Jdforrester (WMF)

Welcome to Meta!

Hello, Jdforrester (WMF). Welcome to the Wikimedia Meta-Wiki! This website is for coordinating and discussing all Wikimedia projects. You may find it useful to read our policy page. If you are interested in doing translations, visit Meta:Babylon. You can also leave a note on Meta:Babel or Wikimedia Forum (please read the instructions at the top of the page before posting there). Happy editing!

-- Meta-Wiki Welcome (talk) 22:03, 22 May 2012 (UTC)

Reply

You have new messages

Hello, Jdforrester (WMF). You have new messages at Pine's talk page.
You can remove this notice at any time by removing the {{Talkback}} or {{Tb}} template.

--Pine^✉ 22:02, 17 October 2012 (UTC)

Followed-up. Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 22:17, 17 October 2012 (UTC)

Visual Editor status update

Thanks for the four paragraph update in the September 2012 WMF Report. Is the target end date for widespread deployment of the VE in WMF's FY 4Q12? Thanks, Pine^✉ 19:18, 2 November 2012 (UTC)

The intent is to "finish" development by July 2013 and then move to deploy it for all WMF wikis as the default editor, but as there is a significant level of research involved we may not hit this goal. Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 21:57, 2 November 2012 (UTC)

[en] Change to wiki account system and account renaming

Some accounts will soon be renamed due to a technical change that the developer team at Wikimedia are making. More details on Meta.

Distributed via Global message delivery 02:51, 30 April 2013 (UTC). (Wrong page? Correct it here.)

Rename timeline

Dear James,

Are you planning to ramp up the notifications about the rename? Is there any special outreach to the most active editors? Is there a timeline for such things?

I was thinking that

• Some of the most interesting and worth-solving issues (e.g.: whether/when/how to redirect past instances of username; how to break ties; whether to allow users locked in a tie to resolve it amicably rather than randomly) will mainly affect the top 1% of editors
• Other interesting cases will be people who edit regularly but sporadically, and may not see the announcement at all
• Accounts with 0-1 edit are really not in the same boat as the rest, and the rest might benefit from proportionately more attention.

Warmly, –SJ talk  18:55, 16 May 2013 (UTC)

A word of thanks

James, amid the niggles and complaints, the efforts of you and others in the team to develop VisualEditor need to be acknowledged. It's big, big job, fraught with challenges; so congratulations are in order for the trial thus far. Tony (talk) 09:55, 10 July 2013 (UTC)

@Tony1: That's very kind of you to say, Tony; I hope that we can continue to live up to your expectations as we make VisualEditor better, together with our editors. Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 14:46, 10 July 2013 (UTC)

Re: VisualEditor weekly status update done

I think you might have seen the thanks I sent you on MediaWiki.org (wee! so modern!), but let me repeat this the regular way: thanks so much for taking the time to update the status page for the VisualEditor. It really helps my work on Tech/News and I appreciate your doing this. odder (talk) 20:30, 12 July 2013 (UTC)

Of course! I'm glad they're useful. Hopefully next week's will be much shorter and simpler. Unfortunately I don't think we're likely to have simple, easy-to-understand "new feature: Xyz!" announcements on VisualEditor for the next few weeks, but I hope they're less dense, at least. If you have any thoughts about how I could do them more usefully, please shout! Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 20:35, 12 July 2013 (UTC)

Upcoming IdeaLab Events: IEG Proposal Clinics

Idea Lab

Idea Lab

Hello, Jdforrester (WMF)! We've added Events to IdeaLab, and you're invited :)

Upcoming events focus on turning ideas into Individual Engagement Grant proposals before the March 31 deadline. Need help or have questions about IEG? Join us at a Hangout:

• Thursday, 13 March 2014, 1600 UTC
• Wednesday, 19 March 2014, 1700 UTC
• Saturday, 29 March 2014, 1700 UTC

Hope to see you there!

This message was delivered automatically to IEG and IdeaLab participants. To unsubscribe from any future IEG reminders, remove your name from this list

Request for feedback on my GSoC'14 proposal

Hi Jdforrester,

I am planning to work on the project titled "Tools for mass migration of legacy translated wiki content" this summer under Google Summer of Code. I have drafted a proposal for the same over the past few weeks. This project is going to help the translation adminstrators like you in a great way, as it would completely automate the tedious manual task of preparing a page for translation and then importing the translations into the Translate extension. You can check the proposal page for detailed information on how I plan to accomplish this.

