Wikimedia Forum/Archives/2015-09

Introducing the Wikimedia public policy site

Hi all,

We are excited to introduce a new Wikimedia Public Policy site. The site includes resources and position statements on access, copyright, censorship, intermediary liability, and privacy. The site explains how good public policy supports the Wikimedia projects, editors, and mission.

Visit the public policy portal: https://policy.wikimedia.org/

Please help translate the statements on Meta Wiki. You can read more on the Wikimedia blog.

Thanks,

Yana and Stephen (Talk) 18:12, 2 September 2015 (UTC)

(Sent with the Global message delivery system)

tired of people hating

I have a lot of ideas and opinions of like others and everything that I have been doing was to help everyone first before me but being treated like a black sheep to everyone and everything that was going on to me and a couple others was wrong and inhuman nature I was doing it for the good and I never got one dollar for all the ideas people destroy and the way you guys where making your systems where evil and wrong and it was blaming me and my friend that was helping everyone and coming up with new ideas to create new jobs — The preceding unsigned comment was added by 67.170.57.17 (talk) 00:40, 3 September 2015 (UTC)

Username policy

Moved from Meta:Requests for help from a sysop or bureaucrat.--Syum90 (talk) 13:14, 1 September 2015 (UTC)

Where can I find global username policy? Please ping me in your response. —Skyllfully (talk | contribs) 04:16, 31 August 2015 (UTC)

As far as I know none exists. Ruslik (talk) 18:17, 2 September 2015 (UTC)

@Skyllfully: There is no a global policy, but you can see Help:User page instead.--Syum90 (talk) 14:51, 4 September 2015 (UTC)

Wikipedia’s/[Wikimedia] biggest scandal: Industrial-scale blackmail

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/09/03/wikipedia_industrial_scale_smears_and_blackmail/ Any Comments? Ottawahitech (talk) 15:57, 4 September 2015 (UTC)

MediaWiki:Centralnotice-wlm 2015-text/ce

Please create a MediaWiki:Centralnotice-wlm 2014-text/ce → MediaWiki:Centralnotice-wlm 2015-text/ce. --Дагиров Умар (talk) 05:55, 7 September 2015 (UTC)

Vandalizm in Azwiki

Have vandalizm here. please protect that page. --Idin Mammadof 1:06, 10 August 2015 (UTC)

• They violated general principles of Wikipedia, and it is constantly going on. Vandalism is legal, and you do nothing? I still have to wait? Is it true that you never look at my complaint? --Idin Mammadof 15:25, 7 September 2015 2015 (UTC)

I want to believe that you will defend the principles of Wikipedia, albeit belatedly. --Idin Mammadof 8:18, 22 September 2015 2015 (UTC)

Closure of old issue

Moved from Meta:Requests for help from a sysop or bureaucrat.--Syum90 (talk) 10:46, 7 September 2015 (UTC)

Firstly, I apologize if this is not the appropriate place to post but I was not sure, and tried looking for a more appropriate channel but ultimately decided that this seemed to be it..

I am not interested in bringing up an old issue or debating it further but I would like to request that it be given a resolution and closed rather than ignored which is the impression I've been left feeling. When it first occurred I was very upset and even more upset that I was not able to find any assistance, ultimately it was never resolved, I let it sit for a very long time, and discontinued spending much time here. But every time I find myself back on Wikipedia editing be it minor or more significant, this issue still irritates me, especially on occasions in which I'm uploading images to Wikipedia that I know should be on Commons but I can not.

My requested resolution is that my account on Wikimedia Commons be unblocked as, the reasons for my block were never justified and that fact was quickly proven but never addressed. However, I will accept any resolution if someone would please post such and explain why such decision was ruled.

Please see the request for comment or [1] on Wikimedia Commons for details. All requests to be unblocked on Commons have been ignored and I believe that the user who initiated the dispute with me has since retired from their administrative role. (On a side note: I just want to point out that aside from Wikipedia, for other wikiprojects, the dispute resolution channels/process is quite confusing and lacking.)

