Cscott
Orphaned fair use image (Image:Square-Dance-Logo.png)
editThanks for uploading Image:Square-Dance-Logo.png. The image description page currently specifies that the image is non-free and may only be used on Wikipedia under a claim of fair use. However, the image is currently orphaned, meaning that it is not used in any articles on Wikipedia. If the image was previously in an article, please go to the article and see why it was removed. You may add it back if you think that that will be useful. However, please note that images for which a replacement could be created are not acceptable under fair use (see our fair use policy).
If you have uploaded other unlicensed media, please check whether they're used in any articles or not. You can find a list of 'image' pages you have edited by clicking on the "my contributions" link (it is located at the very top of any Wikipedia page when you are logged in), and then selecting "Image" from the dropdown box. Note that any fair use images not used in any articles will be deleted after seven days, as described on criteria for speedy deletion. Thank you. —Angr 09:42, 29 March 2007 (UTC)
- The logo was never really non-free, as far as I can tell, it's been replaced by an identical SVG, which wouldn't change the non-free situation in any case. But SVG is better than PNG, so go ahead, delete away. C. Scott Ananian 18:07, 29 March 2007 (UTC)
Username change certification
editThe instructions at Wikipedia:Changing_username/Usurpations are a little unclear, but here is an edit certifying my request for a name change for my SUL.
- And again, for my name change at Meta:Changing_username/Usurpations. C. Scott Ananian (talk) 22:04, 25 July 2013 (UTC)
July 2013
editHello, I'm BracketBot. I have automatically detected that your edit to Gadsby (novel) may have broken the syntax by modifying 2 "[]"s. If you have, don't worry, just edit the page again to fix it. If I misunderstood what happened, or if you have any questions, you can leave a message on my operator's talk page.
- List of unpaired brackets remaining on the page:
- Gadsby.djvu/59 Gadsby: A Story of 50,000 Words] page 51 of 1939 printing by Wetzel Publishing Co.].</ref><ref>[http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Page:Gadsby.djvu/111 Gadsby: A Story of 50,000 Words]
- Gadsby.djvu/111 Gadsby: A Story of 50,000 Words] page 103 of 1939 printing by Wetzel Publishing Co.].</ref>
Thanks, BracketBot (talk) 18:13, 25 July 2013 (UTC)
WMNE Mailing List
editHey Cscott, are you in possession of the names that we wanted to add to this list, by chance? Thanks! Kevin Rutherford (talk) 21:30, 1 August 2013 (UTC)
- I added them all immediately via mailman, then gave the piece of paper to User:Sj just in case there was anyone who didn't click on the confirmation link from mailman. SAnanian (WMF) (talk) 14:59, 2 August 2013 (UTC)
New England Wikipedia Day @ MIT: Saturday Jan 18
editNE Meetup #4: January 18 at MIT Building 5 | |
---|---|
Dear Fellow Wikimedian, You have been invited to the New England Wikimedians's 2014 kick-off party and Wikipedia Day Celebration at Building Five on the Massachusetts Institute of Technology campus on Saturday, January 18th, from 3-5 PM. Afterwards, we will be holding an informal dinner at a local restaurant. If you are curious to join us, please come, as we are always looking for people to come and give their opinion! Finally, be sure to RSVP here if you're interested. I hope to see you there! Kevin Rutherford (talk) |
(You can unsubscribe from future notifications for Boston-area events by removing your name from this list.)
You're invited: Women's History Edit-a-thons in Massachusetts this March
editWomen's History Edit-a-thons in Massachusetts this March - You are invited! | |
---|---|
New England Wikimedians is excited to announce a series of Wikipedia edit-a-thons that will be taking place at colleges and universities throughout Massachusetts as part of Wikiwomen's History Month from March 1 - March 31. We encourage you to join in an edit-a-thon near you, or to participate remotely if you are unable to attend in person (for the full list of articles, click here). Events are currently planned for the cities/towns of Boston, Northampton, South Hadley, and Cambridge. Further information on dates and locations can be found on our user group page. Questions? Contact Girona7 (talk) |
You're invited!
editNE Meetup #5: April 19th at Clover Food Lab in Kendall Square | |
---|---|
Dear Fellow Wikimedian, New England Wikimedians would like to invite you to the April 2014 meeting, which will be a small-scale meetup of all interested Wikimedians from the New England area. We will socialize, review regional events from the beginning of the year, look ahead to regional events of 2014, and discuss other things of interest to the group. Be sure to RSVP here if you're interested. Also, if you haven't done so already, please consider signing up for our mailing list and connect with us on Facebook and Twitter. We hope to see you there! Kevin Rutherford (talk) and Maia Weinstock (talk) |
(You can unsubscribe from future notifications for Boston-area events by removing your name from this list.)
Edit-a-thon invite
editAdrianne Wadewitz Memorial edit-a-thons
editAdrianne Wadewitz edit-a-thons in Southern New England | |
---|---|
As you may have already heard, the Wikipedia community lost an invaluable member of the community last month. Adrianne Wadewitz was a feminist scholar of 18th-Century British literature, and a prolific editor of the site. As part of a worldwide series of tributes, New England Wikimedians, in conjunction with local institutions of higher learning, have created three edit-a-thons that will be occurring in May and June. The events are as follows:
We hope that you will be able to join us, whether you are an experienced editor or are using Wikipedia for the first time. If you have any questions, please leave a message at Kevin Rutherford's talk page. You can unsubscribe from future notifications for Boston-area events by removing your name from this list. |
New England Wikimedians summer events!
editUpcoming events hosted by New England Wikimedians! | |
---|---|
After many months of doubt, nature has finally warmed up and summer is almost here! The New England Wikimedians user group have planned some upcoming events. This includes some unique and interesting events to those who are interested:
Although we also aren't hosting this year's Wikimania, we would like to let you know that Wikimania this year will be occurring in London in August: If you have any questions, please leave a message at Kevin Rutherford's talk page. You can unsubscribe from future notifications for Boston-area events by removing your name from this list. |
New England Wikimedians summer events!
editUpcoming events hosted by New England Wikimedians! | |
---|---|
After many months of doubt, nature has finally warmed up and summer is almost here! The New England Wikimedians user group have planned some upcoming events. This includes some unique and interesting events to those who are interested:
Although we also aren't hosting this year's Wikimania, we would like to let you know that Wikimania this year will be occurring in London in August: If you have any questions, please leave a message at Kevin Rutherford's talk page. You can unsubscribe from future notifications for Boston-area events by removing your name from this list. |
Media Viewer RfC arbitration case - extension of closure dates
editHello, you are receiving this message because you have commented on the Media Viewer RfC arbitration case. This is a courtesy message to inform you that the closure date for the submission of evidence has been extended to 17 August 2014 and the closure date for workshop proposals has been extended to 22 August 2014, as has the expected date of the proposed decision being posted. The closure dates have been changed to allow for recent developments to be included in the case. If you wish to comment, please review the evidence guidance. For the Arbitration Committee, MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 10:00, 12 August 2014 (UTC)
Media Viewer RfC arbitration case - motion to suspend case
editYou are receiving this message as you have either commented on a case page or are named as a party to the case. A motion has been proposed to suspend the Media Viewer RfC arbitration case for a maximum of 60 days due to recent developments. If you wish to comment regarding the motion there is a section on the proposed decision talk page for this. For the Arbitration Committee, Callanecc (talk • contribs • logs). Message delivered by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) at 02:33, 25 August 2014 (UTC)
/User:cscott/bug68854
editI moved your page /User:cscott/bug68854 to User:Cscott/bug68854, as it appeared to be misnamed.--220 of Borg 05:25, 13 September 2014 (UTC)
- Thanks, 220! C. Scott Ananian (talk) 06:00, 13 September 2014 (UTC)
- No worries! --220 of Borg 06:05, 13 September 2014 (UTC)
mw-ocg-bundler question
editHi Cscott, I added a question on Wikitech Talk:OCG but I don't know if you are watching that page. Could you give it a look? Thanks! --Welterkj (talk) 20:34, 31 March 2015 (UTC)
This Friday: Women in Architecture edit-a-thon @ Cambridge, MA
editYou are invited to join the Women in Architecture edit-a-thon @ Cambridge, MA on October 16! (drop-in any time, 6-9pm)--Pharos (talk) 18:28, 14 October 2015 (UTC)
Grants:IEG/Wikipedia likes Galactic Exploration for Posterity 2015
editDear User:Cscott,
People suggested that I consult with fellow Wikipedians to get feedback and help to improve my idea about "As an unparalleled way to raise awareness of the Wikimedia projects, I propose to create a tremendous media opportunity presented by launching Wikipedia via space travel."
I plan to use the WikiOffline and OpenZIM content library as the basis of the content launched into outer space.
Please see the idea at https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IEG/Wikipedia_likes_Galactic_Exploration_for_Posterity_2015. Please post your suggestions on the talk page and please feel free to edit the idea and join the project.
Thank you for your time and attention in this matter. I appreciate it.
My best regards, Geraldshields11 (talk) 14:33, 16 October 2015 (UTC)
Hi,
You appear to be eligible to vote in the current Arbitration Committee election. The Arbitration Committee is the panel of editors responsible for conducting the Wikipedia arbitration process. It has the authority to enact binding solutions for disputes between editors, primarily related to serious behavioural issues that the community has been unable to resolve. This includes the ability to impose site bans, topic bans, editing restrictions, and other measures needed to maintain our editing environment. The arbitration policy describes the Committee's roles and responsibilities in greater detail. If you wish to participate, you are welcome to review the candidates' statements and submit your choices on the voting page. For the Election committee, MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 12:57, 23 November 2015 (UTC)
Snowball Earth
editSomething's wrong with the coding of the first paragraph of this entry. The words "The Snowball Earth," which precede "hypothesis . . . ," don't show up on the page, though they're there when I go to edit the section. I don't know enough about coding to attempt a fix. I'm leery of screwing up the chart that preceds the missing text, and that would create a mess!