As you would be an end user of this tool, it would be great if you could go through the proposal and provide feedback/suggestions. Your feedback would definitely help me improve the proposal as well help in creating an even better tool. You can do the same on the discussion page of the proposal or reply here, whichever is convenient for you. I look forward to hearing from you! Thank you!

P.S: I need to submit the proposal to Google by March 19, 2014.

BPositive (talk) 13:18, 13 March 2014 (UTC)

new Template Documentation Editor for TemplateData

Hello, would it be possible to activate the new Template Documentation Editor for TemplateData in ca-wiki? The mass message said we should contact you. :-) Thanks, and nice work!--Arnaugir (talk) 09:42, 23 May 2014 (UTC)

@Arnaugir: Absolutely. Have you tried it out on MediaWiki.org? Do you have any feedback? Also, as this is a change that happens to all editors at once, have you discussed this as a community? Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 16:38, 23 May 2014 (UTC)

@Jdforrester (WMF): yes, I proposed it in w:ca:Viquipèdia:La taverna/Ajuda#VisualEditor global newsletter—May 2014 and no objections so far. And yes, I tried it in mw.org :-) works smoothly.--Arnaugir (talk) 09:53, 25 May 2014 (UTC)

@Arnaugir: Cool; I see you created bug 65785 for this. Will get it done soon. Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 16:03, 27 May 2014 (UTC)

German Wikipedia's issue with history import - SUL finalisation

Hi James; in 2013, you answered to a question by Niels at SUL talk - German wikipedia import of history, and though I fear there's nothing that can be done now to fix the issue, I still wanted to ask if you think there might be some way to address this... Indeed it's a fact that German Wikipedia is using Special:Import heavily, has been using it for many years and continues to do so. There's now virtually no article translated from other language versions into German that has not been imported. Many users on German Wikipedia are convinced it's the only correct way to adhere to the license, and though I think the approach widely used on English Wikipedia (without import) is also fine, I also use the feature as it's now the standard way to do things on de-wiki and other approaches are controversial (you might call it "peer pressure" ;-) ). A result of this practice, however, is of course that German Wikipedia has now many contributions attributed to the wrong person - imported edits made by non-SUL accounts of the same name. After import, they show up in the user contributions list and article version history just as edits made by the de-wiki person.

In the discussion mentioned above, you wrote "This is why we have always said that Special:Import should not be used on production wikis until SUL finalisations was undertaken". Apparently, this recommendation hasn't made its way to German Wikipedia, unfortunately. Myself, I have mentioned the issue of wrong attribution through import occasionally there, but the standard practice of importing didn't change. - After SUL finalisation, things might be getting worse with regard to existing misattributions, as Niels wrote, for the imported edits by "ExampleUser" from English Wikipedia will get attributed do "ExampleUser-dewiki", which is even more wrong than the current situation. I realize: German Wikipedia should probably never have used the import feature. But the damage is done. Is there really no way to fix it? It's pure speculation and theory, but... shouldn't it, in theory, be possible to create a script that analyzes all imports that were made in German Wikipedia, checks for user names, and corrects attribution? Gestumblindi (talk) 16:02, 19 June 2014 (UTC)

@Gestumblindi: It's certainly possible to write such a script, yes. Happily, this kind of clean-up script could be done after the SUL finalisation process is over (so there's no rush), but it would be a lot of work. Maybe if the issue is particularly acute it would make sense. Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 16:18, 19 June 2014 (UTC)

Thanks for the reply! It's hard to say how big the issue actually is, as there is (I think) no easy way to ascertain how many contributions are affected (the script would find out...). What I can say is that there are a lot of imports on de-WP, so there will be quite a number of misattributions, and I have seen some, but is it "particularly acute"...? Well, I think we can talk about this again after SUL finalisation, indeed. Gestumblindi (talk) 16:27, 19 June 2014 (UTC)

Hello

Hello I am a new user. How cud I have a user page like u? Thanks

— The preceding unsigned comment was added by 115ash (talk) 11:03, 25 June 2014 (UTC)

@115ash: Hi! To create a page like mine it's probably easiest to follow this link and then click "Insert", "Template" then type in "user info". You can then add each of the fields you want to fill in, save, and you're done. Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 23:39, 25 June 2014 (UTC)