Thank you. David Condrey (talk) 10:22, 7 September 2015 (UTC)

CONTENTLANG is bho at w:bh

Hi! I wounder why CONTENTLANG at https://bh.wikipedia.org/?curid=4920#top (the भोजपुरी · Bhojpuri Wikipedia) is bho and not bh as the subdomain of the WMF project would suggest. Please fill a bug / maintenance ticket if this is wrong. Best regards "Gangleri" aka

‫·‏לערי ריינהארט‏·‏Th‏·‏T‏·‏email me‏·‏‬ 00:30, 9 September 2015 (UTC)

Please see phab:T91240 and phab:T41968. --Krenair ^{(talk • contribs)} 00:33, 9 September 2015 (UTC)

Thanks @Krenair for the feedback! Is someone incharged in renaming the subdomanin name? Regards "Gangleri" aka

‫·‏לערי ריינהארט‏·‏Th‏·‏T‏·‏email me‏·‏‬ 14:43, 9 September 2015 (UTC)

There's not a specific individual who is officially in charge of wiki renames, so effectively it's all in the hands of whatever deployers and ops (see System administrators) are interested. I've done a couple of wiki renames recently, but it turns out there's a bunch of places that need clearing up (first one was a private special wiki and that was fine, the second was a public wikipedia however). I'd prefer to get that done before beginning the process for more. --Krenair ^{(talk • contribs)} 16:46, 9 September 2015 (UTC)

Wikimedia Highlights from August 2015

Here are the highlights from the Wikimedia blog in August 2015.

• Hundreds of “black hat” English Wikipedia accounts blocked following investigation
• The Hunt for Tirpitz
• My life as an autistic Wikipedian
• Content Translation updates from Wikimania 2015
• Using Wikipedia to preserve indigenous languages of Colombia
• When cultural heritage gets a digital life

About · Subscribe/unsubscribe, 00:48, 11 September 2015 (UTC)

Proportion of (constructive) edits by Anon editors

Moved from Meta:Requests for help from a sysop or bureaucrat.--Syum90 (talk) 10:08, 11 September 2015 (UTC)

Hello, I just came across an old study on anonymous edits from 2007 referenced in WP:IPHUMAN. It's pretty old and the sample set is small, so I was wondering if there are any more up to date statistics on the relative proportion of anon to registered editors for English Wikipedia? Thanks! Evolution and evolvability (talk) 10:01, 11 September 2015 (UTC)

Evolution and evolvability, you can for instance check Research:Wikipedia article creation which shows unregistered users create better articles than (new) registered users. More recent and broader, wm2015:Submissions/The Effect of Blocking IP Editing: Evidence from Wikia is only a preview but shows how big the loss is at disabling unregistered editing.

Finally, we have monthly counts of edits and reverts for (un)registered users. --Nemo 12:33, 11 September 2015 (UTC)

1. First of all, I’d like to point out that unregistered editors are by no means anonymous. Quite the contrary: from an IP address, one can usually infer one’s location, and possibly also the employer or affiliation. Hence, in a sense, registered users are less identifiable (less anonymous, so to say) than IP editors.
2. [W]hich shows unregistered users create better articles than (new) registered users. – that’s easy to understand, actually: registering an account costs nothing, takes only a few seconds, and (generally) requires no commitment to the project in question. “Don’t want to expose your IP to the public? Register an account. Want to do another edit, yet cannot remember your password? That’s easy, too: just register another one; there’s a plenty of disposable accounts for everyone.”
3. What makes me curious, however, is whether the existence of Wikimedia communities that expect each and every of their contributors to register results in the increase of single-purpose account creation on Wikimedia? (Check wikt:ru:Викисловарь:Организационные вопросы/2010#Закрытие основного пространства имен, категорий и шаблонов для анонимов for an example of an old community decision to that effect.)

— Ivan Shmakov (d ▞ c) 15:05, 11 September 2015 (UTC)

Thanks for the stats! Very useful. I'm surprised there are so few un-registered edits overall, I'd naively expected them to be more common than registered edits. It's also interesting to see how the relative proportions or reg:unreg edits has stayed pretty constant over time, as have the reversion rates (since '08), and both are pretty in line with the little 2007 study. Evolution and evolvability (talk) 04:59, 13 September 2015 (UTC)

(edit conflict) Note that there is a lot of variance across languages. For Wikipedias with over 1 million human edits, we go from a max of 38 % unregistered edits in Japanese to a min of 4 % in Serbian. Similarly, in Wikiquote, from 49 % for English to 4 for Catalan and others; in large Wiktionaries, from 1 % in French to 13 % in Turkish. --Nemo 11:17, 13 September 2015 (UTC)

Maybe at some point we will be able to used data from ORES and related tools to build new statistics on this subject. E.g.: the average constructiveness of unregistered/registered accounts over time. Helder 11:15, 13 September 2015 (UTC) PS: Halfak might be interested in this topic.

