Wikimedia Forum/Archives/2016-11

Arabic Wikipedia violates terms of use?

During my short experience with the Arabic Wikipedia (see here, here, and here) I was repeatedly told that the Arabic Wikipedia is not governed or influenced in anyway by the other Wiki projects, and I believed that, but thanks to User:Luca Polpettini I now know that there are terms of use for Wikimedia which should apply to the Arabic Wikipedia, so it is seems untrue that the Arabic Wikipedia is free to do whatever they want. In the terms of use it is said that harassment and threats are not allowed. I think I was harassed and unfairly banned in the Arabic Wikipedia (please refer to the links for details). It is unfortunate that the terms of use seem to say nothing about resolving conflicts through discussion. This is a loophole which can allow the Arabic Wikipedia to get away with what they do. They told me that I am not allowed to discuss with them and that I must obey what they say without asking questions (one of them actually banned me because I asked him a question). I asked them to come here and discuss, and also User:Hindustanilanguage asked them several times to come here and respond to what I say, but they did not care to respond. They can get away with that because they can say that there is nothing that obliges them to discuss anything with anybody.--HD86 (talk) 03:40, 1 November 2016 (UTC)

Global right Patroller

I have opinions for WMF Project. How if the wikimedia foundations have a global patroller or add right to member SWMT to global patroller? It make easy for patrol in small wiki is a not admin member. how your opinions?Murbaut (talk) 02:46, 22 October 2016 (UTC)

@Murbaut: Usually, stewards will fill this kind of role but that's not like the system can't be improved. Do you know of any small wikis that need more attention? —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 02:59, 22 October 2016 (UTC)

yes small wiki needs attention, if there is no board, highly vulnerable to vandalism. It easy to patrol for member SWMT to fight any vandalism. Murbaut (talk) 03:27, 22 October 2016 (UTC)

There are global rollbackers and global sysops as well. But you don't need either to help with the SWMT; you can join IRC and go to #cvn-sw to start patrolling edits! Hopefully someday we'll be able to integrate that more on-wiki as well, so external sites aren't needed. – Ajraddatz (talk) 03:35, 22 October 2016 (UTC)

@Ajraddatz oh. Do you know tools can show small wiki don't have member of admin right?:)Murbaut (talk) 13:51, 23 October 2016 (UTC)

• Comment To be honest, I do not see any need for this. We already have GRs and GSs to combat vandalism. No need to create redundant groups. Jianhui67 ^{talk★contribs} 05:45, 30 October 2016 (UTC)
• Yeah, we don't need another group for patrolling. But I  Support giving GRs the ability to mark others' edits as patrolled. I wonder why they don't have the ability to patrol other edits yet... --Pokéfan95 (talk) 11:26, 30 October 2016 (UTC)
•  Oppose, uneeded. —MarcoAurelio 11:29, 30 October 2016 (UTC)
  • • • @MarcoAurelio okay I only give opinion :) Murbaut (talk) 12:00, 1 November 2016 (UTC)

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AIpedia

Hello,

I'd like to know if the idea of an encyclopedia written by (and only by) an Artificial Intelligence has already been raised. IA which would be fed with high quality sources, able to synthesize all the stuff.

Ok, it looks like science fiction, but with the progress as Watson's, it doesn't seem to me unreachable. Is there already a project on this ?--Markov (talk) 22:00, 29 October 2016 (UTC)

@Markov: I don't know of one but for many years bots have been creating articles on Wikipedia and one of the functions of d: is to seed potential new articles in WMF projects. I don't think we are at the point where creating an encyclopedia from scratch is possible (that may never occur) but we are doing some babysteps. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 23:36, 29 October 2016 (UTC)

@Koavf: Some softwares are already able to generate text for media as economic publications. And I don't think that Watson uses the same kind of database as Wikidata does. The next step would be to use deep learning to create articles from scratch (but not the basic way the bots already do). --Markov (talk) 09:51, 30 October 2016 (UTC)

Some Big Picture perspective (and I'll remark separately, at the end, on what it implies about courses of action). The value of the wikimedian sisterhood to civilization lies in empowering ordinary human beings to have a voice in information providing. People downstream having access to the information provided — yes, that matters, but the point goes further than that, into what information they have access to: they have access to information by The People. When Wikipedia was first created, the obvious threat to this empowerment was simply ownership of web sites: the way things were headed in the late 1990s, it looked as if in the future all non-propaganda information would be paywalled. We've avoided that (not that it's "over", obviously it never ends), but a more subtle threat has been rising to ordinary people's voice in information providing, which is naively factoring humans out of the equation through failing to recognize the importance of keeping them in the equation. Our technological information processing can do some things that we can't, and there are immensely powerful capitalist motives to emphasize these things and ignore (or, not even look for) the things that we can do that our technological information processing can't; and educators, in struggling against superstition-based resistance to science and technology, have also strongly emphasized what technology can do while demphasizing what we can do that technology can't; and, insidiously, we lack good means to quantify what we're good at because we keep trying to measure things using some structured means, and anything sufficiently structured can be assigned to technology (even the Turing test suffers from this problem). The benefits of having information pass through human hands on its way to being provided are subtle and cumulative, and we don't have means to quantify them — it may even be that the nature of the benefits prevents them from being quantified — but if we don't work at preserving that passing-through-human-hands, the cumulative result will be the loss of something important without our ever really understanding what it was that we lost. It's conceivable this might even be the explanation for the Fermi paradox.

