Wikimedia Forum/Archives/2018-01

Please do not post any new comments on this page. This is a discussion archive first created in January 2018, although the comments contained were likely posted before and after this date. See current discussion or the archives index.

How does my Nupedia recreation look like?

Hi,

Instead of recreating Nupedia from the ground up, I used FANDOM (fandom.wikia.com) to do so. Here’s the link to it:

http://nupedia2018.wikia.com

Thanks! --Little Jackie (talk) 12:55, 1 January 2018 (UTC)

Rename a maintenance category

Hello,

I would like to rename the category Category:Deleteme to Category:Candidates for speedy deletion to have the same name of category in all english wikis (except Wikidata but I am doing). I want to get you opinion before doing this.

Cordially. --Niridya (talk) 18:40, 3 January 2018 (UTC)

Hello, this is not a English wiki. Meta is a multilingual wiki. Stryn (talk) 18:59, 3 January 2018 (UTC)

Hello, I know that Meta is a multilingual wiki and not an english wiki. I mean that base name of pages are in english. --Niridya (talk) 19:21, 3 January 2018 (UTC)

Manchu Wikipedia

If Manchu Wikipedia or Manchu Wikisource would ever be a thing, will it be written entirely in vertical script or will it be written incorrectly to match the style of Latin script (like the Classical Chinese Wikipedia)? --Donald Trung (Talk 🤳🏻) (My global lock 🔒) (My global unlock 🔓) 11:20, 4 January 2018 (UTC)

What's your point? We have an incubator Wikipedia project at incubator:Wp/mnc that for now is a mix of the two styles. There are two pages of a Wikiquote project at incubator:Wq/mnc that are both in vertical script. It's up to the community to get them fixed properly in order to get them ready for approval. But neither is even remotely close now. StevenJ81 (talk) 18:30, 4 January 2018 (UTC)

Censorship of Farsi Wikipedia administrators. (Remove 2017–18 Iranian protests images without reason)

Hello. The Iran Islamic Republic's terrorists remove images of people on Wikipedia from 2017–18 Iranian protests, they get money from the government and have access to remove images. They do not want people to see the protests :( As a typical Iranian citizen, we do not have much familiarity with Wikipedia. Please report to the administrator. if you want see this.. They also reject our edits in the article in farsi wikipedia and they say iranian people do not have problems with terrorists and "islamic Republic of iran" See this Closed this user's access and many other of normal iranian people! Mohammadmosalman (talk) 22:41, 4 January 2018 (UTC) They do not want foreign people to see pictures :( Mohammadmosalman (talk) 22:41, 4 January 2018 (UTC)

@Huji: right of response — billinghurst sDrewth 07:30, 6 January 2018 (UTC)

@Billinghurst: I am deliberately staying out of this matter. The only things I have to say are: (a) Fa WP matters should be discussed there, not on Meta, and (b) if images are truly deleted from Commons against that wiki's policy, that should also be discussed on Commons, not Meta. Huji (talk) 20:23, 6 January 2018 (UTC)

Wiki platform for crowd development of ideas

I was looking for Wiki pages where people can post ideas and other (or the same) people develop them further in order to render more detail and help realize them. Lot's of people have bright idea's that can bring humanity forward. They not always have a clue on how to realize their idea while others have (semi-)professional experience for this. It should go even further than a common forum where people just ask a question and the crowd answers it : someone posts a (general) idea and the community incrementally comments on detailing, improving and realizing this idea. It's more or less comparable with GitHub for the development of software. there should be votes for feasability, durability, sustainability, ...

For instance : - idea 1 (Elon Musk) : we should have a space friendly and low-energy long range public transportation system.

      - how technically realize this ?
             -> Sub.Idea a: dig tunnel, make it a vacuum tube, let train gliding on magnets travel in it. 
                         - realisiation of the vacuum with muliple entrances
                               -> SubSubIdea a : ... + drawings, sketches ...
 