I'm writing to you about this as you did the last edit of the page and you seem to have the skills to correct the problem. (I'm an English PhD with html coding skills; I mostly edit grammar, punctuation, style, and argumentation.) If not, would you pass on my message to someone who can?
Thanks! KC 19:08, 12 January 2016 (UTC)
- User:Boydstra -- the page looks all right to me. Does it look right to you now, too? Perhaps there was a caching problem? Were you on mobile when you were looking at it? C. Scott Ananian (talk) 09:56, 13 January 2016 (UTC)
Snowball Earth again
editThanks for checking on the page.
Yes, I'm reading on my phone, and I still don't see the opening phrase. My phone is my only computer. Shouldn't Wiki articles function in all major media? KC 18:42, 14 January 2016 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Boydstra (talk • contribs)
JavaScript for Scribunto
editHi,
I saw from https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T61101#1935778 that you may have patches to support JavaScript instead of Lua in Mediawiki Scribunto-powered templates? Is that true? This would really be awesome... Anything holding it back? Brettz9 (talk) 16:35, 11 March 2016 (UTC)
- The main problem is that Scribunto doesn't (currently) have a good way of tagging the *language* that a given script is in. So you can have an all-JavaScript Scribunto, or an all-Lua Scribunto, but not a Scribunto install which supports *both*. That limited the applicability of my work, so I got a bit distracted trying to solve that particular problem. I think there's more core support for tagging the content type of a given title now, that might offer a way forward. C. Scott Ananian (talk) 17:40, 11 March 2016 (UTC)
- Thanks for the prompt reply. I see. Maybe the limitation is a bit of a blessing though, as it would force child templates to also be rewritten in JavaScript, the virtual universal auxiliary language of the Web. Brettz9 (talk) 18:32, 12 March 2016 (UTC)
Server costs
editRecently on Jimbo's Talk page, you said that a particular server was costing $10,000 per day to maintain. Is that really correct, or did you mistype? - 72.78.244.41 (talk) 02:03, 7 August 2016 (UTC)
- I looked it up, and you're right, my number was a little high. Erik M said it was costing "$30K/month", so that's $1,000/day. I'll update my post. C. Scott Ananian (talk) 14:25, 7 August 2016 (UTC)
- And to be clear, that was the cost for the datacenter, that server was the last one remaining in that datacenter, and we did manage to arrange the timing such that we got the service transitioned before actually having to pay that price. C. Scott Ananian (talk) 17:50, 7 August 2016 (UTC)
Invitation to "target countries" discussion
editHello, Cscott! Since you attended the Global South meeting at Wikimania 2016, we're inviting you to a discussion on "target countries". You can help the product team at the Wikimedia Foundation create a new list of countries and metrics to replace the "global south" concept in our process with something more relevant. Interested? Learn more about this discussion and share your perspective. (This message is available in more languages.) Joe Sutherland (WMF) (talk) 00:16, 29 October 2016 (UTC)
A barnstar for you!
editThe Real Life Barnstar | |
I, Kaldari, hereby award Cscott the Real Life Barnstar for spending an afternoon at the Boston Public Library looking through microfilm to verify a fact for me! Kaldari (talk) 00:57, 8 November 2016 (UTC) |
ArbCom Elections 2016: Voting now open!
editHello, Cscott. Voting in the 2016 Arbitration Committee elections is open from Monday, 00:00, 21 November through Sunday, 23:59, 4 December to all unblocked users who have registered an account before Wednesday, 00:00, 28 October 2016 and have made at least 150 mainspace edits before Sunday, 00:00, 1 November 2016.
The Arbitration Committee is the panel of editors responsible for conducting the Wikipedia arbitration process. It has the authority to impose binding solutions to disputes between editors, primarily for serious conduct disputes the community has been unable to resolve. This includes the authority to impose site bans, topic bans, editing restrictions, and other measures needed to maintain our editing environment. The arbitration policy describes the Committee's roles and responsibilities in greater detail.
If you wish to participate in the 2016 election, please review the candidates' statements and submit your choices on the voting page. Mdann52 (talk) 22:08, 21 November 2016 (UTC)
Sunday July 16: New England Wiknic @ Cambridge, MA
editSunday July 16, 1-5pm: New England Wiknic | |
---|---|
You are invited to join us the "picnic anyone can edit" at John F. Kennedy Park, near Harvard Square, Cambridge, as part of the Great American Wiknic celebrations being held across the USA. Remember it's a wiki-picnic, which means potluck.
We hope to see you there! --Phoebe (talk) 16:33, 12 July 2017 (UTC) |
(You can subscribe/unsubscribe from future notifications for Boston-area events by adding or removing your name from this list.)
ArbCom 2017 election voter message
editHello, Cscott. Voting in the 2017 Arbitration Committee elections is now open until 23.59 on Sunday, 10 December. All users who registered an account before Saturday, 28 October 2017, made at least 150 mainspace edits before Wednesday, 1 November 2017 and are not currently blocked are eligible to vote. Users with alternate accounts may only vote once.
The Arbitration Committee is the panel of editors responsible for conducting the Wikipedia arbitration process. It has the authority to impose binding solutions to disputes between editors, primarily for serious conduct disputes the community has been unable to resolve. This includes the authority to impose site bans, topic bans, editing restrictions, and other measures needed to maintain our editing environment. The arbitration policy describes the Committee's roles and responsibilities in greater detail.
If you wish to participate in the 2017 election, please review the candidates and submit your choices on the voting page. MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 18:42, 3 December 2017 (UTC)
Facto Post – Issue 9 – 5 February 2018
editFacto Post – Issue 9 – 5 February 2018
Wikidata as HubeditOne way of looking at Wikidata relates it to the semantic web concept, around for about as long as Wikipedia, and realised in dozens of distributed Web institutions. It sees Wikidata as supplying central, encyclopedic coverage of linked structured data, and looks ahead to greater support for "federated queries" that draw together information from all parts of the emerging network of websites. Another perspective might be likened to a photographic negative of that one: Wikidata as an already-functioning Web hub. Over half of its properties are identifiers on other websites. These are Wikidata's "external links", to use Wikipedia terminology: one type for the DOI of a publication, another for the VIAF page of an author, with thousands more such. Wikidata links out to sites that are not nominally part of the semantic web, effectively drawing them into a larger system. The crosswalk possibilities of the systematic construction of these links was covered in Issue 8. Wikipedia:External links speaks of them as kept "minimal, meritable, and directly relevant to the article." Here Wikidata finds more of a function. On viaf.org one can type a VIAF author identifier into the search box, and find the author page. The Wikidata Resolver tool, these days including Open Street Map, Scholia etc., allows this kind of lookup. The hub tool by maxlath takes a major step further, allowing both lookup and crosswalk to be encoded in a single URL. Linksedit
Editor Charles Matthews, for ContentMine. Please leave feedback for him. Back numbers are here. Reminder: WikiFactMine pages on Wikidata are at WD:WFM. If you wish to receive no further issues of Facto Post, please remove your name from our mailing list. Alternatively, to opt out of all massmessage mailings, you may add Category:Wikipedians who opt out of message delivery to your user talk page.
Newsletter delivered by MediaWiki message delivery |
MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 11:50, 5 February 2018 (UTC)
Editing News #1—2018
editRead this in another language • Subscription list for the English Wikipedia • Subscription list for the multilingual edition
Did you know that you can now use the visual diff tool on any page?
Sometimes, it is hard to see important changes in a wikitext diff. This screenshot of a wikitext diff (click to enlarge) shows that the paragraphs have been rearranged, but it does not highlight the removal of a word or the addition of a new sentence.
If you enable the Beta Feature for "⧼visualeditor-preference-visualdiffpage-label⧽", you will have a new option. It will give you a new box at the top of every diff page. This box will let you choose either diff system on any edit.
Click the toggle button to switch between visual and wikitext diffs.
In the visual diff, additions, removals, new links, and formatting changes will be highlighted. Other changes, such as changing the size of an image, are described in notes on the side.
This screenshot shows the same edit as the wikitext diff. The visual diff highlights the removal of one word and the addition of a new sentence. An arrow indicates that the paragraph changed location.
You can read and help translate the user guide, which has more information about how to use the visual editor.
Since the last newsletter, the Editing Team has spent most of their time supporting the 2017 wikitext editor mode, which is available inside the visual editor as a Beta Feature, and improving the visual diff tool. Their work board is available in Phabricator. You can find links to the work finished each week at mw:VisualEditor/Weekly triage meetings. Their current priorities are fixing bugs, supporting the 2017 wikitext editor, and improving the visual diff tool.
Recent changes
edit- The 2017 wikitext editor is available as a Beta Feature on desktop devices. It has the same toolbar as the visual editor and can use the citoid service and other modern tools. The team have been comparing the performance of different editing environments. They have studied how long it takes to open the page and start typing. The study uses data for more than one million edits during December and January. Some changes have been made to improve the speed of the 2017 wikitext editor and the visual editor. Recently, the 2017 wikitext editor opened fastest for most edits, and the 2010 WikiEditor was fastest for some edits. More information will be posted at mw:Contributors/Projects/Editing performance.
