising banner campaign - update

Dear all,

The first week of our English fundraising banner campaign is behind us and I would like to thank you all for your support and understanding. So far our campaign has run smoothly and we have been trying different messaging in all of our banners to see what resonates most with readers.

Several comments have been left both here and on the talk:fundraising page. We will post comments to those in the next few days.

Hear from the donors:

I am a guest lecturer on cruise ships and turn to Wikipedia for information on the ports and places so I can prepare my PowerPoints and presentations. Without access to Wikipedia my work would be so much harder. And you keep making it better, deeper and more intuitive. (donor from the US)

Yeah 2020 felt like the earths magnetic core finally flipped. I work in icu so I’ve seen more death than usual and you’d b surprised at how much we use Wikipedia for basic info to save lives. We know most stuff but once in awhile we like to refresh or just look up new meds that no one has heard of so in a way ur helping us help society. Thanks for all of it. (donor from the US)

Recently an article about my wife, [...], was put up. We are very, very grateful because she wanted to get a page. I had even started an account with the goal of writing the page when, lo and behold, it appeared one day, once more proving that if I just lay around the house like a no-good husband good things will still happen. We think this effort might be attributable to the Wiki Women in Red campaign." (donor from the US)

In the meanwhile:

  • If you have specific ideas to share, please feel invited to add them to the fundraising meta talk page.
  • If you need to report a bug or technical issue, please create a phabricator ticket.
  • If you see a donor on a talk page, VRT or social media having difficulties in donating, please refer them to donate(at)wikimedia.org

Thank you all very much for your support and understanding during the campaign. I will be in touch again latest by the 22nd of December.

Best wishes, JBrungs (WMF) (talk) 07:57, 8 December 2021 (UTC)

Thank you for thos messages showing people still think they are donating to Wikipedia / enwiki and that their money goes to make the contents better, when in reality it goes to the overbloated and quite rich enough WMF and the costly (and too often problematic) affiliates and grants. Fram (talk) 08:12, 8 December 2021 (UTC)
Financial development of the Wikimedia Foundation (in US$), 2003–2020
Black: Net assets (excluding the Wikimedia Endowment, which currently stands at $100m+)
Green: Revenue (excluding third-party donations to Wikimedia Endowment)
Red: Expenses (including WMF payments to Wikimedia Endowment)
Quite, Fram. Also, speaking of money, the other day I asked User:Jimbo Wales on the mailing list why of the $500k UAE award, which he pledged to the community he would use to launch a human rights foundation (discussion), only about $30,000 ever arrived in the accounts of the Jimmy Wales Foundation, according to its public financial statements, and how he used the rest of the money. It would be good for the community to understand what happened. --Andreas JN466 13:34, 12 December 2021 (UTC)
For those that are interested in such things, there are daily fundraising data here: [9] (cells are separated by commas). According to this file (which is not fully authoritative, but gives a useful indication), takings this calendar year are about $6m down on 2020, but still $20 million higher than 2019.
How times change: In 2013, the Wikimedia Foundation's VP of Engineering and Development said that Wikimedia's mission would be sustainable on $10+ million p.a. Today a Wikimedia fundraising manager reckons a billion a year would not be too much. Clearly, the idea of what the "mission" is has changed significantly, a change that is NOT reflected in the banner wordings. They still beg for money to "protect" or "defend Wikipedia's independence" etc. and make kids who are actually broke feel guilty that they can't donate. --Andreas JN466 13:31, 13 December 2021 (UTC)

Donation pop up

I have donated but not on this device. I has a rather snippy tone I do not care to see after giving. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 73.42.231.26 (talk) 21:15, 11 December 2021 (UTC)

The WMF adds these pop-ups to Wikipedia and receives any resulting donations. The WMF can be contacted at m:Talk:Fundraising. Certes (talk) 21:25, 11 December 2021 (UTC)
If you are unhappy with the tone of the fundraising messages and are on social media, you may want to retweet this tweet (currently at about 2k Likes and 1k retweets) or share a link to one of these articles online:
Thanks, --Andreas JN466 14:10, 12 December 2021 (UTC)
That tweet has to be inaccurate, @Jayen466:. Directors/VPs, no doubt, but I'd be surprised if more than a few percent of either anyone with manager in their job title, or even managerial responsibilities is being paid $400k/year...and that's not what the tweet you're linking to indicates. Nosebagbear (talk) 09:30, 13 December 2021 (UTC)
@Nosebagbear: WMF job titles are funny. Almost everybody is a VP, director, manager or at least "senior". In the linked Daily Dot article it says "Top-tier managers earn $300,000 – $400,000 a year." Katherine was actually earning more than $400,000 when she left, others are indeed between $300,000 – $400,000 a year. I agree it would have been better if Hector had stuck to that wording, but he makes many good points in that thread.
Note that meta:Wikimedia_Foundation_salaries does not include "other" compensation, and the most recent figures are from 2019 and thus two years old. WMF salaries increase at rates well above inflation every year. Seitz-Gruwell's salary for example increased by 50% from 2015 to 2019. Cheers, --Andreas JN466 09:56, 13 December 2021 (UTC)
The best points in the world mean diddly squat if he's chosen to go eye-grabbing rather than be accurate - I now have absolutely no reason to trust everything else is there. And pushing an inaccurate tweet on wikipedia itself is also not advisable. Nosebagbear (talk) 10:01, 13 December 2021 (UTC)
One might argue that the impression the tweet conveys is more accurate than that conveyed by the fundraising banners, but I take your point and have struck above. Cheers, --Andreas JN466 10:07, 13 December 2021 (UTC)
Oh don't get me wrong, the fundraising banners are also not conveying an accurate sense either. Unlike past experience with trying to talk to the fundraising team, Julia is, I would say, more open to communication and change so I would suggest you asking (in January) for a sit-down zoom meeting with her. Nosebagbear (talk) 10:52, 13 December 2021 (UTC)
@Nosebagbear: It's completely hopeless. The decisions are not made by Julia but by the board. The same applies to the fundraising targets, and the fact that the WMF regularly exceeds them (by $46 million in 2020/21). People have moaned to the WMF for a decade now, vainly. The only thing that will effect change, I am convinced, is increased public awareness of the actual state of WMF finances and the actual use of the money, to the point where continuing with these banner texts that mislead people into thinking the WMF is struggling to keep Wikipedia up and running becomes counterproductive.
Incidentally, what do you think of [10]? According to the financials filed, only about $30k of the $500k Wales publicly pledged to use for this human rights foundation ever arrived in the foundation's accounts. I think this should be cleared up and the discrepancy explained (after all, there may well be a reasonable explanation ...); otherwise it will remain as yet another example of doubtful financial honesty at the top of the WMF. I'd ask myself but ... --Andreas JN466 12:52, 13 December 2021 (UTC)

