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.
Latest comment: 9 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion
I'm just wondering what outcome if any comes from opening a request for comment discussion. I started a discussion several months ago hoping that it would draw the attention of administration and the matter would be resolved with a decision one way or anotherbut in actuality its been noticed by hardly anyone.
It is a request for comment to gauge opinion, and the weight of opinion determines whether the issue should progress and in which directions. Who drives it, how it is driven, where it is promoted and whether it is promoted through relevant communities, and the impact all are pertinent for broader opinion. Some go nowhere, some get decisions quickly, some plod along. It is an inexact science. — billinghurstsDrewth23:10, 3 January 2015 (UTC)
Wikidata weekly summary #139
Latest comment: 9 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
The Wikidata BEACON generator was updated by Magnus. It now uses all properties with “formatter URL”, so always up-to-date with target URLs. It is faster, too.
Happy new year! :) It'll be a great one for Wikidata!
Have you filed bugs in the past? Awesome! It'd be super helpful if you have a look at your old bugs and see if they are still relevant. You can find them at https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/maniphest/query/authored/ (make sure you're logged in on Phabricator)
The sitelink section has been reworked. This will go live on Wikidata on Tuesday. The sitelinks will then be slimmer and they will appear in a sidebar on the right side if there is enough space.
More performance improvements when parsing an item page, ~%15 faster for some pages :)
Latest comment: 9 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion
I put those links because they are really up-to-date (more than nfc-phones.org, for example) and are very useful for users, because those info are hard to find, especially in Italian. Let me know what you think. — The preceding unsigned comment was added by 79.59.60.176 (talk)
Non-authoritative link, without sources. Not sure that it is needed, however, if you believe that it is a valid link then the talk page of the article is the means to progress the addition. You should also declare whether you do or do not have any association with the site to which you are adding the link. — billinghurstsDrewth11:00, 16 January 2015 (UTC)
Wikidata weekly summary #141
Latest comment: 9 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
Usage tracking will likely be deployed on February 2 on Wikidata. This will not be user-visible. It just means that pages using data from arbitrary items get updated/purged when the data changes. Arbitrary access is being tested at Test Wikidata and testwiki:Test Wiki. An example is at testwiki:Kitten on arbitrary page.
Assigning items on Mix'n'match will now make that change on Wikidata for you automatically
see meta update regarding admin abuse for Ymblanter and HJ Mitchell
Latest comment: 9 years ago2 comments1 person in discussion
These admins are not following policy rules and block without talk engagement including range blocks.
The discussions re RedPenofDoom is just a example of conflict of interest with HJ Mitchell, YmBlanter refuses to engage as well.
wiki oversight is constantly having to overrule YmBlanter and HJ Mitchell — The preceding unsigned comment was added by 81.152.202.164 (talk)
we cant use arbcom or utrs since get blocked when try to use, the block from posting the original block then causes a block to arbcom/utrs.
Oversight is seeing problems with the en wiki admins and they seem a law unto themselves and when people point this out with evidence you get blocked with no talk engagement.
This is why arbcom is failing as fails to address users which are blocked.
Latest comment: 9 years ago3 comments2 people in discussion
Could you undelete my user page (from my deletion - couple of junk ones since I see which are not required). While I'll need to remove some of the garbage it will probably be easier to start from a known point. Cheers --Herbytalk thyme08:51, 21 January 2015 (UTC)
@Herbythyme: lazily brought it all back bar the suppressed content. If some stuff needs to be shot again, please do some diffs. Delighted to see you back from your sabbatical, and maybe with some of the enthusiasm returned. — billinghurstsDrewth09:36, 21 January 2015 (UTC)
Latest comment: 9 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion
Hi,
In July 2014 after a discussion with User:Nemo_bis Marathi Wikipedia local file upload was made sysop only and other users are directed to commons. since Jan to June period there are lot of Marathi language and Marathi Wikipedia celebrations and to get a emotional connect photothon events are arranged so Marathi Wikipedia wants to make it flexible for a specific time span Jan to June and allow local file upload from Jan to June. I want your support in filining a relevant bug at Phabricator (I have not been able to log in there at learning phabricator related aspects for me will take longer time . Actually I made the same request to User:Nemo_bis on his meta talk page he seems to be active but not responding may be he is busy in some other activities). Local discussion page on Marathi Wikipedia for your ref
What you are desiring is nothing to do with stewards, either in design or implementation, so my support or otherwise is moot. If your community desires to have uploads, that would be a decision by consensus, followed by a phabricator request, nothing more, nothing less. I would suggest that your licensing templates would be worthwhile getting right ahead of that time. There is currently a project running on meta that can give you assistance if you need it. Good luck with your deliberations. — billinghurstsDrewth10:28, 28 January 2015 (UTC)
I hope you now realize
Latest comment: 9 years ago4 comments2 people in discussion
That is nasty and unworthy. You didn't like it when others made such comments about you, so you should know to not make them about others. While you are entitled to your opinion, that doesn't mean that it should be shared, and especially not on my talk page.
The community debates don't get degenerate due to one person. The community needs to try consensus, not make their community project a debating forum, where an individual is a winner. — billinghurstsDrewth14:02, 28 January 2015 (UTC)
What are you talking about? I've never asked that any account be globally locked. Maybe you missed Cirt manipulating checkusers on Wikipedia to block Miszatomic there, based on behavior on wikis other than Wikipedia. Maybe you also missed Cirt blocking him on all wikis where he (Cirt) is an admin. Doesn't this abuse of power make you sick? Maybe not... ~ DanielTom (talk) 18:11, 28 January 2015 (UTC)
Latest comment: 9 years ago4 comments2 people in discussion
Billinghurst, I am trying to take your advice.
I've taken direct actions based on your advice.
You've asked me to provide evidence.
I've provided evidence and DIFF links.
You've asked me to use community processes.
I've voluntarily taken the initiative to start those community processes.
Please understand that I do wish to listen to you and hear your advice.
But I do also think that these accounts are related, and since the former is stale (last edit from 2007), we need to use behavioral evidence and DIFF links to compare it to the latter.
You see the words, but you don't actually listen. Take a moment and stop, read, listen, and think. You are running around trying to get someone globally locked contra to the policy. You have not allowed this person to make their case, or to dispute your commentary. You simply have blocked them out and are making accusations based on circumstance. I try to give you guidance, and ask you to be more gentle and think of the community, and progress this matter fairly. I don't see it. Let people talk, let people comment. That everyone wishes to debate point by point, is completely unhelpful. At this point of time, I see rush, and with righteousness. Please put your fairness hat on, and think how you would like to be treated, or you would like a friend to be treated in such a case.
You know that I do not like vandalism. You know that I don't like abuse of the system. You know that I try to be fair. There is investigative process and data analysis under way. The community is safe, just let process flow. — billinghurstsDrewth13:58, 28 January 2015 (UTC)
Latest comment: 9 years ago7 comments2 people in discussion
It should be easy to find the first edit where the vandal claimed his password was "Zarbon", if you can see deleted pages. I'm almost sure he said it when creating a user page for one of his socks, which was then deleted. Unfortunately I can't see deleted edits, but if you can, just look at the edits from the vandals blocked around 15–16 January and I believe you will find it. ~ DanielTom (talk) 15:26, 29 January 2015 (UTC)
Sorry, I was looking at your comments on Wikipedia, and just saw this. Is "Salvidrim!" a checkuser, or is he just very incompetent? How did he know it was "block evasion" and not a troll pretending to be M? ~ DanielTom (talk) 00:11, 30 January 2015 (UTC)
I will deal with the crosswiki implications as I have time. Those communities are self-managing and accountable for their actions. People can make whatever statements they like respective, or irrespective, of the facts and the circumstances. An evidence base, not jumping to conclusions, and acting mindfully usually bring the best results in my experience. — billinghurstsDrewth00:16, 30 January 2015 (UTC)
Thanks for your work clearing this up. I'll just insist once more, that I don't believe User:Mizsatomic (blocked for alleged "block evasion") is the actual Miszatomic. The account was not checked (and apparently "Salvidrim!" didn't get your point). ~ DanielTom (talk) 03:37, 30 January 2015 (UTC)
enWP is not a stewards' territory, and as an admin there it is of no consequence to me if a sock is blocked. If it is our little treasure, then it will show up among other searches. At this stage it is noise and seems unimportant. — billinghurstsDrewth04:03, 30 January 2015 (UTC)
Which bit of "enWP is not part of steward's territory" is unclear? People are blocked and unblocked at enWP all the time, and there exists a process to appeal a block. I do not see that this case is now different. Previously, I had data gathered as part of an investigation that gave me a different view of that case, and that view I expressed, nothing more, nothing less. Take off your cape, and put your undies on under your clothes. 04:29, 30 January 2015 (UTC)
Block request
Latest comment: 9 years ago3 comments2 people in discussion
Why do you think that a checkuser request is going to help? Those are the respective IP addresses of anonymous user(s), there is no further secret information. Never completely trust IP reverse DNS, or IP data information sources to be accurate for geo-location. — billinghurstsDrewth03:42, 29 January 2015 (UTC)
I just thought it was a worthwhile idea, is all. Worthy of looking into for further investigation. But those above IP addresses and the behavior pattern involved show they are all controlled by the same individual, quite likely. It'd be nice to have more active Checkuser investigation at Wikiquote to cut down on this sort of vandalism and disruption and socking, which we unfortunately have quite a bit of at Wikiquote. -- Cirt (talk) 03:51, 29 January 2015 (UTC)
I have undertaken a review of the vandalism at enWQ, and commented as such, and at this point the investigation is continuing. You know quite well from your time as a checkuser that it just converts usernames to IP addresses, and it is not a magic bullet. As said, the investigation is continuing, and jumping to conclusions and rushing to decisions is not helpful. — billinghurstsDrewth04:18, 29 January 2015 (UTC)
I wasn't. But if you look at the contributions from the above listed links, we at the Wikiquote community are certainly getting weary of that sort of vandalism, whoever it's coming from. Thank you, -- Cirt (talk) 05:32, 29 January 2015 (UTC)
Understand, and from my initial investigation, we would be hitting a large ranges of a mobile telephone provider, that is dynamic ranges, and also a different large broadband provider over several ranges, and uncertain on whether static or dynamic. I haven't run collateral damage checks, nor conversed specifically with other CU to see how they are managing this vandal. — billinghurstsDrewth09:21, 29 January 2015 (UTC)
Okay, thank you. It is most confusing how they are able to appear from those locations all over the globe linked, above. -- Cirt (talk) 13:38, 29 January 2015 (UTC)
Not sure of your data set and not sure that I need to be. This is irrelevant to the analysis that I have undertaken, and I don't need to explain single IP contributions, nor need to. On their own they are symptomatic, not necessarily diagnostic. — billinghurstsDrewth13:52, 29 January 2015 (UTC)
Sorry, I meant socking at this user talk page, disrupting the page, and driving that user talk page to need to be semi-protected. We need help investigating stuff like that. It could indeed be separate from other recent socking investigations, or not. But it'd certainly be helpful perhaps to get a few blocks of those folks, and IPs, and sock accounts, and perhaps even rangeblocks. -- Cirt (talk) 20:20, 29 January 2015 (UTC)
If a community has ongoing vandal issues and account blocking alone is insufficient, then IP range blocks can be investigated. The place for that is SRUC and stewards look for ranges, and any collateral damage. Situation normal. I have data for enWQ about the vandal, we have the technology to make that data available to stewards, and in this case, I need to check for collateral damage if blocks are imposed. There also needs to be a process for enWQ to handle cases of collateral damage. — billinghurstsDrewth00:08, 30 January 2015 (UTC)
@Cirt: You have at least two different xwiki vandals at the moment. I think that you need a change of approach. Just quietly stomp them with no fuss. Don't name them, just use LTA and move on. I think that the process of use like enWP is just giving them a scorecard approach. Every time you all jump up and run around they get their jollies. Have a general discussion in your admin channels that allows all administrators to be able to refer your known vandals to stewards with a standing permission, and a permalink to the discussion. Most of these xwiki vandals we can stomp pretty quickly once we see them. — billinghurstsDrewth03:59, 31 January 2015 (UTC)
I've used rangeblocks in the past quite effectively, and perhaps combined with key phrases from AbuseFilter, but the rangeblocks in a targeted fashion were able to quiet everything down for up to a year I think I recall. -- Cirt (talk) 04:11, 31 January 2015 (UTC)
I have undertaken CU checks based on the data that I have seen from the Miszatomic case, and applied some local blocks. It is going to take a while to weed out the whole sockfarm that he has built over the years. Some is going to get through but we can just keep hitting it quietly, slowing it down and paring out the data. I will think about whether addressing his ISP or telco will be of value. — billinghurstsDrewth05:26, 31 January 2015 (UTC)
Wikibooks will get access to language links via Wikidata on February 24th. Coordination is happening at d:Wikidata:Wikibooks.
Roughly 17000 of the candidate articles that Google identified as potentially being about the same topic but lacking a language link have been merged. About 17500 are remaining and waiting for you to go through them via https://tools.wmflabs.org/yichengtry/
Did more work on Capiunto to get it into a state where it can be deployed to Wikimedia sites.
Mourned Titan (phabricator:T88550) as its developers were bought up. Began evaluation for which graph database to use instead for a Wikidata query service (mw:Wikibase/Indexing)
Further work on header section redesign
Tweaks to the sitelink section
Worked on making monolingual text datatype accept more languages
Finished showing the language when a language fallback is used
Started looking into fixing the existing Guided Tours after Guided Tours extension API changes
Worked on implementing Lua convenience functions for rendering arbitrary Snaks. This is useful for displaying references or qualifiers. (phabricator:T76213)
Latest comment: 9 years ago2 comments1 person in discussion
Good morning! Thanks for warning us about crosswiki spamming on "Τζαουάντ Ραμαζανιού". Article is now locked, as proposed. Thanks again! --Ttzavaras (talk) 09:56, 8 February 2015 (UTC)
Yes, maybe helpful, though not resolutionary in itself ...
[22:24] <sDrewth> rights Herbythyme
[22:25] <COIBot> Herbythyme is not found in any of the trusted groups: sysop, bot, bureaucrat, rollbacker, founder, steward, checkuser, editor, reviewer, staff
[22:25] <sDrewth> rights Billinghurst
[22:25] <COIBot> Billinghurst is sysop on w:en, s:en, meta; steward on meta; checkuser on s:en, meta; reviewer on s:la
Mental - pot - kettle. Anyhow there is nothing to suggest any great activity in the reports however at a quick look through there is some evidence of collusion/planning in that a number of domains resolve to the same IPs. It is certainly possible (...) that a hosting IP had been used to create the accounts. Worth keeping an eye on I think. Thanks --Herbytalk thyme13:29, 13 February 2015 (UTC)
Mental - at best you are not losing distance on my lead. The IPs are trackable through COIBot's work (reverse links), and the community could also look to the logic that is in place for enWP's revertlist which allows a rollback based on base IP. — billinghurstsDrewth23:45, 13 February 2015 (UTC)
Wikidata weekly summary #145
Latest comment: 9 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
The templates for adding badges (good article, featured article, etc) to articles on Wikipedia in the sidebar are getting removed from articles rapidly in favor of getting that information from Wikidata \o/ German Wikipedia even deleted those templates already. English Wikipedia seems to be getting close.
We are hiring! Passionate about Wikidata and know your way around Java Script and co? Apply!
We'll spend the next week working with Nik and Stas from WMF to move queries forward in Berlin
Worked on implementing a Lua interface for arbitrary Snak rendering. This can be used to render eg. qualifiers or references in Wikipedia infoboxes.
