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We released a few weeks ago a new version of the ISA tool on the Test Server. The new version propose semi-automatic tagging of images, which seeks to assist community in identifying and labelling depicts statements for Commons files.
Now we are looking for feedback with regards to
the look, feel, and usability of the tool with the machine vision / metadata-to-concept enhancements in place.
and most importantly, the quality of the recommandations provided.
This is why we are organizing an online workshop on Monday 12th of December, 16h-17h30 UTC+1 (on zoom). We will be very happy if you find the time to join us.
Hi all. I'm not a very active wikipedian, and am probably posting in the wrong place - please forgive me and gently direct me to the correct forum :-)
In today's redactle, for the Mariana Trench, I noticed that the pressure was stated as "1,987 bars". This is not according to convention: the proper way to specify a pressure would be "1,987 bar". When I went to edit the page to correct this, I found that this page text was produced by the code "convert|1086|bar|psi" - so I can't fix this, and it appears that this odd unit convention is probably present on many other pages that use the convert tag. Where would I go to have this addressed?
Rob Lushgardener (talk) 23:57, 9 December 2022 (UTC)
In an op-ed piece discussing the conflict-centric nature of most social media, Ezra Klein pivoted to a mention of, by contrast, Wikipedia:
Wikipedia remains one of the most-visited sites on the web, and it is owned and managed by the nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation. It shows. Wikipedia has never tried to become more than it is. It never pivoted to video or remade itself around an algorithmic feed in order to harvest more of our attention. It is a commons but one that is governed so we may use it rather than so that it may use us. It gives so much more than it takes. It thrives, quietly and gently, as a reminder that a very different internet, governed in a very different way, intended for a very different purpose, is possible.
Nice. It's true too. Apparently building an encyclopedia is the one killer application for self-governance. Odd there is not a Facebook/Twitter-like service with Wikipedia governance models. GreenC04:42, 12 December 2022 (UTC)
We should do some pivoting to video, though. The technology is increasingly making it plausible to construct a collaboratively edited documentary. BD2412T04:46, 12 December 2022 (UTC)
A documentary-production project that operated under something like Wikipedia's Core content policies would be compatible with Wikipedia, but, like Commons, should be a separate project under the Foundation. Whether such a project could be started now without being overwhelmed by POV-pushing participants is another question. Donald Albury13:52, 12 December 2022 (UTC)
Sound logo vote + asking for permission for a banner?
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.
Hi everyone,
Voting in the Wikimedia sound logo contest has started. Crowds, pages turning, drums, chimes, vocals, and the sound of keyboards typing. Wikimedia is alive with sound, music, and everything in between. From December 6 to 19, 2022, please play a part and help identify the Sound of All Human Knowledge. Voting is open until 19 December, 23:59 UTC. Learn more on Diff.
On a related note, we would love to activate banners for the voting component of the sound logo project to ensure Wikipedians are notified. Would this be ok? We will be running banners on Commons and Meta-Wiki with fewer impressions than the submission phase. This has already been approved through the appropriate community means. Would extending the "vote now" banner to English Wikipedia be acceptable as well? Thank you. MPourzaki (WMF) (talk) 16:32, 6 December 2022 (UTC)
Hi @Xaosflux, yes this would be for CNBs so online editors are also notified of the sound logo vote happening. We will be running them on Meta and Commons already starting December 8. I didn't know about watchlist banners. MPourzaki (WMF) (talk) 17:41, 6 December 2022 (UTC)
@Xaosflux: The banner impressions are limited to 1 because there's a lot of ongoing discussion involving the WMF and banners, so I'm not actually sure that a banner would attract more editors. I believe our preference would be to use both. Ed Erhart (WMF) (talk) 17:43, 7 December 2022 (UTC)
@Xaosflux: Mmmm. Thankfully that's been fixed. I think you can see from that Meta discussion that our intentions changed starting on 2 December, which is what led to the impression limits given by me above and (eventually) this village pump post. Unfortunately, there was a miscommunication along the way. Ed Erhart (WMF) (talk) 05:07, 8 December 2022 (UTC)
Thank you. Assuming the community has no issues, I can add enwiki back on there when ready. Let's see if anyone has anything to say. — xaosfluxTalk11:10, 8 December 2022 (UTC)
Advertised this to WP:VPR, holding to see if there is feedback. This sounds reasonable on its face, will default to "OK" unless there are some objections below. — xaosfluxTalk11:15, 8 December 2022 (UTC)
I think this should be advertised, and I wouldn't mind both CN and WLN. If I understand what this is, this will become a replacement for the logo if pictures can't be shown. As such choosing the one that everyone likes the best is important. Dreamy Jazztalk to me | my contributions12:17, 8 December 2022 (UTC)
No objection to CN, but don't think we need both if the CN doesn't fall under one of the 3/4 categories most editors turn off. If it does (which may well be the case), I'm neutral on also having the WLN. Nosebagbear (talk) 13:24, 8 December 2022 (UTC)
@Nosebagbear the banner type is 'special', so prob not turned off. The impression diet is very low, so it should only appear 1 or 2 times per device, over 2 weeks. — xaosfluxTalk13:32, 8 December 2022 (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.
Change to DYK criteria
There was a recent change to the WP:DYK criteria which was discussed at length on WT:DYK, but I'm noting it here to give it greater visibility to editors outside of the circle of DYK regulars. Previously, hooks were required to include a definite fact that is mentioned in the article and interesting to a broad audience. The new criteria is that they should include a definite fact that is mentioned in the article and likely to be perceived as unusual or intriguing by a reader with no special knowledge or interest.
Reading between the lines of a current discussion, there seems to be consensus that already submitted hooks will be evaluated by the old wording, but new hooks will be judged by the new wording. My personal opinion is that this is quite a minor change, so it shouldn't be that big of a deal. However, I get the impression that reviewers are likely to start being more strict about just plain enforcing the "interestingness" criteria than they were before. I therefore want to make sure people were aware of this change as to not get caught by surprise.
For those not familiar with DYK, the elevator pitch is that it's an easy way for authors of new (or newly improved) articles to get their work highlighted on the front page. There's some basic quality criteria that the article needs to meet, but it's really nothing that every decent article shouldn't meet already. So, if you write something new, please consider submitting it to DYK. We even relax some of the rules for first-time submitters to make it easier for new people. If you find the process intimidating, dropping a note on WT:DYK asking for help with your submission will get you the support you need.
And for those of you who have had a number of submissions accepted already, please consider getting involved in some of the back-end work. We need more people willing to do reviews and help build hook sets in the prep areas. -- RoySmith(talk)18:43, 13 December 2022 (UTC)
Crypto - Donation Payment Option on Wikipedia
Transactions by the use of Cryptocurrencies has rapidly been adopted and are used by many people now.
Hence, why I think it makes sense for Wikipedia to add crypto as a payment method for donations.
I believe they will see a rise in donations as crypto users are far more used to making transactions
with crypto in current day compared to users two years ago. MattTheXPat (talk) 12:03, 14 December 2022 (UTC)
You can read a news article about this here. That being said, if someone wanted to make a "major" donation in crypto (or really in anything, art, bars of gold, barrels of oil, ....) I'm quite sure WMF will figure out how to accept it from you. — xaosfluxTalk15:28, 14 December 2022 (UTC)
This might be the worst template subcategorization I've ever seen
It's just like Edmund Burke famously never said; "The only thing necessary for the triumph of bad template subcategorization is for good editors to do nothing." Dr. Duh🩺 (talk) 17:12, 13 December 2022 (UTC)
There is no Wikipedia rule that forces you to add a separate deletion template for everything you nominate. You could've given a single notice and listed the templates below it, in bullet points. What you did is just insane. —CX Zoom[he/him](let's talk • {C•X})12:06, 15 December 2022 (UTC)
We are inviting you to share your ideas for technical improvements to our tools and platforms. Long experience in editing or technical skills is not required. If you have ever used our software and thought of an idea to improve it, this is the place to come share those ideas!
The dates for the phases of the Survey will be as follows:
Phase 1: Submit, discuss, and revise proposals – Monday, Jan 23, 2023 to Sunday, Feb 6, 2023
Phase 2: WMF/Community Tech reviews and organizes proposals – Monday, Jan 30, 2023 to Friday, Feb 10, 2023
Phase 3: Vote on proposals – Friday, Feb 10, 2023 to Friday, Feb 24, 2023
Phase 4: Results posted – Tuesday, Feb 28, 2023
If you want to start writing out your ideas ahead of the Survey, you can start thinking about your proposals and draft them in the CWS sandbox.
We are grateful to all who participated last year. See you in January 2023!
Hello community, we have some updates on the Private Incident Reporting System – The system is looking to make it easier for editors to ask for help if they are harassed or abused.
Our goal for the past months was to understand the problem space and your expectations of this project. Following the feedback submitted to date (thank you!), we have developed the next steps. We would like to invite you to read about the new proposed plans and offer further feedback on the project talkpage, if you have any. If you prefer to talk privately, please get in touch with Madalina Ana.
Is there a good way of dealing with text that is in broken English to the extent that it is incoherent? I mean in cases where it can't be corrected because the intended meaning is unclear. I don't have any specific example in mind. Jack Upland (talk) 06:05, 17 December 2022 (UTC)
People from across the Movement shared their feedback and thoughts on the content of the Movement Charter. If you have not had the chance to share your opinion yet, you are welcome to do so still by giving the drafts a read and filling out the anonymous survey, which is accessible in 12+ languages. The survey will close on January 2, 2023. You are invited to continue to share your thoughts with the MCDC via email too: movementcharter(@)wikimedia.org.
What’s next?
The Movement Strategy and Governance team will publish the final report with the summary of the feedback received in January 2023. It will be shared with the MCDC and the communities via different distribution channels.
After receiving the final report, the MCDC will review the suggestions and communicate the changes by providing an explanation on how and why suggestions were or were not adopted in the next versions of the drafts. There will be additional ways to engage with the Movement Charter content in 2023, including early feedback on a proposed ratification process and new drafts of different chapters in the second quarter of 2023.
We invite you to sign-up to the MCDC monthly newsletter, it will be delivered to the Talk page of your choice. Monthly updates are available on Meta to remain updated on the progress of the MCDC.
Interested people can still sign-up to become a Movement Charter Ambassador (MC Ambassador) to support their community. The MC Ambassadors Program grant program will restart accepting applications from both individuals and groups ahead of the next round of consultations in the second quarter of 2023.
We thank you for your participation, time and effort in helping to build the Charter for our Movement!
Who better to create a well governed space for the exchange of info and ideas than the Foundation?
The world needs such a forum that provides the benefits without incurring the costs and risks of a free-for-all that are increasingly apparent.
Funding could be by direct appeal to those harvesting value for commerce (politicians, Government Agencies, Associations, businesses, and similar enterprise users could be asked for a "suggested" donation (starting at a very nominal level) with a "badge" or icon to show that they support the project. Same with individuals but the suggestion would be "whatever you think reflects the value you receive".
Considering the train wreck that Twitter is becoming, the Foundation probably should consider setting up a Mastodon server for use of employees & registered volunteers. By this, I mean they should crunch the numbers, get an idea of the labor required to set it up & support its use. That would be a benefit in that they could continue to pursue their goals thru social media. But as for actually doing that... despite my dislike for Elon Musk's actions & the fact I have moved onto Mastodon, if I had any say I'd wait until Twitter actually crashed & burned before taking this step, & devote the resources to other immediate needs. -- llywrch (talk) 22:04, 17 December 2022 (UTC)
Thanks for sharing Wikis World :) I've discussed this privately with a few people, but I don't currently see having the WMF run, maintain, and most importantly moderate a Mastodon server for community use as a good use of time and resources. There are plenty of other things the WMF needs to do; I fail to see moderating social media conversations as a good one. I think it's more useful for Mastodon servers to grow organically and develop a culture through volunteers, just like Wikipedia originally. Once there's a need for professionalization, then we should come back to this discussion. Legoktm (talk) 07:33, 18 December 2022 (UTC)
Please explain why "the world needs" yet another forum for the exchange of anything. Also, define "well-governed". And "Wikipedia Ethos". In addition why do you think that WMF "should" be doing anything outside of supporting Wikipedia? And, why it is suited for/to be trusted with such a project? 67.243.247.14 (talk) 17:05, 18 December 2022 (UTC)
For those wondering what this contextless post is about, the Frisian Wikipedia has issued a press release announcing its 50,000th article. Congatulations! Phil Bridger (talk) 10:09, 23 December 2022 (UTC)
Feminism and Folklore 2023
Please help translate to other languages.
Dear Wiki Community,
Christmas Greetings and a Happy New Year 2023,
You are humbly invited to organize the Feminism and Folklore 2023 writing competition from February 1, 2023, to March 31, 2023 on your local Wikipedia. This year, Feminism and Folklore will focus on feminism, women's issues, and gender-focused topics for the project, with a Wiki Loves Folklore gender gap focus and a folk culture theme on Wikipedia.
You can help Wikipedia's coverage of folklore from your area by writing or improving articles about things like folk festivals, folk dances, folk music, women and queer folklore figures, folk game athletes, women in mythology, women warriors in folklore, witches and witch hunting, fairy tales, and more. Users can help create new articles, expand or translate from a list of suggested articles.
Organisers are requested to work on the following action items to sign up their communities for the project:
Create a page for the contest on the local wiki.
Set up a fountain tool or dashboard.
Create the local list and mention the timeline and local and international prizes.
Request local admins for site notice.
Link the local page and the fountain/dashboard link on the meta project page.
This year we would be supporting the community's financial aid for Internet and childcare support. This would be provided for the local team including their jury and coordinator team. This support is opt-in and non mandatory. Kindly fill in this Google form and mark a mail to support@wikilovesfolklore.org with the subject line starting as [Stipend] Name or Username/Language. The last date to sign up for internet and childcare aid from our team is 20th of January 2023, We encourage the language coordinators to sign up their community on this link by the 25th of January 2023.
Learn more about the contest and prizes on our project page. Feel free to contact us on our meta talk page or by email us if you need any assistance.
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.
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.
Symbols of Christmas and other religious festivals
I have just logged into Wikipedia on Christmas Day 2022, and did not see any Christmas logos decorating the screen. I had been expecting the technologically sophisticated to have adorned the pages of Wikipedia with these logos, but there were none. Why is this? If the rationale is not wishing to offend people of non-Christian faiths, we could still have
logos to celebrate festivals of other religions, such as Hanukkah or Eid al-Fitr, at the appropriate time of year. YTKJ (talk) 15:27, 25 December 2022 (UTC)
There is a Wikipedia logo. That is what this is. Anyone who needs constant affirmation of their particular beliefs, ideologies and values can easily find appropriate sectarian/ideological/"values"-affirming internet sites, an uncounted number. 24.103.63.182 (talk) 16:45, 25 December 2022 (UTC)
I agree with 24. I'm not Christian. I'm not anti-Christian, or pro or anti any religion. I'm not offended by Christmas celebrations, but it does not escape my observation that most "non-sectarian holiday greetings" (at least in the US, where I am) are really "Merry Christmas, and oh by the way, for the rest of you, happy whatever".
That's not to say today's main page didn't get its share of Christmas spirit. The featured article and featured picture are both Christmas themed, as is the entire "Did you know" hook set. Christmas is featured in the "On this day" section, although to be honest, it would be conspicuous by its absence if it weren't. So I don't think we're being overly grinch-like by not hanging a wreath on the logo today. -- RoySmith(talk)17:06, 25 December 2022 (UTC)
Why would you expect there to be such? This is an encyclopedia, the use of such symbols for simple decoration (as opposed to as illustrations of the symbols themselves or of aspects of the holiday) is not encyclopedic.--User:Khajidha (talk) (contributions) 20:08, 25 December 2022 (UTC)
Tiktok pranks and possible vandalism
FYI, there is a trending prank on Tiktok where users attempt to fool friends/family about the death of famous personalities. Fortunately, most of the Wikipedia biographies for highly-notable folks are in some form of protection, but in case you see an uptick in vandalism, this may be the reason:
There has been repeated & disruptive editing since January 2022 of articles mostly involving women & military history, but also including women in piracy and participation of women in the Olympics.
The disruptive edits typically exaggerate women's roles, usually well beyond that which is supported by sources. Sometimes this is is subtle, such as rounding up the number of women to a higher number rather than the lower number that is much closer in Participation of women in the Olympics. Other times there is outright fabrication, as in changing "nurse" to a "fighter pilot" in Rayna Kasabova for a volunteer nurse who happened to go along once for a ride as a passenger in a 1913 military surveillance flight.
I note that the username violated WP:BLPABUSE by using Cynthia Rothrock. I think the username also was a clear indication of the editor's bias in these edits.
These are considerations:
Editors have been reverting the edits, & administrators have been temporarily blocking IPs as appropriate. Although the larger problem is chronic, it is not in itself urgent, therefore the discussion does not belong at WP:AN/I. This is also a discussion that needs to persist for a while & not swept into an archive.