           -> Sub.Idea b:  make a bridge, cover is with solar panels and wind mills has y votes
           -> Sub.Idea xyz : .... has x votes

- Idea 2 : we should have a high capacity, compact, transportable energy source with powerrange 30-50kW

           - Sub Idea a : stapled Li-Ion batteries
                       ...
           - Sub Idea b : mini H2-turbine
                       ...

- Idea 3 : we should have software on our smartphones with which we take 5 pictures of the same room from different angles. Afterwards we can get all dimensions between objects. - link to GitHub...

Does such a Wiki platform exist ? — The preceding unsigned comment was added by Kurt7272 (talk)

You can explore Wikiversity for ideas useful in education. Ruslik (talk) 19:29, 7 January 2018 (UTC)

The Reference Desk on Wikipedia essentially functions this way as long as your original post is framed in the form of a question. ;) Killiondude (talk) 07:25, 8 January 2018 (UTC)

Hosting a UTRS site on personal server vs. toolforge

Hi, I am currently toying with the idea of developing a UTRS website for zh-wiki that does not yet have it. Right now I am developing it on my own server. But someone in the community said I should really do it on a WMF VPS, just like the en-wiki UTRS, because the nature of the project is such that it should be monitored and intervened by WMF should circumstances warrant.

Is there a policy or convention that such projects are required, expected or recommended to be hosted on toolforge for this reason? Is it a known practice that WMF will intervene a toolforge service when things go wrong with it?

Thank you. Bluedeck 15:00, 11 January 2018 (UTC)

@Bluedeck: There are no requirements to do this, but it is a best practice to host important tools on a system where multiple people are able to help restart things if they go down. Similarly, please see File:FLOSS Best Practices for Bots and Tools poster.pdf for some good general advice. Lastly, because your project will likely contain sensitive information, I'll specifically point towards wikitech:Wikitech:Labs Terms of use, which you probably would've seen anyway, but just in case. Hope that helps. :) Quiddity (WMF) (talk) 23:35, 11 January 2018 (UTC)

Thank you. Does WMF do anything other than just rebooting on failure, though? Bluedeck 01:38, 12 January 2018 (UTC)

Please note that Toolforge and Cloud VPS are very different things. There seems to be a small amount of confusion over the terms in the original question. Toolforge is a managed hosting environment tailored for the common needs of running bots (long running processes which interact with the wikis), cron jobs (typically used for recurring analytics analysis), and web services (e.g. web based tools for reporting data or interacting with the wikis). Cloud VPS is a virtual machine hosting platform powered by OpenStack which is used by 212 Wikimedia related projects to provide computing resources. Toolforge is one of these 212 projects; Beta Cluster is another; the enwiki UTRS system is yet another.

The Wikimedia Cloud Services team does not offer managed hosting (OS upgrades, system administration) as part of the Cloud VPS. Using Cloud VPS does however make it fairly easy to create a community of maintainers with shared administrative rights to manage the virtual machines for a project. It also makes things like project usurpation possible in the unlikely, but possible, event that the original project maintainers lose interest before their client community does. Additionally it provides its services for free (gratis) to Wikimedia projects. --BDavis (WMF) (talk) 17:45, 12 January 2018 (UTC)

I would recommend reaching out to the UTRS developers and see what they would recommend, and how to share resources/code/etc. Legoktm (talk) 20:03, 12 January 2018 (UTC)

That is a wonderful idea. I was planning to do this from ground up so that I can add additional features and even support multiple wikis with just this one site. But their thoughts must be valuable either way. Bluedeck 01:59, 13 January 2018 (UTC)

WikiMiniAtlas

WikiMiniAtlas. Why the map is not showing nearby articles? Xaris333 (talk) 08:32, 12 January 2018 (UTC)

Announcement: results of Bridges Across Cultures

We are pleased to announce the results of our multilingual wiki-collaboration contest, Bridges across Cultures, which has taken place among languages from both Latin America and the Middle East & North Africa in October/November 2017.

