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User talk:Ciphers/Archive 1

< User talk:Ciphers
Latest comment: 8 years ago by Dan Harkless in topic English fluency, again

Welcome!

Hello, Ciphers, and welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Here are some pages that you might find helpful:

I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wikipedian! Please sign your messages on discussion pages using four tildes (~~~~); this will automatically insert your username and the date. If you need help, check out Wikipedia:Questions, ask me on my talk page, or ask your question on this page and then place {{helpme}} before the question. Again, welcome! --Meno25 (talk) 13:29, 13 August 2008 (UTC)Reply

The Wikipedia SignpostWikipedia Signpost: 15 June 2009

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Delivered by SoxBot (talk) at 11:12, 16 June 2009 (UTC)Reply

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Delivered by SoxBot (talk) at 02:22, 9 July 2009 (UTC)Reply

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Delivered by -- Tinu Cherian BOT - 08:29, 28 July 2009 (UTC) Reply

The Wikipedia SignpostWikipedia Signpost: 3 August 2009

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The Wikipedia SignpostWikipedia Signpost: 17 August 2009

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The Wikipedia SignpostWikipedia Signpost: 24 August 2009

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The Wikipedia SignpostWikipedia Signpost: 31 August 2009

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The Wikipedia Signpost: 21 September 2009

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Redirector

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Latest comment: 16 years ago16 comments2 people in discussion

Please stop. At least two of your CHANGED redirectors are clearly incorrect. Besides, you appear to be running an unregistered bot. — Arthur Rubin (talk) 08:42, 29 September 2009 (UTC)Reply

 
You have been temporarily blocked from editing for abuse of editing privileges. Once the block has expired, you are welcome to make constructive contributions. If you believe this block is unjustified, you may contest the block by adding the text {{unblock|Your reason here}} below, but you should read our guide to appealing blocks first.

You have made 5 errors since my previous comment. — Arthur Rubin (talk) 08:48, 29 September 2009 (UTC)Reply

Hi. would you please list the incorrect redirects for me so i could fix them! I am not running a bot, all my edits are manual. --Ciphers (talk) 08:49, 29 September 2009 (UTC)Reply

{{unblock|I still do not know what are the "incorrect" edits i have done!!, plus i am not running a bot. --Ciphers (talk) 08:54, 29 September 2009 (UTC)}}Reply

 

Your request to be unblocked has been granted for the following reason(s):

User agrees not to run the script without checking edits. I would prefer he talk to the bot people to verify this is something that should be done on en:Wikipedia, but this seems adequate.

Request handled by: — Arthur Rubin (talk) 09:28, 29 September 2009 (UTC)Reply

Unblocking administrator: Please check for active autoblocks on this user after accepting the unblock request.

— Arthur Rubin (talk) 09:28, 29 September 2009 (UTC)Reply

  1. More than 10 edits per minute generally indicates a bot.
  2. The edits where you change a redirect or replace an article by a redirect are almost certainly errors.
  3. The rest of the edits may be redirects from other languages, which should not, in general, be automatically created, at least according to this Wikipedia's guidelines.
If you agree to stop using the redirector ( http://tools.wikimedia.de/~magnus/redirector.php , according to your edit comment), without getting a ruling that it's legitimate here, I'll unblock. — Arthur Rubin (talk) 08:59, 29 September 2009 (UTC)Reply
I checked the errors. you are right! i can not promise of stop using the script (because it was created in order to be used) but i can promise to use with much care, and on lower frequencies not to be mistaken as a bot.--Ciphers (talk) 09:04, 29 September 2009 (UTC)Reply
It acts like a bot; If you promise not to use it without first getting approval from the bot group, I'll unblock. — Arthur Rubin (talk) 09:12, 29 September 2009 (UTC)Reply
I'm going to delete the negative numbers, as well. We had someone do that before, and consensus is that -10 (or −10, to be more precise) should redirect to 10 (number), if at all; but it should only be created if there's a specific reason. — Arthur Rubin (talk) 09:17, 29 September 2009 (UTC)Reply
As i mentioned in my previous reply, i would not use it on high frequency as i did before (it acts like a bot just because i am fast in saving pages ;) ). I over trusted the tool, but now i am checking the terrible edits ( i did not know it writes over existing pages). it should really be used with care. sorry for the troubles and thanks for your attentions and the revert as well. --Ciphers (talk) 09:18, 29 September 2009 (UTC)Reply
Thanks again. --Ciphers (talk) 09:30, 29 September 2009 (UTC)Reply
Hey Arthur, the automatic block is still active would you please remove the automatic block. --Ciphers (talk) 09:33, 29 September 2009 (UTC)Reply
Sorry. I think I got it now. Please check, as I'm heading off to bed shortly. — Arthur Rubin (talk) 09:38, 29 September 2009 (UTC)Reply
You might also want to check to make sure that you don't create any redirects to itself under the en:Wikipedia capitalization rules; dvips seemed to be redirected to Dvips. — Arthur Rubin (talk) 09:53, 29 September 2009 (UTC)Reply
Sure. Thanks --Ciphers (talk) 09:55, 29 September 2009 (UTC)Reply

September 2009

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Latest comment: 16 years ago2 comments1 person in discussion

  Welcome to Wikipedia. We invite everyone to contribute constructively to our encyclopedia, but one or more redirects you created, such as with pdfTeX, have been considered disruptive and/or malicious, and have been reverted. Take a look at the welcome page if you would like to learn more about contributing to our encyclopedia. Thanks. Oneiros (talk) 11:30, 29 September 2009 (UTC)Reply

  Please do not create malicious redirects, as you did with CY. They are disruptive and are considered vandalism, and have been reverted. If you would like to experiment, please use the sandbox. Thank you. Oneiros (talk) 11:32, 29 September 2009 (UTC)Reply

The Wikipedia Signpost: 28 September 2009

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Hi there

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Latest comment: 16 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion

Hello Ciphers,

Wow, you seem to be quite a language genius! I have started to learn Arabic, so I was wondering if you could recommend any method to learn it quickly and efficiently? Thanks in advance,

all the best,

Heike (http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benutzer:HeikeLoechel)

Hallo Heike,

Thanks for the message. I am not a genius, in fact it is just i have a plenty of time to practice languages :) . Arabic is just the same, you may learn reading and writing in a short time, however speaking it needs a lot of practice, and plenty of brave to practice. best luck. --Ciphers (talk) 05:27, 1 October 2009 (UTC)Reply


The Wikipedia Signpost: 16 November 2009

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The Wikipedia Signpost: 23 November 2009

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Mughal Gardens

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Just curious as to why you deleted my entry on Mughal Gardens. Was it somehow in error? I felt that the subject deserved more attention so I added some of my 8 months of graduate research on the subject. Leverett.lisa (talk) 00:51, 30 November 2009 (UTC)Reply

Hi. Yes you are true, the reason that led you edit to trigger the abuse filter was using (<ref>Insert footnote text here</ref>) without actually putting a reference. Good that you reverted my revert and i removed the test phrase anyway. best --Ciphers (talk) 06:47, 30 November 2009 (UTC)Reply
Thanks :)Leverett.lisa (talk) 18:23, 30 November 2009 (UTC)Reply

The Wikipedia Signpost: 30 November 2009

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The Wikipedia Signpost: 7 December 2009

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The Wikipedia Signpost: 21 December 2009

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The Wikipedia Signpost: 28 December 2009

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The Wikipedia Signpost: 1 January 2010

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The Wikipedia Signpost: 11 January 2010

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User:Doktor Noo

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Thanks for reverting that. I've brought it up with an admin User:Bettia to see what can be done about this. Welshleprechaun (talk) 09:03, 14 January 2010 (UTC)Reply

sure, my pleasure! --Ciphers (talk) 09:06, 14 January 2010 (UTC)Reply
Thank you for reverting vandalism to my talk page. Oda Mari (talk) 09:08, 14 January 2010 (UTC)Reply

The Wikipedia Signpost: 18 January 2010

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The Wikipedia Signpost: 25 January 2010

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The Wikipedia Signpost: 8 February 2010

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The Wikipedia Signpost: 15 February 2010

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The Wikipedia Signpost: 22 February 2010

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The Wikipedia Signpost: 1 March 2010

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The Wikipedia Signpost: 8 March 2010

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New Page Patrol survey

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New page patrol – Survey Invitation

Hello Ciphers/Archive 1! The WMF is currently developing new tools to make new page patrolling much easier. Whether you have patrolled many pages or only a few, we now need to know about your experience. The survey takes only 6 minutes, and the information you provide will not be shared with third parties other than to assist us in analyzing the results of the survey; the WMF will not use the information to identify you.

  • If this invitation also appears on other accounts you may have, please complete the survey once only.
  • If this has been sent to you in error and you have never patrolled new pages, please ignore it.

Please click HERE to take part.
Many thanks in advance for providing this essential feedback.

You are receiving this invitation because you have patrolled new pages. For more information, please see NPP Survey

AFT5 newsletter

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Hey again all :). So, some big news, some small news, some good news, some bad news!

On the "big news" front; we've now deployed AFT5 on to 10 percent of articles, This is pretty awesome :). On the "bad news", however, it looks like we're having to stop at 10 percent until around September - there are scaling issues that make it dangerous to deploy wider. Happily, our awesome features engineering team is looking into them as we speak, and I'm optimistic that the issues will be resolved.

For both "small" and "good" news; we've got another office hours session. This one is tomorrow, at 22:00 UTC in #wikimedia-office connect - I appreciate it's a bit late for Europeans, but I wanted to juggle it so US east coasters could attend if they wanted :). Hope to see you all there!

Page Curation update

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Hey all :). We've just deployed another set of features for Page Curation. They include flyouts from the icons in Special:NewPagesFeed, showing who reviewed an article and when, a listing of this in the "info" flyout, and a general re-jigging of the info flyout - we've also fixed the weird bug with page_titles_having_underscores_instead_of_spaces in messages sent to talkpages, and introduced CSD logging! As always, these features will need some work - but any feedback would be most welcome.