The editor(s) learned to hack into IP addresses with a certain range, but banning those hundreds of IP addresses would collaterally damage other IP editors doing legitimate work. The editor(s) have also used IPs from outside the range. So this discussion probably does not belong at WP:WPOP.
WP:RPP seems geared to single articles, whereas this applies to edits at multiple articles, some of which are not touched by the problem for months.
Are there any particular phrases or edit summaries that could be used to construct a filter to identify this editor's edits? If not, for the very reasons you have discussed, I'm not sure there's anything that can be done preemptively to address this disruptive editor. If there are, WP:EFN would be the right place to discuss the possibility of such a filter. General IzationTalk 22:49, 26 December 2022 (UTC)
There are specific edits to specific articles, with specific words be changed to other specific words. I will work on a list, but I am am thinking that applying pending changes protection to the set of articles that are being disruptively editing by this/these editor(s) would be the best approach. Where can we discuss a proposal (perhaps a WP:RFC) to collectively apply pending changes protection so the whole or the majority of the affected articles? Peaceray (talk) 06:48, 27 December 2022 (UTC)
RfC on 9to5Google as a source
There is an RfC at WP:RSN on reliability of 9to5Google as a source.[1] Only 3 opinions have been given in about 19 days. More would be appreciated. -- Yae4 (talk) 15:20, 27 December 2022 (UTC)
The release of ChatGPT to the public has startled me a bit with students already passing off its auto-generated text as their own while plagiarism software have no answer.
Has there been any WP/WM discussion with regards to how this might be tackled on Wikimedia projects (detecting patterns of AI generated texts, images etc.)? Also do we allow the uploading of artificial intelligence art: images, "art", videos et al created by AI (e.g. DALL-E); if yes who is considered its creator: the AI, the person who generated these images, or the AI's owners/creators?
Please point me to any discussions, posts, guidelines, policies that have happened or are happening on this topic. The last discussion, similar to this, that I am familiar with was at list of most expensive artworks by living artists, where NFTs where discluded.
Thanks for pointing me to that. Interesting and important discussion, agree with The Transhumanist's caution to the potential misuse of these applications; I think existing policies as to citation, vetting, WP:OR, WP:SYNTH et al will need to be enforced more proactively before we move forward with creating new policies for these LLMs (GPT, Lamda [when released] etc.). Dedicated disrupters have shown misuse even without these (e.g. the recent Zhemao hoaxes) and while they will be broadly facilitated by these newly acquired tools we need to see how our existing framework holds up before deciding on broader policies. Though not all is doom and gloom, some possible good usecases were also highlighted as with help in wikimarkup, copyediting, creating startpoints etc. all of which would and should require extensive human intervention before insertion into articles. Hallucination will be a major problem with these LLMs and should become apparent to knowledageble editors, GPT detectors already exist and appear to do fine as of now (even being used by a university teacher who caught a student as such), editors having doubts as to validity of a user's edits can consult these. I agree that eventually we will have to put out some guideline or policy for these.
Commons' stance would follow from the rulings in the Monkey selfie copyright dispute. If they are willing to host an image created (taken) by an animal, then on what grounds would they reject an image created by any other non-human entity. The English Wikipedia community does not appear to be ready to add anything at this time to our policies and guidelines dealing with content created by AIs/LLMs. We will just have to wait and see how practice evolves in dealing with such content. Donald Albury17:44, 1 January 2023 (UTC)
When looking at the view count of a page, does it include the times you yourself have visited the page with your account? Xәkim (talk) 18:12, 30 December 2022 (UTC)
Absolutely - and anyone can try this out for themselves on any obscure project page that'll reliably get ~0 views/day. I obviously don't know what's going on at the backend of the WMF server infrastructure, but considering that even CU logs only seem to go back three months, it's a pretty safe bet that XTools couldn't tell who clicked what when even if someone wanted it to do that. Dr. Duh🩺 (talk) 20:41, 30 December 2022 (UTC)
I believe that information is stored briefly, so the Technology folks can check backwards for problems (e.g., if people in ____ location can't read pages, is that a deterioration of an existing situation, or recent, abrupt change that "coincidentally" happened bexause WP:ITSTHURSDAY/right after this one machine was rebooted/?). It is not stored any longer than they think they need it (certainly not more than 90 days) and is considered highly confidential. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 20:32, 3 January 2023 (UTC)
Recent deaths tag
Was any decision made to remove the tag saying "This article is being heavily edited because its subject has recently died" from Wikipedia? I saw that David Gold (businessman) was recently in the category "Recent deaths", but did not see the tag heading the article on him. YTKJ (talk) 18:09, 5 January 2023 (UTC)
Per Golbez, the template is not used pre-emptively. It should only be added to articles that are being heavily edited in the wake of a recent death. If the article is not being heavily edited, don't add the template. --Jayron3214:57, 6 January 2023 (UTC)
I don't have an opinion one way or the other on your idea, but during the early days of the Covid pandemic, one of the things that we noticed was that page views were highest while a situation was developing. Once it had settled in, readers seem to move on to other sources. So, yes, articles are supposed to be encyclopedia articles instead of news articles, but in practice we do seem to get a lot of readers looking for up-to-the-minute information.
I'm not sure that's entirely incompatible with WP:NOTNEWS, which IMO is worth reading in full, and which begins by saying that "Editors are encouraged to include current and up-to-date information within its coverage". Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 23:19, 5 January 2023 (UTC)
For legislation and elections, I believe, primary source should take precedence over secondary. For example, NYT, an RS, often stops updating vote count one or two weeks after election day. When we add these data into our articles what should we use? Officially certified results or a secondary source that is no longer relevant. For legislation, if a secondary source says bill X received majority of votes, but actual House records say that it doesn't, we should use the House record, because if it says No, it is No. The bill does not pass, no matter what the secondary source has to say. —CX Zoom[he/him](let's talk • {C•X})16:45, 6 January 2023 (UTC)
It's interesting to speak in hypotheticals, but it feels like you're inventing situations that never happened. I don't know that secondary sources reporting that legislation passed, but that it actually failed, and that no further reporting ever indicated so... --Jayron3216:48, 6 January 2023 (UTC)
The NYT case is real and can be confirmed on literally any California election that wasn't considered competitive. NYT becomes too lazy and I would certainly not use its data when the SOS data is far more "reliable". —CX Zoom[he/him](let's talk • {C•X})16:54, 6 January 2023 (UTC)
The 400ish members of the House of Representatives in the Speaker election, are less problematic to keep track of. If you're worried about California election results, you should take up a different discussion on that issue. Bringing in unrelated matters isn't useful. --Jayron3216:58, 6 January 2023 (UTC)
Current and up-to-date information should be included, but in context of what an encyclopedia is, and that means thinking about what a reader 10 years down the road will want to know. In the case of the speaker election, that it took X rounds of voting due to a split of GOP, most backing McCarthy but about 20 supporting a different candidate, is the high level result we're looking for, not the individual votes. This is where using things like EL (to pages at Congress.gov) or even as data at Commons (since US Govt activities fall under PD, and Commons does accept raw data as contributions).
This is where we need editors at the early stage of a notable event (obviously like this election) to always be thinking about the long-term state of the article and work in contributions that are meant to keep it up to date in a manner that is more future-proof than the more common proseline "On <date>, <this happened>" problem. Masem (t) 18:09, 6 January 2023 (UTC)
September-October Community Safety survey results now on meta
A few months ago, the 3rd Community Safety survey was conducted on your wiki. The results are now available on meta. We hope you will use this data to continue discussions about safety in your community.
The quarterly survey will be conducted again this month.
Your feedback and questions are welcome on our talk page.
Yesterday (31st of December), the Wikimedia Foundation’s annual banner fundraising campaign on English Wikipedia in Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States finished. We run this campaign on an annual basis but this year’s campaign was truly unique. We would like to thank all of you who participated in shaping the messages and working together to better tell our story to readers and donors. Without you, the message would not have evolved and improved to where it is today.
Following the fundraising campaign, we will be in touch early in the new year to share more information about the campaign as well as ideas to carry the collaboration forward in the new year.
I am out of the office until the 16th of January and will answer any questions or comments after this.
@JBrungs (WMF) Out of curiosity. I read that the fundraising banners were to some extent rewritten per suggestions from the community. Compared to say last year, was there a change in the amount of donations that you think was caused by the rewrite? Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 18:53, 1 January 2023 (UTC)
It would be a fallacy to ascribe the entire difference to the wordings. There is currently a war in Europe impacting economies all over the world, governments are in debt because of the huge costs associated with the pandemic, interest rates have risen steeply, and mortgage rates, energy costs and living costs have increased far in excess of pay rises (in the UK, e.g., some people are having to choose between heating and eating; workers in multiple service sectors are currently on strike for higher pay).
Lots of people are struggling; even those who are better off have less money in their pockets, and moreover may feel there are other, more vital causes to give money to. AndreasJN46619:24, 1 January 2023 (UTC)
@Gråbergs Gråa Sång, I don't have any specific information, but Julia's out, so until she gets back with the real answer, I've heard that if you compare the original banners, which were being tested in mid-November (when there was a war in Europe, governments were struggling, interest rates and living costs had risen, etc.) against the recommended banners being run just a couple of weeks later (when there was still the same war in Europe, governments were still struggling, interest rates and living costs had still risen, etc.), the recommended banners were performing much worse. There have always been people who thought that there were other, more vital causes to give money to. Presumably, though, that number didn't change very much in less than one month, so the wording on the banner can be assumed to be the primary cause. I believe that the fundraising folks routinely calculate the performance for every banner variation.
The banner your source quoted was Jimbo Wales' idea. I would not be surprised if it performed much better than any of the community-suggested ones run on GivingTuesday.
On a more general note, I have been struck in conversations like these how much we revere reliable sources for article content, but for internal discussions, we ignore them, or even actively reject them. Volunteer-me has been hosting a million-plus-byte-long discussion in my userspace this last year about a hot-button issue. We have found many sources that recommend a different approach, and we seem to be no closer to accepting the recommended approach than when we started. On another subject, we seem to be willing to write in the mainspace, for example, that a dozen expert sources say that a phrase like committed suicide is stigmatizing (see Suicide terminology#Opposition to the term "commit" suicide), but when we're at the Village Pump, we insist that we must be allowed to use that in articles because in our own personal, unreliable opinions, the experts are all wrong. It does not appear that sources make any difference to editors outside the mainspace. In the fundraising discussions, I noticed that every editor who claimed to have professional experience with fundraising supported the old banners. Based on this experience, I suspect that even if we had a dozens expert reliable sources saying that the WMF's original fundraising banners were appropriate and ethical, and that the WMF's annual budget was appropriate and ethical, we'd still have a number of volunteers saying that they know more than the experts. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 20:59, 3 January 2023 (UTC)
If you look at your colleagues' third-week updates you'll note that by then, most of the revenue difference between the November banners and the December ones had evaporated. I'd be happy to think that the remaining difference was due to people who were hard up themselves – the Thomases – not feeling they had to donate to keep Wikipedia alive. And I am pretty sure, come next December your colleagues will be able to use what they've learned to start the 2023 fundraiser with messages that perform decently without repeating the ethical lapses of the past. AndreasJN46621:23, 3 January 2023 (UTC)
Isn't that the week that they switched away from the community-suggested banners to the one Jimbo Wales suggested? Also, that chart doesn't seem to contain a comparison to the original (mid-November) banners. Day 1 in that chart is GivingTuesday, when the first community-suggested banner was run. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 04:51, 4 January 2023 (UTC)
The chart shows the comparison to the 2021 banners, which were pretty similar to the November 2022 ones (2021 example, November 2022 example). As a matter of fact, the November banners already used slightly less urgent-sounding wordings (e.g. "support" rather than "defend" Wikipedia's independence).
I don't see anyone in the RfC saying the community should write and optimise the banners. (For that, the community would need to be given access to the daily A/B test results.) People were saying that they wouldn't stand for banners suggesting Wikipedia was in financial crisis at a time when the Foundation had more money than ever before, having more than quadrupled its assets (Endowment included) since that 2015 Washington Post report saying the WMF had "a ton" of money (it had $78 million then, in 2015, and reported over $350 million in 2022). AndreasJN46608:54, 4 January 2023 (UTC)
If you want to know how much changing the banner message affected, it makes more sense to look at when you changed the banner, instead of comparing it against slightly different wording in a significantly different situation (e.g., when there was no war in Europe, interest rates had not risen, living costs had not dramatically risen, etc.). Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 23:05, 5 January 2023 (UTC)
Exactly, though by the same token it would be unrealistic to assume that the economic situation (or indeed prior reporting on Wikimedia finances) had no impact on donations at all. AndreasJN46609:02, 4 January 2023 (UTC)
Oh look, a (WMF) account claiming that because people have experience with fund raising, they have a better grasp of what is ethical and what isn't than other people. No idea why we pay for such "community relations" drivel. Fram (talk) 09:26, 4 January 2023 (UTC)
They know what's done in the fundraising business, just as nurses know what's done in nursing and burglars know what's done in burglary. Unfortunately, knowing the industry standard doesn't tell us much about ethics. Certes (talk) 10:16, 4 January 2023 (UTC)
It should tell us whether it's considered unethical by the industry standard, which I'd consider a better measuring stick than whether someone on the internet has an opinion, including me. Are you aware of there having been any ethicists in that discussion? There were none among the editors that I know. Personally, I'd love to wake up some morning and discover a scholarly review of the WMF's fundraising in Business Ethics Quarterly or Ethics (journal). Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 23:15, 5 January 2023 (UTC)
"Honesty: Fundraisers will always be honest and truthful, upholding public trust and never misleading supporters or the public."[2]. "Communications must be accurate and honest."[3]. Countless editors have explained what bits in the previous fundraising messages weren't honest or truthful. So yes, "it's considered unethical by the industry standard". Fram (talk) 09:10, 6 January 2023 (UTC)
I believe that those editors were working from mistaken beliefs. For example, some of them appear to believe that "hosting costs" are the same as "what it takes to keep Wikipedia online". Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 18:22, 6 January 2023 (UTC)
And there go the goalposts... You asked about the erhical standards, and when these are presented you ignore this completely and start about factual claims instead, even those these had been discussed to death already. Bye, as it is still impossible to have a normal discussion with you when it involves WMF criticism apparently. Fram (talk) 18:56, 6 January 2023 (UTC)
Not really? A couple of people reasoned along these lines:
IF
keeping Wikipedia online costs only $2.6M per year, AND
many, many times that amount is in the bank, AND
the messages say that the donations will only 'keep Wikipedia online',
THEN
it could be unethical to request even more money under that set of circumstances.
This is perhaps more obvious with a simpler example:
IF
my next meal will cost $5 AND
I have many, many times that amount of my own money in my pocket, AND
I say to you "Please give me $5, or I won't have enough money to eat today. I promise I'll only spend it on eating today's meals",
THEN
it would be unethical for me to make such a request. In that scenario, I do have the money, and I am telling you that I don't.
But the editors are reasoning from a false IF: Keeping Wikipedia online costs much, much, much more than $2.6M per year. "Hosting costs" are not the same as the "costs of keeping Wikipedia online". "Hosting" provides space in empty server racks. You can't keep Wikipedia online if you don't also spend money on the hardware that screws into those racks, the people who install, maintain, and operate the hardware, etc. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 22:35, 9 January 2023 (UTC)
Reply tool
I'm not sure where to say this, but kudos to whoever programmed the reply tool so that it adds my comments to the correct thread, even when I reply while viewing a diff. Serious thought obviously went into how stupid editors would be, and how to pre-empt them. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested∆transmissions∆ °co-ords° 21:59, 1 January 2023 (UTC)
@Whatamidoing (WMF) I am still looking at conflict reduction (especially on user talkl, and I was looking at diff today for a revert. on the crucial issue of the [[Buttered cat paradox] :-). Do you think that diff encourages new editors after a revert to go to user talk, rather than article talk? My reasoning is that there is no clear call to action, and the eye goes to the Green column, and they then click undo, the editor name, or user talk.Wakelamp d[@-@]b (talk) 11:30, 7 January 2023 (UTC)
I'm not sure that encouraging new editors to do anything is especially relevant, when the person being reverted has made more than a thousand edits. Also, they won't see the visual diff anyway, unless they've both enabled it in Beta Features and switched from the wikitext default. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 23:13, 9 January 2023 (UTC)
The "new editor" was me :-) Thank-you for the advice. I turned off all Beta and cleared cache on chrome with CRTL + F5, but I still get the same when I hit the revert. Using Firefox, and not logged in I get this
Someone who's had an account for more than a dozen years and made nearly 2,000 edits shouldn't be considered "new". ;-)
The Beta Feature system is a bit buggy. For example, the numbers of people trying an item seem to only go up. I'd suggest turning on the things that you like. (at the moment, most of the things in the list are pretty good.) Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 17:33, 10 January 2023 (UTC)
InternetArchiveBot fixed
Hello! This is just a general notice that thanks to some fine work (tracked at Phabricator T321740), the Internet Archive Bot is now functional again and can be accessed here. It had been broken/working highly inconsistently since at least October. However, it may still have some performance issues, so be aware. —Ganesha811 (talk) 11:02, 10 January 2023 (UTC)
What to do with unscheduled beauty pageant
It is now 2023 and the pageant Miss World 2022 has yet to be scheduled as far as anyone can tell.