- The visual diff tool was developed for the visual editor. It is now available to all users of the visual editor and the 2017 wikitext editor. When you review your changes, you can toggle between wikitext and visual diffs. You can also enable the new Beta Feature for "Visual diffs". The Beta Feature lets you use the visual diff tool to view other people's edits on page histories and Special:RecentChanges. [1]
- Wikitext syntax highlighting is available as a Beta Feature for both the 2017 wikitext editor and the 2010 wikitext editor. [2]
- The citoid service automatically translates URLs, DOIs, ISBNs, and PubMed id numbers into wikitext citation templates. This tool has been used at the English Wikipedia for a long time. It is very popular and useful to editors, although it can be tricky for admins to set up. Other wikis can have this service, too. Please read the instructions. You can ask the team to help you enable citoid at your wiki.
Let's work together
edit- The team is planning a presentation about editing tools for an upcoming Wikimedia Foundation metrics and activities meeting.
- Wikibooks, Wikiversity, and other communities may have the visual editor made available by default to contributors. If your community wants this, then please contact Dan Garry.
- The
<references />
block can automatically display long lists of references in columns on wide screens. This makes footnotes easier to read. This has already been enabled at the English Wikipedia. If you want columns for a long list of footnotes on this wiki, you can use either<references />
or the plain (no parameters){{reflist}}
template. If you edit a different wiki, you can request multi-column support for your wiki. [3] - If you aren't reading this in your preferred language, then please help us with translations! Subscribe to the Translators mailing list or contact us directly. We will notify you when the next issue is ready for translation. Thank you!
—User:Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 23:14, 28 February 2018 (UTC)
Facto Post – Issue 10 – 12 March 2018
editFacto Post – Issue 10 – 12 March 2018
Milestone for mix'n'matcheditAround the time in February when Wikidata clicked past item Q50000000, another milestone was reached: the mix'n'match tool uploaded its 1000th dataset. Concisely defined by its author, Magnus Manske, it works "to match entries in external catalogs to Wikidata". The total number of entries is now well into eight figures, and more are constantly being added: a couple of new catalogs each day is normal. Since the end of 2013, mix'n'match has gradually come to play a significant part in adding statements to Wikidata. Particularly in areas with the flavour of digital humanities, but datasets can of course be about practically anything. There is a catalog on skyscrapers, and two on spiders. These days mix'n'match can be used in numerous modes, from the relaxed gamified click through a catalog looking for matches, with prompts, to the fantastically useful and often demanding search across all catalogs. I'll type that again: you can search 1000+ datasets from the simple box at the top right. The drop-down menu top left offers "creation candidates", Magnus's personal favourite. m:Mix'n'match/Manual for more. For the Wikidatan, a key point is that these matches, however carried out, add statements to Wikidata if, and naturally only if, there is a Wikidata property associated with the catalog. For everyone, however, the hands-on experience of deciding of what is a good match is an education, in a scholarly area, biographical catalogs being particularly fraught. Underpinning recent rapid progress is an open infrastructure for scraping and uploading. Congratulations to Magnus, our data Stakhanovite! Linksedit
Editor Charles Matthews, for ContentMine. Please leave feedback for him. Back numbers are here. Reminder: WikiFactMine pages on Wikidata are at WD:WFM. If you wish to receive no further issues of Facto Post, please remove your name from our mailing list. Alternatively, to opt out of all massmessage mailings, you may add Category:Wikipedians who opt out of message delivery to your user talk page.
Newsletter delivered by MediaWiki message delivery |
MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 12:26, 12 March 2018 (UTC)
Facto Post – Issue 11 – 9 April 2018
editFacto Post – Issue 11 – 9 April 2018
The 100 Skins of the OnioneditOpen Citations Month, with its eminently guessable hashtag, is upon us. We should be utterly grateful that in the past 12 months, so much data on which papers cite which other papers has been made open, and that Wikidata is playing its part in hosting it as "cites" statements. At the time of writing, there are 15.3M Wikidata items that can do that. Pulling back to look at open access papers in the large, though, there is is less reason for celebration. Access in theory does not yet equate to practical access. A recent LSE IMPACT blogpost puts that issue down to "heterogeneity". A useful euphemism to save us from thinking that the whole concept doesn't fall into the realm of the oxymoron. Some home truths: aggregation is not content management, if it falls short on reusability. The PDF file format is wedded to how humans read documents, not how machines ingest them. The salami-slicer is our friend in the current downloading of open access papers, but for a better metaphor, think about skinning an onion, laboriously, 100 times with diminishing returns. There are of the order of 100 major publisher sites hosting open access papers, and the predominant offer there is still a PDF. From the discoverability angle, Wikidata's bibliographic resources combined with the SPARQL query are superior in principle, by far, to existing keyword searches run over papers. Open access content should be managed into consistent HTML, something that is currently strenuous. The good news, such as it is, would be that much of it is already in XML. The organisational problem of removing further skins from the onion, with sensible prioritisation, is certainly not insuperable. The CORE group (the bloggers in the LSE posting) has some answers, but actually not all that is needed for the text and data mining purposes they highlight. The long tail, or in other words the onion heart when it has become fiddly beyond patience to skin, does call for a pis aller. But the real knack is to do more between the XML and the heart. Linksedit
Editor Charles Matthews, for ContentMine. Please leave feedback for him. Back numbers are here. Reminder: WikiFactMine pages on Wikidata are at WD:WFM. If you wish to receive no further issues of Facto Post, please remove your name from our mailing list. Alternatively, to opt out of all massmessage mailings, you may add Category:Wikipedians who opt out of message delivery to your user talk page.
Newsletter delivered by MediaWiki message delivery |
Facto Post – Issue 12 – 28 May 2018
editFacto Post – Issue 12 – 28 May 2018
ScienceSource fundededitThe Wikimedia Foundation announced full funding of the ScienceSource grant proposal from ContentMine on May 18. See the ScienceSource Twitter announcement and 60 second video.
The proposal includes downloading 30,000 open access papers, aiming (roughly speaking) to create a baseline for medical referencing on Wikipedia. It leaves open the question of how these are to be chosen. The basic criteria of WP:MEDRS include a concentration on secondary literature. Attention has to be given to the long tail of diseases that receive less current research. The MEDRS guideline supposes that edge cases will have to be handled, and the premature exclusion of publications that would be in those marginal positions would reduce the value of the collection. Prophylaxis misses the point that gate-keeping will be done by an algorithm. Two well-known but rather different areas where such considerations apply are tropical diseases and alternative medicine. There are also a number of potential downloading troubles, and these were mentioned in Issue 11. There is likely to be a gap, even with the guideline, between conditions taken to be necessary but not sufficient, and conditions sufficient but not necessary, for candidate papers to be included. With around 10,000 recognised medical conditions in standard lists, being comprehensive is demanding. With all of these aspects of the task, ScienceSource will seek community help. Linksedit
Editor Charles Matthews, for ContentMine. Please leave feedback for him. Back numbers are here. Reminder: WikiFactMine pages on Wikidata are at WD:WFM. ScienceSource pages will be announced there, and in this mass message. If you wish to receive no further issues of Facto Post, please remove your name from our mailing list. Alternatively, to opt out of all massmessage mailings, you may add Category:Wikipedians who opt out of message delivery to your user talk page.
Newsletter delivered by MediaWiki message delivery |
Facto Post – Issue 13 – 29 May 2018
editFacto Post – Issue 13 – 29 May 2018
The Editor is Charles Matthews, for ContentMine. Please leave feedback for him, on his User talk page.
To subscribe to Facto Post go to Wikipedia:Facto Post mailing list. For the ways to unsubscribe, see the footer.
Facto Post enters its second year, with a Cambridge Blue (OK, Aquamarine) background, a new logo, but no Cambridge blues. On-topic for the ScienceSource project is a project page here. It contains some case studies on how the WP:MEDRS guideline, for the referencing of articles at all related to human health, is applied in typical discussions. Close to home also, a template, called {{medrs}} for short, is used to express dissatisfaction with particular references. Technology can help with patrolling, and this Petscan query finds over 450 articles where there is at least one use of the template. Of course the template is merely suggesting there is a possible issue with the reliability of a reference. Deciding the truth of the allegation is another matter. This maintenance issue is one example of where ScienceSource aims to help. Where the reference is to a scientific paper, its type of algorithm could give a pass/fail opinion on such references. It could assist patrollers of medical articles, therefore, with the templated references and more generally. There may be more to proper referencing than that, indeed: context, quite what the statement supported by the reference expresses, prominence and weight. For that kind of consideration, case studies can help. But an algorithm might help to clear the backlog.
If you wish to receive no further issues of Facto Post, please remove your name from our mailing list. Alternatively, to opt out of all massmessage mailings, you may add Category:Wikipedians who opt out of message delivery to your user talk page.
Newsletter delivered by MediaWiki message delivery |
Facto Post – Issue 14 – 21 July 2018
editFacto Post – Issue 14 – 21 July 2018
The Editor is Charles Matthews, for ContentMine. Please leave feedback for him, on his User talk page.
To subscribe to Facto Post go to Wikipedia:Facto Post mailing list. For the ways to unsubscribe, see the footer.
Officially it is "bridging the gaps in knowledge", with Wikimania 2018 in Cape Town paying tribute to the southern African concept of ubuntu to implement it. Besides face-to-face interactions, Wikimedians do need their power sources. Facto Post interviewed Jdforrester, who has attended every Wikimania, and now works as Senior Product Manager for the Wikimedia Foundation. His take on tackling the gaps in the Wikimedia movement is that "if we were an army, we could march in a column and close up all the gaps". In his view though, that is a faulty metaphor, and it leads to a completely false misunderstanding of the movement, its diversity and different aspirations, and the nature of the work as "fighting" to be done in the open sector. There are many fronts, and as an eventualist he feels the gaps experienced both by editors and by users of Wikimedia content are inevitable. He would like to see a greater emphasis on reuse of content, not simply its volume. If that may not sound like radicalism, the Decolonizing the Internet conference here organized jointly with Whose Knowledge? can redress the picture. It comes with the claim to be "the first ever conference about centering marginalized knowledge online".
