This is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page.
The next Weekly Summary (February 19th) will be the 300th edition of the newsletter! To help making it special, you can share your favorite Wikidata tool, so the other readers discover nice tools
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
TemplateStyles has been deployed to the Swedish Wikipedia. TemplateStyles is a feature to make it easy to add CSS to templates without administrator privileges. This allows for better adaptability to screen sizes, especially on mobile where are half our total page views. If your community would like to be the next to have the feature, please submit a task on Phabricator. [1][2][3]
You can opt in to a new beta feature that lets you use visual diffs on history pages. [4]
The visual editor shows and lets you edit templates in one way, and reference lists in another. This meant that templates that only contain a fake reference list, like ((reflist)), would not get updated as you edited. Now they will update as you edit, but you will no longer be able to visually edit them as templates. [5]
The abuse filter extension has a new feature contains_all that you may use to check if one or more strings are all contained in another given string. [6]
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 13 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 14 February. It will be on all wikis from 15 February (calendar).
Meetings
You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 13 February at 18:30 (UTC). See how to join.
You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 14 February at 16:00 (UTC). See how to join.
There is currently a discussion at Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Incidents regarding an issue with which you may have been involved. . You'll probably never speak to me again. Guy (Help!) 14:17, 17 February 2018 (UTC)
User:LauraHale/Irma Khetsuriani
Please see User talk:LauraHale/Archive 15#Irma Khetsuriani, this article was not moved without a reason and "seems OK" is not sufficient to solve the problems. This is a BLP, we shouldn't be spreading false information about living people in enwiki. Please note that the problems listed at that talk page discussion are not necessarily exhaustive, they were sufficient to remove this from the main page but I didn't check all sources and claims. Fram (talk) 13:50, 8 February 2018 (UTC)
@Fram: You don't have a unilateral veto on articles. You can use AfD or cleanup templates (or PROD, but that would clearly be a waste of everyone's time in this case) if you disagree with article content. Please restore the article ASAP. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 13:52, 8 February 2018 (UTC)
I will NOT put BLP violations in the mainspace. Cleanup the article thoroughly and then put it back, or leave it well alone where it is. Fram (talk) 13:54, 8 February 2018 (UTC)
I'm not asking you to; I'm asking you to stop removing entire articles by personal veto, rather than due process. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 12:21, 9 February 2018 (UTC)
BLP is due process. Moving BLP violations back to the mainspace is a problematic action, moving them out of the mainspace is what every responsible editor should do. Fram (talk) 10:20, 19 February 2018 (UTC)
Wikidata weekly summary #300
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
Welcome to the 300th Weekly Summary!
The weekly newsletter was started by Lydia at the very beginning of the Wikidata project, even before the first deployment, to keep the community informed about the developments, the new projects and tools. More than five years later, the newsletter is still there, its content powered by the community, and sent every week all along the years. I wanted to say a warm "thank you!" to each person who helped filling the Weekly Summary <3
Over the past years, as you know, Wikidata has grown a lot. More data, more tools, more editors and reusers, more exciting projects led by the community. The Weekly Summary has evolved with us, and the 300th edition seems a good moment to ask you all your suggestions about the newsletter, how it could continue evolving, and how you would like to improve it.
On that purpose, you can find a feedback page to express all your ideas about the Weekly Summary. We're very interested to know more about your reading habits, the parts you're more or less interested in, the new topics you would like to share with the community. Thanks in advance for filling it.
I stay available anytime to discuss with you, feel free to contact me if you have any question or concern! Cheers, Léa
A selection of cool tools on Wikidata
Here are a few tools that are recommended by some Wikidata community members. External websites, gadgets or scripts, they are very useful for Wikidata editors or users!
QuickStatements is a powerful tool that can edit or add Wikidata item en masse, via a text editor or importing a spreadsheet. (Éder Porto via Facebook)
Mix'n'match (manual), which helps us to interlink Wikidata with the rest of the web and the world :-) (Spinster, Siobhan via Twitter)
WikiShootMe! allows you to see Wikidata items plotted out on a map and shows you whether they have images or not. (Ham II)
Yair Rand's WikidataInfo script adds the QID of the equivalent Wikidata item to the page being viewed (on sister projects), along with its Wikidata label and description. (Andy Mabbett)
Recoin measures the degree of completeness of relevant properties of a Wikidata item and suggests any relevant statements that can be added to the item. (Rachmat04)
DuplicateReferences gadget adds a link to copy references and add them to other statements on the same item. (PKM)
checkConstraints gadget adds notifications on the interface to easily notice the violation of constraints and help people fixing them (Léa)
Resolve authors lists scientific articles with the property author name string (P2093) and groups them on the basis of co-authors and topic, which helps to distinguish people referred to by identical name strings. (Daniel Mietchen)
The Wiki Loves Monuments map is powered by Wikidata. You can look for a city and find the monuments around. (Stefano Sabatini via Facebook)
Fixed incomplete "Label:", "Description:" and "Statement:" entity usage messages in various places (phab:T178090). Thanks, Matěj!