The article Miss World 2022 is kind of in a weird state, because there have been a number of announcements of contestants, but no announcements of the date nor location of the pageant itself. It comes across as a bit WP:CRYSTAL to me. For the sake of good encyclopedic content, I think one of these options could be explored:
Remove the "TBDs" from the infobox
Draftify the article entirely and wait for an event to be scheduled
I would agree with the Draftify option as no detail on the actual event can be found besides the actual contestants have qualified and that was through other events. Paulpat99 (talk) 21:11, 9 January 2023 (UTC)
Is it unusual to have a relatively new user complete a lot of edits?
Sorry if this is not the correct place to put this but I've noticed a lot of recent edits on a page I was also editing in my free time. The page (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_S%26P_600_companies), and related pages, has had a lot of edits by a user that has only had an account 4 months. They seem to be making a lot of drastic changes in a short space of time. Is this something unusual for a new user? Pearsejward (talk) 15:02, 3 January 2023 (UTC)
Possible explanations range from they're an evil sockpuppet to they've been editing anonymously for a long time and just recently decided to create an account, to it's a WP:CLEANSTART, to they're simply a quick learner. Is there some particular reason you suspect there's a problem? -- RoySmith(talk)15:14, 3 January 2023 (UTC)
It's most likely nothing and I think some of your suggestions have alleviated my curiosities. I had just never seen so many edits done in such a short time. Thanks. Pearsejward (talk) 16:34, 3 January 2023 (UTC)
It's often better to look at the edits rather than the editor. These seem to be useful sourced changes. I'd have done them in fewer, larger edits, but someone working through a set of documents one-by-one might reasonably do things differently. If someone was repeatedly adding and removing a space to game autoconfirmed, I'd feel differently about them. Certes (talk) 16:49, 3 January 2023 (UTC)
BTW, I'll add one more possibility, which is that it's a genuinely new user who is under the tutelage of somebody more experienced. Might be an edit-a-thon, or a school project, or even a new employee at an institution being trained in a WIR position. I agree with Certes; if the edits are legitimate and useful, that's probably more important than who the editor is. -- RoySmith(talk)17:23, 3 January 2023 (UTC)
I've been editing Wikipedia for about the same time, and have certainly made drastic changes (most of them good, I hope!) Nothing suspicious about quick learners, or eager contributors; what's suspicious is people who start off immediately disruptive, despite showing great familiarity with Wikipedia, but that's not the case for this user, who seems to be doing a great job. DFlhb (talk) 08:58, 4 January 2023 (UTC)
In addition to answers mentioned above, I am retired from my computer day-job and like to do updates (most days) to stay mentally sharp (oh, yes) & enjoy my Wikipedia time, so maybe the same for this person? Regards, JoeNMLC (talk) 04:33, 13 January 2023 (UTC)
Upcoming vote on the revised Enforcement Guidelines for the Universal Code of Conduct
Hello all,
In mid-January 2023, the Enforcement Guidelines for the Universal Code of Conduct will undergo a second community-wide ratification vote. This follows the March 2022 vote, which resulted in a majority of voters supporting the Enforcement Guidelines. During the vote, participants helped highlight important community concerns. The Board’s Community Affairs Committee requested that these areas of concern be reviewed.
The volunteer-led Revisions Committee worked hard reviewing community input and making changes. They updated areas of concern, such as training and affirmation requirements, privacy and transparency in the process, and readability and translatability of the document itself.
The revised Enforcement Guidelines can be viewed here, and a comparison of changes can be found here.
How to vote?
Beginning January 17, 2023, voting will be open. This page on Meta-wiki outlines information on how to vote using SecurePoll.
Who can vote?
The eligibility requirements for this vote are the same as for the Wikimedia Board of Trustees elections. See the voter information page for more details about voter eligibility. If you are an eligible voter, you can use your Wikimedia account to access the voting server.
What happens after the vote?
Votes will be scrutinized by an independent group of volunteers, and the results will be published on Wikimedia-l, the Movement Strategy Forum, Diff and on Meta-wiki. Voters will again be able to vote and share concerns they have about the guidelines. The Board of Trustees will look at the levels of support and concerns raised as they look at how the Enforcement Guidelines should be ratified or developed further.
As a reminder, the WMF refused to allow Community approval over the Code itself.
The Code itself is botched.
You don't have a valid enforceable Code until it has been approved.
No possible revision of Enforcement-Guidelines can fix either of those issues. You can't achieve enforcement unless the WMF has to go back to Step 1 and allows the Community to produce a better Code, then seeks consensus for that Code. Alsee (talk) 02:57, 13 January 2023 (UTC)
I wasn't sure where to post this, sorry in advance if this is the wrong place to post. Is there a policy on the age of census data that should be in an article. I ask because Echols County, Georgia has a section with information from the 2000 Census. Mjrmtg (talk) 01:03, 13 January 2023 (UTC)
@Mjrmtg: The article has census information from 2020 to 1860. If you think the lede is out of date, be bold and update it. Otherwise, please clarify your question. RudolfRed (talk) 01:29, 13 January 2023 (UTC)
@RudolfRed To clarify, there is a Demographic section and in that section is 2000 Census and 2005 Estimates subsections which has information that is 22 and 17 years old respectively. Is it ok to remove information 17 years old from articles? Didn't want to step on anyone's toes. Mjrmtg (talk) 02:31, 13 January 2023 (UTC)
Mjrmtg, census data over time shows trends, and that is encyclopedic content. This is supposed to be an encylopedia article that includes the entire history of the county, not a 2023 snapshot. Cullen328 (talk) 06:06, 13 January 2023 (UTC)
@Mjrmtg policy, nope. If statistics are verifiable and referenced they may generally be included. You can make editorial decisions such as removing outdated information, adding "as of" dating declarations, or updating articles with new information. — xaosfluxTalk13:40, 13 January 2023 (UTC)
Obviously we should aim to include the most up to date information available. Older information, clearly stated as such, can also be included, especially where it shows significant movements, such as a growing or falling population. Johnbod (talk) 14:08, 13 January 2023 (UTC)
Cannot find interlanguage for links for Categories
Progress is recorded at the monthly stats page. Through 2022, with 4,526 very old (from the 2004–2009 period) and old (2010–2015) FAs initially needing review:
222 FAs were kept at FAR or deemed "satisfactory" by three URFA reviewers, with hundreds more being marked as "satisfactory", but awaiting three reviews.
FAs needing review were reduced from 77% of total FAs at the end of 2020 to 64% at the end of 2022.
Of the FAs kept, deemed satisfactory by three reviewers, or delisted, about 60% had prior review between 2004 and 2007; another 20% dated to the period from 2008–2009; and another 20% to 2010–2015. Roughly two-thirds of the old FAs reviewed have retained FA status or been marked "satisfactory", while two-thirds of the very old FAs have been defeatured.
Entering its third year, URFA is working to help maintain FA standards; FAs are being restored not only via FAR, but also via improvements initiated after articles are reviewed and talk pages are noticed. Since the Featured Article Save Award (FASA) was added to the FAR process a year ago, 38 FAs were restored to FA status by editors other than the original FAC nominator. Ten FAs restored to status have been listed at WP:MILLION, recognizing articles with annual readership over a million pageviews, and many have been rerun as Today's featured article, helping increase mainpage diversity.
Examples of 2022 "FAR saves" of very old featured articles
But there remain almost 4,000 old and very old FAs to be reviewed. Some topic areas and WikiProjects have been more proactive than others in restoring or maintaining their old FAs. As seen in the chart below, the following have very high ratios of FAs kept to those delisted (ordered from highest ratio):
Biology
Physics and astronomy
Warfare
Video gaming
and others have a good ratio of kept to delisted FAs:
Literature and theatre
Engineering and technology
Religion, mysticism and mythology
Media
Geology and geophysics
... so kudos to those editors who pitched in to help maintain older FAs !
FAs reviewed at URFA/2020 through 2022 by content area
FAs reviewed at URFA/2020 from November 21, 2020 to December 31, 2022 (VO, O)
A URFA/2020 archives show 357, which does not include those delisted which were featured after 2015; FAR archives show 358, so tally is off by at least one, not worth looking for.
B FAR archives show 63 kept at FAR since URFA started at end of Nov 2020. URFA/2020 shows 61 Kept at FAR, meaning two kept were outside of scope of URFA/2020. Total URFA/2020 Keeps (Kept at FAR plus those with three Satisfactory marks) is 150 + 72 = 222.
But looking only at the oldest FAs (from the 2004–2007 period), there are 12 content areas with more than 20 FAs still needing review: Biology, Music, Royalty and nobility, Media, Sport and recreation, History, Warfare, Meteorology, Physics and astronomy, Literature and theatre, Video gaming, and Geography and places. In the coming weeks, URFA/2020 editors will be posting lists to individual WikiProjects with the goal of getting these oldest-of-the-old FAs reviewed during 2023.
Ideas for how you can help are listed below and at the Signpost article.
Review "your" articles: Did you nominate a featured article between 2004 and 2015 that you have continuously maintained? Check these articles, update as needed, and mark them as 'Satisfactory' at URFA/2020. A continuously maintained FA is a good predictor that standards are still met, and with two more "Satisfactory" marks, "your" articles can be listed as "FAR not needed". If they no longer meet the FA standards, please begin the FAR process by posting your concerns on the article's talk page.
Review articles that already have one "Satisfactory" mark: more FAs can be indicated as "FAR not needed" if other reviewers will have a look at those already indicated as maintained by the original nominator. If you find issues, you can enter them at the talk page.
Fix an existing featured article: Choose an article at URFA/2020 or FAR and bring it back to FA standards. Enlist the help of the original nominator, frequent FA reviewers, WikiProjects listed on the talk page, or editors that have written similar topics. When the article returns to FA standards, please mark it as 'Satisfactory' at URFA/2020 or note your progress in the article's FAR.
Review and nominate an article to FAR that has been 'noticed' of a FAR needed but issues raised on talk have not been addressed. Sometimes nominating at FAR draws additional editors to help improve the article that would otherwise not look at it.
WP:WikiProject Years is plagued with infighting to the point where meaningful contributions to year articles are no longer possible. Virtually all aspects of year articles are heavily disputed in one form or another, and most changes in any direction are challenged by WikiProject members. Significant community input appears to be necessary, and any thoughts on the matter would be appreciated. Relevant discourse can be found at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Years as well as recent archives (Archive 14 and Archive 15). Thebiguglyalien (talk) 22:02, 16 January 2023 (UTC)
WikiProject Apple Inc.
If anyone would like to see WikiProject Apple Inc. revived, or has any thoughts on how it should be organized, check out this discussion on that WikiProject's talk page.
It's far less active today than it was in 2010-2012, but the goal isn't to surpass MILHIST or WIR, just to make things easier for editors of Apple-related articles DFlhb (talk) 05:20, 17 January 2023 (UTC)
Meh… NOCONFED is an Essay, not Policy or guidance. Essays reflect the opinion of a segment of the WP community, but not necessarily consensus of the broader community. The only weight they have is that of persuasion.
Well, as it turns out, some essays are more equal than others. WP:NONAZIS seems to enjoy widespread endorsement by admins and non-admins, so you will often see it frequently used as block rationales or during deletion discussions. It's difficult in history to come up with a parallel to Nazism that is just as stark in its industrial-scale inhumanity and cruelty, even taking the history of the Deep South into consideration. As Hob Gadling said on the WP:NONAZIS talk page: Suggestions about pages applying the same exclusion principle to other groups such as communists or confederates have been roundly rejected on this very page, so this [so-called slippery slope] is not slippery at all.🌈WaltCip-(talk)15:53, 14 January 2023 (UTC)
All of the mentioned essays are dealing with very serious issues, and I don't see any of them as being "more equal than others". Also, WP:NONAZIS was created in 2018, while WP:NOCONFED exists for barely six months now. Having that in mind, its not strange that WP:NONAZIS enjoy such endorsement by users, which was steadily gathered over the last five years. On the other hand, despite its short existence, WP:NOCONFED is already endorsed by seven users, as of now. That is much bigger endorsement than for WP:NORACISTS, which is currently endorsed by three users. Can that number be seen as an indicator that WP:NORACISTS isn't relevant? Of course not – over time, the endorsement for that essay will only grow bigger. Along that line, I can say that I am looking forward to see WP:NOCONFED gathering much bigger endorsement in the future, and to see it applied here with the same zeal and strictness as WP:NONAZIS. As for the (completely legitimate) opinion of Hob Gadling, and some other users as well, I can only say that we should agree to disagree on the matter. — Sundostundmppria(talk / contribs)07:07, 16 January 2023 (UTC)
To me, I think the Overton window is not as narrow as you think it is when it comes to Confederates vs. Nazis comparisons, but as we've determined before, you and I are always going to disagree on this. Time will tell if this receives the widespread endorsement that you believe it will. 🌈WaltCip-(talk)21:15, 17 January 2023 (UTC)
2022 vector skin
The new 2022 vector skin is horrible. The lack of a table of contents causes infoboxes to push images down, and the TOC on the left squeezes everything together. Who chose this? Was there an RfC I missed? ~ HAL33318:16, 18 January 2023 (UTC)
I think it's curious that in the RfC for Vector 2022, a slim majority of commenters opposed the change, but the RfC close was summarized with "Overall, there is a positive reception to the changes". It seems the closers misrepresented the oppose votes as "support after X" votes, which they most certainly were not. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 23:24, 18 January 2023 (UTC)
Par for the course. There is a joke here about political systems that feature either people choosing their leaders, or leaders choosing their people. AndreasJN46623:37, 18 January 2023 (UTC)
Does this new skin fix the issue with Wikipedia crashing Chromium based browsers, by eating up all memory and crashing the browser, or even the OS? -- 64.229.90.199 (talk) 06:00, 19 January 2023 (UTC)
Except that this issue only affects Wikipedia and not other websites (as reported by several other users over various VP forums over several years now). Therefore there is something in the coding of Wikipedia that is breaking Chromium-based browsers (ie. the majority of browsers in use), by triggering some bug in Chromium. So there should be something that can be done to fix the issue (like many other website workarounds over the years that go to fix other browser specific issues; ie. different code triggered for NS/IE/basic etc) -- 64.229.90.199 (talk) 21:44, 19 January 2023 (UTC)
Improper handling of assessment for inactive WikiProjects
First, I want to be clear this is not intended as a criticism of any particular editor, it is more of an institutional bad habit that has developed over the past few years and went unnoticed and unquestioned.
Anyway, TL;DR, at some point a few years ago (nobody I talked to was able to figure out exactly how this started and what policy supports this), assessment categories related to inactive WikiProjects (ex. Category:Start-Class Popular Culture articles) started to be deleted as part of broadly understood "maintance". In addition to not being policy supported, this is not just unncessary make-work with zero purpose and benefit, but I argue that this is actively determintal to the project (hiding useful statistics and possibly even introducing errors into the main assessment statistics).
An example of the damage caused is visible in the following aspects:
there is no justificable reason to delete/hide such statistics, this is a make-work that does not benefit the project at all and arguably damages it by hiding said statistics. I've seen some statistics cited in scholarly research, I myself became aware of this issue as I cited stats for WikiProject Popculture assessment a while back, wanted to update the numbers - and found that they are gone, and there's no way (that I am aware) to get information such as "list of all start-class articles assessed by that project" - maybe it's doable with Wikidata, I am unsure, but it was much easier before).
since assessment relies on category system, it's possible that this is producing fake results for assessment statistics, as there are some articles where there is no other quality assessment than that of the inactive wikiprojects. Example: Marquis de Sade in popular culture. Such articles may suddenly become reclassified as unassessed as the perfectly fine former assessments by the projects declared as inactive become disconnected (they exists on article's talk pages, but is no longer tied to the category system). This likely affects thousands if not tens of thousands article, ex. WikiProject Popculture had over 3k assessed articles before the statistics were hidden/deleted (see last matrix before the destruction). I am unable to determine the number of such articles (with assessments only from inactive WikiProjects, no longer connected to categories), but it is likely not insiginificant.
