GhostInTheMachine

This user knows that it can be a challenge to keep AGF in mind.

---

Tech News: 2024-45

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Updates for editors

• Stewards can now make global account blocks cause global autoblocks. This will assist stewards in preventing abuse from users who have been globally blocked. This includes preventing globally blocked temporary accounts from exiting their session or switching browsers to make subsequent edits for 24 hours. Previously, temporary accounts could exit their current session or switch browsers to continue editing. This is an anti-abuse tool improvement for the Temporary Accounts project. You can read more about the progress on key features for temporary accounts. [1]
• Wikis that have the CampaignEvents extension enabled can now use the Collaboration List feature. This list provides a new, easy way for contributors to learn about WikiProjects on their wikis. Thanks to the Campaign team for this work that is part of the 2024/25 annual plan. If you are interested in bringing the CampaignEvents extension to your wiki, you can follow these steps or you can reach out to User:Udehb-WMF for help.
• The text color for red links will be slightly changed later this week to improve their contrast in light mode. [2]
• View all 32 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, on multilingual wikis, users can now hide translations from the WhatLinksHere special page.

Updates for technical contributors

• XML data dumps have been temporarily paused whilst a bug is investigated. [3]

In depth

• Temporary Accounts have been deployed to six wikis; thanks to the Trust and Safety Product team for this work, you can read about the deployment plans. Beginning next week, Temporary Accounts will also be enabled on seven other projects. If you are active on these wikis and need help migrating your tools, please reach out to User:Udehb-WMF for assistance.
• The latest quarterly Language and Internationalization newsletter is available. It includes: New languages supported in translatewiki or in MediaWiki; New keyboard input methods for some languages; details about recent and upcoming meetings, and more.

Meetings and events

• MediaWiki Users and Developers Conference Fall 2024 is happening in Vienna, Austria and online from 4 to 6 November 2024. The conference will feature discussions around the usage of MediaWiki software by and within companies in different industries and will inspire and onboard new users.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

MediaWiki message delivery 20:47, 4 November 2024 (UTC)

Cornwall

Hi, remember this? DuncanHill (talk) 10:29, 5 November 2024 (UTC)

Not really, my brain simply cannot integrate such dissonance. How could we get this fixed? — GhostInTheMachine ^{talk to me} 21:00, 5 November 2024 (UTC)

Short D[sic]escription

I want to do more than a two-click thanks for this. As a user nearly as new as you, I had never noticed the "no-redirect" warning on the Short description doc. Noted. David Brooks (talk) 16:17, 8 November 2024 (UTC)

Can you please start a discussion on Talk:Liam Payne discography for this edit?

Regarding this edit, I already reverted this edit you made last month. The article was already like this. There is no reason to remove the widths of columns—I maybe understand that adjusting text size isn't ideal, and I know all the accessibility guidelines around this, but the standard approach when an edit has been reverted is to go to the talk page for consensus per BRD. It would be appreciated if you could do this since you feel that strongly about it that you have returned to the article to make the same edit again. Thanks. Ss112 17:14, 11 November 2024 (UTC)

Help from an administrator please

It looks like the dab page PBF was "re-purposed" (on 2024-10-23, diff [4]) and then moved (on 2024-11-01) to create an article for Pakistan Business Forum. I have re-created the dab page and also removed the dab content from the new article, which looks OK on the surface, but leaves the dab page edit history attached to the "wrong" place. Is there a way to unwind the state of the PBF page so that it has a valid history, while leaving Pakistan Business Forum with enough history? — GhostInTheMachine ^{talk to me} 19:51, 11 November 2024 (UTC)

Editors who do this kind of hijack-and-move as a way of creating new articles create more trouble than they probably realise, though this one is nowhere near as bad as some that I have seen. It will require separating the history of the dab page, the history of the repurposed page, and the history of an earlier page which had the same title. I'll get onto it. Thanks for pointing it out. When I've done that I'll look at the new article and see what needs to be done to that. At the least, it will probably need clean up to remove irrelevant history, and maybe more than just that. JBW (talk) 21:30, 11 November 2024 (UTC)

The references added to the article don't come near to establishing notability, so I've moved it to draft space and advised the editor who did it to work on it & then submit it as an AfC draft. JBW (talk) 22:20, 11 November 2024 (UTC)

Thank you for untangling everything — GhostInTheMachine ^{talk to me} 07:44, 12 November 2024 (UTC)

Tech News: 2024-46

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Updates for editors

• On wikis with the Translate extension enabled, users will notice that the FuzzyBot will now automatically create translated versions of categories used on translated pages. [5]
• View all 29 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, the submitted task to use the SecurePoll extension for English Wikipedia's special administrator election was resolved on time. [6]

Updates for technical contributors

• In 1.44.0-wmf-2, the logic of Wikibase function getAllStatements changed to behave like getBestStatements. Invoking the function now returns a copy of values which are immutable. [7]
• Wikimedia REST API users, such as bot operators and tool maintainers, may be affected by ongoing upgrades. The API will be rerouting some page content endpoints from RESTbase to the newer MediaWiki REST API endpoints. The impacted endpoints include getting page/revision metadata and rendered HTML content. These changes will be available on testwiki later this week, with other projects to follow. This change should not affect existing functionality, but active users of the impacted endpoints should verify behavior on testwiki, and raise any concerns on the related Phabricator ticket.

