User talk:MarcoAurelio/Archives/2020-02
 | Please do not post any new comments on this page. This is a discussion archive first created in February 2020, although the comments contained were likely posted before and after this date. See current discussion or the archives index. |
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 4 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 5 February. It will be on all wikis from 6 February (calendar).
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
20:05, 3 February 2020 (UTC)
- This section was archived on a request by: —MarcoAurelio (talk) 21:51, 3 February 2020 (UTC)
Growth team updates #12
Welcome to the twelfth newsletter from the Growth team!
The Growth team's objective is to work on software changes that help retain new contributors in mid-size Wikimedia projects.
General news
- A training for mentors has been published. The training was first tried with the Czech community, and went well.
- Growth team features have been deployed to Hungarian, Ukrainian, and Armenian Wikipedias. If your community is enthusiastic about welcoming newcomers, we encourage you to contact us so that we can verify together whether your wiki is eligible. Then you can go through the checklist to start the process of configuring the features.
Productive edits from newcomer tasks
We deployed the basic workflow for newcomer tasks to our target wikis on November 20, and the early results are exciting.
Graph captions (top to bottom):
■ Copyedits
■ Add links
■ Expand article
■ Add reference
■ Advanced edits
- About 1.5% of newcomers who visit their homepage complete the workflow and save a suggested edit. So far, this has amounted to over 450 edits, on all wikis, coming from both desktop and mobile users.
- When we look at the edits that newcomers make, we see that they are largely positive! We are pleased to see that this feature does not appear to encourage vandals.
- 75% of the edits are productive and unreverted.
- 95% of the edits appear to be in good faith.
- Most of the edits include copyedits and adding links, with some newcomers also adding content and references. Copyedits are suggested most strongly.
- Click here to learn more specifics about the results so far.
Topic matching deployed
The results from our user tests showed us that newcomers are likely to do more suggested edits if they can choose articles related to a topic that they're interested in, such as "science", "music", or "sports".
- On January 21, we deployed topic matching on our pilot wikis. Newcomers are now using it. We expect it to cause more newcomers to try suggested edits, and to keep making more of them.
- In the coming weeks, we will be making improvements to the accuracy of the algorithm used to topic matching, which is part of the ORES project.
Next steps for newcomer tasks
Because we are seeing positive results from newcomer tasks, the Growth team plans to concentrate our efforts on improving the workflow and encouraging more newcomers to use it.
- Guidance: next, we will be using the help panel to provide guidance to newcomers as they do suggested edits, and to prompt them to do another edit after completing their first one. In user tests for this feature, demo videos were one of the favorite features, and we will think about how these might be added.
- Starting the workflow: only about 20% of newcomer who visit their homepage begin the newcomer tasks workflow. We are going to be trying out different layouts of the homepage to encourage more newcomers to try newcomer tasks.
- Additional task types: we are researching methods to recommend more specific tasks to newcomers, such as specific links to add, or images that could be added to articles from Commons.
Growth team's newsletter prepared by the Growth team and posted by bot • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
17:39, 4 February 2020 (UTC)
- This section was archived on a request by: —MarcoAurelio (talk) 17:25, 5 February 2020 (UTC)
Links in edit summaries
Just FYI: in edit summaries like this, it would be helpful to readers if you could create a live wikilink instead of just pasting in a bare URL, which does not get autolinked in an edit summary. In this particular case, you would have used:
Add regiowiki.at as 'regiowiki' per [[Special:PermanentLink/19776973#regiowiki.at]]
Feedback
I see you're asking to be confirmed again for Steward. Good luck with that (seems to be going well so far). This is too small a deal to post there but also has bothered me for long enough that I wanted to take the opportuntity to write something. Meta:Requests for adminship/TonyBallioni really bothered me as I felt my decision to participate in that RfA was ignored based on a standard that I could not have known about beforehand. I understand that the standard was done to try and be fair to Tony. However, on other wikis when there is a standard like that it is written out so people can know ahead of time. If the standard had been written out I would not have bothered participating - no hard feelings. But instead I really took time to craft a thoughtful message in that process only to find out after the fact that I shouldn't have because my voice wasn't welcome. Even typing this now I'm getting agitated. As I wrote at the start, I have no doubt that you're an excellent steward and deserve to be reconfirmed but I wanted to let you know the impact that this had on me. Best, Barkeep49 (talk) 18:02, 8 February 2020 (UTC)
- Hi Barkeep49. I feel you. My homewiki, the Spanish Wikipedia, has clear voting rules known beforehand. I have been trying to establish clearer rules for voting on Meta-Wiki local affairs for some time already, but people around here have historically thought that it was unneeded bureaucracy; and for the most cases I concede it'd be as most votes on Meta either clearly pass or clearly don't pass. I'm however of the opinion that we should always be prepared for the unexpected, although it looks I'm alone in that regard. In the case of Tony's RfA, your voice was counted as everyone else was. No vote was discounted from the RfA. Like I said in the bureaucrat chat, the RfA didn't managed to get at least 75% of support required to pass. When I said "If I even go ahead and discount votes" I was talking in a conditional, hypotetical situation; because no votes where finally discounted. I am sorry if my language was not clear back in the days, and you felt unwelcome. I hope this clarifies this a bit. Best regards, —MarcoAurelio (talk) 18:37, 8 February 2020 (UTC)
IRC bot
It may be a bit late now, but I just noticed this page indicating there's an IRC bot written in Python that appears to be broken. If no one else has, I will offer to review the code and see if it can be brought up to speed. Or build a replacement, which ever is easier. Operator873talkconnect 23:59, 8 February 2020 (UTC)
- Hi Operator873. Thanks for your message and offering. We found a replacement using Wm-bot, which covers the tasks from our former bot and has some other nice functionalities as well. Best regards, —MarcoAurelio (talk) 12:08, 9 February 2020 (UTC)
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
- There is a new version of the Wikimedia Commons app for Android. It should fix the failed uploads problem. [1]
Problems
- There was a problem with the new MediaWiki version last week. It deleted some messages by accident. The new version was late because it was stopped to fix things. [2]
Changes later this week
The MediaWiki action API is used by various tools like bots and gadgets. Some error codes will change. Some parameter values that do not follow the standard will no longer work. [3]- The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 11 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 12 February. It will be on all wikis from 13 February (calendar).
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
19:12, 10 February 2020 (UTC)
- This section was archived on a request by: —MarcoAurelio (talk) 21:19, 17 February 2020 (UTC)
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
- Pages on Wikidata and Commons now load faster. You can read more about page load performance. [4][5]
Changes later this week
- The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 18 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 19 February. It will be on all wikis from 20 February (calendar).
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
16:17, 17 February 2020 (UTC)
- This section was archived on a request by: —MarcoAurelio (talk) 21:20, 17 February 2020 (UTC)
Meow
Check your inbox :) TonyBallioni (talk) 18:36, 17 February 2020 (UTC)
- Got it. Reviewing. —MarcoAurelio (talk) 21:23, 17 February 2020 (UTC)