Did groundwork for Lua convenience functions that render data in the user’s interface language, rather than the content language (for multilingual wikis, like Commons or Wikidata only)
Did further work on making the Lua interface code nicer and share code with the parser functions
Removed input method selector in the sitelink input as it was hiding the actual input and not very useful there
Fixed some issues in diff views showing new data instead of old data
Created a few scripts to make it easier for 3rd parties to install Wikibase
Fixed icinga notification that tests if dispatch lag gets high
Investigated several issues regarding storage of time values and started fixing them
Fixed editing of qualifiers
Fixed most browser tests after introduction of new header design
Latest comment: 9 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion
Hi! Back in July 2012, you have globally locked this user. The only edit of theirs I can find is a single live edit on enwiki, creating w:en:American Standard International School of Dhaka (although they may have deleted edits on projects where I am not admin). Now, they have sent UTRS appeal #13196 (which you should have access to), and it seems mostly reasonable (COI edits can be dealt with locally if need be), and I was wondering if there were circumstances I am not aware of that led to the global block? Otherwise, what do you think about a potential unlocking of the account? Thanks in advance! Salvidrim!05:53, 17 February 2015 (UTC)
Latest comment: 9 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion
Hello Billinghurst, I need your assistance. Could you please mask 3 earliest edits on my talk page on EN Wiki. It's for privacy reasons. Since probably I won't be unblocked yet, I have nobody to ask for help. Thanks in advance. --Munja(talk)16:29, 25 February 2015 (UTC)
Chaged a number of Lua modules (from deprecated function mw.wikibase.getEntity to mw.wikibase.getEntityObject)
Updated the json documentation
Always link to Wikidata on client pages that don’t have any langlinks. This affects users without JavaScript and logged out users, logged in users will still see the link item dialog. gerrit:168632
Fixes for the Wikibase qunit Jenkins job
Made Vagrant git-update also properly update Wikibase and dependencies
Fix for phabricator:T88254 (malformatted Wikidata entries appearing in Watchlist RSS feed in clients)
Final touches on new header design
Investigated how we can provide language fallback also in suggestions when search or adding new statements
More work on allowing additional languages in monolingual text datatype
Added missing backend piece for quantities with units. Now the remaining piece is the user interface.
Latest comment: 9 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion
Restarted the webservice, set up big brother to hopefully auto-restart the webservice, and added you to the tool. Legoktm (talk) 18:36, 9 March 2015 (UTC)
Latest comment: 9 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion
Hi Billinghurst, Vitruvian@tr.wikiquote there is a problem with this sysop. He will not contribute to wiki projects. That's why he blocked indefinitely. Can you unblock? Good wikis. --Uğurkenttalk15:08, 11 March 2015 (UTC)
This issue is not something for just a single steward, nor something that can be handled with that scant amount of information. If this is an important issue then please raise it at Stewards' noticeboard and please provide further background to the situation. — billinghurstsDrewth21:48, 11 March 2015 (UTC)
Wikidata weekly summary #149
Latest comment: 9 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
Latest comment: 9 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Hi Billinghurst. I updated your scripts in User:Billinghurst/global.js, most notably to update force ltr and to replace the obsolete regex menu framework with the newer TemplateScript. I tested the use cases to make sure nothing broke, but I might have missed something. Let me know if anything breaks. :) —Pathoschild 02:48, 19 March 2015 (UTC)
Lots of improvements around MixNMatch. It has a new catalog overview page. ~340K IDs have been matched so far with it and it now has an FAQ for institutions wanting to get their identifiers linked in Wikidata
First screenshot of the primary sources tool that'll help with migrating data from Freebase and enriching it with references has been leaked ;-): 1 and 2
Latest comment: 9 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Hi Billinghurst, Apologies for the random ping earlier; PiRSquared17 took care of it. It was regarding an unregistered user you recently blocked that created a disturbing page. DivineAlpha (talk) 06:06, 22 March 2015 (UTC)
Could you please exterminate
Latest comment: 9 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Yes, local action and local discussion regarding the action. Svwiki is so large so this can be handled locally. -- Tegel(Talk)15:52, 27 March 2015 (UTC)
request
Latest comment: 9 years ago5 comments2 people in discussion
Billinghurst sir It has been 5 days that I have asked for the global IP block exempt right on Steward requests/Global permissions but the result has not been shown yet I request you to think for the right.बेनुपराज पौडेल (talk) 13:40, 24 March 2015 (UTC)
WikiArabia takes place in Monastir, Tunisia, 3-5 April
The GLAM-WIKI 2015 conference in The Hague (10-12 April) features several presentations and tutorials about Wikidata for/with cultural institutions.
The Library world will use Wikidata to link its information to any and all Wikipedias. No longer English only, but every Wikipedia will be exposed in this way.
Went through all the feedback we got for improving watchlist integration on Wikipedia and co and posted our assesment
Put the infrastructure for creating Turtle-Beta dumps in place. All new Wikidata dumps will be in https://dumps.wikimedia.org/wikidatawiki/entities/ from Monday on (the old * directory will be kept around and receive new json dumps for backwards compatibility).
Reduced size of entities pages by removing no longer needed data (to make the UI faster).
Fixed bug that sometimes caused dates and other types of values to be cut short when quickly saving. (phabricator:T92831)
Fixed issues with setting focus after clicking edit.
Latest comment: 9 years ago4 comments2 people in discussion
At mr-wikipedia undersigned is trying to take small steps one by one, on improving copyright understanding and sorting out copyright related various issues. As of now I am looking for following help.
1) w:mr:Template:अविन्याविकासजग is designed to be part of copyright awareness campaign on mr-wikipedia. In Initial stage campaign is being conducted through MediaWiki:Sitenotice for getting maximum exposure. I need your technical help in tweaking (correcting syntax) w:mr:Template:अविन्याविकासजग this template so as I can include the same in a site notice.
2) Importing following templates from wikimedia commons to mr-wikipedia.
It is a bit hard to work out the purpose of the first, though I can see that it is missing an opening {| though I am not sure where it is mean to go. If this a template from another wiki then it would be useful to have either a redirect from the original name version. I will have a look at these other templates and import there where I can to your site. — billinghurstsDrewth11:21, 8 April 2015 (UTC)
@Mahitgar: I went and have a look and mrWP is not set up for transwiki import, and I think that the community should be discussing that should be a feature for your wiki. If you look at http://noc.wikimedia.org/conf/highlight.php?file=InitialiseSettings.php and search for wgImportSources you will see that mrwiki has nothing, and I think that your community needs to have an RFC that discussion that you have a configuration to allow transwiki for 'en' 'commons' 'm' as a minimum. Have the discussion for a week, and if the community is in favour we will lodge a phabricator: ticket to have that implemented, then any admin will be able to import pages/template/... from those three wikis without the intervention of others. — billinghurstsDrewth11:30, 8 April 2015 (UTC)
Thanks for your prompt reply and view. About first I suppose I made mistake in hurry, after your hint I could sort it out myself. Your second suggession also is good one and we will go with the same. Thanks and Regards.
We are going to change the way value suggestions are ranked when entering a new statement. This will help with "male" and "female" not showing up among the top suggestions. Previously we ranked by number of sitelinks. We will change this to the maximum of sitelinks and labels. So if an item has labels in many languages but no sitelinks like "male" and "female" it will still show up high in the suggestions. (phabricator:T94404)
Discussed how to move forward with identifiers. Outcome: They should get their own datatype. (phabricator:T95287)
Implemented arbitrary access for the {{#property:…}} parser function. This can be invoked on the wikis that have arbitrary access enabled by using {{#property:P123|from=Q42}}. So far this is only Wikidata itself.
Did further performance work on the client (Wikipedia and co) in preparation for arbitrary access
Improved the performance of wbgetentities significantly when loading a large number of entities
how could an admin block an admin!? is there any rule for doing this!?
Latest comment: 9 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion
hi Billinghurst!
as an admin my IP is blocked by an irresponsible admin Mr Khangul just for the reason i have allowed and unblocked a user who is hard working, keen to develop, contribute in pashto wiki. see this for his countributions: Usman khan's contributions
plz have a look to his work. if you think that he (Usmankhan) deserved to be blocked by Khangul. and for restoring (Usmankhan) was that against the rule of wiki, or i have done something wrong for which Khangul (an admin like me) blocked me from wiki and deleted my pages where i have requested for bureaucrat.
plz take this matter serious and solve the prob which khangul create day by day to new users, and now for admins as well.
you will note that pashto wiki contribution is zero now a day due to khangul's behaviors with users.
Umm, please don't take me for a fool, however you are not independent of the user UsmanKhan, so please do not pretend otherwise.
If my proposal meets with the approval of the community of stewards, I would think that we would be reviewing blocks on the wiki, and we would be able to review deletions of user pages. — billinghurstsDrewth11:18, 14 April 2015 (UTC)
Special:GlobalRenameRequest
Latest comment: 9 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion
Hi Billinghurst, some week ago I was asked to change my name on scn.wiki. I put the request and you told me to use Special:GlobalRenameRequest, but I have to merge the accounts, not to require a new name. Actually, in the it.wiki it says (correctly) that 2diPikke is already taken (and the same will be on scn.wiki). Can you explain me better what to do? Thanks. --Squattaturi (talk) 21:48, 17 April 2015 (UTC)
Latest comment: 9 years ago9 comments3 people in discussion
Hi Billinghurst. Would you be able to answer a question I have about a rename you carried out in relation to the SUL finalisation? The rename in question is here. That user (previously 'Carcharoth' on fr-wiki) may (I am not 100% certain) have a Commons account of the same name (Commons talk page). I am asking because the fr-wiki name and the commons username were the two unattached accounts listed here before the SUL finalisation started. The fr-wiki name is no longer unattached (I think this is because of the rename you did), but the commons name is still unattached. I was wondering if a rename request had: (a) not been made; (b) been made but is waiting in a queue somewhere; or (c) the user doesn't realise that a rename request is needed. I don't speak or write very good French, so I thought it best to ask you (and in any case, the user doesn't seem active, though presumably the fr-wiki rename request was made somewhere, somehow). Carcharoth (talk) 00:27, 8 April 2015 (UTC)
@Carcharoth: Local accounts at different wikis cannot be directly associated, we can only surmise. If there were email addresses associated with these accounts, then email address(es) for both accounts will have received the notification requesting moves. [All renames are up to date, I did an absolute truckload of them]
I am going to make an assumption that you are looking at the usurption issue, my advice would be along the lines of that we leave it until the globalisation takes effect and that Commons account will be moved, and then we can merge any other account that you have (for what was a local Commons account) to your SUL account. If that is the case, then put a merge request to SRUC and we will put it on hold for when the tools and the account are available. — billinghurstsDrewth01:46, 8 April 2015 (UTC)
Thanks. The one remaining unattached account was moved and the other account automatically created (see here). I'll go to SURC and figure out now how to request a merge (though I'm guessing it may be a long wait). Carcharoth (talk) 00:25, 20 April 2015 (UTC)
I have a similar issue too, my Commons account is currently unattached. When can I have it then? Do I need to put a request to SRUC or it will be attached automatically soon? ● MehranDebate15:46, 8 April 2015 (UTC)
If your Commons account is unattached it can be moved whenever you please, the following notes apply. 1) You will need to confirm on the account that it is yours, and to where it is being moved (point to the diff here as the reverse confirmaion; 2) if you have Commons edits on this account and want them merged, you are best to wait until unification takes place; 3) if you have no Commons account on this account, then align the accounts details now, and put in a request; 4) if you have a Commons account on this account and it can be blown away, then put that instruction into the rename request for the move-in. — billinghurstsDrewth23:19, 8 April 2015 (UTC)
Mehran@Commons is not mine, it belongs to someone else who was not willing to rename it before. Currently I use MehranVB@Commons that is attached to another global account. Now I have no idea if it is possible to move MehranVB@Commons to Mehran@Commons since MehranVB is a attached itself. If it cannot be done, the best thing for me is to usurp Mehran@Commons and attach it to my SUL. If I am allowed to do so, could you please consider it as a request and move the account or it is necessary to put the request in SRUC? ● MehranDebate07:47, 9 April 2015 (UTC)
If your Commons account is attached to another, it is better to lodge a merge request at SRUC and when we get into the next stage (globalisation of all unattached accounts) we can then merge the two accounts. — billinghurstsDrewth11:43, 9 April 2015 (UTC)
Thanks, so for now can I usurp Mehran@Commons (which does not belong to me)? (I will lodge a merge request later) ● MehranDebate12:02, 9 April 2015 (UTC)
At this late stage the preference would be to leave it as it is. Then m@c account will be renamed as per the message, and you will then be able to get the account name, and we will merge your other account. — billinghurstsDrewth23:31, 9 April 2015 (UTC)
Deleted my complaint
Latest comment: 9 years ago4 comments2 people in discussion
Thank you. Btw i need your help in this, this user: "FreeatlastChitchat" keeps on reverting critical info of Muhammad Ali Jinnah. What can I do about this:
Wikimedia's monthly GLAM (Galleries, Libraries, Archives, Museums) newsletter now includes a Wikidata report. The draft for the first edition, covering April, may be edited and your contributions will be welcome.
Made label, description and aliases special pages easier to use
Bene* created a new Special:ListProperties special page to list properties by data type
Expanded our set of automated browser tests
Made language fallbacks work in more situations and more consistently. In particular, the entity selector now uses language fallback. This should benefit especially people who want to use Wikidata in a variant such as en-gb.
Continued work on the planned DataModel 3.0 release
Continued discussing and documenting future calendar model support
Continued work on our RDF generator
Continued work on usage tracking for labels on multilingual sites
Addshore worked on various issues regarding redirects
Addshore worked on a special page to turn an item into a redirect
Work on showing entity labels in edit summaries on history pages
Implemented change dispatching based on the new usage tracking mechanism
Fixed issue with page deletions on some Wikipedias not being reported to Wikidata
More work on straightening out date formatting and parsing
Fixed handling of scientific notation for quantity values
Term box: fixed bug causing stale info to be show, and another bug causing babel languages to be ignored sometimes.
