User talk:Pcoombe (WMF)

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Hello Pcoombe (WMF), and 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!

-- 23:29, 3 June 2011 (UTC)

Thanks

Thanks for your help with testing the UK fundraiser. Victuallers 15:40, 30 September 2011 (UTC)

2 queries

Please see;

• Talk:Fundraising_2011#Paypal_donation_link_error
• Talk:Fundraising_2011#Talk:Fundraising

Cheers, Chzz 21:06, 11 November 2011 (UTC)

Thanks Chzz, will look into these. Pcoombe (WMF) 21:33, 11 November 2011 (UTC)

Dark patterns

The other day, I noticed an interesting discussion, talking about the fact that the Oxfam 'Donate' box *defaults* to 'monthly' / regular donations rather than single ones - e.g. [1]. It's possibly debatable, but worth thinking about. The page where I read about it is: [2]. Chzz 21:29, 11 November 2011 (UTC)

Ah yes, I discovered the darkpatterns wiki the other day too, but haven't had chance to properly explore it yet.

That's a nice idea, but in practice kind of tricky because at the moment we can only do recurring donations via PayPal. Which a) isn't most people's preferred method and b) doesn't have as good support for international currencies. We might still test it at some point though, perhaps just in the US at first. I know that Wikimedia UK are going this route, providing monthly donations as the default option, but they are able to support Direct Debits which are very popular in the UK. Pcoombe (WMF) 21:40, 11 November 2011 (UTC)

Yes, I'm English/in England, and almost everything is DD. I didn't know that it was less common in the USA. But yes - it's something to consider. I imagine some people would find it annoying to default to that, but OTOH I imagine it'd bring in a lot more ongoing donations.

I actually find the current link to "Monthly_donations/en" to be confusing - because after clicking it, there's no indication on that page that it is 'monthly' or anything, except that the final link is "Make a monthly donation". What I mean is... it's odd that it still just says "Make your donation now" so it seemed to me like clicking had just repeated the same page. Chzz 23:25, 11 November 2011 (UTC)

Yep, we're working on overhauling that page as it has a number of issues, but it's currently on hold whilst we launch the rest of the fundraiser. Pcoombe (WMF) 01:22, 12 November 2011 (UTC)

Good.

I also suggest some link to "Ask questions/comments about the fund-raising". I've noted several users today who have either wanted to report a problem making a dontation, or just wanted to contact WMF and ask something - but it's confusing for them to find how to do that. There's only the FAQ, and users can get frustrated trying to follow links to find out how to get in touch; I really think it needs a better help-function. One typical example comment is here - but it's not just that; it's the same thing when users have troubles making the payment, or whatever. Chzz 07:26, 12 November 2011 (UTC)

We've added our support email address problemsdonating@wikimedia.org to all the pages (this is probably better than a wiki page as many donors won't be familiar with editing, plus we already had the message translated). Hope this helps. Pcoombe (WMF) 15:36, 13 November 2011 (UTC)

There is still no email, or any other 'help' link, on the page that I am seeing - [3] - possibly it is different for UK. (Also, the donation doesn't seem to work; I get "There has been an error connecting to the Direct Debit page, please try again, or contact customer services on support@smartdebit.co.uk". Chzz 04:03, 15 November 2011 (UTC)

It is indeed different for the UK, we've asked the Chapter about putting a contact email on their first page as well. I didn't have any problems donating, perhaps try again now? If it still doesn't work you can contact richard.symondswikimedia.org.uk. Pcoombe (WMF) 09:54, 15 November 2011 (UTC)

Sorry to bother you (I'm sure you're busy) but, five days on, the UK page still has no means of asking questions [4] - and users are indeed trying to ask all kinds of things, but struggling to know how. Chzz 08:56, 17 November 2011 (UTC)

Email address updates

Hi Peter,

I saw that you were changing the donate email address, is this a global change, and do you need help with making the changes on WMF Wiki too?

