User talk:Jeblad/archive 1

I undid you removal of account information at Wikimedia Norge. There is absolutely no reason why that information should be kept only at one of the participating projects. Finn Rindahl 12:43, 4 December 2008 (UTC)

The page is open for public editing, pleas do NOT publish account information on that page as the page then has to be protected. Jeblad 18:20, 4 December 2008 (UTC)

OK, point taken - we then need to transclude a protected subpage - that information belongs here and not at wp:nb/nn. I'll ask Jon Harald to take care of it. Finn Rindahl 18:41, 4 December 2008 (UTC)

Checkuser policy

The policy is a global policy and the minimum standard, though some wikis can hold a higher standard than is set, though not lower. The enforcement of the policy is by other checkusers on the wiki, in conjunction with the Ombudsman Commission. Where a user has concerns about the governance of the use of the checkuser tool, it is to the Ombudsman that you should request follow-up. There is no-one else who can do that investigation, so you need to heed that commentary and go and talk to the OC.  — billinghurst sDrewth 01:42, 24 March 2014 (UTC)

Central people involved in this has not heard anything from the OC, and as I'm too is named in it and therefore a part in the process, and with nothing heard from the OC, I conclude that OC is defunc. — Jeblad 20:50, 4 April 2014 (UTC)

Discussion about Check User policy and why it is completely broken. (diff) — Jeblad 20:58, 4 April 2014 (UTC)

Flagged Revisions and no.wiki

Hello, I wanted to write you earlier but then I've been away for a while. I'm very interested in what you said at bugzilla:64726, «We do know that we are losing editors at a fast pace, and we do know that we are losing new editors faster than the bigger editors. Other than that it is mostly speculations about whats going on». I feel you, we have such big problems with it.wiki as well and we're having a hard time figuring them out, there are really no tools nor help: see Research:The sudden decline of Italian Wikipedia for what we tried so far. It would be amazing for me if you could manage to do two things:

1. produce some more statistics and analysis of the current situation as regards patrolling: tswiki:MySQL queries, for instance, has several example queries for patrollers activity, unpatrolled changes and so on, many of which added when pt.wiki was worried about increases in vandalism (which seemed to be disproven by facts);
2. look a bit more into what could be the causes of the declining editor base, possibly reusing some of the techniques we used for it.wiki (see above) and maybe by making a survey among formerly very active editors, something we're interested in trying but didn't do yet.

--Nemo 14:54, 19 August 2014 (UTC)

I'm not sure if I can do any followups on your point 1, I simply have to much to do right now, but our present situation to your point 2 is basically internal feuds when it comes to old timers. Over time it seems like the old timers gets involved in some feuds over edits and it wears them down.

I have an idea that comes from control theory that it might have to do with time delays. This is partly due to an event notifier I wrote a few years back that made it possible to get a notification when interesting discussions arose, even when I did not reload any page, which strangely enough stressed other users. That made me conclude that the discussions acted as control loops and went uncontrolled if a delay existed. Its like "party A knows something before party B, and party B reacts more fiercely than necessary to be heard over party A, which already has made its point". The solution could be to let all parties be notified at the same time.

The retention seems to have something to do with lack of positive feedback instead of negative (not control theory here), perhaps that can sooth discussions, and perhaps we even lack corrective feedback when we are simply wrong. That makes me wonder if we need something like "likes" on Facebook (even if I don't like Facebook) or the moderation on Slashdot. The idea is basically a first notice in a thread is unmoderated but the following are, and only those that gets likes over a certain level will be shown or shown in full. That could be rather low, but it would make it possible for the community to say that they don't like some parts of an discussion but without being confrontational.

Also it seems like actions taken by automatic means are more acceptable than manual means. Voting over adminship is very hearse way to say whether you like an user or not, and especially the yearly voting for terms done at some projects seems to expel users at an high rate. I'm not quite sure, but I don't think this is the right way to do it. One way could be to do anonymous moderation on admin actions, and if the moderation gets sufficient votes it would be undone. If an admin gets enough undone actions the group membership would be revoked. That would remove the necessity of yearly voting for new terms.