Thanks for the ping, Helder. I'm just gearing up for a study of anonymous mobile editors. See Research:Mobile anonymous apocalypse. I could certainly extend the study to look for productive edits by anons generally. It'll be a few days before I start posting there, so I recommend adding that page to your watchlist. Once I'm waist deep in the data, it'll be relatively easy for me to take additional measurements. --Halfak (WMF) (talk) 16:03, 14 September 2015 (UTC)

LinkedIn-profiles

See Authority control's TP. Kind regards,  Klaas `Z4␟` V:  06:51, 15 September 2015 (UTC)

Restrict changetags permission to sysops (and bots?) on Wikimedia Wikis

Several Wikimedia projects, most of them "big ones" have disabled via CSS/JS or by request in Phabricator that the 'changetags' permission be restricted to sysops and other user groups such as bots. Currently this permission, which allows any user to be able to add (abuse filter) tags to any edits, is asigned to all registered users by default. Given the concerns raised at phab:T97013 and that this thread didn't got much replies, now that it seems we're all back from hollydays I'd like to propose that this new right as Cenarium said, be restricted to sysops by default on all Wikimedia wikis. Individual wikis will be able to further restrict this right or leasen it or assign it to a different user group if they achieve consensus to do so. (Ping @Steinsplitter, DaB., PerfektesChaos, and Cenarium: you might be interested). Thanks. —MarcoAurelio 09:37, 10 September 2015 (UTC)

For reference:

• dewiki: phab:T97766
• enwiki: phab:T97013
• frwiki: phab:T98629 (restricts to bot and autopatrolled)

Some examples. —MarcoAurelio 09:40, 10 September 2015 (UTC)

• Comment Agree with Cenarium's proposal.--Syum90 (talk) 10:13, 10 September 2015 (UTC)

I do not believe this needs to be an admin only permission but I do believe it needs to have a restriction associated to it like Rollbacker and file mover. Aside from the potential for abuse, most people aren't going to use this anyway so not everyone needs to have it by default. Reguyla (talk) 16:20, 10 September 2015 (UTC)

Well, we can discuss the user groups which can access this tool, but as Steinsplitter and Stryn say this isn't an useful tool for most of users.--Syum90 (talk) 07:45, 11 September 2015 (UTC)

• This tool is adding unneeded checkboxes to history pages. This might be helpful for bots, but unlikely for users. So yes, please restrict this stuff. --Steinsplitter (talk) 16:42, 10 September 2015 (UTC)

• On fiwiki some users have used this to mark some edit summaries as incorrect (I won't use it). Here was already some edit... ehh.. changetags warring. I personally don't like the whole changetags at all. --Stryn (talk) 17:02, 10 September 2015 (UTC)

• The idea is to mark events like vandalism, linkspam, copyvio etc.

  • If nearly every registered user gets the right to remove the tag again after an undesired edit, the list of current problematic edis becomes meaningless.
  • Should need rollback at least, but sysop+bots by default is fine, too. Bots are the fellows who distribute tags on suspicious revisions; they should be old enough to deal with’em.

  --PerfektesChaos (talk) 15:15, 15 September 2015 (UTC)

New Wikipedia Library Database Access (September 2015)

Hello Wikimedians!

The TWL OWL says sign up today!

The Wikipedia Library is announcing signups today for free, full-access accounts to published research as part of our Publisher Donation Program. You can sign up for new accounts and research materials from:

• EBSCOHost - this is one of our largest access donations so far: access to a wide variety of academic, newspaper and magazine sources through their Academic Search Complete, Business Source Complete and MasterFILE Complete
• Newspaperarchive.com - historical newspapers from the United States, Canada, UK and 20 other countries, and includes an Open Access "clipping" feature (1000 accounts)
• IMF Elibary- a digital collection of the IMF's reports, studies and research on global economics and development (50 accounts)
• Sabinet - one of the largest African digital publishers, based in South Africa, with a wide range of content in English and other European and African languages (10 accounts)
• Numérique Premium - a French language social science and humanities ebook database, with topical collections on a wide range of topics (100)
• Al Manhal - an Arabic and English database with a wide range of sources, largely focused on or published in the Middle East (60 accounts)
• Jamalon - an Arabic book distributor, who is providing targeted book delivery to volunteers (50 editors)

