It seems that you are very active and know much better about Wikipedia rules than me.
Some time ago I just added a chessbase.com article to the external links of a Wikipedia page namely:
"McDonnell–La Bourdonnais, match 4, game 16"
which I personally read and liked and thought that would be useful to others.
It seems that it was reverted by you.
I would like to know the reason for it.
Hello, I would like to talk on a final revision on the articles in discussion if you like. please let me know on your thoughts for a final revision Lobus (talk) 22:39, 5 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Today's story comes from a DYK about a concert that fascinated me, and you can listen! For my taste, the hook has too little music - I miss the unusual scoring and the specific dedication - but it comes instead with a name good for viewcount. - Could you perhaps help with sources for Huang Zhun (composer)? -- Gerda Arendt (talk) 19:08, 6 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Thank you today for improving article quality in December! - Today is a woman poet's centenary. --(forgot to sign)
Today it's another great woman, soprano Sigrid Kehl, and I found a 1963 Christmas Oratorio detail. 10 years earlier than that cycle, Bach wrote seven cantatas for the 1724 season, based on seven songs, - my focus this year. Expect three stories for the three days they celebrated in Leipzig ;) - Enjoy the season! --Gerda Arendt (talk) 21:39, 23 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Remsense, based on this edit summary of yours at Translation, I believe we have a common interest in language and linguistics articles. In your case, perhaps with tedious wording, in my case, with rampant OR and vast expanses of citation-free content. Everybody feels they are an expert in their own language (and per Chomsky, they are correct, and I agree) however that doesn't exempt them from WP:V and WP:OR. Although the topic is close to my heart, imho, our modern languages articles fail V and OR more than any other major topic I follow (linguistics and dead languages less so) and makes me want to slash and burn 45kb articles down to two paragraphs, or this article down to one sentence (namely: "Hungarian has verbs.[1]"). It almost feels like a lost cause, but so far, my approach has been to proceed with kid gloves. Maybe we could get a few people together and try to come up with a plan for this. WT:LING or WT:LANGUAGES could be a good venue. Austronesier and Kwamikagami might have some thoughts about this. Or maybe we should just give up, I dunno. Mathglot (talk) 08:12, 9 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Weekly highlight
Technical documentation contributors can find updated resources, and new ways to connect with each other and the Wikimedia Technical Documentation Team, at the Documentation hub on MediaWiki.org. This page links to: resources for writing and improving documentation, a new #wikimedia-techdocs IRC channel on libera.chat, a listing of past and upcoming documentation events, and ways to request a documentation consultation or review. If you have any feedback or ideas for improvements to the documentation ecosystem, please contact the Technical Documentation Team.
Updates for editors
Layout change for the Edit Check feature
Later this week, Edit Check will be relocated to a sidebar on desktop. Edit check is the feature for new editors to help them follow policies and guidelines. This layout change creates space to present people with new Checks that appear while they are typing. The initial results show newcomers encountering Edit Check are 2.2 times more likely to publish a new content edit that includes a reference and is not reverted.
The Chart extension, which enables editors to create data visualizations, was successfully made available on MediaWiki.org and three pilot wikis (Italian, Swedish, and Hebrew Wikipedias). You can see a working examples on Testwiki and read the November project update for more details.
Translators in wikis where the mobile experience of Content Translation is available, can now discover articles in Wikiproject campaigns of their interest from the "All collection" category in the articles suggestion feature. Wikiproject Campaign organizers can use this feature, to help translators to discover articles of interest, by adding the <page-collection> </page-collection> tag to their campaign article list page on Meta-wiki. This will make those articles discoverable in the Content Translation tool. For more detailed information on how to use the tool and tag, please refer to the step-by-step guide. [1]
The Nuke feature, which enables administrators to mass delete pages, now has a multiselect filter for namespace selection. This enables users to select multiple specific namespaces, instead of only one or all, when fetching pages for deletion.
