Andrew Dalby

Welcome to Meta!

Hello Andrew Dalby, 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 Meta:Metapub (please read the instructions at the top of the page before posting there). If you would like, feel free to ask me questions on my talk page. Happy editing!

Letter petitioning WMF to reverse recent decitions

The Wikimedia Foundation recently created a new feature, "superprotect" status. The purpose is to prevent pages from being edited by elected administrators -- but permitting WMF staff to edit them. It has been put to use in only one case: to protect the deployment of the Media Viewer software on German Wikipedia, in defiance of a clear decision of that community to disable the feature by default, unless users decide to enable it.

If you oppose these actions, please add your name to this letter. If you know non-Wikimedians who support our vision for the free sharing of knowledge, and would like to add their names to the list, please ask them to sign an identical version of the letter on change.org.

• Letter to Wikimedia Foundation: Superprotect and Media Viewer
• Letter on change.org

I'm notifying you because you participated in one of several relevant discussions. -Pete F (talk) 21:59, 20 August 2014 (UTC)

Superprotect status

Dear Andrew Dalby, since you are an administrator on a wiki from which no user participated in this discussion, I'd like to make sure you are aware of some recent events which may alter what the Wikimedia Foundation lets you do on your wiki: Superprotect.

• Request for comment: Requests for comment/Superprotect rights
• An open letter about its implementation: Letter to Wikimedia Foundation: Superprotect and Media Viewer

Peteforsyth 09:05, 12 September 2014 (UTC)

Global CSS/JS migration

Hello Andrew Dalby. You have a global.js page which contains your global scripts for all wikis. Since August 19^th, your global.js and global.css pages are now automatically loaded on all wikis (see announcement). Since you were already loading them before this feature, you may experience script errors or issues like tools being added twice. I can fix that for you by merging your local scripts and styles into your global pages, and deleting the local pages with synchbot. Do you want me to do that? —Pathoschild 17:21, 20 September 2014 (UTC)

Hi again! Feel free to add a Synchbot request or leave a message if you want me to do this; for now I'll strike you off the list. :) —Pathoschild 21:08, 21 June 2015 (UTC)

new user group about classical culture

Hi, I knew your name and what you do and I was going to contact you in the future but before I could do it, User:ilario told me last week that you might be interested in this user group we are drafting User:Epìdosis/Sandbox with User:Epìdosis. We can change the name to a more generic one but we are also willing to help on the language side. User:Mizardellorsa has joined us last week also for la.wikisource.org.

I don't expect miracles but we can do something as a group. I was goign to open the first discussion about proposed activites, for example a writing week. Not specifically on some platforms but just because I was just checking the engine before going full potential.

I am a member of the Italian Classical Culture Association but I mostly focus on generic helping. I know Latin, not a lot of Greek (I studied it privately in any case, as a hobby).--Alexmar983 (talk) 23:33, 5 December 2018 (UTC)

Hi, Alex. I'm sorry I didn't reply before, I don't visit meta every day.

Ilario is right. I've been thinking about a user group myself, but I haven't even got as far as drafting a proposal! My initial idea was different from yours: not so much the classical world (although that interests me) more the uses of Latin in the modern world. This could involve Wikispecies, Wikisource, and all wikis in which Latin terminology is used in article titles: in astronomy, biology, medicine, anatomy ...

I am not quite sure right now how much my idea would overlap with yours. Certainly, some of the specific issues are shared by your topic and mine: "supporting the correct use of Latin and Greek in multilingual namespaces ... increasing cooperation between wikimedia platforms ... looking for reliable and up-to-date sources ... improving analytical tools related to these topics on WikiProjects". Yes, yes, all of that! So, do we have one subject for a user group, or two? What do you think? Andrew Dalby (talk) 20:20, 10 December 2018 (UTC)

No problem, I am super busy really, I delay so many answer myself.