The Signpost: 12 November 2012

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Latest comment: 13 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion
  • News and notes: Court ruling complicates the paid-editing debate
    Last week, media outlets reported a ruling by a German court on the problem of businesses using Wikipedia for marketing purposes. The issue goes beyond the direct management of marketing-related edits by Wikipedians; it involves cross-monitoring and interacting among market competitors themselves on Wikipedia. A company that sells dietary supplements made from frankincense had taken a competitor to court. The recently published judgment by the Higher Regional Court of Munich, in dealing with the German Wikipedia article on frankincense products, was handed down in May and is based on European competition law.
  • Featured content: The table has turned
    Thirteen articles, six lists, and five images were promoted to 'featured' status last week.
  • Technology report: MediaWiki 1.20 and the prospects for getting 1.21 code reviewed promptly
    In late September, the Technology report published its findings about (particularly median) code review times. To the 23,900 changesets analysed the first time (the data for which has been updated), the Signpost added data from the 9,000 or so changesets contributed between September 17 and November 9 to a total of 93,000 reviews across 45,000 patchsets. Bots and self-reviews were also discarded, but reviews made by a different user in the form of a superseding patch were retained. Finally, users were categorised by hand according to whether they would be best regarded as staff or volunteers. The new analyses were consistent with the predictions of the previous analysis.
  • WikiProject report: Land of parrots, palm trees, and the Holy Cross: WikiProject Brazil
    As promised, we're expanding our horizons by featuring projects that cover underrepresented areas of the globe. This week, we headed to WikiProject Brazil which keeps track of articles about the world's largest Portuguese-speaking country. The project has shown spurts of activity and continues to serve as a hub for discussions, despite the project's collaborations, peer reviews, and outreach activities being largely inactive.

AFT5 newsletter

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Latest comment: 13 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion

Hey all :). A couple of quick updates (one small, one large)

First, we're continuing to work on some ways to increase the quality of feedback and make it easier to eliminate and deal with non-useful feedback: hopefully I'll have more news for you on this soon :).

Second, we're looking at ways to increase the actual number of users patrolling and take off some of the workload from you lot. Part of this is increasing the prominence of the feedback page, which we're going to try to do with a link at the top of each article to the relevant page. This should be deployed on Tuesday (touch wood!) and we'll be closely monitoring what happens. Let me know if you have any questions or issues :). Thanks, Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 14:27, 16 November 2012 (UTC)Reply

The Signpost: 19 November 2012

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  • News and notes: FDC's financial muscle kicks in
    The WMF's Funds Dissemination Committee has published its recommendations for the inaugural round 1 of funding. Requests totalled US$10.4M, nearly all of the FDC's budget for both first and second rounds. The seven-member committee of community volunteers appointed in September advises the WMF board on the distribution of grant funds among applying Wikimedia organizations. The committee, which has a separate operating budget of $276k for salaries and expenses, considered 12 applications for funds, from 11 chapters and from the WMF itself for its non-core activities. The decision-making process included community and FDC staff input after October 1, the closing date for submissions. Taken together, the volunteers decided to endorse an average of 81% of the funding sought—a total of $8.43M, which went to 11 of the 12 applicants. This leaves $2.71M to be distributed in round 2, for which applications are due in little more than three months' time.
  • WikiProject report: No teenagers, mutants, or ninjas: WikiProject Turtles
    This week, we spent some time with WikiProject Turtles. The young project started in January 2011 and has accumulated 5 Featured Articles, 3 Featured Lists, and 6 Featured Pictures. The project maintains a combined to-do list and hot articles meter, a popular pages ranking, and a collection of resources for turtle articles. We interviewed Faendalimas and NYMFan69-86.
  • Technology report: Structural reorganisation "not a done deal"
    WMF Executive Director Sue Gardner was forced to clarify this week that proposed structural changes to the Foundation's Engineering and Product Development Department were not a "done deal" and that it was "important that you [particularly affected staff] realise that ... your input is wanted". The reorganisation, announced on November 5 and planned for the middle of next year, will see its two components split off into their own departments.
  • Featured content: Wikipedia hit by the Streisand effect
    Seven featured articles, four featured lists and ten featured pictures – including the photograph that spawned the Streisand effect – were promoted this week.

Wikidata weekly summary #33

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Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Development
    • Updated demo system
    • Refactored and improved change propagation code
    • Add option for client and change propagations to work with job queue
    • Added filter and preference for recent changes on the client, to show/hide Wikidata edits
    • Pruning of changes table
    • Fixed some issues in the Wikidata Vagrant
    • Added puppet recipe for Wikidata on WMF labs
    • Worked on making statements editable in the frontend
    • JSON of entities is sent to the frontend now
    • Finalized DataTypes extension’s $.valueview system
    • Improved entity selector widget
    • Added Selenium tests for special pages
    • Tracking separate revision ids in Javascript to fix the edit conflict handling
    • Fixed fatal PHP error in Special:SetLabel
    • Entities with just whitespaces as label/description are not allowed anymore
  • Discussions/Press
  • Events
    • upcoming: Offener Sonntag at WMDE’s membership assembly
    • upcoming: SWIB
    • foss.in
    • local meetup in Bangalore
  • Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • Open Tasks for You
Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Global message delivery 09:01, 24 November 2012 (UTC)

The Signpost: 26 November 2012

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  • News and notes: Toolserver finance remains uncertain
    On November 24, a general assembly of Wikimedia Germany (WMDE) voted on the fate of the Wikimedia Toolserver, a central external piece of technical infrastructure supporting the editing communities with volunteer-developed scripts and webpages of various kinds that are assisting in performing mostly menial tasks.
  • Recent research: Movie success predictions, readability, credentials and authority, geographical comparisons
    An open-access preprint presents the results from a study attempting to predict early box office revenues from Wikipedia traffic and activity data. The authors – a team of computational social scientists from Budapest University of Technology and Economics, Aalto University and the Central European University – submit that behavioral patterns on Wikipedia can be used for accurate forecasting, matching and in some cases outperforming the use of social media data for predictive modeling. The results, based on a corpus of 312 English Wikipedia articles on movies released in 2010, indicate that the joint editing activity and traffic measures on Wikipedia are strong predictors of box office revenue for highly successful movies.
  • Technology report: Wikidata reaches 100,000 entries
    Wikidata, the new "Wikimedia Commons for data" and the first new Wikimedia project since 2006, reached 100,000 entries this week. The project aims to be a single, human- and machine-readable database for common data, spanning across all Wikipedia projects, which will "lead to a higher consistency and quality within Wikipedia articles, as well as increased availability of information in the smaller language editions" while lowering the burden on Wikipedia's volunteer editors—whose numbers have stalled overall, and continue to dwindle on the English Wikipedia.
  • WikiProject report: Directing Discussion: WikiProject Deletion Sorting
    This week, we uncovered WikiProject Deletion Sorting, Wikipedia's most active project by number of edits to all the project's pages. This special project seeks to increase participation in Articles for Deletion nominations by categorizing the AfD discussions by various topic areas that may draw the attention of editors. The project was started in August 2005 with manual processes that are continued today by a bevy of bots, categories, and transclusions. The project took inspiration from WikiProject Stub Sorting and some historical discussions on deletion reform. As the sheer number of AfDs continues to grow, the project is seeking better tools to manage the deletion sorting process and attract editors to comment on these deletion discussions.

Wikidata weekly summary #34

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Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Development
    • Added DirectSqlStore to client so that it can directly access the repository database, and not require creating any tables on the client
    • Bug fixing on the client extension, and preparing it for first deployment
    • Less edit conflicts due to a smarter conflict detection
    • Better recent changes comments on the client
    • Clean up on the backend for entity artefacts
    • The statement UI enables to create statements and displays them, but has still a few glitches
    • The client now accesses the data on the server directly, and the data is not replicated anymore
    • Added a number of profiler calls
    • Special:Contributions displays labels now
    • User preference on the client to hide Wikidata edits
    • Statements can be created and saved now
    • Statements are properly styled in JavaScript and non-JavaScript version
    • Improved JavaScript part of the templating engine
    • Improved entity selector widget
    • Client:Watchlist Selenium Tests
    • Client: RecentChanges Selenium tests
    • Added DataValues, DataTypes, jQuery.ui QUnit tests to Selenium
    • Some PHPUnit test fixes
  • Discussions/Press
  • Events
    • Linuxday
    • Open Sunday after Wikimedia Deutschland’s membership assembly
    • SWIB
    • foss.in
    • upcoming: intro and Q&A in Bangalore
  • Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • Open Tasks for You
Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Global message delivery 08:21, 1 December 2012 (UTC)

The Signpost: 03 December 2012

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Latest comment: 13 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion
  • Featured content: The play's the thing
    Three articles, two lists, and four images were promoted to 'featured' status this week.
  • Technology report: MediaWiki problems but good news for Toolserver stability
    Deployments of MediaWiki 1.21wmf5 cause widespread problems for users across wikis when HTML and CSS updates came temporarily out of sync. On the first wikis targeted for deployment, this was caused by the different cache invalidation rates for HTML (typically one month) and CSS (typically five minutes). The retrospective on the problem highlighted the fact that that the test wiki – the WMF's answer to a production environment that individual developers can no longer practically emulate themselves – actually demonstrated the exact problem that would later manifest itself on production wikis. It went unnoticed.
  • WikiProject report: The White Rose: WikiProject Yorkshire
    This week, we went searching for white roses in the lands of WikiProject Yorkshire. The project began in May 2007 as a way to improve articles about the historic English county of Yorkshire and its modern-day administrative divisions and cities. Since then, the project has accumulated 31 Featured Articles, 14 Featured Lists, 91 Good Articles, and a monstrous list of Did You Know entries. Despite all of the effort improving Yorkshire articles, the project has experienced waning participation in the last few years. The project still publishes a newsletter each month, monitors the popularity of and recent changes to its articles, maintains a portal, and collects resources for contributors to use.