Improved violation messages for ranges involving the current date (e. g. “should not be in the future”).
Continued work on caching constraint check results.
Enabled Lua fine-grained usage tracking for better performance on several more wikis: hywiki, frwiki, svwiki, itwiki, zhwiki, bewiki, nlwiki, glwiki, and Wikimedia Commons (phab:T187265phab:T186714)
Representation and grammatical features of the form can be changed using the UI (WikibaseLexeme) (phab:T173743, phab:T160525)
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
The explanation of the abbreviations on the recent changes page could overlap with the list of changes. This has been fixed. [8][9]
You can now see statistics for pageviews per wiki per country. You can see this on maps or in a table. [10]
Problems
Linter is reporting estimated counts instead of actual counts for some wikis. This is because of performance problems. You might notice a false higher number in linter counts for some categories. This will be fixed as soon as the performance problem has been fixed. [11]
Last week the way that Visual Editor displays references lists was changed. As a result, the references generated by specific templates like ((sfn)) are not visible in the references list whilst editing. [12][13]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 20 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 21 February. It will be on all wikis from 22 February (calendar).
Meetings
You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 20 February at 19:30 (UTC). See how to join.
You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 21 February at 16:00 (UTC). See how to join.
Future changes
The way edit summaries and log comments are stored in the database is being changed. In the future this will make longer comments possible. [14]
Edit conflicts could be solved in a different way in the future. You can test a new prototype.
The article will be discussed at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/BrowseAloud (3rd nomination) until a consensus is reached, and anyone is welcome to contribute to the discussion. The nomination will explain the policies and guidelines which are of concern. The discussion focuses on high-quality evidence and our policies and guidelines.
Users may edit the article during the discussion, including to improve the article to address concerns raised in the discussion. However, do not remove the article-for-deletion notice from the top of the article. KTC (talk) 15:08, 20 February 2018 (UTC)
Hi Andy,
I'm trying to determine if there's a clear position on having and using an ORCID for a pseudonymous identity, but have been unable to winkle a conclusion from the documentation I've seen so far. It would be helpful to know so that we don't inadvertently engage in wp:OUTING on a massive scale. Would you be willing to clear this up? TIA, LeadSongDogcome howl! 21:15, 21 February 2018 (UTC)
There is no prohibition on an author having separate ORCID iDs for separate identities (the example I've heard given is a serious scientist who writes erotica under a pseudonym!), nor (from ORCID's PoV) not declaring the connection between them. Each would, however, require the user to use a separate email address. Note that "The ORCID Registry is designed to discourage more than one account for an individual" [15], but this clearly refers to an individual persona. Do you have particular example of potential "outing" in mind? Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 21:47, 21 February 2018 (UTC)
No specific case of outing, but as we encourage Wikimedians to add ((authority control)) to their userpages, I suspected the potential was there for those who have an ORCID registered. Many of us do use the same pseud for various platforms. Thank you for clearing up that ambiguity. Perhaps a word or two on the point at the wp article on ORCID might be in order? LeadSongDogcome howl! 22:30, 21 February 2018 (UTC)
We only encourage them to add them to their own user pages; and they are not automatically populated when there. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 23:25, 21 February 2018 (UTC)
True enough, that. Still, data wants to be free, and as we "build the web", associations gradually get forged without intentional interventions. How long until all faces in group photos are auto-tagged by Fb and fellows? Privacy isn't dead, but it's mortally wounded. LeadSongDogcome howl! 16:36, 22 February 2018 (UTC)
Mea culpa
At some XfD or other in the last month, I recall saying something like "This is just some grudge complaint by someone with a history of getting into it with me", about an objection you'd raised (I think regarding the wording of a pointer I posted to the XfD at another talk page). In retrospect, that was cranky, deflecting, and hypocritical on my part, especially after my professing last year a desire for us to get along better. So, I'm sorry about that. I don't quite recall the context, but it was at the tail end of a lot of stressy stuff from various parties all day long, and I was took it out on whoever was handy. I vented in a similar way in the direction of Justlettersandnumbers around the same time span. Kind of a more-than-momentary loss of temper. — SMcCandlish☏¢ 😼 07:46, 23 February 2018 (UTC)