ِThe contest was organized by multiple Wikimedia affiliates, including Argentina, Brazil and Chile (Latin America) and Iran, Levant, and Turkey (MENA), with the aim of exchanging cultural experiences and values between the two regions; as the contestants from either Latin America or MENA were asked to write and expand Wikipedia articles related to the rich and unique culture of the other region. In total, 832 articles were created or improved as part of this contest: 427 articles about Latin American culture were expanded in Arabic, Persian and Turkish Wikipedia, while 415 articles about MENA culture were done in Spanish and Portuguese Wikipedia. 64 different participants submitted at least one article to the contest.

As for the results, six prizes are designated for the best performing contestants (with three being dedicated for the best participants from either Latin America or MENA). The prizes will be awarded for the following users who achieved the highest points:

Latin America

Rosarinagazo, Spanish Wikipedia (143 articles, 1210 points).
Tuga1143, Portuguese Wikipedia (117 articles, 1150 points).
MarisaLR, Spanish Wikipedia, (97 articles, 850 points).

Middle East & North Africa

محک, Persian Wikipedia (97 pages, 890 points).
Abdou7878, Arabic Wikipedia (80 pages, 810 points).
Mohammed alzaidy, Arabic Wikipedia (88 pages, 760 points).

Hopefully, we intend to continue and further extend this successful experience in 2018 and in the following years. If you are interested in including your language project in future versions, please get in touch with the contest’s organizers.

--Abbad (talk) 09:19, 13 January 2018 (UTC).

Reminder about Wikimania scholarships: deadline January 22

Registration for a Wikimania scholarship closes on January 22.
If you are thinking of applying, here are some tips from the committee that oversees the applications: https://blog.wikimedia.org/2017/10/20/wikimania-scholarships/
To register, navigate to this page: https://scholarships.wikimedia.org/apply
Good luck, everyone! María (WMF) (talk) 17:47, 18 January 2018 (UTC)

Legal question about the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act

How is Wikimedia complying with COPPA? Because anyone can create an account, even if they are under the age of 13. Should the WMF amend the terms of use to state that a parent must have given permission to the child and the WMF must receive confirmation that they have parental permission? I mean, Wikipedia has a child protection page, but how is that valid under COPPA? Should underage accounts be grounds for global locking? Ups and Downs (↕) 22:52, 18 January 2018 (UTC)

I happen to agree with you, Wikimedia should adopt this policy. Especially since they and we don't know who we're dealing with online such as the Wikipedia environment. CentralEchelon (talk) 15:47, 20 January 2018 (UTC)

@UpsandDowns1234: some of this may be answered for you here: Wikikids/Questions_and_answers#Legal_matters. — xaosflux ^Talk 17:36, 20 January 2018 (UTC)

It's not the best source, but contains some of the key points. Keep in mind most of COPPA is about collecting "personal information", and the most common types are not collected by us (e.g. name, address, age). — xaosflux ^Talk 17:38, 20 January 2018 (UTC)

People with Autism?

I was just wondering! What's the policy with the Wikimedia Foundation for users who are autistic? I myself was diagnosed with the Asperger Syndrome in 2009 and completely according to the doctor meet the Autism spectrum. Is the Wikimedia Foundation Autistic friendly? And are there tasks which we can feel comfortable with which won't get us into trouble with the administrators etc. CentralEchelon (talk) 15:53, 20 January 2018 (UTC)

Hello CentralEchelon, in general any editor is welcome that can respect the community behavioral guidelines of the project(s) they participate in. You are not required to identify your diagnosis, but are allowed to. One of our largest projects is the English Wikipedia, and their community has an essay on this topic here: w:en:Wikipedia:High-functioning autism and Asperger's editors. To learn more about editing on the English Wikipedia, you may be interested in going through the Wikipedia Adventure. Best regards, — xaosflux ^Talk 17:33, 20 January 2018 (UTC)

Let bureaucrats on Wikimedia projects to add and remove 'accountcreator' permission by default.