Wikidata weekly summary #35

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Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Global message delivery 13:21, 7 December 2012 (UTC)

The Signpost: 10 December 2012

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Latest comment: 13 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion
  • News and notes: Wobbly start to ArbCom election, but turnout beats last year's
    At the time of writing, this year's election has just closed after a two-week voting period. The eight seats were contested by 21 candidates. Of these, 15 have not been arbitrators (Beeblebrox, Count Iblis, Guerillero, Jc37, Keilana, Ks0stm, Kww, NuclearWarfare, Pgallert, RegentsPark, Richwales, Salvio giuliano, Timotheus Canens, Worm That Turned, and YOLO Swag); four candidates are sitting arbitrators (David Fuchs, Elen of the Roads, Jclemens, and Newyorkbrad); and two have previously served on the committee (Carcharoth and Coren). Four Wikimedia stewards from outside the English Wikipedia stepped forward as election scrutineers: Pundit, from the Polish Wikipedia; Teles, from the Portuguese Wikipedia; Quentinv57, from the French Wikipedia; and Mardetanha, from the Persian Wikipedia. The scrutineers' task is to ensure that the election is free of multiple votes from the same person, to tally the results, and to announce them. The full results are expected to be released within the next few days and will be reported in next week's edition of the Signpost.
  • Featured content: Wikipedia goes to Hell
    Eight articles, four images, six lists, and one topic were promoted to 'featured' status on the English Wikipedia this week.
  • Technology report: The new Visual Editor gets a bit more visual
    The Visual Editor project – an attempt to create the first WMF-deployable WYSIWYG editor – will go live on its first Wikipedias imminently following nearly six months of testing on MediaWiki.org. A full explanatory blog post accompanied the news, explaining the project and its setup. Once a user has opted-in, the editor can handle basic formatting, headings and lists, while safely ignoring elements it is yet to understand, including references, categories, templates, tables and images. At the last count, approximately 2% of pages would break in some way if a user tried the Visual Editor on them; it is unclear whether any specific protection will be put in place beyond relying on editors to spot problems.
  • WikiProject report: WikiProject Human Rights
    In celebration of Human Rights Day, we checked out WikiProject Human Rights. Started in February 2006, the project has grown to include over 3,000 articles, including 12 Featured Articles, 3 Featured Lists, 66 Good Articles, a large collection of Did You Know entries, and a few mentions "in the news". The project monitors listings of popular pages and cleanup tags. We interviewed Khazar2, Cirt, and Boud.

Wikidata weekly summary #36

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Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Development
    • Deployed new code on wikidata.org. All changes can be found here
    • Updated demo system
    • http://test2.wikipedia.org now uses http://wikidata.org for getting language links and wikidata.org edits affecting the existing articles on test2 show up in RecentChanges (if they are not hidden)
    • Statements (think of “population: 2.000.000” and similar things) are taking shape in the interface. They are still pretty buggy though at this point.
    • It is now possible to link to images on Wikimedia Commons in a statement (think of “image: sundown_at_the_beach.png” for example)
    • Links are now protocol-relative (bugzilla:42534)
    • No longer possible to create new items and set labels when database is set to read-only
    • Added more tests to the GeoCoordinate parser
    • Make use of EditEntity in removeclaims API
    • Removed many singletons to reduce global state
    • Made SpecialSetLabel work with non-item entities
    • Improved settings system
    • Improved options of ValueFormatters
    • Improved options of ValueParsers
    • Moved label+description uniqueness check out of transaction to avoid deadlocks and changed it to only be enforced for edits changing any violating values
    • Fixed serialization of SiteArray
    • ~=[,,_,,]:3
    • Had to fix reporting of aliases in wbsearchentities again
    • Implemented integration of baserevids for statements UI API calls for editconflict detection for statements/claims/snaks
    • Universal Language Selector fallback fix for Selenium tests
    • Report URL to entity in wbsearchentites API module
    • Moved the demo system to a larger server
    • Fixed several bugs in Statements user interface, most notably, adding Statements to existing sections and layout fixes
    • Added wikibase API module on the client to provide information about the associated repo (e.g. url, script path, article path)
    • A bunch of messages for autocomments were fixed (they are automatically added as an edit summary for edits on items and co in Wikidata - for example: “‎Changed [en] description: Finnish rock band”)
  • Discussions/Press
  • Events
    • WhereCamp
    • Wikidata talk as part of a lecture on knowledge management in Karlsruhe
    • upcoming: 29C3
    • upcoming: Office hours
  • Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • Open Tasks for You
    • Want to help Lydia write the next weekly summary? Let her know.
    • Hack on one of these
Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Global message delivery 14:46, 14 December 2012 (UTC)

The Signpost: 17 December 2012

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Latest comment: 13 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion
  • News and notes: Arbitrator election: stewards release the results
    Seven days after the close of voting, the results of the recent Arbitration Committee (ArbCom) elections have been announced by two of the four stewards overseeing the election, Mardetanha and Pundit. Of the 21 candidates, 13 managed to gain positive support-to-oppose ratios, and the top eight will be appointed to two-year terms on the committee by Jimbo Wales, exercising one of his traditional responsibilities.
  • WikiProject report: WikiProjekt Computerspiel: Covering Computer Games in Germany
    In the past year, we've tried to expand our horizons by looking at how WikiProjects work in other languages of Wikipedia. Following in the footsteps of our previously interviewed Czech and French projects, we visited the German Wikipedia to explore WikiProjekt Computerspiel (WikiProject Computer Games). The project dates back to November 2004 and has become the back-end of the Computer Games Portal, which covers all video games regardless of platform. Editors writing about computer games at the German Wikipedia deal with unique cultural and legal challenges, ranging from a lack of fair use precedents to the limited availability of games deemed harmful for youths to strong standards for the inclusion of material on the German Wikipedia.
  • Op-ed: Finding truth in Sandy Hook
    This week's big story on the English Wikipedia is obviously the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting (which, by the time you read this, may be renamed 2012 Connecticut school shooting). Quickly created and nominated for deletion not once but twice, and both times speedily kept, the article saw the expected flurry of edits (a look at the history suggests an average of at least one a minute over the first day and a half) and more than half a million page views on the first full day.
  • Featured content: Wikipedia's cute ass
    Four articles, three lists, and five images were promoted to 'featured' status on the English Wikipedia this week, including a picture of a three-week old donkey (also known as an 'ass').
  • Technology report: MediaWiki groups and why you might want to start snuggling newbie editors
    MediaWiki users (including Wikimedians) can now organise themselves into groups, receiving recognition and support-in-kind from the Wikimedia Foundation. The project, backed by new Wikimedia technical contributor coordinator Quim Gil, has seen five proposals lodged in its first week of operation. The idea of MediaWiki groups mimics that of Wikimedia User Groups.

The Signpost: 24 December 2012

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  • News and notes: Debates on Meta sparking along—grants, new entities, and conflicts of interest
    As part of its new focus on core responsibilities, the Wikimedia Foundation is reforming its grant schemes so that they are more accessible to individual volunteers. The community is invited to look at proposals for a new scheme—for now called Individual engagement grants (IEGs)—which is due to kick off on January 15. On Meta, the community is once again debating the two new offline participation models—user groups (open membership groups designed to be easy to form) and thematic organizations (incorporated non-profits representing the Wikimedia movement and supporting work on a specific theme within or across countries). In a consultation process on Meta that will last until January 15, the community will be discussing WMF proposals for a new guideline on conflicts of interests concerning Wikimedia resources. The draft covers COI issues for both volunteers and organizations across the movement.
  • WikiProject report: A Song of Ice and Fire
    This week, we spent some time with WikiProject A Song of Ice and Fire, which focuses on the eponymous series of high fantasy literature, the television series Game of Thrones, and related works by George R. R. Martin. The project was started in July 2006 and has grown to include 11 Good Articles maintained by a small yet enthusiastic band of editors.
  • Featured content: Battlecruiser operational
    Seven articles and two lists were promoted to 'featured' status this week, including List of battlecruisers. The article covers all of the battlecruisers—which were a type of warship similar in size to a battleship but with several defining characteristics—ever planned or constructed. The last British battlecruiser built, HMS Hood, is pictured at right.
  • Technology report: Efforts to "normalise" Toolserver relations stepped up
    Efforts were stepped up this week to sow a feeling of trust between the major parties with an interest in the future of the Toolserver. The tool- and bot-hosting server – more accurately servers – are currently operated by German chapter, Wikimedia Germany, with assistance from the Foundation and numerous volunteers, including long-time system administrator Daniel Baur (more commonly known by his pseudonym DaB). However, those parties have more recently failed to see eye-to-eye on the trajectory for the Toolserver, which is scheduled to be replaced by Wikimedia Labs in late 2013, with increasing concern about the tone of discussions.

Wikidata weekly summary #38

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Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week. It's rather short this time because pretty much everyone enjoys some well-deserved vacation.
  • Development
    • Some of us unwrapped gifts (-:
    • Started working on supporting different kinds of Snaks in the user interface
    • Fixing support for PostgreSQL in core, which was broken with introduction of the sites stuff
    • Code reviewing of changes in MediaWiki core
    • Adding watchlist filter in client for Wikidata changes
  • Discussions/Press
  • Events
    • right now: 29C3
  • Open Tasks for You
Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Global message delivery 19:46, 28 December 2012 (UTC)

The Signpost: 31 December 2012

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  • From the editor: Wikipedia, our Colosseum
    In the impersonal, detached Colosseum that is Wikipedia, people find it much easier to put their thumbs down. As such, many people active in the Wikimedia movement have witnessed a precipitous decline in civil discourse. This is far from a new trend, yet many people would agree that it all seemed somehow worse in 2012.
  • In the media: Is the Wikimedia movement too 'cash rich'?
    A recent, poorly researched and poorly written story in the Register highlighted the perceived "cash rich" status of the Wikimedia movement. ... The Telegraph and Daily Dot, among others, have alleged that there are multiple links between the WMF, Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales, and Kazakhstan's government, which is, for all intents and purposes, a one-party non-democratic state.
  • Technology report: Looking back on a year of incremental changes
    In the first of two features, the Signpost this week looks back on 2012, a year when developers finally made inroads into three issues that had been put off for far too long (the need for editors to learn wiki-markup, the lack of a proper template language and the centralisation of data) but left all three projects far from finished.
  • Interview: Interview with Brion Vibber, the WMF's first employee
    Brion Vibber has been a Wikipedia editor for nearly 11 years and was the first person officially hired to work for the Wikimedia Foundation. He was instrumental in early development of the MediaWiki software and is now the lead software architect for the foundation's mobile development team.
  • Featured content: Whoa Nelly! Featured content in review
    At the beginning of the year, we began a series of interviews with editors who have worked hard to combat systemic bias through the creation of featured content; although we haven't seen six installments yet, we've also had some delightful interviews with people who write articles on some of our most core topics. Now, as we close the year, I would like to present some of my own musings on the state of featured content—especially as it pertains to systemic bias and core topics.
  • WikiProject report: New Year, New York
    This week, we're celebrating the New Year from Times Square by interviewing WikiProject New York City. Since December 2004, WikiProject NYC has had the difficult task of maintaining articles about the largest city in the United States, many of which are also among the the most viewed articles on Wikipedia. The project is home to 22 Featured Articles, 7 Featured Lists, 32 pieces of Featured Media, and a lengthy list of Did You Know? entries.
  • Recent research: Wikipedia and Sandy Hook; SOPA blackout reexamined
    Northeastern University researcher Brian Keegan analyzed the gathering of hundreds of Wikipedians to cover the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in the immediate aftermath of the tragedy. ... A First Monday article reviews several aspects of the Wikipedia participation in the 18 January 2012, protests against SOPA and PIPA legislation in the USA. The paper focuses on the question of legitimacy, looking at how the Wikipedia community arrived at the decision to participate in those protests.