If you wish to receive no further issues of Facto Post, please remove your name from our mailing list. Alternatively, to opt out of all massmessage mailings, you may add Category:Wikipedians who opt out of message delivery to your user talk page.
Newsletter delivered by MediaWiki message delivery |
Facto Post – Issue 15 – 21 August 2018
editFacto Post – Issue 15 – 21 August 2018
The Editor is Charles Matthews, for ContentMine. Please leave feedback for him, on his User talk page.
To subscribe to Facto Post go to Wikipedia:Facto Post mailing list. For the ways to unsubscribe, see the footer.
To grasp the nettle, there are rare diseases, there are tropical diseases and then there are "neglected diseases". Evidently a rare enough disease is likely to be neglected, but neglected disease these days means a disease not rare, but tropical, and most often infectious or parasitic. Rare diseases as a group are dominated, in contrast, by genetic diseases. A major aspect of neglect is found in tracking drug discovery. Orphan drugs are those developed to treat rare diseases (rare enough not to have market-driven research), but there is some overlap in practice with the WHO's neglected diseases, where snakebite, a "neglected public health issue", is on the list. From an encyclopedic point of view, lack of research also may mean lack of high-quality references: the core medical literature differs from primary research, since it operates by aggregating trials. This bibliographic deficit clearly hinders Wikipedia's mission. The ScienceSource project is currently addressing this issue, on Wikidata. Its Wikidata focus list at WD:SSFL is trying to ensure that neglect does not turn into bias in its selection of science papers.
If you wish to receive no further issues of Facto Post, please remove your name from our mailing list. Alternatively, to opt out of all massmessage mailings, you may add Category:Wikipedians who opt out of message delivery to your user talk page.
Newsletter delivered by MediaWiki message delivery |
MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 13:23, 21 August 2018 (UTC)
Timeless Newsletter • Issue 2
editThe second issue of the Timeless newsletter is out.
The news: Themes are coming to Timeless! Your infobox and navbox templates in particular are probably going to look absolutely horrible in the new built-in night mode.
For more information, background, plans and progress updates, please see the full issue on Meta, complete with a ridiculous list of phabricator task links, gratuitous mention of other skins, and me complaining about the current state of MediaWiki skinning in general.
Facto Post – Issue 16 – 30 September 2018
editFacto Post – Issue 16 – 30 September 2018
The Editor is Charles Matthews, for ContentMine. Please leave feedback for him, on his User talk page.
To subscribe to Facto Post go to Wikipedia:Facto Post mailing list. For the ways to unsubscribe, see the footer.
In an ideal world ... no, bear with your editor for just a minute ... there would be a format for scientific publishing online that was as much a standard as SI units are for the content. Likewise cataloguing publications would not be onerous, because part of the process would be to generate uniform metadata. Without claiming it could be the mythical free lunch, it might be reasonably be argued that sandwiches can be packaged much alike and have barcodes, whatever the fillings. The best on offer, to stretch the metaphor, is the meal kit option, in the form of XML. Where scientific papers are delivered as XML downloads, you get all the ingredients ready to cook. But have to prepare the actual meal of slow food yourself. See Scholarly HTML for a recent pass at heading off XML with HTML, in other words in the native language of the Web. The argument from real life is a traditional mixture of frictional forces, vested interests, and the classic irony of the principle of unripe time. On the other hand, discoverability actually diminishes with the prolific progress of science publishing. No, it really doesn't scale. Wikimedia as movement can do something in such cases. We know from open access, we grok the Web, we have our own horse in the HTML race, we have Wikidata and WikiJournal, and we have the chops to act.
If you wish to receive no further issues of Facto Post, please remove your name from our mailing list. Alternatively, to opt out of all massmessage mailings, you may add Category:Wikipedians who opt out of message delivery to your user talk page.
Newsletter delivered by MediaWiki message delivery |
MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 17:57, 30 September 2018 (UTC)
Facto Post – Issue 17 – 29 October 2018
editFacto Post – Issue 17 – 29 October 2018
The Editor is Charles Matthews, for ContentMine. Please leave feedback for him, on his User talk page.
To subscribe to Facto Post go to Wikipedia:Facto Post mailing list. For the ways to unsubscribe, see the footer.
Around 2.7 million Wikidata items have an illustrative image. These files, you might say, are Wikimedia's stock images, and if the number is large, it is still only 5% or so of items that have one. All such images are taken from Wikimedia Commons, which has 50 million media files. One key issue is how to expand the stock. Indeed, there is a tool. WD-FIST exploits the fact that each Wikipedia is differently illustrated, mostly with images from Commons but also with fair use images. An item that has sitelinks but no illustrative image can be tested to see if the linked wikis have a suitable one. This works well for a volunteer who wants to add images at a reasonable scale, and a small amount of SPARQL knowledge goes a long way in producing checklists. It should be noted, though, that there are currently 53 Wikidata properties that link to Commons, of which P18 for the basic image is just one. WD-FIST prompts the user to add signatures, plaques, pictures of graves and so on. There are a couple of hundred monograms, mostly of historical figures, and this query allows you to view all of them. commons:Category:Monograms and its subcategories provide rich scope for adding more. And so it is generally. The list of properties linking to Commons does contain a few that concern video and audio files, and rather more for maps. But it contains gems such as P3451 for "nighttime view". Over 1000 of those on Wikidata, but as for so much else, there could be yet more. Go on. Today is Wikidata's birthday. An illustrative image is always an acceptable gift, so why not add one? You can follow these easy steps: (i) log in at https://tools.wmflabs.org/widar/, (ii) paste the Petscan ID 6263583 into https://tools.wmflabs.org/fist/wdfist/ and click run, and (iii) just add cake.
If you wish to receive no further issues of Facto Post, please remove your name from our mailing list. Alternatively, to opt out of all massmessage mailings, you may add Category:Wikipedians who opt out of message delivery to your user talk page.
Newsletter delivered by MediaWiki message delivery |
MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 15:01, 29 October 2018 (UTC)
Editing News #2—2018
editRead this in another language • Subscription list for this multilingual newsletter • Subscription list on the English Wikipedia
Did you know?
Did you know that you can use the visual editor on a mobile device?
Tap on the pencil icon to start editing. The page will probably open in the wikitext editor.
You will see another pencil icon in the toolbar. Tap on that pencil icon to the switch between visual editing and wikitext editing.
Remember to publish your changes when you're done.
You can read and help translate the user guide, which has more information about how to use the visual editor.
Since the last newsletter, the Editing Team has wrapped up most of their work on the 2017 wikitext editor and the visual diff tool. The team has begun investigating the needs of editors who use mobile devices. Their work board is available in Phabricator. Their current priorities are fixing bugs and improving mobile editing.
Recent changes
edit- The Editing team has published an initial report about mobile editing.
- The Editing team has begun a design study of visual editing on the mobile website. New editors have trouble doing basic tasks on a smartphone, such as adding links to Wikipedia articles. You can read the report.
- The Reading team is working on a separate mobile-based contributions project.
- The 2006 wikitext editor is no longer supported. If you used that toolbar, then you will no longer see any toolbar. You may choose another editing tool in your editing preferences, local gadgets, or beta features.
- The Editing team described the history and status of VisualEditor in this recorded public presentation (starting at 29 minutes, 30 seconds).
- The Language team released a new version of Content Translation (CX2) last month, on International Translation Day. It integrates the visual editor to support templates, tables, and images. It also produces better wikitext when the translated article is published. [4]
Let's work together
edit- The Editing team wants to improve visual editing on the mobile website. Please read their ideas and tell the team what you think would help editors who use the mobile site.
- The Community Wishlist Survey begins next week.
- If you aren't reading this in your preferred language, then please help us with translations! Subscribe to the Translators mailing list or contact us directly. We will notify you when the next issue is ready for translation. Thank you!
ArbCom 2018 election voter message
editHello, Cscott. Voting in the 2018 Arbitration Committee elections is now open until 23.59 on Sunday, 3 December. All users who registered an account before Sunday, 28 October 2018, made at least 150 mainspace edits before Thursday, 1 November 2018 and are not currently blocked are eligible to vote. Users with alternate accounts may only vote once.
The Arbitration Committee is the panel of editors responsible for conducting the Wikipedia arbitration process. It has the authority to impose binding solutions to disputes between editors, primarily for serious conduct disputes the community has been unable to resolve. This includes the authority to impose site bans, topic bans, editing restrictions, and other measures needed to maintain our editing environment. The arbitration policy describes the Committee's roles and responsibilities in greater detail.
If you wish to participate in the 2018 election, please review the candidates and submit your choices on the voting page. MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 18:42, 19 November 2018 (UTC)
ArbCom 2018 election voter message
editHello, Cscott. Voting in the 2018 Arbitration Committee elections is now open until 23.59 on Sunday, 3 December. All users who registered an account before Sunday, 28 October 2018, made at least 150 mainspace edits before Thursday, 1 November 2018 and are not currently blocked are eligible to vote. Users with alternate accounts may only vote once.
The Arbitration Committee is the panel of editors responsible for conducting the Wikipedia arbitration process. It has the authority to impose binding solutions to disputes between editors, primarily for serious conduct disputes the community has been unable to resolve. This includes the authority to impose site bans, topic bans, editing restrictions, and other measures needed to maintain our editing environment. The arbitration policy describes the Committee's roles and responsibilities in greater detail.