Hello. There's a proposal to allow bureaucrats to add and remove the account creator permission locally on Wikimedia Wikis. Thanks. —MarcoAurelio (talk) 15:24, 21 January 2018 (UTC)

Account creation permission in the Basque Wikipedia

Hello! Currently we are running lots of Education related outreach courses and sometimes we need the Account Creator permission to avoid the 6 account-per-IP limit. That's the reason I was promoted to bureaucrat, so I can give this permission to the person who is running the course. But I have checked that I can't give this permission to anyone, as it is blocked in the User Rights page. Where is the problem or how could I solve this? -Theklan (talk) 09:53, 21 January 2018 (UTC)

Hi Theklan. This is because the account creator permission is not configured as a default permission from any group (you can check at eu:Special:ListGroupRights the user rights configuration for your wiki). There are some options I can see:

If you need to get someone flagged with account creator permissions now, please drop us a line at SRP and we will gladly assist.
You can also hold a local vote at euwiki to request that administrators or bureaucrats be able to add and remove this permission locally.
In case of large workshops, if you know the IP or IP range from where the workshop will take place, I think it's best handled through Mass account creation .

Regards, —MarcoAurelio (talk) 11:03, 21 January 2018 (UTC)

Hello, MarcoAurelio! The last case is not valid for us, as we normally find that they have the same IP after arriving the place. The first one could be valid, as we have few people working on the Education Program, but what we voted [1] was basically this: we needed new bureaucrats because sometimes someone needs the Account Creation permission and only bureaucrats can give it (as far as we knew). After, we held a second votation here to renew this bureaucrats. So, as I understand, euwiki community has accepted that bureaucrats have this right, and renewed who have this charge. -Theklan (talk) 17:13, 22 January 2018 (UTC)

Hi Theklan - It is possible to grant the bureaucrats at euwiki the ability to add and remove the permission locally, sure. As you can see in a thread below, I am indeed proposing that this permission be on the default "package" of the bureaucrat toolset on Wikimedia wikis. I don't know how much time it'll take to get the proposal approved so if you do not want to wait you can submit a Phabricator task asking that euwiki 'crats be able to grant and remove the permission. And, like I said, should you need to have someone flagged now, please drop us a line at SRP and we'll handle that real quick. Regards, —MarcoAurelio (talk) 18:52, 22 January 2018 (UTC)

Thanks @MarcoAurelio:! Where is the exact place in Phabricator to ask? I would like to bother the less possible as there are lots of projects there. -Theklan (talk) 19:05, 22 January 2018 (UTC)

Hi Theklan: you can use the https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/maniphest/task/edit/form/22/ form to create the task. Please let me know if you have doubts/questions. I'm @MarcoAurelio on Phabricator as well. —MarcoAurelio (talk) 19:08, 22 January 2018 (UTC)

Request for bot in Thai Wikipedia

Hello, I'm Horus from Thai Wikipedia. Lately we have only few active bot operators here, and some backlogs can't be done entirely by humans. I am looking for users who are interested to operate bots for (1) moving categories (2) check license, fair use rationale, and source of files, because a lot of files are not following non-free policy. Thanks. --Horus (talk) 12:36, 26 January 2018 (UTC)

As to categories you can talk to the owner of Special:CentralAuth/AvicBot, which is already flagged in Thai Wikipedia and performs category related tasks in English Wikipedia. Ruslik (talk) 18:28, 26 January 2018 (UTC)

2018 Ombuds Commission announcement

I am happy to announce the new and returning members of the 2018 Ombudsman Commission (OC), the small group of volunteers who investigate complaints about violations of the privacy policy, and in particular concerning the use of CheckUser and Oversight[1] tools, on any Wikimedia project for the Board of Trustees.

