Meta:Babel/Archives/2020-08

Are people sanctioned by the U.S. treasury department allowed to use Wikimedia projects

Hello!

The US Treasury sanctioned some Hong Kong individuals seen here.

Are they permitted to use Wikimedia projects?

Thanks, WhisperToMe (talk) 16:42, 7 August 2020 (UTC)

What connection would this have to Wikimedia? And I strongly doubt senior civil servants and politicians in HK are busy editing Wikimedia projects anyway. – Ajraddatz (talk) 16:46, 7 August 2020 (UTC)

@Ajraddatz: Yeah it's true that senior politicians or civil servants themselves would not likely be editing pages though they could tell an intern to do the edits they want. Anyway the Wikimedia Foundation is HQ'ed in San Francisco, has its main servers in Virginia, and therefore does operate under U.S. law.

• The order notes: "OFAC’s regulations generally prohibit all transactions by U.S. persons or within (or transiting) the United States that involve any property or interests in property of designated or otherwise blocked persons. The prohibitions include the making of any contribution or provision of funds, goods, or services by, to, or for the benefit of any blocked person or the receipt of any contribution or provision of funds, goods or services from any such person."

WhisperToMe (talk) 16:50, 7 August 2020 (UTC)

Thanks for posting the specific text. We could opine as to whether contributing to Wikipedia fits within the prohibition, but it's really something that would require a legal opinion, and absent evidence that these people are actually trying to contribute here probably not worth a community investigation into IMO. – Ajraddatz (talk) 16:57, 7 August 2020 (UTC)

Ok. It could be visited/revisited if there are edits from Hong Kong government computers as the sanctioned individuals are executives of relevant departments. WhisperToMe (talk) 17:40, 7 August 2020 (UTC)

Also "use" is a very broad term, I can't see us blocking IP's from reading our projects (using them) unless they are actively disrupting operations. — xaosflux ^Talk 19:14, 7 August 2020 (UTC)

I think even globally banned people under the Wikimedia Terms of use aren't blocked from reading articles, only from editing. WhisperToMe (talk) 19:53, 7 August 2020 (UTC)

According to wmf:Terms_of_Use/en#12._Termination, (globally) banned people, unless told otherwise, is indeed still able to read Wikimedia sites. Although preventing someone from reading Wikimedia public pages is like trying to fence the entire countryside isn't it? —MarcoAurelio (talk) 22:22, 7 August 2020 (UTC)

Comment wikilawyering is the damnedest thing. Talk to Legal. We cannot know. We also can only talk about Meta on this page.  — billinghurst sDrewth 22:38, 7 August 2020 (UTC)

@Billinghurst: I went ahead and e-mailed meta. I guess this discussion could be moved to Wikimedia Forum. WhisperToMe (talk) 04:47, 8 August 2020 (UTC)

They should be because we are not connected with any governments. PythonSwarm (talk) 04:40, 27 August 2020 (UTC)

This section was archived on a request by:  — billinghurst sDrewth 08:44, 27 August 2020 (UTC)

Alternate accounts policy

Hallo, everyone,

Does Meta-wiki have a policy on valid uses of alternat accounts, required declarations, etc.? (I am mostly going to use the account for Commons uploads, but might also want to say some meta things that might not be popular on my home wiki. I don't want to break any rules, but the alternativ is: stay quiet, avoid stress.) I tried searching on phrases like „sock puppet” and „alternate account” and only found Sock puppetry. I don't intend to stack votes.

45.133.192.124 14:38, 2 August 2020 (UTC)

Important: maintenance operation on September 1st

Read this message in another language • Please help translate to your language

The Wikimedia Foundation will be testing its secondary data centre. This will make sure that Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia wikis can stay online even after a disaster. To make sure everything is working, the Wikimedia Technology department needs to do a planned test. This test will show if they can reliably switch from one data centre to the other. It requires many teams to prepare for the test and to be available to fix any unexpected problems.

They will switch all traffic to the secondary data centre on Tuesday, September 1st 2020.

Unfortunately, because of some limitations in MediaWiki, all editing must stop while the switch is made. We apologize for this disruption, and we are working to minimize it in the future.

You will be able to read, but not edit, all wikis for a short period of time.

• You will not be able to edit for up to an hour on Tuesday, September 1st. The test will start at 14:00 UTC (15:00 BST, 16:00 CEST, 10:00 EDT, 19:30 IST, 07:00 PDT, 23:00 JST, and in New Zealand at 02:00 NZST on Wednesday September 2).
• If you try to edit or save during these times, you will see an error message. We hope that no edits will be lost during these minutes, but we can't guarantee it. If you see the error message, then please wait until everything is back to normal. Then you should be able to save your edit. But, we recommend that you make a copy of your changes first, just in case.

Other effects:

• Background jobs will be slower and some may be dropped. Red links might not be updated as quickly as normal. If you create an article that is already linked somewhere else, the link will stay red longer than usual. Some long-running scripts will have to be stopped.
• There will be code freezes for the week of September 1st, 2020. Non-essential code deployments will not happen.

This project may be postponed if necessary. You can read the schedule at wikitech.wikimedia.org. Any changes will be announced in the schedule. There will be more notifications about this. Please share this information with your community.

Trizek (WMF) (talk) 13:48, 26 August 2020 (UTC)

This section was archived on a request by: DannyS712 (talk) 09:42, 2 September 2020 (UTC)

Change that breaks layout

See m:Tech#Change_that_breaks_layout.--GZWDer (talk) 02:10, 27 August 2020 (UTC)