Wikidata weekly summary #39

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Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Global message delivery 21:36, 4 January 2013 (UTC)

The Signpost: 07 January 2013

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  • Op-ed: Meta, where innovative ideas die
    Meta is the wiki that has coordinated a wide range of cross-project Wikimedia activities, such as the activities of stewards, the archiving of chapter reports, and WMF trustee elections. The project has long been an out-of-the-way corner for technocratic working groups, unaccountable mandarins, and in-house bureaucratic proceedings. Largely ignored by the editing communities of projects such as Wikipedia and organizations that serve them, Meta has evolved into a huge and relatively disorganized repository, where the few archivists running it also happen to be the main authors of some of its key documents. While Meta is well-designed for supporting the librarians and mandarins who stride along its corridors, visitors tend to find the site impenetrable—or so many people have argued over the past decade. This impenetrability runs counter to Meta's increasingly central role in the Wikimedia movement.
  • WikiProject report: Where Are They Now? Episode IV: A New Year
    The dawning of a new year offers both a fresh slate and an opportunity to revisit our previous adventures. 2012 marked the fifth anniversary of the WikiProject Report and was the column's most productive year with 52 articles published. In addition to sharing the experiences of Wikipedia's many active projects, we expanded our scope to highlight unique projects from other languages of Wikipedia, and tracked down all of the former editors-in-chief of the Signpost for an introspective interview ... While last year's "Summer Sports Series" may have drawn yawns from some readers, a special report on "Neglected Geography" elicited more comments than any previous issue of the Report. Following in the footsteps of our past three recaps, we'll spend this week looking back at the trials and tribulations of the WikiProjects we encountered in 2012. Where are they now?
  • News and notes: 2012—the big year
    The past 12 months have seen a multitude of issues and events in the Wikimedia foundation, the movement at large, and the English Wikipedia. The movement, now in its second decade, is growing apace in its international reach, cultural and linguistic diversity, technical development, and financial complexity; and many factors have combined to produce what has in many ways been the biggest, most dynamic year in the movement's history. Looking back at 2012, we faced a difficult task in doing justice to all of the notable events in a single article; so the Signpost has selected just a few examples from outside the anglosphere, from the English Wikipedia, and from the Wikimedia Foundation, rather than attempting to cover every detail that happened.
  • Featured content: Featured content in review
    Over the past year, 963 pieces of featured content were promoted. The most active of the featured content programs was featured article candidates (FAC), which promoted an average of 31 articles a month. This was followed by featured picture candidates (FPC; 28 a month). Coming in third was featured list candidates (FLC; 20 a month). Featured topic and featured portal candidates remained sluggish, each promoting fewer than 20 items over the year.
  • Technology report: Looking ahead to 2013
    Following on from last week's reflections on 2012, this week the Technology report looks ahead to 2013, a year that will almost certainly be dominated by the juggernauts of Wikidata, Lua and the Visual Editor.

Wikidata weekly summary #40

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Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Global message delivery 16:22, 11 January 2013 (UTC)

The Signpost: 14 January 2013

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  • Investigative report: Ship ahoy! New travel site finally afloat
    After six years without creating a new class of content projects, the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) has finally expanded into a new area: travel. Wikivoyage was formally launched—though without a traditional ship's christening—on 15 January, having started as a beta trial on 10 November. Wikivoyage has been taken under the WMF's umbrella on the argument that information resources that help with travel are educational and therefore within the scope of the foundation's mission.g
  • News and notes: Launch of annual picture competition, new grant scheme
    On January 16, voting for the first round of the 2012 Wikimedia Commons Picture of the Year contest will begin. Wikimedia editors with 75 edits or one project are eligible to vote to select their favorite image featured in 2012. ... On January 15, the foundation launched its latest grant scheme, called Individual Engagement Grants (IEG).
  • WikiProject report: Reach for the Stars: WikiProject Astronomy
    This week, we set off for the final frontier with WikiProject Astronomy. The project was started in August 2006 using the now-defunct WikiProject Space as inspiration. WikiProject Astronomy is home to 101 pieces of Featured material and 148 Good Articles maintained by a band of 186 members. The project maintains a portal, works on an assortment of vital astronomy articles, and provides resources for editors adding or requesting astronomy images.
  • Special report: Loss of an Internet genius
    Comforting those grieving after the loss of a loved one is an impossible task. How then, can an entire community be comforted? The Internet struggled to answer that question this week after the suicide of Aaron Swartz, a celebrated free-culture activist, programmer, and Wikipedian at the age of 26.
  • Featured content: Featured articles: Quality of reviews, quality of writing in 2012
    Continuing our recap of the featured content promoted in 2012, this week the Signpost interviewed three editors, asking them about featured articles which stuck out in their minds. Two, Ian Rose and Graham Colm, are current featured article candidates (FAC) delegates, while Brian Boulton is an active featured article writer and reviewer.
  • Technology report: Intermittent outages planned, first Wikidata client deployment
    The Wikidata client extension was successfully deployed to the Hungarian Wikipedia on 14 January, its team reports. The interwiki language links can now come from wikidata.org, though "manual" interwiki links remain functional, overriding those from the central repository.

Wikidata weekly summary #41

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Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Global message delivery 15:52, 18 January 2013 (UTC)

AFT5 newsletter

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Hey all; another newsletter.

  • If you're not already aware, a Request for Comment on the future of the Article Feedback Tool on the English-language Wikipedia is open; any and all comments, regardless of opinion and perspective, are welcome.
  • Our final round of hand-coding is complete, and the results can be found here; thanks to everyone who took part!
  • We've made test deployments to the German and French-language projects; if you are aware of any other projects that might like to test out or use the tool, please let me know :).
  • Developers continue to work on the upgraded version of the feedback page that was discussed during our last office hours session, with a prototype ready for you to play around with in a few weeks.

That's all for now! Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 16:11, 23 January 2013 (UTC)Reply

The Signpost: 21 January 2013

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  • News and notes: Requests for adminship reform moves forward
    The English Wikipedia's requests for adminship (RfA) process has entered another cycle of proposed reforms. Over the last three weeks, various proposals, ranging from as large as a transition to a representative democracy to as small as a required edit count and service length, have been debated on the RfA talk page. The total number of new administrators for 2012 was just 28, barely more than half of 2011's total and less than a quarter of 2009's total. The total number of unsuccessful RfAs has fallen as well. These declining numbers, which were described in what would now be considered a successful year (2010) as an emerging "wikigeneration gulf", have been coupled with a sharp decline in the number of active administrators since February 2008 (1,021), reaching a low of 653 in November 2012.
  • WikiProject report: Say What? — WikiProject Linguistics
    This week, we spent some time with WikiProject Linguistics. Started in January 2004, the project has grown to include 7 Featured Articles, 4 Featured Lists, 2 A-class Articles, and 15 Good Articles maintained by 43 members. The project's members keep an eye on several watchlists, maintain the linguistics category, and continue to build a collection of Did You Know? entries. The project is home to six task forces and works with WikiProject Languages and WikiProject Writing Systems.
  • Featured content: Wazzup, G? Delegates and featured topics in review
    This week, the Signpost's featured content section continues its recap of 2012 by looking at featured topics. We interviewed Grapple X and GamerPro64, who are delegates at the featured topic candidates.
  • Arbitration report: Doncram case continues
    The opening of the Doncram case marks the end of almost 6 months without any open cases, the longest in the history of the Committee.
  • Technology report: Data centre switchover a tentative success
    On 22 January, WMF staff and contractors switched incoming, non-cached requests (including edits) to the Foundation's newer data centre in Ashburn, Virginia, making it responsible for handling almost all regular traffic. For the first time since 2004, virtually no traffic will be handled by the WMF's other facility in Tampa, Florida.

Wikidata weekly summary #42

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Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Development
    • Updated demo system
    • Improved design of sites code in core
    • Fixed SQLite compatibility
    • Worked on implementing references handling in statements user interface
    • Useful error messages will be shown in statements user interface in case of data value mismatches
    • Switched the demo system to Labs’ puppet
    • Selenium tests for length constraint, claim edit-conflicts
    • Setting up dispatcher script on internal test machine
    • More work on wikibase.getEntities() function for Scribunto/Lua-Templates
    • AbuseFilter is now working with Wikibase
    • The change dispatcher script is now ready for use on the WMF cluster
    • Initial implementation of {{#property}} parser function for the client
    • Created a widget for the client to connect a page to a Wikidata item and add interwiki language links to a page
    • Preparing a page to list unconnected pages on the clients
  • Discussions/Press
  • Events
  • Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • Open Tasks for You
Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Global message delivery 14:52, 25 January 2013 (UTC)

The Signpost: 28 January 2013

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  • In the media: Hoaxes draw media attention
    On New Year's Day, the Daily Dot reported that a "massive Wikipedia hoax" had been exposed after more than five years. The article on the Bicholim conflict had been listed as a "Good Article" for the past half-decade, yet turned out to be an ingenious hoax. Created in July 2007 by User:A-b-a-a-a-a-a-a-b-a, the meticulously detailed piece was approved as a GA in October 2007. A subsequent submission for FA was unsuccessful, but failed to discover that the article's key sources were made up. While the User:A-b-a-a-a-a-a-a-b-a account then stopped editing, the hoax remained listed as a Good Article for five years, receiving in the region of 150 to 250 page views a month in 2012. It was finally nominated for deletion on 29 December 2012 by ShelfSkewed—who had discovered the hoax while doing work on Category:Articles with invalid ISBNs—and deleted the same day.
  • WikiProject report: Checkmate! — WikiProject Chess
    When we challenged the masters of WikiProject Chess to an interview, Sjakkalle answered our call. WikiProject Chess dates back to December 2003 and has grown to include 4 Featured Articles and 15 Good Articles maintained by over 100 members. The project typically operates independently of other WikiProjects, although the project would theoretically be a child of WikiProject Board and Table Games (interviewed in 2011). WikiProject Chess provides a collection of resources, seeks missing photographs of chess players, and helps determine ways that Wikipedia's coverage of chess can be expanded.
  • News and notes: Khan Academy's Smarthistory and Wikipedia collaborate
    To many Wikimedians, the Khan Academy would seem like a close cousin: the academy is a non-profit educational website and a development of the massive open online course concept that has delivered over 227 million lessons in 22 different languages. Its mission is to give "a free, world-class education to anyone, anywhere." This complements Wikipedia's stated goal to "imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge", then go and create that world. It should come as no surprise, then, that the highly successful GLAM-Wiki (galleries, libraries, archives, museums) initiative has partnered with the Khan Academy's Smarthistory project to further both its and Wikipedia's goals.
  • Featured content: Listing off progress from 2012
    This week, the Signpost featured content section continues its recap of 2012 by looking at featured lists. We interviewed FLC directors Giants2008 and The Rambling Man as well as active reviewer and writer PresN.
  • Arbitration report: Doncram continues
    The Doncram case has continued into its third week.
  • Technology report: Developers get ready for FOSDEM amid caching problems
    As reported in last week's "Technology Report", the WMF's data centre in Ashburn, Virginia took over responsibility for almost all of the remaining functions that had previously been handled by their old facility in Tampa, Florida on 22 January. The Signpost reported then that few problems had arisen since handover. Unfortunately that was not to remain the case, with reports of caching problems (which typically only affect anonymous users) starting to come in.

