Meta:Babel/Archives/2022-08

Ready for translation: Education Newsletter July 2022

July 2022 education newsletter released for translation. Please help our readers to read education newsletter in their native language. The latest education newsletter is ready for translation: here Newsletter headlines link for translation: here (please translate by August 03, 2022) Individual articles for translation: Category:Education/Newsletter/July 2022. Regards, ZI Jony ^(Talk) 17:47, 2 August 2022 (UTC)

Special:WikiSets

Just wondering, since there's only three sets left as for now (2, 7, 12), what content was in the rest of the sets, and what happened to them? —— Eric Liu_（Talk） 08:22, 8 August 2022 (UTC)

Are you expecting stewards to run a lookup service for your curiosity? I think that is a bit of a tall order. Check the deletion logs would be the best way to get an answer for yourself. If you believe that the stewards should be keeping a register of wikisets, then please start a conversation with the stewards, the topic is not really pertinent to here.  — billinghurst sDrewth 10:57, 8 August 2022 (UTC)

Some clues can be found in the Wiki Set Log

1. Created as a test in 2008
2. The existing "global bot wikis" set
3. Created as a test in 2008
4. Created as a test in 2008.
5. Created as a test in 2008. I can't find where any of these early tests were eventually deleted, maybe wiki set deletions weren't logged at the time?
6. Created as "Emergency flagged bot revision group" in June 2009 following an (unspecified) emergency. Repurposed at "Importupload" in September 2009, with no explanation. Repurposed again as "Arbcom_dewiki" on June 1, 2011 per request (but I can't find the request). Finally deleted as a deprecated group on June 18, 2011
7. The existing "global sysop wikis" set.
8. "Indic sysop wikis", created in 2010 as an [e]xample wikiset for RFC and potential future use. The RfC in question is Requests for comment/Indic Sysop. Renamed to "Indic Wikis" in 2011, and deleted as unused in 2013.
9. "Huggle wikis", created in 2011 as potential future use, maybe, and then deleted as unused in 2015.
10. "GR Opt-out wikis", created in 2011 following requests coming in to be opted out of GRs, and then deleted one day later. It appears the current logic about reusing wiki set numbers did not exist back then.
11. "CUlog", created as an apparent test in 2011 along with a CULogView group and deleted by the same user as unused in 2013. I can find no relevant discussions explaining what this is.
12. The "All existing wikis" set, used for New wiki importers
13. At various times a 13th wikiset has been created as a test and immediately deleted. This appears to free up the number for later wiki sets.
14. At one point in 2012, there were two test wikisets at the same time, so one got numbered "14"

* Pppery * _{it has begun} 17:03, 11 August 2022 (UTC)

No! If needed or of emergency, I would just go to Steward requests, and that's not the case here. I'm really just wondering! Why are you being so hostile? Isn't here for "general discussions about Meta-Wiki"? I would still apologize if it's not appropriate to ask for this here though. I’m sad. —— Eric Liu_（Talk） 08:35, 5 September 2022 (UTC)

And of course @Pppery: Thanks for your research, I truly appreciate it. —— Eric Liu_（Talk） 08:45, 5 September 2022 (UTC)

"Minor" project's Village Pumps are completely bloated with mass messages, leaving no room for project discussion

A comparison between the bloat of mass messages and actual project discussions.

I have the feeling that this is incrementally worse. Every team wants every message to be delivered to every project's chat. This mass messages creates 0 engagement, and it's causing actual discussions to be buried. Any thoughts? Ignacio Rodríguez (talk) 15:28, 11 August 2022 (UTC)

@Ignacio Rodríguez projects can direct those things elsewhere if they want. They are almost always delivered to a list, so a project can make a special pump for "annoucements", or redirect things like technical notices to a technical pump (like how these 74 projects have a technical pump: wikidata:Q4582194). — xaosflux ^Talk 15:33, 11 August 2022 (UTC)

Not every community, specially the smaller ones, has the knowledge or time to make those adjustments. There must be a better way instead of mindlessly flooding every pump with bloat Ignacio Rodríguez (talk) 16:19, 11 August 2022 (UTC)

I'm sensitive to this concern: in my previous role as a Movement Strategy and Governance (MSG) facilitator, I sent out a fair number of these mass messages to the places listed at Distribution list/Global message delivery. I noticed they did tend to pile up on the venues, and did fear this might discourage local users from creating other threads (or drown out threads) specific to those projects with sheer volume. I'm wondering how you've reached the conclusion that they create zero engagement though. How can you be sure no one is reading, clicking through, engaging here on Meta-Wiki, signing up for the events, voting on the topics, etc.? As a counter-point: most of the messages sent by MSG invite readers with a link to translate the original message into their language ({{int:please-translate}}), and there are a non-zero number of additional translations later submitted as a result. To me, this is at least a minor indicator that engagement is being generated, even if there's not many responses made directly on the village pumps. Xeno (WMF) (talk) 17:38, 11 August 2022 (UTC)