[1] https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Resolution:Amending_the_Scope_of_the_Ombudsman_Commission

I apologize for the length of the announcement. :)

The application period for new commissioners for 2018 recently closed. The Wikimedia Foundation is extremely grateful to the many experienced and insightful volunteers who offered to assist with this work. This year we received applications representing the widest variety of languages, projects, and regions I’ve seen since I started working with the committee three years ago.

Given the increasing caseload OC has been handing year over year, we have decided to take advantage of the opportunity the diverse candidate pool afforded us and expand the committee by one seat; this year’s OC will consist of eight, rather than seven, members, with a two-member advisory team who will guide the new commission.

I am pleased to announce the composition of the 2018 OC. First, the new members are:

Billinghurst
Billinghurst is a long-term Metapedian/Wikimedian who served as a steward from 2012 to 2016 and still serves as a global sysop. He considers his home wiki to be the English Wikisource where he's performed over 260,000 edits and focuses on transcribing biographical reference data from the 19th and early 20thC. In addition, however, to serving as a local administrator on Wikisource he also holds the sysop hat on Commons, Meta and the English Wikipedia racking up almost 700,000 edits across the projects with almost a million edits when you count his bot. He claims to still have a bit of wisdom and knowledge to give.

Jamie Tubers
Sam, who edits as Jamie Tubers, joined the English language Wikipedia community in 2011 and has over the years expanded his activities into a wide range of movement activities including co-founding the Wikimedia user group Nigeria and helping to organize events like Wiki Loves Africa and Wiki Loves Women. He is dedicated to correcting our content gaps and biases related to Africa and raising awareness of the projects on the continent.

Dyolf77
Habib started editing in 2010 and has been heavily engaged in community affairs, both onwiki and as part of user groups, for years. A native of Tunisia, he has been a free-culture advocate on a wide range of issues in and beyond the movement. Onwiki, you can mainly find him helping out on Commons, where he is a sysop, as well as the Arabic and French language editions of Wikipedia.

Saileshpat
Saileshpat started editing Wikipedia in 2012 and soon became deeply involved in the Odia community. He has helped organize outreach events and worked to spread awareness in his region. In addition he was one of the co-organizers of WikiConference India 2016. Saileshpat has helped in a content relicensing process, where the Government of Odisha decided to release content under Creative Commons licenses. Online he is mainly active on the Odia Wikipedia and Commons.

Elmacenderesi
Elmacenderesi has been working on Wikimedia projects since 2007, primarily on the Turkish Wikipedia. There, he has been a CheckUser and a Bureaucrat since 2008 and an Oversighter since 2011. He is also a member of Wikimedia OTRS and serves as a global outreach coordinator, working with academic institutions and GLAMs, for The Wikipedia Library.

Teles
Lucas became a Wikipedian in 2007 and started to engage with CheckUser rights in 2009, when he became a local CU on the Portuguese Wikipedia. He held both Oversight and Checkuser rights on Ptwiki between 2015 and 2017, when his term with the rights expired. He is currently an administrator on Commons. His traditional main focus has been on anti-vandalism work. In 2012, the global community elected him as a steward, a position he has held since.

In addition, experienced OC members Lankiveil and Góngora will be returning as members of the Ombuds Commission:

Lankiveil
Lankiveil is a long-term user, admin, and oversighter on the English Wikipedia, having made his first edits in 2004. He served on the Ombuds Commission in 2017, and is also an OTRS volunteer. He also sometimes edits at Irish Wikipedia, and Wikidata. He is a native speaker of Australian English and is a member of Wikimedia Australia.

Góngora
Góngora, J. Gustavo Góngora-Goloubintseff, primarily edits Spanish Wikipedia, Catalan Wikipedia and Norwegian bokmål Wikipedia. He has been an administrator and bureaucrat on the Spanish Wikipedia since 2007, and an administrator on the Catalan Wikipedia from 2010 until 2017, where he is also a CheckUser. He was a member of the Spanish Arbitration Committee in 2008, before it was dismantled. He was a board member of Wikimedia España in 2011. He is currently a member of both Wikimedia España and Wikimedia Norge.