As for the practical aspects, i.e. what needs to be done - it's relatively simple. All assessment categories and associated pages of inactive WikiProjects need to be restored, and they should not be deleted without a consensus at VP or MfD. Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here06:46, 10 December 2022 (UTC)
The simplest way to do this would presumably be to edit Template:Inactive WikiProject banner so that it produces categories in the same way Template:WPBannerMeta does. A wider point is that a simpler process is needed to shift inactive Wikiprojects into places that receive a few more eyes, perhaps by turning them into taskforces of larger projects. CMD (talk) 07:30, 10 December 2022 (UTC)
I've tried to merge a project before, but found the process cumbersome. The template merging is a particularly tricky issue given the interactions with categories and the like. CMD (talk) 13:58, 12 December 2022 (UTC)
It is very true, the process is really very difficult. I made so many mistakes in my first attempt. At least, I now know what things not to do. —CX Zoom[he/him](let's talk • {C•X})15:01, 12 December 2022 (UTC)
Thank you for the ping Piotrus. Indeed, the removal of quality & importance data of inactive WikiProjects only help in losing useful stats, with no upside. This also makes it incredibly difficult for an interested editor to reactivate the project because they need to start from scratch, unable to build upon the work by their predecessors as everything is deleted. Merging inactive projects as task forces of larger projects might be a good idea where feasible, see WP:WikiProject Dutch municipalities for example which I merged earlier in the year following a talk page discussion. But outright deletion of such project stats does more harm than favour. —CX Zoom[he/him](let's talk • {C•X})08:29, 10 December 2022 (UTC)
There are two quite different types of assessment:
Quality assessment refers to organization, readability, completeness, citations, links etc. and is project-independent
Importance assessment refers to how central the article is to coverage of the project's subject
Removing categories for project-related quality or importance assessments is completely unjustified, assuming the assessments are reasonably accurate. Even is the project is inactive, it is useful to see stats on articles that belong to the project. So yes, all assessment categories and associated pages of inactive WikiProjects need to be restored. Aymatth2 (talk) 14:02, 10 December 2022 (UTC)
The "importance" categories generally are fairly useless and not worth the bandwidth. Arguably tagging a newbie article as "low priority" makes importance assessment a net negative. Quality assessments have nothing to do with WikiProjects anymore (except perhaps MilHist, but that is a fairly active, hence atypical project), so they should be moved out of the project banners. —Kusma (talk) 14:15, 10 December 2022 (UTC)
To return to Piotrus' original point, we should certainly always display article quality ratings, independent of whether the corresponding project is "active" or not. Many projects were founded not because of editor interest, but only to provide a framework for quality assessment. Unsurprisingly, many of these projects aren't very active, but that is no reason not to display quality ratings. —Kusma (talk) 14:19, 10 December 2022 (UTC)
Personally I think that importance ratings are okay because it, in theory, helps to streamline efforts to improve an article to FA/GA status. For example, if an editor interested in computer software were to put in effort to get an FA, they may start with the High-importance software article, rather than the low-importance one. So, I'd not want to remove them totally. However, several WikiProjects have a local consensus to not use importance ratings and that is respected, as their templates lack this functionality. —CX Zoom[he/him](let's talk • {C•X})16:00, 10 December 2022 (UTC)
In theory, Top-Importance helps people focus on the right articles to work on (haven't seen this happen in practice, ever). In practice, Low-Importance gives newbies a kick in the teeth. In the last 15 years, I haven't been made aware of a theoretical or practical use of Mid-Importance or High-Importance. —Kusma (talk) 17:06, 10 December 2022 (UTC)
Oh, this does happen, sometimes. I'm not sure how you think you would "see" this, short of a specific discussion on a project talk page (which also has been known to happen). Not that I disagree that that both ratings are little used, and people whio spend lots of time updating them are largely wasting their effort. Johnbod (talk) 18:32, 10 December 2022 (UTC)
While in theory low/mid/high might have some use, they are of little importance and consequence. I think we all however agree that the quality assessments are useuful. Let's not get side tracket into the discussion of the marginal importance of the, well, importance ratings... Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here07:59, 12 December 2022 (UTC)
While in theory importance ratings help editors prioritise which articles they work on, does this ever happen in practice? If an editor is sufficiently interested in a subject to bring articles up to GA, let alone FA, I would imagine that if they are concerned about article importance at all, they will be making their own subjective assessment, rather than relying on what is fundamentally the subjective assessment of some random person often a decade or more ago, some of which are frankly bizarre – looking at articles I have nominated for GA, Neaira (hetaira) is listed as high importance to WikiProject Greece, while Women in Classical Athens is low importance to the same WikiProject! I've never encountered anyone who was put off of writing about a subject they were interested in because someone had tagged it low importance, or who had started improving an article because it was tagged top importance. Caeciliusinhorto (talk) 17:37, 10 December 2022 (UTC)
I've basically been ignoring both the importance and quality ratings for several years, now. Even when I was adding project banners to talk pages, I never rated an article as anything other than 'stub' or 'start'. GA and FA are based on formal reviews, but the other, intermediate, ratings I have always seen as highly subjective, as are the importance ratings. I only follow the projects I belong to for things like notices of AfDs and discussions about problems with articles within the projects' scopes. - Donald Albury15:18, 10 December 2022 (UTC)
C- and B-class aren't really arbitrary, but there can be wide variation, some of which seems to be due to a reluctance to make major changes to outdated ratings. Even if it really is a B-class article, if it was previously tagged as a Start-class article, editors worry that perhaps the other guy knew more about it than they do.
I think the stub ratings should be applied by bot (mw:ORES has basically no false positives for stubs, though it does skip a few that are on the border between stub and Start), and that anything currently rated C-class or higher that the bot thinks is a stub should be flagged for manual review. Sending a bot around would halve the unassessed-article backlog. WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:13, 10 December 2022 (UTC)
Assessments are often not based on the guidelines. A high quality and complete article will rarely get assessed higher than start/low if it is short. But that is a different issue. The question here is whether wikiproject assessment categories should be removed if the project becomes inactive. I can see no reason to make it harder to find Stub-Class Ruritania articles or Low-importance Ruritania articles just because not much is happening with Wikiproject Ruritania. Aymatth2 (talk) 13:57, 11 December 2022 (UTC)]]
@Wakelamp: The 350-odd inactive wikiprojects may include tens or hundreds of thousands of articles. They were assigned to categories by the project templates, but now the templates have been changed to disable the category assignment, That is the issue being discussed here. Aymatth2 (talk) 00:03, 6 January 2023 (UTC)
FWIW, years ago I took the time to review the ratings of a number of stub-Class articles for one of the WikiProjects, & found about a quarter could reasonably be considered "start" quality, & another 10% even higher quality. So the oft-bemoaned issue that about half of all Wikipedia articles are stubs may be wrong, & the true number of stubs is closer to a third -- not great, but not as bad as many people believe. -- llywrch (talk) 21:22, 17 December 2022 (UTC)
@Piotrus Another thing that might go into limbo is the log file of class changes . It only goes back 7 days though. For academics couldn't they just data mine the last time the article had a project? Or use wikidata?
@Llywrch "So the oft-bemoaned issue that about half of all Wikipedia articles are stubs may be wrong, & the true number of stubs is closer to a third -" Do many articles actually get reclassified? There doesn't see to be anyway to see a project's process in improving class and importance over time? (Aside : I just found out that [[Wikipedia:Content assessment| "assessing an article as "A-Class" generally requires the agreement of at least two editors"]) Wakelamp d[@-@]b (talk) 11:13, 5 January 2023 (UTC)
@Wakelamp Re: "For academics couldn't they just data mine the last time the article had a project? Or use wikidata?". Maybe. If they have the right skills. I don't and for my research I reply on WikiProject statistics, and when they are deleted, I am at a loss of what to do. For example, in a paper I am writing I had some statistics about WikiProject Popular Culture, I wanted to update them - but I cannot. And this can be of interest to readers; in another article I have recently written (see wikiversity:WikiJournal Preprints/Where experts and amateurs meet: the ideological hobby of medical volunteering on Wikipedia), a reviewer just asked for some statistics related to WikiProject Medicine. I was able to add/update those b/c that project is still active, but the paper on popular culture cites a year-old statistics that can no longer be udpated or refined with my skills, not until the system I am familiar with is restored. I hope that gives you an idea of the trouble the current (totally pointless) deletion of data is having on some research. Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here12:16, 5 January 2023 (UTC)
There should be a technical fix to make {{Inactive WikiProject banner}} simply display the "Inactive project" warning and then invoke {{WPBannerMeta}} to display the normal project parameters. I do not see an easy way to recreate all the deleted categories.
One way to get the missing categories is to ask an admin for a WP:REFUND. Given that there are 10K possible pages involved, it would be much nicer if it could be managed by bot.
The easiest way would be to add the |inactive= parameter to {{WPBannerMeta}} and deprecating the {{Inactive WikiProject banner}}. I can add a edit request for it. Although, I was wondering if the language could be improved in a way that encourages the banner reader to reactivate the project, or should the language be kept as it is. —CX Zoom[he/him](let's talk • {C•X})21:35, 17 December 2022 (UTC)
The easy way to recreate the 10k categories would be to authorise a bot to do it. Or authorise an WP:ADMINBOT to WP:REFUND them to preserve history. ADMINBOT requires Village Pump consensus though, which we can gather in a subsection if needed. —CX Zoom[he/him](let's talk • {C•X})21:40, 17 December 2022 (UTC)
The entire concept of inactive projects is IMHO wrong, but that's a discussion for a different issue. For now, the key point is that assessment infrastructure should not be affected by the activity of a wikiproject.. Depraciating Inactive WikiProject banner is a good idea, there is no need for asessement banner to inform at all about the status of a project. And yes, we probably need an ADMINBOT to REFUND all these categories. It would be nice if one of the people responsible for creating this, well, problem (i.e. deleting stuff for no good reason and with no policy justification), would step up to help. Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here11:07, 18 December 2022 (UTC)
Perhaps this is a discussion for a different place, but a WikiProject is a group of editors who want to work together to improve Wikipedia (and not, e.g., a collection of articles or other pages). Of course a group of people can become inactive. WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:42, 19 December 2022 (UTC)
Suggest reconsider. Many WikiProjects have been set up by a single editor and have never gained traction. Some relate to a single TV programme, game, university or foodstuff. Examples include: Wikipedia:WikiProject Bacon, Wikipedia:WikiProject Warhammer 40,000 or Wikipedia:WikiProject Cal Poly Pomona. That does not mean we need to indefinitely maintain a whole tree of categories. Please do not blindly restore categories of all inactive projects; I believe this would have little value and just add to the clutter of categories at the bottom of the page. Instead we could work on selective restoration, which could be triggered by a parameter in Template:Inactive WikiProject banner? Better still if a group of interested editors want to revive a project, then we can just switch it back to active again. — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 10:03, 19 December 2022 (UTC)
Those projects should be merged, but all articles covered by them should have quality ratings displayed. Of course, the better solution would be to stop pretending that quality ratings are related to WikiProjects. —Kusma (talk) 10:24, 19 December 2022 (UTC)
PetScan can do category intersection. I think the idea is viable, but it would be a major change for the project and we'd need to make sure all the tools and bots can handle it. — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 09:48, 20 December 2022 (UTC)
I suspect it will involve moving the classification coding to the banner template instead. For example {{WPBS|class=C|projects=Castles,Netherlands,Middle Ages}} — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 14:12, 22 December 2022 (UTC)
@Kusma "Of course, the better solution would be to stop pretending that quality ratings are related to WikiProjects. " A fair point. I rate articles all across Wikipedia (for stub/start/C classes at least), without being a member of most related projects. And for example the inexistence of assessment template Wikipedia:WikiProject Music is quite annoying when it comes to assessing generic music topics, for example (I think we can use assessment for "Music theory" instead, but seriously, that's a pointless split). In either case, my immediate concern is restoring visibility of assessments that have been hidden/disconnected from the main assessment scheme when associated projects have been declared inactive. Btw, a quick check (@MSGJ) shows that Bacon WP never did any assessments, WH40K did some but they have been hidden once the project was declared inactive last year, ditto for the "Cal Poly Pomona". I fully support merge of such projects, but any assessments done under their banners should not be lost. Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here12:37, 22 December 2022 (UTC)
Is this because you are worried that some articles will not have any assessment, if these ones are hidden? For example are there any games articles which are not now in any assessment category? — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 14:10, 22 December 2022 (UTC)
@MSGJ Yes, to your first question (although this is not the only reason, it's arguably the most important for the project). As for the second question, hard to be sure since links backs are broken. If there were game projects which becsame obsolete, it is likely some of them had assessed articles to which nobody added a broader game project assessment, and once they were shut down this became de facto unassessed, just like with that popculure de Sade example. It would take a lot of work to find some examples, as I don't know how to get a list of articles assessed by a defunct WikiProject since the infrastructure that did so (generated such lists) was destroyed. Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here04:37, 28 December 2022 (UTC)
PS. I can tell you only that WH40K project assessed 158 articles, CPP, 60, and Bacon, 451 (I guess I was wrong with my first assessment). I did, actually, figure out a way to see the list of all articles assessed by a project, backtracking from the still existing WikiProject assessment templates (ex. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:WhatLinksHere/Template:WikiProject_Warhammer_40,000 for WH40K). But to see which ones have assessments only from a given WikiProject would require manual checking one by one or running a Wikidata querry that's beyond my ability to write. That said, here you go: Eldar (Warhammer 40,000), Ork (Warhammer 40,000), T'au Empire - game related articles, assessed within that project, now no longer linked to any assessment categories. I just "restored" the rating for Battle for Armageddon, adding a Board Games WikiProject banner there, but I have no time or will to manually look through hundreds of articles from just three WikiProjects, and the counts by other above suggest we likely have tens if not hundreds of articles to double check for lost ratings... Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here04:45, 28 December 2022 (UTC)
If assessments have been lost then I agree this is a concern for the project. I may seek technical advice on how we can track down any other articles which have lost their assessments due to inactive project banners. I am confident there will be an easy way to do this; then we will know how urgent the problem is. I will be happy to work with you and others on this issue in 2023, but don't underestimate the scale of the task, especially if we push ahead with the "single assessment rating" idea — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 17:43, 29 December 2022 (UTC)
I was interested to see if the PageAssessments database still held the assessment. [4] shows that it remembers the project (Warhammer 40,000) but unfortunately does not hold the class anymore. It looks like the database refreshes itself occasionally and if the banner is no longer there, then the class is removed. — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 20:58, 29 December 2022 (UTC)
@MSGJ Indeed. I think we could get the answer through Wikidata. I cannot write a complex query like this, but wikidata has a query writing volunteer section. Think you could ask there if a query can list the number of articles with assessments only for WikiProjects marked as defunct? Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here09:43, 5 January 2023 (UTC)
I think the assessment of WikiProject Bacon as never gaining traction when they held multiple yearly installments of competitions with active participants is inaccurate. They may be dead now, but that doesn't mean they were always dead.I do think the WikiProject process could be overhauled. I think it's accurate to say most WikiProjects are dead and a lot of "active" ones are simply categories with a fancy coat of paint. I can only name like, three WikiProjects I'd actually consider active. (For the record: MILHIST, VG, and U.S. Roads. But I'm not a WikiProject expert by any means and I'm sure there's more I don't know about.) One minor change I'd personally make is to say something like WikiProjects can't be created without (three, five, some number) people affirming that they'll join it. casualdejekyll12:42, 5 January 2023 (UTC)
I don't agree there's a consensus. A bunch of editors from a particular discussion were pinged, a discussion on VPM (not an active board by any means) was opened up a few weeks ago, and there's a festive period during which a lot of editors are more inactive. I know there have been past discussions on cleaning up inactive WikiProjects, which I think is a pretty supported task. I personally support that cleanup. If we're being realistic, 95%+ of these dead WikiProjects are not getting revived, in line with the general trend that is our editorbase is getting smaller not bigger. WP 1.0 is not really relevant anymore, and aside from a number of well-managed WikiProjects most are pretty useless at this point except from being good topical noticeboards. I think cleanup and merging of inactive WikiProjects is appropriate, although I'm not sure how useful of a task it is, but perceived usefulness isn't a reason against doing a task which is good. As for the comment above about "quality assessments being independent per WikiProject" - while that may be true in theory, because the WikiProject template supports this, it's not really in practice. The same person usually does mass-assessment, and for most articles the quality indicators are the same for all projects, and the priority indicators were set by the same person too and usually arbitrarily. ProcrastinatingReader (talk) 22:15, 29 December 2022 (UTC)
@ProcrastinatingReader I am afraid you are missing the point. This not about restoring inactive WikiProjects - nobody is advocating for that. This about restoring their assessments, which are no better or worse than other assessments. And indeed, some folks have suggested moving such assessments away from WikiProjects, at least inactive ones, which is in line with your reasoning I think. I really don't see what we don't have consensus on? Are you ok with numerous former assessments being effectively deleted, with no policy supporting depreciating assessments done by formerly active wikiprojects? Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here06:24, 1 January 2023 (UTC)
Are you ok with numerous former assessments being effectively deleted, with no policy supporting depreciating assessments done by formerly active wikiprojects? I think WikiProjects are mainly administered through common practice, and not some written rules?