I'm sorry if I offended you. The 0 part is definitively an exaggeration. What I meant is that the "project village pump" purpose is to discuss issues pertaining the project, and the mass messages doesn't (mostly) contribute to that. Ignacio Rodríguez (talk) 15:31, 13 August 2022 (UTC)

No offense taken! I'm glad that folks are thinking about this. Xeno (WMF) (talk) 19:24, 13 August 2022 (UTC)

I have become concerned about this as well (as I have found entire small projects missing from GMD and have been adding them). However I don't have any easy answers to offer. Certain things like elections and major policy changes need to be sent out. Perhaps we need to encourage more selective use of the GMD function, as well as some automated archiving of old messages. (Also see phab:T313672 which I suspect is related). --Rschen7754 18:05, 11 August 2022 (UTC)

I too feel like this is a problem. On Incubator I have created a separate page for such messages years ago, incubator:Incubator:Wikimedia news, distinct from the Community Portal which hosts discussions. I think this works well and I can only encourage every community that prefers to keep things separate to do so in this way. It's not like the global messages are irrelevant, just that local discussions tend to disappear, especially when they are "low volume" due to the community being small. --MF-W 14:36, 1 September 2022 (UTC)

Comment If anyone is interested: we have decided to move all global message to a subpage within our main pump. s:es:Wikisource:Café/Noticias_Wikimedia. It seems to be a fair compromise. Maybe it can be the default way to treat small projects :) Ignacio Rodríguez (talk) 20:04, 27 September 2022 (UTC)

• Support ban on mass messaging Having a ban communicates that the messaging is inappropriate, and that mass messages should be exceptional and not routine. The effect of mass messages is the death of community discussion. Mass messages have spoiled the public commons and community space for marginal benefits mostly to the funded interests of the Wikimedia Foundation. For any community member to be heard, they have to compete against paid staff and paid projects for attention. The discussion boards were established for and by community, but this is not how they are currently used in 90% of community forums. It makes no sense to have 1000 local conversations of 10 people each to decide what to do when the problem originates at the top. Turning off the tap of mass messaging would prevent the flood. Almost everyone who is sending mass messages is engaged in unethical behavior to the detriment of the Wikimedia Movement. All can be forgiven for ignorance, but more awareness is needed for the problem.

A potential solution: the Wikimedia Foundation funds a project to establish messaging rules. We set a limit on how many messages go out per year, allocate quotas to different groups, then that is the limit on messages. Meta Wiki is not a social media platform, it cannot host messages without limit, and the current system unfairly favors anyone with money to post more messages. Bluerasberry (talk) 14:37, 28 September 2022 (UTC)

• The "MassMessage graveyards" are a serious problem, choking out any possibility of local discussions, which has been even pushing projects to offwiki forums to escape them. I think that each village pump should be checked for what percentage of sections are MassMessages, and for each one where local posts make up the minority of sections, the following actions should be taken:
  • The page should be removed from the distribution list.
  • An edit should be made to the page, removing or archiving all MassMessages (excluding those with responses). The removal edit would, in the edit summary, link to a page on Meta describing the situation, and explaining how to re-add the page to the distribution lists if desired, and how to set up a separate page on the project specifically for receiving MassMessages.
  • Further use of the MassMessage tool on the remaining fora should be restricted to particular cases, subject to review on Meta, and given a distinct "budget" (or at least, an aspirational goal for how low the level should be kept) for the various kinds of messages needed.
• --Yair rand (talk) 22:16, 6 October 2022 (UTC)
  • But on the other side, cutting off projects from hearing about important global policy proposals is problematic. --Rschen7754 01:03, 7 October 2022 (UTC)

    Could the global policy changes be limited to once per year? Wakelamp (talk) 14:08, 7 October 2022 (UTC)

    @Wakelamp, do you really think people will prefer a single 100-page-long announcement to 200 smaller ones scattered throughout the year? At least with the shorter ones, it's easy to glance at it and decide whether you're personally interested. Also, you won't discover that you need to reply to 50 proposals in a single month, and have no information in the other 11 months.

    You can read about some prior discussions along these lines in phab:T130602. The specific task is closed, but the subject is still open for discussion. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 21:00, 10 October 2022 (UTC)

    Thank-you for the link Doh I thought they were talking about WMF created notices.

    "you won't discover that you need to reply to 50 proposals in a single month, and have no information in the other 11 months" You should see my full list (when it is done!)