The Helpful One 19:44, 20 January 2012 (UTC)

Thanks, I think I've got all of them but if you spot any that still need changing that would really be living up to your name :) Peter Coombe (WMF) 20:18, 20 January 2012 (UTC)

Heh, having 2 legitimate accounts can't be easy! So just to confirm, you'd like donations@wikimedia.org changed to donate@wikimedia.org on all the templates on the Wikimedia Foundation wiki, such as I have done in this edit? The Helpful One 20:25, 20 January 2012 (UTC)

Ah, it's okay. I'll do those templates because I have AWB set up ready. But if you spot donations@wikimedia.org anywhere else please do update it. It isn't crucial, both email addresses work, we just want it to be consistent. Peter Coombe (WMF) 20:36, 20 January 2012 (UTC)

Fundraising 2011/Improvement

Hi, thank you for your work on Fundraising 2011. Now that I noticed you made the page of improvement requests into a redirect to talk:Fundraising 2011([5]), can you tell me where you replaced/archived requests from info-ja, which we input as respond of inquiry what kinds of requests we'd got during the campaign, so that we at otrs volunteering team may trace them? Thanks, --Aphaia (talk) 00:56, 22 February 2012 (UTC)

Thanks for the help

Hi Peter. Thanks for the help (pun intended). Just read about your Fellowship to help improve the help system on Wikipedia. Just wanted to say this is a great idea and a serious undertaking. I have to thank you for taking on such a monumental task and I'm looking forward to your improvements. Thanks and all the best to you. 64.40.54.80 14:52, 28 April 2012 (UTC)

Comment on the help questionnaire

Hi Peter,

I assume you are the one who set up the questionnaire on Wikipedia’s help pages: https://wikimedia.qualtrics.com/SE/?SID=SV_8uFecCwmOU6h7es. (If not, please correct me.)

The idea is good, but I got stuck on the third question, "And how satisfied were you with the help you found on these topics?", as there was no way to answer "Don’t remember/Don’t want to answer". I’ve used several of the help sections mentioned but some of them I haven’t looked at for a very long time and I simply cannot remember to what degree I was satisfied with them. I tried to just skip the ones I couldn’t answer in a good way but the page would not let me move on without answering all questions.

Making a good questionnaire, with the right combination of questions and answer options, is a tricky thing, much trickier than it seems. One of the difficulties is to give the users a set of answer options that actually covers all their varied answers. Very often, adding a "Don’t know / Cannot answer / Prefer not to answer" option helps covering that last part that you might have missed. Is that something that could be added to the survey (even if that would probably mean you had to analyze the two questionnaire versions separately)?

Best regards, Eliashedberg (talk) 06:15, 15 June 2012 (UTC)

Thanks for the comments. If you can't remember, it's fine to just select "neutral". I don't really want to change the survey at this stage since quite a few people have already completed it. the wub "?!" 15:28, 15 June 2012 (UTC)

Category cleanup

Stuff like this warms my heart. Thanks for taking the time to keep things organized! -Pete F (talk) 20:47, 29 January 2013 (UTC)

p.s. I see you tried in vain to bring in Cat-a-lot. I usually use HotCat for stuff like this, but for bigger projects have found AWB to be a great tool. It would be great to compare notes on the easiest ways to go about it some time. -Pete F (talk) 20:49, 29 January 2013 (UTC)

Thanks fellow Pete! Sorting out the fundraising pages has been on my to-do list for a while. I have actually been using AWB for them, after all my attempts at Cat-a-lot failed. Peter Coombe (WMF) (talk) 21:07, 29 January 2013 (UTC)

Cool. I did a lot of categorization work here about a year ago, mainly on Wikimania-related pages but also on organizing things by geography and by year. If you ever want somebody to talk through a categorization question with, let me know -- I know I came across things where two minds would probably have been better than one! -Pete F (talk) 21:13, 29 January 2013 (UTC)

Help test better mass message delivery

Hi. You're being contacted as you've previously used global message delivery (or its English Wikipedia counterpart). It doesn't feel so great to be spammed, does it? ;-)

For the past few months, Legoktm has built a replacement to the current message delivery system called MassMessage. MassMessage uses a proper user interface form (no more editing a /Spam subpage), works faster (it can complete a large delivery in minutes), and no longer requires being on an access list (any local administrator can use it). In addition, many tiny annoyances with the old system have been addressed. It's a real improvement! :-)

You can test out MassMessage here: testwiki:Special:MassMessage. The biggest difference you'll likely notice is that any input list must use a new {{#target:}} parser function. For example, {{#target:User talk:Jimbo Wales}} or {{#target:User talk:Jimbo Wales|test2.wikipedia.org}}. For detailed instructions, check out mw:Help:Extension:MassMessage.