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The Editing Team is working on making it easier to populate citations from archive.org using the Citoid tool, the auto-filled citation generator. They are asking communities to add two parameters preemptively, archiveUrl and archiveDate, within the TemplateData for each citation template using Citoid. You can see an example of a change in a template, and a list of all relevant templates. [3]
Last week, all wikis had problems serving pages to logged-in users and some logged-out users for 30–45 minutes. This was caused by a database problem, and investigation is ongoing. [5]
View all 19 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, a bug in the Add Link feature has been fixed. Previously, the list of sections which are excluded from Add Link was partially ignored in certain cases. [6][7]
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Wikimedia REST API users, such as bot operators and tool maintainers, may be affected by ongoing upgrades. On December 4, the MediaWiki Interfaces team began rerouting page/revision metadata and rendered HTML content endpoints on testwiki from RESTbase to comparable MediaWiki REST API endpoints. The team encourages active users of these endpoints to verify their tool's behavior on testwiki and raise any concerns on the related Phabricator ticket before the end of the year, as they intend to roll out the same change across all Wikimedia projects in early January. These changes are part of the work to replace the outdated RESTBase system.
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I see that you reverted several edits I made related to the French Revolution, where I changed the phrase "Reign of Terror" to "the Terror". You stated that this was a "misguided change of terminology".
Just to be clear, I do NOT support terror, I am NOT a propagandist. I am just trying to make Wikipedia more accurate. The actual French term is the Terror. I pointed this out when editing Robespierre's article the 8th December saying that "Reign of Terror" is an exclusively English term and the French name is « la Terreur ». You reverted and stated that Last time I checked, this is an English-language encyclopedia. Apologies if I was not clear in the edit summary. "The Terror" is a very well-established term in English-language scholarship, as in French. Indeed there are many examples for the use of this term here on English Wikipedia. As just one example, Danton's article mentions "the Terror" eleven times while "Reign of Terror" is only mentioned three times.
Searching on Google for these terms alongside French Revolution, the Terror returns 632,000 results while Reign of Terror gives 616,000 results; they seem to be about equally used and if anything "Reign of Terror" is used less.
There have been many scholarly works published in English that use the phrase "the Terror" only. Here are a few:
Articles in the New York Times from 1910 and 1936, and the Washington Post from 1989 use the term "the Terror" in the title.
Clearly, this term is well-accepted in the English-speaking world and changing this term would not make Wikipedia less accurate.
However the main reason I edited is that the term "Reign of Terror" is a misleading, propagandistic anachronism. "Reign of Terror" was not used in France at the time (or now) and was invented after Robespierre's fall by his English-speaking critics. The name was chosen to evoke images of anarchy and blood, as if only terror could reign in the place of a king.
I understand the concern that if we change "Reign of Terror" to "the Terror", people may not recognize this term. However, the term is usually mentioned in context of the French Revolution, in which the period of terror is well-known, and hovering over the link will of course display the page Reign of Terror (The first sentence of that page could also be changed to "The Reign of Terror, also known as the Terror, was a period of the French Revolution when..."). If this is not enough context, we could also use "Reign of Terror" the first time in the lead section and/or in the section headers of articles, and then use "the Terror" afterwards. Or we could keep "Reign of Terror" in quotation marks to show that this was not the actual phrase, but a name given by others.
I would welcome any civil comments you and others might have about this issue. The French Revolution has sometimes been inaccurately represented in the English-speaking world, and as Wikipedia editors we should try to present facts in an unbiased way. Curuwen (talk) 02:28, 10 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
It's really not your place to unilaterally decide the English-language term in common use is misleading or inappropriate. If you want to dispute whether it is the common term in English, start a thread on Talk:Reign of Terror about it. Remsense ‥ 论05:12, 11 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
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Interested in improving event management on your home wiki? The CampaignEvents extension offers organizers features like event registration management, event/wikiproject promotion, finding potential participants, and more - all directly on-wiki. If you are an organizer or think your community would benefit from this extension, start a discussion to enable it on your wiki today. To learn more about how to enable this extension on your wiki, visit the deployment status page.