I think the way to do it should be that involvement in a namespace gives credits you can use for moderation in that namespace, but recent involvement at the page under consideration will block you from moderation. You should not be able to keep to many credits, you should loose them over time, and there should probably be some tradeoffs between how fast you earn them and the cost of moderation. There is a paper about cost and moderation, I'll take a look and see if I can find it somewhere.

I'm more unsure why the influx of new editors are dropping. It could be that people slowly learns that Wp is a very difficult environment, and they simply pulls away. If that is the case they need some way to learn about Wp before they dare to try. Perhaps a test environment where they can write an article and get feedback before it is published can be an interesting idea.

One note about your point 1 that seems to has slipped notice on the bug; there are patrollers on nowiki, and they have problems keeping up with the vandalism right now. That does not mean there are more vandalism now than before, it means that the patrollers are not able to keep up with the vandalism level, and it is the numbers of patrollers that are to low. To solve this problem we either need more patrollers (which we can't fix) or we need better tools to make the current patrollers more effective (which we can do). Main problem is; WMF won't let us use the most effficient tool that is available for the moment.

Another one on 1; the number of vandalism reverts won't change very much over time even if the patrollers goes away, but the "time before revert" will change. This, and the inherent problem of calculating a mean from a long tail, makes it very hard to quantify what changes in the patroller community in fact means. — Jeblad 23:14, 20 August 2014 (UTC)

We already have a "like" button, Thanks features. ;-) Your thoughts about what could have alienated old users are very interesting (especially on time delays) but we always risk giving an undue weight to what affects us as power users: for instance, if you find that a significant portion of the lost super-active editors went through an admin review, then it makes sense to study the thing, otherwise not. That's why on it.wiki we thought of (off-wiki) surveys as a possibility for the sentiments and events you can't count on wiki.

I had understood what you were saying on the patrollers, but there are ways to isolate the problem more and show it more clearly, as is necessary if you want to take any action or convince someone. Looking at the number of patrollers active by day, for instance, you may have a different picture. The time to revert can also be measured; I've not done it myself but it's a rather common operation and there are now tools to make it easier, in particular https://pythonhosted.org/mediawiki-utilities/lib/reverts.html#mw-lib-reverts --Nemo 05:06, 21 August 2014 (UTC)

Situation for super active users from 1. may 2014

What I want is something slightly different than the "Thanks"-link, especially as I want it to be public.

Our project nowiki is rather small in number of active users, and we have a rough idea whats going on. There isn't much us in breaking down the stats when the stats only contain a couple of handfuls of users. Long story short, it is internal conflicts. That wear down the patrollers. This summer (june) we had 58 super active, previous year 65, year before 80. We are bleeding editors. It is no use in pointing fingers, things have happen and we must adapt. Numbers do not help us right now, what would help us is btter tools to handle the most pressing situation. — Jeblad 20:02, 21 August 2014 (UTC)

Ah sure, if it's just a few dozens people and you know exactly what made them go away it's another matter. I thought maybe you were not sure; even in smaller wikis where I know 100 % of active users, I sometimes can't tell what exactly made someone go inactive. :-) --Nemo 23:14, 22 August 2014 (UTC)

Superprotect status

Dear Jeblad, 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 09:24, 12 September 2014 (UTC)

General fixes

This is my own interest with nowiki. I found that it seems to be nowiki did not use general fixes function of AWB (as far as I observed) which could help formatting the articles. If nowiki needs, I can format for 400k articles. Alphama (talk) 06:28, 30 September 2014 (UTC)

If you want to run some bot job to fix formatting you must get a permission from the community at nowiki, I can't grant you any such permission. — Jeblad 10:57, 30 September 2014 (UTC)

Re: no.wiki article count

I don't see any drop in article count for fi.wiki. As for no.wiki, wikiapiary:Wikipedia (no) shows that Special:Statistics reported an inflated number compared to the true one, which stats:EN/TablesWikipediaNO.htm reports. The difference in 40k articles can be explained by imports, deletions and other things which don't immediately update Special:Statistics; I suggest to always refer to Wikistats which always builds the numbers from scratch based on actual data. --Nemo 19:32, 30 November 2014 (UTC)