Whether to put common name first or full official name first when it comes to country or political-entity articles

We currently have United States starts with the official name, as the United Kingdom, while having various countries or political-entities start with their common name first. I presume the rationale for full official name would be that the main article title at the top is already the common name, therefore new information takes precedency. However, I'd like to request community's opinion on this since it seems rather incoherent throughout the site. Lolitart (talk) 10:06, 14 November 2021 (UTC)

Not sure what examples are but I don't think there are any issues with that. You probably want to read WP:COMMONNAME. There is consensus on that already. It takes precedence. AXONOV (talk) ⚑ 15:55, 14 November 2021 (UTC)
Arguable not a case for common name which only concerns the article title. The question is since the common name is already at the top of the page, it seems more reasonable, as in the case of United States and United Kingdom, to use the full name to open the paragraph as that provides more information, but I'm uncertain if there is a consensus about that as many other articles begin the paragraph with common name as well. Lolitart (talk) 00:10, 15 November 2021 (UTC)

Reverted edit about foreign spin-off movies

Hi can someone please tell me why my edit on the page about the Fast & Furious film series was reverted? It doesn't really have to be a national movie with some of the same characters from the series to be considered a spin-off movie. Foreign remakes can also be considered spin-off movies. Take a look at this example: Step Up (franchise). There's a Chinese remake of this American film series named Step Up: Year of the Dance. It's a Chinese remake that doesn't have anything to do with the American films, but it's still considered a spin-off movie. Karamellpudding1999 (talk) 07:52, 14 December 2021 (UTC)

A spin-off is something that the franchise creates, it must be 'official' or at least by the same creators. Similar(ly named) productions by 3rd parties without authorization are plagiarisms, spoofs, ... --Zac67 (talk) 08:03, 14 December 2021 (UTC)
I don't think that the films in the Børning-trilogies are plagiarisms. I think it's Norwegian remakes of the nine films from the Fast & Furious film series, the Hobbs & Shaw spin-off and the TV-series Fast & Furious Spy Racers. Karamellpudding1999 (talk) 08:28, 14 December 2021 (UTC)
I'd call those spoofs or parodies – comedic imitation of the same theme. It's only a remake when it uses the same story (same base novel, screenplay, ...) – while the stories are somewhat generic, they don't seem to be copied right away. --Zac67 (talk) 12:10, 14 December 2021 (UTC)

Update on Annual Fund Campaign

Dear all,

I wanted to give you a quick update on our annual fundraiser. We have been seeing all your valuable feedback here as well as on our Fundraising Talk Page on Meta and very much appreciate it, in particular, your suggestions for improvement. There are quite a few aspects we would like to take forward and will do so in the next couple of days.

As of Friday, December 17th, 4pm PST (midnight UTC) we will be pausing our Annual Fund banners and we plan to come back with Endowment banners next week, Monday, December 20th. In the meantime, we are working on improvements based on the feedback we’ve received.

We hope that this will significantly lighten the burden of the volunteers who have been so patiently helping readers and donors across English Wikipedia. Thank you very much for all your work!

We will post another update on the campaign by mid-next week. Best wishes, Ppena (WMF) (talk) 20:13, 17 December 2021 (UTC)

If the feedback is valuable then why not reply to it, rather than post a content-free statement here? Why is it that nobody from the WMF can reply to anything in a timely manner? I'm more than ever convinced of what I have said before about the speed of action of the WMF. Phil Bridger (talk) 20:43, 17 December 2021 (UTC)
Thank you for pausing. The feedback I have seen definitely suggests that donors are under the mistaken impression that they are donating to Wikipedia, and that the Wikipedia community initiated, or at least has some say in, the advertisements. Certes (talk) 23:05, 17 December 2021 (UTC)
@Ppena (WMF): You say you're "working on improvements based on the feedback," but I see no substantial differences between the donation banners as they are now and the ones that were up a few days ago, certainly nothing that appears to have been changed in response to feedback here and on other Wikipedia/Wikimedia discussion pages.
Could you describe, clearly and specifically, what "improvements" were made based on the feedback? 2600:387:F:4333:0:0:0:2 (talk) 17:55, 20 December 2021 (UTC)

Is there interest in an RfC to disable centralnotice banners

On meta:Talk:Fundraising, Elli floated the idea of an RfC to disable the fundraising banners. Is there interest in such an RfC? It would surely be difficult to get anything done quickly enough for it to matter, with Christmas looming; on the other hand, it might have symbolic value and be instructive even for many Wikipedians who are unaware of just how much the WMF's money demands have increased, and how much the perception created by the banners is at odds with the financial realities (I estimate the WMF currently has $350 million to $400 million in cash, short-term and long-term investments, including the Endowment. In 2020/2021, it had a roughly $50 million surplus of revenue over expenses, but still went to South American countries hard hit by Covid, saying it needed money.) --Andreas JN466 11:49, 21 December 2021 (UTC)

As I've mentioned there, I'd certainly support such an RfC, though I am not exactly sure about the technical implementation. Certainly something symbolic would be appropriate to show our community's disapproval. The WMF plasters our site with obnoxious banners guilting our readers into giving money they often cannot spare, while pretending they're in dire straits as an organization when the reality could not be further from the truth. Would it be good to collect some donations? Sure, but not like this. If the WMF insists on deceptive and obnoxious fundraising banners, then I think we should seriously consider taking actions as a community to prevent them from being displayed. Elli (talk | contribs) 11:55, 21 December 2021 (UTC)
Thanks. Kusma raised the idea, also on meta:Talk:Fundraising, of putting up sitenotices countering any misleading fundraising banners. This might actually be easier to implement, and could arguably be viewed as an attempt to implement WP:NPOV. As regards some of the banners currently shown, for example, it might be worth pointing out that the Endowment contains well over $100 million (the Foundation does not give timely updates on the exact amount) already, and reached its $100 million target five years early. --Andreas JN466 12:06, 21 December 2021 (UTC)
Probably needs to be an anonnotice, as logged in editors aren't shown the terrible begging. People should only donate to the WMF if that doesn't impact their ability to donate to causes that need money in the next 50 years. —Kusma (talk) 12:15, 21 December 2021 (UTC)
Right now I don't see any fundraising banners, even when logged out. Anyone else see any right now? --Andreas JN466 13:29, 21 December 2021 (UTC)