But yea, I'd be fine with these assessments being deleted, if they were the same as the other assessments which still exist on the article. Then nothing of value is lost, and I suspect this is the majority of cases. If it was an assessment that differs from the existing ones, or if it was the only assessment on the article, then I think there's more of a problem, but I suspect that's a minority of cases. Moving assessment away from WikiProjects is something that makes sense to me, and basically reflects current practice, since assessment is generally done en masse (with few exceptions; MILHIST etc). ProcrastinatingReader (talk) 10:24, 1 January 2023 (UTC)
@ProcrastinatingReader The point you are missing is that they were not "the same as the other assessments which still exist on the article". There are some articles which had no assessments outside from wikiprojects that became inactive, so obviously, some value is lost. It's hard to be sure how many as nobody has run a wikidata query, but it's likely in thousands if not more. There is no good reason to waste people's effort that went into assessing them, particularly when those people are often not even associated with those wikiprojects, they just used whatever assessment template seemed most relevant (as I did on many occasions, as I assess articles in various areas and I know I used some now-defunct templates; I doubt I was the only person like that. Anyway, I don't think it's fair that assessments I did were invalidated because of a technicality that is not even supported by any policy anyone could locate). Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here09:41, 5 January 2023 (UTC)
@ProcrastinatingReader: Quality assessments should be independent of projects. I would like to see them put into a generic quality template. Importance assessments are project-specific and belong in the project templates. Winston Churchill was an important politician, not a very important artist. Aymatth2 (talk) 00:03, 6 January 2023 (UTC)
Improper handling of assessment for inactive WikiProjects – break
@Aymatth2 Do we need a vote for that? I totally support the idea, but generally we have a consensus here (for restoring assessments and for moving the quality ones into a single wikiproject-independent template), but how do we implement that?
However, I'll note that even if the quality assessments are split, they should still be connected to WikiProjects, as the active ones like milhist or med certainly care to know how many articles of what quality exist within their sphere. I am sure members of such project would oppose any split that would affect how the system works on their end.
So perhaps the way to do it is to keep the current system, but add a master template that copies an existing assessment if one exists, and if not, it can still host a quality assessment. This way we would avoid the trouble with upsetting the system that works for active WikiProjects, and solve the problem of assessments for articles that are not within the scope of any WikiProject (or active one). Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here03:49, 6 January 2023 (UTC)
@Piotrus: We would have to launch a new discussion to get approval for separating quality assessments from wikiproject importance assessments. The cleanest way, to me, is to move the quality assessment up into {{WikiProject banner shell}}, drop it from the individual wikiproject templates, and make sure that all talk pages with one or more wikiproject templates have them grouped into a {{WikiProject banner shell}}. E.g.
The banner shell could pass down the |class= value to the project templates, which would add categories like Category:GA-Class British Empire articles. But there may be better ways, and implementation would definitely require bot development. This is quite a dramatic change... Aymatth2 (talk) 15:45, 6 January 2023 (UTC)
I proposed this above and obviously support this when RfC is started but we need to ensure that it is technically feasible first of all. —CX Zoom[he/him](let's talk • {C•X})16:47, 6 January 2023 (UTC)
@CX Zoom @Aymatth2 We do, but doing requires working, and sadly all of this is outside my competency. Overall, maybe we should first do the easy thing, which is (1) restore the deleted assessment system, and then we can move on to (2) reforming the assessment by giving the banner shell this "backup" functionality so it can host assessment information even if there is no active project associated with it?
Proposal to fix {{WPBannerMeta/inactive}} so it passes an |inactive=y parameter to {{WPBannerMeta}}, plus all the other parameters, and to change {{WPBannerMeta}} so it displays a note saying the project is inactive, but otherwise shows the assessments and assigns categories as usual. This seems uncontroversial and easy to do.
Request for a bot to recover all the deleted inactive project categories. But it does no harm to have redlinked categories on the talk pages until that is done. Worst case it could be done manually, 10,000 tedious edits.
Idea Lab for comments on how best to get the wikiproject assessment categories added to the talk page when the |class= parameter is collected by {{WikiProject banner shell}}. Seems uncontroversial. I may be missing the obvious technical approach on this one.
Sounds good on all of those. I think we have consensus for points 1 and 2, as they don't change anything (except recovering some content that was deleted without a policy supporting said deletion). And of course Idea Lab is uncontroversial too. Please ping me when you start relevant discussions so I can support. Thank you! Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here09:33, 8 January 2023 (UTC)
Thanks for pursuing this guys! And sorry I have not been actively engaged in the last few days. However I am not sure there is a consensus for points 1 and 2. I see significant concern that some (possibly valuable) assessments have been lost when projects have been deactivated. But recreating hundreds of unused categories does not seem to be the best way forward. On the other hand the conversation has moved beyond that issue into something much broader. If I may separate the two issues and suggest ways forward:
Inactive WikiProjects: the inactive project template could be made to display the assessment class (if available) but not to categorise. This will obviate the need to recreate all those categories. They will output the assessment via PageAssessments so any tools that use this will start to work again. I can sandbox the code for this and seek comments in next few days.
Single Wikipedia-wide quality scale: suggest starting a formal RfC somewhere appropriate on the single question "Should Wikipedia use a single quality scale for article assessments and deprecate WikiProject specific quality scales?" Based on the support shown in this discussion I expect this will attract support across the community and we can then continue with discussion about its implementation.
As I noted above, I am ready to help with the technical aspects of whatever outcome achieves consensus. — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 17:12, 8 January 2023 (UTC)
Sounds like the system is working well as intended. Hopefully the Lincolnshire project will be active now. — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 19:13, 9 January 2023 (UTC)
@MSGJ Why do you see a problem with restoring the categories? Without the categories the assessment will not be included in the project-wide statistics. Given that the deletion of the categories was done without any identified support in policy or even best practice essay recommendation or whatever, restoring them is a simple reversion of unjustified deletion (abuse of deletion process - deletion without discussion/policy reason), if nothing else. Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here03:31, 9 January 2023 (UTC)
Piotr: several reasons:
These categories were often created without consensus by a single (or handful of) editors. Many WikiProjects were not created via the formal approval process.
The topics are arbitrary and correspond to the niche interests of the editor(s) who created the project. They are not necessarily a logical way of organising articles in an encyclopedia.
Many of categories have been deleted without comment for several months/years, which suggests the deletion was uncontroversial. I do not think it is helpful to label these as an abuse of the deletion process!
We are talking above about divorcing WikiProjects from the quality assessment. The restoration of all these categories seems to be directly opposed to that movement. We could instead be using these articles with "lost" assessments to demonstrate the potential of a new project-wide quality assessment process.
Re: 1. Two wrongs don't make a right. The fact that a WP project was not created via the approved procedure (which I concur leads to many dead-on-arrival-or-soon-afterward dud projects) doesn't mean that their assessment schemes should be deleted. As I noted above, many assessments are done not by the members of a wikiproject, but by editors (like me) who assess articles from all fields they are active in without being a member of a relevant wikiproject, since there is no rule saying only members of a wikiproject can do assessments. Do explain to me why some of the assessments I did are now disconnected from the main assessment database? Why is my effort wasted? Because I used an assessment banner of a WikiProject that has been declared inactive, while no other banner seemed appropriate? This should not matter, my assessment should continue to be piped to the main database.
Re: 2. Yes, but that's not relevant to the issue of restoring assessments. It's like saying we should randomly delete categories because there are some that are very detailed while other, arguably more important ones, haven't been created.
Re: 3. I disagree - the lack of controversy was b/c it was a niche technical action that nobody thought through and realized it affects the wider assessments (as the people most likely to raise an objection were the inactive members of the inactive wikiprojects, and nobody bothered to inform the assessment folks at the other end that some data will be removed, or individual editors doing assessments, like me, that our work is being discarded).
Re: 4. There is no contradiction between restoring the old system and eventually moving to the new one (a move which I tentatively support). We can reverse the damage done (restore assessments) without reactivating pointless wikiprojects, and continue discussion on how to move all assessments to a system that won't care about associated wikiproject's activity. Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here05:20, 10 January 2023 (UTC)
Absolutely your assessments should stand. You were assessing on behalf of the whole project, you were not assessing for a niche WikiProject. Therefore the system has been flawed from the beginning. Let's use our energies to develop a proper topic-free template that we can use to properly assess articles, and not waste time restoring dead project banners. — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 07:40, 10 January 2023 (UTC)
@MSGJ I am worried that the latter task will prove too difficult to implant, either due to organizational interia or due to nobody stepping up, and while waiting ad infinitum for this to change, nothing will. Hence why I prefer restoring the status quo in assessment first. Note I am not stopping anyone from pursuing reforming assessment system, in fact I give this my wholehearted blessing - but I want to see my (and others) assessment, deleted/hidden without a policy justifying such a course, restored ASAP (with the additional note that restoration of said assessments, and thus correcting the errors in the project wide assessment statistics, is beneficial to everyone, at least as long as we think quality assessments and their statistics have value). Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here10:47, 10 January 2023 (UTC)
Okay I understand your position - it just seemed to be pulling in the wrong direction! I have indicated that I am willing to "step up", but you are right that project inertia should not be under-estimated. What do you think about my idea of restoring the display of assessments but not categorising? Do you have an insight into which tools rely on categorisation and which ones use the PageAssessments database? A possible idea (which could be quick to implement) is to create a generic banner template which categorises straight into Category:C-Class articles, so not attached to any particular project. — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 11:29, 10 January 2023 (UTC)
@MSGJ I'd totally support that, although I think this should be a parent category to others. There is nothing wrong with knowing how many military history or popular culture or Poland C-class articles we have, and in fact it's a useful statistic for said WikiProjects and researchers and folks who are just curious about those kind of breakdowns. Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here05:59, 13 January 2023 (UTC)
@MSGJ That one doesn't seem to be a problem - WikiProject Aliens is inactive but the movie is listed in several other projects, which are active and presumably pipe correctly to the main assessment system. The problem as identified mainly concerns articles which are only within the scope of inactive wikiprojects. Unless I am missing something? Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here05:33, 11 January 2023 (UTC)
Yes it was just an example to show how we could easily adapt the inactive banner to show the assessments — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 08:17, 11 January 2023 (UTC)
Quality assessments should be project-independent, since they refer to how well an article covers a subject, regardless of which projects are interested in the subject. But categories giving quality by project are useful. Category:C class Ruritania articles is more useful than Category:C class articles. It may be hard for a generic template to capture a quality assessment and pass it transparently to all the project templates so they can add project-specific categories. But there must be a solution. Aymatth2 (talk) 14:47, 11 January 2023 (UTC)
@Prokonsul Piotrus, I agree completely with you. I havwe been keeping Wikiproject History going, but there was a period of time when it becamse dormant. it would have been not beneficial at all if we had discarded the wikiproject or its folders during that time. Sm8900 (talk) 12:44, 13 January 2023 (UTC)
as discussed above, we should only take the quality assessment out and leave the importance assessments with the wikiprojects
this proposal will fail as active wikiprojects like milhist will never agree to give up their well-estabilished and functional assessments
we should not propose to "This proposal would take article assessment out of the hands of WikiProjects and puts it in the hands of the general community.". We should propose to "This proposal would create a back up system for article assessments that would no longer be solely dependent on WikiProjects, allowing articles to be rated on quality even if there is WikiProjects banner, or preserving such a rating if all WikiProjects associated with the article become inactive (currently such ratings are effectively retired). "
I agree with most of what is in that RfC, but this is too distracted from what we started this thread with: to restore lost assessments by removing/fixing inactive parameter & restoring categories. This change shouldn't be controversial in the first place. There isn't an existing community consensus to delete assessments and this thread at VPM is more or less unanimously supported. If an RfC has done, it should be done on just this one question. The quality assessment change is a separate question and can have an RfC at a later stage when we figure out how to technically manage it. Bundling multiple questions together also impact the participant's opinion on the other question. —CX Zoom[he/him](let's talk • {C•X})17:21, 12 January 2023 (UTC)
@CX Zoom We don't need an RfC to restore deleted assessments since, as you note, there has never been consensus to do so, nor a policy to support it. As far as I can tell based on what Liz wrote (links at the very top in my OP), someone just started to delete this stuff for no identifiable reason and it became an action done by some other admins who assumed that it is policy/consensus supported. In other words, it's just a mistake that needs to be fixed.
Now, I do think an RfC for the proposal to reform the system/create backup is a good idea. Personally I support the backup idea (allowing hosting of assessments in a banner independent of any wikiproject), while I don't think the "take assessments away from WikiProject" idea will fly (milhist, med and others will crush it, and why shouldn't they). And yes, I am worried that badly designed RfC will focus attention on the "take assessments away" idea and end up failing, leaving the other, very good idea (backup), forgotten. Bundling all of this with the non-controversial assessment restoration would compound the problem, of course. Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here05:57, 13 January 2023 (UTC)
First can I dispel the myth that the action of deactivating these categories was against policy or consensus. There was quite a well attended discussion at WP:VPR that has been copied to Template talk:Inactive WikiProject banner#Discussion from Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals) for posterity. Okay it was a while ago now, but you can see that several people supported much stronger actions including the complete removal of inactive project banners. So this was a compromise that was agreed on. Secondly, can we please separate the two different discussions going on here?? In this subsection I am trying to take forward the idea of a WikiProkect-independent quality scale, but you keep banging on about the inactive project banners. Can I suggest we continue that discussion in a different section as it has nothing to do with the proposed RfC. Thirdly, to the points at hand, I will reply shortly. — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 13:10, 13 January 2023 (UTC)
Thank you for the link. I think there was lot of misunderstanding and generalities in the discussion, as well as general misunderstanding of how system works. That discussion was about decluttering the talk page spaces, but it ended up using effectively a nuclear option - and no, I don't see a consensus for that (only for minimizing the banners for inactive projects).
Looking at the few instances the term assessment was mentioned there, I see you were the OP there and you said "If the project is inactive then the assessment data is not being used either", which is clearly incorrect as the assessment data was used through being piped to the totality of the assessment system. One editor (User:John Carter) there already noticed the danger and opposed this: "I would very much regret seeing the removal of a banner if in so doing the possibly sole existing assessment of an article is also eliminated". User:Happy-melon, in my reading of their comment, likewise opposed "losing valuable data" by removing the banners (and only supported rewording them for inactive projects), noting that "It is actively damaging to WP to erase that data by removing project banners from talk pages... The more of the infrastructure of a wikiproject remains, the easier it is to restore and revitalise." Although Happy-melon specifically objected to the removal of the banners, not categories, I think the spirit of their sentiment is obvious and they'd not support destruction of the category infrastructure. The third editor who mentioned assessments, User:JimCubb, again supported adding inactive parameter but also wrote "should the project be revived, all of the assessments are there waiting to be viewed", likewise in my understanding implying they did not wish for the categories to be deleted, making viewing the assessments (in aggregation) difficult. That's for editors commenting on assessment. Regarding categories, likewise, I don't see any consensus for the deletion of the categories. Let's look at mentions: User:JimMillerJr expressed concern that " The deletion of thousands of now empty categories is a little more difficult. If a project is later revived, the recreation of previously deleted catagories could result in a mess at CfD." and later that "Conversion is preferable to outright deletion, especially regarding the categories on those talk pages." I understand conversion as merging or such; anyway, the editors I mentioned have been pinged and can clarify their thoughts (a decade+ later) if they are still active and interested. But, to repeat myself, I see zero consensus or support for the deletion of the category system in that discussion.
As for the RfC, I expressed my thoughts, noting that I think it is flawed in the current version (and will almost certainly fail). Oh, and nobody cares much about inactive project banners here, they can stay they way they are as far as I and I think most participants are concerned. What I believe the consensus for exists, however, is to restore the deleted assessment infrastructure, so that assessments can be repiped back to the global assessment scheme, instead of being invalidated by the project's inactivity. This is the most important and pressing issue at hand (fixing pointless damage done). Reforming the assessment system is frankly off topic here, and I'd encourage you to start a new discussion at WP:VPIL about this. Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here05:54, 14 January 2023 (UTC)
Question about film credits
Just came across an IP who seems to be in a mission to add voice acting (VA)/dubbing credits into the articles of multiple Mexican actors and celebrities, while I know this is normal practice for American actors to include VA credits in their filmographies, I'm not sure if this is also allowed for actors from other countries who have VA in languages other than English (afterall, this is enwiki). And if this is allowed, we would then have to start adding VA credits for any celebrity of any nationality who has done VA in any language?
My personal perception was that you could maybe mention these credits in their Career section rather than add it to the filmography, I couldn't find any relevant guidelines in WP:FILMBIO -Gouleg🛋️ harass/hound (she/her) 16:54, 18 January 2023 (UTC)
Does anyone know why many pages with the name 'Index' are so heavily trafficked recently?
