User talk:SPoore (WMF)

Archive 1

Talk to me

Hello

Hello dear lady. Thank you very much for your efforts in the Encyclopaedia projects and your trusted work. In fact, I am the owner of the account (مشاري) in the Arabic Wikipedia for eight years and I have about 50 thousand editing and the establishment of 800 articles with sincerity and great care and I do not commend myself except my neck and my great desire to follow the liberation and work back the Encyclopedia back to my heart, especially after what happened to me in 11 When I was using my computer from one of my 13-year-old brothers to no avail. I tried to recover my account and clarify it over the last two months but to no avail where my account was banned globally and today by chance, I discovered the way to talk to the team of trust and security, and I was never destructive or absurd Over the past eight years, what my brother has done recently, I want to restore the Encyclopedia of Hope to Shawki's unity of the Encyclopedia after it has been prevented from permanently preventing injustice if the ban is temporarily for a month or two will be better and give me an opportunity to clarify what happened, and I promise not to repeat what happened once Others, stressed the protection p Z will not give my members anyone the opportunity to enter my account again reference to what happened figure (T215799), I apologize for the prolongation but what happened after Vinnie, I wish you dear lady helped me ........ --37.231.220.88 13:44, 15 April 2019 (UTC)

Hello

Hi there (it has been a long time since we met at WorldCon 2012 2014 in London!). Very briefly, I saw a contribution you made somewhere (possibly on this wiki) related to talk page discussions of project-specific global bans. Not partial blocks, but very specifically the issue of project-specific global bans (which has caused some problems on en-Wikipedia as you may or may not be aware). But I can't now find that discussion! Would you know what I am thinking of? It may relate to this edit, so maybe I should ask Karen instead, but will wait and see if you are around and might be able to help. Carcharoth (talk) 22:40, 13 June 2019 (UTC)

Since things have moved on a bit, am pointing you to this and the mentions of you over there, though I am sure you are getting the pings. :-) Carcharoth (talk) 13:47, 15 June 2019 (UTC)

Hello Carcharoth, I do remember us meeting at WorldCon in London. It's hard to believe that its been 7 seven years! About your original question. Although better today, unfortunately, finding something through searching is still not too easy even if you know for sure that it exists. I don't recall making a post about global bans. It was much more likely it was something about the new partial blocks feature possibly being used to enforced page, topic or interaction bans on a local language wiki. I've written a lot about that on different wikis (including ENWp, Functionaries mailing list, or Meta) where you might have seen it. If I remember anything else I'll let you know.

Yes, I have seen the pings. :-) I'm working on a comment to post that will help clarify the situation. SPoore (WMF) Strategist, Community health initiative (talk) 21:09, 16 June 2019 (UTC)

Thanks for the reply (what name is it best to use for you here?). Difficult to keep track of everything. Your comments have helped clarify things somewhat. Hope you get more feedback and views (as a side effect of all this!). Carcharoth (talk) 11:46, 22 June 2019 (UTC) PS. It was 2014, not 2012! So it was 5 years ago. My mistake! :-) Carcharoth (talk) 11:18, 24 June 2019 (UTC)

WMF terminology question

Hi. The Wikimedia Foundation is kind of opaque sometimes, and it's often not so easy to understand how things are going on inside, so I was wondering if you could answer a quick question for me: Is the term "Foundation platform" used internally within the Foundation to refer to the wikis? Is this a reasonably common term that you tend to hear in internal discussions?

Thanks. :) --Yair rand (talk) 17:54, 16 June 2019 (UTC)

Hi Yair rand, I'm happy to answer your question as best I can. From my frame of reference, the term "platform" is used internally as it is describe on this page about the work of Wikimedia Foundation Core Platform team. My understanding is that it is more that just a local wiki or even a group of wikis. Instead it is more about the Mediawiki code and the other aspects of the technical infrastructure that support the wikis and other Wikimedia internet services. I do think in general there is some ambiguity in the broadness or precision of the term. So it might be subject to being used different ways. I hope the answer helps. SPoore (WMF) Strategist, Community health initiative (talk) 21:26, 16 June 2019 (UTC)

Need help getting the feature needed to enable mentorship installed at Hebvoy

Hi Sydney. I was referred to you by the user יונה בנדלאק from the Hebrew Wikipedia. I am currently the only admin at the Hebrew Wikivoyage. I have been the most active user there since it was launched in 2013 and created the vast infrastructure of the wiki almost entirely by myself, with the hopes that a community of editors would eventually form (it hasn't so far). Over the years, although we had several active editors whom helped write some excellent articles, most of them eventually left. The most active user, except for me, is now active only once in a long while because he is now doing his mandatory military service.