If you find any bugs, have suggestions for additional features, or have any other feedback, drop a note at m:Talk:MassMessage. Thanks for spamming! --MZMcBride (talk) 05:25, 1 October 2013 (UTC)

Beginning of MassMessage, end of EdwardsBot

Hi. You're being contacted as you're listed as an EdwardsBot user.

MassMessage has been deployed to all Wikimedia wikis. For help using the new tool, please check out its help page or drop a note on Meta-Wiki.

With over 400,000 edits to Wikimedia wikis, EdwardsBot has served us well; however EdwardsBot will no longer perform local or global message delivery after December 31, 2013.

A huge thanks to Legoktm, Reedy, Aaron Schulz and everyone else who helped to get MassMessage deployed. --MZMcBride (talk) 02:36, 22 November 2013 (UTC)

Bitcoin

Hi. There have recently been a lot of inquiries about Bitcoin on FWF. Maybe you have received some via email. This seems to be caused by this and this reddit thread. Can you give any more information about why you don't consider it safe? I don't really know much about BTC, but it is an interesting concept. PiRSquared17 (talk) 23:55, 5 December 2013 (UTC)

Thanks for the info, we have indeed received emails about bitcoin. We're keeping an eye on it, but have no plans to implement it during this fundraising season. Our team are working flat out at the moment, and we would have to investigate it with our legal department before doing anything. Peter Coombe (WMF) (talk) 20:45, 6 December 2013 (UTC)

Request for feedback on my GSoC'14 proposal

Hi Pcoombe,

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) 13:16, 13 March 2014 (UTC)

Petition extension

Hi. What kind of petitions would it be used for? WMF-internal decisions? PiRSquared17 (talk) 17:14, 18 April 2014 (UTC)

The aim is to run a petition in the next few months calling for more mobile operators to give free access to Wikipedia (Wikipedia Zero). I don't think there are any WMF uses planned other than that, but decided to build it as a re-usable extension in case some other MediaWiki users find it helpful in future. Peter Coombe (Wikimedia Foundation) (talk) 17:51, 18 April 2014 (UTC)

Talk:CentralNotice/Calendar#Wikimania_banner_not_in_compliance

Please disable this banner immediately. I'll wait 60 minutes. --Nemo 08:12, 2 July 2014 (UTC)

Question on removing a CNBanner and CNCampaign

Hi. I wonder how can I remove a campaign from Special:CentralNotice (not archiving). If I understood correctly, one should be deleting the banner, but it doesn't work either ([6]). How can I get rid of all old stuff and all the wikipages created by that centralnotice? (texts, translations, etc...) Best regards. -- M\A 15:38, 11 April 2015 (UTC)

Hi @MarcoAurelio:. You can delete a banner using the Delete button at the bottom of the banner edit page (next to Clone and Save). You can't delete campaigns though, only archive them. Then they will no longer show up in the list of campaigns by default. Peter Coombe (Wikimedia Foundation) (talk) 12:34, 13 April 2015 (UTC)

Possibly Weird Fundraising Idea

Hello, I realize that I might be suggesting this in the wrong place, if so it would be great if you could point me in the right direction. I'm also not sure if anything like this has been done before, like i said in the title it might be a bit weird or off the wall. The basic idea would be to put a banner similar to one of these at the top of UFC event pages the day of the event. The pages generate a fair amount of traffic on that single day (Example 1 Example 2 Example 3) and i believe it might be a great day to remind people they can support wikipedia. I can break down some stats if you would like, but one example would be UFC 193, just on the day that the even took place the article for the event and the biography articles for the fighters that participated had 988,625 combined views. My feeling is that if we catch people right on the exact day that they are enjoying the sport they are reading about they might be more apt to make a donation to wikipedia than on another random day. Food for thought, thanks for reading. Kevlar (talk) 19:53, 5 January 2016 (UTC)