(edit conflict)

  • @WaltCip and Xaosflux: That in itself, surely, is not a reason not to have an RfC. It would be about making a statement that we feel the tone and messaging of the fundraising banners are not compatible with Wikipedia's fundamental reason for being: to reflect facts as accurately as possible, and to counter misconceptions and fake news, rather than actively spreading them. This is a longstanding problem, with the same concerns recurring year after year (see e.g. the quotes in this Signpost piece from 2015) so I feel fairly confident we'll have the same or similar conversations again next year unless more is done. As for banner visibility for logged-in users, I think I am correct in saying that this year, logged-in users were not shown any banners, regardless of their preferences set-up. --Andreas JN466 17:51, 21 December 2021 (UTC)

What's an article that obtained FA while in progress?

In progress here can mean under construction, running in office, etc. I want to use that to see what can I improve on the article SpaceX Starship - in-dev launch vehicle. The closer topic of the article to Starship the better, but I don't mind that too much. CactiStaccingCrane (talk) 15:34, 21 December 2021 (UTC)

Are you asking whether we have a featured article about something (such as a product or a project) that is still in development? Blueboar (talk) 15:52, 21 December 2021 (UTC)
Yup, exactly. CactiStaccingCrane (talk) 15:53, 21 December 2021 (UTC)
Hmmm… a quick look at the “Engineering and Technology” section at WP:FA indicates that we do not have any FAs that would help. They all seem to be about historical projects and products (etc) that have moved beyond the “in development” stage. Blueboar (talk) 16:06, 21 December 2021 (UTC)
This is difficult... I will try to make the article looks like one of these FAs, and make it modular to be appended while in progress. Let's be the first then :) CactiStaccingCrane (talk) 16:09, 21 December 2021 (UTC)
It would be difficult (but maybe not impossible) for an article to pass Featured article criteria 1b and 1e, that the article should be comprehensive and stable, if it was about such a topic. Phil Bridger (talk) 16:32, 21 December 2021 (UTC)
Hmmm, this is interesting, since in its last two FAC, the article failed 1e not because the subject is changing, but due to the article not being complete. CactiStaccingCrane (talk) 16:36, 21 December 2021 (UTC)
John McCain was promoted to FA in August 2008, while he was running for president, but I don't think that would be possible anymore. Barack Obama was promoted in 2004 (before being delisted earlier this year), Hillary Clinton in 2014, and it's not unusual to see athletes or coaches promoted during their active careers. I will note a FAC occurring during the middle of a major, ongoing event that could substantially change article content (think a major presidential candidate, or an ongoing sports season) would be unlikely to pass, and I've seen several athlete FAs have to go to FAR because they weren't kept up after promotion. Generally, things that are not "settled" or are actively changing don't make good FAC candidates. Hog Farm Talk 20:49, 22 December 2021 (UTC)
Closest thing that comes to mind is Ubinas and other topics that are being actively researched upon. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 21:19, 22 December 2021 (UTC)
Thanks! I will take a look at their FAC, and see what I can learn from it. CactiStaccingCrane (talk) 00:11, 23 December 2021 (UTC)

Writing about statistics

Do we have any existing page (even an article) that explains how to write about statistics/percentages, and specifically a page that explains that "10% as likely" is not even remotely the same thing as "10% more likely"? WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:41, 22 December 2021 (UTC)

Honestly, I've never found a mathematics-related topic on Wikipedia that's written in a comprehensible manner. Basic things about statistics like parametric model are a mixture of garbled verbiage and verbal garbage, I get maybe a few sentences in before I find myself begging to read at least one sentence that even vaguely resembles the English language. I say that because I don't know of any such page, and if someone creates one I'm sure it'd be written well enough that some of it could be adapted to fit a mainspace article. The Blade of the Northern Lights (話して下さい) 16:53, 22 December 2021 (UTC)
Doesn't that fall under basic competence of the English language? Anyway, broadly relevant: Misuse of statistics. -- zzuuzz (talk) 19:44, 22 December 2021 (UTC)
I'm asking because of Sex differences in medicine. Search for the word "times", which appears in both the "times as" and "times more" constructions. Without looking, I automatically suspect that half of them are wrong. WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:47, 22 December 2021 (UTC)
There are many wrong or misrepresented numbers on Wikipedia, but it's not looking too wrong to me. I haven't checked every reference. Most occurrences use the 'times more than' construction. The other says, "1.4 times as common" - the reference for that says "risk ratio 1.4:1", and seems unambiguous. The "times more than" is somewhat debateable. "Two times more than" could either mean twice (2n) or thrice (n + 2n), however I think in common usage (outside of straight math(s)), it is commonly understood to mean the former. It may not be ideal language due to its ambiguity, a bit lazy but not overly wrong, and of course we sometimes just quote the sources. I'm sure WP:RDL would have something for you. -- zzuuzz (talk) 23:43, 22 December 2021 (UTC)
Until I corrected it yesterday, the "1.4 times" sentence said "1.4 times more common".
I think that "Two times more than" means (n + 2n), because "10% more than" means (n + .1n), and it would be basically innumerate to say that "110% more than" means exactly the same as just "10% more than". People in the real world might be sloppy, but we shouldn't be. WhatamIdoing (talk) 08:20, 23 December 2021 (UTC)
I congratulate you if you're improving this stuff. I'll wager that half the time you're going to trace this to the original source. Going back to the original question, I haven't seen anything addressing this. Wikipedia:Times more than would make for a good (if perhaps niche) essay. It could also be used to address "n times less than", which I've noticed has become strangely more common recently, and seems even more weird. -- zzuuzz (talk) 09:14, 23 December 2021 (UTC)
Many people don't understand that it is weird. It would be better where possible to use absolute numbers rather than percentages or "times" because a lot of otherwise reasonably intelligent people, including the journalists and others who write our sources, just don't understand such relative numbers. For example, many people don't understand that taking a test with a high reliability percentage for a very rare disease can lead you to get a result saying that you are tested to have the disease but it is, in fact, much more likely that you do not. That follows from the math(s), but most people don't do it and assume that they are probably ill. Phil Bridger (talk) 09:57, 23 December 2021 (UTC)
I wonder if we should re-write these as natural numbers, e.g., "Fourteen men for every ten women".
@Zzuuzz, I have been seeing this in news/media sources for years. I don't remember seeing it in a scientific paper, but perhaps I just haven't noticed it before. WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:08, 24 December 2021 (UTC)

Upcoming Call for Feedback about the Board of Trustees elections

You can find this message translated into additional languages on Meta-wiki.
More languages • Please help translate to other languages.