Recently a new editor joined the Hebrew Wikivoyage whom, unfortunately, seems to be causing more harm than good (I am starting to suspect this is an old troll we had whom got banned, but I do not have access to the necessary tools to prove it). As a result, I find myself investing too much time daily investigating and cleaning up the changes he makes throughout the main space (he is very active). Today, after he pointed out to me that he intends to add mostly raw machine translations without rephrasing them and does not care much about investing the time in writing content of higher quality, I finally understood that we might have no other choice but to have an "involuntary mentorship process" for him, which means that he would only be capable of creating draft articles in his user space during the involuntary mentorship process period, and that his work would be added only after it is complete, reviewed, and approved (this option exists in the Hebrew Wikipedia especially for such instances).

To my understanding, the feature needed to prevent specific users from editing the main space needs to be installed and the process of getting it installed is somewhat problematic in this case, mainly because we do not actually have a large active community that can vote on whether to adopt this feature or not + opening a discussion about importing such a feature together with the new editor will be, in my opinion, awkward and counter productive.

Please help get this feature enabled at the Hebrew Wikivoyage. ויקיג'אנקי (talk) 01:00, 19 June 2019 (UTC)

Hello ויקיג'אנקי, it nice to meet you and I'm glad to work with to get the Partial blocks feature deployed to Hebrew Wikivoyage. Right now partial block is deployed on English Wikivoyage as a test to see if there was any bugs to Wikivoyage that might need to be addressed before it is deployed to all local language Wikivoyage.

What I'm going to do is ping Niharika Kohli, the Product Manager of the Anti-Harassment Tools team. If she thinks that we are going to deploy to all Wikivoyage soon then you may want to wait until the regularly scheduled deployment. If it is a few week off, then we can think about doing a special deploy to he wikivoyage.

In any case, I suggest that you begin to think about if there are policies and workflows that need to be updated to get to use partial blocks. I can share some pages with you that describe how pb works that you can use to start a help page. SPoore (WMF) Strategist, Community health initiative (talk) 20:54, 19 June 2019 (UTC)

Thank you. Once it is available I will create the help pages based on what the Hebrew Wikipedia have created. ויקיג'אנקי (talk) 06:36, 20 June 2019 (UTC)

Hello again ויקיג'אנקי, :-) The Anti-Harassment Tools team decided to go ahead and deploy it to Hebrew Wikivoyage today. Sounds like a good idea to use hewp policy as a basis for he Wikivoyage policy. I'll let you know when it is done. It may be tomorrow UTC time since Niharika works on Pacific Time. SPoore (WMF) Strategist, Community health initiative (talk) 13:28, 20 June 2019 (UTC)

Hello ויקיג'אנקי, letting you know that partial blocks is live on he Wikivoyage now. Please let me and Niharika Kohli know if there is a problem or you have questions about partial blocks. There is a page for feedback or you can leave on this page. SPoore (WMF) Strategist, Community health initiative (talk) 21:15, 20 June 2019 (UTC)

sorry for the late reply. I was away for a couple of days. Thank you for helping. I'll let you know if there is any problem with it. ויקיג'אנקי (talk) 14:47, 25 June 2019 (UTC)

Tech News: 2019-51

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Problems

• The Linter extension helps you find technical errors in articles. It did not show new changes last week. This was because of an API problem. It is now working again. [1]
• Special:Watchlist can show the wrong information again. It does not always show which edits are read and which are unread. This is because of a database problem. The developers are working on solving the problem. [2]

Changes later this week

• You can get email notifications. You can get them immediately, a summary every day or a summary once every week. If you choose a summary you can soon choose not to get notifications you have already marked as read on the wiki. [3]
• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 17 December. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 18 December. It will be on all wikis from 19 December (calendar).

