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Contents
The Signpost: 31 January 2019
- Op-ed: Random Rewards Rejected
- News and notes: WMF staff turntable continues to spin; Endowment gets more cash; RfA continues to be a pit of steely knives
- Discussion report: The future of the reference desk
- Featured content: Don't miss your great opportunity
- Arbitration report: An admin under the microscope
- Traffic report: Death, royals and superheroes
- Technology report: When broken is easily fixed
- News from the WMF: News from WMF
- Recent research: Ad revenue from reused Wikipedia articles; are Wikipedia researchers asking the right questions?
- Essay: How
- Humour: Village pump
- From the archives: An editorial board that includes you
Administrators' newsletter – February 2019
News and updates for administrators from the past month (January 2019).
- Enterprisey • JJMC89
- BorgQueen
- Harro5 • Jenks24 • Graft • R. Baley
Interface administrator changes
- A request for comment is currently open to reevaluate the activity requirements for administrators.
- Administrators who are blocked have the technical ability to block the administrator who blocked their own account. A recent request for comment has amended the blocking policy to clarify that this ability should only be used in exceptional circumstances, such as account compromises, where there is a clear and immediate need.
- A request for comment closed with a consensus in favor of deprecating The Sun as a permissible reference, and creating an edit filter to warn users who attempt to cite it.
- A discussion regarding an overhaul of the format and appearance of Wikipedia:Requests for page protection is in progress (permalink). The proposed changes will make it easier to create requests for those who are not using Twinkle. The workflow for administrators at this venue will largely be unchanged. Additionally, there are plans to archive requests similar to how it is done at WP:PERM, where historical records are kept so that prior requests can more easily be searched for.
- Voting in the 2019 Steward elections will begin on 08 February 2019, 14:00 (UTC) and end on 28 February 2019, 13:59 (UTC). The confirmation process of current stewards is being held in parallel. You can automatically check your eligibility to vote.
- A new IRC bot is available that allows you to subscribe to notifications when specific filters are tripped. This requires that your IRC handle be identified.
CfD backlog
Perhaps you have already noticed that administrators' involvement in CfD closures is close to zero in the last few weeks. Would you be willing to close a number of discussions, especially the older ones? Marcocapelle (talk) 13:21, 10 February 2019 (UTC)
- Boy, that's a long list... I'll take a crack at closing some of the oldest ones today. -- Black Falcon (talk) 16:36, 10 February 2019 (UTC)
- Would you like doing some more closures? Marcocapelle (talk) 21:56, 12 February 2019 (UTC)
- Certainly, it's just been a rather busy week for me. I'll devote some time this weekend to thinning the backlog. -- Black Falcon (talk) 04:27, 15 February 2019 (UTC)
- Would you like doing some more closures? Marcocapelle (talk) 21:56, 12 February 2019 (UTC)
Today's Wikipedian 10 years ago
Ten years! |
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--Gerda Arendt (talk) 07:39, 11 February 2019 (UTC)
- Thank you, though it's hard to believe it's been that long... -- Black Falcon (talk) 18:51, 17 February 2019 (UTC)
The Signpost: 28 February 2019
- From the editors: Help wanted (still)
- News and notes: Front-page issues for the community
- Discussion report: Talking about talk pages
- Featured content: Conquest, War, Famine, Death, and more!
- Arbitration report: A quiet month for Arbitration Committee
- Traffic report: Binge-watching
- Technology report: Tool labs casters-up
- Gallery: Signed with pride
- From the archives: New group aims to promote Wiki-Love
- Humour: Pesky Pronouns
Administrators' newsletter – March 2019
News and updates for administrators from the past month (February 2019).
Interface administrator changes
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- The RfC on administrator activity requirements failed to reach consensus for any proposal.
- Following discussions at the Bureaucrats' noticeboard and Wikipedia talk:Administrators, an earlier change to the restoration of adminship policy was reverted. If requested, bureaucrats will not restore administrator permissions removed due to inactivity if there have been five years without a logged administrator action; this "five year rule" does not apply to permissions removed voluntarily.
- A new tool is available to help determine if a given IP is an open proxy/VPN/webhost/compromised host.
- The Arbitration Committee announced two new OTRS queues. Both are meant solely for cases involving private information; other cases will continue to be handled at the appropriate venues (e.g., WP:COIN or WP:SPI).
- paid-en-wpwikipedia.org has been set up to receive private evidence related to abusive paid editing.
- checkuser-en-wpwikipedia.org has been set up to receive private requests for CheckUser. For instance, requests for IP block exemption for anonymous proxy editing should now be sent to this address instead of the functionaries-en list.
- The Arbitration Committee announced two new OTRS queues. Both are meant solely for cases involving private information; other cases will continue to be handled at the appropriate venues (e.g., WP:COIN or WP:SPI).
- Following the 2019 Steward Elections, the following editors have been appointed as stewards: Base, Einsbor, Jon Kolbert, Schniggendiller, and Wim b.
Category redirects
Hi Black Falcon
The discussion at Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/JJMC89 bot III seems to me to involve you taking what seems to me be a very hard line against category redirects, so went to look at our deletion log to see what sort of redirects you were deleting and why.
I was astonished by what I saw.[1]
e.g. you deleted the Category:Azerbaijan–Palestine relations, which a redirect to Category:Azerbaijan–State of Palestine relations.
The rationale which you used involved no speedy deletion criterion.
This is a very surprising deletion, because "Foo-Palestine relations" is a perfectly reasonable entry for someone unfamiliar with our current nomenclature to use to categorise a topic. It's actually the title of the head article Azerbaijan–Palestine relations.
And the same applies to each of the other 86 subcats of Category:Bilateral relations of the State of Palestine: there should in each case be a category redirect from the variant without "State of Palestine" ... but in each case you deleted the redirect.
Why are you doing this? How does deletion of an unambiguous redirect help either readers or editors?
Moving down through your deletion log, I see that you deleted the cat redirect from Category:Centuries in Judaism to Category:Judaism by century. Again, why? It's unambiguous, and it's a perfectly reasonable search guess. So why delete it?
Please can you explain? --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 18:29, 24 March 2019 (UTC)
- Of course, BHG. I deleted Category:Azerbaijan–Palestine relations, which redirected to Category:Azerbaijan–State of Palestine relations, because it was not unambiguous. "Palestine" and "State of Palestine" are not equivalent terms, and we should not leave it to bots to infer that someone who specified "Palestine" in fact intended "State of Palestine".
- Regarding Category:Centuries in Judaism, I honestly do not remember my thought process at the time. With hindsight, I think it may have been because I saw you deleted Category:Centuries in animation and Category:Centuries in philosophy and simply followed suit, or it may have been because "X in Y" ≠ "Y by X", but both of these are after-the-fact guess as to my reasoning... unlike the Palestine one which I clearly remember. If you think Category:Centuries in Judaism and the others at Wikipedia:Categories_for_discussion/Log/2019_January_25#Categories_by_century are useful category redirects, I would be happy to undelete them. -- Black Falcon (talk) 18:57, 24 March 2019 (UTC)
- What other entity could be referred to "Azerbaijan–Palestine relations"? The other meanings of Palestine doesn't conduct international relations.
- You might have a point if the head articles were named differently, but when they use the undisambiguated title, it's bizarre to claim that the category redirect is intolerably ambiguous. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 20:03, 24 March 2019 (UTC)