Hi Andy. Sorry if this is splitting the discussion or having it in the wrong place (feel free to move/merge as needed). Following what was said here, I am wondering how to incorporate webarchive URLs into the ((CWGC)) and ((CWGC cemetery)) templates? Also, if you have time, how can we detect 'soft' 404 errors (not being detected by link checkers) such as at this version of Drumcondra Church? That may make sense if you see what I said here. Carcharoth (talk) 12:48, 24 February 2018 (UTC)
Example edit here. How would I incorporate the archive URL? (in this case, the archive URL is useless, as it is a copy of the search form, not the results - interesting though it is to see what the search form looked like back in 2009!). Carcharoth (talk) 14:14, 24 February 2018 (UTC)
In those templates, you can't (unless the templates are re-written). Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 14:47, 24 February 2018 (UTC)
Wikidata weekly summary #301
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
Checkusers and stewards can now view private data such as the IP address in the abuse log. This data is removed regularly. [16]
Problems
Last week's MediaWiki version was rolled back because of a bug. [17][18]
Since the deployment train last week until late evening on 20 February UTC, when you thanked someone for an edit, the thank went to the latest unthanked edit to that page. It didn't matter which edit you tried to give thanks for. This has been fixed. [19]
Special:Statistics did not take newly created pages into account since 13 February 2018. Because of this the statistics are recreated. [20][21][22]
Changes later this week
Users with version 10 of the Internet Explorer browser will no longer get JavaScript on Wikimedia wikis. If you use this browser on your computer, you can try upgrading to a newer version. [23]
The Wikinews wikis will switch to use the Remex parsing library. This is to replace Tidy. It will happen on 27 February. Other wikis will be recommended to switch soon when they have fixed the errors that must be fixed. Tidy will be removed in the middle of 2018. [24][25]
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 27 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 28 February. It will be on all wikis from 1 March (calendar).
Meetings
You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 27 February at 19:30 (UTC). See how to join.
You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 28 February at 16:00 (UTC). See how to join.
... for improving article quality in Febuary 2018! --Gerda Arendt (talk) 11:17, 1 March 2018 (UTC)
Quick update on maps
Hello Mr. Mabbett, A little over a month ago you asked for updates on the status of interactive maps. There's now a different team taking on the task of getting maps in a more healthy state. The impetus is due to the top requests from the Community Tech wishlist and the need to get the maps codebase up to snuff. This will require a bit of work before anyone's comfortable turning it on for English Wikipedia - given it's size and activity. The team wants to make sure we do some preliminary work before approaching you all again. I hope this helps and sorry I couldn't get more information to you sooner. I'm eager for your thoughts, here, on the talk page for the project, or in Phabricator. Yours, 172.13.199.59 (talk) 18:36, 1 March 2018 (UTC)
Something weird happened and I was signed out while writing that. Apologies. CKoerner (WMF) (talk) 18:39, 1 March 2018 (UTC)
Community ban discussions must now stay open for at least 24 hours prior to being closed.
A change to the administrator inactivity policy has been proposed. Under the proposal, if an administrator has not used their admin tools for a period of five years and is subsequently desysopped for inactivity, the administrator would have to file a new RfA in order to regain the tools.
A change to the banning policy has been proposed which would specify conditions under which a repeat sockmaster may be considered de facto banned, reducing the need to start a community ban discussion for these users.
Technical news
CheckUsers are now able to view private data such as IP addresses from the edit filter log, e.g. when the filter prevents a user from creating an account. Previously, this information was unavailable to CheckUsers because access to it could not be logged.
The edit filter has a new featurecontains_all that edit filter managers may use to check if one or more strings are all contained in another given string.
Bhadani (Gangadhar Bhadani) passed away on 8 February 2018. Bhadani joined Wikipedia in March 2005 and became an administrator in September 2005. While he was active, Bhadani was regarded as one of the most prolific Wikipedians from India.