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Hi. In your revert, you said totally fine, you not having immediate access to a given source doesn't make it unverifiable.
I did reviewed the source and decided to remove the paragraph. The only source cited was a book written by an author who has faced significant criticism for being a biased defender of the Díaz dictatorship.
Right, and it's just relaying something that Tolstoy said. There's no reason to remove the material unless he never said that. Remsense ‥ 论22:13, 17 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
It would seem the comments aren't due for inclusion in an article about Díaz, if they haven't been attested elsewhere. Feel free to remove them again if this seems likely. Remsense ‥ 论01:34, 18 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Thank you so much for your edits. You said "it is quite frustrating to have spent a couple days fixing all this only to come back and have it all messed up again" and I don't have a clue what you mean. I don't know what could have happened - but I'm sorry! And I'm grateful! Thank you! Jenhawk777 (talk) 06:48, 18 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I've been seeing some chatter that ProKMT has, at the very least, used an alternate account without appropriate disclosure first. They said it was because they forgot their main account password but there's some suspicion that they may have been editing from an IP too. Could they be the missing sock-master for that group? Simonm223 (talk) 17:16, 18 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Hey I looked at the diffs and, yeah, the Joshua Project, not an RS. But Der Wereld Morgen doesn't look any worse than any other news media. I don't intend to revert because, frankly, one newspaper more or less doesn't bother me really but I did want to note this in case Donkey Hot Day raises a fuss over calling the sources unreliable. Simonm223 (talk) 14:14, 19 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
What I was getting at—though I should've been more clear—is that we really shouldn't lean on news sources for claims like those, IMO. Remsense ‥ 论20:17, 19 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I didn't see any inline citation, so I fail to see how it could be authoritative. Even if it were, please see WP:RECENTIST: we do not pay special attention to recent events in how we balance articles, and hopefully it is clear how inclusion of Syria and not myriad different geopolitical issues would be very unbalanced. Remsense ‥ 论20:15, 19 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Hello, I congratulate you on the New Year holiday of international significance! We wish English and other language Wikipedia contributors great and endless success in 2025! Special congratulations to you: we wish you great recognition and great success for your participation, activity and work in English Wikipedia in 2025! Thank you. Happy editing! (Captian Wiki (talk) 18:23, 19 December 2024 (UTC)) Captian Wiki (talk) 18:22, 19 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Hi there, I replied to your comment on my talk page, but figured you may see this more easily. My reason for creating the new article Nationalism in Antiquity is WP:SUBPOV, as the existence/dating of nations and nationalism to antiquity is a minority (but notable) view in scholarship on nationalism. Is your disagreement with something specific in the passages moved? The passages that I moved (which you reinstated) in Nationalism in the Middle Ages bogged down the subsection of that respective article and are not even relevant to the Middle Ages, Meanwhile, the passages in question from Nationalism were a lot of detail for what is a minority opinion among scholars, but good detail for an article on the subject in its own right. Happy to hear your thoughts and suggestions on how to proceed. Yr Enw (talk) 20:51, 19 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
@Remsense Hi, I am going to try another pass at trimming the sections I had previously, per WP:BEBOLD. If you had a problem with specific aspects of what had been removed (or, equally, with the new article), it would be useful to know beforehand. Thank you. Yr Enw (talk) 08:53, 21 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Hello, I noticed you have responded to me a few times on the RfC above. However, you still never clarified your point when I pressed on whether an infobox was needed. I understood your initial point about the margins, even though it seemed to me to be wholly unconvincing and nonpersuasive. I was hoping you could elaborate a bit? Barbarbarty (talk) 08:16, 20 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I did clarify! If you don't find what I wrote convincing, that's your right. For what it's worth, I have a lot of very strong opinions about infoboxes, but my preference for abridged over none in this case is not one of them: again, it's marginal to me. Remsense ‥ 论08:18, 20 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I guess if I had to be a