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There were three Wikidata-related presentations at the 10th International Conference on Ecological Informatics that took place on 23-28 September in Jena.
Upcoming: German-speaking WikiCon, October 3-5 in St Gallen (Switzerland). Several Wikidata-related talks and workshops in the programme.
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
Ordinary pages can no longer be loaded as javascript. You could do this using ?action=raw&ctype=text/javascript in the URL. Only fully protected pages in the MediaWiki: namespace or user javascript subpages can be loaded as javascript now. This is for better security. [1][2]
Problems
New and updated translations from translatewiki.net will not reach the wikis for a while. You can still translate messages on translatewiki.net. The Wikimedia wikis will be updated with the new translations later. This is because of work on the translation system. [3][4]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 2 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 3 October. It will be on all wikis from 4 October (calendar).
Meetings
You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 3 October at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.
You can join the meeting with the Wikimedia Foundation Search Platform team. The meeting will be on 3 October at 15:00 UTC. See how to join if you want to know how the search function works or have questions.
Future changes
Because of a data centre test you will be able to read but not edit the wikis for up to an hour on 10 October. This will start at 14:00 (UTC). You might lose edits if you try to save during this time. The time when you can't edit might be shorter than an hour. You can read more about this.
Hi Andy, I know that you have had some past involvement with the RCS so I wonder if you can help me.
I've just created John Leigh (doctor), wherein it states that he was a Fellow of the Chemical Society. Try as I might, I cannot find a category for this, although we have Category:Fellows of the Royal Society of Chemistry. The CS was one of the organisations that merged to form the RCS. Am I supposed to categories him there? That would seem to be potentially misleading and certainly anachronistic. Should I create a new category?
Also, do you still have any contacts at the RCS? Their publications are behind a paywall but there are at least two mentions of a John Leigh in proceedings from 1889, which may well be an obituary or similar. I'm not spending £42 to find out but if you can't help then I may ask at WP:RX. Thanks. - Sitush (talk) 07:38, 4 October 2018 (UTC)
@Sitush: Practise seems to be to use the modern category; see for example Matilda Cullen Knowles. I would see nothing wrong with changing that, and creating a new category, then moving people to it as appropriate (some will be in both, of course). I have no ongoing formal relation with the RSC, but an email to them (FAO the librarian) should result in the info you require, or a copy of the relevant paper. Alternatively, see [[5]]. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 11:35, 4 October 2018 (UTC)
Thanks very much. I have created and at least part-populated Category:Fellows of the Chemical Society. I will have missed some out, I am sure. I will try the librarian as you suggest - taking up an RSC Gold slot for a one-off use seems a bit greedy of me. - Sitush (talk) 14:23, 4 October 2018 (UTC)
There is an open request for comment on Meta regarding the creation a new user group for global edit filter management.
Technical news
Partial blocks should be available for testing in October on the Test Wikipedia and the Beta-Cluster. This new feature allows admins to block users from editing specific pages and in the near-future, namespaces and uploading files. You can expect more updates and an invitation to help with testing once it is available.
The Foundations' Anti-Harassment Tools team is currently looking for input on how to measure the effectiveness of blocks. This is in particular related to how they will measure the success of the aforementioned partial blocks.
Because of a data centre test, you will be able to read but not edit the Wikimedia projects for up to an hour on 10 October. This will start at 14:00 (UTC). You might lose edits if you try to save during this time.
Following a request for comment, the size of the Arbitration Committee will be decreased to 13 arbitrators, starting in 2019. Additionally, the minimum support percentage required to be appointed to a two-year term on ArbCom has been increased to 60%. ArbCom candidates who receive between 50% and 60% support will be appointed to one-year terms instead.
Nominations for the 2018 Arbitration Committee Electoral Commission are being accepted until 12 October. These are the editors who help run the ArbCom election smoothly. If you are interested in volunteering for this role, please consider nominating yourself.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
There was a problem when you copied and pasted from a table with the visual editor. It could add href where it shouldn't be. This has now been fixed. [7]
Changes later this week
Because of a data centre test you will be able to read but not edit the wikis for up to an hour on 10 October. This will start at 14:00 (UTC). You might lose edits if you try to save during this time. The time when you can't edit might be shorter than an hour. You can read more about this.