If you wish to participate in the 2018 election, please review the candidates and submit your choices on the voting page. MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 18:42, 19 November 2018 (UTC)
Facto Post – Issue 18 – 30 November 2018
editFacto Post – Issue 18 – 30 November 2018
The Editor is Charles Matthews, for ContentMine. Please leave feedback for him, on his User talk page.
To subscribe to Facto Post go to Wikipedia:Facto Post mailing list. For the ways to unsubscribe, see the footer.
GLAM ♥ data — what is a gallery, library, archive or museum without a catalogue? It follows that Wikidata must love librarians. Bibliography supports students and researchers in any topic, but open and machine-readable bibliographic data even more so, outside the silo. Cue the WikiCite initiative, which was meeting in conference this week, in the Bay Area of California. In fact there is a broad scope: "Open Knowledge Maps via SPARQL" and the "Sum of All Welsh Literature", identification of research outputs, Library.Link Network and Bibframe 2.0, OSCAR and LUCINDA (who they?), OCLC and Scholia, all these co-exist on the agenda. Certainly more library science is coming Wikidata's way. That poses the question about the other direction: is more Wikimedia technology advancing on libraries? Good point. Wikimedians generally are not aware of the tech background that can be assumed, unless they are close to current training for librarians. A baseline definition is useful here: "bash, git and OpenRefine". Compare and contrast with pywikibot, GitHub and mix'n'match. Translation: scripting for automation, version control, data set matching and wrangling in the large, are on the agenda also for contemporary library work. Certainly there is some possible common ground here. Time to understand rather more about the motivations that operate in the library sector.
Account creation is now open on the ScienceSource wiki, where you can see SPARQL visualisations of text mining.
If you wish to receive no further issues of Facto Post, please remove your name from our mailing list. Alternatively, to opt out of all massmessage mailings, you may add Category:Wikipedians who opt out of message delivery to your user talk page.
Newsletter delivered by MediaWiki message delivery |
MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 11:20, 30 November 2018 (UTC)
Timeless Newsletter • Issue 3
editWelcome to the third issue of the Timeless newsletter, complete with a somewhat dubious explanation of where I've been all this time.
Somewhat dubious explanation of where I've been all this time:
I suffered a rather bad concussion in October, which knocked me pretty much completely out of commission through November, and I'm still recovering even now. One person = bus factor of one, even though it wasn't actually a bus but a very short flight of stairs.
Updates:
- Random bugs have been fixed. More bugs have been found. For a full list of horrors, see the workboard.
- Implementing themes (T131991: the dark/night mode and winter variants of the skin) has proven far more complicated than initially thought, lacking either the extension, or preferably, some core support for this functionality. Thus:
- I have submitted a Request for Comment proposing to merge Extension:Theme into core - this will enable skins to specify style variants as distinct options for users to select in their preferences by letting the skin specify the styles separately for each, a much neater way of implementing this than some of the existing hacks.
- Jack Phoenix has already submitted a patch to do this. We simply need the buy-in and consensus to merge it, and to resolve whatever issues may arise from this wider review.
Comments on the RfC (MediaWiki wiki RfC page, task) or bugs, or further reports, are always appreciated.
Until next time, hopefully with no further injuries,
Facto Post – Issue 19 – 27 December 2018
editFacto Post – Issue 19 – 27 December 2018
The Editor is Charles Matthews, for ContentMine. Please leave feedback for him, on his User talk page.
To subscribe to Facto Post go to Wikipedia:Facto Post mailing list. For the ways to unsubscribe, see the footer.
Zotero is free software for reference management by the Center for History and New Media: see Wikipedia:Citing sources with Zotero. It is also an active user community, and has broad-based language support. Besides the handiness of Zotero's warehousing of personal citation collections, the Zotero translator underlies the citoid service, at work behind the VisualEditor. Metadata from Wikidata can be imported into Zotero; and in the other direction the zotkat tool from the University of Mannheim allows Zotero bibliographies to be exported to Wikidata, by item creation. With an extra feature to add statements, that route could lead to much development of the focus list (P5008) tagging on Wikidata, by WikiProjects. There is also a large-scale encyclopedic dimension here. The construction of Zotero translators is one facet of Web scraping that has a strong community and open source basis. In that it resembles the less formal mix'n'match import community, and growing networks around other approaches that can integrate datasets into Wikidata, such as the use of OpenRefine. Looking ahead, the thirtieth birthday of the World Wide Web falls in 2019, and yet the ambition to make webpages routinely readable by machines can still seem an ever-retreating mirage. Wikidata should not only be helping Wikimedia integrate its projects, an ongoing process represented by Structured Data on Commons and lexemes. It should also be acting as a catalyst to bring scraping in from the cold, with institutional strengths as well as resourceful code.
Diversitech, the latest ContentMine grant application to the Wikimedia Foundation, is in its community review stage until January 2.
If you wish to receive no further issues of Facto Post, please remove your name from our mailing list. Alternatively, to opt out of all massmessage mailings, you may add Category:Wikipedians who opt out of message delivery to your user talk page.
Newsletter delivered by MediaWiki message delivery |
MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 19:08, 27 December 2018 (UTC)
Facto Post – Issue 20 – 31 January 2019
editFacto Post – Issue 20 – 31 January 2019
The Editor is Charles Matthews, for ContentMine. Please leave feedback for him, on his User talk page.
To subscribe to Facto Post go to Wikipedia:Facto Post mailing list. For the ways to unsubscribe, see the footer.
Recently Jimmy Wales has made the point that computer home assistants take much of their data from Wikipedia, one way or another. So as well as getting Spotify to play Frosty the Snowman for you, they may be able to answer the question "is the Pope Catholic?" Possibly by asking for disambiguation (Coptic?). Headlines about data breaches are now familiar, but the unannounced circulation of information raises other issues. One of those is Gresham's law stated as "bad data drives out good". Wikipedia and now Wikidata have been criticised on related grounds: what if their content, unattributed, is taken to have a higher standing than Wikimedians themselves would grant it? See Wikiquote on a misattribution to Bismarck for the usual quip about "law and sausages", and why one shouldn't watch them in the making. Wikipedia has now turned 18, so should act like as adult, as well as being treated like one. The Web itself turns 30 some time between March and November this year, per Tim Berners-Lee. If the Knowledge Graph by Google exemplifies Heraclitean Web technology gaining authority, contra GIGO, Wikimedians still have a role in its critique. But not just with the teenage skill of detecting phoniness. There is more to beating Gresham than exposing the factoid and urban myth, where WP:V does do a great job. Placeholders must be detected, and working with Wikidata is a good way to understand how having one statement as data can blind us to replacing it by a more accurate one. An example that is important to open access is that, firstly, the term itself needs considerable unpacking, because just being able to read material online is a poor relation of "open"; and secondly, trying to get Creative Commons license information into Wikidata shows up issues with classes of license (such as CC-BY) standing for the actual license in major repositories. Detailed investigation shows that "everything flows" exacerbates the issue. But Wikidata can solve it.
If you wish to receive no further issues of Facto Post, please remove your name from our mailing list. Alternatively, to opt out of all massmessage mailings, you may add Category:Wikipedians who opt out of message delivery to your user talk page.
Newsletter delivered by MediaWiki message delivery |
MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 10:53, 31 January 2019 (UTC)
Facto Post – Issue 21 – 28 February 2019
editFacto Post – Issue 21 – 28 February 2019
The Editor is Charles Matthews, for ContentMine. Please leave feedback for him, on his User talk page.
To subscribe to Facto Post go to Wikipedia:Facto Post mailing list. For the ways to unsubscribe, see the footer.
Systematic reviews are basic building blocks of evidence-based medicine, surveys of existing literature devoted typically to a definite question that aim to bring out scientific conclusions. They are principled in a way Wikipedians can appreciate, taking a critical view of their sources. Ben Goldacre in 2014 wrote (link below) "[...] : the "information architecture" of evidence based medicine (if you can tolerate such a phrase) is a chaotic, ad hoc, poorly connected ecosystem of legacy projects. In some respects the whole show is still run on paper, like it's the 19th century." Is there a Wikidatan in the house? Wouldn't some machine-readable content that is structured data help? Most likely it would, but the arcana of systematic reviews and how they add value would still need formal handling. The PRISMA standard dates from 2009, with an update started in 2018. The concerns there include the corpus of papers used: how selected and filtered? Now that Wikidata has a 20.9 million item bibliography, one can at least pose questions. Each systematic review is a tagging opportunity for a bibliography. Could that tagging be reproduced by a query, in principle? Can it even be second-guessed by a query (i.e. simulated by a protocol which translates into SPARQL)? Homing in on the arcana, do the inclusion and filtering criteria translate into metadata? At some level they must, but are these metadata explicitly expressed in the articles themselves? The answer to that is surely "no" at this point, but can TDM find them? Again "no", right now. Automatic identification doesn't just happen. Actually these questions lack originality. It should be noted though that WP:MEDRS, the reliable sources guideline used here for health information, hinges on the assumption that the usefully systematic reviews of biomedical literature can be recognised. Its nutshell summary, normally the part of a guideline with the highest density of common sense, allows literature reviews in general validity, but WP:MEDASSESS qualifies that indication heavily. Process wonkery about systematic reviews definitely has merit.
If you wish to receive no further issues of Facto Post, please remove your name from our mailing list. Alternatively, to opt out of all massmessage mailings, you may add Category:Wikipedians who opt out of message delivery to your user talk page.
Newsletter delivered by MediaWiki message delivery |
MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 10:01, 28 February 2019 (UTC)
Facto Post – Issue 22 – 28 March 2019
editFacto Post – Issue 22 – 28 March 2019
The Editor is Charles Matthews, for ContentMine. Please leave feedback for him, on his User talk page.