Tech News #28

This is your weekly reminder that I am looking forward to seeing latest developments in VisualEditor in the current issue of Tech News… Thanks so much :-) odder (talk) 17:03, 3 July 2014 (UTC)

@Odder: :-) Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 18:50, 3 July 2014 (UTC)

Thank you, @James; really appreciate your help. odder (talk) 10:45, 4 July 2014 (UTC)

TemplateDataEditor

en:Wikipedia:VisualEditor/Updates/21_May_2014 - can you enable the "Template Documentation Editor for TemplateData" in ru-wiki? It's the only one way to edit TemplateData without scrolling kilometers of code. en:User:NicoV/TemplateDataEditor has not been updated for a long time.Sunpriat (talk) 20:44, 8 July 2014 (UTC)

@Sunpriat: Hey, yes, that's easy – but normally we ask for people to mention such changes on their wiki first to make sure it's not unexpected. Is that OK? Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 21:10, 8 July 2014 (UTC)

I asked on the this page. It is sufficient if no one speaks against or if I will write the news of his inclusion on our news forum?Sunpriat (talk) 22:25, 8 July 2014 (UTC)

@Sunpriat: Aha, that looks fine. Will schedule for tomorrow morning. Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 23:46, 8 July 2014 (UTC)

List of Wikipedias/tl

I'm not sure what language the page content is translated into but this page you created is not written in Tagalog as the title suggest. Regards.--Lam-ang (talk) 19:58, 23 July 2014 (UTC)

@Lam-ang: Unfortunately the author didn't respond – see User talk:Inrawiracham. Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 20:30, 23 July 2014 (UTC)

Tech News #31

I have taken the liberty to add four VisualEditor items to this week's issue of Tech News, based on my understanding of their importance and relevance to the average user, as it appears that you had forgotten to do so. Please excuse my pickiness and do feel free to continue adding VE items if you want to have more influence over what information gets featured :-) Thanks, and enjoy the rest of your weekend! odder (talk) 21:17, 26 July 2014 (UTC)

@Odder: Argh, sorry, forgot; thanks! Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 00:04, 27 July 2014 (UTC)

Tech News #32

@Jdforrester (WMF): Will there be VE items this week? odder (talk) 20:01, 1 August 2014 (UTC)

@Odder: Sorry, was travelling to London. Thanks for writing some up on my behalf! Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 10:34, 3 August 2014 (UTC)

Gatekeeper barnstar

I hereby award you this gatekeeper barnstar for being the third most active +2'er that we know of! Nemo 23:24, 3 February 2015 (UTC)

@Nemo bis: Ha. Thank you. I'd never have thought my little helping was so much of our work; we must expand the pool!

(Also, I think I'm 4th not 3rd from your link?)

Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 23:31, 3 February 2015 (UTC)

Special characters in VisualEditor

Hi. You know why it does not recognize the characters we add to MediaWiki:Visualeditor-quick-access-characters.json in eswiki? We use these quotation marks: « », rather than “ ” or " ". I can't edit this namespace. Regards, Jarould (talk) 00:09, 22 April 2015 (UTC)

@Jarould: In computer code you need to use '"' characters. Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 00:10, 22 April 2015 (UTC)

Global CSS/JS migration

Hello Jdforrester (WMF). You have global scripts and styles in User:Jdforrester (WMF)/global.js and User:Jdforrester (WMF)/global.css, which you import using your local CSS/JS pages. Since August 2014, your global.js and global.css pages are loaded automatically on all wikis. Since you already import them yourself, you may experience script errors or tools being added twice. Do you want me to remove the global imports from your local pages using Synchbot (without changing any other content)? —Pathoschild 02:01, 25 June 2015 (UTC)

@Pathoschild: That'd be great, thank you. Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 14:36, 25 June 2015 (UTC)

Done! You can see the log on your archive page. —Pathoschild 18:47, 28 June 2015 (UTC)

@Pathoschild: Thank you! Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 18:50, 28 June 2015 (UTC)

Best person to give Mobile advice

Hi James,

(tl;dr) Who is the best person that the enWS community can approach to get knowledge and assistance with output to mobile format?