The Board of Trustees is preparing a call for feedback about the upcoming Board Elections, from January 7 - February 10, 2022.

While details will be finalized the week before the call, we have confirmed at least two questions that will be asked during this call for feedback:

  • What is the best way to ensure fair representation of emerging communities among the Board?
  • What involvement should candidates have during the election?

While additional questions may be added, the Movement Strategy and Governance team wants to provide time for community members and affiliates to consider and prepare ideas on the confirmed questions before the call opens. We apologize for not having a complete list of questions at this time. The list of questions should only grow by one or two questions. The intention is to not overwhelm the community with requests, but provide notice and welcome feedback on these important questions.

Do you want to help organize local conversation during this Call?

Contact the Movement Strategy and Governance team on Meta, on Telegram, or via email at msg(_AT_)wikimedia.org.

Reach out if you have any questions or concerns. The Movement Strategy and Governance team will be minimally staffed until January 3. Please excuse any delayed response during this time. We also recognize some community members and affiliates are offline during the December holidays. We apologize if our message has reached you while you are on holiday.

Best,

Movement Strategy and Governance

Thank you. Xeno (WMF) (talk) 20:12, 27 December 2021 (UTC)

English Fundraising banner campaign - further update

Dear all,

We are entering the last phase of the English banner fundraising campaign and banners are scheduled to be removed from Wikipedia on the 31st of December. While we will have part of the fundraising team working through the end of the year, many of our colleagues, including me, are taking time off between now and the first weeks of January. Please bear with us as we reply to any questions or comments here or on the fundraising meta talk page in mid-January.

Some updates on the banners:

Last week, we lowered the number of banners a reader/IP address sees from 10 banners to 6.  Banners are no longer shown for people who have already donated, closed a banner, or seen 6 banners. We are currently showing banners on less than half of the eligible pageviews in the campaign countries for these reasons. Banners are not being shown to logged in readers, as has been the set up for many years. We are planning to disable banners from the 23rd to the 27th of December. Similar to past years, we will run our final end of year reminder with the Endowment banners, between December 27th through the 31st.

The team has received valuable feedback from volunteers during the campaign. One suggestion was to include a message on the confirmation donor thank you page about how to disable banners across multiple devices. We are currently monitoring the response to this new message on the page. Thank you for this great idea to improve the reading experience for our donors. We have also adjusted banner messaging (e.g. removed the sentence including the number of fundraising banners we’ve shown). The team continues to incorporate feedback and work on improvements for our donors in the last few days we have left of the campaign.  

At this time of year, we receive thousands of notes from readers and donors. Please take a look at a few of these notes:

My £21 donation to Wiki P.

so learning's available for folks like me

Includes the 80p admin fee.

With appreciation to you Jimm ee…

(Donor from the UK)

Just wanted to let you know that I increased my donation from a one-time donation to a monthly donation based on your team. After making my initial donation, I asked how I could avoid being asked again each time I accessed your site. I received a quick and very helpful response, to which I replied with a thank you, and received a follow up “glad we could help” message. Now I know you don’t just provide a great website, but great customer service. And great customer service is a rarity these days! Thank you, Wikipedia, and Happy Holidays to you and your staff

(Donor from the US)

Thank you for your kind words of gratitude for such a small donation.

I do look up Wikipedia from time to time and it would be a real shame not to have this wonderful resource available at our fingertips.

What a legacy you have created, founding Wikipedia 20 years ago. I hope you and your staff enjoy your 20th year celebration and I hope there are many more years to come.

You should be very proud of your and your staffs achievements.

(Donor from Australia)

In the meanwhile:

  • If you have specific ideas to share, please feel invited to add them to the fundraising meta talk page.
  • If you need to report a bug or technical issue, please create a phabricator ticket.
  • If you see a donor on a talk page, VRT or social media having difficulties in donating, please refer them to donate(at)wikimedia.org

Thank you all very much for your support and understanding during the campaign. We realise there has been pressure on volunteers monitoring the Teahouse and the Helpdesk these past weeks and we are very thankful to all of you who patiently responded to donor questions, complaints, and feedback.

I will be in touch again briefly at the start of January.

Best wishes, JBrungs (WMF) (talk) 13:56, 22 December 2021 (UTC)

Hey look, another bunch of people paying the WMF and thanking Wikipedia. It's almost as if they believe that the banners they see on Wikipedia go directly to fund Wikipedia, and not to fund the organisation behind it which does many, many things, some of them even beneficial for Wikipedia! And of course, all of them believing that their donations are needed to keep Wikipedia running. As if... Fram (talk) 14:14, 22 December 2021 (UTC)