First of all, tomorrow I should probably meet User:Epìdosis and submit the application, this was the plan we agreed in these last days. I think we are quite open to your needs. In my opinion, purely thematic groups are relativity rare, this should be the third or fourth one after "medicine" and "militaria" maybe "LGTB" (I cannot find you the link right now but I think they are the only one we have of this kind). On the other hand what you need is also very close to other transantional user groups such as those concerning wikisource, libraries, gender gap... which are focused more on a goal, a philosophy than a field. What you need is maybe more such type of group, what we have arranged is more close to the first type. But this is just my personal classification, the ecosystems of non-geographic UG is under constant evolution, as far I can see.

Now, in an ideal world maybe they could be separated and overlap when needed but I don't think we have enough human ressources at the moment to do this. I sampled many communities and I am sure that you can find the "three names" you need to start but reaching a constant baseline activity would be hard. I am not 100% optimistic myself with the current UG proposal, I really think we should see how it goes.

I believe that these two souls (classical languages and classical culture) can coexist in a single group as a starting point. In real life, I see them cooperating also in other associations: for example the Associazione italian di Cultura Classica organizes seminars to teach Latins to pupils but also about archeology and Greek mythology.

On wikimedia platforms contact is possible: this May for example I supervised the local certamen but also took pictures for the wikipedia article on lawiki. Wikidata also allow to maximize automatic maintenance for "minor" platforms. There is so many things to do we can push what we both need together for a while.

So I'd say we start, you are totally free and than we see how it goes and you can spin off if it helps the work.

I can assure I do so many things that there is no way this group will be dominated by a specific vision because of me.--Alexmar983 (talk) 21:03, 10 December 2018 (UTC)

@Alexmar983: @Andrew Dalby: thank you for this topic. Andrew correctly reflects my opinion. A big thematic group means a lot in terms of interests while the idea is to support completely Latin language and not as part of classical studies. The goal is only the support and the work around latin language and it means more a phylological goal. --Ilario (talk) 17:44, 9 January 2019 (UTC)

Ilario build your vision. The group is there, you can use or duplicate part of the work. My advice is based on real learned society in any case. Bye.--Alexmar983 (talk) 19:01, 9 January 2019 (UTC)

Merry Christmas 2021

Gifnk dlm 2020 (chat) wishes you a Very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. Hopefully this greeting has made your day a little better. Spread WikiLove by wishing another user Merry Christmas! Merry Christmas and Happy New Year.

Much love! -Gifnk dlm 2020 Merry Christmas 🎄(talk) 12:19, 24 December 2021 (UTC)

Invitation to participate in the WQT UI requirements elicitation online workshop

Dear Andrew_Dalby,

I hope you are doing well,

We are a group of researchers from King’s College London working on developing WQT (Wikidata Quality Toolkit), which will support a diverse set of editors in curating and validating Wikidata content.

We are inviting you to participate in an online workshop aimed at understanding the requirements for designing effective and easy-to-use user interfaces (UI) for three tools within WQT that can support the daily activities of Wikidata editors: recommending items to edit based on their personal preferences, finding items that need better references, and generating entity schemas automatically for better item quality.

The main activity during this workshop will be UI mockup sketching. To facilitate this, we encourage you to attend the workshop using a tablet or laptop with PowerPoint installed or any other drawing tools you prefer. This will allow for a more interactive and productive session as we delve into the UI mockup sketching activities.

Participation is completely voluntary. You should only take part if you want to and choosing not to take part will not disadvantage you in any way. However, your cooperation will be valuable for the WQT design. Please note that all data and responses collected during the workshop will be used solely for the purpose of improving the WQT and understanding editor requirements. We will analyze the results in an anonymized form, ensuring your privacy is protected. Personal information will be kept confidential and will be deleted once it has served its purpose in this research.

The online workshop, which will be held on April 5th, should take no more than 3 hours.

If you agree to participate in this workshop, please either contact me at kholoud.alghamdi@kcl.ac.uk or use this form to register your interest https://forms.office.com/e/9mrE8rXZVg Then, I will contact you with all the instructions for the workshop.

For more information about my project, please read this page: https://king-s-knowledge-graph-lab.github.io/WikidataQualityToolkit/

If you have further questions or require more information, don't hesitate to contact me at the email address mentioned above.

Thank you for considering taking part in this project.

Regards Kholoudsaa (talk) 16:24, 19 March 2024 (UTC)