To subscribe to Facto Post go to Wikipedia:Facto Post mailing list. For the ways to unsubscribe, see the footer.
Half a century ago, it was the era of the mainframe computer, with its air-conditioned room, twitching tape-drives, and appearance in the title of a spy novel Billion-Dollar Brain then made into a Hollywood film. Now we have the cloud, with server farms and the client–server model as quotidian: this text is being typed on a Chromebook. The term Applications Programming Interface or API is 50 years old, and refers to a type of software library as well as the interface to its use. While a compiler is what you need to get high-level code executed by a mainframe, an API out in the cloud somewhere offers a chance to perform operations on a remote server. For example, the multifarious bots active on Wikipedia have owners who exploit the MediaWiki API. APIs (called RESTful) that allow for the GET HTTP request are fundamental for what could colloquially be called "moving data around the Web"; from which Wikidata benefits 24/7. So the fact that the Wikidata SPARQL endpoint at query.wikidata.org has a RESTful API means that, in lay terms, Wikidata content can be GOT from it. The programming involved, besides the SPARQL language, could be in Python, younger by a few months than the Web. Magic words, such as occur in fantasy stories, are wishful (rather than RESTful) solutions to gaining access. You may need to be a linguist to enter Ali Baba's cave or the western door of Moria (French in the case of "Open Sesame", in fact, and Sindarin being the respective languages). Talking to an API requires a bigger toolkit, which first means you have to recognise the tools in terms of what they can do. On the way to the wikt:impactful or polymathic modern handling of facts, one must perhaps take only tactful notice of tech's endemic problem with documentation, and absorb the insightful point that the code in APIs does articulate the customary procedures now in place on the cloud for getting information. As Owl explained to Winnie-the-Pooh, it tells you The Thing to Do.
If you wish to receive no further issues of Facto Post, please remove your name from our mailing list. Alternatively, to opt out of all massmessage mailings, you may add Category:Wikipedians who opt out of message delivery to your user talk page.
Newsletter delivered by MediaWiki message delivery |
MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 11:45, 28 March 2019 (UTC)
Facto Post – Issue 23 – 30 April 2019
editFacto Post – Issue 23 – 30 April 2019
The Editor is Charles Matthews, for ContentMine. Please leave feedback for him, on his User talk page.
To subscribe to Facto Post go to Wikipedia:Facto Post mailing list. For the ways to unsubscribe, see the footer.
Talk of cloud computing draws a veil over hardware, but also, less obviously but more importantly, obscures such intellectual distinction as matters most in its use. Wikidata begins to allow tasks to be undertaken that were out of easy reach. The facility should not be taken as the real point. Coming in from another angle, the "executive decision" is more glamorous; but the "administrative decision" should be admired for its command of facts. Think of the attitudes ad fontes, so prevalent here on Wikipedia as "can you give me a source for that?", and being prepared to deal with complicated analyses into specified subcases. Impatience expressed as a disdain for such pedantry is quite understandable, but neither dirty data nor false dichotomies are at all good to have around. Issue 13 and Issue 21, respectively on WP:MEDRS and systematic reviews, talk about biomedical literature and computing tasks that would be of higher quality if they could be made more "administrative". For example, it is desirable that the decisions involved be consistent, explicable, and reproducible by non-experts from specified inputs. What gets clouded out is not impossibly hard to understand. You do need to put together the insights of functional programming, which is a doctrinaire and purist but clearcut approach, with the practicality of office software. Loopless computation can be conceived of as a seamless forward march of spreadsheet columns, each determined by the content of previous ones. Very well: to do a backward audit, when now we are talking about Wikidata, we rely on integrity of data and its scrupulous sourcing: and clearcut case analyses. The MEDRS example forces attention on purge attempts such as Beall's list.
If you wish to receive no further issues of Facto Post, please remove your name from our mailing list. Alternatively, to opt out of all massmessage mailings, you may add Category:Wikipedians who opt out of message delivery to your user talk page.
Newsletter delivered by MediaWiki message delivery |
MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 11:27, 30 April 2019 (UTC)
Timeless Newsletter • Issue 4
editWelcome to the fourth issue of the Timeless newsletter, with a cat! Or maybe not.
Un chat qui miaule???
It's true! The angry cat, a fundamental part of Timeless, has resulted in confusion and bug reports all across the projects and phabricator. And now it shall be immortalised forever in the new, shiny Timeless logo.
Updates:
After putting off the project for three months because I got hit in the head with a flight of stairs, and then putting off the project for another two months while working out what the status of the grant was, I have now put off the project even more in order to focus on my other project for a bit. So progress lately has been a bit whims-based as a result:
- The project now has a logo. For some reason.
- The angry cat in the background is now customisable! Behold: not a cat. What would you like to replace it with on your project?
- I broke, unbroke, and then sort of sideways broke all the form styles. Help.
Radar:
- The French Wiktionary voted to set Timeless as their default skin, with results possibly as you might expect: I ran away and hid, and the WMF said no. A bit of discussion later and we largely agreed that all else aside, this is a bit of a branding issue, but we love the enthusiasm! Also the bug reports that inevitably come out of such a discussion. I'm still working on properly going through those.
- Theme support is still stuck in limbo, but now we have another skinning RfC. tl;dr, we wanna replace the entire skinning system, and Skizzerz'll write a prototype later.
I will be fully resuming work on Timeless next week, or maybe the week after, depending on what madness (or illness) comes out of the Hackathon in Prague. Please come talk to me there to discuss strategy!
Facto Post – Issue 24 – 17 May 2019
editFacto Post – Issue 24 – 17 May 2019 The Editor is Charles Matthews, for ContentMine. Please leave feedback for him, on his User talk page.
To subscribe to Facto Post go to Wikipedia:Facto Post mailing list. For the ways to unsubscribe, see the footer.
Two dozen issues, and this may be the last, a valediction at least for a while. It's time for a two-year summation of ContentMine projects involving TDM (text and data mining). Wikidata and now Structured Data on Commons represent the overlap of Wikimedia with the Semantic Web. This common ground is helping to convert an engineering concept into a movement. TDM generally has little enough connection with the Semantic Web, being instead in the orbit of machine learning which is no respecter of the semantic. Don't break a taboo by asking bots "and what do you mean by that?" The ScienceSource project innovates in TDM, by storing its text mining results in a Wikibase site. It strives for compliance of its fact mining, on drug treatments of diseases, with an automated form of the relevant Wikipedia referencing guideline MEDRS. Where WikiFactMine set up an API for reuse of its results, ScienceSource has a SPARQL query service, with look-and-feel exactly that of Wikidata's at query.wikidata.org. It also now has a custom front end, and its content can be federated, in other words used in data mashups: it is one of over 50 sites that can federate with Wikidata. The human factor comes to bear through the front end, which combines a link to the HTML version of a paper, text mining results organised in drug and disease columns, and a SPARQL display of nearby drug and disease terms. Much software to develop and explain, so little time! Rather than telling the tale, Facto Post brings you ScienceSource links, starting from the how-to video, lower right.
The review tool requires a log in on sciencesource.wmflabs.org, and an OAuth permission (bottom of a review page) to operate. It can be used in simple and more advanced workflows. Examples of queries for the latter are at d:Wikidata_talk:ScienceSource project/Queries#SS_disease_list and d:Wikidata_talk:ScienceSource_project/Queries#NDF-RT issue. Please be aware that this is a research project in development, and may have outages for planned maintenance. That will apply for the next few days, at least. The ScienceSource wiki main page carries information on practical matters. Email is not enabled on the wiki: use site mail here to Charles Matthews in case of difficulty, or if you need support. Further explanatory videos will be put into commons:Category:ContentMine videos. If you wish to receive no further issues of Facto Post, please remove your name from our mailing list. Alternatively, to opt out of all massmessage mailings, you may add Category:Wikipedians who opt out of message delivery to your user talk page.
Newsletter delivered by MediaWiki message delivery |
Submission to Community Growth
editHello Cscott,
Thank you for your submission to the Community Growth space at Wikimania 2019. We have received your submission, and we will evaluate it during the month of June. In the meantime, we may contact you on the proposal talk page with suggestions on possible collaborations with other presenters or on how to improve your proposal.
If you have any questions, please contact us on the space’s talk page or via “Email this user” to any of the leadership team listed on the space’s page.
Sincerely, MMiller (WMF) (talk) 01:18, 11 June 2019 (UTC)
Editing News #1—July 2019
editRead this in another language • Subscription list for this multilingual newsletter
Did you know?
Did you know that you can use the visual editor on a mobile device?
Every article has a pencil icon at the top. Tap on the pencil icon to start editing.
Edit Cards
This is what the new Edit Cards for editing links in the mobile visual editor look like. You can try the prototype here: 📲 Try Edit Cards.
Welcome back to the Editing newsletter.
Since the last newsletter, the team has released two new features for the mobile visual editor and has started developing three more. All of this work is part of the team's goal to make editing on mobile web simpler.
Before talking about the team's recent releases, we have a question for you:
Are you willing to try a new way to add and change links?
If you are interested, we would value your input! You can try this new link tool in the mobile visual editor on a separate wiki.
Follow these instructions and share your experience:
Recent releases
editThe mobile visual editor is a simpler editing tool, for smartphones and tablets using the mobile site. The Editing team has recently launched two new features to improve the mobile visual editor:
- Section editing
- The purpose is to help contributors focus on their edits.
- The team studied this with an A/B test. This test showed that contributors who could use section editing were 1% more likely to publish the edits they started than people with only full-page editing.