At enWS we utilise template headers on many namespaces and that usually contains the WS style, metadata and free text input. As more metadata is readily available with WD storage, which has value to provide with a work, however, it can also crowd out the text of a work, which is obviously the highlight of a presentation. We are needing some guidance on how we can best balance and best present desktop and mobile views. Is there a 'good' person with whom we can discuss this, or is this best pursued by phabricator, or a mix of the two approaches. Thanks.  — billinghurst sDrewth 02:32, 22 September 2015 (UTC)

@Billinghurst: Hey there. I think the best person would be User:Jkatz (WMF), who leads product for the Reading department (including mobile); he may know which developers are best to whom to speak. Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 13:04, 22 September 2015 (UTC)

Thank you

Pine nut cookies and Chinese tea

Thank you for your assistance, which saved me considerable time. --Pine^✉ 09:40, 7 January 2016 (UTC)

@Pine: You are, of course, welcome. Good luck! Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 15:11, 7 January 2016 (UTC)

Tireless contributor barnstar

Hello, after our conversation yesterday I realised that I never congratulated with you about your promotion! (I confirm that outside WMF some were certainly confused on why you didn't get it earlier while some did. Mysteries I won't venture into.) More importantly, I award you the

Tireless contributor barnstar, for your tireless work on MediaWiki, which is valued by MediaWiki people independently from how WMF calls you, and was as valued as it is now before your title changes.

Nemo 18:25, 20 January 2016 (UTC)

@Nemo bis: That's very kind, thank you. :-) Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 18:32, 20 January 2016 (UTC)

VisualEditor rollout on German Wikipedia

By German Wiki-tradition: Not a barnstar, but a gummy bear!

James, thank you and your team for your great work on the VisualEditor rollout on German Wikipedia! --Gnom (talk) 16:10, 15 March 2016 (UTC)

@Gnom: It is always a pleasure to help. If you need anything, please ask. :-) Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 16:12, 15 March 2016 (UTC)

LiquidThreads

It was extremely disrespectful of you to destroy collaboration in #MediaWiki-extensions-LiquidThreads, where volunteers had spent copious time triaging bugs. Nemo 07:09, 5 August 2016 (UTC)

@Nemo bis: I'm sorry, I'm entirely lost. You're the one insisting for years now that it's not worked upon and is EOL; I was reflecting your wishes. Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 15:54, 5 August 2016 (UTC)

Yes, some persons have been honest to users and at the same time pragmatic in bug triaging. Please leave them alone. Nemo 17:51, 2 September 2016 (UTC)

Simple diff

Hi James. I submitted a request for a "simple diff" (a diff that only diaplays text changes - without the markup) to the last community wish list but was unsuccessful. Someone has just pointed me to VisualEditor/Diffs I'm having trouble understanding where that's at. Is it at the point, yet, where I can put a link at the top of a Wikipedia article pointing the mobile and desktop reader to a diff that displays just the text changes between a specific revision and the current, public-facing revision?

We have a few English Wikipedia articles, now, that have a version in their history that has passed expert review, and I think it would be helpful for the reader to see at a glance how the article has evolved since it was last expert-reviewed. Anthonyhcole (talk) 04:22, 30 May 2017 (UTC)

Hey there Anthonyhcole,

No, the visual diffs system can't currently be linked to pre-loaded with a diff; it can't yet compare two saved versions of an article. Right now it's only available inside the visual editor to show what changes the user has made since they started editing. The things you request will be coming, but not soon. First we need to finish creating it as a good, understandable diff view for users within the editor, then we can start providing it on history and diff pages (at which point we'll meet that request). That said, it won't be limited to only textual changes – reference, template, image and other changes are shown, and I wasn't planning to have a "dumb mode" that ignores such changes. Possibly in longer time. Hope this helps!

Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 15:27, 30 May 2017 (UTC)

Thanks James. I'm quite keen to see this happen. If I can get outside funding to cover the costs (wages etc.) of developing such a feature, would that help? Or are the skills involved so arcane that doing so would inevitably draw talent away from other; higher-priority projects? That is, if I gave you the necessary money for this task, as a tied grant, would WMF technical be able to find the right people? (I'm not assuming you"d want to. I"m hoping I can persuade you. For now I'm just wondering what your constraints are: financial, talent or other.) --Anthonyhcole (talk)

Understood, Anthonyhcole. Mostly our constraints are talent, not cash, yes; this is very fiddly work tying together a bunch of pretty cutting-edge stuff with a lot of Wikimedia-specific context. Once we're happy with the visual diffing system overall, providing it as a service will be rather simpler, but that's the blocker right now. It's definitely something I expect us to provide during the next fiscal year (July 2017–June 2018).

Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 16:22, 30 May 2017 (UTC)

Cool. I might check back with you in six months, then, if you don't mind, and see how it's going. Thanks for your attention. --Anthonyhcole (talk) 16:31, 30 May 2017 (UTC)

In the meantime, maybe the new history browsing tool could make looking at histories more interesting already? --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 15:50, 30 May 2017 (UTC)

Well that's impressive. But it's not quite what I'm after, Elitre. --Anthonyhcole (talk) 16:10, 30 May 2017 (UTC)

I’m having another go. Anthonyhcole (talk) 14:56, 12 November 2017 (UTC)

Have you tried visual diffing lately?, Anthonyhcole? https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T178248 for the next phase. Elitre (WMF) (talk) 16:03, 13 November 2017 (UTC)

Elitre, I can access the visual diff feature while using the visual editor by clicking “view your changes” and “visual (beta)”. How do I do what you appear to have done above - create a link to a visual diff comparing saved versions in a page’s history? (Yes, this visual diff project looks like just what I wanted.) —Anthonyhcole (talk) 04:27, 14 November 2017 (UTC)

Append &visualdiff to your diff's URL. Elitre (WMF) (talk) 09:18, 14 November 2017 (UTC)

Thanks. So https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?diff=749832945&oldid=749832814&title=User:Anthonyhcole/Sandbox&visualdiff produces nothing like what I’m looking for yet. It tells the reader what paragraphs have been changed but not how the language has changed. Compare that visual diff with this, which is a standard diff of the same two pages without the markup. The latter tells the reader simply and clearly how the text (meaning) has changed.

(This example, by the way, is the difference between en:Dengue fever when it passed peer review and a recent version of en:Dengue fever. I’d like the reader to be able to click a button and easily compare the current version with the reviewed version of this and other expert-reviewed articles.) —Anthonyhcole (talk) 10:46, 14 November 2017 (UTC)

Update regarding Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons tutorial videos

• 
• 
• 
• 

Hello,

I regret to inform you that the series of motivational and educational videos project, which had been planned introduce Wikipedia and some of its sister projects to new contributors, is being discontinued.

There are multiple factors that have led to this decision. The initial budget and time estimates were far too small for a project of this scale and complexity. Also, my simultaneous involvement in Cascadia Wikimedians User Group was problematic due to the shortage of human resources for the user group, which resulted in my spending far more time trying to help the user group than I had planned, so my time and attention were diverted from this video project to assisting the user group.

You can find more information in the final report for the grant.

I regret that this project did not fulfill the hopes that many of us had for it, and I hope that in the future someone with the necessary resources will choose to resume work on it or a similar project. If you are interested in working on this or a similar project then please contact the WMF grants team.

On a personal note, I am retiring from the Wikimedia community. Perhaps I will return someday.

Regards,

--Pine^✉ 23:20, 30 August 2017 (UTC)

Series director and screenwriter

The Community Wishlist Survey

Hi,

You get this message because you’ve previously participated in the Community Wishlist Survey. I just wanted to let you know that this year’s survey is now open for proposals. You can suggest technical changes until 11 November: Community Wishlist Survey 2019.

You can vote from November 16 to November 30. To keep the number of messages at a reasonable level, I won’t send out a separate reminder to you about that. /Johan (WMF) 11:24, 30 October 2018 (UTC)

Email

(on your @wikimedia one). Thanks, —MarcoAurelio (talk) 12:34, 7 December 2018 (UTC)

@MarcoAurelio: I don't see it? jforrester @? Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 16:13, 7 December 2018 (UTC)

Never mind, found it now. Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 16:18, 7 December 2018 (UTC)

Video tutorial regarding Wikipedia referencing with VisualEditor

• 
• 
• 
• 

Hi, I have received a grant from WMF to support production of a video tutorial regarding creating references with VisualEditor. I anticipate that the video will be published in March 2019. If this tutorial is well received then I may produce additional tutorials in the future for English Wikipedia and possibly other projects such as Commons and Spanish Wikipedia. If you would like to receive notifications on your talk page when drafts and finished products from this project are ready for review, then please sign up for the project newsletter.
Regards, --Pine^✉ 00:32, 28 February 2019 (UTC)