This seems to be a common confusion, which I once shared. A clear statement somewhere discoverable that Wikipedia's content is written and maintained by an unpaid volunteer community might help. The start of "Other areas of Wikipedia" on the main page could be a good place. Certes (talk) 15:27, 22 December 2021 (UTC)
What is also needed is more public awareness of WMF finances. At $350+ million in total funds, the Foundation is richer than ever. Suggestions? --Andreas JN466 16:43, 22 December 2021 (UTC)
Hiring a few developers to address some long-standing technical requests might reduce that to $349m. Every little helps. Certes (talk) 17:01, 22 December 2021 (UTC)
how about putting a box with a link to the latest WMF financial statements on the main page? --Andreas JN466 18:07, 22 December 2021 (UTC)
@Fram and Certes: well, can't hurt to ask:Talk:Main_Page#How_about_a_temporary_box_with_WMF_financial_information_this_month --Andreas JN466 18:43, 22 December 2021 (UTC)
Never mind "common", it's a universal confusion among the people I know in real life (unless I disabuse them of the notion). We need to get the hell rid of these banners ourselves, as the WMF will never do so. The comment by JBrungs (WMF) above selects three positive messages and ignores all of the devastating messages we receive onwiki by people guilty about the small scale of their donations because they're in poverty but think Wikipedia is at risk of financial collapse. I can only assume the WMF catches wind of this feedback too. Fram is right on the money. Wikipedia is on the verge of collapse, but through lack of volunteers, due in some part to how the WMF treats us—as Fram understands more than almost anybody. — Bilorv (talk) 11:23, 24 December 2021 (UTC)
Few editors have anything good to say about the banners. They're symptoms of the WMF's scope creep from service provider to owner and controller. However, having been foolish enough to hand over our trademark and domain name, I'm not sure what we can do. I almost took a wikibreak from 30 Nov to 31 Dec, with a user page notice explaining why. I decided against that, as its slight effect would hurt readers and colleagues but be invisible to WMF members. An RfC on the community's opinion on the campaign might or might not have any effect. Wikipedia rightly avoids "this house applauds/condemns..." motions, but there may be a valid case to ignore all rules. Certes (talk) 16:26, 24 December 2021 (UTC)
Wikipedia rightly avoids "this house applauds/condemns..." motions It sure feels like Parliament around here sometimes. WaltCip-(talk) 14:52, 25 December 2021 (UTC)
  • I'm less cynical about the WMF's desire to create an endowment than some others here—it's a valid, forward-looking way to ensure an institution can carry on its mission in perpetuity. But I can't help but notice that in both the U.S. and Australia examples above, the donor referred to "you and your staff". That's yet more evidence affirming Bilorv's view that donors think they're supporting the contributors behind Wikipedia, rather than the support organization. The language of the fundraising banner doesn't just allow that misinterpretation to persist, but I suspect actively reinforces it.
    JBrungs (WMF), please recognize that when you share these examples of donors thinking they're supporting Wikipedia editing and celebrate their comments, that's not how it comes across to us. From our end, what we see is people thinking they're giving to us, but we're not actually getting that money, and we're not feeling enough of its impact.
    On feeling its impact, yes, the WMF is doing lots of good work in some areas, but the community has put in a lot of effort to make very clear what our priorities are—addressing more than a tiny fraction of wishlist items, for instance, or responding when we shout about issues like WP:THEYCANTHEARYOU—and they're not being met, while instead we're seeing things that no one in the community asked for like the foundation renaming getting top priority. There's also really not any sort of large-scale effort to channel the foundation's resources back to the community in ethically permitted ways—project grants affect only a tiny number of editors, there's no established pipeline from community volunteers to WMF jobs, Wikimania scholarships are hit or miss (compared to "we'll pay full ride for every admin or similarly established editor (e.g. 6 months/2500 edits/25 edits in the last month/not blocked) who wants to attend, as it's the least we can do"), and the T-shirt giveaway program is virtually unknown (you could afford to offer every established editor a T-shirt or similar as a holiday gift, and to do the same every year).
    So in short, the main reason you're encountering constant grumbles about these fundraising banners is not just that editors don't understand endowments (some of us do), but rather that the community is angry that the WMF is not allocating resources in ways that support us. When you report up to the C suite folks about how the fundraising this year went, I hope you talk about the allocation concerns and make it clear that addressing them would help, not just reduce to "we got the normal pushback from some in the community who don't understand why we want an endowment". {{u|Sdkb}} talk 23:26, 27 December 2021 (UTC)
    Well said. I don't think anyone is against raising the funds needed to run Wikipedia and similar projects and maintain a prudent surplus. The endowment, whilst contentious, is not unreasonable. The problem we see is excessive sums being begged to feed an allegedly starving Wikipedia then squandered elsewhere, year after year. Certes (talk) 00:39, 28 December 2021 (UTC)
    Agreed, Sdkb. Sometimes it feels like the additional money the WMF has at its disposal just buys more highly-paid employees (who have never added one byte to Wikipedia or any other Wikimedia project and never would) who then, without consulting the community, come up with grand, but obviously flawed ideas (Knowledge Engine, rebranding, Universal Code of Conduct, human rights policy ...) they try to ram down everyone's throats ... rather than doing the down-to-earth stuff the community tells them is actually needed. The downside of having too much money ... it attracts the wrong people.
    The WMF reported a "Salaries, other compensation and employee benefits" total of $55,634,913 for a total of 291 employees in its most recent, 2019 Form 990, yielding an average of $191,000 per employee. Compare this cost per employee to the equivalent figures for:
    Moreover, the salaries and wages total reported by the WMF has increased by an annual 20% for the three most recent years we have records for. Various individuals have had salary increases of 50% and more in the space of four years. All of this relies on funding from people who were made to believe by your fundraising banners that you were running out of money to keep Wikipedia online. This has to stop.
    If you want to expand your paid staff, tell the public in which areas this expansion is to take place, and what the benefit will be. Don't claim to be "super-efficient" if your employees are earning two to three times what people in comparable nonprofits take home. --Andreas JN466 18:17, 28 December 2021 (UTC)
    Please be fair to the WMF. You can't expect people raking in over $191,000 per annum to get their hands dirty by talking to mere volunteer editors, so each one needs someone on below $191,000 to take care of their communication with us. Phil Bridger (talk) 19:03, 28 December 2021 (UTC)
    Mean averages are often misleading, due to massive income inequality between levels of the hierarchy. It's really the upper management that we're going to be concerned about as the wrong type of people, and these will be the people making more than average. I am happy that the WMF were able to, so far as I've heard, furlough and give fair treatment to all employees when COVID-19 restrictions have impeded the WMF's normal functioning. However, they need to adopt a maximum wage cap at, say, double the lowest-earning employee's salary (and progressively lower it from there until it's at a 1:1 ratio). If you don't like that then either you're not in your job for the right reasons, or the lowest-earning employee is not making enough money to live on. We all volunteer here for $0 per annum, some of us more than 40 hours per week. — Bilorv (talk) 11:03, 30 December 2021 (UTC)

Need help to the discussion on List of Taiwanese inventions and discoveries

Hi all.

I guess there is some deadlock on the talk page of List of Taiwanese inventions and discoveries. We need some help especially editors who are familiar with Political status of Taiwan.

In brief, an editor added Bopomofo in the list for its inventor is a citizen of Republic of China, which is formally named Taiwan. However, some Taiwanese editor don't agree the editing because Bopomofo was published in 1918 while Taiwan is still under the rule of Japan. The inventor of Bopomofo is not a Taiwanese yet, though he came to Taiwan with the government of Republic of China in 1949. We think the definition of "Taiwanese" is better if only included citizen of Republic of China since 1945 or 1949 (more similar as the definition of article Taiwanese people, or it could make some problem (for example, if Mao Zedong invited something before 1949, that would be a Taiwanese invention). But the original editor like since 1912 more because he thinks the ROC which is named Taiwan also today is the same country as the ROC before. Now that a citizen of ROC today is Taiwanese, it no reason to a citizen of ROC before 1945 can't be seen as a Taiwanese.