As for courses of action, my conservative conclusion from all this is that the greatest benefit to civilization lies in keeping the wikimedian sisterhood a bastion of human empowerment in the information flow. --Pi zero (talk) 14:23, 4 November 2016 (UTC)

SineBot for Meta?

The licensing discussion here is overflowing with unsigned comments. I have asked the maintainer of SineBot to step in and yield some comprehensibility from the chaos. Hopefully, that will occur. However, his talk page does state that he is currently very busy and might not respond promptly. If that is the case, is there anyone else with the ability to run SineBot (or equivalent) on the licensing discussion once or twice a day until the discussion closes? Thanks! Zazpot (talk) 20:13, 5 November 2016 (UTC)

Information about ongoing policy discussions, requests, etc.

I noticed with shock that I only noticed the proposal to create a global right in the above section #Global autopatrolled a week after it was created. Even when I count in that I was on holidays until the 2nd of November, that are still 4 days. Shockshock. This made me remember an idea I had some time ago: to create a template which links to ongoing policy proposals, rights requests etc. of global effect. Meta-only things might or might not be included as well, or get their own template. Such a thing exists on dewiki with de:Vorlage:Beteiligen, and it seems like en:Template:Centralized discussion is also an equivalent. I believe this could be helpful both for "regular" Meta users and for users who aren't very active here but who would like to stay informed about what "global discussions" are being had at the moment, which might after all, affect them as well. So, are there others who would find such a template useful? Others who also would help to keep it updated? Is a template the most suitable means, or would it be better to deliver it as a weekly(?) massmessage? --MF-W 02:17, 6 November 2016 (UTC)

Wikipedia Kiswahili

hey I ask for administrative rights in the Kiswahili Wikipedia. I am very familiar with the language and the errands in the wiki. Trunzep (talk) 13:28, 8 November 2016 (UTC)

@Trunzep: Permission requests goes to Steward requests/Permissions. --Stryn (talk) 15:10, 8 November 2016 (UTC)

Swahili Wiktionary

Can any bureaucrat or steward grant me my admin rights on sw.wiktionary.org. Confirm frm here Trunzep (talk) 14:24, 12 November 2016 (UTC)

No. I'm not sure if there is a language barrier here, but every request needs to be open for one week. 7 days. To allow anyone to comment, even if nobody does. Please stop asking, as you've been told this multiple times already. – Ajraddatz (talk) 18:46, 12 November 2016 (UTC)

Password reset

I apologise that this message is in English. Help with translations!

We are having a problem with attackers taking over wiki accounts with privileged user rights (for example, admins, bureaucrats, oversighters, checkusers). It appears that this may be because of weak or reused passwords.

Community members are working along with members of multiple teams at the Wikimedia Foundation to address this issue.

In the meantime, we ask that everyone takes a look at the passwords they have chosen for their wiki accounts. If you know that you've chosen a weak password, or if you've chosen a password that you are using somewhere else, please change those passwords.

Select strong passwords – eight or more characters long, and containing letters, numbers, and punctuation. Joe Sutherland (WMF) (talk) 23:59, 13 November 2016 (UTC)

And administrators, you may now sign up for two-factor authentication. — xaosflux ^Talk 00:34, 14 November 2016 (UTC)

The link for translation does not work. Gamliel Fishkin 04:30, 14 November 2016 (UTC)

@JSutherland (WMF) and Xaosflux: I, as admin on cs.wikiversity, folloved this recommendation and changed my password from strong enough (more than 10 signs, combination of more groups numbers and more groups letters with no sense. I changed case of letters somewhere (not first letter), added very special signs... If I'm logging on Meta - no problems. If I try log in on "my" projects, loggign page send me info, that my (new) password is incorrect and requests rewrite control code. After all, I can't log in at all. Is this a bug or what??? I'm afraid I because of this bug loss control of my account, what means also missing adminship. I'm totally sure, I remember my new (and old too) password precisely. Can someone help me? Please! (these problems occured many times). --Kusurija (talk) 22:29, 15 November 2016 (UTC)

@Kusurija: you appear to be logged in already, your post above was made from a logged in session. @JSutherland (WMF): I have been noticing a recent problem (may be coincidence) - when going to other projects I'm not logged in instantly, but have to wait for a toast notification to say logged in then for the page to reload. — xaosflux ^Talk 22:41, 15 November 2016 (UTC)

Hi, Kusurija and Xaosflux - I'm going to ping BWolff (WMF) of the Wikimedia Foundation's security team who's better placed to answer this. Joe Sutherland (WMF) (talk) 23:36, 15 November 2016 (UTC)