For the past week or so, the top read articles have included Index, Index, Washington, and Index (economics), among others. Clearly, an automated service is spamming searches with the word 'index;' perhaps some piece of badly written zombie code trying to fetch an index page? Does anyone know for certain? If not, is there some way to identify the source of this traffic? Ngcouch (talk) 02:50, 20 January 2023 (UTC)
Perhaps these articles are where people who are curious to read more about a topic start off, as “index” article are usually full of links to more in-depth articles. Blueboar (talk) 03:03, 20 January 2023 (UTC)
I suspect you're right. Index, Washington isn't normally a hotbed of activity according to its page traffic stats, believe it or not, but suddenly on Jan 13 it exploded in activity. Whatever you've found seems to have been going on for the last week. Index (statistics) was hit even harder, racking up over 11 million pageviews since the 13th. Automated view surges like this happen from time to time, but this is an interesting pattern. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 05:41, 20 January 2023 (UTC)
My guess is that it isn't people, it's some AI scraping the web for information; likely some ChatGPT type thing, building an information base, etc. Those kind of routines may look for certain key words like "index" as a likely starting point, so they are hitting those pages harder. --Jayron3219:44, 20 January 2023 (UTC)
Would it be practical to have a 'select pages for which one's last contribution is the current one' be feasible? (Would be useful for longer term contributors - I ).have some from 2006.) Jackiespeel (talk) 18:28, 20 January 2023 (UTC)
US Congressional representation of US cities after redistricting
There is a systematic problem that appears in many Wikipedia articles concerning many US cities. I do not have sufficient technical knowledge to propose the solution, but I am sure that there are many within the Wikipedia community who do, once the problem is realized.
As you know, Congressional redistricting occurs after each decennial census. It often is the case that a city that was in one Congressional District will, after redistricting, be assigned to a different Congressional District. Apparently, the current default practice for many Wikipedia articles concerning cities is automatically to show the current elected Representative for whatever Congressional District is shown. The problem that arises is that this process often (typically ?) takes place without an updating, when necessary, of the fact that the particular city has now been assigned to a different Congressional District. The result then is that the article automatically updates to show as that city's Congressional Representative a politician who does not represent that city, but rather represents a District that the city had formerly been assigned to, but is no longer included within. I have in 2023 (now that redistricting under the 2020 census has occurred) edited (after confirming with local elections offices, the Wikipedia articles on Dinuba and Mendota, both cities in California, in Tulare and Fresno Counties, respectively. However, I suspect that this problem has created misinformation for hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Wikipedia articles about US cities.
Is there a survey or editing tool that could determine whether a particular article needs such a fix? I have a suggestion that might lead to a solution. I will illustrate with the Mendota article. After the 2010 census, Mendota was assigned to the 21st District pf California. That change was made in the article, with a Footnote 6 illustrating the appropriate 2013 website. (The new districting takes effect in the Congress commencing with the 3rd year of the decade following the census.) In the 117th Congress, David Valadao represented the 21st District, including Mendota, and was shown as Mendota's US Congressional Representative. Prior to my editing of this article, the 2023 version of the article showed Jim Costa as representing Mendota in Congress. This was incorrect. It happened because beginning in January 2023 Mr. Costa did indeed represent the 21st District and so the formula applied by Wikipedia automatically "updated" the "Mendota" article to show the current Representative of the 21st District, which is now Mr. Costa, and no longer Mr. Daladao. Om fact. the actual Representative now representing Mendota is John Duarte. The problem arose because the District that Mendota is now part of was renumbered from 21 to 13, and Mr. Duarte is the current Representative for the 13th District. The current practice of Wikipedia is to "update" the politician who currently represents a District with a particular number, without ascertaining whether there should also be an update as to whether the particular city still is within a Congressional District that is labeled with the same or a different number.
Thanks for considering this problem and a possible solution.
I suspect that this is something that is best fixed by hand, and not via a bot or something… because there are simply too many permutations. For example, consider the situation where a city or town used to be in one district has now been gerrymandered and split between two districts (part of the town might retain the “old” district number, but part is now split off and has a “new” district number). Blueboar (talk) 18:49, 23 January 2023 (UTC)
Prompted by the immediately preceding item, I took a look at the NYPL on-line catalog. I didn't find USN&WR, but I did find an interesting project they're doing to provide a catalog of freely licensed research materials, available without the need for a NYPL library card. I haven't explored it yet, but mentioning it here because it looks like it might be useful to a lot of editors researching articles. https://digital-research-books-beta.nypl.org/about -- RoySmith(talk)02:15, 24 January 2023 (UTC)
I suppose if locally some abuse of that tool was discovered (checkusers can review the log) a community consensus (likely an arbcom order here due to the private data that would be the basis) could result in this being applied to someone - although practically if someone was at that point they likely would already just be getting siteblocked. — xaosfluxTalk14:19, 25 January 2023 (UTC)
I'm posting this general notification here, as the RFC only shows as a generic "Talk:2022" on the RFC dashboard; more people might have input if they know the RFC topic is about a specific person, not a generic year. Thanks in advance. —Bagumba (talk) 05:28, 26 January 2023 (UTC)
Need to find an online source for a 1988 US New & World Report article
I am tired of poking around the internet and just thought I'd ask here... Are past US News & World Report articles available anywhere online? I do not have access to EBSCO, I do have Newspapers.com and some access through stuff at Wikipedia Library. I am trying to find an easily-accessible online source for the May 2, 1988 edition, an article with the title ""Racial tensions, drugs and poverty—an explosive mix in rural North Carolina; There's trouble in Robeson County" by Joseph Shapiro & Ronald Taylor. Thanks, Shearonink (talk) 23:50, 23 January 2023 (UTC)
I'm in favor of audio and video files on biographies. If we're excluding video and audio files, then we might as well exclude images; they essentially serve the same purpose. The only difference is that they have an audio aspect instead of just a visual one. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 00:05, 17 January 2023 (UTC)
There was a project on WikiCommons to get people to pronounce their own names so they could be added to articles. I think we should support other speech as well. Rmhermen (talk) 00:31, 17 January 2023 (UTC)
Note the referenced discussion is specifically on including audio links in the biography's infobox. There is no disagreement with the standard method of linking to related media at Wikimedia Commons. isaacl (talk) 00:45, 17 January 2023 (UTC)
Wikipedia:Voice intro project includes the line "Embed that in an infobox if possible". And Stephen Fry, one of the earliest[6], has it in the infobox. Now speech that does not include the person saying their own name is something else again. I would suggest that be included in the article but not the infobox. Rmhermen (talk) 01:05, 17 January 2023 (UTC)
As long as these are free media clips, this seems reasonable, and given our disallowance for non-free images of living persons, the same would be true of voice clips (we'd not allow non-free voice clips on the basis that a free clip is possible). There's a few more gotchas to this, but zero problems as long as we are talking free content clips. --Masem (t) 01:19, 17 January 2023 (UTC)
Well the guidelines are within legal parameters governing sample usage and length. It is a good idea I think to make such application universal (i.e. covering both free and non-free sources). There is a possibility that over time 30-second samples of spoken/video materials may proliferate in any single article (there may also be technical aspects to this). I would also strongly suggest that there is clear guidance for media content be properly referenced with citations for attribution and verification just like text content. 172.254.222.178 (talk) 01:42, 17 January 2023 (UTC)
Should is a funny word here. If you have free or properly licensed media, be it video, audio, or image, you can add it to the article. If you feel it adds value to the article, you're allowed to add it. I don't see any problems, but I also don't see where it's something we should do. You can feel free to do so, but I don't have any expectation that one is compelled to. --Jayron3202:00, 17 January 2023 (UTC)
Nor should the expectation be that it is "required" to do so. And there will be plenty of articles where the consensus will be against including it.
Personally, I don't think anything is added by adding random audio clips – and the same goes for images of signatures – in the vast majority of biographies.
And they almost certainly should not be in the infobox, as it's a clear violation of MOS:INFOBOXPURPOSE to do so. And if editors are getting instructions to put these in infoboxes, those directions need to change. --IJBall (contribs • talk) 07:09, 19 January 2023 (UTC)
I quite like these, please do keep adding them! As for "should": not sure there could be consensus to mandate it, so it's likely you'll keep running into this every now and then. DFlhb (talk) 04:26, 17 January 2023 (UTC)
I actually quite like this idea, but I think there should be a standard of quality to the clips. I think the Vaush one is very good (no background music or effects and serves as a nice introduction to the person); on the contrary, the ones for Tim Pool and Jenna Ortega are fairly poor (both have excessive music and effects, and are just poor in general). Curbon7 (talk) 19:16, 20 January 2023 (UTC)
Thanks for the various pings. Yes, we should aim to include the voice of the subject of all biographies, where that is possible, and we have ten years of precedence for doing so. Ideally, they would be saying their own name (so we have the correct pronunciation), but otherwise at least demonstrating what they sound(ed) like. As with images, high quality is preferable to low quality, but we must work with what we have. And, as with the main image, the infobox is the place to put it. WP:WikiVIP refers, and c:Commons:Voice intro project explains in more detail why we should do this. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits14:33, 21 January 2023 (UTC)
This is a great idea and project. Anyone who asks living people for freely licensed photographs should be encouraged to also ask for a voice sample. —Kusma (talk) 14:46, 21 January 2023 (UTC)
Reference
Hi, I came across this sentence: The removal of cataracts was a common surgical procedure in Djenné[35] (as in many other parts of Africa[36]). on the article Cataract_surgery#West_Africa. It made me think if these references were in a good place according to manual of style but I couldn't find it so quick. Doesn't it have to be "The removal of cataracts was a common surgical procedure in Djenné[35] (as in many other parts of Africa).[36]" ? Thanks Coldbolt (talk) 09:27, 29 January 2023 (UTC)
@Coldbolt, it doesn't have to be that way, especially of the second source is only meant to support the content inside the parentheses. There are multiple acceptable ways of formatting that. Some people would put both refs at the end of the sentence, for example. If you're working on that article, then please use a placement that makes sense to you. WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:56, 30 January 2023 (UTC)
Tool to look for related users by edit history?
does a tool exist, given a user, list users/ip that have edited the same pages with the given user in the past x days? like, given my username and 10 days, the tool will check all pages i edited in the past 10 days, identify users that also edited the same pages in the past 10 days, and list these users by the number of pages for each.
the use of this is, currently i found two accounts operated by the same person (because they edited some pages one after another), but i dont know if other accounts exist, so if a tool like this exists, i can detect and check anomalous related edits. RZuo (talk) 17:10, 30 January 2023 (UTC)
There are a bunch of tools that do similiar sorts of comparisons. My recommendation is to file a report at WP:SPI. The folks who work SPI have a wealth of experience doing this kind of thing and know all the tools. The standard SPI templates will provide you with links to some of them, but the clerks have lots of things in their toolkits, not all of which are publicly available. -- RoySmith(talk)17:42, 30 January 2023 (UTC)
There are a few prolific editors around, particularly gnomes who specialise in making minor corrections to numerous pages. The chances are that they have edited many of the pages you've edited recently, with no suspicion of sockpuppetry on either side. You may want to refine your search, but even then you'll pick up innocent editors whose interests happen to match. Better still, as RoySmith suggests, pass it on the experts. Certes (talk) 17:55, 30 January 2023 (UTC)
there's no vandalism yet (or else it would've been straight to checkusers). and the activity is not on enwp. i asked here because enwp being the largest wiki often has tools other wikis dont.--RZuo (talk) 18:37, 30 January 2023 (UTC)
Update from Wikimedia Foundation
I am back to post a brief follow up message to my November note. Following the close of the RfC, the Wikimedia Foundation set up a co-creation page to seek input from community members on proposed messaging for banners. We posted regular updates on the campaign's performance to this page. In brief, over 450+ banners were tested during this year's campaign, and $24.7M of revenue was raised against an original $30M goal (a shortfall of $5.3 million). During the first few days the new banners resulted in about 70% less revenue than on the corresponding days in the prior year. Additional information on the campaign results are posted here. Next year, the fundraising team will continue to engage with the community on banner messaging. We look forward to building on the process we created this year.
I wanted to provide further updates on a few other issues that were raised:
Given the reduced revenue from the English campaign, the Wikimedia Foundation has reduced its budget projections for the current year. At this point, we don’t expect to see the same year-on-year growth in the Foundation’s budget next year. We will have more information by April on future financial projections.
The Foundation’s annual planning this year is being led by the needs of our Product & Technology departments. This will be the first time since about 2015 that these two departments will undertake joint planning. @SDeckelmann-WMF has asked me to pass along this update: "We've made progress on PageTriage issues raised by New Page Patrollers in an open letter. In the last 120 days, 141 patches have been reviewed through collaboration between the Foundation and the community. There have also been several meetings between community members and staff to talk about the future of PageTriage and the newcomer experience, and there is now work planned in Q4 to update the extension. We continue to engage with Commons as we are making critically needed software upgrades to community prioritized tools. The Foundation's Wishathon (leading up to the community wishlist kickoff for 2023) involved about 40 staff contributing time over a week in December to deliver 71 patches and 4 wishes granted. We are working with the community to make Vector 2022 the default skin, after 3 years of development work, feedback and iteration with wiki communities. More to come in March!"
Some comments were made in the RfC about the unclear role of the Tides Foundation in managing the Knowledge Equity Fund. Over the next few months, we will be moving the remainder of the Equity Fund from Tides back into the Foundation. The Wikimedia Endowment has received its 501(c)(3) status from the US Internal Revenue Service, so we are in the process of setting up its financial systems and transitioning out of Tides.
Overall, very nice work. Thank you to both you and @SDeckelmann-WMF for making efforts to communicate with us, listen to our needs, and improve community relations. Of course there is always room for more, but in general I am encouraged by recent developments. I think the needle is moving in the right direction. –Novem Linguae (talk) 22:14, 25 January 2023 (UTC)
Thank you for keeping us informed. The news about NPP and Tides are welcome signs that the goals of the WMF and the communities may be converging. The reduction in income may seem worrying but coincides with a very difficult financial climate for many potential donors and may represent money remaining with readers who need it to cover basic necessities. Certes (talk) 22:37, 25 January 2023 (UTC)
After the debacle that was the Vector 2022 rollout, the WMF could really use a win if it wants to retain its credibility. Maybe this will prompt the WMF to find a cure for WP:CANCER. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 01:50, 26 January 2023 (UTC)
Thanks for the communication and update, it is very good news. PageTriage improvements will make a significant difference to en.wiki, and Commons has great room for enhancement. CMD (talk) 02:38, 26 January 2023 (UTC)
During the first few days the new banners resulted in about 70% less revenue than on the corresponding days in the prior year. Interesting. So do I take this to mean that the new banners that the community specifically suggested, or at least collaborated with the WMF on, actively resulted in less revenue being pulled in? If so, hmm. --🌈WaltCip-(talk)14:17, 26 January 2023 (UTC)
I'm not a WMF staff (thankfully) but that is correct. The banners that received the largest feedback and were what was posted before the start of the campaign dramatically underperformed. The banners that the foundation staff suggested during the course of the campaign but which complied with the RfC did better but still underperformed banners from previous years. Of course many would (and did) argue that this is a price worth paying to have fundraising more aligned with Wikipedia's values but you are correct @WaltCip that the foundation paid a price. Best, Barkeep49 (talk) 15:43, 26 January 2023 (UTC)
This is good news. We have (for the most part) stopped lying to readers to convince them to part with money, in some cases when they cannot afford it; still the website is able to function and the WMF is able to run.I hope that next year we can emphasise that what we need first and foremost is readers' labour, not their money, as this encyclopedia is and must remain written by its readers in a volunteer capacity. We have a crisis of editor shortage but no funding crisis. With these more tame and more democratic fundraising banners, the WMF was still close to reaching its excessive goal of $30million.A legitimately noble first step in adjusting the budget would be for Maryana (and other decision-makers) to make up the $5million by cutting six-figure salaries of senior staff, starting with her own. It is correct that the projects of NPP, critical software on Commons and Vector 2022 are important foci for the WMF and should be priorities. — Bilorv (talk) 21:59, 26 January 2023 (UTC)
There is a market for senior executives. The market for non-profit senior executives is less than the market for for-profit senior executives so they should make less than those people. But let's not ignore that there is a market. I want talented people to work for the Foundation because an inept foundation is no good. I hope the Board knows whether foundation employees, and especially senior staff, are paid at top of market, middle of market, or bottom of market and to be able to defend why. That's the place I would start with rhetoric about senior executive pay. Best, Barkeep49 (talk) 22:26, 27 January 2023 (UTC)
I agree, the foundation should have a well-paid and ample staff. The fundraising is going to the staff of a foundation that runs the website as well as the intellectual partnerships of the chapters and the international outreach. But, largely, the business of the foundation is fundraising and paying the bills, and so we should be happy if they seem to be good at doing that because there's never enough money and there is a lot of time left in human history that we want to have a website for. People get annoyed because they don't understand why community projects aren't staffed, but maybe they should instead think about software projects as open source projects that volunteers would contribute to if they have the time or the inclination to do so. Andre🚐22:31, 27 January 2023 (UTC)
I read this again today and I have a couple additional thoughts:
The Foundation’s annual planning this year is being led by the needs of our Product & Technology departments. This will be the first time since about 2015 that these two departments will undertake joint planning. It sounds like WMF is shifting its Annual Plan to focus on software and technology more? I missed this on the first reading, but if so, this is an exciting development. I think the idea of WMF shifting funds towards software will be well-received. Feel free to emphasize this more in your communications. I think volunteers will really like this.