Implemented access to other arbitrary items via the #property parser function
Bene* implemented check to make sure two properties can not have the same alias only differing in capitalization
Latest comment: 9 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion
They seem to be running around like a flock of headless ducks, not knowing what to make of the CU result! So that is good ... Stho002 (talk) 21:33, 20 April 2015 (UTC)
@Stho002: I rather thought that the whole concept of a Wiki community was that it should be egalitarian and therefore "headless". It is largely because you want to be the "head" that you have been excommunicated. Accassidy (talk) 08:58, 22 April 2015 (UTC)
Pashto Wikipedia Proposal
Latest comment: 9 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion
Billinghurst we are very thankful to you for your help and resolving the Pashto Wikipedia's issues.Once again Thanks.--UsmanKhan (talk) 05:27, 21 April 2015 (UTC)
@UsmanKhan: I have the hope that there will be the use of the talk pages extensively for contentious issues. You may even consider the development of a template for contentious issues. Similarly, where there is contention that an article tries to cover the area of contention itself. — billinghurstsDrewth06:12, 21 April 2015 (UTC)
tools.wmflabs.org/checker: No webservice
Latest comment: 9 years ago5 comments3 people in discussion
Hi,
The transclusion checker tool for book digitizations on Wikisources is down and you, MZMcBride and Legoktm are listed as maintainers. Could please any of you check what have happened? Many thanks, Lugusto • ※17:07, 14 April 2015 (UTC)
I believe this was fixed by running "webservice2 uwsgi-python restart" basically. Labs keeps changing things. :-( --MZMcBride (talk) 14:06, 23 April 2015 (UTC)
Latest comment: 9 years ago17 comments2 people in discussion
I appreciate that was not the right venue but your close comment made it clear that not only was it not the right venue but you have no respect for me nor do you really care about the impact of functionary conduct on projects. You say that wasn't a venue for "blackening reputations" and in the process all you did was taint mine with that rather lousy statement. I'm sorry if I consider the conduct of functionaries to be a serious nature and that I thought the Stewards on meta might as well. I am seriously disappointed that you found it necessary to leave that kind of a closing statement and would suggest that perhaps you should change it to something less of a spit in my face for trying to do something about problematic behavior. Maybe soething like, not the right venue would be sufficient!Reguyla (talk) 12:40, 23 April 2015 (UTC)
Nevermind, I changed it to Wrong Venue. Matter closed. There is no need to say more than that and again I am disappointed in you for that blatantly disrespectful comment towards me. Reguyla (talk) 12:47, 23 April 2015 (UTC)
You bring a matter to stewards, knowing that the matter is not for stewards, about an individual when you are aware of the processes to resolve the matter is completely internal to that wiki. You use commentary that makes personal opinion that reflects poorly on the person. You were told exactly that it was not for stewards, and you continued the conversation, and debated the matter. If you don't like the closing statement, then maybe you should look at why the statement was made in your statements. On that page there is no ability for any stewards to make any commentary apart from "not our issue". I am disappointed that you thought that you could parade along that page with that matter more like a show pony rather than engaging with the target wiki in a meaningful attempt to resolution. — billinghurstsDrewth12:54, 23 April 2015 (UTC)
I knew that you would not be able to simply take action yes. I did however feel that the Stewards could discuss the matter and present it to the Arbcom and felt confident that if you bothered to take the time to look at it, you would see that Floquenbeam is a problematic functionary worthy of review. You made that statement because you do not like ME and you never took the submission seriously in the first place. I am blocked on ENWP because I think admins and functionaries should have to follow the rules and many of them feel otherwise. If I could discuss it on the target wiki I would, but I cant because a couple of admins won't let anyone unblock my account so I can even edit. But it wasn't even my personal issue that was the point here. It was Floquenbeams conduct that apparently is completley acceptable conduct for an admin/functionary to have as is leaving derogatory statements when closing good faith submissions by editors whom you personally do not like. Reguyla (talk) 13:00, 23 April 2015 (UTC)
and just FYI my change to your poorly worded close was reverted because its better for an admin to make an extremely poorly worded closing statement in a discussion that for someone to change it to be unbiased. Also for what its worth, any time someone complains about anothers conduct there are going to be "commentary that makes personal opinion that reflects poorly on the person". Otherwise its not a complaint, its a compliment. Reguyla (talk) 13:08, 23 April 2015 (UTC)
No we couldn't discuss it, and it is wrong of you to think that we sit as some arbitrary body to make public judgements on individuals at other wikis. Our personal opinions are exactly that, personal. — billinghurstsDrewth13:15, 23 April 2015 (UTC)
Oh please, there is a discussion on that very page right now about the conduct of functionaries and admins on the Pashto wiki so clearly you are capable of talking about serious problems when you want too. There are routinely discussions about problems there that have been actionable for far less than when I presented. The mere fact that the Stewards won't address concerns to the WMF or the Arbcom about conduct on ENWP is exactly why the conduct of its admins and functionaries have gotten so bad. They know they can get away with it and you enable that behavior by degrading editors who bring up concerns in a venue that is related and that they have access too. Anyway, I am going to send an email to the Arbcom about Floq's conduct but it'll take some time to draft because the Arbcom requires a detailed legal package to even discuss the matter to ensure that nearly no one will even take the time to do it. That's assuming their spam filter doesn't delete it or they don't ignore the issue because it pertains to one of their own. Its a completely broken and non transparent process that is rife with abuse itself. But since you have no interests in doing the right thing and have essentially scuttled my attempts to fix the degrading situation I have no choice. Reguyla (talk) 13:22, 23 April 2015 (UTC)
I am pretty disappointed that at this point its clear you have no intention of changing your insulting and inflammatory closing statement that's directed at me. If something would not be tolerated or acceptable conduct for an editor or IP to do, then an Admin shouldn't do it either and that includes leaving obviously unacceptable statements when closing discussions. Its clear that you do not feel that way unfortunately. Reguyla (talk) 13:37, 23 April 2015 (UTC)
Please do not try to equate the issue of psWP community, with your issue with one user of advanced rights. psWP is a different case and different circumstances. I have already pointed you to the information page about stewards and the powers that we have, pWP qualified, and your matter does not. — billinghurstsDrewth14:27, 23 April 2015 (UTC)
Of course the circumstances are different but they are also very similar in many ways. The difference is, in one case you are choosing to act and the other you are choosing not too. The circumstances of every case is different. And just for the record, yes I do have an issue with one or two admins on ENWP because those admins are problematic and nee to be addressed in order to allow the success of the project and the abusive conduct those admins exert on the project. I also have a larger issue of the choke hold that the admin culture has on that community and the communities inability to address the problem because the admins running those boards won't allow themselves to be removed...including current and former members of the Arbcom. That is part of the reason I addresed the issue to the Stewards and yes again I knew you couldn't simply take action. But, you could absolutely have allowed discussion about the problem rather than close it with insulting comments that are clearly biased. Reguyla (talk) 14:37, 23 April 2015 (UTC)
psWP has a large amount of history including a RFC, and many other factors that differentiate this matter. There is no similarity in my mind, and that you equate your matter just demonstrates your lack of understanding. Plus, if you want a discussion, then do a RFC (C = Comment = Discussion), do not bring your issue to the stewards. You are barking up the wrong tree. — billinghurstsDrewth14:44, 23 April 2015 (UTC)
I see no point in an RFC, it will just be met by the same cynicism and contempt as you are showing here and in your closing statements. Had you simply stated Wrong venue and closed it I wouldn't have thought anything of it and moved on. The fact that you decided it was appropriate to close it with a derogatory statement directed at me only shows that you have no interest in RFC's or discussions about the conduct of ENWP admins. That's their problem apparently and not yours and that attitude is precisely why the problem has gotten so far out of hand on ENWP. Reguyla (talk) 15:11, 23 April 2015 (UTC)
An RFC is a traditional means to progress and that you don't wish to do so is your choice. that said, it is no reason to continue discussion that was unable to be actioned by stewards, and you had been told that. If you call people liars, etc. and don't wish to follow the process for a resolution, it will of course be seen as an attempt to poorly represent someone's reputation. Don't be surprised if the spade is called a spade. Your conclusions about my views on RFCs are just baseless. — billinghurstsDrewth03:39, 24 April 2015 (UTC)
Since we are "calling a spade a spade" as you put it, my decision to call them a lier was based on facts and if you had bothered to actually read my ban review, which clearly you did not, and the verbiage used by them you would have see that too, its quite clearly visible and there is a big difference between not editing and no disruption. Additionally, my irritation is not in that you closed it, because I knew that you couldn't just run over and block them even if it was taken seriously, but that you chose to directly attack me in your closing statement for bringing a very serious problem to the Stewards for action thinking that you cared about abusive admin conduct on Wikipedia. It certainly gives the appearance that the close was personal rather than professional. The mere fact that Floquenbeam is allowed to use lies and false statements to support a block that isn't supported by the community and that you would apparently not care about it just makes my statements that Admins on ENWP don't feel like they have to follow the rules and certainly not Floq, all the more true. I would again ask you to please rephrase your closing statement. Reguyla (talk) 09:12, 24 April 2015 (UTC)
(outdent) Geeze you spout rubbish and draw conclusions from nothing. enWP has a process to deal with abuse, use it if you have a complaint. That I don't get my knickers in a not about enWP is an allowable response and should not be drawn as a conclusion about a block, about which stewards cannot have any impact. For the record it is an accurate statement that I made at SN, and to me it seems that all you demonstate here is a hypocrisy. You give free criticism but will not take it. — billinghurstsDrewth14:36, 24 April 2015 (UTC)
Just because I call an ugly baby ugly rather than lie and say it isn't doesn't mean I am spouting rubbish. Sure there is a sense of hypocrisy to my statements but no more than admins and functionaries on ENWP that defy policy and do whatever they want while blocking non admins for far less. I also have no problem taking fair and accurate criticism but the criticism you offered in that closing statement wasn't any of that. It wasn't even criticism, it was a blatant personal attack. All I am asking for is for you to simply rephrase it so it isn't a personal attack, is that really so much to ask? Reguyla (talk) 22:40, 24 April 2015 (UTC)
Latest comment: 9 years ago8 comments2 people in discussion
Hi! Many thanks for your scripting solution posted here. I'm doing a lot of template work, and such visual aid is of great value. Now I'm trying to get the script to work. I tried to copy the js code into my global js depository = not working? I notice you have the code at en:user:Billinghurst/bracketmatch.js and then loads it at Wikisource by using // bracket matcher
mw.loader.load('//en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:Ais523/bracketmatch.js&action=raw&ctype=text/javascript');. So why the special js depository? Now I have put the code here. Will that work? And is a special set of user preferences needed to get this to work? So far I've only worked with special css code, so js may be a different beast to tame… --Paracel63 (talk) 11:58, 22 April 2015 (UTC)
@Paracel63: That methodology calls the code from that enWP user's page of code, rather than having to maintain itself yourself. [Note that is how we pull gadgets from other wikis to maintain one set of code] To get it to work, after you have a preview of the text you will see the hypertext link "Parse" which toggles the bracket view. I am happy to review and set it up for you if necessary, just tell me where, I have the rights to do it. — billinghurstsDrewth12:31, 22 April 2015 (UTC)
Oh you did link it, yes that is fine if you copied it all fine. That is the hard way and you have to maintain it yourself. Have a poke at my global.js to see how lazy you can be. — billinghurstsDrewth12:36, 22 April 2015 (UTC)
Hi! Many thanks for your input. I see the "parse" link, and it seems to work as expected. Only problem now, it only colours pairs of double brackets, not triple brackets (like in templates). I copied all your code, but maybe there was something else I forgot? You're free to fix my code here, if there is an easy solution. Best of wishes.--Paracel63 (talk) 11:30, 25 April 2015 (UTC)
Hi again! Now I get it to work in templates too! The specific colour coding makes it easy to spot the specific pairs while working. But is there a way (w:User talk:Ais523) of pointing out with colour code (for example white against a black block or something similar), when the pair doesn't match up? Now you have to inspect each pair to see if they are the right amount of brackets in each pair. An "alarm marking" would find your attention much quicker. :-)--Paracel63 (talk) 11:45, 25 April 2015 (UTC)
Latest comment: 9 years ago8 comments3 people in discussion
Dear user:Billinghurst I was blocked on Pashto wikipedia for persistence to write about homosexuality. I just saw on the stewards board that other have been unblocked. Is it possible if i can also be unblocked.
Adjutor101 (talk) 07:41, 23 April 2015 (UTC)
I have asked the user to disclose all socks and to choose an account, on Requests for comment/Support collaboration on Pashto Wikipedia/Requests/Adjutor101. That request was filed 08:21, 24 April 2015, after your reply above, so I'm treating it as separate, though this may resolve quickly. As you know, we cannot at this point be sure about socks, the use of shared access may be common. All that will come out in the wash. Thanks, Billinghurst. --Abd (talk) 17:20, 24 April 2015 (UTC)
I am not sure what it has to do with you. Last that I saw you were not a member of psWP. Stewards are elected representatives of the broader community with the authority to resolve matters. You are not. Your nose goes in where it is not needed, nor especially welcomed. — billinghurstsDrewth01:26, 25 April 2015 (UTC)
Um, I've edited that project, though very little. I have no "authority." You have the authority to make decisions about rights and blocking and the like, to close. The community has the right to advise. Do we have that right, Billinghurst? If not, I need to know. --Abd (talk) 02:29, 25 April 2015 (UTC)
But now I am working on wikitionary to advance Pashto. I also take back my request as I am working now independently from the Pashto society due to personal differences with the head. Adjutor101 (talk) 10:00, 25 April 2015 (UTC)
There are a number of user boxes you can add to your user page to indicate interests and which wiki projects you belong to.
Development
On Tuesday, we are deploying usage tracking (no arbitrary access yet) to Dutch Wikipedia and French Wikisource, and subscription tracking on Wikidata. There should be no noticeable changes for users. These are necessary steps towards enabling arbitrary access in clients.
Worked on making language fallback work in the suggester (when adding a new statement or searching for an item)
More work on RDF output and the query service
Added Special:RedirectEntity for redirecting items
Investigated and working to fix JS bug on items with “invalid” values (phabricator:92975)
Did work towards having entity ids in revision histories and in diffs linked with their label (like on watchlists or in the recentchanges)
Latest comment: 9 years ago5 comments2 people in discussion
Hey, I see you've been editing here recently, so I'm hoping to catch you soon with this request. I've moved the previous (3-year-old) contents of Article counts revisited, which I am almost entirely responsible for (and its talk page), into my userspace to make way for more relevant, current, and voluminous information on the same topic, which I would like to move from my userspace to the same title as I used before. As a normal user, I can't finish this "swap". So could you please move User:Dcljr/Article count changes (with its associated talk page) to Article counts revisited for me (over the redirect now there)? Thanks in advance... - dcljr (talk) 07:28, 28 April 2015 (UTC)
Oops… no, you accidentally just undid my original page move. I wanted "User:Dcljr/Article count changes" moved to "Article counts revisited". So now I need you to:
Yeah, I still have subpages that need moving, but I can do that myself because it won't conflict with any existing titles. Thanks for doing this for me. - dcljr (talk) 02:41, 29 April 2015 (UTC)
Once again a help request
Latest comment: 9 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion
Hi,
After your suggession on this talk page at mr wikipedia we got import page facility activated, I imported commons:Template:Self and commons:Module:Fallback along with subtemplates there of; but :
First still mr:Template:Self shows some errors, at first glance I do not understand the reason for error. Please do have a look at mr:w:Template:Self and guide me how do we sort out the errors.
Secondly from plain reading of mr:Module:Fallback it seems we need to mention default language for mr wikipedia some where, but I could not understand exactly where and how ?
Third where one is supposed to look for base and/or root pages of templates and modules.
Commons's fallback appears to need c:Module:Fallbacklist though it is only the resultant code that you actually need. However, the bulk of those errors seem to be in the documentation template, not the actual template, which suggests just ditch the doc layer, and copy what you need to document in your native language. The template seems to work fine mr:चित्र:Wireless_mouse_img.jpg — billinghurstsDrewth10:41, 30 April 2015 (UTC)
Wikidata weekly summary #156
Latest comment: 9 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
We rolled out usage tracking on the first two wikis (French Wikisource and Dutch Wikipedia). Users should not notice anything. More wikis will follow in the next weeks. This is the remaining step for enabling arbitrary access on wikis other than Commons.
The students team is working hard to get a first release of the improved constraint reports and checks against 3rd party databases out.
Ricordisamoa fixed the issue with long descriptions being cut off.
We fixed the focus flow in the property selector.
We improved the messages on Special:EntityData to make it more understandable.
A study has been published about how Wikidata can help significantly improve the quality of medical content on Wikipedia. This is why we do Wikidata! \o/
The Wikidata Menu Challenge has started and goes on to May 27. Add labels, images and pronunciation audio to a list of around 290 items to help show off the power of Wikidata at a food festival.
Hovercards also show the target's label and ID now. (Try them by turning them on in the beta features section of your preferences.)
Continued working on RDF export
More work on making it possible to add a reference right away when adding a statement (and allowing the full statement incl references to be edited at the same time)
Did more work to make usage tracking possible on multilingual wikis (namely Commons)
Latest comment: 9 years ago4 comments2 people in discussion
I think current laos wikipedia is very botched and be abundant with ridiculous article and troll users, i want you appoint me as bureaucrats of laos wikipedia for manager it, i'll be creating new wikipedia, thank you--Laomonarchrestore (talk) 22:27, 10 May 2015 (UTC)
If there is no local policy about the appointment of admins for loWP, then please follow the process expressed at SRP. I doubt that we would appoint bureaucrats for loWP at this point of time. — billinghurstsDrewth10:25, 11 May 2015 (UTC)
I cannot tell you the exact reason for the original range block, as I didn't make it. It is a soft block on the /17, so you should be able to edit if you are logged into a wikimedia account. If you don't have an account, you can create one at this link. — billinghurstsDrewth03:34, 13 May 2015 (UTC)
a persistent old spam issue
Latest comment: 9 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion
I was under impression that soon you might put a global filter from meta for this issue. If global filter is not possible do we go ahead with local filters for this spam issue (I am talking about mr-wikis).
There is a global filter for this gentleman in place, and it does cover mrWP. enWP is not covered by global filters, that is small/medium/opt-in wikis. — billinghurstsDrewth09:46, 13 May 2015 (UTC)
Where do I post link?
Latest comment: 9 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Hi Billinghurst,
You left me a ping recently, telling me to make an edit on my user page that is to be merged, and then to leave a link to the edit on the stewardship page. However, the section I posted about getting my name back is missing, so I'm not sure where to post the diff. Can you please clarify? (Sorry, I'm not to computer savvy.) Zaereth (talk) 05:29, 15 May 2015 (UTC)
Request for suggessions
Latest comment: 9 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Hi,
On meta, I have created a new page for cross wiki collaboration, Edit filters benefiting to various local Wikiprojects. Your suggessions about article or in the article, are most welcome wherever whenever possible to your goodselves.