    I have been looking at a few smaller wikis; there is little discussion or their pumps (so WMF are proposals are unlikely to be read), few articles are being created (sports, political leaders, local tv shows,entertainers,...) except by autotranslation (old versions of en articles that were auto translated, that have never been manually edited), few active editors,

    (And I am here because of my interest in mass messages , but also because of my interest in the affect of autotranslation on connectivity and community) Wakelamp (talk) 16:56, 11 October 2022 (UTC)

    A good deal of MassMessage postings are from the WMF. See, e.g., VisualEditor/Newsletter/2022/August for the last one that I caused to be inflicted on about a thousand pages. Qgil-WMF and his team have been encouraging the use of very short announcements, and I have been trying out that style. I think it helps reduce the amount of space taken up by announcements, but it doesn't address the problem of local people not using the wikis for communication. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 20:19, 11 October 2022 (UTC)

    I like the idea of short comms. (Can you send unexpanded mass messages?)

    With local people not using wiki for comms, are they communicating but not on on wiki? Non-wiki comms is becoming common on en wiki. I am not sure whether it is because of privacy/revealing of true identity/more features than talk

    Your comment " caused to be inflicted on about a thousand pages" made me realize thatyou really really don't like spam :-). Although my friend J , may dislike spam just a smidgin more than you. He became very very annoyed by spam on day ..... it was 1982 and he was receiving one piece a day ..so he did his PhD on using Bayesian filters for spam id, and he has spent his whole career on spam. Wakelamp (talk) 16:09, 12 November 2022 (UTC)

    Off-wiki communications seem to be driven partly by the difficulty of communicating on wiki (see mw:Talk pages consultation 2019; some of it's technical and some of it's not), plus that's where people already are. If you learn that "anyone can edit" on Facebook, or in a Whatsapp discussion with your friends from school, or on Slack at work, then you're likely to go back to that place to ask your questions. I live on the wikis, so this seems weird to me, but for someone who lives on Facebook, it probably seems like the most natural thing in the world.

    By the way, most of the English Wikipedia's early decisions were made off wiki, too. The idea that only on-wiki discussions "counted" took more than five years to take hold, and some of those original off-wiki discussion forums are still active today. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 07:54, 13 November 2022 (UTC)

• Village pumps, or a selected alternate forum, are there for the exact purpose of receiving the communications of the broader Wikimedia. If those forums are getting too long, then how about we look to bot archive the respective forums, so we are simply clean up after ourselves.  — billinghurst sDrewth 10:14, 11 October 2022 (UTC)

  @Billinghurst, a bot is nice, but it's pretty significant overhead to maintain. I have wondered whether a sort of fake "auto-archiving" system would work better. Can redirects be combined with parser functions? Imagine that the page is currently titled Project:Village pump now, and I want it to become Project:Village pump 2022, to be followed by Project:Village pump 2023, etc. Could the undated page title be redirected to something like #REDIRECT[[Project:Village pump {{CURRENTYEAR}}]]?

  (Imagine if we'd done something like this to w:en:WP:ANI years ago. It wouldn't have accumulated 1.2 million edits, and instead we'd "only" have 75,000 per year – something that various stats tools can realistically process.) Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 20:27, 11 October 2022 (UTC)

  The problem isn't the lack of an archive procedure. The problem is that the small amount of actual on-wiki discussion is buried within mass messages. Ignacio Rodríguez (talk) 17:42, 14 October 2022 (UTC)

  @Ignacio Rodríguez: The small number of edits is due to the small number of participants, not the number of posts on a page. Keeping the pages active, the posts relevant, and the pages readable (short enough) is about meeting the balance. We still want small communities to know what is happening and to participate.  — billinghurst sDrewth 12:53, 15 October 2022 (UTC)

  You're not thinking with the perspective of a small wiki participant. Many people contribute every couple of weeks and check the village pump rarely. We may have one or two discussion every month, and months can go by without anyone posting anything there. Every time they enter there they only see the weekly tech newsletter intercalated with miscellaneous Wikimedia stuff (half of the time in English and not their native language), and buried within there's the real talk (e.g. my screenshot above). That's not a welcoming environment and it's not encouraging discussion and engagement. Ignacio Rodríguez (talk) 23:13, 15 October 2022 (UTC) PS: my preferred solution is what we did at esWS, to have a separate pump for "interwiki" mass messages. Of course if someone is decent enough to write to us directly they can use our main pump.