Wikidata weekly summary #43

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Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Development
    • Deployment on the Hebrew and Italian Wikipedia ([1] [2] [3])
    • Switched the Wikipedias over to a new, more scalable dispatching changes script for propagating changes from the repository to the clients
    • Fixing various deeply buried bugs and a few minor bugs reported after deployment
    • Preparations for next deployment on wikidata.org
    • Working on property parser function for the client
    • Implemented robust serialization of changes for dispatching
    • Resumed work on linked data interface
    • References can now be created, edited and removed on existing statements
    • Several minor user interface fixes
    • Styling of the user interface for statements
    • Selenium tests for references
    • Selenium tests for non-JS SpecialPages
    • Worked on puppet
  • Discussions/Press
  • Events
  • Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • Open Tasks for You
    • Test statements on the [demo system before the roll-out to wikidata.org on February 4
    • Hack on one of these
Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Global message delivery 13:22, 1 February 2013 (UTC)

The Signpost: 04 February 2013

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  • Special report: Examining the popularity of Wikipedia articles
    On February 12, 2012, news of Whitney Houston's death brought 425 hits per second to her Wikipedia article, the highest peak traffic on any article since at least January 2010. It is broadly known that Wikipedia is the sixth most popular website on the Internet, but the English Wikipedia now has over 4 million articles and 29 million total pages. Much less attention has been given to traffic patterns and trends in content viewed.
  • News and notes: Article Feedback Tool faces community resistance
    Article feedback, at least through talk pages, has been a part of Wikipedia since its inception in 2001. The use of these pages, though, has typically been limited to experienced editors who know how to use them.
  • WikiProject report: Land of the Midnight Sun
    This week, we took a trip to WikiProject Norway. Started in February 2005, WikiProject Norway has become the home for almost 34,000 articles about the world's best place to live, including 16 Featured Articles, 19 Featured Lists, and nearly 250 Good Articles. The project works on a to do list, maintains a categorization system, watches article alerts, and serves as a discussion forum.
  • Featured content: Portal people on potent potables and portable potholes
    This week, the Signpost's featured content section continues its recap of 2012 by looking at featured portals, a small yet active part of the project. We interviewed FPOC directors Cirt and OhanaUnited.
  • In the media: Star Trek Into Pedantry
    On 30 January 2013, Kevin Morris in the Daily Dot summarised the bitter debates in Wikipedia around capitalisation or non-capitalisation of the word "into" in the title of the upcoming Star Trek film, Star Trek Into Darkness.
  • Technology report: Wikidata team targets English Wikipedia deployment
    Following the deployment of the Wikidata client to the Hungarian Wikipedia last month, the client was also deployed to the Italian and Hebrew Wikipedias on Wednesday. The next target for the client, which automatically provides phase 1 functionality, is the English Wikipedia, with a deployment date of 11 February already set.

Wikidata weekly summary #44

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Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Development
    • Deployment of the first parts of phase 2 (infoboxes/statements) on wikidata.org done - see it live for example here, here and here
    • Diffs for statement edits can now be shown
    • Started work on query definitions
    • Edit links are now disabled in the interface when the user does not have the rights to edit
    • Edit links are now hidden when viewing old revision
    • Worked on search field for WikibaseSolr
    • More work on Lua templates for Wikibase entities
    • Worked on bugfixes in the statement user interface
    • New features in the statement user interface (references counter/heading)
    • JavaScript editing for table showing labels and description of the same item in different languages
    • Repaired and updated the demo system
    • Resumed work on Linked Data interface
    • Support for enhanced recent changes format in client
    • There are automatic comments for statement edits as well in the history now
    • Special page for unconnected pages, that is pages on the client that are not connected to items on the repository
    • Added permission checks for statements, so a user that can not edit will not be able to edit or that only a group can be allowed to do some changes like creating statements
  • Discussions/Press
  • Events
    • FOSDEM
    • upcoming: office hour (English; German later)
  • Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • Open Tasks for You
Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Global message delivery 16:07, 8 February 2013 (UTC)

The Signpost: 11 February 2013

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  • Featured content: A lousy week
    Six articles, one list, and fourteen pictures were promoted to "featured" states this week on the English Wikipedia.
  • WikiProject report: Just the Facts
    This week, we got the details on WikiProject Infoboxes.
  • In the media: Wikipedia mirroring life in island ownership dispute
    Foreign Policy has published a report on editing of the Wikipedia articles on the Senkaku Islands and Senkaku Islands dispute. The uninhabited islands are under the control of Japan, but China and Taiwan are asserting rival territorial claims. Tensions have risen of late—and not just in the waters surrounding the actual islands.
  • Discussion report: WebCite proposal
    Current discussions on the English Wikipedia include...

Wikidata weekly summary #45

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Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Development
    • Deployment to English Wikipedia
    • Fix various minor bugs in client, including watchlist toggle with preference to default to always show Wikidata edits
    • Added the new Baso Minangkabau Wikipedia (min)
    • Fixed wrong revision of statements being shown in diff and old revision view
    • Diff visualization for claims (simple version for main snak)
    • Diff visualization for claims (extended version for references, qualifiers, ranks)
    • Tooltip that notifies about the license your contributions will be covered by while editing (can be disabled by each user)
    • Started with valueview refactoring
    • Started with user interface handling of deleted properties
    • Started with refactoring of local partial entity lookup
    • Started with refactoring of toolbar usage in jQuery.wikibase view widgets
    • Finished improvement on jQuery.wikibase.claimview’s edit mode handling
    • Improved search by using entity selector in search field instead of normal MediaWiki search field
    • More work on Lua-based templates for entities
    • Specified the capabilities of the query language we need
    • Created query object
    • Proper bot-flagging of edits (bugzilla:44857)
    • Use of ID to directly address an item or property
    • Search should give more of the complete matches now
    • Special:ItemByTitle should work for canonical namespaces and later on for local namespaces
    • More robust format for notifications of changes on the repository to the client
    • Started work on refactoring API and autocomments code
    • Started to maintain documentation of configuration options in git
  • Discussions/Press
  • Events
    • Upcoming: Wikipedia Day NYC
    • Upcoming: office hour in English tomorrow
    • Note: changed day of next German office hour to March 8
  • Other Noteworthy Stuff
    • We have a time scheduled when Wikidata will be read-only for a database migration. The window for that is Feb 20 19:00 to Feb 21 2:00 UTC.
    • New features and bugfixes on Wikidata are planned to be deployed on Monday (Feb 18). This should among other things include:
      • Showing useful diffs for edits of claims (they’re currently empty)
      • Automatic comments for editing of claims (there are currently none)
      • Ability to add items to claims by their ID
      • Better handling of deleted properties
      • More results in the entity selector (that’s the thing that lets you select properties, items and so on) so you can add everything and not just the first few matches that are shown
    • We’re still working on the issue that sometimes editing of certain parts of items or properties isn’t possible. If you’re running into it try to reload the page and/or change the URL to the www. version or the non-www. version respectively.
    • Deployment on all other Wikipedias is currently planned for March 6 (a note to the Village Pumps of all affected projects will follow soon)
    • Check out a well-done item
  • Open Tasks for You
  • Help expand en:Wikipedia:Wikidata
  • Help expand and translate Wikidata/Deployment Questions
  • Hack on one these
Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Global message delivery 21:27, 15 February 2013 (UTC)

New Article Feedback version available for testing

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Latest comment: 12 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion

Hey all.

As promised, we've built a set of improvements to the Article Feedback Tool, which can be tested through the links here. Please do take the opportunity to play around with it, let me know of any bugs, and see what you think :).

A final reminder that the Request for Comment on whether AFT5 should be turned on on Wikipedia (and how) is soon to close; for those of you who have not submitted an opinion or !voted, it can be found here.

Thanks! Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 19:12, 19 February 2013 (UTC)Reply

The Signpost: 18 February 2013

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Latest comment: 12 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion
  • WikiProject report: Thank you for flying WikiProject Airlines
    This week, we put our life in the hands of WikiProject Airlines. Starting in July 2005, the project has improved articles relating to airline companies, alliances, destination lists, and travel benefit programs. WikiProject Airlines has accumulated over 4,000 pages, including 4 Featured Articles and 26 Good Articles.
  • Technology report: Better templates and 3D buildings
    As of time of writing, twenty wikis (including the English, French and Hungarian Wikipedias) are in the process of getting access to the Lua scripting language, an optional substitute for the clunky template code that exists at present.
  • News and notes: Wikimedia Foundation declares 'victory' in Wikivoyage lawsuit
    On February 15, the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) declared 'victory' in its counter-lawsuit against Internet Brands (IB), the owner of Wikitravel and the operator of several online media, community, and e-commerce sites in vertical markets. The lawsuit clears the last remaining hurdles for the WMF's new travel guide project, Wikivoyage.
  • In the media: Sue Gardner interviewed by the Australian press
    Sue Gardner's visit to Australia sparked a number of interviews in the Australian press. An interview published in the Daily Telegraph on 12 February 2013, titled "Data plans 'unnerving': Wikipedia boss", saw Gardner comment on Australian plans to store personal internet and telephone data. The planned measure, intended to assist crime prevention, would involve internet service providers and mobile phone firms storing customer usage data for up to two years.
  • Featured content: Featured content gets schooled
    Two articles, nine lists, and thirteen pictures were promoted to 'featured' status on the English Wikipedia this week.