Frankly I need support in correction of my english used in the article. Since one of the main complaits about my righting is about my broken english :)
Past: Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing) spoke about authority control in Wikidata (and sister projects) at the World Digital Library's Arab Peninsula Regional Group Symposium, organised in conjunction with the Qatar National Library, in Doha on 13 May. His slides, with an Arabic translation, will be online soon.
Past: Wikidata editing workshop at the Wikimedia Conference in Berlin
Past: Wikidata workshop for archivists of Catalan City of Justice
Upcoming: MediaWiki hackathon in Lyon
Other Noteworthy Stuff
Elections for the board of the Wikimedia Foundation are ongoing. Wikidata should be well represented among the voters. Go and vote!
Dutch Wikipedia and French Wikisource now have the arbitrary access feature. Persian Wikipedia, English Wikivoyage and Hebrew Wikipedia are following today. Italian Wikipedia and all remaining Wikisource projects are following on June 1st.
English Wikipedia is running a bot to add authority control templates to many articles that are filled completely from Wikidata. Italian Wikipedia is doing so as well.
Latest comment: 9 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Dear Billinghurst,
we are initiating a long needed action - we would like to translate names of all Wikimedia languages to all Wikimedia languages in the next two months.
We have noticed that you are active on Abkhaz Wikipedia and that is the reason why we are taking liberty to contact you.
We hope that you would be interesting to help us in our endeavor - To make this action easier we have already prepared the list of all Wikimedia languages, and for each language we have already prepared the page with existing and missing translations. So when you go to the page for your language you would have two tasks - to check whether existing translations are OK and to fill in the missing one. The more detailed instruction are on the language page.
What are the benefits of this work?
We believe it is about time to have all Wikimedia languages translated to all Wikimedia languages :)
Translated languages will be parsed into Wiktionary and the resulting number of Wiktionary entries will be significant for each language. That could significantly increase the number of entries for less developed Wiktionaries, and improve the quality of entries in general. We are aware that there is no Wiktionary in your language, (yet ;)) but your contribution would influence other Wiktionaries.
Wikidata - this would be great contribution to Wikidata.
All other projects could benefit from this list (Wiki Travel :)), as we believe that certain amount of terms has to be properly translated to all languages.
We are gathered around the project
Wiktionary Meets Matica Srpska and we hope that you would be interesting in working with us!
If you have any questions you can ask them on the Names of Wikimedia languages discussion page or via personal emails.
Important notice: The data are licensed under CC0, as they should be incorporated into Wikidata at the end of the process.
If you don’t want to receive future announcement about the project, please leave a note on discussion page.
Latest comment: 9 years ago3 comments2 people in discussion
Hi billinghurst, how much activity is required to be suitable for a global lock? The user [of the edit I reverted, which you thanked me] got blocked on en wiki. Tropicalkitty (talk) 09:20, 24 May 2015 (UTC)
Latest comment: 9 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion
Cher correspondant,
J'ai lu que vous aviez bloqué mon compte parce que vous avez suspecté que mes interventions ressemblaient à celles d'une intervention "robotisée". Il n'en est rien, mon IP change régulièrement en effet car je me connecte par le système IP Vanish je pense que vous connaissez. Je vous remercie de bien vouloir me répondre ou de faire en sorte que je ne sois plus bloqué.
Wikidata descriptions can be soon be edited in the Wikipedia iOS app.
A early preview of the official SPARQL endpoint for Wikidata has been created to query Wikidata. Remember that it is not stable and still beta. A short introduction to SPARQL can be found in Lucie's slides.
If you are not familiar with SPARQL yet, a tool has been created by Tpt and Bene* to generate SPARQL queries from natural language questions.
To do SPARQL queries from the command line, a command line tool was crafted by Marius.
The special page to query for badges is within reach.
A feedback session on the architecture of Wikibase was held.
We got a cool presentation by Maxime about inventaire.io.
We figured out the next steps to make Wikidata more mobile friendly.
@AryanSogd: This one of a few crosswiki spammers who repeatedly create articles about themselves through many sock puppets or IP addresses. Wherever they creates their articles, we delete them and protect the page. — billinghurstsDrewth10:14, 26 May 2015 (UTC)
Latest comment: 9 years ago3 comments2 people in discussion
Hi, Billinghurst. I'm Ikan Kekek, an admin at Wikivoyage. You have a distinguished record of service to Wikimedia, but I still think you could benefit from the Wikivoyage welcome message, which includes links you may want to look at at your leisure. You'll find that some of these aren't relevant to you, but there are some that are.
@Ikan Kekek: Please feel comfortable putting a welcome message on my pertinent user talk page at which Wikivoyage. The redirects were often set up early on in the days of the creation of the wikis, prior to their welcome messages. — billinghurstsDrewth11:01, 28 May 2015 (UTC)
No need, now that I've put it here - the links all work. However, if you would like people to feel free to use your user talk page on Wikivoyage, you might want to clarify that on your WV user talk page. Ikan Kekek (talk) 05:46, 29 May 2015 (UTC)
Please help for a nation-wide issue. You may not , of course, but if you dont help, viki of a whole country will be opressed ever by scoundrels
Latest comment: 9 years ago3 comments2 people in discussion
PLEASE HELP US. Just examine the issue, I trust you will decide rightly.
I am afraid, RFC may not be useful to explain the real situtation. Becuse, there is a probability that the people which mistread, will be judgers again, for the same issue.
But if you dont make something, viki of a country of 70 million people, wil never be developed.
Pages in Turkish viki are considered as a space of power struggle and of political propaganda, by the members who must be responsible for protecting our wiki ideals.
The issue is general, which is valid for all Turkish members with some authorization, to erase, to edit or to ban. So, you should revise their personal situations as a whole. The authorized active members in Turkish viki are few in number, and they aim to maintain this situation, so, to stay as an elite ruling Turkish viki.
The charged users of Turkish viki, who gained eligibility over other users and content, systematically apply cencorship, opression and harrassment over the regular users and contributed contents from regular users. They systemically impede corrections and editing approaches, especially for protecting articles which they constructed for propaganda purposes. However, obstraction and cencorship are general rules, to protect their power-positions, to protect their biased policy and to conceal their unfaithfulness against wiki criterias. Also, they systematically hinder the opening of new pages. So, there is a serious barrier, against newcomers for collecting points and gaining access for eligibilities.
The opression is unbearable especially in case of the pages about the ciritical-Islamist philosophers and writers. However, in general, this negative attribute is against all Turkish academicians and university members. Turkish viki seems declared a war against Turkish universities and scientists.
The abuse of authority and abuse of delegation rights, among Turkish users-in-charge or gate-keepers, are hard to be explained. However, international stewarts and wiki bureaucrats can assess the situtation very clearly, if they examine two recent examples which I give below.
Okurogluselo (talk) 18:00, 28 May 2015 (UTC)
First, the case about Prof.Dr Celalettin Vatandas. Vatandas is a sociologist and the writer of twelve books about the early-history of Islam, the historical problems of Muslim communities, post-colonial studies, and problems caused by modernity processes in eastern nations.Also, he has books about multi-culturalism and late-modernity problems in all nations of the world. All of the books are still in circulation and publication reports say, these are good sellers in their own category. His massive study about the world-cognition of Turkish youth ( The youth in Turkey) gives way to national-wide argumentations in Turkey. His books are in Turkish, but he has also articles in English. Moreover, he is the first council in very credible official foundation of Republic in Turkey, Ataturk Highest Institution of Culture,Language and History, called AYK in abbreviation. He is the vice-president of Gumushane University and the dean of the faculty of Communication Sciences there.
I wrote an article about him including all points above,(the ones proper for viki), gave bibliography and sources in proper format, even I added links of internet news from credible sites about his populer studies. But the members of abusement, our viki "elites", erased the page, with the code of M6. They said, the professor is not worth of being in wikipedia. I tried to tell the truth in discussion page, also I sent messages to all the active users in charge. But instead of concerning the article in a proper way, they voted for it quickly in their narrow community, and erased it without reading or considering my last corrections. Everything was happened in period less than 36 hours. Not five days. Now, they erased even my polite objections to defense the value of the article. This is basically, the clearing of the proofs about their guilty-crime against wiki criterias.
Second case is the Şafak Yayla. Yayal was a member of DHKP-C, an absolutely terrorist organization, which is in terror list of US, UK, EU and Turkey. Yayla was an "armed" activist, and the murderer of the public prosecuter who was first hostaged by Yayla, with armed thread. Criminal reports said that the primer cause killed the prosecuter were the bullets from the pistol of Yayla and his partner in the action.
Can you think that such an activist, who was a member of a terrorist organization, was a terrorist? If not, who can be called as terrorist on earth? Do you say Baghdadi was not terrorist but president of his self-declared state? But our Turkish elite members doesnt allow to call Yayla as terrorist. In fact, I didnt attempt to call him terrorist, bu only objected to call him, as "proleteriat revolutuanist" and "activist". In case of it, I edited the article with saying that, DHKP-C is an internationally and officially recognized terrorist organization and Yayla was the member of it, still without calling him directly as terrorist. Within my statements, I gave a link to DHKP-C vikipedia article, which declares the organization's official terrorist situation -an old article, wrote before these self-evident elites-. However, they erased my corrections. And clearly I explained the reasons and benefits of my attempt, both in community dashboard of the case and in explanations of my writings.
Still the article, nor erased neither corrected. They struggled to keep it in the way they made. They erased all the points I collected from my contributions. And they attacked, with the accusation of not abiding the wiki rules. However, clearly I abide the rules, but they dont. The ones who are expected to protect, abuses and violating wiki criterias, to gain power, and to use this power.
Please make a judgement, and save us from these people.
Please help for a nation-wide issue. You may not , of course, but if you dont help, viki of a whole country will be opressed ever by scoundrels
PLEASE HELP US. Just examine the issue, I trust you will decide rightly.
I am afraid, RFC may not be useful to explain the real situtation. Becuse, there is a probability that the people which mistread, will be judgers again, for the same issue. But if you dont make something, viki of a country of 70 million people, wil never be developed.
Pages in Turkish viki are considered as a space of power struggle and of political propaganda, by the members who must be responsible for protecting our wiki ideals.
The issue is general, which is valid for all Turkish members with some authorization, to erase, to edit or to ban. So, you should revise their personal situations as a whole. The authorized active members in Turkish viki are few in number, and they aim to maintain this situation, so, to stay as an elite ruling Turkish viki.
The charged users of Turkish viki, who gained eligibility over other users and content, systematically apply cencorship, opression and harrassment over the regular users and contributed contents from regular users. They systemically impede corrections and editing approaches, especially for protecting articles which they constructed for propaganda purposes. However, obstraction and cencorship are general rules, to protect their power-positions, to protect their biased policy and to conceal their unfaithfulness against wiki criterias. Also, they systematically hinder the opening of new pages. So, there is a serious barrier, against newcomers for collecting points and gaining access for eligibilities.
The opression is unbearable especially in case of the pages about the ciritical-Islamist philosophers and writers. However, in general, this negative attribute is against all Turkish academicians and university members. Turkish viki seems declared a war against Turkish universities and scientists.
The abuse of authority and abuse of delegation rights, among Turkish users-in-charge or gate-keepers, are hard to be explained. However, international stewarts and wiki bureaucrats can assess the situtation very clearly, if they examine two recent examples which I give below.
First, the case about Prof.Dr Celalettin Vatandas. Vatandas is a sociologist and the writer of twelve books about the early-history of Islam, the historical problems of Muslim communities, post-colonial studies, and problems caused by modernity processes in eastern nations.Also, he has books about multi-culturalism and late-modernity problems in all nations of the world. All of the books are still in circulation and publication reports say, these are good sellers in their own category. His massive study about the world-cognition of Turkish youth ( The youth in Turkey) gives way to national-wide argumentations in Turkey. His books are in Turkish, but he has also articles in English. Moreover, he is the first council in very credible official foundation of Republic in Turkey, Ataturk Highest Institution of Culture,Language and History, called AYK in abbreviation. He is the vice-president of Gumushane University and the dean of the faculty of Communication Sciences there.
I wrote an article about him including all points above,(the ones proper for viki), gave bibliography and sources in proper format, even I added links of internet news from credible sites about his populer studies. But the members of abusement, our viki "elites", erased the page, with the code of M6. They said, the professor is not worth of being in wikipedia. I tried to tell the truth in discussion page, also I sent messages to all the active users in charge. But instead of concerning the article in a proper way, they voted for it quickly in their narrow community, and erased it without reading or considering my last corrections. Everything was happened in period less than 36 hours. Not five days. Now, they erased even my polite objections to defense the value of the article. This is basically, the clearing of the proofs about their guilty-crime against wiki criterias.
Second case is the Şafak Yayla. Yayal was a member of DHKP-C, an absolutely terrorist organization, which is in terror list of US, UK, EU and Turkey. Yayla was an "armed" activist, and the murderer of the public prosecuter who was first hostaged by Yayla, with armed thread. Criminal reports said that the primer cause killed the prosecuter were the bullets from the pistol of Yayla and his partner in the action.
Can you think that such an activist, who was a member of a terrorist organization, was a terrorist? If not, who can be called as terrorist on earth? Do you say Baghdadi was not terrorist but president of his self-declared state? But our Turkish elite members doesnt allow to call Yayla as terrorist. In fact, I didnt attempt to call him terrorist, bu only objected to call him, as "proleteriat revolutuanist" and "activist". In case of it, I edited the article with saying that, DHKP-C is an internationally and officially recognized terrorist organization and Yayla was the member of it, still without calling him directly as terrorist. Within my statements, I gave a link to DHKP-C vikipedia article, which declares the organization's official terrorist situation -an old article, wrote before these self-evident elites-. However, they erased my corrections. And clearly I explained the reasons and benefits of my attempt, both in community dashboard of the case and in explanations of my writings.
Still the article, nor erased neither corrected. They struggled to keep it in the way they made. They erased all the points I collected from my contributions. And they attacked, with the accusation of not abiding the wiki rules. However, clearly I abide the rules, but they dont. The ones who are expected to protect, abuses and violating wiki criterias, to gain power, and to use this power.
Please help us, You may not of course, but if you dont help, whole viki of a country will be forever opressed, by scoundrels
PLEASE HELP US. Just examine the issue, I trust you will decide rightly.
I am afraid, RFC may not be useful to explain the real situtation. Becuse, there is a probability that the people which mistread, will be judgers again, for the same issue. But if you dont make something, viki of a country of 70 million people, wil never be developed.
Pages in Turkish viki are considered as a space of power struggle and of political propaganda, by the members who must be responsible for protecting our wiki ideals.
The issue is general, which is valid for all Turkish members with some authorization, to erase, to edit or to ban. So, you should revise their personal situations as a whole. The authorized active members in Turkish viki are few in number, and they aim to maintain this situation, so, to stay as an elite ruling Turkish viki.
The charged users of Turkish viki, who gained eligibility over other users and content, systematically apply cencorship, opression and harrassment over the regular users and contributed contents from regular users. They systemically impede corrections and editing approaches, especially for protecting articles which they constructed for propaganda purposes. However, obstraction and cencorship are general rules, to protect their power-positions, to protect their biased policy and to conceal their unfaithfulness against wiki criterias. Also, they systematically hinder the opening of new pages. So, there is a serious barrier, against newcomers for collecting points and gaining access for eligibilities.
The opression is unbearable especially in case of the pages about the ciritical-Islamist philosophers and writers. However, in general, this negative attribute is against all Turkish academicians and university members. Turkish viki seems declared a war against Turkish universities and scientists.
The abuse of authority and abuse of delegation rights, among Turkish users-in-charge or gate-keepers, are hard to be explained. However, international stewarts and wiki bureaucrats can assess the situtation very clearly, if they examine two recent examples which I give below.