Account rename in Wikitech

Hello, sorry for messaging you but I wasn't sure who to message. I'm the owner of both User:Mohammad and User:MohammadtheEditor accounts in Wikipedia, also, I created the account wikitech:User:MohammadtheEditor before I change my username from MohammadtheEditor to Mohammad, I'd like to own wikitech:User:Mohammad as well and since new account creation is disabled, I was wondering if you could rename it for me? Thanks. Mohammad 16:21, 1 April 2019 (UTC)

@Mohammad: Hi there, I'm afraid I don't know who manages that, sorry. Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 18:55, 2 April 2019 (UTC)

AFAIK

Google Vision API allows reverse-image-searching. Not much of a concrete idea about pricing, though. Best, Winged Blades of Godric (talk) 18:03, 17 June 2019 (UTC)

Revert in tech news

I can appreciate preserving the state of the tech news with your revert here: https://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Tech/News/2018/51&diff=next&oldid=22661635 But just as a comment, this was never true. My comment here https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T204506#4590516 came in September 2018 well before the December tech news. It shows that WMA had a maintainer at that time (me), and it corrected the wrong statement that the VM was running on an outdated OS. Back then it was in-place upgraded rather than reinstalled, but the labs admins knew that. These tech news showed up when I was correcting links to the new wma.wmcloud.org domain (after I recently did a full reinstall on a brand new VM), and the comment bugged me... --Dschwen (talk) 05:55, 26 January 2022 (UTC)

OK, sure, but the time to tell people that was before it was sent to four thousand users and a thousand village pumps over three years ago; changing it now doesn't inform anyone, and just misleads. Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 17:04, 26 January 2022 (UTC)

Yeah, point taken. --Dschwen (talk) 22:25, 26 January 2022 (UTC)

Your misleading revert

Your statrement in this revert is wrong. These are absolutely not "titles", but summaries / abstract sentences. They are intrioducted by the date prefixing it. They are here as part of items in a list. It just happens that English (only!) tends to capitalize each item in vertically enumerated lists, but each time is still separated from the next.

And even in the linked pages, these are also short abstracts of the content and not plain title (and there two ther should be full stops (even in English) as they are still not plain titles, but often contain several sentences describing several covered topics in the newsletter. Each newsletter only has a single "title" actually made of some term like "Newsletter", qualified by its date of issue. And nothing else. That's just like issues of a newspaper or journal. The series does not change its title each time, but there are may be small abstracts describing the issue. In scientific papers, or similar documents, short abstracts are very common at their top and are not titles: they are added to complement an indexing title (such as an issue number or date, or the date of authors) that does not say enough thing about what it speaks about. These abstracts are collected and displayed by search engines without having to explore all the text to find relevant things. As well reades want these abstracts to a a good idea of what is inside.

In fact this is general, these newletters issues don't have real titles, except their issue numbering (based on their date) inside the series (the seires iself has a well defined title). "Titles" however are replaced by some section titles or other headings or which may be structuring long issues of the letter (there may be more headers than those indicated in the short abstract sentences describing of each newsletter issue).

It seems that you focus too much about some English-specific incoherences of the punctuation. But even English has its logic and other languages won't follow what is considered by them as a bad practice (notably its overused capitalization, abbreviations, and unterminated sentences, where it is even hard to distinguish what is a verb, a noun or an adjective: this does not help at all the translators as these English texts are really and too frequently ambiguous). Even Wikipedia recognized this and has some good pages explaining why those common English practices should not be followed for documents that are intended to be read by internation readers (even the practices common in US are strongly discouraged in other English speaking countries, including UK, Ireland, India, New Zealand Australia...).

This is not just a terminologic case (we are not speaking about lexical difference between British English and American English) and not about requiring the Oxford style, but these are recognized in many US publications too (including many scrientif journals, and wellknown news papers like the New York Times). You seem to be too much influenced by US medias (notably some popular newscasts on TV that tend to focus too much on focusing people with senseless broad terms jsut to improve their audience and revenues for their advertizing announcers, rather than building a suteainable authority: these "live news" title rapidly become obsolete, they are no longer referencable, not clearly differentiatable, and those news articles rapidly become junks). We should not folllow that commercially influenced trend.