And the following experienced OC members will be returning as advisors to the commission (this advisory role provides expertise when needed, but does not participate in all discussions):

Pajz
Pajz has edited the Wikimedia projects since 2005. He was a Wikipedia administrator between 2007 to 2016 and is a member of the Volunteer Response Team. He served as one of the OTRS administrators from 2013 to 2015, before being first appointed to the Ombudsman Commission in 2016.

Krd
Krd, who is primarily active on German Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons, and also serves at the Volunteer Response Team as an agent and OTRS admin, and was a prior member of German Wikipedia Arbitration Committee for more than three years. He joined the OC in 2017.

And finally, please join me in thanking the following outgoing volunteers, who have given substantially of their time to serve the commission:

Vogone
User:Vogone has contributed to Wikimedia projects since early 2012. While they began their involvement on the German Wikipedia, they quickly branched out to Wikibooks, Wikisource, Wikivoyage, and Wikiversity. They were the first bureaucrat on the Wikidata project. Vogone has worked heavily assisting our smaller projects as a global rollbacker, global sysop, and member of the Small Wiki Monitoring Team. They have experience in translation administration, both on Meta and translatewiki.net. Vogone has shown a keen interest in the technical side of user privacy, including contributing to MediaWiki software around edit suppression. Vogone joined OC in 2017.

Richwales
User:Richwales has been an active Wikimedian since 2005. He is an administrator, oversighter, and sockpuppet investigation clerk on the English Wikipedia. Richwales also served on the now-defunct Audit subcommittee, which served a similar role to the Ombudsman Commission. Rich joined the OC in 2017.

Alan
User:Alan has been a registered Wikimedian for more than three years, but an anonymous editor since 2006, working primarily across Spanish language projects. He is a global sysop and global rollbacker, an administrator on Commons, as well as having been an OTRS volunteer for ~4 years. In the past he has served as an administrator and bureaucrat on Spanish Wikivoyage. He joined the OC in 2016.

Rubin16
User:Rubin16 primarily edits the Russian Wikipedia, where he is a bureaucrat and administrator. He is formerly a member of their Arbitration Committee. He is an administrator on Wikimedia Commons and is a Central Notice and translation admin on Meta. (He is also a translation admin on Commons.) He is a member of Wikimedia Russia. He joined the OC in 2015.

Polimerek
User:Polimerek primarily edits Polish Wikipedia (where he is an admin and former arbitrator), Polish Wikibooks and Wikimedia Commons. He also serves the Wikimedia movement as the president of Wikimedia Poland and on the Grant Advisory Committee. He is a former CheckUser. Polimerek joined the OC in 2014.

---

I'd also like to offer a huge “thank you” to those returning and those coming aboard for the first time, as well as to all those applied. The applications we received this year showed us an extremely able group of volunteers across a diverse array of languages and projects, and while this appointed mix of users may best serve the need for this year, I hope that those who applied and were not appointed will consider applying again in future years. Kbrown (WMF) (talk) 23:52, 31 January 2018 (UTC)

The composition of the 2018 Ombudsman Commission has just been announced on Wikimedia-L. The full announcement text is above. In nutshell and in no particular order, the OC in 2018 will consist of:

Serving in an advisory capacity, and filling in if necessary, will be:

Many thanks also go to the departing members of the 2017 OC for their service: Vogone (joined OC in 2017), Richwales (joined OC in 2017), Alan (joined OC in 2016), Rubin16 (joined OC in 2015), and Polimerek (joined OC in 2014).
Kbrown (WMF) (talk) 23:52, 31 January 2018 (UTC)

:This section was archived on a request by: — xaosflux ^Talk 16:24, 2 March 2018 (UTC)