  I am participate in a range of wikis small to large, and I don't think that this is a single, simple issue. It appears evident that there are too many messages being poked to VPs and remaining in VPs, so overwhelming local conversation. I do not agree that by default they are the wrong place to be, as soon as you put them somewhere non-evident they become absolutely pointless in being delivered as no one will see them at a local wiki. So a better screening process by WMF of what they distribute, and can they relook at criteria used, allwikis, all langauges, sisterwikis, etc., a means to clean up, clear instruction on how a community can intervene.  — billinghurst sDrewth 08:35, 21 October 2022 (UTC)

  I agree that an intermediate solution can be that MassMessages come with a default "auto archive date" that's shorter than the default. And messages that involve dates should auto archive shortly past that date. Ignacio Rodríguez (talk) 14:53, 21 October 2022 (UTC)

  You can't auto-archive if there's no archive bot, which is the case for nearly all of the wikis, except for the very biggest ones. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 19:31, 24 October 2022 (UTC)

  @Whatamidoing (WMF) Given that archiving is a very necessary component of Village Pumps, and not every (minor) community have the technical knowledge to implement an archive bot, the WMF should offer archive bot for every project. this works very well, and it's easy to setup. Ignacio Rodríguez (talk) 20:18, 24 October 2022 (UTC)

  Have you ever looked at the French Wikipedia's main village pump? I suggest clicking the edit button and looking at the code. Basically, they have a separate village pump page for each day. The result is that it is auto-archiving, without needing anyone to set up or maintain a bot.

  I think that having a separate page for every day would be overkill on small wikis, but a separate page for each month or year would be very easy. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 05:33, 25 October 2022 (UTC)

  Another thing: MassMessages should include a direct link to the distribution list used to reach the community, so we can setup more accurately where should we organize those messages. Ignacio Rodríguez (talk) 15:20, 17 October 2022 (UTC)

  Definitely agree about the clear reference to understanding about the message, though I think that there is a better means than to the distribution list, it would be better to have an informed landing page that gives full information about the purpose of what is being attempted AND then how to push to another page.  — billinghurst sDrewth 08:35, 21 October 2022 (UTC)

  @Ignacio Rodríguez, every section posted by Special:MassMessage has an automatic and mandatory link to the distribution hidden at the end. If you click the [edit] button for the section, you'll see a line at the end that says something like

  There might additionally be a visible link to the distribution list (e.g., VisualEditor/Newsletter), but you can always find the distribution list. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 19:31, 24 October 2022 (UTC)

  Overall, it sounds like we have identified two separate problems:

  1. The pages get too big, so nobody wants to read them.
  2. The pages are full of announcements, so nobody wants to use them for anything else.

  The first problem can be solved by bot (archive when the page gets too big) or by using different pages for different years (the page will be empty in January and big in December, but never as big as many are now). If we wanted to take the bot approach, then an update to the Global bot policy would help.

  The second problem could be solved by having two different pages for the two different purposes, e.g., Village pump (announcements) and Village pump (discussion). Some wikis already do this.

  @Sj, I recall that you were interested in small wikis. Do you have any advice or other options you think worth considering? Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 19:40, 24 October 2022 (UTC)

  Hi WhatareUdoing I'd definitely go with a separate announcements page! And a single "announcements summary" section in the general VP that gets a single line per announcement and is archived each ~year (Serving as a sort of "announcements calendar" since people do like to quickly scan past announcements) –SJ talk  03:21, 25 October 2022 (UTC)

  Sj, having a one-line summary would require people to remember to write that extra line, unless the ==Section heading== is used. But I think the rest is feasible. There's just a certain amount of work needed to make it happen (translate the title, update the typical distribution lists, add local links...) Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 05:35, 25 October 2022 (UTC)

  Any community having this issue can already just do this today by changing their subscription page...what am I missing here? — xaosflux ^Talk 14:03, 13 November 2022 (UTC)

  @Xaosflux 1. There is no straightforward way to do it. There are several distribution lists, and not every community has the same technical skills, or even discussions (it can be an issue to those communities even if they don't talk about it). 2. It is a problem that can be adressed at the community level, but also at a central level. 3. You are not missing anything. The purpose of this thread was to gather thoughts about this problem. Ignacio Rodríguez (talk) 17:54, 13 November 2022 (UTC)

  I think the problem is it’s not obvious what the “standard” solution is. yuewiki has recently moved our subscription to a separate page (I did not participate in the discussions, being new on that wiki at the time and I hadn’t been active in any case), but only after investigating how several other wikis were tackling the problem before concluding that creating a separate page wasn’t a “totally out there” idea (and then there was the question of what the new page should be called).

  The fact that an investigation needed to be done shows that “X can already just do this today by Y” was not perceived to be obvious or straightforward. — Al12si (talk) 05:06, 13 December 2022 (UTC)

  THANK YOU Ignacio Rodríguez (talk) 19:43, 13 December 2022 (UTC)