bit more concrete, which I was refraining from doing in the RfC for some reason: in my experience, people with ADHD often appreciate infoboxes as an anchor when trying to begin reading an article. (I do not talk about or try to reify my psychiatric profile on here ever, but for what it's worth that includes me, though mildly—I'm mostly thinking here of others who have it worse.) That does not make them necessary by a long shot, but it perhaps affects my likelihood for supporting one in cases like biographies. Remsense ‥ 论08:24, 20 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Forgive me if I was sounded terse. Your point on ADHD is apt, if I can offer that as an explanation as I am also neurodivergent. I guess I am just irritated as well as these discussions seem to invite a lot of bad-faith. Please do not think that I believe you have exhibited such behavior! I do appreciate your response. Barbarbarty (talk) 08:27, 20 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Also speaking of answers to questions, it is regretful that the user you asked a question of has yet to respond. I was quite looking forward to them elaborating myself. Whenever this RfC closes it will be interesting to see how the votes are tallied. Barbarbarty (talk) 08:28, 20 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
No, I appreciate your ask, hence why I felt it was worth opening up a bit over! Like I said, I'm a bit unduly cagey when it comes to addressing stuff like that directly, and it can leave others in the dark. Remsense ‥ 论08:28, 20 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Hello Remsense, may you be surrounded by peace, success and happiness on this seasonal occasion. Spread the WikiLove by wishing another user a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year, whether it be someone you have had disagreements with in the past, a good friend, or just some random person. Sending you heartfelt and warm greetings for Christmas and New Year 2025. Happy editing,
— Benison (Beni · talk) 18:08, 22 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
You must have one of the biggest watchlists! Either that, we have the same one as it seems your name is always popping up on my list. Merry Christmas and happy editting. Masterhatch (talk) 18:48, 22 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
You reverted my edit on the Columbus article, I'm just wondering why it was cited as unreliable? I realize WordPress blogs are not normally considered reliable, but the reference guidelines state "However, if an author is an established expert with a previous record of third-party publications on a topic, their self-published work may be considered reliable for that particular topic". And the author is an established expert (Church historian). Ptikhon (talk) 19:27, 22 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The other issue with additions that rely on self-published or primary sources is they often indicate that an addition may be undue entirely—if I can be honest, if this is the only secondary source about this, it's likely not notable enough to be mentioned in a general encyclopedia article about Columbus. Remsense ‥ 论19:30, 22 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Not sure why you were trying to cite a book about 20th-century history to make major claims about the 11th century. If the details are sufficiently important, you will find them in a book that is actually about the period in question, not about how modern nationalism metabolized it. Remsense ‥ 论22:06, 22 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
No, we need a modern secondary source that's actually about the conflict itself. Since this is an encyclopedia article, we should represent a tertiary summary without including overly specific or unsupported material. Remsense ‥ 论10:00, 24 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I misread what was happening and thought you were maintaining the 'many claim that...' wording just now, not removing it. My mistake entirely. Safrolic (talk) 00:37, 23 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Ha! That is something I have done in the past too; you made my day by assuring me I'm not uniquely capable of such things. Cheers! Remsense ‥ 论00:40, 23 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
As a try to play by the rules i did not do any eddit warring by applying to the three-revert-rule (3RD) in order to to create the understanding in why i reverted the article. Since i wasn't able to get my point across on the edit page i'll try to provide my claim here, and sincerely ask you if you want to review the changes i've made as i believe i have a stronger sourced claim that the previous edit.
All you have to do is establish consensus on the talk page like you were already asked. If you are right, it will be borne out there. Remsense ‥ 论01:06, 23 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Regarding this edit: I don't think lemma conveys the intent you are thinking of? It's more of a manual of style guidance for written guidance.