We are working with the community to make Vector 2022 the default skin, after 3 years of development work, feedback and iteration with wiki communities. This is a not-so-exciting development. The Vector 2022 deployment on enwiki has not gone well, and has arguably been against community consensus. This might be a good issue to backpedal a bit on.
Thank you for posting the above update. It's not always easy for WMF staff to talk to us on our talk pages and village pumps, but we welcome the effort. I think it's good for community relations. I'm looking forward to future updates and discussions. –Novem Linguae (talk) 18:44, 31 January 2023 (UTC)
The UCoC supports Wikimedia’s equity objectives and commitment to ensuring a welcoming, diverse movement, and it applies to all members of our communities. Voting is an opportunity for you to be a part of deciding how we uphold this commitment to our community and each other!
"The UCoC supports Wikimedia’s equity objectives and commitment to ensuring a welcoming, diverse movement..."? Please do not canvas for votes. AndyTheGrump (talk) 21:24, 30 January 2023 (UTC)
@JPBeland-WMF Dubious for the UCOC to be a commitment to each other, as well? The BOT have stated that they ratified the document, but the vast bulk of those affected by such were never given a chance to sign it off (the same applies to the recommendations - they also never received a mandate) Nosebagbear (talk) 13:55, 31 January 2023 (UTC)
A bit close to the deadline, but I have boldly fixed the link in the initial comment posted by JPBeland-WMF above to the voter information page, in case those who read the notification wished to follow the link to that page. CMD (talk) 18:47, 31 January 2023 (UTC)
Hello all,
The vote on the Universal Code of Conduct Enforcement Guidelines is now closed. The results will now be counted and scrutinized to ensure that only eligible votes are included. Results will be published on Meta and other movement forums as soon as they become available, as well as information on future steps. Thank you to all who participated in the voting process, and who have contributed to the drafting of Guidelines.
How will you deal with forumshopping, vindictive reports, lies, sockpuppets, ...? Basically, is there anything at all to discourage problematic reports/reporters? For example, WP:ANI#Stalking from a blocked user, the PIRS runs the risk of simply providing this stalker a new venue, and a better chance for them of having some success as people at the PIRS may be unfamiliar with the situation. We have long-term pests like "Vote X for Change" who likes to take things out of context or to misrepresent events and policies to create problems for their victims. Giving them another venue, and I presume making it impossible for anyone at enwiki to be aware of this (will anyone here know that complaints are made, will anyone know who made the complaint, will e.g. a checkuser on the complainant be possible?), seems like a well-intentioned idea with bad consequences. Fram (talk) 10:51, 3 February 2023 (UTC)
A friend, a Wikipedia novice, asked how to use Alexa to access Wikipedia. I am unfamiliar with Alexa, but Googled and found a couple of tips. I have summarised them at Wikipedia:Amazon Alexa, but input from someone more familiar with Alexa would be appreciated.
I hadn't seen this noted or discussed elsewhere so thought I should note it somewhere: the Pakistan Telecommunications Authority has blocked Wikipedia over a dispute about 'blasphemy'. BBC article:
[7] --(loopback)ping/whereis06:01, 5 February 2023 (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.
The Crown Heights riot is considered a Black American riot.
It has nothing to do with Black Americans. This type of slander happens everyday. Two South American children were hit by a Jewish man's car. A Jewish ambulance assisted the Jewish driver and passengers. The SOUTH AMERICAN children were left under the car dying. This caused an IMMIGRANT from TRINIDAD to be angry and seek revenge by killing an innocent Jewish man with no relationship to the accident. The media knew Gavin CATO was a South American boy. Guyana is not America's 51st state. How is he Black American? It's a Caribbean and South American versus Jewish riot. The facts did not fit the narrative of Black Americans attacking Jewish people. How do we correct fake news? 2600:8802:3A12:E700:CD98:4710:36DD:848C (talk) 05:06, 10 February 2023 (UTC)
Not sure if it applies to VPM, but I'm inclined to remove this per WP:NOTFORUM or WP:DENY. But I'll hold off and see if others agree. Unless there's an objection, I'll revert in a day or so, or feel free to do the honors. Mathglot (talk) 06:06, 10 February 2023 (UTC)
If it's a real concern, you seem singularly uninterested in following the good advice you have already received, which is maybe why you've cross-posted it first at at Wikipedia:Teahouse#Wiki Administrators needed, where you said, "Millions are articles are incorrect ", and complained about "slander ", "lying ", "racist narratives ", and "trash misinformation"; and then at Wikipedia:Help desk#Crown Heights Riot, where you reiterated your point about slander. In both posts, you've been told to go to the article talk page, which you haven't done. Instead, here you are, cross-posting the same diatribe for the third time. If you're only here to complain in triplicate, and ignore the good advice given to you in good faith twice before, then there's nothing anyone can do to help you. Good luck. Mathglot (talk) 11:46, 10 February 2023 (UTC)
I don't know why you want to keep posting in inappropriate venues, when you have been told that the proper place to raise this is on the article talk page.But if and when you do post on the talk page, please specify exactly what text you think should be changed. I don't know if you actually want something corrected here on Wikipedia or if you just want to vent about something unrelated to Wikipedia. The phrase "Black American" does not appear in the Crown Heights riot article, and I don't see any text in that article claiming that Gavin Cato was American. CodeTalker (talk) 15:45, 10 February 2023 (UTC)
I posted here to expose the stupidity of the articles and regurgitation by Wikipedia. News platforms are incredibly ignorant to describe Guyanese people as Black Americans to push a false narrative. None of the immigrants involved in the incident were Black Americans (drivers, victims, or murderers). Thank you for the response. Instead of being concerned, you tried to discredit the FACTS I posted, why? Are you going to go on record to claim a South American immigrant is a Black American? 2600:8802:3A12:E700:CD98:4710:36DD:848C (talk) 12:04, 10 February 2023 (UTC)
You need to either move on from this or make an edit request on an article talk page, proposing your change backed with sources to support it(not your personal opinion or analysis, what sources say). Make a choice now, if you continue to disrupt Wikipedia with this, you will be blocked. 331dot (talk) 15:40, 10 February 2023 (UTC)
If they were immigrants, would they not be considered to now be Americans or to be on their way to becoming Americans? Gavin Cato was described as the child of Guyanese immigrants and not as an immigrant himself. This would seem to imply that he had been born in the US and was thus American. --User:Khajidha (talk) (contributions) 16:54, 10 February 2023 (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.
Survey of the users of and contributors to Wikipedia
Hello,
I contact you, hoping it is the right space, because with various colleagues we would like to survey the Wikipedia users on how they consider, use the information provided by Wikipedia, according to the context (professional, personal, etc.) We would also ask the contributors specific questions about their participation and their involvement.
The project is managed by a group or researchers from several public research institutions, mainly French, coordinated by the research network Marsouin with, we hope, collaboration with the different language communities.
More precisely, the survey aims at addressing the following questions (open list):
for the contributors, what does that mean to be a contributor, how it is perceived by their relative, how this impacts their practice, their vision of Wikipedia and of its governance (see the WMF's taxonomy of "gaps", p. 16)
for the readers, how they use Wikipedia, but also what does acceptability as a source of information means, according to the context - school, university, information, etc.), for them and for their "audience" (see WMF's taxonomy of "gaps", p. 10)
This questionnaire will rely on and expand the one done in 2019 by the WMF and surveys the same team has done (but only with the French wikipedia users) in 2015 and in 2011. See the results of the former surveys (in French: 2011, 2015).
Any help for defining some concerns of the En-Wikipedia community that we could survey, and for the test of the questionnaire would be greatly appreciated!
If you think it would be a good idea to translate the survey in other languages (French, Italian and Turkish are already taken care of), and are able to help for that, it would be just great!
Thanks for the interest. You have stated that your research is being conducted from public research institutions. Insofar as your research has any participation from U.S.-based institutions, I'd strongly recommend they seek and obtain the appropriate institutional review board (IRB) approval to conduct this survey. --⛵ WaltClipper-(talk)14:20, 10 February 2023 (UTC)
There are no US based institutions at that point, but we have an IRB also in my university and it is actually a wise advise, we'll do that! Jullienn (talk) 16:16, 10 February 2023 (UTC)
Sounds good, just wanting to make sure you stay kosher on the administrative side of things. Even casual survey projects like these have IRB implications. Some concerns on En-Wikipedia you might want to take into consideration are:
The relationship between the contributor and the Wikimedia Foundation, particularly with respect to the WP:UCOC.
The prevalence of fake news and information.
The threats and opportunities of AI-driven editing, as outlined in WP:LLM, and
The access to, or blocking of, Wikipedia in other countries.
After 3097 voters from 146 Wikimedia communities voted, the results are 76% in support of the Enforcement Guidelines, and 24% in opposition. Statistics for the vote are available. A more detailed summary of comments submitted during the vote will be published soon.
From here, the results and comments collected during this vote will be submitted to the Board of Trustees for their review. The current expectation is that the Board of Trustees review process will complete in March 2023. We will update you when their review process is completed.
Perhaps we're all speechless. I intend to continue doing what I've always done and, if someone decides it contravenes their rules, I'm sure the encyclopedia will have no problem carrying on without me. Certes (talk) 18:39, 16 February 2023 (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.
Starting in January of this year, something happened to the formatting of my user talk page. Instead of paragraph format, it became all-centered format. This doesn't seem to have happened to other people's talk pages so I probably did something stupid - or somebody posting on my page did something that changed it. How do I change it back to paragraph format? MelanieN (talk) 02:42, 16 February 2023 (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.
• Full text of the scholarly article upon which the Haaretz article is based [9]
The authors claim poor sources and sometimes no sources are used to distort the history of the Holocaust in Poland. Is this being addressed or discussed somewhere on Wikipedia? Anthonyhcole (talk) 09:13, 16 February 2023 (UTC)
Script RefRenamer converts all VE numeric names on a page to useful named references (default: Lastname-YYYY). There are many addditional options to customize how you want it done. This has worked flawlessly on pages containing more than a hundred numeric references; here's an example where it made about 136 changes at Generation Z (diff).
The script doesn't stop the VE problem from occurring, but it is a complete solution for converting one page that you're working on to reasonable ref names. Powerful and effective; kudos! Mathglot (talk) 21:50, 9 February 2023 (UTC)
Доброе, коллеги! Кавалер высшей награды всемирной общественной организации является ли значимой персоной в английском разделе Википедии?
Good morning, colleagues! Is the holder of the highest award of the world public organization a significant person in the English section of Wikipedia? ----Рөстәм Нурыев (talk) 05:46, 17 February 2023 (UTC)
My question exactly. Decisions on notability are usually made on a case-by-case basis, so to answer this we would need some more specifics, such as the name of the person, the name of the award and the name of the organisation. I think something may have been lost in translation here, because that looks suspiciously like the output from Google Translate. Alas, my Russian is very rusty, as it is nearly half a century since I studied the subject. Phil Bridger (talk) 12:47, 17 February 2023 (UTC)
1. Deleted. Nobody's cared to touch them in 20 years, a DDG search didn't give me any obvious evidence that these terms are in widespread use, but I'm not a subject-matter expert.
2. Merged together. The concepts closely complement each other.
3. Merged into a major article as a section, e.g. Part of speech.
Wikipedia:Proposed deletion would seem the appropriate course of action. Dictionary definitions of obscure terms don't merit stand-alone articles. If we were to use the terms anywhere, (e.g. in an article on linguistics) we would presumably explain their meaning in context, which is much more useful. AndyTheGrump (talk) 17:25, 17 February 2023 (UTC)
I have proposed the deletion of the articles on the grounds that they're dictionary definitions of obscure terms which don't appear to merit stand-alone articles. Thanks. JamesTMartin (talk) 18:43, 17 February 2023 (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.
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.
Community feedback-cycle about updating the Wikimedia Terms of Use starts
The Terms of Use are the legal terms that govern the use of websites hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation. Feedback on the draft proposal will be gathered from February through April.
A proposal for better addressing undisclosed paid editing
Bringing the ToU in line with current and recently passed laws affecting the Wikimedia Foundation including the European Digital Services Act
Regarding the Universal Code of Conduct and its enforcement guidelines, we are instructed to ensure that the ToU include it in some form.
Regarding CC 4.0, the communities had determined as the result of a 2016 consultation that the projects should upgrade the main license for hosted text from the current CC BY-SA 3.0 to CC BY-SA 4.0. We’re excited to be able to put that into effect, which will open up the projects to receiving a great deal of already existing CC BY-SA 4.0 text and improve reuse and remixing of project content going forward.
Regarding the proposal for better addressing undisclosed paid editing, the Wikimedia Foundation intends to strengthen its tools to support existing community policies against marketing companies engaged in systematic, undisclosed paid editing campaigns.
Finally, regarding new laws, the last ToU update was in 2015, and that update was a single item regarding paid editing. The last thorough revision was in 2012. While the law affecting hosting providers has held steady for some time, with the recent passage of the EU’s Digital Services Act, we are seeing more significant changes in the legal obligations for companies like the Wikimedia Foundation that host large websites. So with a decade behind us and the laws affecting website hosts soon changing, we think it’s a good time to revisit the ToU and update them to bring them up to current legal precedents and standards.
As part of the feedback cycle two office hours will be held, the first on March 2, the second on April 4.
I'm surprised that WMF lets people comment or provide feedback on ToU at all. I had always assumed this sort of thing was left only to the lawyers because they understood the specific legal nuances of the text in a way that may not be conveyed to laypeople. ⛵ WaltClipper-(talk)19:06, 25 February 2023 (UTC)
Well, any legal concerns will still be dealt with by the lawyers, and the WMF is free to ignore any feedback that doesn't align with their intent. On the first day of comments, various typographical errors were pointed out; of course I imagine someone might of caught them eventually (and some were apparently just transcription errors), but it's nice that the community was able to speed up that process. Checking on the page now, I see there has been an enlightening discussion on the marketing company mediation requirement in the proposed update. isaacl (talk) 18:17, 26 February 2023 (UTC)
Updating the language-links box in Vector 2022
The message about language links in the main menu is long and out of date. A proposal to update it:
I've fixed a few mistakes, including "This was largely because of the economic impact" being replaced by "This was large because of the economic impact".
So far, I am not aware of any chatbox/'AI' program that is capable of directly editing Wikipedia. Those edits appear to me to be from a human editor who is not familiar with Wikipedia style. Donald Albury16:05, 21 February 2023 (UTC)
Hard to tell if it's LLM-based; some changes are solid improvements, others aren't, but could reasonably be explained by newb-ness. I doubt LLMs would make those mistakes, anyway. DFlhb (talk) 14:46, 28 February 2023 (UTC)
Ukraine's Cultural Diplomacy Month 2023: We are back!
Please help translate to other languages.
Hello, dear Wikipedians!
Wikimedia Ukraine, in cooperation with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine and Ukrainian Institute, has launched the third edition of writing challenge "Ukraine's Cultural Diplomacy Month", which lasts from 1st until 31st March 2023. The campaign is dedicated to famous Ukrainian artists of cinema, music, literature, architecture, design and cultural phenomena of Ukraine that are now part of world heritage. We accept contribution in every language! The most active contesters will receive prizes.
We invite you to take part and help us improve the coverage of Ukrainian culture on Wikipedia in your language! Also, we plan to set up a banner to notify users of the possibility to participate in such a challenge!