- Loading overlay
- The purpose is to smooth the transition between reading and editing.
Section editing and the new loading overlay are now available to everyone using the mobile visual editor.
New and active projects
editThis is a list of our most active projects. Watch these pages to learn about project updates and to share your input on new designs, prototypes and research findings.
- Edit cards: This is a clearer way to add and edit links, citations, images, templates, etc. in articles. You can try this feature now. Go here to see how: 📲Try Edit Cards.
- Mobile toolbar refresh: This project will learn if contributors are more successful when the editing tools are easier to recognize.
- Mobile visual editor availability: This A/B test asks: Are newer contributors more successful if they use the mobile visual editor? We are collaborating with 20 Wikipedias to answer this question.
- Usability improvements: This project will make the mobile visual editor easier to use. The goal is to let contributors stay focused on editing and to feel more confident in the editing tools.
Looking ahead
edit- Wikimania: Several members of the Editing Team will be attending Wikimania in August 2019. They will lead a session about mobile editing in the Community Growth space. Talk to them about how editing can be improved.
- Talk Pages: In the coming months, the Editing Team will begin improving talk pages and communication on the wikis.
Learning more
editThe VisualEditor on mobile is a good place to learn more about the projects we are working on. The team wants to talk with you about anything related to editing. If you have something to say or ask, please leave a message at Talk:VisualEditor on mobile.
PPelberg (WMF) (talk) and Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 21:25, 15 July 2019 (UTC)
Timeless Newsletter • Issue 5
editWelcome to the fifth and final issue of the Timeless newsletter!
Progress was made. True story.
I am happy to announce that after about a year, this delightful project in which absolutely nothing has gone according to plan is coming to a close. Or at least, the grant-funded portion is. Which means we will now be resuming our regular schedule of random whims-based development, you probably won't notice any difference whatsoever unless you use MonoBook, and there's a report.
What's new from the past two months:
A lot less than we'd hoped, frankly. We:
- Fixed various bugs, some of which even weren't for stuff I'd just broken two patches previously.
- Resolved sundry compatibility issues for other extensions, templates onwiki, whatever, largely by removing dumb crap from the css.
- Implemented some shiny new features you'll probably hate or just never use or actually see, like click-toggled dropdowns, icons everywhere, and options to select a default layout or set an image for the site header wordmark.
- Brought the total number of open tasks on the Timeless workboard down to 70.
We also wound up with:
- Patches resulting in RelatedArticles working in MonoBook, and FlaggedRevisions showing up in Minerva, unless someone actually managed to turn that off as well. (Blame T181242.) It's possible we went a little overboard with the whole 'let's close all the tasks!' sprint.
- An unfortunate repeated discovery that themes (the Night/Winter variants I keep insisting will happen at some point) are still pretty far off on the horizon. Um.
- Possibly a quite a few more bugs coming your way. This month, and especially the past week, have been a bit of a mess, development-wise. While hopefully none of the worse issues make it to production, please keep the reports coming for whatever you do find and we'll get it fixed as soon as we can. Y'all've been amazing about this, and it's really appreciated.
And I guess that's that. I'm really bad at reporting, and this is a report. For the purposes of the grant, this was a requirement, but do you want me to keep trying to send these out?
meow
editn.n
Editing News #2 – Mobile editing and talk pages – October 2019
editRead this in another language • Subscription list for this multilingual newsletter
Inside this newsletter, the Editing team talks about their work on the mobile visual editor, on the new talk pages project, and at Wikimania 2019.
Help
editWhat talk page interactions do you remember? Is it a story about how someone helped you to learn something new? Is it a story about how someone helped you get involved in a group? Something else? Whatever your story is, we want to hear it!
Please tell us a story about how you used a talk page. Please share a link to a memorable discussion, or describe it on the talk page for this project. The team would value your examples. These examples will help everyone develop a shared understanding of what this project should support and encourage.
Talk Pages
editThe Talk Pages Consultation was a global consultation to define better tools for wiki communication. From February through June 2019, more than 500 volunteers on 20 wikis, across 15 languages and multiple projects, came together with members of the Foundation to create a product direction for a set of discussion tools. The Phase 2 Report of the Talk Page Consultation was published in August. It summarizes the product direction the team has started to work on, which you can read more about here: Talk Page Project project page.
The team needs and wants your help at this early stage. They are starting to develop the first idea. Please add your name to the "Getting involved" section of the project page, if you would like to hear about opportunities to participate.
Mobile visual editor
editThe Editing team is trying to make it simpler to edit on mobile devices. The team is changing the visual editor on mobile. If you have something to say about editing on a mobile device, please leave a message at Talk:VisualEditor on mobile.
- On 3 September, the Editing team released version 3 of Edit Cards. Anyone could use the new version in the mobile visual editor.
- There is an updated design on the Edit Card for adding and modifying links. There is also a new, combined workflow for editing a link's display text and target.
- Feedback: You can try the new Edit Cards by opening the mobile visual editor on a smartphone. Please post your feedback on the Edit cards talk page.
- In September, the Editing team updated the mobile visual editor's editing toolbar. Anyone could see these changes in the mobile visual editor.
- One toolbar: All of the editing tools are located in one toolbar. Previously, the toolbar changed when you clicked on different things.
- New navigation: The buttons for moving forward and backward in the edit flow have changed.
- Seamless switching: an improved workflow for switching between the visual and wikitext modes.
- Feedback: You can try the refreshed toolbar by opening the mobile VisualEditor on a smartphone. Please post your feedback on the Toolbar feedback talk page.
Wikimania
editThe Editing Team attended Wikimania 2019 in Sweden. They led a session on the mobile visual editor and a session on the new talk pages project. They tested two new features in the mobile visual editor with contributors. You can read more about what the team did and learned in the team's report on Wikimania 2019.
Looking ahead
edit- Talk Pages Project: The team is thinking about the first set of proposed changes. The team will be working with a few communities to pilot those changes. The best way to stay informed is by adding your username to the list on the project page: Getting involved.
- Testing the mobile visual editor as the default: The Editing team plans to post results before the end of the calendar year. The best way to stay informed is by adding the project page to your watchlist: VisualEditor as mobile default project page.
- Measuring the impact of Edit Cards: The Editing team hopes to share results in November. This study asks whether the project helped editors add links and citations. The best way to stay informed is by adding the project page to your watchlist: Edit Cards project page.
– PPelberg (WMF) (talk) & Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 16:51, 17 October 2019 (UTC)
ArbCom 2019 election voter message
editEditing news 2020 #1 – Discussion tools
editRead this in another language • Subscription list
The Editing team has been working on the talk pages project. The goal of the talk pages project is to help contributors communicate on wiki more easily. This project is the result of the Talk pages consultation 2019.
The team is building a new tool for replying to comments now. This early version can sign and indent comments automatically. Please test the new Reply tool.
- On 31 March 2020, the new reply tool was offered as a Beta Feature editors at four Wikipedias: Arabic, Dutch, French, and Hungarian. If your community also wants early access to the new tool, contact User:Whatamidoing (WMF).
- The team is planning some upcoming changes. Please review the proposed design and share your thoughts on the talk page. The team will test features such as:
- an easy way to mention another editor ("pinging"),
- a rich-text visual editing option, and
- other features identified through user testing or recommended by editors.
To hear more about Editing Team updates, please add your name to the "Get involved" section of the project page. You can also watch these pages: the main project page, Updates, Replying, and User testing.
– PPelberg (WMF) (talk) & Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 15:45, 13 April 2020 (UTC)
User:Cscott/BabelTest
editHello. I came across User:Cscott/BabelTest, which you created in 2018, and am wondering whether it is still useful to you or could be deleted. Currently, the page is the sole member of several categories that would be empty otherwise. -- Black Falcon (talk) 04:58, 17 May 2020 (UTC)
Editing news 2020 #2 – Quick updates
editRead this in another language • Subscription list
This edition of the Editing newsletter includes information the Wikipedia:Talk pages project, an effort to help contributors communicate on wiki more easily. The central project page is on MediaWiki.org.
- Reply tool: This is available as a Beta Feature at the four partner wikis (Arabic, Dutch, French, and Hungarian Wikipedias). The Beta Feature will get new features soon. The new features include writing comments in a new visual editing mode and pinging other users by typing
@
. You can test the new features on the Beta Cluster. Some other wikis will have a chance to try the Beta Feature in the coming months. - New requirements for user signatures: Soon, users will not be able to save invalid custom signatures in Special:Preferences. This will reduce signature spoofing, prevent page corruption, and make new talk page tools more reliable. Most editors will not be affected.
- New discussion tool: The Editing team is beginning work on a simpler process for starting new discussions. You can see the initial design on the project page.
- Research on the use of talk pages: The Editing team worked with the Wikimedia research team to study how talk pages help editors improve articles. We learned that new editors who use talk pages make more edits to the main namespace than new editors who don't use talk pages.
Editing news 2020 #3
editSeven years ago this week, the Editing team made the visual editor available by default to all logged-in editors using the desktop site at the English Wikipedia. Here's what happened since its introduction:
- The 50 millionth edit using the visual editor on desktop was made this year. More than 10 million edits have been made here at the English Wikipedia.
- More than 2 million new articles have been created in the visual editor. More than 600,000 of these new articles were created during 2019.
- Almost 5 million edits on the mobile site have been made with the visual editor. Most of these edits have been made since the Editing team started improving the mobile visual editor in 2018.
- The proportion of all edits made using the visual editor has been increasing every year.
- Editors have made more than 7 million edits in the 2017 wikitext editor, including starting 600,000 new articles in it. The 2017 wikitext editor is VisualEditor's built-in wikitext mode. You can enable it in your preferences.