First, the case about Prof.Dr Celalettin Vatandas. Vatandas is a sociologist and the writer of twelve books about the early-history of Islam, the historical problems of Muslim communities, post-colonial studies, and problems caused by modernity processes in eastern nations.Also, he has books about multi-culturalism and late-modernity problems in all nations of the world. All of the books are still in circulation and publication reports say, these are good sellers in their own category. His massive study about the world-cognition of Turkish youth ( The youth in Turkey) gives way to national-wide argumentations in Turkey. His books are in Turkish, but he has also articles in English. Moreover, he is the first council in very credible official foundation of Republic in Turkey, Ataturk Highest Institution of Culture,Language and History, called AYK in abbreviation. He is the vice-president of Gumushane University and the dean of the faculty of Communication Sciences there.
I wrote an article about him including all points above,(the ones proper for viki), gave bibliography and sources in proper format, even I added links of internet news from credible sites about his populer studies. But the members of abusement, our viki "elites", erased the page, with the code of M6. They said, the professor is not worth of being in wikipedia. I tried to tell the truth in discussion page, also I sent messages to all the active users in charge. But instead of concerning the article in a proper way, they voted for it quickly in their narrow community, and erased it without reading or considering my last corrections. Everything was happened in period less than 36 hours. Not five days. Now, they erased even my polite objections to defense the value of the article. This is basically, the clearing of the proofs about their guilty-crime against wiki criterias.
Second case is the Şafak Yayla. Yayal was a member of DHKP-C, an absolutely terrorist organization, which is in terror list of US, UK, EU and Turkey. Yayla was an "armed" activist, and the murderer of the public prosecuter who was first hostaged by Yayla, with armed thread. Criminal reports said that the primer cause killed the prosecuter were the bullets from the pistol of Yayla and his partner in the action.
Can you think that such an activist, who was a member of a terrorist organization, was a terrorist? If not, who can be called as terrorist on earth? Do you say Baghdadi was not terrorist but president of his self-declared state? But our Turkish elite members doesnt allow to call Yayla as terrorist. In fact, I didnt attempt to call him terrorist, bu only objected to call him, as "proleteriat revolutuanist" and "activist". In case of it, I edited the article with saying that, DHKP-C is an internationally and officially recognized terrorist organization and Yayla was the member of it, still without calling him directly as terrorist. Within my statements, I gave a link to DHKP-C vikipedia article, which declares the organization's official terrorist situation -an old article, wrote before these self-evident elites-. However, they erased my corrections. And clearly I explained the reasons and benefits of my attempt, both in community dashboard of the case and in explanations of my writings.
Still the article, nor erased neither corrected. They struggled to keep it in the way they made. They erased all the points I collected from my contributions. And they attacked, with the accusation of not abiding the wiki rules. However, clearly I abide the rules, but they dont. The ones who are expected to protect, abuses and violating wiki criterias, to gain power, and to use this power.
Please make a judgement, and save us from these people. — The preceding unsigned comment was added by Okurogluselo (talk)
As a steward I have little or no authority to make any decisions about Turkish Wikipedia more than a general user. So making comment on my talk page is not that productive.
Turkish Wikipedia is a self-determining community. Ideally all feedback about Turkish Wikipedia would be requested to take place on that wiki, though there will be some circumstances where it needs to take place on meta. If on Meta, it should either be in the form of an RFC or though Wikimedia Forum, both avenues for general subject matters. If you are looking for larger scale discussion, then an RFC is most definitely preferred, and a pointer from the Forum to an RFC would be encouraged. — billinghurstsDrewth07:00, 29 May 2015 (UTC)
Blocage
Latest comment: 9 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Bonjour,
Je suis bloqué depuis quelques jours (et non depuis le 24 mars 2014, comme on me le dit) pour une raison que je ne comprends pas. Je ne passe par aucun proxy, je n'utilise pas Tor, je n'héberge personne, je suis un utilisateur lambda, qui se borne le plus souvent à corriger une coquille ou une faute d'orthographe, à préciser une information. Pouvez-vous me débloquer, svp? Merci.
Mon adresse IP: 178.162.216.37
début du blocage: 24 mars 2014
fin du blocage: 22 octobre 2017.
Cordialement,
J. Dr.
Désolé de passer par vous directement: je ne comprends strictement rien à la page officielle de déblocage.— The preceding unsigned comment was added by 178.162.216.37 (talk)
This is an IP range that was hard blocked by another steward due to the spam that was coming from it. I lessened the severity of the block to it requiring user to be logged into wikimedia accounts to be able to edit. If you do not have a wikimedia account, then you can create one via Special:CreateAccount. — billinghurstsDrewth14:36, 30 May 2015 (UTC)
Wikidata weekly summary #160
Latest comment: 9 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
Latest comment: 9 years ago9 comments3 people in discussion
Hello Billinghurst,
Today I tried to add articles in Urdu wikipedia but they blocked me without explaining any reason. There is a user known as USMANKHAN who repeatedly reverted my edits and then another user Obaid Raza blocked me from editing articles. He also deleted my added articles without any discussion or any pre-warnings. Kindly help me get unblocked and to be able to add articles. Here you can see that he has blocked me without explaining anything. --Khangul (talk) 18:24, 9 May 2015 (UTC)
Mr billinghurst it has been the second time that I am being blocked by the admins of urdu wikipedia without any explaination. I am trying to translate articles and publish the articles in Urdu wikipedia but they dont let me do that. Kindly help me with this issue.--Khangul (talk) 22:24, 9 May 2015 (UTC)
Hi billinghurst, thanks for asking the actual reason behind blocking. In fact user:Khangul does not know Urdu language, but he tried to write articles in urdu using pushto alphabets and wordings. some admins noticed this vandalism and asked the user to stop creating articles, but the subjected user did not notice this message. Eventually I blocked him explaining reasons in urdu language, and that's why user:usmankhan reverted his edits and user:Obaid Raza blocked him for 2 hours before me. Hope you understand our problems and issues, thanks. Muhammad Shuaib (talk) 11:39, 10 May 2015 (UTC)
@Khangul and محمد شعیب: I just want to see an end to the squabbling, and would like to see a plan to how to cooperatively edit. I know that having to talk to users takes time, and can sometimes can be painful and infuriating, but that is truly one of the responsibilities of an admin. I also see nothing on the user's talk page about stopping, and would hope that urWP community could look to ensure that you do communicate on user talk pages AND that they do not block user talk page access unless totally necessary. Blocks are the lazy and dismissive way to handle things, and should be used as a last resort, where people can be editing in good faith.
@Billinghurst and محمد شعیب: Mr. Muhammad Shuaib the information you have posted here about me is totally wrong. I can speak, read and write Urdu. Most of the Afghanis can speak and read and write Urdu langauge since they have lived many years in Pakistan as refugees. Vandalism is not defined as adding articles in wikis. It is a process of spreading misinformation or deleting content of articles. I to add to the information regarding Afghan writers, but every article I have added was deleted for unknown reason. They also blocked the access to my talk page or their talk page so that I could discuss and refer to the problem locally. I had to come here to meta and write here to billinghurst. Mr. Shuaib you claim that i didnt notice the message, kindly put a link of the message that you have posted to me before imposing a ban on me. If you dont show the proof then it means that its just a lie. Mr Usman khan reverted every message and its content because he is doing rivalry without any reason. He has already come up with false claims about me to billinghurst and other stewards and they removed mine and other admins rights from Pashto wiki. Even in Pashto wiki whenever I write something he show up for no reason and try to oppose any suggestion i give him.--Khangul (talk) 17:33, 12 May 2015 (UTC)
@Khangul: Local administrators act on urWP, it is not for me to individually override their actions. Your place for conversation is w:ur:User talk:Khangul. As I understand it, you were blocked for three days, and by my calculation that block will now have expired, and you should be able to edit. — billinghurstsDrewth01:47, 13 May 2015 (UTC)
@Billinghurst: I do not understand the two standards here among the Stewards. When it was Pashto Wikipedia local issue, you were actively involved. And I think it was you who made the decision to remove all the admins from their rights but when its again the same blocking case in some other wiki, you have written me that Local administrators act on urWP, it is not for me to individually override their actions. I dont understand this. Please elaborate. --Khangul (talk) 19:38, 3 June 2015 (UTC)
emoji filter
Latest comment: 9 years ago4 comments2 people in discussion
It looks like the emoji filter is pretty much 100% vandalism at this point. Do you think it would make sense to switch it to actually prevent the edits (instead of just warning and logging)? Kaldari (talk) 18:44, 27 May 2015 (UTC)
It isn't 100% vandalism, there has been appropriate use on some wikis, especially Wikidata. Communities have been doing a great job following up. Now if we could identify the addition of emojis from mobile apps, that might be a great fork to follow for blocking, though again WD would be an interest to monitor first. — billinghurstsDrewth23:30, 27 May 2015 (UTC)
Thanks for staying on top of it. BTW, it looks like the phone symbol ☎ (U+260E) is commonly used on English Wikivoyage (see the 'Do' template for example), so we may need to make that character an exception as well. Kaldari (talk) 23:52, 2 June 2015 (UTC)
The light dawns, I see that the emoji declaration is a regex, I have made that exclusion emoji := "[🌀-🙏🚀-🛳☀-☄☇-♬♰-✒✙-➿☎]". Thanks to the pointers Kaldari. — billinghurstsDrewth15:09, 3 June 2015 (UTC)
AbuseFilter change
Latest comment: 9 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion
Hey Billinghurst, as an AbuseFilter power-user I was wondering if you have any thoughts or concerns about a patch I wrote to fix the long-standing AntiSpoof/AbuseFilter bug T29987. I know most of the AbuseFilter users are used to this bug and it will take some adjustment if the fix is merged. Do you think it would be super disruptive or do you think users would be able to adjust to it without too much difficulty? Kaldari (talk) 17:37, 5 June 2015 (UTC)
I would hardly call myself a power user, just a persistent copier with global access and tenacity to lessen the crap and the abuse of system. I will presume that you have seen my comment on the bug, and I think that if we are correcting errors and making things easier to write quality filters that we can all put up with fixing workarounds. Thanks for your efforts and the pointer. — billinghurstsDrewth01:40, 6 June 2015 (UTC)
Wikidata weekly summary #161
Latest comment: 9 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
Wikidata has passed German Wikipedia in number of items with images (743850 dewp articles vs. 804885 items) - now only second to English-language Wikipedia.
Catalan Wikipedia is moving Taxon IDs to Wikidata.
Zolo did a comparison of English/French/German/Chinese and Cebuano Wikipedias in terms of main types of articles. Biographies were compared by period, nationality and occupation.
Italian Wikipedia and all remaining Wikisource projects now have arbitrary access. The rollout will continue. The schedule for the next projects is at d:Wikidata:Arbitrary access.
The Content Translation tool now automatically connects translated articles to Wikidata. (Thanks Content Translation developers!) Previously translated but unconnected articles have been connected by a bot. (Thanks Amir!)
Code review of the extensions written by a team of students to improve the constraint reports and make it possible to automatically check our data against other databases. A first version will go live soon pending further codereview and fixes.
Latest comment: 9 years ago4 comments2 people in discussion
Hello Billinghurst, my name is Sarvaturi, my Global account is Sarvaturi, and my Home wiki is scn.wiktionary.org (Sicilian Wiktionary). I wrote a message here because a maintenance bot changed my Meta userpage from Sarvaturi to Sarvaturi~metawiki but I don't like this. Please I would like to have the userpage Sarvaturi~metawiki (with my corresponding contributions) renamed into Sarvaturi (or moved to my Sarvaturi userpage). Best regards and I hope you have a good day. --Sarvaturi (talk) 06:50, 8 June 2015 (UTC)
Ok, I thank you for your answer. Yes I have done a renaming request (merge request) too in the page SRUC you have shown me. Good day. :) --Sarvaturi (talk) 07:04, 8 June 2015 (UTC)
An apology from Willy on Wheels to WMF stewards
Latest comment: 9 years ago4 comments2 people in discussion
I would like to apologise to the stewards and wikipedia admins for my page-moves that was seen 2005-2008. I can tell you though, there were a lot of impostors, particularly some user called Sunholm, who is not me, but a wannabe (and a role account per their own confession on en.wiki)!).
Either way, I want to edit constructively on WMF projects. I've been doing so on non-WMF projects as it is; in any case, a mirror of Wikipedia with copies of articles like en:w:Mexican Canadian etc.
not up to me, as an individual, but to the community. You have no global ban so I don't see that you are necessarily restricted. — billinghurstsDrewth22:23, 8 June 2015 (UTC)
Well, if Meta would like to open a Request for comment on me, Willy on Wheels (who has been blocked numerous times, but not every on wheels account was mine), then please, feel free, open this to the wider community. It makes no sense for me to open an RfC on myself, does it?
I would do page moves here, but only requested moves, and certainly not moving pages "on wheels" again.
To expect anyone to lift a finger for you seems an interesting concept. I am sure others will see this conversation and work out if they want to do anything, I cannot say that it is where I am wishing to put my efforts at this time. Best of luck. You may consider whether you wish to email emWP's ArbCom and prostrate yourself before them with a humble apology. — billinghurstsDrewth03:58, 9 June 2015 (UTC)
Request for help
Latest comment: 9 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion
Edit action hits which are only flagged or tagged by a filter (but without warn or disallow) are usually (technically) are supposed to get saved. But prima facia we are coming across instances where in few such edits are not getting saved.
Why I am trying to find out :
If the 'edit filter extension' counts, 'user edit actions preceding of pressing save buttons (actions like preview action), then there remains a chance of Edit filters based on number of user edit actions or filters with rate limit may malfunction ocasionally.(nl wikipedia and mr wikipedia have reported some bugs as some edit filters may not be functioning as expected in this respect)
At en wikipedia:
I have listed few such likely instance at Wikipedia:Edit_filter/False_positives/Reports#Study_of_hits_and_false_positives. I need your support in administrative preview of listed instances to confirm that if any blacklisting or any other action might have stopped those edit actions from getting saved. If not then those can be usefull for further technical/bug study
If I can get your support then I can dig further to list more such instances at en wikipedia, and bring doubtfull hits to technical discussion and report at respective bugs wherever necessary. Secondly, I would likely to know, If you are aware of any discussion has already taken place at en wikipedia about above mentioned aspects.
None of this is known to me "off the top of my head" and would involve me having to research, for which I don't currently have the availability. You maybe able to get answers from Glaisher or Hoo man who are more aware of the code. — billinghurstsDrewth03:54, 11 June 2015 (UTC)
Badges
Latest comment: 9 years ago79 comments4 people in discussion
Extended content
Link GA has 73 entries, Link FA has 107 entries, Link FL has 9 entries. Many of them have been tagged for speedy deletion for more than a week. Me and Ladsgroup left messages to talk page offering to orphan the templates if asked. ptwiki wasnt to keep it for a long more. Two more wikis kept the templates for "historical reasons". I wonder what else to be done to reduce the numbers even more. -- Magioladitis (talk) 23:04, 2 April 2015 (UTC)
Small wikis we know that it is due to not watching, big wikis can be due to process or their choice. For big wikis you will probably be best to ping local WD users active at those wikis to prosecute the case. — billinghurstsDrewth00:04, 3 April 2015 (UTC)
Make a further check in Link GA list for more templates that could be deleted or tagged for deletion if you have some spare time. -- Magioladitis (talk) 23:57, 22 April 2015 (UTC)
4 wikis restored the deleted templates because there were some more transclusions left out. Check [3]. I removed most of the links and asked Ladsgroup to do the fy.wiki part. Can you please investigate further and judge if can re-delete them? Thanks, Magioladitis (talk) 20:20, 10 May 2015 (UTC)
Please delete those 8 too. We have not seen them before because they were never connected with interwikis. [4]. And those 3 with Link GA [5]. I 've taken care of everything as it comes to links. -- Magioladitis (talk) 13:47, 11 May 2015 (UTC)
presuming that the functionality has been migrated to WD, then they can go through the standard deletion request cycle. My quick look shows small wikis that presumably have just copied the WPs. — billinghurstsDrewth14:38, 24 May 2015 (UTC)
I work with Ladsgroup to find all the unattached Wikipedias and those that delete the template without removing the tranclusions. There are quite a lot. -- Magioladitis (talk) 18:30, 24 May 2015 (UTC)
Hmm, there is a bit to dig through. I can delete nominated templates, but not unnominated as some communities wish to retain, for whatever reasons. I have done a couple, but need them otherwise nominated to give communities their opportunities. — billinghurstsDrewth14:38, 25 May 2015 (UTC)
None of the administrators there seems active right now, so I thought I'd contact you and mention a couple of things that I did, so you can make sure I did them correctly. (I'm contacting you because you appeared active there recently on some administrative actions.)