The number that has dropped is reported in the thread w:no:Wikipedia:Torget#30 000 artikler borte? and is about the number {{NUMBEROFARTICLES}} as used on w:no:Special:RecentChanges (w:no:MediaWiki:Watchlist-summary) and w:no:Spesial:Statistikk. As a special page this is not cached. The drop is noticed by several users, including me, and the previous number is also noticed and referred by news outlets, for example this one Ønsker kvinner på Wikipedia (it is about a seminar on gender gap) is using the number 435.526 while the number right now is 401 062. It is also worth noting that wikiapiary:Wikipedia (no)#chart1 shows a similar strange discontinuity. References to a similar event on Finnish Wikipedia was made by Ulf Larsen, and he is usually creditable on these sorts of things.

The drop is comparable to one year of article production on nowiki, and unless a very good explanation can be given I don't think this can be dismissed. A difference of 34k of articles in hours can't be explained as "imports, deletions and other things", so I don't think Nemo explanation is good enough, this event needs proper investigation. In any case it is the community on nowiki that asks the question, not me, so a proper explanation should be posted there. — Jeblad 05:50, 1 December 2014 (UTC)

I don't think that there happened a drop in articles on fiwiki (if happened at least it was just a very small drop). Our 360 000th article was created on 21th of November (see fi:Wikipedia:Virstanpylväät) and now we have 360 681 articles. But looking at the nowiki stats, something strange indeed happened. --Stryn (talk) 06:17, 1 December 2014 (UTC)

I also thinks the reference to fiwiki is wrong, perhaps Ulf Larsen can give some additional details/explanation. We had a similar incident with article count some time ago, but I can't remember when… — Jeblad 06:22, 1 December 2014 (UTC)

Jeblad, I don't know how else to say it. There wasn't any drop in article count. MediaWiki's sitestats were wrong and have been corrected. This happens routinely. --Nemo 13:37, 1 December 2014 (UTC)

Sorry, but I want facts and numbers that explain what has happen, and something that can assure the community that no articles are lost. Only way I can se that done is by a comparison article by article between a backup and the present state in the article database. The number as it stand is nearly 10% or one year of work, we can't just dismiss that as "imports, deletions and other things" done, or fixed, in a few hours. — Jeblad 14:45, 1 December 2014 (UTC)

The wikiapiary link above shows that no pages disappeared (in fact there is an increase in the total number of pages at the same time). Nothing happened, how to prove there isn't a teapot in orbit around the sun? If you want a proof that the count is correct, you can download the dump and run manually the counts which wikistats makes.

As for what triggered the stats correction: unless someone run a maintenance script server side, it's possible that some heavily used template was changed (possibly removing a link which made some articles countable), or that a bot edited many pages triggering some update.

I understand the frustration, but the solution is simple: don't rely on on-wiki statistics (such as Special:Statistics and magic words) for any serious business. --Nemo 15:12, 1 December 2014 (UTC)

If we can't depend on Special:Statistics then we have to say that Mediawiki and WMFs current use of the software isn't dependable. I can't see how that would be an acceptable solution to WMF. Sorry, but I think we still need an explanation from WMF. — Jeblad 18:10, 1 December 2014 (UTC)

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Flagged revisions deployment RfC

Just FYI: There is Requests for comment/Flagged revisions deployment, check also the Dereckson's first versio for the reference. --Zache (talk) 02:52, 13 May 2016 (UTC)

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Inre: Grants talk:IdeaLab/Similarity measure for AbuseFilter and Grants talk:IdeaLab/BadWords detector for AbuseFilter

Hey Jeblad, whenever you feel like you have the capacity to start this work, let me know, and I support you getting your proposal(s) prepared. Thanks for getting the ideas prepared-- I think there's a good deal of potential in them to improve filtering. Take care, I JethroBT (WMF) (talk) 19:36, 4 August 2016 (UTC)

RfC: Protect user pages by default

A request for comment is available on protecting user pages by default from edits by anonymous and new users. I am notifying you because you commented on this proposal when it was either in idea or draft form. Funcrunch (talk) 17:55, 31 August 2016 (UTC)

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