Wikidata weekly summary #46

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Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Global message delivery 17:17, 22 February 2013 (UTC)

The Signpost: 25 February 2013

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  • In the media: Ex-WMF trustee creates "Wikipedia Corporate Index" for PR agency
    On 13 February 2013, PR Report, the German sister publication of PR Week, published an article announcing that PR agency Fleishman-Hillard was offering a new analysis tool enabling companies to assess their articles in the German-language Wikipedia: the Wikipedia Corporate Index (WCI).
  • Recent research: Wikipedia not so novel after all, except to UK university lecturers
    "Wikipedia and Encyclopedic Production" by Jeff Loveland (a historian of encyclopedias) and Joseph Reagle situates Wikipedia within the context of encyclopedic production historically, arguing that the features that many claim to be unique about Wikipedia actually have roots in encyclopedias of the past.
  • News and notes: "Very lucky" Picture of the Year
    The Wikimedia Commons 2012 Picture of the Year contest has ended, with the winner being Pair of Merops apiaster feeding, taken by Pierre Dalous. The picture shows a pair of European Bee-eaters in a mating ritual—the male bird (right) has tossed the wasp into the air, and he will eventually offer it to the female (left).
  • Featured content: Blue birds be bouncin'
    Six articles, three lists, and twelve images were promoted to "featured" status on the English Wikipedia this month.
  • WikiProject report: How to measure a WikiProject's workload
    How can we measure the challenges facing a project or determine a WikiProject's productivity? Several prominent projects have been doing it for years: WikiWork.

Wikidata weekly summary #47

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Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Development
    • Extended diff view to include references now
    • Fixed bug where incorrect statements revision was shown in diff view
    • Added first version of Linked Data interface (RDF/XML); will be accessible from Special:EntityData
    • Updated the demo system
    • More work towards using Solr for our search
    • More investigation and fixes of search issues
    • Fixed several bugs in the entity selector and improved its behavior
    • Worked on refactoring of how our widgets use the toolbar
    • Worked on implementation of missing data model components in JavaScript
    • A lot of bug fixing
  • Events
  • Other Noteworthy Stuff
    • Rollout of phase 1 (language links) on all remaining Wikipedias is still planned for March 6
    • Next update on wikidata.org is also planned for March 6. This will have bugfixes and if all goes well string as a new available data type.
    • Proposal was made to the Hungarian, Hebrew and Italian Wikipedias to be the first batch to use phase 2 of Wikidata (infoboxes). Scheduled timeframe for this is end of March
    • d:Wikidata:Database reports has some useful reports like the list of most used properties
    • The interwiki shortcut :d was changed to always use www in the resulting link (to prevent editing issues on other URLs).
    • The list of available properties is growing and a whole bunch of new ones are being discussed
    • Reasonator gives you a nice adapted view of an item about a person
    • Items by cat helps you find missing items in a certain Wikipedia category
    • A few more additions to d:Wikidata:Tools that you should have a look at if you’re editing statements
    • We now have more than 2600 active users on Wikidata. Thanks for being awesome. <3
  • Open Tasks for You

The Signpost: 04 March 2013

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Latest comment: 12 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion
  • Op-ed: We must do more to turn readers into editors
    Recently I was having a casual conversation with a friend, and he mentioned that he spent too many hours a day playing video games. I responded with a comment that I, too, spent way too much time on an activity of my own – Wikipedia. In an attempt to reply with a relevant remark, he offered something along the lines of: "So have you ever written anything?" After a second, I quickly answered yes, but I was still in shock over his question. It seemed to be rooted in a belief on his part that using Wikipedia meant just reading the articles, and that editing was something that someone, hypothetically, might do, but not really more likely than randomly counting to 7,744.
  • News and notes: Outing of editor causes firestorm
    "WP:OUTING", the normally little-noticed policy corner of the English Wikipedia that governs the release of editors' personal information, has suddenly been brought to wider attention after long-term contributor and featured article writer Cla68 was indefinitely blocked last week. This snowballed into several other blocks, a desysopping by ArbCom, and a request for arbitration.
  • Featured content: Slow week for featured content
    Three articles, six lists, and three pictures were promoted to "featured" status on the English Wikipedia this week, including the article on "Laura Secord", who was a Canadian heroine of the War of 1812 best known for warning the British of an impending American attack.
  • WikiProject report: WikiProject Television Stations
    This week, we tuned to WikiProject Television Stations, a project that dates back to March 2004. WikiProject Television Stations primarily focuses on local stations, national networks, television markets, and other topics related to television channels in North America, the Caribbean, and some Pacific countries. The project has a fair bit of work ahead of them with over 4,000 unassessed articles and only one Good Article out of 626 assessed articles, giving the project a relative WikiWork rating of 5.262.

Wikidata weekly summary #48

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

The Signpost: 11 March 2013

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Latest comment: 12 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion
  • From the editor: Signpost–Wikizine merger
    I am pleased to announce that the Signpost and Wikizine have reached an in-principle agreement that will see Wikizine published as a special Signpost section at the beginning of each month.
  • News and notes: Finance committee updates
    During March, three of the Wikimedia Foundation's grantmaking schemes on Meta will reach important crossroads, which will shape how both the editing communities and Wikimedia institutions handle the distribution of donors' money across the movement.
  • Featured content: Batman, three birds and a Mercedes
    Twelve articles, five lists, and eight pictures were promoted to "featured" status on the English Wikipedia this week, including an image of the Mercedes-Benz SLS AMG, a front-engine, 2-seat luxury grand tourer automobile developed by Mercedes-AMG.
  • WikiProject report: Setting a precedent
    This week, we spent some time with WikiProject U.S. Supreme Court Cases.
  • Technology report: Article Feedback reversal
    The WMF has aborted a plan to deploy version 5 of the Article Feedback tool (AFTv5) rolled out to all English Wikipedia articles.


revert of my change

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You recently reverted my deletion of the Biohydrology section of the article on Dysart Woods. I started to revise this section, but since the whole section is essentially a very poorly plagiarized version of the Abstract of my MS thesis I felt uncomfortable with the amount self citation involved and decided the specific details presented are not useful without more background information. I don't have time to write this material or figure out how to format it for wikipedia. If someone thinks this specific information is notable they should take the time to get it right.

Specifically: sentence 1 is factually incorrect sentence 2 is plagiarized, with words rearranged, but is unclear because the previous sentence claims there has been no mining. Does not mining cause changes in hydrology? sentence 3 is plagiarized and out of context sentence 4 is vague and adds nothing meaningful sentence 6 is incoherent, and incorrectly defines volumetric water content sentence 7 is plagiarized verbatim sentence 8 is incoherent

Wikidata weekly summary #258

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Latest comment: 8 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion
 
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Development
    • Working on Lexeme support - specifically grammatical features of Forms of a Lexeme and statements on Forms
    • Finishing touches on a new notification type for Echo. This will notify the creator of an article when it has been connected to an item on Wikidata.
    • The new d:Special:AvailableBadges list all badges that can be used for sitelinks.
    • Discussed implementation plan for Multi Content Revisions which are a building block for structured data on Commons (phabricator:T107595)
    • Worked on feedback for the constraints API and user script
    • Worked on database and access improvements to take load off a much-used database table

You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here.


Wikidata weekly summary #259

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Latest comment: 8 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion
 
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Development
    • Worked more on support for lexicographical data (specifically support for lexicographic category and statements on forms)
    • Dealt with issues after the deployment of automatic interwiki links for Wiktionary
    • Worked on constraint violation user script based on your feedback (improving messages to make it more understandable, layout, etc)
    • Add support for the following new language codes for monolingual text properties: brx, chn, cop, gez, quc, kjh, nr (will become available in a few days)

You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here.

Wikidata weekly summary #260

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Latest comment: 8 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion
 
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Development

You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here.


Wikidata weekly summary #261

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Latest comment: 8 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion
 
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here.


Wikidata weekly summary #262

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Latest comment: 8 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion
 
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Development
    • Attending WikiCite
    • Showing badges on other projects (phab:T73887)
    • Improving label tracking (phab:T151717)
    • Working more on statements on forms in order to support lexicographical data

You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here.

Wikidata weekly summary #263

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Latest comment: 8 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion
 
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Discussions

You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here.


The Signpost: 9 June 2017

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Latest comment: 8 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion
  • News and notes: Global Elections
    WMF Board election results, and FDC elections begin
  • Technology report: Tech news catch-up
    Bots, scripts, tools, and changes from February to June 2017
* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 02:18, 9 June 2017 (UTC)Reply

Wikidata weekly summary #264

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Latest comment: 8 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion
 
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here.

Wikidata weekly summary #265

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Latest comment: 8 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion
 
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Development
    • Improvements to Wikidata Query Service UI
    • Continued work on importing property constraints from statements (phab:T102759)
    • Started to add support for Senses of Lexeme entities (phab:T160053)
    • More experimenting with the new front-end framework
    • Added RDF mapping for "tabular data" data type (phab:T167951)

You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here.


The Signpost: 23 June 2017

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Latest comment: 8 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion
  • Op-ed: Facto Post: a fresh take
    Exploring sourcing issues in Wikimedia projects, a solution in Wikidata and fact mining, and a newsletter to continue the conversation.
* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 07:32, 23 June 2017 (UTC)Reply

Wikidata weekly summary #266

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Latest comment: 8 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion
 
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
 
Cheat sheet about Wikidata Query Service (de)
  • Development
    • Creating a separate section for constraint statements (example)
    • Adding client-side hooks for saving and removing statements (phab:T167870)
    • More work on constraints checks (phab:T168629)
    • Enabling Wikidata edits in the enhanced recent changes and watchlist on clients (phab:T46874)
    • Updating constraint check user script and propose to make it a gadget (phab:T167625)
    • Creating Special:PageData as a canonical entry point for machine readable page data (phab:T163923)
    • Working on editable Glosses on Senses (non-persistent) (phab:T165567)
    • Setting up federation on mediainfo test system (phab:T163119)

You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here.


Wikidata weekly summary #267

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Latest comment: 8 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion
 
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Development
    • Worked more on support for lexicographical data and Wiktionary. The focus was on creating a necessary new datatype to link to Lexemes as well as making Glosses and statements on Glosses editable.
    • Getting ready to migrate the constraints definitions from templates on the property talk page to statements on the property.

You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here.