At lad:Vikipedya:Administradores, the page hadn't been edited in nearly two years. The current list of administrators I got from SpecialPages was down to 3 (4, actually, but two seem to belong to the same account). So I moved all others to the section of former Administrators. I also renamed one administrator on the page, because he has long used the new name, and the old name is now just a redirect.
Thanks. (Wasn't happy to write the explanatory notes in English, but I don't speak Ladino [I read it a little] and had no other choice.) StevenJ81 (talk) 15:36, 11 June 2015 (UTC)
Wikidata weekly summary #162
Latest comment: 9 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
A challenge was raised to calculate the degrees of separation to Kevin Bacon. Already one routine has been produced, the next step is to use live data so that we can work on reducing the number of intermediary steps.
Deployed arbitrary access on all Wikivoyage and Wikiquote projects and announced the next ones. See d:Wikidata:Arbitrary access for more.
More fine tuning on entity usage tracking (relevant for arbitrary access)
Fixed bug that sometimes allowed multiple properties to have the same label in a given language (phabricator:T102148)
More work on automatically creating redirects when merging items
More code review of the Wikidata Quality extensions (improved constraint reports and checks against 3rd party databases). Starting to look good for a first deployment.
The sitelinks heading hierarchy changed and includes a “Site links” heading now that is only shown on mobile. This is a DOM change needed to make Wikidata work better on mobile.
Started working on having PHPCS coverage for the major Wikibase.git code base to find small code issues more easily
Prepared Wikibase.git for the DataModel 3.0 switch
Released Wikibase DataModel Serialization 1.4
Released Wikibase Internal Serialization 1.4
New releases of several DataValue components, including DataValues Number 0.5, DataValues JavaScript 0.7 and ValueView 0.14.5
Latest comment: 9 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
Discussions
German language Wikipedia closed its RfC on usage of Wikidata data. As a result Wikidata data can be used on the project as long as it happens through a template and it has a non-Wikimedia reference.
Events/Blogs/Press
Past: Office hour on IRC. We talked about cool things that happened around Wikidata over the past 3 months got an update on upcoming developments and Freebase and more. You can read the log.
Fixed an issue where you'd sometimes select the wrong value when entering a statement unintentionally (phabricator:T98471)
Switched the whole code base to make use of DataModel 3.0
The concept of “claims” no longer exists in Wikibase, as all places in the software work with statements. We are making this more and more explicit in the code.
More work on getting the Wikibase Quality extensions ready for deployment. They'll improve constraint checking and provide checks against 3rd party databases.
Special:UnconnectedPages had to be reworked (thanks Amir!) because of huge performance issues. Because of this it loses some functionality (being able to specify where the list starts and limiting the list to pages that have local interwiki links). We're working on bringing functionality back without the performance penalty.
Enabled arbitrary access on arwiki, cawiki, eswiki, huwiki, kowiki, rowiki, ukwiki, viwiki, and usage tracking on dewiki, ruwiki, cswiki and all s3 wikis. (ruwiki and cswiki get arbitrary access on June 23)
Finishing work on improved handling “invalid” values and statements with deleted properties.
Small breaking DOM change: Wikibase no longer adds its own h1 tag but uses MediaWiki's default .firstHeading element. (phabricator:T93534)
Upcoming: Wikimania. There will be several talks and workshops related to Wikidata. Say hi at the "Ask Us Anything" session for Wikidata if you're there.
Machine readable versions (in various formats) of Wikibase entities will be advertised in their page heads as alternate link. (phabricator:T96298)
Fixed property label on item pages not scrolling anymore (phabricator:T94588)
More work on getting the Wikibase Quality extensions ready for release. The part doing constraint violation checks should go to test.wikidata.org next week. The part doing checks against 3rd party databases will still take a bit longer but is also shaping up nicely.
Made it possible to create items even when another user is mass-creating items (phabricator:T103796)
Bene* worked more on making Wikidata work nicely on mobile
Fixed weird issue with cursor jumping around in sitelink input field (phabricator:T103489)
Fixed an issue where it was not possible to edit a statement after you removed its only reference (phabricator:T103603)
Lydia will be traveling for much of July. Expect her to be a bit less responsive during that time.
Latest comment: 9 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion
Dear Billinghurst:
As I mentioned above, I am trying to contribute to the Ladino (Djudeo-Espanyol) Wikipedia. As you saw when I was here before, it's a pretty quiet wiki. Over the course of the last month or so, I have tried to reach two out of the three administrators there. I have had no responses whatsoever. I have also tried to get some attention in the local lad:Vikipedya:Kafe. Unfortunately, that page is broken up into several subpages, and none of them really seem active. So I don't really even know where to go to try to get consensus, whatever that may mean in a small wiki like that.
Accordingly, I wanted to get your feedback about doing a few things. A couple of them actually require administrator rights. Other changes I am thinking of can be accomplished without that, but normally I would want to gain consensus first.
Requiring administrator rights
There are several different ways to spell Ladino, and each at least has a template that appears on the home page. Simply put, I would like to add the date on the Hebrew calendar to the secular date on these templates. I consider that to be appropriate, in that (a) Ladino is a Jewish language, and (b) both Hebrew Wikipedia and Yiddish Wikipedia refer to the Hebrew calendar date and the secular date on their home pages. I copy-pasted two of the five templates at lad:Usador:StevenJ81/sandbox so you can see my intention.
I do intend to change the hyperlinks, because I just don't expect "day" articles, or even "month" articles, to be written very soon there (concerning either calendar). I thought I would simply link to "Gregorian calendar" and "Hebrew calendar" respectively.
The question of how I would spell the months in each place is addressed below.
These require administrator rights because as main-page templates, they are protected. If you went and unprotected (or semi-protected) them for a day, I could take care of this. I would inform you as soon as I finish.
Not requiring administrator rights, just consensus
Separately, I hoped to import a Gregorian-Hebrew calendar template I have been working on elsewhere. (See en:Template:Today/CE/AM and its interwiki links. I didn't create it myself, but I have ported it from enwiki to simplewiki, hewiki, yiwiki, lawiki and frwiki.) One problem was that as I found things a few days ago, the transliterations for the Hebrew months had not been localized for ladwiki. I boldly made a couple of obvious changes (at translatewiki), and the transliterations there now are reasonable. See my sandbox for where things are now.
The truth is that I am not sure myself where to find absolutely definitive spellings for these (or Gregorian months) according to all four Latin-alphabet spelling schemes; in any event, though, I doubt they would vary all that greatly. I got the idea, though, to look at the Serbo-Croatian Wikipedia to see how they handled a dual-alphabet situation. I saw there that they simply put them both together, side by side with a slash in between. So I'd like to do that at the Ladino Wikipedia. I'd be very surprised if it breaks anything, and it would provide both a Latin alphabet version (more common these days) and a Hebrew alphabet version (more definitive, actually). I know how to do that at translatewiki, but just wanted to make sure you didn't think that was rash.
Sidebar: I have to go back to Serbo-Croatian and change the Hebrew months to dual-alphabet, consistent with the secular months and days of the week. I can use what is there—Latin alphabet—and what is on the Serbian Wikipedia—Cyrillic alphabet—as definitive guides. I'm willing to be bold about that.
Two other things, possibly requiring phabricator tickets?
There are two other things I'd ask your advice on, but wonder if they actually need to go to the coders:
If you set your language preference on any site to he or yi, then go to the place where you can choose a default time-and-date style, you are actually given a choice of the Hebrew calendar date as one of the options. If you set your language preference to lad, not only do you not get that, but you get none of the other, standard choices? Why?
There are pages in ladwiki in the Latin alphabet, and pages in the Hebrew alphabet. But if you look at the pages in the Hebrew alphabet (like lad:אלזס), you'll see that most of them nevertheless left-align, rather than right-align. Is there a way for pages in the Hebrew alphabet to right-align automatically? (I could do subst:-able templates to do what someone did on lad:אסטרונומייה, but better if the server can do it automatically.)
@StevenJ81: I know zero about the specifics about ladWP and the language lad, so I feel really uncomfortable having an opinion about specific matters. @MF-Warburg: who is more language astute and better in these areas.
If there are matters that require immediate admin changes, then the place to request those is Steward requests/Miscellaneous and the GS/Stewards will handle it there. For discussion of admin rights, if there is no specific page at ladWP, then utilise lad:Vikipedya:Kafe for any conversation, and in the end consensus in small wikis means that no one says "no" for a reasonable reason.
Upcoming: Wikimania. There will be several talks and workshops related to Wikidata. Say hi at the "Ask Us Anything" session for Wikidata if you're there.
Other Noteworthy Stuff
A new database report lists people categorized as dead in Wikipedia, but lacking Property:P570 (date of death). It's updated several times during the day. There are about 20 to 30 new entries each day. There is currently some backlog from the Arabic, Marathi, and Thai Wikipedias. Items updated first in Wikidata wont appear in the report. They are listed directly in Wikidata's recent deaths report.
Latest comment: 9 years ago5 comments2 people in discussion
Request help or forward me to someone who could help in creating an edit filter that disallows repeated characters and other vandalism on edit summaries for Ilokano Wikipedia. Thanks. --Lam-ang (talk) 13:54, 5 July 2015 (UTC)
I did look at the edit filters at enWP (and other big Wikipedias) but the ones that disallows vandalism for edit summary are mostly private so I have no access. I did implement a filter for repeated characters but does not seem to work on summaries. --Lam-ang (talk) 14:50, 6 July 2015 (UTC)
@Lam-ang: On the big wikis, just ask. They are private filters to hide them from the spammers/abusers, I would expect that they will be freely shared. If you see some that you like by name, please let me know which and I will export them from whichever wiki to iloWP. Re edit summaries, it should work the same as "added_lines", etc., just use the parameter "summary". — billinghurstsDrewth13:10, 7 July 2015 (UTC)
Latest comment: 9 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Dear Bilinghurst, I've seen you responded to a request about removing syria direct.org from the blacklist. Or to be more precise. You said, syria direct will be allowed. Could you please help me, because I would like to use sources from this site in various Hungarian articles. Could you please answer in my Talk page in English Wikipedia?
Ksanyi (talk) 19:28, 8 July 2015 (UTC)
Wikidata weekly summary #166
Latest comment: 9 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
Latest comment: 9 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Hi! I found your user page on the Hungarian Wikibooks, which contains only a soft redirect here (to user page). Shall I delete it, so that your Meta user page appears directly there? --Tacsipacsi (talk) 13:51, 13 July 2015 (UTC)
@Tacsipacsi: If you wish, I have been disposing of them as I pass through wikis on anti-spam or steward tasks. Obviously you have no issues that bring me over. :-)
Link AA
Latest comment: 9 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion
Latest comment: 9 years ago10 comments3 people in discussion
Hello
I'm test admin of luri lrc wikipedia and I can't protect the main page and other page of this wiki please help me.lrc lori (talk) 09:39, 18 July 2015 (UTC)
so thanks
please protect these templates [7] and [8] sorry for this request thise page and templates are in first page and other edite them we need to protect them agaist the unsuitable edites.
lrc lori (talk) 13:05, 18 July 2015 (UTC)
could you please protect these pages and templates that only test admin of luri lrc can edite them? please I'm so sorry.lrc lori (talk) 13:20, 18 July 2015 (UTC)
could you please protect this template[9] even luri useres as like as I can't edite that? and no one even luri wikipedia useres can't edite that template please some useres that they are'nt lur edite this template and they are from fa.wikipedia.org please help us please protect this template for always I and other luri wikipea useres ask you please.lrc lori (talk) 01:02, 20 July 2015 (UTC)
For your information he keeps putting "Central Luri" on the main page, while the wiki meant for "Northern Luri" and he need to stop this behavior. Mjbmr (discussion • contribs) 08:31, 20 July 2015 (UTC)
Attending Wikimania 2015 in Mexico City right now, meeting awesome people that already use or want to know everything about Wikidata.
After the next deployment, redirects will be automatically created when merging items.
Special:UnconnectedPages can now be queried via the query API, thanks to Ladsgroup.
Migrating away from an older serializer to the DataModel Serialization component.
Worked on a new time parser that can parse formats like M/D/Y, Y M D and so on.
Fixed a bug where a value could not be edited when save failed.
Made the snak type, badge and rank selectors position themselves after resizing the browser window and introduced a possibility to collapse the sitelinks sections.
Worked on a change in editing to be able to edit a statement and it’s references in one step.
Or am I wrong and does this 2001:41D0:70::/32 block only affects the 2001:41D0:70::/44 range and not the 2001:41D0::/40 range? Trijnsteltalk22:38, 23 July 2015 (UTC)
@Trijnstel: I was simply softening a hard block that Vito had added and it would appear that the softening resets the base IP from the one that was originally assigned (this really screws up the clarity of the block history and makes them hard to find when the base IP is not specified.) Anyway, I have just removed it as there is a hotchpotch of blocks through that range and it is not worth wasting more time on the issue. — billinghurstsDrewth01:32, 24 July 2015 (UTC)
Latest comment: 9 years ago4 comments1 person in discussion
hi Billinghurst i prepared the basilica cistern page in wikipedi simple english and i wrote my reference. please don't delete it and remove my blog from spam list. the website is newplacetravel.blogspot.com. — The preceding unsigned comment was added by Haruneme (talk)
@Haruneme: I have a better idea, STOP ADDING YOUR BLOG. Wikipedia is an encyclopaedia, your links do not equate to authoritative information, and links to your site will be removed. If you continue to add your links, your site will be blacklisted. This has been explained, and this is the last time that I will convey this message. — billinghurstsDrewth14:11, 27 July 2015 (UTC)
i will add topics on Wikipedia about places why don't i add links? Okay i read the rules of adding links please don't delete them okay? — The preceding unsigned comment was added by 92.44.210.90 (talk)
You are not listening. The Wikipedias are encyclopaedias, not directories of links. Your blogs are not, and will not be, authoritative, and the links to them WILL be removed. Stop adding them. — billinghurstsDrewth15:27, 27 July 2015 (UTC)
look the pages was prepared by me why do you change them? i am writing a things i share them on wikipedi and i add links. I understand you but don't touch pages that added by me?— The preceding unsigned comment was added by Haruneme (talk)
I don't change the text that you add, I remove links that you add that point to your site that is unauthorative, unreferenced, and a conflict of interest. I will continue to remove the links to your site if you add them again. — billinghurstsDrewth15:39, 27 July 2015 (UTC)
why do you remove the links? i prepared the page according to the blog. at that time i will delete the informations that i added to Wikipedi
I have explained why I remove the links. If you delete the information so be it, though that would make it clear that you are not here to build an encyclopaedia with no conflict of interest. — billinghurstsDrewth15:56, 27 July 2015 (UTC)
Request for support
Latest comment: 9 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Latest comment: 9 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion
Wikipedia article on St. Joseph's school, Darjeeling reads like an advert, usage of over the top grandiloquent language. Revise is necessary.— The preceding unsigned comment was added by 155.94.198.249 (talk) 06:52, 31 July 2015 (UTC)
I am not sure which language wiki to which you are referring, though please feel free to edit it to make it suitable for that wiki. — billinghurstsDrewth07:40, 31 July 2015 (UTC)
Wikidata weekly summary #169
Latest comment: 9 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
Latest comment: 9 years ago9 comments2 people in discussion
I know that this particular site is not well liked among some people on the projects and for good reason but every once in a while they do hit the nail on the head. This topic outlines precisely why we should be skeptical of decisions on Wikipedia from Checkusers who base their decisions not on evidence but solely on their "experience" and gut instincts when there is no actual proof. This topic is particularly striking given the recent discussion about EChastain who was also banned on ENWP and accused not once but twice of being a sock of a banned editor and then had that ban extended to commons. Aside from that, given that you spoke up on the EChastain issue, I thought you would be interested in seeing this incident on ENWP. It also helps to clarify why I am so untrusting of the admins and checkuser's non data based decisions. Reguyla (talk) 17:17, 3 August 2015 (UTC)
@Reguyla: We have systems and review, and people operating in public view. A mistake was made and being rectified, with acknowledgement … I think that what happens at enWP is sometimes less than perfect (users/admins/checkusers/arbcom), however, in the combative environment where people avoid blocks, and we have suspicions, accusations, and demands for actions, that sometimes these things will happen. I am more impressed that mistakes were admitted and rectified and hopefully lessons learnt.