@Kevlar: Thanks for the suggestion. I've copied it to our fundraising ideas page so that other people can chime in. Peter Coombe (Wikimedia Foundation) (talk) 23:30, 7 January 2016 (UTC)

Request to create a banner

Hello Pcoombe,

The photography contest Wiki Loves Earth organized last May is nominated for the "web event of the year" of the 9th edition of Morocco Web Awards

http://marocwebawards.com/mwa9/wiki-loves-earth-morocco/

Is it possible to create a banner for a 7-day period at CentralNotice to encourage people to vote ?

Cordially, --Reda benkhadra (talk) 15:03, 3 February 2016 (UTC)

Hi Reda, I see you already asked User:Romaine and User:Jseddon (WMF). They are probably better able to help you with this, I'm afraid I don't have much time to work on things outside of Fundraising. Peter Coombe (Wikimedia Foundation) (talk) 16:08, 16 February 2016 (UTC)

Share your experience and feedback as a Wikimedian in this global survey

Hello! The Wikimedia Foundation is asking for your feedback in a survey. We want to know how well we are supporting your work on and off wiki, and how we can change or improve things in the future. The opinions you share will directly affect the current and future work of the Wikimedia Foundation. You have been randomly selected to take this survey as we would like to hear from your Wikimedia community. To say thank you for your time, we are giving away 20 Wikimedia T-shirts to randomly selected people who take the survey. The survey is available in various languages and will take between 20 and 40 minutes.

Take the survey now!

You can find more information about this project. This survey is hosted by a third-party service and governed by this privacy statement. Please visit our frequently asked questions page to find more information about this survey. If you need additional help, or if you wish to opt-out of future communications about this survey, send an email to surveys@wikimedia.org.

Thank you! --EGalvez (WMF) (talk) 22:25, 13 January 2017 (UTC)

Deletion backlog at WMF wiki

Hi Peter. Hope that you're doing well. There's a bit of a backlog in wmf:Category:Deletion_requests (200+ pages). Last time I remember you handled the cleanup. Could you do it again this time as well? Thanks. Regards, —MarcoAurelio (talk) 10:57, 29 August 2017 (UTC)

Okay, all done for now. Peter Coombe (Wikimedia Foundation) (talk) 14:29, 2 September 2017 (UTC)

Thank you! Best regards, —MarcoAurelio (talk) 14:16, 20 September 2017 (UTC)

Fundraising/Translation/Ways to Give new

Hi! Please be more accuracy with updating source code for translatable pages (see page history with my fixes).

1. If item was not been changed or was been updated slightly, please don't remove translation markers with numbering. Otherwise, new elements are created, and all previously translations are lost.
2. If the existing paragraph should be divided, then just do it without touching the markup. A new translation element will be created for the new paragraph, and the previous translation will be marked as obsolete.

---Kaganer (talk) 22:21, 1 October 2017 (UTC)

Sorry about that, thank you very much for fixing it! Peter Coombe (Wikimedia Foundation) (talk) 09:54, 2 October 2017 (UTC)

Question about translation

Hello, how can anyone help with translating https://donate.wikimedia.org/wiki/Template:CountryNope into other languages? https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Elitre_(WMF)#Question_about_translation Can you create the correct page for https://donate.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:LandingPage&country=RU&uselang=ru to display the text in Russian, if we give you a translation (https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/U:Iluvatar/landing)? --Sunpriat (talk) 01:35, 10 July 2018 (UTC) Probably it will be useful to configure the translation of the message into other languages, as the link for donations is available from many wikis and this message is shown to several countries (for example, Russia (russian lang), Iran (persian lang), Libya (arabic lang) and others). --Sunpriat (talk) 16:18, 10 July 2018 (UTC) Сreated phab:T199255 --Sunpriat (talk) 17:46, 10 July 2018 (UTC)

Thanks, I have replied on the Phabricator task. Apologies for the delay! Peter Coombe (Wikimedia Foundation) (talk) 18:47, 24 July 2018 (UTC)