In depth

• Admins and users of the Wikimedia projects where Automoderator is enabled can now monitor and evaluate important metrics related to Automoderator's actions. This Superset dashboard calculates and aggregates metrics about Automoderator's behaviour on the projects in which it is deployed. Thanks to the Moderator Tools team for this Dashboard; you can visit the documentation page for more information about this work. [8]

Meetings and events

• 21 November 2024 (8:00 UTC & 16:00 UTC) - Community call with Wikimedia Commons volunteers and stakeholders to help prioritize support efforts for 2025-2026 Fiscal Year. The theme of this call is how content should be organised on Wikimedia Commons.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

MediaWiki message delivery 00:04, 12 November 2024 (UTC)

Short Descriptions

have you been changing short descriptions i made? 95.24.4.60 (talk) 15:09, 12 November 2024 (UTC)

That is possible, I change a lot of short descriptions — GhostInTheMachine ^{talk to me} 16:15, 12 November 2024 (UTC)

Alexander Shaouni (police officer)

Messy article, and probably not notable, but it’s deleting without community input is likely to be highly controversial. Please take it to WP:AfD. Bearian (talk) 02:12, 17 November 2024 (UTC)

Be not afraid ... I do not have the power to delete it myself. I have "AfD"ed it instead — GhostInTheMachine ^{talk to me} 16:15, 18 November 2024 (UTC)

ArbCom 2024 Elections voter message

Hello! Voting in the 2024 Arbitration Committee elections is now open until 23:59 (UTC) on Monday, 2 December 2024. All eligible users are allowed to vote. Users with alternate accounts may only vote once.

The Arbitration Committee is the panel of editors responsible for conducting the Wikipedia arbitration process. It has the authority to impose binding solutions to disputes between editors, primarily for serious conduct disputes the community has been unable to resolve. This includes the authority to impose site bans, topic bans, editing restrictions, and other measures needed to maintain our editing environment. The arbitration policy describes the Committee's roles and responsibilities in greater detail.

If you wish to participate in the 2024 election, please review the candidates and submit your choices on the voting page. If you no longer wish to receive these messages, you may add {{NoACEMM}} to your user talk page. MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 00:10, 19 November 2024 (UTC)

Tech News: 2024-47

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Updates for editors

• Users of Wikimedia sites will now be warned when they create a redirect to a page that doesn't exist. This will reduce the number of broken redirects to red links in our projects. [9]
• View all 42 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, Pywikibot, which automates work on MediaWiki sites, was upgraded to 9.5.0 on Toolforge. [10]

Updates for technical contributors

• On wikis that use the FlaggedRevs extension, pages created or moved by users with the appropriate permissions are marked as flagged automatically. This feature has not been working recently, and changes fixing it should be deployed this week. Thanks to Daniel and Wargo for working on this. [11][12]

In depth

• There is a new Diff post about Temporary Accounts, available in more than 15 languages. Read it to learn about what Temporary Accounts are, their impact on different groups of users, and the plan to introduce the change on all wikis.

Meetings and events

• Technical volunteers can now register for the 2025 Wikimedia Hackathon, which will take place in Istanbul, Turkey. Application for travel and accommodation scholarships is open from November 12 to December 10 2024. The registration for the event will close in mid-April 2025. The Wikimedia Hackathon is an annual gathering that unites the global technical community to collaborate on existing projects and explore new ideas.
• Join the Wikimedia Commons community calls this week to help prioritize support for Commons which will be planned for 2025–2026. The theme will be how content should be organised on Wikimedia Commons. This is an opportunity for volunteers who work on different things to come together and talk about what matters for the future of the project. The calls will take place November 21, 2024, 8:00 UTC and 16:00 UTC.
• A Language community meeting will take place November 29, 16:00 UTC to discuss updates and technical problem-solving.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

MediaWiki message delivery 01:57, 19 November 2024 (UTC)

Revert of my edit to Stanley Cohen (biochemist)

You were perfectly correct. However, it was a typo, not deliberate vandalism. Athel cb Athel cb (talk) 19:44, 20 November 2024 (UTC)

Such things happen. No worries. The edit summary says: "Reverting edit(s) by Athel cb (talk) to rev. 1244549467 by Smasongarrison: non-constructive (RW 16.1)" — Typos are mostly "non-constructive" rather than deliberate damage — GhostInTheMachine ^{talk to me} 20:25, 20 November 2024 (UTC)