We don't need to attract immediately many visitors, just to build a long term utility: these articles should be here to remain as references, to help explain the hostory of the project, and being able to track and explain some of its defects that may be detected later, so that we can discuss of alternative solutions and migration plans, by better understanding what was their impact on the rest. This series is not a live channel like CNN or Fox News, or a trash "people press" like The Sun, or Closer and so many ads we find over the internet with their abusive titles ! verdy_p (talk) 01:53, 19 February 2022 (UTC)

As I have requested before, please do not edit war in your efforts to impose French-style punctuation on English source texts. You are wrong to claim that these are summaries. They are not. I know this, because I have been the one to write most of them. Your analysis is incorrect, and based on faulty assumptions about how English works. Please stop. Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 15:00, 19 February 2022 (UTC)

A request

Hi James,

We have posted an open letter to the Foundation and Board of Trustees. It concerns the development of MediaWiki extensions and needs the personal attention of all concerned developers and managers. Please see it at:

Open_letter_from_English_Wikipedia_New_Page_Reviewers

and

en:Wikipedia:New_pages_patrol/Coordination/2022_WMF_letter

Your comments are welcome. Many thanks.

Kind regards,

On behalf of the English Wikipedia Community

Kudpung (talk) 10:02, 22 September 2022 (UTC)

Moderator Tools newsletter - Issue #2

Welcome to issue #2 of the Moderator Tools newsletter! It's been about a year since the first one (sorry for the delay), but we're excited to tell you what our team has been working on since then, and where you can guide our ongoing and upcoming work.

Automoderator

Automoderator's configuration page as of September 2024.

Automoderator is now feature-complete for its initial release! Automoderator is a highly configurable automated anti-vandalism tool which reverts edits that a machine learning model determines to be vandalism. It can be enabled, disabled, and configured at any time by administrators via a Community Configuration form. Automoderator is now in use on Indonesian, Turkish, Ukrainian, and Vietnamese Wikipedias, with other projects at various stages of discussion and setup. You can track data about Automoderator's activity so far via a Superset dashboard. To request Automoderator on your Wikimedia project, please refer to the deployment steps.

We are wrapping up our focused time developing Automoderator while we review data and feedback about its impact. We also still plan to provide support for small Wikimedia projects with few/no administrators (T372280), and integrate the multilingual revert risk model, which is an improved version of the model currently in use, with support for 47 language Wikipedias. We're looking for support testing the multilingual model to better understand its behaviour - please check out the testing process and review some edits!

Nuke extension ('Mass delete')

During the 2024-2025 Wikimedia Foundation fiscal year, our team wants to make improvements to the software that moderators (patrollers, administrators, stewards, etc.) are using today, rather than focusing on building new tools. Although it's valuable to build new features, it's also important that we continue maintaining the important tools that are already being used to maintain and improve Wikipedia's quality.

Nuke search interface.

One such project is to make usability and feature improvements to the Nuke extension (known as 'mass delete' on some projects). We have contracted a community developer, Chlod, who has worked on the extension in the past, to help us with this! With the Nuke project, we hope to make a number of improvements, including additional filters, increasing the deletion time range, automated deletion of related pages, and bug fixes. Read more about this project, and provide feedback, at Extension:Nuke/2024 Moderator Tools project.

Recent Changes

As part of our efforts to improve existing impactful moderator tooling, we are working on a project for a few months to make improvements to Special:RecentChanges and related workflows. We will be prioritizing work for this project on an ongoing basis, but have some larger projects that we will solicit input for via our project page. We have a brief survey at Moderator Tools/Survey:Recent Changes to gather input for this project - please answer the questions if you're interested.

Task prioritization

Finally, looking to the future, we plan to research and work on tasks identified as part of the Community Wishlist focus area titled 'task prioritization'. We'll be looking for opportunities to speak with editors about how they decide what needs their attention, and in particular will be investigating the Watchlist to see where we might be able to make usability and feature improvements. If you have thoughts about opportunities in this focus area please share them on the task prioritization talk page, or file a new wish!

Although we have active engineering projects ongoing, we're always happy to chat about your community's content moderation tool needs - feel free to get in contact at Talk:Moderator Tools to let us know where you think we should focus our efforts. MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 12:11, 25 November 2024 (UTC)