Hi User:Kusurija, I'm not sure I understand you correctly. Can you copy and paste the exact message that MediaWiki gives you? (It is ok if it is in your language). BWolff (WMF) (talk) 23:39, 15 November 2016 (UTC)

WOT - Web of Trust

Why not offer to take over the ownership of WOT - Web of Trust. Good open source security application, useful for Wikipedia authors, but it lost its credibility since the current owners sold private info to third parties. I believe the current owners can not regain their credibility. They should sell it to some reliable organization, such as Wikimedia.193.10.117.191 17:10, 18 November 2016 (UTC)

@193.10.117.191: That's a little outside the scope of Wikimedia--would you call WoT an educational project? —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 21:53, 19 November 2016 (UTC)

I am blocked from wiki

As discussed earlier i want to contribute to wikipedia but i can't find any reliable medium in getting this through that is why i get blocked.Suggest something better that i can learn this effectively and contribute effectively as well. Mudasir18 (talk) 08:02, 5 November 2016 (UTC)

You can create a new account and try to start anew. Regards, Tuanminh01 (talk) 02:22, 9 November 2016 (UTC)

On the English Wikipedia, that's considered sock puppetry. WP:CLEANSTART only applies to people who do not have any current blocks. However, if you got blocked shortly after joining and only because of some kind of newbie mistake that you're unlikely to repeat, it's unlikely that anyone would even notice you were the same person. Still, the best thing to do would be to appeal the block through established channels. @Mudasir18: Is it a regular block or an AE block? Darkfrog24 (talk) 03:36, 16 November 2016 (UTC)

@Mudasir18: Unless you are hugely obsessive with wikipedia, I recommend you rest for a month to calm down, then make a new account and try again. Tuanminh01 (talk) 05:39, 16 November 2016 (UTC)

@Tuanminh01: This is absurd!--Luca Polpettini (talk) 19:08, 22 November 2016 (UTC)

Please comment on issue of Arabic Wikipedia

I posted about serious issues with the Arabic Wikipedia (see here, here, and here), but it is surprising that almost nobody commented, although the issue became clear at the end. They refused even to comment, even though they were asked to respond not only by me but also by another user from the community here.

I posted very serious things about them but they chose not to respond in anyway. What does that tell you? Do you find that acceptable? Please comment on this.--HD86 (talk) 05:22, 17 November 2016 (UTC)

I have read and this is foolish: Wikimedia have no tools to protect honest users if harassers are administrators. It is sad :( --Luca Polpettini (talk) 19:16, 22 November 2016 (UTC)

Harassers-admins block honest users. Honest users try to argue with harassers, because they don't want become harassers themselves. The final result is only harassers-admins, and no honest users, remain in the community. Really sad.. :(( --Luca Polpettini (talk) 19:23, 22 November 2016 (UTC)

Thanks Luca for your kind comment. I am waiting to hear from the others here.--HD86 (talk) 23:33, 25 November 2016 (UTC)

Propose to reactivate superprotect

Many enwiki admins are compromised and vandalizing main page. I propose that some vandalism targets can betemporary superprotected so that only WMF staffs can edit.--117.136.0.202 16:53, 18 November 2016 (UTC)

 Oppose if WMF staff. But if stewards, it is a rational idea. Gamliel Fishkin 00:39, 20 November 2016 (UTC)

Probably best to discuss this on enwiki instead. – Ajraddatz (talk) 00:43, 20 November 2016 (UTC)

Some of the compromised accounts were staff accounts. Superprotection would have just made it much more difficult to fix. --Yair rand (talk) 22:36, 27 November 2016 (UTC)

Wikipedia talk:Teahouse

It's been brought up that someone from the WMF may want to comment on this conversation regarding the Teahouse on en.wikipedia. Not sure if this is exactly the right place for it, but it seems close-ish. Timothyjosephwood (talk) 21:01, 28 November 2016 (UTC)

Thanks, Timothyjosephwood. I saw and replied. Jtmorgan (talk) 21:29, 28 November 2016 (UTC)

New Project? Wikhypothesis

Wikhypothesis would function as a repository of hypotheses about what is and all relevant evidence for said hypotheses. Thus, it could serve as the backbone for a metaanalysis of any hypothesis humans care to consider by becoming an extremely concise metajournal of all human knowledge acquisition.

Do you think this is a good new project or belongs in Wikiversity or other? Enter the conversation here: Wikhypothesis. Thanks.

[I am following Instruction #4 on Proposals for new projects: "Advertise your project!"] — The preceding unsigned comment was added by Jtdjtdjtdjtd (talk)

@Jtdjtdjtdjtd: You are definitely free to advertise and solicit opinion--I hope any feedback is valuable. It looks like you created the proposal three years ago with your alternate account User:Jtdjtdjtd.business but haven't edited since until now. That is totally your right to do but I marked the proposal as rejected since there was no discussion or a live demo or any community built around the idea in years. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 04:35, 30 November 2016 (UTC)