I keep myself well outside of the politics of that place, and out of "MyShitDdoesntStink"ocracy, I have a preference to edit and achieve, not to piss around on the games that some wish to play, that isn't why I am here … I will give all people a fair chance, but I hope that they don't expect two or more fair chances. <shrug> — billinghurstsDrewth09:18, 6 August 2015 (UTC)
I agree, that's really not why I edit either I just see how lousy of a job some do as admins on ENWP and are allowed to manipulate the system and cause the editing environment to be so bad through their bullying and abusive behavior and I feel compelled to do something. Since I wasn't an admin when doing it, I was perceived as a threat and banned. If the processes for dealing with the admin abuse and bullying editors was better then I wouldn't have been banned and a whole lot more people would be editing that project still that have been run off. So I disagree with your sentiments somewhat that there are working processes there. Sure sometimes they get one right, but before they do, as can be seen by the case in point, a lot goes wrong first. I bring that case up because I feel that the EChastain failure was very similar in nature. It was never actually proven that EChastain was Matisse (it may be but there was no proof). It was a couple admins guessing and obviously their guesses aren't always right. I find it absurd that Commons would block an editor with 50, 000 edits based on an decision from ENWP that was done without any proof. I am even more appalled that so many admins and editors on commons simply lined up to agree without even bothering to look at any of the details or evidence of the case. And we wonder why people don't like editing the WMF projects? That is why! Reguyla (talk) 21:18, 6 August 2015 (UTC)
@Reguyla:, outside of emergency actions, I find it unusual that a person with 50k edits can be blocked by one admin without any due process, as that sits roughly with my principles around natural justice and a 'fair go'. So philosophically you will not find me in disagreement, without touching on the specifics of any case. To me the opinion of the community should always be predominant, and be sought, whether it aligns with my own point of view or not. Justice needs to be seen to be done to be accepted, and barring exceptional circumstances, it should be the demonstrated norm. In the end all advanced rights holders only represent the community, and only have rights to do something, it is an election to role of leadership, not an election of a leader. Anyway, my 20c viewpoint is possibly of little value, compared with how I try to implement my beliefs of a 'fair go'. — billinghurstsDrewth23:23, 6 August 2015 (UTC)
I understand and it certainly appeared as though you were not in the ban them without evidence camp either. Unfortunately, the reason why many of the projects are in the state that they are, which is that a few very vocal and abusive admins rule over all, is because no one is willing to stand up to them and those that do are banned like I was to silence their dissent and win the disagreement. MY fear is that until the WMF starts to step in and reign in some of those problematic individuals with the same enthusiasm they have for usurping the community in other ways, the problems are only going to get worse. Anyway, no need to beat a deceased equine, the damage has already been done. Reguyla (talk) 17:45, 7 August 2015 (UTC)
Made some small changes to the style of the edit warning and sitelinks so they are easier to notice and understand
Added error messages for Special:GoToLinkedPage and Special:ItemByTitle so you get a useful message in case no result is found
The Entity Selector now displays alias in brackets behind label
The number of entities loaded via the {{#property:…}} parser function and via Lua will be reported in the “Parser profiling data” (which can be found below a page preview or within the Html of a page)
Prepared for next rounds of arbitrary access rollout
Investigated growing lag of dispatching of changes to Wikipedia and co. We'll need to investigate further and change things so the lag between an edit on Wikidata and it being send to the Wikipedias and other projects is not too high.
Added the property ID to Special:ListProperties
Moved two extensions (Wikidata.org and WikimediaBadges) from Github to Gerrit. More will follow.
Latest comment: 9 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion
Dear Mardetanha, I have a question: can be such a thing, that in other project, for example Armenian Wikibooks, admin elects without voting, for "clean up" this project. --Vadgt (talk) 14:33, 10 August 2015 (UTC)
Latest comment: 9 years ago6 comments3 people in discussion
hmm, so the fact that the timeframe is same, and the new block is for unlogged only does not resolve this? I've assumed it would... Pundit (talk) 12:50, 5 August 2015 (UTC)
@Pundit: I wasn't commenting on the purpose of the wider block, I was just saying that it was still in place, so still in effect, and therefore overriding and nullifying your smaller, lighter block. — billinghurstsDrewth09:03, 6 August 2015 (UTC)
Latest comment: 9 years ago3 comments2 people in discussion
Is it possible to opt-out of this global userpage nonsense? What would happen if, say, my Meta user page were deleted? ~ DanielTom (talk) 11:04, 12 August 2015 (UTC)
At a local wiki if you do not have a local user page, then your meta page will be transcluded. So just <noinclude> your meta page, or portions of it, if you want to keep your meta page but not have it xwiki. — billinghurstsDrewth11:12, 12 August 2015 (UTC)
Latest comment: 9 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion
Run the link search on the top 40 wikis from my latest COI bot/poke will you (peakware.com)...
I'd appreciate your opinion. Cheers --Herbytalk thyme13:57, 14 August 2015 (UTC)
You have a bunch of names etc. and want to find Wikidata items with those labels/aliases? Try relabel!
SourcererBot is adding lots of references to existing statements on several thousand items.
Mix-n-Match has new catalogs including the National Library of Australia.
Deaths at Wikipedia are a series of reports comparing items at Wikidata with death-by-year-categories of Wikipedia. For the years since 2000, only about 15% of items at Wikidata lack d:Property:P570 (date of death).
Hi Billinghurst. I edited your global.js to update you to the latest version of TemplateScript. The main change you'll notice is that writing scripts is much easier thanks to a context argument passed in by TemplateScript, which encapsulates a pile of common actions. Let me know if anything breaks. :) —Pathoschild 02:59, 22 August 2015 (UTC)
Wikidata weekly summary #172
Latest comment: 9 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
Soon the edit summary for edits through the API will also contain the automatic edit summary that you are used to for edits done through the website. The summary given by the API user will be appended to the automatic summary. (phabricator:T97247)
Addressed performance issues in usage tracking updates and had to delay the latest round of rollouts because of it
Fixed a bug where suggestions would show up twice in item and property selectors (phabricator:T109697)
Improved performance of the mw.wikibase.sitelink Lua method
Made final changes so we can redirect mobile users to the mobile version by default
Evaluated the remaining steps to get the extension deployed that lets you do checks against 3rd party databases. Not much left it seems and we'll tackle that in one of the next sprints. Getting the new features deployed for the constraints checks will still take a bit longer.
More work on making the edit summaries in the watchlist on Wikipedia and co more meaningful
Optimized Wikidata for viewing on mobile devices. You will be redirected to m.wikidata.org automatically when using a mobile device soon the same way it already happens on Wikipedia. (Editing will only be possible via the special pages!)
API custom summary will no longer override the autocomment (phabricator:T97247)
Paging and sorting has been added to Special:ListProperties and it now also shows the IDs of the properties
Worked more on making the edit summaries on the client more meaningful and readable
Introduced a limit of 250 different entities that can be used on a page in the client via arbitrary access. The limit does not apply to convenience functions in lua, such as mw.wikibase.label which use a TermLookup instead of loading a full entity to get labels. (phabricator:T93885)
Latest comment: 9 years ago3 comments2 people in discussion
Thanks for adding this, but I've belatedly realised that .*Paul [A-Za-z\.\(\)\"\' ]{0,20} Easter.* is always looking for two full spaces, so wouldn't catch simple cases of "Paul Easter" with a single space! (Socks just created Paul T.T.Easters and T.T. Paul Easter (filmmaker/Producer) without a problem.) Maybe .*Paul\b[A-Za-z\.\(\)\"\' ]{0,20}\bEaster.*? --McGeddon (talk) 17:51, 8 September 2015 (UTC)
Done I will think upon it generally. This would all be better as an abuse filter, tied in with some Checkuser stuff. I will see if I can rouse someone who has more local time than me. — billinghurstsDrewth22:16, 8 September 2015 (UTC)
Stalagmites and stalactites visualizes items without statements, items with statements, and deleted/redirected items by batches of 100,000 QIDs
Mix n Match is now available for mobile, has an improved automatic matching algorithm, got speed improvements and new catalogs were added like the National Gallery of Victoria, World Heritage Sites and CulturaItalia
Matched birth and death days seeks to investigate all pairs of humans (in various subsets) that appear to have the same birth dates and death dates. De-duplication underway!
You can now use the new special page Special:PagesWithBadges to see which articles on that project have a badge like "featured article".
Release of the query service and unit support (see above)
Made quantities not show URIs when editing a value but instead show the label
Worked on new datatype for identifiers to be able to split them from the other statements in the user interface, link them without the need for the authority control gadget and be able to link them in JSON/RDF
Worked more on making the edit summaries in the watchlist on Wikipedia and co more meaningful
As you may know, the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees approved a new "Access to nonpublic information policy" on 25 April 2014 after a community consultation. The former policy has remained in place until the new policy could be implemented. That implementation work is now being done, and we are beginning the transition to the new policy.
An important part of that transition is helping volunteers like you sign the required confidentiality agreement. All Wikimedia volunteers with access to nonpublic information are required to sign this new agreement, and we have prepared some documentation to help you do so.
The Wikimedia Foundation is requiring that anyone with access to nonpublic information sign the new confidentiality agreement by 15 December 2015 (OTRS users have until 22 December 2015) to retain their access. You are receiving this email because you have access to nonpublic information and are required to sign the confidentiality agreement under the new policy.
Signing the confidentiality agreement for nonpublic information is conducted and tracked using Legalpad on Phabricator. The general confidentiality agreement is now ready, and the OTRS agreement will be ready after 22 September 2015. We have prepared a guide on Meta-Wiki to help you create your Phabricator account and sign the new agreement: Confidentiality agreement for nonpublic information/How to sign
If you have any questions or experience any problems while signing the new agreement, please visit this talk page or email me (gvarnumwikimedia.org). Again, please sign this confidentiality agreement by 15 December 2015 (OTRS users have until 22 December 2015) to retain your access to nonpublic information. If you do not wish to retain this access, please let me know and we will forward your request to the appropriate individuals.
Thank you,
Gregory Varnum (User:GVarnum-WMF), Wikimedia Foundation
Latest comment: 9 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion
My ip address is 178.62.64.106. I was blocked until twenty-twenty, but then I assume my block will continue. Who do think you are blocking me on all wikis everywhere? I demand that this be sorted out ASAP — The preceding unsigned comment was added by 178.62.64.106 (talk)
Demand? Interesting choice of works. I think that you will find that I have softened the block, not added it. It is a problematic range for Wikimedia due to its nature. Please create an account Special:CreateAccount and you should be able to edit. — billinghurstsDrewth02:55, 20 September 2015 (UTC)
Tag AWB edits
Latest comment: 9 years ago3 comments3 people in discussion
A follow-up to the Wikidata for research proposal has begun to be drafted by the University of Haifa and the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin
Community page for the new SPARQL query service, including a subpage for interesting or illustrative queries, and a board for suggestions and discussions.
Latest comment: 9 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion
Hello,
Thank you for keeping all informations regarding Host Europe up to date so far. Due to current changes we want to take the opportunity to ask you for a current update.
In fact, there is a difference between Host Europe GmbH and HEG (Host Europe Group) - it is partly mixed up in this article. This could lead to a buzz and disinformation.
Would it be an option to split the information into two separate articles (one about Host Europe GmbH and one about HEG)?
In addition we'd like to provide the readers with some deeper insights into each of the acquired brands.
In detail, one Wikipedia-page for the following brands are planned:
- domainFACTORY (https://www.df.eu/)
- Server4You (http://www.server4you.de/)
- Serverloft (http://www.serverloft.de/)
Each of the companies cares about thousands of customers and has a different focus on the market, so the public interest should be given.
In both articles (the one regarding Plusserver and the one about Host Europe) the other brands are mentioned and could be linked with their own pages, which don't exist so far.
This should provide more transparency to all readers as well.
So, how could we support you about updating this article to match Wikipedia's rules and cause a minimum of extra workload?
Please reply to: thomas.von.mengden@heg.com
Thanks in advance,
Thomas von Mengden,
Social Media Manager at
Host Europe GmbH | Host Europe Suisse AG | Server4You | Serverloft — The preceding unsigned comment was added by 87.230.108.20 (talk)
dear oh dear, @DerHexer: or anyone fro the deWP community do you wish to deal with this conflict of interest and spam-like discussion. Best I can say was that I was reverting in spam-like activity. — billinghurstsDrewth23:12, 25 September 2015 (UTC)
@DanielTom: I have edited the page in question, so at least it should not be indexed locally. If you have concerns about privacy, then I would suggest that you broach this matter with Ombudsman Commission as they have the authority to address your concerns. You could suggest a range of mitigation means from removal of sections to removal of the page. It is better that the matter is addressed to this body who have been elected by the community for specific and authoritative management of privacy issues. Any individual trying to manage this will need to provide reasoning/justification, probably on-line, and it will simply draw attention to the matter. — billinghurstsDrewth03:28, 28 September 2015 (UTC)
Global filter tagging "Japan Football edits"
Latest comment: 9 years ago4 comments2 people in discussion
Now the tag "Japan Football edits" appears in all production wikis because of Global AbuseFilter number 89. I don't think it's very nice to have this tag on Finnish Wikipedia for example only because it's coming from a global abuse filter configured here at meta. Please consider removing the tagging function. Won't a simple log entry do the trick? --Pxos (talk) 13:36, 28 September 2015 (UTC)
@Pxos: It is a reactivated filter that is clearly too broad, and getting more than the problem editor. I have removed the tagging, and I will look to fine tune the filter before turning the tagging back on. Thanks for the alert. — billinghurstsDrewth21:58, 28 September 2015 (UTC)
Thanks for these, he is such a persistent egotist. Looks like I will need to separate these vandals to different filters and stop the patching for proper filters. — billinghurstsDrewth22:02, 28 September 2015 (UTC)
Yes, I think that separated filters is the best option. Well, one title more:
Latest comment: 9 years ago2 comments1 person in discussion
Hi Billinghurst,
Can you check gadgets on wp.min? Some of the gadgets can not load because the issue of ResourceLoader although they set on
ResourceLoader like HotCat. Please help us and thanks in advance. Ę-oиė >>> ™ 13:18, 30 September 2015 (UTC)
Latest comment: 9 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Your IP address has been blocked on all wikis.
The block was made by Billinghurst (meta.wikimedia.org). The reason given is Long-term abuse.
Start of block: 12:44, 1 Oktubre 2015
Expiry of block: 12:44, 4 Oktubre 2015
Your current IP address is 95.246.187.135. Please include all above details in any queries you make (un)block for global (un)lock and (un)hiding — The preceding unsigned comment was added by 95.246.187.135 (talk)
Yes, what is your point? Is the block not long enough? I heard that you block evade anyway. Are you disputing that you are creating multiple accounts? — billinghurstsDrewth14:44, 1 October 2015 (UTC)
IP Block
Latest comment: 9 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion
I'm confused. I'm at a Baltimore address seeking to create a wikipedia account and it says the ip has been blocked because of an open proxy. I'm not sure what this means. This is an office building with media, academics, and public advocacy groups, so preventing all the people here from using Wikipedia and editing articles about their organizations from work seems to be a great hindrance to the nearly 100 employees and 6-10 organizations on this network. What is the justification specifically for blocking this IP address? I saw something about applying for an IP block exemption. What is the process for this?
Hi. The reality is that the Dec 2012 block was placed by another, and I softened it in May this year (the log that you see), following someone contacting me. From May, users were able to edit from those IP addresses. if they were logged in to a wikimedia account. I have removed the block, though as the block will have been due to excessive spambot activity, there is no guarantee that a block will not be placed in the future on part or all of the IP range, so it is recommended that editing from within an account. If you do not have an account please look at Special:CreateAccount. Thanks for contacting me. — billinghurstsDrewth01:41, 4 October 2015 (UTC)
Wikidata weekly summary #178
Latest comment: 9 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
Discussion has started on English WikiProject Football about using Wikidata for player squad templates (example) and player club history (example). Needs more input on best practices and commitment to update data.
