Stewards' noticeboard/Archives/2017-03

Admin activity review, new Wikispecies local policy

According to Special:Diff/16380625 Wikispecies has new policy of De-adminship as a result of inactivity. The list was updated. --Melos (talk) 21:12, 4 March 2017 (UTC)

I've also updated the list. As I noticed lately, the nl-Wikipedia has voted to abandon their annual reconfirmation procedure of all admins in Decembre 2016, see nl:Wikipedia:Stemlokaal/Afschaffen herbevestigingsprocedure and nl:Special:Diff/48248045?title=Wikipedia:Regelingen rond moderatoren.
On the page nl:Wikipedia:Regelingen rond moderatoren#Procedures voor het ontnemen van de moderatorstatus, you can also read that there still exists the inactivity criterium and another de-admin procedure nl:Wikipedia:Afzetting moderatoren which is about trust/mistrust in admins, but not annually. --Bjarlin (talk) 22:45, 4 March 2017 (UTC)

Long-abandoned(?) Global file deletion review

I found Global deleted image review and Requests for comment/Global file deletion review. Seems that the rights is favored but not as automatic. However, that was 2015. Currently, the proposed page sits there like a dust. What to do with the "global file deletion review" right? --George Ho (talk) 21:39, 12 March 2017 (UTC)

Upcoming changes

There are a lot of small changes happening in the next couple of weeks, and as the stewards may get questions, I wanted to share my list with you all:

• There's a change to how columns in reference lists are handled, at the request of the German Wikipedia. This change will improve accessibility by automatically formatting long lists of <ref>s into columns, based on each reader's screen width. This is being deployed "default off", because some (but not all) local templates are incompatible with it.
  • What you need to do: Projects that are ready to use the feature can file a Phabricator task or talk to me, and we'll get their wiki on the list for the next config change.
• The label on the "Save changes" button will change on most sister projects tomorrow (Wednesday) to say "Publish page". This has been discussed for years, is supported by user research, and is meant to be clearer for new contributors.
  • What you need to know: No matter what the problem is, the solution seems to be "talk to me". That includes everything from bad translations to outdated screenshots to people with new ideas about what the button ought to say (which needs to be cleared with the Legal team in advance).
• The color and shape of the "Save changes" (or now "Publish page"), "Show preview" and "Show changes" buttons on some desktop wikitext editors will change. (phab:T111088)
  • What you can do about it: Unfortunately, it is not technically possible to completely override this change and restore the appearance of the old buttons for either your account or an entire site. I hope that we will not discover that most Wikimedians continue to dislike big, bright blue buttons even after they've had a couple of weeks to get used to the change. Also, I have some worries about whether this is going to break WikEd, which seems to be suffering from bitrot. This is riding the normal deployment train, so you should be able to see it at mw.org in about 24 hours.
• Do you all remember last April, when nobody could edit for about 30 minutes twice, because of some work that Technical Ops was doing on the servers? The same kind of planned maintenance is happening again. It's currently scheduled for Wednesday, April 19th and Wednesday, May 3rd. The time of day is unknown, but it will probably afternoon in Europe and morning in North America (14:00 UTC is my first guess). This will be announced repeatedly, but please mark your calendars now.
  • We did a lot of outreach and announcements about this last year, including last-second banners. It mostly seemed to work. If you have ideas about how to make that process better, then please let me know.

That's everything on my mind at the moment (except the death of Tidy, but that's a project for another day), but I may have forgotten something. If you have questions (about this or any other WMF work), then please {{ping}} me, and I'll see what I can find out for you. Thanks, Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 19:54, 13 March 2017 (UTC)

Updates

• A handful of communities have already requested the columns-for-references change. Requests are being granted promptly to any community that requests it. I plan to contact small wikis about this sometime in May.
• "Publish page" has been deployed to nearly all the wikis at this point. There have been very few problems or even questions – less than 1% of affected wikis, I think. I've got a couple of requests for Legal to process.
• I've asked them to postpone the BIG blue button change until (at least) after the server switch work is completed.
• Tech/Server switch 2017 is scheduled for 14:00 UTC on 19 April and 3 May 2017. Please see my recent post to enwiki's WP:AN for a reminder about the problem that Special:RecentChanges had during this work last year.

As always, if you have questions, then please ping me. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 17:14, 7 April 2017 (UTC)