A filter prevents me from doing this, that's why I put the request here (in fact I don't know where to put it exactly, since I found no page where you can make requests for speedy deletions). 176.128.237.169 (talk) 16:19, 26 February 2023 (UTC)
I'm not but this is not quite the problem. Where is the page for speedy deletion requests? There are user pages that are obviously spam and are to be deleted quickly (not this one, but it's a frequent case however), and I wouldn't be able to place the template on those pages either. 176.128.237.169 (talk) 16:44, 26 February 2023 (UTC)
There is no separate page for speedy deletion requests. The template goes on the page to be deleted. User pages are a partial exception to WP:OWN, in that only the user named can request speedy deletion under {{db-u1}}. I don't know if the edit filter you have hit applies to unregistered users on all user pages or is specific to this one because of previous vandalism. Either way, it's best to talk to Mir Harven about it at User talk:Mir Harven to see if that editor wants the page deleted. Phil Bridger (talk) 16:59, 26 February 2023 (UTC)
I am not sure that this is not just a politically motivated move. It appeared just the day after I posted some points & offered arguments that Serbo_ Croatian "language" POV pushing contributors are misrepresenting history of the Croatian language: Talk:Croatian_language#Useful_videos_on_Croatian_language,_both_in_English_and_Croatian. As far as I can see, they didn't offer rational arguments. Interestingly enough, these contributors try to silence Wikipedia contributors by insisting on marginal technicalities (such as village pump activity). These are bureaucratic- literally, without specific Wikipedia meaning- moves without any content, except for psychologically understandable motives: you are trying to prove your point & are defeated in the arena of public discourse & the only way to continue with pushing your ideology (in this case, the language ideology of Serbo-Croatism) is to try to suppress arguments & voices that destroy it. And the only way to achieve it is by insisting on marginal issues. That is what ruins Wikipedia's- I mean English Wikiedia's- reputation on some areas. Wikipedia should cling to the fact that it reflects what is universally- or almost universally- accepted by now. In this case, it is reflection of an ideology held by a clique & unsupported by empirical evidence. Perhaps the best example is the article Declaration on the Common Language, which is so biased that it is actually a complete misrepresentation of the event which spectacularly- failed. This text is an example of misappropriation of Wikipedia space for forcing ideologized opinions not based in empirical reality, or, if you want it clearly: distortion of truth.Mir Harven (talk) 09:53, 1 March 2023 (UTC)
Featured Article question
I brought up Wikipedia on my smartphone, using Google Chrome (not an app) in desktop mode, and looked briefly at the featured article. Then I clicked to display the whole page of the featured article. The preview of the featured article and the lede paragraph of the real article did not match. The preview isn't the beginning of the article. It may be an old beginning of the article; I haven't checked the history. Why are we displaying a teaser of the featured article that isn't the beginning of the featured article? Robert McClenon (talk) 04:36, 1 March 2023 (UTC)
This might be better asked at WT:TFA, but my understanding is that it is at least in part because the Today's Featured Article slot is a fixed size, and simply taking the first 1,000 characters or whatever from the actual lead of the article doesn't necessarily make the most coherent blurb. Caeciliusinhorto-public (talk) 09:05, 1 March 2023 (UTC)
Reminder: Office hours about updating the Wikimedia Terms of Use
The office hours will be held on March 2, at 17:00 UTC to 18:30 UTC. See for more details here on Meta.
Another office hours will be held on April 4.
We hereby kindly invite you to participate in the discussion. Please note that this meeting will be held in English language and led by the members of the Wikimedia Foundation Legal Team, who will take and answer your questions. Facilitators from the Movement Strategy and Governance Team will provide the necessary assistance and other meeting-related services.
The Wikimedia Foundation tests the switch between its first and secondary data centers. This will make sure that Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia wikis can stay online even after a disaster. To make sure everything is working, the Wikimedia Technology department needs to do a planned test. This test will show if they can reliably switch from one data centre to the other. It requires many teams to prepare for the test and to be available to fix any unexpected problems.
All traffic will switch on 1 March. The test will start at 14:00 UTC.
Unfortunately, because of some limitations in MediaWiki, all editing must stop while the switch is made. We apologize for this disruption, and we are working to minimize it in the future.
You will be able to read, but not edit, all wikis for a short period of time.
You will not be able to edit for up to an hour on Wednesday 1 March 2023.
If you try to edit or save during these times, you will see an error message. We hope that no edits will be lost during these minutes, but we can't guarantee it. If you see the error message, then please wait until everything is back to normal. Then you should be able to save your edit. But, we recommend that you make a copy of your changes first, just in case.
Other effects:
Background jobs will be slower and some may be dropped. Red links might not be updated as quickly as normal. If you create an article that is already linked somewhere else, the link will stay red longer than usual. Some long-running scripts will have to be stopped.
We expect the code deployments to happen as any other week. However, some case-by-case code freezes could punctually happen if the operation require them afterwards.
This project may be postponed if necessary. You can read the schedule at wikitech.wikimedia.org. Any changes will be announced in the schedule. There will be more notifications about this. A banner will be displayed on all wikis 30 minutes before this operation happens. Please share this information with your community.
But is there really no way to ensure edits go into some kind of buffer, rather than being lost? If someone's been working on an edit for a few hours, they won't see the banner that only appears 30 minutes before the switch; I'd hate to see people lose good edits over this. DFlhb (talk) 14:41, 28 February 2023 (UTC)
@DFlhb, if a user presses "publish" during the read-only, then they will get the read-only notification and the editor will go back to edit mode, with their edits still in the editor. They can retry publishing it later, until if goes online. This is valid for Wikimedia Foundation supported editors: I have no idea of what would go on for custom built editors. The only case where work would get lost is when a user close the browser tab where they had their ongoing editing, or if they purge this tab's cache. Trizek (WMF) (talk) 20:06, 28 February 2023 (UTC)
Good, seems reasonable. (And for the record I wasn't being sarcastic with "Sounds fun!", it actually does seem kind of cool) DFlhb (talk) 20:23, 28 February 2023 (UTC)
I tried to save an edit while we were in read-only. I got a clear message, and I could go back to the editor, and still try to publish my edit. (And I agree on the cool part, @DFlhb: just now, it was kind of funny to go to RecentChanges, turn Live Updates on, see the flow of edits stopping for 2 minutes and coming back.) Trizek (WMF) (talk) 14:16, 1 March 2023 (UTC)
Read-only mode lasted for 119 seconds. I'm not sure if that's a new speed record for them, but it's much faster than the ~20 minutes that it was in 2016.
@Whatamidoing (WMF) speaking as somebody who has done this kind of stuff, I think it's great that you're practicing it, and that you can do the whole process in 119 seconds. With a little more practice, you might get it down to 47 seconds, like these guys :-) The Switch Datacenter page on wikitech indicates it's done about once every 2 years. I'm surprised it's not done more frequently, to make sure people stay current. -- RoySmith(talk)21:14, 1 March 2023 (UTC)
They run smaller ones multiple times a year, which probably helps them keep their hand in. I don't know what the plan is moving forward. Forever ago, when it was a much less automated process, they hoped to do this once a year, and eventually more often. But I think (=but I might be wrong) that their goals changed a few years ago, to make it more automated and more comprehensive (e.g., Cloud services) rather than to do this particular style of m:server switch more frequently. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 18:16, 2 March 2023 (UTC)
Absolute garbage new interface
I don't know where else to put this, but I just want to say that the new webpage design is absolutely, irredeemably awful. I genuinely think that I will stop using this website, and that many others will too, if it is not quickly changed back, because the amount of blank space at the sides of the redesigned page layout is simply obnoxious, not to mention all the other awful features of this sudden and un-asked for change. I highly, HIGHLY suggest at the very least a "legacy mode" option that can be used to return to the previous user interface, because as it is this website frankly looks like trash. (Duplicated because I realized I posted this in the wrong place before)
2601:405:4400:9420:DC22:E380:D2EE:15A9 (talk) 03:27, 19 January 2023 (UTC)
The setting should also at least be persistent between pages to make the absolutely dogshit UI changes on desktop somewhat more palatable. It's amazing how these changes are somehow just as bad as Fandom (website)'s browsing experience. 219.89.209.234 (talk) 05:40, 20 January 2023 (UTC)
And there should be a [Set a local exception for this global preference] option in the Preferences too so editors don't have to un-checkmark that mode every single time when visiting other wikis. Some1 (talk) 01:08, 21 January 2023 (UTC)
I just want to make a comment. Very often in response to UI redesigns (not just on Wikipedia but in general) I see users complain about the new interface and other users saying, you can change that by tweaking some option. Generally speaking this just avoids the question. The real question is if some element of the new interface should be changed for the default... not on an individual basis. The hard reality of websites is that VERY few users will ever complain so a single complaining user is a warning sign that something might have the potential for improvement. Just sweeping the complaint under the rug by getting them to tweak an option doesn't really address the matter. It just side-steps it. Jason Quinn (talk) 01:58, 5 March 2023 (UTC)
To get back to ye olde skin, see near the end of User_talk:Jimbo_Wales#What_happened_to_Wikipedia? - ok "Go to your "Preferences" and then "Appearance ", and then select "Vector (2010)" and save your change". I have to say that (despite usually being as conservative in such matters as anybody), I switched to try the new one some weeks ago, & haven't yet switched back. It does seem to be slower though. Johnbod (talk) 13:10, 19 January 2023 (UTC)
My friend said their watchlist and tabs across the top went away completely so they couldn't even find a starting place; just, Wikipedia went kaplooey. So, the previous default was Vector 2010 ? Thx, Johnbod. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 13:15, 19 January 2023 (UTC)
Clicking on the three lines next to the MP globe leads to the dropdown menu - but not the other-language WPs ([Wikipedia languages[ is right at the bottom), and access to the 'preferences' (where one can select the old layout and even Monobook, among others) is only available to signed in users. (There can be many reasons for not signing in, including 'different computer, one minor typo, no point signing in' etc).
Question: how see an editor's contributions? I am willing to give this new interface a try. But how I am to navigate to see an editor's contributions, which I often want to do, under this. There is no longer a User contributions on other editors' User and User talk pages. A too-awkward workaround is to navigate to my own contributions, then edit the URL to put in another editor's username. --Doncram (talk,contribs) 19:31, 20 January 2023 (UTC)
You can also take a non-committal look at the new interface thru one of the other Wikipedias where it has been implemented. After a few minute's poking around, I found the French Wikipedia has been migrated. (I noticed that de.wikipedia.org is still set to the old interface; maybe the Foundation is scared of taking on both en.wikipedia & de.wikipedia at the same time?) -- llywrch (talk) 21:11, 20 January 2023 (UTC)
The links are hidden in the menu that's displayed by clicking the two arrows ( << ) next to the Wikipedia logo on the top left corner. Some1 (talk) 01:05, 21 January 2023 (UTC)
Thanks, i see that and more now. I was expecting that top left would be about high level Wikipedia, instead, i suppose. It's not immediately intuitive for me, but i think i may like it. --Doncram (talk,contribs) 07:01, 21 January 2023 (UTC)
Hey, people, it's different and it's not "garbage" because of that. For one thing, it uses icons/symbols which are universal. It's good for you, probably, to get used to them. I notice that I am more able to navigate this more easily because I had relatively recent experience in a different wikimedia project where the symbols were used. There, at first, I did not understand, say, the symbol with three horizontal lines and a star, but now i am getting it. User:SandyGeorge, User:Some1, do you remember when the bell symbol showed up? You eventually figured out that means "Alerts", I hope. And it is more elegant and better, actually, than a text string which uses up more space and which I bet is harder, perhaps for you and definitely for many others for whom English is not their first language, to immediately grasp. It will help you to understand the symbols when you occasionally go over to other-language Wikipedias and to other types of wikimedia projects.
Also, I am not used to it either, but the left hand side has been freed up for a new purpose, showing the table of contents (TOC) of the current page. I am thinking "having TOC on the left" probably is good, enabling better navigation. Given that is in place for myself and most others, now I realize I could/should adjust to take advantage. For example, on my own Talk page, I think that "TOC on the left" would not be very helpful if there are literally hundreds of discussion sections (as there were until I recently archived a couple of years worth). So it makes sense now for me to curate my own Talk page a bit more, so that "TOC on the left" works better for others. Frankly, the TOC's on many/most noticeboard pages and Talk pages have not worked very well... it is a pain to go all the way back up a Talk page to see them, and generally they have seemed to be less helpful for navigation than they should be. Now, with "TOC on the left", I think i will find it easier for myself to navigate some long pages. Especially if others sensibly curate those pages to enhance the usefulness of "TOC on the left".
I don't think the new design is "garbage." I'm actually using it right now and have no plans to switch back to 2010 Vector. The floating TOC is easily the best feature (well, my favorite feature) of the 2022 Vector skin (though it is a bit buggy and the links don't always bring you to the correct sections sometimes).
I have a few suggestions for the 2022 Vector skin, though:
Add a [Set a local exception for this global preference] option for 'Enable limited width mode' so that editors don't have to un-checkmark that mode every single time when visiting other wikis.
Unhide the Contributions link and the clock from the dropdown menu.
The Preview (when clicking 'Edit source') shouldn't show the article with limited width when 'Enable limited width mode' is disabled.
I haven't minded the "hidden" UTC clock. Given how infrequently I use it, I am willing to trade that for no longer getting logged out when the clock finally appears – and shifts all the other items in the bar – just as I try to click on Special:MyContribs. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 19:41, 23 January 2023 (UTC)
Thanks for the link, Whatamidoing (WMF). Speaking of the Log out button, I'm not a big fan of having to click three times just to fully log out (the drop down menu, log out button, then submit), especially if I'm in a hurry. I'm not sure if the bar shifting has ever happened to me; I never got accidentally logged out while using Vector 2010. Some1 (talk) 23:33, 23 January 2023 (UTC)
@Some1, how often do you intentionally log out? I might do that, um, once or twice a decade? I don't need to share my laptop with anyone who might try to edit Wikipedia, and I don't try to edit from public computers. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 03:10, 30 January 2023 (UTC)
Whatamidoing (WMF), quite often, e.g. I usually log out every time I leave the house (to prevent possible session hijacking and all that). The button being hidden isn't too bad, but the "Do you want to log out?" prompt is annoying (Yes, that's why I clicked the Log out button). Anyway, it's good to see that the clock is back and unhidden. Some1 (talk) 01:25, 1 February 2023 (UTC)
I asked around about this, and unless you have some concrete reason to worry about someone copying the cookies off your browser (e.g., it's happened to you before), then it didn't sound like logging out was considered a proportional response to the actual (small) risk. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 01:26, 8 February 2023 (UTC)
@Some1 If I've followed the threading correctly, it was you who said, "links don't always bring you to the correct sections sometimes". There's a number of bugs open in phab about this. I think T327350 is the right place to start, and explore the various other bugs that links to. -- RoySmith(talk)04:14, 30 January 2023 (UTC)
@Doncram, I believe that the limited width is supposed to be much better for the ~10% of people who have dyslexia. It's not my own personal favorite feature, but there are sound reasons to support it, especially on an education-focused site like this one. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 19:45, 23 January 2023 (UTC)
I'm one of those and it is better..... that said I also don't use a mouse very often and that has declined in accessibility for me. But I think it looks better. Moxy-03:21, 30 January 2023 (UTC)
In case anyone's trying to switch, you can click "Switch to old look" in the side bar, which will take you to the exact section of Special:Preferences that you need to be in. (If the sidebar's collapsed, then click the Hamburger button by the logo to open it.)
The "preview" option for each item listed in prefs will let you find the style that you like best. After you've made your choice, remember to click the big blue button at the bottom of the page to save your prefs. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 01:17, 4 February 2023 (UTC)
All these kilobytes spent on arguing about Vector 2022 in that RFC, and here I am just happily using it, as I have been for the past month. I get used to it more and more every day. --⛵ WaltClipper-(talk)19:05, 10 February 2023 (UTC)
Indeed! It took me a couple of days to get used to the different layout after I switched from Monobook a few months ago, but I certainly have no complaints now. Donald Albury19:50, 10 February 2023 (UTC)
I've been using Monobook since it came out, as someone who just switched, what benefits did switching give? I've been enjoying watching this kerfluffle from the sidelines. --Golbez (talk) 20:11, 10 February 2023 (UTC)
I was shocked and hated the new interface at first, too. I haven't been active recently, and wondered if I'd missed the rollout, but it seems it was just suddenly foisted on the community. I had a hard time finding stuff hidden at the top.
I do like the reduced width of the page. As I get older, it was getting harder for me to read such long lines.
But what I came here to complain about (sorry) is the Table of Contents being relocated down to the lower left side of the page. What??? It was perfect at the beginning of the article. That's where TOCs belong. Hoping to see this restored. YoPienso (talk) 17:24, 19 February 2023 (UTC)
My personal theory for this change is to unify Wikimedia and Wikipedia looks. You could say that the Kiwix application is in dire need of a graphical overhaul ( which it does need) but I think that the goal was just to unify the looks of all the Wikimedia sites. But, I don't use the UI that comes by default, I use timeless in the beta dark mode. :P Imoutofchoices (talk) 20:38, 19 February 2023 (UTC)
@Yopienso, I have collapsed the "sidebar", which means that the Table of Contents is (almost) the entire left side of the page. This works better for me than having the left sidebar followed by the TOC when I scroll down. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 22:18, 21 February 2023 (UTC)
@Yopienso, if you're having trouble seeing the Table of Contents because it's too far down the page, and the top corner looks like this, then click the button that says "hide" to get the Main menu out of your way. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 21:43, 23 February 2023 (UTC)
@Whatamidoing (WMF): On a page I am working on in my sandbox, there is a box on the left under "Languages" that says: "On this Wikipedia the language links are at the top of the page across from the article title. Go to top." I have nothing against the new UI, and I use it so that, as a content creator, I know what the readers are seeing. But I am curious as to why we have a "Languages" heading on the left when the languages are not there. (And do we really need languages at all on a page in the user space?) Hawkeye7(discuss)21:26, 26 February 2023 (UTC)
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There is a joke here about political systems that feature either people choosing their leaders, or leaders choosing their people. Andreas JN466 23:37, 18 January 2023 (UTC)
03:21, 30 January 2023 (UTC)
Hamburger button by the logo to open it.)