Because of the data centre test there will be no new version of MediaWiki this week. Changes for this week will come next week instead.
Meetings
You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 10 October at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.
SPNHC & TDWG Conference 2018 — blog post on a talk (slides, speaker notes) about using Wikimedia projects and materials from the Biodiversity Heritage Library and other sources to collect information regarding New Zealand's biodiversity
I've posted a pointer to that, on the Wikidata 'Project Chat' page. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 12:17, 11 October 2018 (UTC)
Thanks. I'm sure there must be a technical solution to the problem of picking up multiple language wiki links. Peter coxhead (talk) 12:35, 11 October 2018 (UTC)
You may prevent the proposed deletion by removing the ((proposed deletion/dated)) notice, but please explain why in your edit summary or on the article's talk page.
A new Wikidata game has been created to suggest corrections for some constraints violations. These corrections are learned from the Wikidata edit history.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Problems
Some pages, edits and users disappeared for a short while after the server switch. Missing content and users was fixed within a day. Some preferences and other things might take a few more days to fix. [8]
Wikis are updated with new and updated translations from translatewiki.net again. This will happen once a week. The developers are working on fixing the problem so we can have translation updates more often again. [9]
Changes later this week
When you create an abuse filter that prevents edits you can now write a specific error message for it. Before this all abuse filters that prevented edits had the same error message. [10]
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 16 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 17 October. It will be on all wikis from 18 October (calendar).
Meetings
There will be no more meetings with the Editing team. This is because not enough Wikimedians were interested. To tell developers which bugs you think are the most important you can use Phabricator as normal. [11]
You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 17 October at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.
I was cleaning up the documentation at Template:Infobox television episode and noticed that the "module" value that you added in 2014 wasn't documented. Could you please explain what should go there and how it works so I can better understand it? Thank you! --Gonnym (talk) 16:54, 17 October 2018 (UTC)
Hey! could you help him "adjust" his user page so it does not cause someone to decline the unblock?14:41, 19 October 2018 (UTC)
It declares his interest. What "adjustment" do you think is needed? Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 15:07, 19 October 2018 (UTC)
The follow me could be interpreted as spamming, and lead to the unblock being declined, and I would like to see him unblocked.-- Dlohcierekim (talk) 16:56, 19 October 2018 (UTC)
Also, your user page is so cool, I thought you could give him some pointers on how to do it right,-- Dlohcierekim (talk) 17:03, 19 October 2018 (UTC)
Clearly, you don't understand what goes through an admin's mind when considering an unblock request. I did not want to hurt his chances at unblocking. It's all moot now. He's unblocked.-- Dlohcierekim (talk) 18:16, 19 October 2018 (UTC)
Maaaaybe.-- Dlohcierekim (talk) 18:31, 19 October 2018 (UTC)
NPR Newsletter No.14 21 October 2018
Graphs are unavailable due to technical issues. There is more info on Phabricator and on MediaWiki.org.
Chart of the New Pages Patrol backlog for the past 6 months.
Hello Pigsonthewing, thank you for your work reviewing New Pages!
Backlog
As of 21 October 2018[update], there are 3650 unreviewed articles and the backlog now stretches back 51 days.
Community Wishlist Proposal
There is currently an ongoing discussion regarding the drafting of a Community Wishlist Proposal for the purpose of requesting bug fixes and missing/useful features to be added to the New Page Feed and Curation Toolbar.
Please join the conversation as we only have until 29 October to draft this proposal!
Project updates
ORES predictions are now built-in to the feed. These automatically predict the class of an article as well as whether it may be spam, vandalism, or an attack page, and can be filtered by these criteria now allowing reviewers to better target articles that they prefer to review.
There are now tools being tested to automatically detect copyright violations in the feed. This detector may not be accurate all the time, though, so it shouldn't be relied on 100% and will only start working on new revisions to pages, not older pages in the backlog.