- On 17 November 2019, the first edit from outer space was made in the mobile visual editor.
- In 2019, 35% of the edits by newcomers, and half of their first edits, were made using the visual editor. This percentage has been increasing every year since the tool became available.
Editing news 2020 #4
editRead this in another language • Subscription list for this newsletter
Reply tool
editThe Reply tool has been available as a Beta Feature at the Arabic, Dutch, French and Hungarian Wikipedias since 31 March 2020. The first analysis showed positive results.
- More than 300 editors used the Reply tool at these four Wikipedias. They posted more than 7,400 replies during the study period.
- Of the people who posted a comment with the Reply tool, about 70% of them used the tool multiple times. About 60% of them used it on multiple days.
- Comments from Wikipedia editors are positive. One said, أعتقد أن الأداة تقدم فائدة ملحوظة؛ فهي تختصر الوقت لتقديم رد بدلًا من التنقل بالفأرة إلى وصلة تعديل القسم أو الصفحة، التي تكون بعيدة عن التعليق الأخير في الغالب، ويصل المساهم لصندوق التعديل بسرعة باستخدام الأداة. ("I think the tool has a significant impact; it saves time to reply while the classic way is to move with a mouse to the Edit link to edit the section or the page which is generally far away from the comment. And the user reaches to the edit box so quickly to use the Reply tool.")[5]
The Editing team released the Reply tool as a Beta Feature at eight other Wikipedias in early August. Those Wikipedias are in the Chinese, Czech, Georgian, Serbian, Sorani Kurdish, Swedish, Catalan, and Korean languages. If you would like to use the Reply tool at your wiki, please tell User talk:Whatamidoing (WMF).
The Reply tool is still in active development. Per request from the Dutch Wikipedia and other editors, you will be able to customize the edit summary. (The default edit summary is "Reply".) A "ping" feature is available in the Reply tool's visual editing mode. This feature searches for usernames. Per request from the Arabic Wikipedia, each wiki will be able to set its own preferred symbol for pinging editors. Per request from editors at the Japanese and Hungarian Wikipedias, each wiki can define a preferred signature prefix in the page MediaWiki:Discussiontools-signature-prefix. For example, some languages omit spaces before signatures. Other communities want to add a dash or a non-breaking space.
New requirements for user signatures
edit- The new requirements for custom user signatures began on 6 July 2020. If you try to create a custom signature that does not meet the requirements, you will get an error message.
- Existing custom signatures that do not meet the new requirements will be unaffected temporarily. Eventually, all custom signatures will need to meet the new requirements. You can check your signature and see lists of active editors whose custom signatures need to be corrected. Volunteers have been contacting editors who need to change their custom signatures. If you need to change your custom signature, then please read the help page.
Next: New discussion tool
editNext, the team will be working on a tool for quickly and easily starting a new discussion section to a talk page. To follow the development of this new tool, please put the New Discussion Tool project page on your watchlist.
ArbCom 2020 Elections voter message
editEditing news 2021 #1
editRead this in another language • Subscription list for this newsletter
Reply tool
editThe Reply tool is available at most other Wikipedias.
- The Reply tool has been deployed as an opt-out preference to all editors at the Arabic, Czech, and Hungarian Wikipedias.
- It is also available as a Beta Feature at almost all Wikipedias except for the English, Russian, and German-language Wikipedias. If it is not available at your wiki, you can request it by following these simple instructions.
Research notes:
- As of January 2021, more than 3,500 editors have used the Reply tool to post about 70,000 comments.
- There is preliminary data from the Arabic, Czech, and Hungarian Wikipedia on the Reply tool. Junior Contributors who use the Reply tool are more likely to publish the comments that they start writing than those who use full-page wikitext editing.[6]
- The Editing and Parsing teams have significantly reduced the number of edits that affect other parts of the page. About 0.3% of edits did this during the last month.[7] Some of the remaining changes are automatic corrections for Special:LintErrors.
- A large A/B test will start soon.[8] This is part of the process to offer the Reply tool to everyone. During this test, half of all editors at 24 Wikipedias (not including the English Wikipedia) will have the Reply tool automatically enabled, and half will not. Editors at those Wikipeedias can still turn it on or off for their own accounts in Special:Preferences.
New discussion tool
editThe new tool for starting new discussions (new sections) will join the Discussion tools in Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-betafeatures at the end of January. You can try the tool for yourself.[9] You can leave feedback in this thread or on the talk page.
Next: Notifications
editDuring Talk pages consultation 2019, editors said that it should be easier to know about new activity in conversations they are interested in. The Notifications project is just beginning. What would help you become aware of new comments? What's working with the current system? Which pages at your wiki should the team look at? Please post your advice at mw:Talk:Talk pages project/Notifications.
Editing news 2021 #2
editRead this in another language • Subscription list for this newsletter
Earlier this year, the Editing team ran a large study of the Reply Tool. The main goal was to find out whether the Reply Tool helped newer editors communicate on wiki. The second goal was to see whether the comments that newer editors made using the tool needed to be reverted more frequently than comments newer editors made with the existing wikitext page editor.
The key results were:
- Newer editors who had automatic ("default on") access to the Reply tool were more likely to post a comment on a talk page.
- The comments that newer editors made with the Reply Tool were also less likely to be reverted than the comments that newer editors made with page editing.
These results give the Editing team confidence that the tool is helpful.
Looking ahead
The team is planning to make the Reply tool available to everyone as an opt-out preference in the coming months. This has already happened at the Arabic, Czech, and Hungarian Wikipedias.
The next step is to resolve a technical challenge. Then, they will deploy the Reply tool first to the Wikipedias that participated in the study. After that, they will deploy it, in stages, to the other Wikipedias and all WMF-hosted wikis.
You can turn on "Discussion Tools" in Beta Features now. After you get the Reply tool, you can change your preferences at any time in Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-editing-discussion.
00:27, 16 June 2021 (UTC)
ArbCom 2021 Elections voter message
editEditing newsletter 2022 – #1
editRead this in another language • Subscription list for the multilingual newsletter • Local subscription list
The New topic tool helps editors create new ==Sections== on discussion pages. New editors are more successful with this new tool. You can read the report. Soon, the Editing team will offer this to all editors at most WMF-hosted wikis. You can join the discussion about this tool for the English Wikipedia is at Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)#Enabling the New Topic Tool by default. You will be able to turn it off in the tool or at Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-editing-discussion.
The Editing team plans to change the appearance of talk pages. These are separate from the changes made by the mw:Desktop improvements project and will appear in both Vector 2010 and Vector 2022. The goal is to add some information and make discussions look visibly different from encyclopedia articles. You can see some ideas at Wikipedia talk:Talk pages project#Prototype Ready for Feedback.
23:14, 30 May 2022 (UTC)
Editing news 2022 #2
editRead this in another language • Subscription list for this multilingual newsletter
The new [subscribe] button notifies people when someone replies to their comments. It helps newcomers get answers to their questions. People reply sooner. You can read the report. The Editing team is turning this tool on for everyone. You will be able to turn it off in your preferences.
ArbCom 2022 Elections voter message
editHello! Voting in the 2022 Arbitration Committee elections is now open until 23:59 (UTC) on Monday, 12 December 2022. All eligible users are allowed to vote. Users with alternate accounts may only vote once.
The Arbitration Committee is the panel of editors responsible for conducting the Wikipedia arbitration process. It has the authority to impose binding solutions to disputes between editors, primarily for serious conduct disputes the community has been unable to resolve. This includes the authority to impose site bans, topic bans, editing restrictions, and other measures needed to maintain our editing environment. The arbitration policy describes the Committee's roles and responsibilities in greater detail.
If you wish to participate in the 2022 election, please review the candidates and submit your choices on the voting page. If you no longer wish to receive these messages, you may add {{NoACEMM}}
to your user talk page. MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 00:27, 29 November 2022 (UTC)
Editing news 2023 #1
editRead this in another language • Subscription list for this newsletter
This newsletter includes two key updates about the Editing team's work:
- The Editing team will finish adding new features to the Talk pages project and deploy it.
- They are beginning a new project, Edit check.
Talk pages project
The Editing team is nearly finished with this first phase of the Talk pages project. Nearly all new features are available now in the Beta Feature for Discussion tools.
It will show information about how active a discussion is, such as the date of the most recent comment. There will soon be a new "Add topic" button. You will be able to turn them off at Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-editing-discussion. Please tell them what you think.
An A/B test for Discussion tools on the mobile site has finished. Editors were more successful with Discussion tools. The Editing team is enabling these features for all editors on the mobile site.
New Project: Edit Check
The Editing team is beginning a project to help new editors of Wikipedia. It will help people identify some problems before they click "Publish changes". The first tool will encourage people to add references when they add new content. Please watch that page for more information. You can join a conference call on 3 March 2023 to learn more.
ArbCom 2023 Elections voter message
editHello! Voting in the 2023 Arbitration Committee elections is now open until 23:59 (UTC) on Monday, 11 December 2023. All eligible users are allowed to vote. Users with alternate accounts may only vote once.
The Arbitration Committee is the panel of editors responsible for conducting the Wikipedia arbitration process. It has the authority to impose binding solutions to disputes between editors, primarily for serious conduct disputes the community has been unable to resolve. This includes the authority to impose site bans, topic bans, editing restrictions, and other measures needed to maintain our editing environment. The arbitration policy describes the Committee's roles and responsibilities in greater detail.
If you wish to participate in the 2023 election, please review the candidates and submit your choices on the voting page. If you no longer wish to receive these messages, you may add {{NoACEMM}}
to your user talk page. MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 00:22, 28 November 2023 (UTC)