The same debate also happen on Chinese Wikipedia. A third part editor renamed (moved) the article to "List of inventions and discoveries of Taiwan in post-war period" then ended the debate. However I understand there are different rule between Wikipedia in different languages, maybe it not work in here. However, to ask some third part opinion may be helpful.--Reke (talk) 07:29, 31 December 2021 (UTC)

RfC: NFTs on the List of most expensive artworks by living artists

Hey folks! Sharing here a discussion on the List of most expensive artworks by living artists, specifically at Talk:List_of_most_expensive_artworks_by_living_artists#RfC:_Categorizing_NFT_sales_in_the_list_of_most_expensive_artworks_by_living_artists. Working through the question of whether NTFs (or NFT art) should be included in this list. If anyone has thoughts or comments, would appreciate additional input! SiliconRed (talk) 22:08, 31 December 2021 (UTC)

English fundraising banner campaign ended

Dear all,

The English fundraising campaign banners came down yesterday and are now no longer shown for non logged in users. We would like to thank all of you for your support, patience and understanding during the last month.

It is thanks to your support that we are able to sustain Wikipedia and the Wikimedia projects.

Many of our colleagues will be taking the next week off so any questions you might post here or on the fundraising meta talk page will not be answered until mid-January.

Thank you again.

Best wishes, JBrungs (WMF) (talk) 10:09, 1 January 2022 (UTC)

Well, at least we can get on with editing the encyclopedia now, without the distraction of dealing with people who are irate at the hectoring tone of these banners. The only question is whether the WMF will learn from their mistakes. That would seem unlikely as it has never happened before, and I'm sure that the campaign will be adjudged a success because it raised lots of money, without taking into account the enormous amount of bad feeling that it has caused. Phil Bridger (talk) 19:39, 1 January 2022 (UTC)
I suspect it's lost us a few potential editors who inferred that donations pay for writing Wikipedia. It's a question of whether to prioritise improving an encyclopedia or increasing the cash pile, and our views may not coincide with the WMF's. Certes (talk) 20:04, 1 January 2022 (UTC)
@JBrungs (WMF), a reply to my comment or some of the others above would have been appreciated. But if that won't be forthcoming, it would at the very least be nice if your message here had acknowledged, even tacitly, that there is substantial community discontent with the fundraising banners. Pretending otherwise by referring to our "support, patience and understanding" doesn't magically will that reality into being—it just makes us feel like the WMF is not listening to us (which, I have to note, is precisely the issue of concern above), creating further animosity. {{u|Sdkb}} talk 07:16, 2 January 2022 (UTC)

Category:Living people by year deletion for overcategorization

Anyone want to tackle nominating this category and its sub-categories for deletion as Wikipedia:Overcategorization when there is already Category:Living people and xxxx births. Thanks. --Bamyers99 (talk) 22:16, 1 January 2022 (UTC)

Although there currently appears to be duplication of categories in the articles so categorized, why is this not better than having separate categories on the page for Category:Living people and year of birth? BD2412 T 22:53, 1 January 2022 (UTC)
Having everybody in Category:Living people is useful to some features to help enforce Wikipedia:Biographies of living persons. MediaWiki:Common.js uses it to automatically make edit url's like https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=50_Cent&action=edit&editintro=Template:BLP_editintro on 50 Cent, displaying {{BLP editintro}} to editors. Searches can add incategory:"living people" to find biographies which should be BLP compliant. All current subcategories of Category:Living people by year were created yesterday by Jph, apparently without a discussion. That seems a little too bold for something that would require around a million new categorizations if applied to all of Category:Living people. PrimeHunter (talk) 15:28, 2 January 2022 (UTC)

 Done Nominated: Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Log/2022 January 2#Category:Living people by year --Bamyers99 (talk) 19:27, 2 January 2022 (UTC)

It is possible to delete a deletion tag from an article

See Special:Diff/1063886411. Simply removing a } will delete the tag from the article without the abuse filter noticing.

This is a bugfix request not a tip to other editors, I can't find where to report bugs and it isn't really that related to WMF so I'm putting it here. Anpang01 (talk) 12:16, 5 January 2022 (UTC)

@Anpang01: this doesn't seem to be a software "bug", and it isn't a "delete" action - it is just an edit, and by default all edits are allowed. The AbuseFilter tries to warn or stop certain edits, but it isn't perfect. It seems you may have found a possible "false negative" in an abuse filter, and those happen (it is generally better to allow a false negative than to block a good edit) - and though it is a FN and not a FP - feel free to report it over at Wikipedia:Edit filter/False positives (be sure to note it is a FN and which filter you expect should have tripped - or may need adjustment). — xaosflux Talk 14:35, 5 January 2022 (UTC)

Do we have a list of sub-projects?

I'd like to have a comprehensive directory of things a new wikipedian could get involved in if they want to do more than just write content but don't know what's available or needed. I started User:RoySmith/How can I help?, but I don't want to invest a lot of effort if it's just duplicating something that already exists. Please feel free to add entries, and if this ever reaches any kind of critical mass, I'll move it into WP space. -- RoySmith (talk) 15:54, 5 January 2022 (UTC)

RoySmith, I wrote something (somewhat) similar a while ago, albeit focused on new users – User:Giraffer/TFNUTD. Feel free to steal some stuff from there if it would help. Giraffer (not) 18:00, 8 January 2022 (UTC)

Wiki Loves Folklore is back!

Please help translate to other languages.

You are humbly invited to participate in the Wiki Loves Folklore 2022 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.

You can also organize a local contest in your country and support us in translating the project pages to help us spread the word in your native language.

Feel free to contact us on our project Talk page if you need any assistance.