Meetings

• You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 18 December at 16:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• The partial blocks feature is now stable. It will come to most wikis on 6 January. Your wiki can ask to wait. Contact NKohli (WMF) if you don't want it now. [4]

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

00:18, 17 December 2019 (UTC)

Tech News: 2019-52

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Tech News

• Because of the holidays the next issue of Tech News will be sent out on 6 January 2020.

Recent changes

• All mobile site users now have new features. Features include: tabs for page/discussion; an expanded user-menu; direct access to history pages. These features were initially part of the "advanced mode".

Changes later this week

• There is no new MediaWiki version this week or next week.

Future changes

• You can use setlang in the URL to change the user interface language. This will no longer happen automatically. When you open the link you will be asked to confirm the language change. This will not happen if Javascript is not working in your browser. [5]

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

20:07, 23 December 2019 (UTC)

Tech News: 2020-02

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

• When trying to move a page, if the target title already exists then a warning message is shown. The warning message will now include a link to the target title. [6]
• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 7 January. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 8 January. It will be on all wikis from 9 January (calendar).

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

21:22, 6 January 2020 (UTC)

Partial blocks

Hello Sydney, if you have a moment any insight you may have in to phab:T242541 (Allow partial blocks against specified actions) would be welcome. Best regards, — xaosflux ^Talk 16:46, 12 January 2020 (UTC)

Tech News: 2020-03

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

• You can no longer read Wikimedia wikis if your browser use very old TLS. This is because it is a security problem for everyone. It can lead to downgrade attacks. Since 9 December you just see a warning. Soon the browser will not connect to the wikis at all. Most are users on Android systems older than 4.4. You can read the browser recommendations. [7]
• Special:LinkSearch has been moved from the "Redirecting special pages" section on Special:SpecialPages to the "Lists of pages" section. [8]

Changes later this week

• Wikis can protect pages so that only some users can edit them. The standard protection levels are Allow only autoconfirmed users and Allow only administrators. If your wiki use more protection levels the technical name might be renamed for standardisation. This doesn't affect what users see. [9]
• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 14 January. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 15 January. It will be on all wikis from 16 January (calendar).

Future changes

• Deepcat and Catgraph will stop working. This will happen at the end of January. This is because you can now use the normal search function instead. [10]
• You can use <ref follow="…"> to merge footnotes that follow each other. It is meant to be used for digitised books on Wikisource. If the order of the footnotes is wrong no error was shown but the bad <ref> was shown outside the <references /> list. This will change and you will see an error message instead. [11]

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 18:40, 13 January 2020 (UTC)

Hats off to you and the T&S team!

I missed the RFC on partial blocks, but I have to say this is a brilliant idea. Too often we indeed have caused editors to leave the project that may have just had issues dealing with particular topics, and indeed many blocks for edit warring are usually because of an editor's issues with just one or two articles (using a hatchet as a scalpel methinks). So I just wanted to say thank you, to you and the rest of the T&S team, for coming up with a smart way to potentially retain editors (some will always find a way to game any system we create, but this one I think will have a highly positive effect over the long run). I think this measure is one of the best ideas I've seen come out of the WMF, and I hope to see many more like it! Cheers, — Coffee // have a cup // 22:48, 13 January 2020 (UTC)

Thanks, Coffee! I'll pass on your comment to the rest of T&S and also the Anti-Harassment Tools team. They will appreciate hearing you comment. SPoore (WMF) Strategist, Community health initiative (talk) 00:43, 15 January 2020 (UTC)

Tech News: 2020-04

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 21 January. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 22 January. It will be on all wikis from 23 January (calendar).

Future changes

• There is a new suggestion for what to show when someone edits without registering an account. This is to give unregistered editors better privacy and make some anti-vandalism work go faster. You can give feedback.
• Pywikibot is a Python library to automate work on wikis. It will no longer support Python 2. Use the python2 tag if you need to continue running Python 2 scripts. The Pywikibot team strongly recommends to migrate to Python 3. You can get help to do so. [12]
• The weekly MediaWiki branch cut will soon become automated. The timing for this cut may change. You can discuss in Phabricator if this affects you. [13]
• You can read about coming technical events and mentoring interns.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

19:42, 20 January 2020 (UTC)