Wikidata weekly summary #268

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Latest comment: 8 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion
 
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Development
    • Search results will not only show labels but also descriptions with language fallbacks (gerrit:362215). Thanks to Matěj Suchánek!
    • Fixed link to the file description page in the Image Header gadget (phab:T169558)
    • Forms of the Lexeme are multi-variant (phab:T165575)
    • Preparing a demonstration of referencing Forms and Sense of a Lexeme in statements (phab:T169716)
    • Property constraint definitions will be migrated to statements (phab:T169647, Project chat)
    • Implemented “Format” constraint (phab:T102752, help page)

You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here.


The Signpost: 15 July 2017

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Latest comment: 8 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion
  • Gallery: A mix of patterns
    An interesting mix of patterns and colors to brighten your day...
  • Humour: The Infobox Game
    Enjoy the Parameters: The Infobox Game can be enjoyed by everyone, not just those interested in water buffalo breeds, volcanic hotspots or the mysterious heteroisoform, and some day just might spawn an important facet of the financial derivatives industry.
  • Wikicup: 2017 WikiCup round 3 wrap-up
    The heat turns up on the 32 contestants who entered round three: 13 featured articles, 82 good articles, 167 DYKs, but we had to pick just eight of them to advance.
* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 01:48, 15 July 2017 (UTC)Reply

Wikidata weekly summary #269

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Latest comment: 8 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion
 
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • WikidataCon
    • The scholarship process is now closed. Recipients will be informed around July 25th.
    • You can still suggest ideas for the program, or submit a project until July 31st. The program of the conference is made by the attendees, only what you bring will be in there :)
  • Development
    • Preparing Lexemes demo for Wikimania
    • Fixing links to non-entity namespaces (phab:T169221) (thanks to Matěj Suchánek!)
    • Tracking labels of quantity units in parser and Lua functions (phab:T170167) (thanks to Matěj Suchánek!)
    • Fixing checking of constraints on deprecated statements (phab:T170391)
    • Improving the Query Service UI (phab:T170279)
    • Improving wbsearchentities (phab:T103875)
    • Removing links from printable version (phab:T87108)
    • Adding customizable fallback to Special:GoToLinkedPage (phab:T166473)

You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here.


July 2017

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Latest comment: 8 years ago3 comments2 people in discussion

  Thank you for your contributions. Please mark your edits, such as your recent edits to Boston, as "minor" only if they are minor edits. In accordance with Help:Minor edit, a minor edit is one that the editor believes requires no review and could never be the subject of a dispute. Minor edits consist of things such as typographical corrections, formatting changes or rearrangement of text without modification of content. Additionally, the reversion of clear-cut vandalism and test edits may be labeled "minor". Please refrain from marking all your current edits as minor, when many of them appear to be extensive and complex. Thank you. Hertz1888 (talk) 01:22, 20 July 2017 (UTC)Reply

  Please refrain from making test edits in Wikipedia pages, such as those you made to Kolkata, even if you intend to fix them later. Your edits have been reverted. If you would like to experiment again, please use the sandbox. Thank you. Dl2000 (talk) 22:09, 20 July 2017 (UTC)Reply

  Please stop making test edits to Wikipedia, as you did to Doppler. It is considered vandalism, which, under Wikipedia policy, can lead to being blocked from editing. If you would like to experiment again, please use the sandbox. Dl2000 (talk) 22:32, 20 July 2017 (UTC)Reply

Removal of maintenance templates

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Latest comment: 8 years ago3 comments1 person in discussion

Hi Ciphers, did you have particular reasons for removing maintenance templates such as {{Use dmy dates}}, {{Use British English}}, and {{Pp-pc1}} from pages? I've restored several of them since they generally shouldn't be removed without good reason, and the reasons weren't clear to me from the edits. If you object to their presence in those articles, please remove them again. A rationale in the edit summary would also be helpful to other editors. Cheers.—Laoris (talk) 21:17, 21 July 2017 (UTC)Reply

Besides the above, I have concerns about some of the changes you've made on many pages you have edited:
  • The first time the article title is used in the lead sentence, it doesn't need to be capitalized if it's not a proper noun. WP:LEADSENTENCE gives some examples of this.
  • Metadata templates such as {{taxonbar}} and {{Authority control}} should appear after the last section and navboxes, and before the categories, as indicated in their template documentation and as outlined at MOS:ORDER.
  • The {{DEFAULTSORT}} template should appear directly before the list of categories, not after, per its template documentation and as outlined at MOS:ORDER.
  • Interwiki linking templates such as {{Commons category}} or {{Wiktionary}} should appear at the top of the last section in the article, not after navboxes. See Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Layout § Links to sister projects.
  • Categories whose name matches the article title are known as eponymous categories and when used in their eponymous article, should be sorted with a space so that the article appears at the beginning of the category. For instance, at the Verona article, the Verona category should be used as [[Category:Verona| ]].
The Manual of Style indicates the accepted placement for many of these templates, and each template typically has documentation indicating its correct use. Consistent use and placement of these templates help other readers and editors find them more easily.—Laoris (talk) 22:32, 21 July 2017 (UTC)Reply
Hi Ciphers, I just wanted to again encourage you to use the Wikipedia style guidelines as you edit, especially those mentioned above. While I am pleased to see that you are taking time to contribute to Wikipedia, and although it is not required to know and follow every guideline, since you are making significant contributions I think it would be even more beneficial to follow the guidelines above to help promote consistency and intuitiveness. Thanks for your time! —Laoris (talk) 17:01, 26 July 2017 (UTC)Reply

UK Dialing Codes

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Latest comment: 8 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion

This is just a quick note to say that UK dialling codes do not have dashes in them. I have taken the dash out of Guildford without reverting your whole edit. --DanielRigal (talk) 08:58, 22 July 2017 (UTC)Reply

Wikidata weekly summary #270

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Latest comment: 8 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion
 
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Development

You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here.

Gender dysphoria

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Latest comment: 8 years ago2 comments1 person in discussion

Thanks for your change to Gender dysphoria. It was mostly pretty good and I liked the direction you were going, but I reverted it because of a couple of miscues here and there (e.g., not "a transgender", and something else). But since this is the lead of a controversial article, you have to tread very carefully. Either go to the Talk page and discuss, or else just try your same change again, but instead of all at once in one edit, break it up into five or more very small edits, each one doing just one, very specific thing: change or add one infobox param; change or add another infobox param; add the part about "as a result of a mismatch", and so on; just going a few words at a time, or a single thought at a time, and for each one add a complete explanation in the edit summary. If you have to write two sentences of Edit summary about why the six words "as a result of the mismatch" is better, than do it (I agree with you, it is better, but you're going to have to show you've put some thought into this, and why it's better.) If you break up your edit this way, then if someone comes along and has a quarrel with a couple of words or a param here or there, they can just revert or change that one, instead of the whole thing. In general, I like your changes, and I hope you will try again. Mathglot (talk) 01:17, 27 July 2017 (UTC)Reply

But see also User:Flyer22 Reborn's comments in the edit summary here. Mathglot (talk) 09:49, 27 July 2017 (UTC)Reply

Danger of over-linking

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Latest comment: 8 years ago3 comments3 people in discussion

Hi, thank you for your 'thanks' for my recent edits to some of your recent work. I hope you won't mind if I mention that I had my attention drawn to a few of those edits vie Recent Change review, and, in the main, I can see you've made some really useful contributions to a wide range of articles. Thank you, though it might help if you gave some more edit summaries when you're done. May I urge you also to show a little more restraint at times when adding wikilinks to some articles, please? I realise you're trying to add clarity, and that really is most welcome, and in most cases youi've done just that. I'm sure you'd agree that it's also a good idea not to link to the very obvious words if, in so doing, it fills the article up with too many blue links. You might find WP:MOSLINK of relevance here, especially the section on overlinking. By way of example, part of your recent edits to Gravity might be said to fall into this category though, to be fair, they only added to an already over-linked page. So, none of this is cause for reverting the edits you made, and I only draw your attention to it in order to help you contribute even more effectively in your future editing. If you're interested, there's a nice bit of script one can add to one's side toolbar which highlights duplicate links within an article. You can find it at User:Ucucha/duplinks. Please accept this feedback in the positive spirit in which it is intended. Regards from the UK, Nick Moyes (talk) 21:48, 30 July 2017 (UTC)Reply

Thank you for the note Nick Moyes. Understood, and will do. Thanks again. --Ciphers (talk) 06:45, 31 July 2017 (UTC)Reply
You're still overlinking. And you're changing correct English to incorrect. If a word or phrase is unfamiliar or new to you, don't assume it's incorrect or that it should be linked. Magic9Ball (talk) 18:59, 10 August 2017 (UTC)Reply

Wikidata weekly summary #271

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Latest comment: 8 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion
 
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • WikidataCon
    • Today is the very last day to submit projects in the program! (deadline: July 31th)
    • You can also subscribe to the existing submissions to show your interest and support your favorites
  • Development
    • Added Special:NewItem to Special:SpecialPages (phab:T169456) Thanks to Matěj Suchánek
    • Making possible to check constraints on qualifiers and references (phab:T168532)
    • Working on showing non-mandatory and mandatory constraints differently (phab:T164254)
    • Improving Special:PagesWithProp for Wikidata use cases (phab:T66950)
    • Doing last polishing on the Lexeme entity type and cleaning up the demo data for the demo at Wikimania
    • Improving the dispatching of changes to Wikipedia and co to cope with the increased demand that lead to delays in Wikidata changes showing up in Wikipedia watchlist and recent changes

You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here.