Kind regards,

Wiki loves Folklore International Team

--MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 13:14, 9 January 2022 (UTC)

Wikicontest of the month Oceania

Hello,

I organized with two colleagues the wikicontest of the Month Oceania (https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikip%C3%A9dia:Mois_oc%C3%A9anien_Wikip%C3%A9dia/2021) on the French version of wikipedia which took place in December 2021. It is now over. I would like to know if a Wikipedian living in a country in Oceania would agree to send from his country of residence, postcards in the colors of the competition. It would be a nice nod to the three competition winners who will soon be named. All the costs of printing these postcards and sending them will be covered by the Wikimedia France association. Concretely, the Wikipedian would receive in his mailbox the postcards already printed. He would just have to write the address on the back, place a stamp there that he would buy and then drop them off at the post office. The purchase of stamps for France or any other country of residence of the winners would of course be reimbursed.

Would anyone be interested?

--Girart de Roussillon (talk) 22:17, 9 January 2022 (UTC)

Metadata

So my question is basically for my understanding of what metadata means that means the right to violate privacy then I give us a company or organization government whoever the right to violate someone's privacy am I correct to assume have to excuse me my phone is not acting correctly but obviously been Meta Meta data didn't know that I was being mad at it but anyways and I know more enjoy your most people know don't know that they're being actually violated from their privacy but anyways is that's what this means metadata can somebody please answer that for me — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2601:447:C000:4F50:6532:B7A1:B6D9:A641 (talk) 04:49, 11 January 2022 (UTC)

See Metadata. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 09:56, 11 January 2022 (UTC)

Feminism and Folklore 2022

Please help translate to other languages.

Greetings! You are invited to participate in Feminism and Folklore 2022 writing competion. This year Feminism and Folklore will focus on feminism, women biographies and gender-focused topics for the project in league with Wiki Loves Folklore gender gap focus with folk culture theme on Wikipedia.

You can help us in enriching the folklore documentation on Wikipedia from your region by creating or improving articles focused 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 organizing the contest on your local Wikipedia by signing up your community to participate in this project and also 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. Feel free to contact us on our talk page or via Email if you need any assistance...

Thank you.

Feminism and Folklore Team,

Tiven2240 --05:49, 11 January 2022 (UTC)

IPA reader

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T298950

I've been impressed by this website which takes IPA (e.g. /ˈbɜːrmɪŋəm/) as input, and pronounces it. Could we do something similar? Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 19:27, 10 January 2022 (UTC)

@Pigsonthewing, that's very cool! There is an audio option with the IPA template, but it's only used occasionally (e.g. here). A tool that could create a pronunciation every time would be much better! Looking at the blog post from the developer of that website, they write I spend a lot of time on Wikipedia so they might be amenable to helping us out, but the tool relies on Amazon Polly, which I doubt is open source. Still probably worth reaching out to see what they say. Cheers, {{u|Sdkb}} talk 20:31, 10 January 2022 (UTC)
  • The use of IPA should not be encouraged because pronunciations are neither constant nor standard in English. For example, see recent research showing significant variation in the pronunciation of simple words like "last" and "three". The use of IPA itself is also not standard. And, in my experience, the supposed pronuciations given in article leads are usually OR. As an example, see J. K. Rowling. This gives two supposed pronunciations (/ˈroʊlɪŋ/ ROH-ling) but cites a source which actually says that it's pronounced "rolling". It's like WP:CITEVAR and WP:ENGVAR so Let's Call the Whole Thing Off! Andrew🐉(talk) 21:04, 10 January 2022 (UTC)
    • That would be a big shift. If you want to propose that, I'd do it in its own dedicated thread. {{u|Sdkb}} talk 21:23, 10 January 2022 (UTC)
    • {{IPA}} has 119696 transclusions; i think that means there is pretty clear consensus to include it. Your Rowling does indeed have two instances, but they are inaccessible to anyone who cannot read IPA. If we are going to include them, we should do so in the most accessible manner possible. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 22:24, 10 January 2022 (UTC)
    For common English words, this is more an issue for Wiktionary. But given that English orthography is about as phonemic as Chinese (sometimes, the spelling tells you how to pronounce a word, sometimes it doesn't), pronunciations should be given for English names wherever possible, and IPA is the most standardised way to do so (I have no idea why you would claim otherwise). Reading IPA isn't easy, though, so adding audio is an excellent suggestion. —Kusma (talk) 11:39, 11 January 2022 (UTC)
Thank you. I've reached out to the author and invited her to join the discussion here. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 22:28, 10 January 2022 (UTC)

I've created a task for this topic, at Phabricator. Link above. Please feel free to add useful notes or links, etc, there. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 10:06, 11 January 2022 (UTC)

@Pigsonthewing, this exchange might be relevant to the license question. {{u|Sdkb}} talk 21:39, 12 January 2022 (UTC)

Does anyone remember a game that was deleted from the play store around 2016-2015?

Its name was The Quest and it was a retro pixel game with the icon resembling a pixelated knight holding a sword upwards. I really need a link or something. It was a really fun game (For me at least) and I have seen no articles so if anyone knows ANYTHING about this please edit a reply, I want to make a wiki for The Quest but I need more information then I already know. I think there was more than one character in the game. LeggoMyEggoNOW (talk) 20:08, 12 January 2022 (UTC)

@LeggoMyEggoNOW This sort of question should be asked at Wikipedia:Reference desk. The Village pump is for questions related to Wikipedia itself. --Ahecht (TALK
PAGE) 21:30, 12 January 2022 (UTC)

Community Wishlist Survey 2022

The Community Wishlist Survey 2022 is now open!

This survey is the process where communities decide what the Community Tech team should work on over the next year. We encourage everyone to submit proposals until the deadline on 23 January, or comment on other proposals to help make them better.

The communities will vote on the proposals between 28 January and 11 February.

The Community Tech team is focused on tools for experienced Wikimedia editors. You can write proposals in any language, and we will translate them for you. Thank you, and we look forward to seeing your proposals! SGrabarczuk (WMF) (talk) 18:10, 10 January 2022 (UTC)