Many other partnerships with accounts available are listed on our partners page, including expanded accounts for Elsevier ScienceDirect, British Medical Journal and Dynamed and additional accounts for Project MUSE, DeGruyter, Newspapers.com, Highbeam and HeinOnline. Do better research and help expand the use of high quality references across Wikipedia projects: sign up today!
--The Wikipedia Library Team 19:42, 16 September 2015 (UTC)

We need help! Help us coordinate Wikipedia Library's distribution of accounts, communication of access opportunities and more! Please join our team at our new coordinator signup.

This message was delivered via the Global Mass Message tool to The Wikipedia Library Global Delivery List.

I Feel Sad about Wikipedia

If there would be someone please review my contributions on en.wikipedia.org where I was blocked. Now this moment, I feel extremely sad! This is very last to visit Wikipedia.org. There would be no struggles from me, this location on the earth to improve Wikipedia.org. Sorry! Ciao! CopperQA (talk) 05:30, 19 September 2015 (UTC)

Minutes of Wikimedia board?

Moved from Meta:Requests for help from a sysop or bureaucrat.--Syum90 (talk) 11:03, 18 September 2015 (UTC)

Where do I find minutes of the Wikimedia board? Thanks, a California editor, BeenAroundAWhile (talk) 20:20, 12 September 2015 (UTC)

Try wmf:Meetings. You can ask the Board questions at Board noticeboard. Rogol Domedonfors (talk) 20:33, 19 September 2015 (UTC)

There is poison in the food, help fight it with wikifoodia.org and barcode-scanner-apps

Hi, I trying to promote a new sort of wiki: wikifoodia.org which is a bit different than other wikis.

The idea is that it should be used with barcode-scanner-apps.

People should be able to scan a barcode, say: 123456789, the app forms a url: http://wikifoodia.org/123456789 and opens it in a browser. When finished reading, the user just hits the back button and the device is ready to scan the next barcode.

Some stock apps can already be used this way, ex for android: Barcode scanner from ZXing (Zebra crossing) (the only barcode scanner that I've really tested). Although it is not as streamlined as a custom app could be. (One has to enter the url in the settings first and then there are lots of buttons and options that might confuse less experienced users.)

And as anyone who reads newspapers know, it's not all perfect with the food that we buy:

We have anything from toxic phthalates to hormone treated meat to food that have traveled several times around the earth before it ends up on your plate.

Information that the producers seldom writes on the package.

Here is a page I wrote with a bit more information Wikifoodia.

Magnus Andersson (talk) 18:47, 22 September 2015 (UTC)

@Magnus Andersson:

• http://www.codecheck.info/
• https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=ch.ethz.im.codecheck&hl=en
• video: webcam codecheck

--Atlasowa (talk) 21:51, 23 September 2015 (UTC)

Strategy process for reading department

Heads up that input is needed for the strategy process of reading department. Thanks --Melamrawy (WMF) (talk) 20:14, 23 September 2015 (UTC)

Exactly what are you asking the community to do here? The instructions on that page, and subpages such as mw:Reading/Strategy/Strategy Process/Choices are quite obscure. Can I also take the opportunity to urge you and your colleagues never again to ask the community to do this sort of thing without making it very clear what information or opinions you want, why you want them, when you want them, how you will use them, where the results will be summarised, published and used, who is accountable for delivering those results to the stakeholders, and what if anything came of them. We have seen too many consultations, surveys and the like which simply petered out into nothing, disappeared into the ether or were lost in a Foundation re-org and hence, as far as the community could ever tell, ended up as a complete waste of the community's time and effort. Please do better this time. Rogol Domedonfors (talk) 21:42, 23 September 2015 (UTC)

Oh, and you need to update the banners at the top of mw:Reading and mw:Reading/Strategy which refer to an exercise with a confusingly similar name ("strategy choice questions") which closed a fortnight ago. Rogol Domedonfors (talk) 06:44, 24 September 2015 (UTC)