Translations for Fundraising/Translation/Problems donating

Hi, you may want to set zh as one of the translatable languages, instead of zh-hans. This is because translation to zh-hans has been disabled on meta, and Chinese translations are done in zh. -★- PlyrStar93 _{→Message me. ←} 17:03, 19 July 2018 (UTC)

Thanks very much for the information, I have done this. Peter Coombe (Wikimedia Foundation) (talk) 17:10, 19 July 2018 (UTC)

CentralNotice

Hi Peter, I see that you are more or less online now. Could you please have a look at CentralNotice/Request/Wikimarathon 2019 for UKWP and set up the campaign? The campaign is already prepared https://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:CentralNotice&subaction=noticeDetail&notice=WMUA_Wikimarathon_2019 and needs only two tiny changes:

• enable it (ready but not enabled at Special:CentralNotice)
• adjust dates (26 Jan 00:00 to 31 Jan 00:00), i.e. move by one day.

This is unfortunately very urgent: this is a short campaign and we really need to have it live at Ukrainian sunrise, i.e. in a couple of hours. Thank you very much in advance — NickK (talk) 01:08, 26 January 2019 (UTC)

@NickK: Apologies, I had actually logged off for the night before this message. Looks like Seddon was able to help you with this though. Peter Coombe (Wikimedia Foundation) (talk) 18:39, 26 January 2019 (UTC)

@Pcoombe (WMF): Thank you for your answer, and it's fine (you were the latest active CN admin, that's why I contacted you). Yes, Seddon helped us by enabling it except dates (it will still expire one day early). Can you please fix it if you have time? Thanks — NickK (talk) 19:27, 26 January 2019 (UTC)

@NickK: Done. Peter Coombe (Wikimedia Foundation) (talk) 20:41, 26 January 2019 (UTC)

Perfect, thank you very much! — NickK (talk) 23:36, 26 January 2019 (UTC)

The button “Donate” leads to the deleted page.

Hello, Pcoombe (WMF)!

On foundation.wikimedia.org, there was a page foundation:Сделать пожертвование to which I was brought to from ru.wikisource.org’s button “Donate” today. Could you please make the redirection to the general disclaimer about donations from Russia as the following below?

#REDIRECT[[donate:Special:FundraiserRedirector]]

To check the brocken link, please open https://ru.wikisource.org/ and then click on "Пожертвовать".

Thanks!
Pacha Tchernof (talk) 11:07, 10 February 2022 (UTC)

Thanks for spotting this @Pacha Tchernof, the redirect has been added now. Peter Coombe (Wikimedia Foundation) (talk) 12:16, 14 February 2022 (UTC)

Thanks a lot, @Peter Coombe (WMF)! — Pacha Tchernof (talk) 12:21, 14 February 2022 (UTC)

Missing tuning sessions in Fundraising navbox

Hi, an edit of yours adding the Fundraising navbox came up in my watchlist ... could you edit the navbox so the latest Tuning sessions are included? At the moment, all the 2021/22 ones show as redlinks, even though three of them are available. Best, Andreas JN466 19:32, 26 July 2022 (UTC)

Thanks @Andreas, I had noticed that too. It's using a module to try and automatically generate the links, will see if I can fix it. Peter Coombe (Wikimedia Foundation) (talk) 19:35, 26 July 2022 (UTC)

Okay, I edited the module to support the new filename format as well as the old one. Just waiting for the 2021-22 Q3 file to be renamed to match. Peter Coombe (Wikimedia Foundation) (talk) 21:52, 26 July 2022 (UTC)

More banner problems

Tracked in Phabricator:
Task T336353

It looks like whoever this survey provider is has an unstable server. This link keeps intermittently failing on their end with ERROR 500 (Internal Server Error). The last 4 times I tried, it failed twice. Haven't turned off the campaign yet; any idea if a support ticket is open with this provider? Pings to @Itzike and JBrungs (WMF): who are listed on the notes. — xaosflux ^Talk 13:06, 10 May 2023 (UTC)

Thank you @Xaosflux, I've disabled the banner again and will follow up with Jullienn. Peter Coombe (WMF) (talk) 13:12, 10 May 2023 (UTC)