Noting here for the record that the WMF has chosen to run the wishlist survey this year despite having so far fulfilled only one out of the 268 proposals the community made last year (with only three others marked in progress) and despite strong community objections to doing so. {{u|Sdkb}} talk 20:15, 10 January 2022 (UTC)
Sounds like par for the course for the WMF. At least they raised lots of money this year so we can have lots more people to not fulfil the community's wishes. Phil Bridger (talk) 20:32, 10 January 2022 (UTC)
They only filled one in 2021? Jeeze. The WP:CANCER is even worse than I thought. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 21:51, 10 January 2022 (UTC)
It would be interesting to see how the revenue-per-year curve compares to some productivity metric such as pages-hosted-per-year or edits-per-year. Or even page-views-per-year. We exist to deliver content to our users. I have no fundamental problem with raising more and more money each year as long as we're also delivering more and more content. -- RoySmith (talk) 22:10, 10 January 2022 (UTC)
I suspect that pages, edits and views are no longer priorities, and resources are now diverted to other areas considered more important. Certes (talk) 22:22, 10 January 2022 (UTC)
Proposed something to address this specifically here. Hopefully this gets enough traction. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 00:40, 11 January 2022 (UTC)
@Sdkb, I don't think that is a fair description of the conversation you linked to at Meta-Wiki. Excluding WMF staff in that discussion, there's just you and four other editors, and you are by far the strongest objector to opening the wishlist again. The other editors are mostly saying that they think more developer resources should be dedicated to these smaller requests from existing editors. Your main argument for postponing it appears to be that the work scheduled to be done between July 2021 and June 2022 is only half done. Since the calendar is also halfway through that 12-month timespan, it seems to me that they are exactly on schedule.
I understand that it can be confusing, but what we need is this an overlapping cycle that looks like this:
Voting Planning Development work
                Voting Planning Development work
This overlapping cycle maximizes the time that the devs are able to work on wishlist projects. The voting and planning phases, which require less dev time, take about six months. Finishing "everything" before the next voting phase would result in a built-in six-month delay in getting the next set of tool built. Instead, the team sensibly looks ahead and starts the voting phase about six months before the devs are likely to be finished with their current work. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 00:51, 11 January 2022 (UTC)
I'll ping @Ayack@Femkemilene@Kusma so they can speak for themselves. Regarding the scheduling, that wasn't made clear, and that does mitigate things a little bit. But only taking on 4 out of 268 proposals to start with is a very small fraction, when any of the top 50-100 could reasonably be seen as high-priority needs. While those remain unmet, things have not changed so much between 2021 and now that there is need to run the survey again. {{u|Sdkb}} talk 01:04, 11 January 2022 (UTC)
I think the argument that asking for new proposals before enough of the old ones have been acted on is wasting community time has merit. But we shouldn't argue with the developers implementing the changes, but ask to speak to the manager instead :) I know the WMF is so broke that they feel the need to run fundraising campaigns, but perhaps they can still hire and allocate a few more developers to work on the software? —Kusma (talk) 11:26, 11 January 2022 (UTC)
I'm not that much against running the Wishlist again, even if I feel frustrated with the ratio of volunteer time spent/what the Community Tech Team can achieve. I think it's important that we come up with a good proposal to increase the funds 2x-5x, so that this does not happen again. I wasn't aware of the overlapping cycle, which does ease my frustration by 15%. There is a proposal up to increase funding, even if nobody seems to know how much funding there is currently for this vital team. I hope we can develop this into our top wish. Femke (talk) 18:05, 11 January 2022 (UTC)
I gather that this year's progress has been less than normal due to staff changes plus some people needing to take time away from work. Hiring a new dev for that team is not easy. It can easily take six months to go from "let's hire someone" to "this new person is starting to be productive". Waiting for staff to return is usually faster than trying to replace them. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 22:30, 14 January 2022 (UTC)

Coolest Tool Award video

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cdnwhDAdrxE&t=2173s -- RoySmith (talk) 00:05, 15 January 2022 (UTC)

WikiProject "---" in Green

I just discovered Wikipedia:WikiProject Women in Green recently, which I think is an awesome thing to have, a WikiProject dedicated specifically to article improvement, and a cool bookend to Women in Red which is dedicated to creating new articles. Does anyone know of any other WikiProjects dedicated specifically to improving other types of articles? Should there be more like this one to cover other areas? I could see how it would be great to have places to go for people looking for a project, and maybe have ones like History, Math/Science/Medicine, Sports, Popular culture, etc. BOZ (talk) 13:37, 15 January 2022 (UTC)

For anyone else who's confused, "Green" here refers to GA standard. (As Women in Red turned redlinks blue, I wrongly assumed that this initiative targetted names which are redirects and appear green with some scripts.) Certes (talk) 14:06, 15 January 2022 (UTC)

Spin-off films

Hi. I can see that spin-off films are listed in the List of film series articles, just look here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here. Is it correct to list spin-off films there? Althrough a spin-off film is a part of the franchise, it's not a part of the film series. It's a standalone movie in the same franchise as the film series. Karamellpudding1999 (talk) 08:19, 14 January 2022 (UTC)

Why do those articles even exist? Do they met WP:LISTN? Neocorelight (Talk) 08:58, 14 January 2022 (UTC)
I want to remove spin-off films from those lists, but I think it's to much job. So if there's anyone else who can do it, or can let a bot do it? Karamellpudding1999 (talk) 12:25, 14 January 2022 (UTC)
The answer to your question is that it would take more work to code a bot that was capable of recognising the difference between a spin-off and part of a series than it would take to edit the articles manually. Neocorelight asks the more important question. There was no consensus for deleting these lists in 2009, but I think views on notability may have changed since then. Phil Bridger (talk) 13:08, 14 January 2022 (UTC)
Let's continue the discussion here. Karamellpudding1999 (talk) 09:55, 17 January 2022 (UTC)

User on Wikibooks looking for Wikipedian assistance

Hello,

There is a user on Wikibooks looking for assistance from a Wikipedia administrator regarding an IP block.

Their request can be found on Wikibooks:Reading room/Assistance.

I figured I'd ask on their behalf, since they've tried a few different things and the issue is apparently unresolved. --Mbrickn (talk) 22:55, 15 January 2022 (UTC)

@Blueboar: Thanks for looking into it! The user is User:Tgregtregretgtr, I'm afraid I don't know their current IP. --Mbrickn (talk) 00:35, 16 January 2022 (UTC)
It generally takes something special to get your talk page access revoked and get banned from UTRS. Judging by their public edits at Wikibooks, like this, they are 96.18.219.55. I'll ping Blablubbs (and probably not much else). -- zzuuzz (talk) — Preceding undated comment added 01:03, 16 January 2022 (UTC)
Fair enough, thanks for looking into it for them! --Mbrickn (talk) 03:29, 16 January 2022 (UTC)
I'm fairly sure that Tgregtregretgtr == the UTRS appellant == block target, and I believe the IP block continues to be appropriate. FWIW, they don't seem to be banned from UTRS (see #53386 and #53484). --Blablubbs (talk) 17:36, 17 January 2022 (UTC)
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