On the question of using specific language: there was an editor once who insisted that "must" can never appear in a guideline, since guidelines aren't mandatory. My point of view was that guidelines can still describe a procedure with specific mandatory steps in the context of following that procedure, even if the procedure itself might not apply to all cases. There are a lot of different approaches that are feasible with the many different situations on Wikipedia which makes enforcing specific terms tricky. isaacl (talk) 05:52, 23 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
My experience is with the mathematical meaning of the word, where it means an intermediate theorem used as part of a larger proof. isaacl (talk) 06:10, 23 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The previous map is perfectly adequate; period maps are very often used for historical polities. Not sure how it could be "outdated" (were we wrong before about what the borders were?) The replacement was gaudy and apparently synthesizes its sources in a problematic way, and you made no attempt at achieving consensus for the change, not even an edit summary explaining why. Remsense ‥ 论20:34, 24 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Good afternoon. Thank you for correcting me on the Old English page. However, I am still sceptical of the current definition because it characterizes the language as an early stage of English rather than a parent language. I believe this characterization is not universally accepted, especially because Old English is the common ancestor of both English and Scots. Moreover, Wikipedia does not provide any citation for the current definition. Please let me know if I am making assumptions based on incomplete or inaccurate information.
For the citation issue, see WP:LEADCITE: the lead is meant to be a summary of the cited material in the body, and thus citations in it are generally redundant and unhelpful. Secondly, I don't quite see how the definitions are incompatible: where we draw diachronic boundaries between languages (e.g. what are periodizations vs what are "different languages") seems a non-issue for our purposes. It is meaningfully true both that Old English is a stage of the English language, and that it is the parent language of both Modern English and Scots. Remsense ‥ 论20:57, 24 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
My apologies; I should have read the page you indicated beforehand. I now understand that the periodization issue need not be addressed in the lead. Thank you for your correction! Conocephalus (talk) 21:04, 24 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Hello Remsense, may you be surrounded by peace, success and happiness on this seasonal occasion. Spread the WikiLove by wishing another user a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year, whether it be someone you have had disagreements with in the past, a good friend, or just some random person. Sending you heartfelt and warm greetings for Christmas and New Year 2025. Happy editing, Abishe (talk) 21:58, 24 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Hello everyone, and welcome to the 26th issue of the Wikipedia Scripts++ Newsletter, covering all our favorite new and updated user scripts since 1 August 2024. At press time, over 94% of the world has legally fallen prey to the merry celebrations of "Christmas", and so shall you soon. It's been a quiet 4 months, and we hope to see you with way more new scripts next year. Happy holidays! Aaron Liu (talk) 05:06, 25 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Got anything good? Tell us about your new, improved, old, or messed-up script here!
Very useful for changelist patrollers, DiffUndo, by Nardog, is this edition's featured script. Taking inspiration from WP:AutoWikiBrowser's double-click-to-undo feature, it adds an undo button to every line of every diff from "show changes", optimizing partial reverts with your favorite magic spell and nearly fulfilling m:Community Wishlist/Wishes/Partial revert undo.
Doğu/Adiutor, a recent WP:Twinkle/WP:RedWarn-like userscript that follows modern WMF UI design, is now an extension. However, its sole maintainer has left the project, which still awaits WMF mw:code stewardship (among some audits) to be installed on your favorite WMF wikis.
DannyS712, our former chief editor, has ascended to MediaWiki and the greener purpley pastures of PHP with commits creating Special:NamespaceInfo and the __EXPECTUNUSEDTEMPLATE__ magic word to exclude a template from Special:UnusedTemplates! I wonder if Wikipedia has a templaters' newsletter...
BilledMammal/Move+ needs updating to order list of pages handle lists of pages to move correctly regardless of the discussion's page, so that we may avoid repeating fiasco history.
Andrybak/Unsigned helper forks Anomie/unsignedhelper to add support for binary search, automatic edit summaries after generating the {{unsigned}} template, support for {{undated}}, and support for generating while syntax highlighting is on.
Polygnotus/Move+ updates BilledMammal's classic Move+ to add automattic watchlisting of all pages—except the target page(s)—changed while processing a move.
View all 19 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, a bug in the Add Link feature has been fixed. Previously, the list of sections which are excluded from Add Link was partially ignored in certain cases. [6][7]
Remsense ‥ 论 01:16, 22 December 2024 (UTC)
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