Melamrawy (WMF), that "strategy process for reading department" prose is utterly, ridiculously unreadable. Or is this some sort of Buzzword Bingo parody? What does the WMF "reading department" actually do? --Atlasowa (talk) 22:22, 23 September 2015 (UTC)

As a department see mw:Reading: "build exceptional learning and reading experiences for the sum of all knowledge". Which is good, but ... if we look at mw:Reading/Strategy/Updated Timeline we see that the two Problems are 1: Our core capabilities, infrastructures and workflows are not optimised for emerging platforms, experiences and communities and 2: When users access content through third parties we [can't do various things]. These are both pretty short-term. WMF should be hugely more ambitious in delivering new forms of content while improving access to current forms. The future-looking part needs to inform and interact with the here-and-now part. Can someone explain why people outside WMF should care at all about problem 2, for example? See the Innovation page here on Meta for a handful of off-the-cuff suggestions about new forms of content and delivery. Where is the Reading team in that discussion? Rogol Domedonfors (talk) 06:45, 24 September 2015 (UTC)

All Dutch wikipedia torrent links are dead

created an account just to inform you guys that the torrent links for all dutch (nlwiki-#Date#-pages-articles.xml.bz2) are dead. link: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Data_dump_torrents

those pages were more than 2.5 years old. perhaps they're automatically archived? ask mods or board @WpNl  Klaas `Z4␟` V:  16:25, 24 September 2015 (UTC)

There is no need to register to edit pages here. Those torrents are unofficial and unmaintained. Users add them for themselves (for unknown purposes). What do you use the torrents for? There are stable torrents for the archive.org copies. --Nemo 16:31, 24 September 2015 (UTC)

Request for a Special Page on Meta

Dear friends,

One of the major things discussed during Wikimania 2015 Indic Wiki Meetup was to plan for a special page on Meta.

This page is intended to serve as a common source of information for all Indic Wiki Languages (for the purpose of sharing information).

This becomes all the more necessary as we've got 20+ languages and many incubator projects.

I request our friends to guide me on this issue. --Muzammil (talk) 20:20, 25 September 2015 (UTC)

Hi, Muzammil. How would that page be "special"? What do you need beyond starting some Indic languages page and pointing people to it? Ijon (talk) 18:00, 28 September 2015 (UTC)

Hi, Asaf. The problem we have is that there are multiple languages (around 30, if you include incubator ones as well) and every time some message needs to be posted, one has to do so on various village pumps, one by one. Now, if we have one common communication page on Meta where we could post any message (say, WMF wants to hold some program in India, or the proposed Wiki Conference India next year, etc), it could be designed in such a way that information is posted in English on Meta. The volunteers of different Indian projects can then post the same message on their respective project village pumps with appropriate translation. --Muzammil (talk) 18:12, 28 September 2015 (UTC)

Reimagining WMF grants report

Last month, we asked for community feedback on a proposal to change the structure of WMF grant programs. Thanks to the 200+ people who participated! A report on what we learned and changed based on this consultation is now available.

Come read about the findings and next steps as WMF’s Community Resources team begins to implement changes based on your feedback. Your questions and comments are welcome on the outcomes discussion page.

Take care, I JethroBT (WMF) 17:02, 28 September 2015 (UTC)

Блокировка за вандализм

Добрый день! Мои правки в википедии удаляют администраторы, а теперь еще и блокируют за вандализм. Тема моих правок относится только к моей семье. В основном уже умерших. В мировой истории говорится что они были расстреляны, но это совсем не так. Семья последнего Российского монарха не была расстреляна. Мой дед внук Николая 2, сын Алексея. Бабушка Кейт Мидлтон сестра моего деда, внучка Николая 2, дочь Алексея. Не понимаю в чем выражается вандализм? С ув. Павел — The preceding unsigned comment was added by Paveltm (talk) 5 September 2015 (UTC)

Looking for a dump of knowledge base with real people (alive) and a knowledge base of charities

Hi I am looking for a dump of knowledge base with real people (alive) and a knowledge base of charities. i downloaded the wikidata dump which apparently is missing info from wikipedia such as: the photo the description

I was actually looking for something offline that will give me this data: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=query&titles=Elon%20Musk&prop=revisions&rvprop=content&format=jsonfm

your help will be greatly appreciated.

Thanks Ido —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 89.138.73.212 (talk) 12:13, 21 September 2015