You'll now get redirected to the mobile view automatically on mobile devices (example)
Made it possible to use more entities on a page via Lua without running into Lua's memory limit
Added the Article Placeholder extension’s results to the search result page (this is one of a few remaining blockers before we can put it on a testsystem for you to try out and give feedback)
Added option to create a new article from Article Placeholder
More work on the new datatype for properties
More work on making meaningful edit summaries on the client. Found a few remaining bugs during testing.
I wanted to follow-up on an message I sent you in September regarding the need for you to sign a confidentiality agreement by 15 December 2015 (OTRS users have until 31 December 2015) in order to maintain your access from Wikimedia to nonpublic information.
As you may know, the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees approved a new "Access to nonpublic information policy" on 25 April 2014 after a community consultation. The former policy has remained in place until the new policy could be implemented. That implementation work is now being done, and we are transitioning to the new policy.
An important part of that transition is helping volunteers like you sign the required confidentiality agreement. All Wikimedia volunteers with access to nonpublic information are required to sign this new agreement, and we have prepared some documentation to help you do so.
The Wikimedia Foundation is requiring that anyone with access to nonpublic information sign the new confidentiality agreement by 15 December 2015 (OTRS users have until 31 December 2015) to retain their access. You are receiving this message because you have access to nonpublic information and are required to sign the confidentiality agreement under the new policy. If you do not sign the new confidentiality agreement by 15 December 2015, you will lose your access to nonpublic information.
Signing the confidentiality agreement for nonpublic information is conducted and tracked using Legalpad on Phabricator. We have prepared a guide on Meta-Wiki to help you create your Phabricator account and sign the new agreement: Confidentiality agreement for nonpublic information/How to sign
If you have any questions or experience any problems while signing the new agreement, please visit this talk page or email me (gvarnumwikimedia.org). Again, please sign this confidentiality agreement by 15 December 2015 (OTRS users have until 31 December 2015) to retain your access to nonpublic information. If you do not wish to retain this access, please let me know and we will forward your request to the appropriate individuals.
Thank you,
Gregory Varnum (User:GVarnum-WMF), Wikimedia Foundation
Latest comment: 9 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Hello Billinghurst,
Please unblock me. My current IP address is 167.160.116.213, and the blocked range is 167.160.96.0/19. — The preceding unsigned comment was added by 167.160.116.213 (talk)
Blocks are placed by individuals though for the team of stewards, so all unblock requests belong at SRG. The block on the /19 is a soft block (meaning that edits can be made when a user is logged into their account.) We are unlikely to remove this block, and you would be better to create an account to edit. — billinghurstsDrewth06:30, 17 October 2015 (UTC)
Wikidata weekly summary #180
Latest comment: 9 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
Stewards are volunteers, and each will undertake checks of the steward requests pages as they are able, and those who are available will do them. Individually, we simply are unable to take and fulfil requests 24/7 due to RL, so coming to our talk pages is not particularly helpful. If you consider that something is urgent, it would be preferable to either pop into IRC via the link given at Stewards or try an avenue like Stewards' noticeboard. — billinghurstsDrewth23:36, 26 October 2015 (UTC)
Latest comment: 9 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Bonjour
Apparemment, vous m'avez bloqué sur tous les Wiki? Puis-je savoir pourquoi? Toutes les modifications que j'ai pu apporter sur des pages sont justes et vérifiables. Merci d'avance.
Hi
Apparently you've blocked me on all the Wikis' pages. May I know why? All the modifications I've made are based on real facts and easy to verify. Thanks in advance. — The preceding unsigned comment was added by Baureal (talk)
@Baureal: I haven't actually blocked you on any wikis (semantic argument), though you may editing in an IP range that has a global block placed. As it states at the top of the page, please take requests to Steward requests/Global and you will need to include some information so we can identify the IP address, alternatively use the email address supplied. — billinghurstsDrewth11:59, 1 November 2015 (UTC)
Block
Latest comment: 9 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion
I don't know why i'm blocked by Wikipedia services. I can't create an account — The preceding unsigned comment was added by 178.162.216.30 (talk)
Finished the create article button for the ArticlePlaceholder page
From Monday on a bzip2 compressed version of the beta Wikidata TTL dumps will be published along the gzip one
Getting close to make it possible to add the main value of a statement and its reference at the same time
Worked on adding a new section to item and property pages for identifiers
Did backend work for making identifiers useful in our machine-readable outputs (by actually linking them instead of just giving the identifier string) - more work needed
Fixed a bug where dates would have English months on non-English wikis (phabricator:T116503)
Done for the smaller communities, and left {{delete|orphaned talk page}} for the larger communities to manage.
Blocked
Latest comment: 9 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Why am I blocked?
I've done nothing and wanted to edit a wiki page for the first time.
Then i saw this:
"
Deine IP-Adresse befindet sich in einem Bereich, der auf allen Wikis gesperrt ist.
Die Sperre wurde durchgeführt von Billinghurst (meta.wikimedia.org). Der angegebene Grund ist hosting on leaseweb.de; convert to softblock as users/VPN on range.
Beginn der Sperre: 13:48, 24. Mär. 2014
Ablauf der Sperre: 15:38, 22. Okt. 2017
Du kannst Billinghurst kontaktieren, um die Sperre zu diskutieren. Du kannst nicht die Funktion „E-Mail an diesen Benutzer“ benutzen, bis du eine gültige E-Mail-Adresse in deinen Benutzerkonteneinstellungen angegeben hast und du nicht daran gehindert wirst, diese Funktion zu verwenden. Deine aktuelle IP-Adresse ist 178.162.208.141 und der gesperrte Bereich ist 178.162.128.0/17. Bitte beziehe alle obigen Einzelheiten in all deinen Anfragen ein.
"
It is a block that was added by another steward due to spam activity. I have previously softened the block so that users logged into their Wikimedia accounts can edit. If you do not have an account then you can create one at Special:CreateAccount. — billinghurstsDrewth00:13, 11 November 2015 (UTC)
Essay service/moving spammer back on Commons
Latest comment: 9 years ago4 comments3 people in discussion
I cannot say anything about any detail or location. I can say trust your judgment and your memory. I started the nascent filter c:Special:AbuseFilter/145 which is set to track a couple of phrases. I have started a page at cuwiki (couldn't find one) and I have set a @Trijnstel:. — billinghurstsDrewth10:31, 11 November 2015 (UTC)
Thanks Andrew, and thanks @Trijnstel: for handling the acct on Commons. It's so much faster and easier to bring this to people who know what they're doing. This spam service has usually been pretty clever: to get around spam filters on Commons, they upload images, and then come back and add spammy links to the descriptions. I never recorded the earlier essay-writing accts, but some of the moving spam accts can be seen at c:Commons:Requests for checkuser/Case/BBBMoving. INeverCry19:05, 11 November 2015 (UTC)
Wikidata weekly summary #184
Latest comment: 9 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
I wanted to follow-up on an message I sent you in September regarding the need for you to sign a confidentiality agreement by 15 December 2015 (OTRS users have until 31 December 2015) in order to maintain your access from Wikimedia to nonpublic information.
As you may know, the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees approved a new "Access to nonpublic information policy" on 25 April 2014 after a community consultation. The former policy has remained in place until the new policy could be implemented. That implementation work is now being done, and we are transitioning to the new policy.
An important part of that transition is helping volunteers like you sign the required confidentiality agreement. All Wikimedia volunteers with access to nonpublic information are required to sign this new agreement, and we have prepared some documentation to help you do so.
The Wikimedia Foundation is requiring that anyone with access to nonpublic information sign the new confidentiality agreement by 15 December 2015 (OTRS users have until 31 December 2015) to retain their access. You are receiving this message because you have access to nonpublic information and are required to sign the confidentiality agreement under the new policy. If you do not sign the new confidentiality agreement by 15 December 2015, you will lose your access to nonpublic information.
Signing the confidentiality agreement for nonpublic information is conducted and tracked using Legalpad on Phabricator. We have prepared a guide on Meta-Wiki to help you create your Phabricator account and sign the new agreement: Confidentiality agreement for nonpublic information/How to sign
If you have any questions or experience any problems while signing the new agreement, please visit this talk page or email me (gvarnumwikimedia.org). Again, please sign this confidentiality agreement by 15 December 2015 (OTRS users have until 31 December 2015) to retain your access to nonpublic information. If you do not wish to retain this access, please let me know and we will forward your request to the appropriate individuals.
Thank you,
Gregory Varnum (User:GVarnum-WMF), Wikimedia Foundation
Latest comment: 9 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion
As a beginner wishing to upload for the November photo contest "windows", I've encountered your block page, but have no idea how to use it, or what it's for.
BEGINNERS MIND is a helpful perspective. A few instructions might be in order?
Latest comment: 9 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion
Hi Billinghurst, I see you have some level of involvement/understanding related to Title blacklist. I'm unsure of its scope and syntax, so I hope you might be able to assist with blacklisting new user accounts and files which simultaneously contain "selfie" and "shoe(s)" in response to several months of abuse from Fritella (aka the selfie shoes vandal). For additional reference see here and Checkuser-l from ca. 30. September/1. October. This primarily impacts the Commons, if there is a local (rather than meta) step to take, please let me know. Thanks, Эlcobbolatalk16:39, 19 November 2015 (UTC)
Latest comment: 9 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion
I don't know why our ip address is blocked, I was just going to make a wiki account, and it said that our ip address was blocked on July 12, 2013, and it expires on September 12, 2017. I don't know if it was someone in our school that did something bad, but it isn't really fair to the rest of the students. — The preceding unsigned comment was added by 69.31.101.3 (talk)
as the text "Caught by a global block?" above says please take unblock requests to SRG. FWIW if it was a 5yr block and my name is against it, my action will have to have softened a block by another steward. It would usually allow you to create an account locally via special:createaccount — billinghurstsDrewth21:13, 23 November 2015 (UTC)
Wikidata weekly summary #186
Latest comment: 8 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
@Syum90: Thanks. I have updated the title blacklist regex for the user for the variation that you have shown; and removed the lead letter for the abuse filter to grab other variations that he may attempt. — billinghurstsDrewth01:24, 28 November 2015 (UTC)
Latest comment: 8 years ago2 comments1 person in discussion
Guten Tag!
Überrascht von obiger Nachricht darf ich folgendes festhalten:
Mein Name: Michael [redacted]
Ersuche daher um Aufhebung der Sperre. Wollte ursprünglich ein Konto bei Wikipedia eröffnen und zur Unterstützung monatlich eine Spende per Dauerauftrag bei meiner Bank veranlassen.
Hello Michael. I am not sure of the message that you are trying to pass on. I would like to suggest that you email stewardswikimedia.org and give a full explanation, and hopefully some links to the matter. We will get one of our Germans-peaking stewards to assist you. — billinghurstsDrewth09:56, 4 December 2015 (UTC)
What future IdeaLab campaigns would you like to see?
Latest comment: 8 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Hi there,
I’m Jethro, and I’m seeking your help in deciding topics for new IdeaLab campaigns that could be run starting next year. These campaigns aim to bring in proposals and solutions from communities that address a need or problem in Wikimedia projects. I'm interested in hearing your preferences and ideas for campaign topics!
I don't know your account name to be able to comment whether you are locked. I can see that there is a soft block on the IP range, and if you wish to edit you will need to login to your wikimedia account. If you don't have an account, then please create one at Special:CreateAccount. — billinghurstsDrewth12:51, 5 December 2015 (UTC)
Wikidata weekly summary #187
Latest comment: 8 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
Latest comment: 8 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion
Most people commenting & voting on Global bans are from Wikipedia, and/or from wikis where the to-be-banned person is already indef-blocked (by virtue of sheer editor numbers, & the required motivation behind requesting that someone be globally banned). Currently, it's very easy for admins from said wikis with an agenda (e.g. who want to silence their critics) to gang up and pile on votes to have their targets banned from projects they have never even edited in. This shouldn't be allowed. Wouldn't the principle "one wiki, one vote" be more reasonable & democratic wiki-wise? What do you think? ~ DanielTom (talk) 01:44, 6 December 2015 (UTC)
I think that my talk page is not the place for that discussion, and I believe that the relevant page for discussion about the policy and its implementation should take place on Talk:Global bans. I further think that people who come and stir the pot on a user's talk page should reflect on their approach, it seems to be a troublemaker's approach. — billinghurstsDrewth23:48, 10 December 2015 (UTC)
Wikidata weekly summary #188
Latest comment: 8 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
query.wikidata.org now more prominently shows example queries in case you missed them before, lets you filter and gives you a preview for them. Additionally you can click a little magnifying glass next to an item ID in a query result and explore it further.
I'm kind of shocked. It's not right that you don't have your rights anymore. But you of course have right to do whatever you want. So... I wanted to thank you for all your hard work and I express my hope that I'll still be able to see you around sometimes :-) Greets, tufor (talk) 13:29, 15 December 2015 (UTC)
@Grind24: Don't fret, there will always be volunteers. There are still 30-odd (and odd) stewards. We come, we do our volunteer time, and at some point we move on, hopefully leaving this a better place/environment for our actions. The role is super janitor, and you get a great array of mops and cloths to use, and a high level of control; though one gets held to a higher standard and it is not without its consequences of abuse, hate mail, disputes, frustrations, hard yakka, and taking away from one's editing time, etc. Every steward needs to be able to give their best for the community as that is what the community needs. When you stop feeling that you can give your best, then get out of the way.
Some know my reasons, they are not special, nor exclusive, but at this stage I am not able to give my best, with the best face and selflessly for the community, so I'm getting out of the way. I have tried to not make my doing the steward duties about me, and I believe that I have been predominantly successful, I could be wrong, I could be right, neither matters beyond serving as a guide in history of what expectations and style of steward you elect into the future.
I have other things to do around here (well, that is the current plan) and while I have done stewardry things, that I have reproduced 100+ books at English Wikisource and have continued to edit are still my more self-fulfilling achievements. — billinghurstsDrewth23:17, 15 December 2015 (UTC)
Latest comment: 8 years ago2 comments1 person in discussion
In March you blocked the 104.237.80.0/20 range because of cross-wiki spam and a leaky host (can't remember the exact reason as I'm now logged in so can't load the page which gave me the reasons any more). Is this range block still necessary? It means I have to be logged in to edit and meant I had to request an IP exemption to continue editing. The address being blocked is of a private VPN network which is a necessity for anyone editing from mainland China like myself.--Xania (talk) 01:16, 19 December 2015 (UTC)
<3 Thanks for being awesome. Enjoy the holidays :)
We will take the "in other projects"-sidebar out of beta features in January (phabricator:T103102)
Making ranking information like label and statement counts available to the CirrusSearch index in order to improve ranking in search results (phabricator:T110648)
Continued work on the identifier data type for identifiers like VIAF and ISBN so we can easily put them into a separate section in the items and properly link them in the exports (phabricator:T95682, phabricator:T121274)
Continued work on making external identifiers clickable links without the help of the authority control gadget (phabricator:T95684)
Fixed a mistake in the set reference API documentation (gerrit:259171)
— billinghurst sDrewth 09:36, 21 January 2015 (UTC)
Done Please put all future requests at SRG. — billinghurst sDrewth 07:44, 31 January 2015 (UTC)
Done — billinghurst sDrewth 09:43, 23 March 2015 (UTC)
Appreciated sats (talk) 14:57, 23 March 2015 (UTC)
--Paracel63 (talk) 11:58, 22 April 2015 (UTC)
.svg){kind=logo}
wikimedia.org). Again, please sign this confidentiality agreement by 15 December 2015 (OTRS users have until 22 December 2015) to retain your access to nonpublic information. If you do not wish to retain this access, please let me know and we will forward your request to the appropriate individuals.
wikimedia.org and give a full explanation, and hopefully some links to the matter. We will get one of our Germans-peaking stewards to assist you. — billinghurst sDrewth 09:56, 4 December 2015 (UTC)
Take care! Trijnsteltalk 16:11, 15 December 2015 (UTC)