The Signpost: 5 August 2017

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Latest comment: 8 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion
  • WikiProject report: Comic relief
    An interview with a project that is centered around comics.
  • Featured content: Everywhere in the lead
    Recently promoted articles, lists and pictures – with a very heavy one in the mix
  • Technology report: Introducing TechCom
    The Architecture Committee adopts a new charter and name; and the latest in script, bot, and tech news
  • Humour: WWASOHs and ETCSSs
    An elite squad of highly insightful editors can lead the way for other editors who may need to retrain their faces into forming a smile.
* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 00:21, 5 August 2017 (UTC)Reply

MOS:SURNAME

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Latest comment: 8 years ago5 comments3 people in discussion

Among other problems, your recent edits dont' follow WP policies about people's names. We don't refer to them by their first names, unless it's necessary to distinguish them in that sentence from other people with the same last name. Neil Armstrong is "Armstrong", not "Neil". Harry Elmore Hurd is "Hurd", not "Harry". Magic9Ball (talk) 20:59, 6 August 2017 (UTC)Reply

We don't? :) You know .. I've spend a long time on those edits, so I'd appreciate if you could fix them for me instead of reverting them. Thank you. --Ciphers (talk) 21:04, 6 August 2017 (UTC)Reply
No, we don't. It's WP-EN policy.
It's unfortunate that you've spent (not "spend") time making those changes to Apollo 11, but the effect of them was to reduce the quality of the article. Using first names instead of last names was inappropriate. MDY format on an article about the US space program is correct. The "nbsp" character between numerals and units prevents them from being broken up, which can confuse the reader. Your phrase "the lunar orbit" would refer to the orbit of the Moon around Earth; simply "lunar orbit" refers to any orbit around the Moon. The word "broadcasted" might seem logical, but it's incorrect; it should be "broadcast". Why? Because that's how English says it. These are subtle distinctions, and they may not make sense to someone who didn't grow up speaking the language, but they make a difference in the readability of the article. Your user page states that you have "near-native" fluency in English, but I think you're over-estimating yourself a little there. Regardless, someone with "near-native" fluency should not try to correct editors who speak and write the language natively. Jason A. Quest (talk) 21:41, 6 August 2017 (UTC)Reply
A few of your changes were slight improvements; I'll remake them. -Jason A. Quest (talk) 21:51, 6 August 2017 (UTC)Reply
Thank you, Jason. I appreciate that .. really. --Ciphers (talk) 22:31, 6 August 2017 (UTC)Reply

Wikidata weekly summary #272

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Latest comment: 8 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion
 
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here.


English fluency

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Latest comment: 8 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion

You read and write English well enough to make worthwhile contributions to the English WP, and I encourage you to keep doing it. But you are not fluent, and you should not be trying to change the wording of people who are. For example, "in the meanwhile" is a phrase that doesn't work in English: it's either "in the mean time" or "meanwhile". "Consensual" is the adjective form of "consent", not of "consensus"; they are different words with different meanings. A "licence" is awarded to a "licensee". These are mistakes that someone who speaks English natively wouldn't make... but you are. And worse: these are things that were correct before you changed them. You are wasting your time – and others' time – by introducing these changes. Stick to fixing the things you know better than other editors of the English WP. English grammar is not one of them. Thank you. Magic9Ball (talk) 15:28, 11 August 2017 (UTC)Reply

Hello Ciphers. Please stop vandalism on Wolf Warriors 2

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Latest comment: 8 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion

Hello admin,

Please stop this random IP from vandalizing the page.

171.36.18.44

Thank you,

--2606:A000:86CC:4100:3512:9D00:6858:2D0D (talk) 12:22, 12 August 2017 (UTC)Reply

Hi, unfortunately I'm not currently an admin on English Wikipedia. For further assistance please visit this page. Thank you. --Ciphers (talk) 02:21, 15 August 2017 (UTC)Reply

Dinner table

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Latest comment: 8 years ago4 comments2 people in discussion

Hi there, I have just seen your recent addition of an article about dinner tables. It seems a similar article for Dining table previously existed and was merged into Table (furniture). I believe the same may analogously be valid for this new article. Similarly, Kitchen table seems to redirect to Kitchen, so it may be an idea to redirect to Dining room if the main focus is the cultural significance of dinner rituals as opposed to the funiture. Regards pseudonym Jake Brockman talk 12:40, 14 August 2017 (UTC)Reply

Hi, Jake. You're actually right. The original purpose was to focus on the metaphorical aspect of the dinner table (i.e. buffet), rather than the physical table itself, so perhaps we should move the page to "Dinning Table" instead? any other suggesstions? Best, --Ciphers (talk) 02:27, 15 August 2017 (UTC)Reply
I think that the cultural aspect is covered in the article Dinner, though that one could use some work to highlight different regional aspects and go a bit deeper. This is a bit western-hemisphere-heavy right now. I really struggle with an article about "dinner table" or "dining table" as it will inevitably overlap with Dining room, Dinner and Table (furniture) - without adding anything unique that cannot also be logically found in any of the others. pseudonym Jake Brockman talk 07:32, 16 August 2017 (UTC)Reply
Jake. I appreciate the detailed feedback, and I understand your honest angle of the subject. With that being said, it is indeed hard to constantly generate new contents for creating new articles given the high complexity of our modern world which occasionally results in combining multiple -or otherwise distinct- things into a fewer number of abstract concepts or things, the fact that sometimes overshadow some of the details and might result in clouding our judgment to what or what not should be included in the final copy of the article. Please feel free to move, merge or otherwise split the Dinner table's content into however you see fit, or otherwise like. Please feel free to reach out in case you have any further questions. Thank you. --Ciphers (talk) 22:07, 17 August 2017 (UTC)Reply

Wikidata weekly summary #273

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Latest comment: 8 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion
 
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Other Noteworthy Stuff
    • Share your feedback on the draft strategic direction, a basis on which strategic plans will be built.
    • Wikidata reached d:Q36000000. The number of items has been increased by 20% in less than three months
  • Development

Most of the team was at Wikimania, talking to people, getting meaningful input from the editors, giving talks, hacking around :)

You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here.


Wikidata weekly summary #274

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Latest comment: 8 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion
 
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Development
    • Working on making constraints work on qualifiers and references (phabricator:T168532)
    • Working on making it easier to see when input in property or value fields is not recognized/wrong (phabricator:T170531)
    • Added new language codes (eya, fuf, ood, pjt, yap, zun) for use in monolingual text values
    • Fixed an issue with badges not being shown next to interwiki links on Wikipedia and co (phabricator:T172592)
    • Worked on showing labels when linking to a redirect (phabricator:T96553)
    • Worked on making change dispatching to Wikipedia and co work better so changes made on Wikidata show up there in a reasonable time. There were issues because of significantly increased edit activity on Wikidata.

You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here.


English fluency, again

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Latest comment: 8 years ago8 comments4 people in discussion

Two other editors have noticed (as have I) and discussed above, that your level of English fluency is not as high as you think. The userbox you set, en-4, "near-native", is obviously incorrect and I have taken the liberty of reducing it to a level I feel is appropriate. Please take a look at WP:Babel/Levels, which defines the levels of language proficiency intended in the userboxes. The purpose of these is to enhance collaboration among Wikipedia editors by informing them of your capabilities. I do not speak Japanese and thus have no idea what your fluency in it is, but I would also be surprised if it is "near native", and I would ask you to consider if ja-3 would be more appropriate. JustinTime55 (talk) 19:33, 24 August 2017 (UTC)Reply

Justin, I understand what you're trying to say, but please do not alter my userpage without asking for my consent first. I guess you wouldn't like anyone doing the same to yours, now do you? --Ciphers (talk) 17:24, 25 August 2017 (UTC)Reply
Regardless of whether or not I would like it, the fact is, our user pages do not belong to us. Please read WP:UP#OWN: ...pages in user space belong to the wider community. They are not a personal homepage, and do not belong to the user. They are part of Wikipedia, and exist to make collaboration among editors easier. Bots and other users may edit pages in your user space or leave messages for you, though by convention others will not usually edit your user page itself, other than (rarely) to address significant concerns or place project-related tags. I felt I was within rights to edit your page to address a significant concern: your userbox misleads the Wikipedia community by overstating your English fluency as near-native. These userboxes are used to generate lists used to direct editors to people with a given skill level. I will not edit war, but I ask you to consider changing it yourself. JustinTime55 (talk) 20:27, 25 August 2017 (UTC)Reply
Ciphers, maybe you can use this as a learning experience: How do you think another editor feels when you "correct" their perfectly good English with your mistakes? Your self-evaluation is incorrect; please change it, and more importantly, leave the English (and Japanese?) corrections to people who are truly fluent. Magic9Ball (talk) 21:26, 25 August 2017 (UTC)Reply
Justin, Ball; who said anything that I should care about what either of you has to think or say? More importantly, how can I tell that either of you is actually a native speaker, not to mention having any ability to assess other's language skills? I am a scientific researcher, and I'm here to enrich Wikipedia with my skills and knowledge, not to nitpick other people's grammar or syntax. Do either of you know anything about Quantum physics or high-dimensional geometry?
The bottom line is, if you see something I've edited that you think is wrong you've got three options, fix it, revert it, or leave it. I prefer the third. Otherwise, I'm more than happy to file a complaint against any user comes to my user page or talk page to harass, or intimidate me. You are free to reference, cite or otherwise recite all the policies you like, but I think I made my point clear here. --Ciphers (talk) 23:37, 25 August 2017 (UTC)Reply
Ciphers, speaking as another native English speaker, and one with unusually good proofreading skills, I must say that I concur with the other editors. After reverting your recent edit to Cryptography, which consisted mostly of incorrect English changes (along with a serious language-neutral error), I took a look at your list of recent edits. Examining the diffs of two of your edits at random, on Acne and 1912 Detroit Tigers season, I found that in both cases you had changed correct English to severely incorrect English, and I have now reverted these changes.
Unfortunately I don't have time to go through the rest of your voluminous edits, but from what I've seen so far, and bolstered by the other editors' comments, I expect a large percentage of them involve changing correct English to incorrect English. You claim you're here to enrich Wikipedia with your scientific research skills and knowledge, not to attempt to fix other people's grammar or syntax, yet all of your edits I've looked at so far consist mostly or entirely of the latter. Some of your English errors have been so bizarre that I must concur that you are objectively not "near-fluent" in English, especially when it comes to copyediting.
Personally, I'm not overly concerned about what you claim your language skills are on your user page, but I am concerned about you spending lots of time making articles worse with your faulty English proofreading skills, and in turn wasting the time of other editors that need to clean up your mess. I would urge you to try to stick to factual changes, rather than laboring under the incorrect assumption that you have the ability to copyedit English like a native speaker. I would also note that your attitude in your last comment is inappropriate. Wikipedia only works when people cooperate, so rejecting the observations of native English speakers, accusing them of misrepresenting themselves, and saying you don't care about what they have to say or what Wikipedia's policies are is not a good way forward.
You have a userbox on your page saying "This user tries to do the right thing. If they make a mistake, please let them know." I would suggest you try to actually adopt said attitude rather than forcing things to escalate needlessly. --Dan Harkless (talk) 09:47, 27 August 2017 (UTC)Reply
Thank you, Dan. I guess your argument makes more sense to me than the above two. I'll try to be more cautious in my edits moving forward. Thanks again for the note. --Ciphers (talk) 03:50, 28 August 2017 (UTC)Reply
Thank you for taking my observations and suggestions in a positive spirit, and I wish you luck in your further editing efforts. --Dan Harkless (talk) 19:50, 28 August 2017 (UTC)Reply
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