Wikimedia:Village pump

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Welcome to the Outreach Wiki's village pump. This page has two functions:

  • This is where general outreach-related discussions can be held. Click here to open up a new topic.
  • You can also use this page to request administrator assistance with vandalism or other incidents needing action. Please be as specific as possible, including the name of the user or IP causing problems, the page name, and your signature.
  • Requests for permissions should be made on the respective page.


Please sign and date your post (by typing ~~~~ or clicking the signature icon: Insert-signature.png in the edit toolbar). Please add new topics to the bottom of this page.

« Older discussions | Archives: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

Strategy 2017[edit]

See m:Strategy/Wikimedia movement/2017. Should this be promoted on the Main Page? Koavf (talk) 05:55, 10 April 2017 (UTC)

  • It appears that you did this with this diff. I have no objection, but I think that you should have waited a week after posting the question here. --Pine✉ 07:03, 16 July 2017 (UTC)

Where to request File mover rights on Outreach wiki[edit]

Where can I request for File mover rights on Outreach wiki? As publication leader for the Education Newsletter I move drafts articles to their permanent names after copy-edit. The redirects left behind serve no purpose and I might have to tag them for deletion at some point. —M@sssly✉ 15:03, 27 May 2017 (UTC)

@Masssly: There is no such the file mover permission here. —Alvaro Molina (✉ - ✔) 15:44, 27 May 2017 (UTC)
@Masssly, AlvaroMolina: Hi as mentioned AlvaroMolina at this time it is not possible to assign this right because it does not exist on outreach. However, if you are in favor, I can apply for Phabricator to create the user group. What do you think? --Samuele2002 (talk) 06:45, 28 May 2017 (UTC)
Yes, I am in favour. —M@sssly✉ 06:51, 28 May 2017 (UTC)

How can I help here?[edit]

I'm a former anon from 2004-2005, but now want to help again as a user. What can I do to help that's useful? --Walkden861 (talk) 17:26, 13 June 2017 (UTC)

@Walkden861: You may want to check out the strategy talk on Meta: m:Strategy/Wikimedia movement/2017/Cycle 2. Koavf (talk) 18:03, 13 June 2017 (UTC)

Add Wikidata support here or not?[edit]

Since all monolingual projects (i.e. above Other Wikimedia projects of Special:SiteMatrix) plus Commons, MediaWiki.org, Meta-Wiki, Wikispecies and Wikidata itself are now combined interwiki links to that project (supports for Incubator, Multilingual Wikisource and Beta Wikiversity are chakushu-ing on phab:T54971), I would like to find next project that makes sense to iw-link. And perhaps to provide combined, structured, and on-going updated (if that isn't vandalism) datas. Any comments are welcome under this section. --Liuxinyu970226 (talk) 00:57, 7 July 2017 (UTC)

@Liuxinyu970226: This is a good question--it's not covered by Wikidata's discussion of sister projects. Nor are Wikitech and the Wikimanias (if you're still looking for a next logical project to add). Of course, this project will have some pages like this or Main Page which will be interwiki links with others but a vast majority are Outreach-only. What would be the value of Wikidata integration to you? Koavf (talk) 01:39, 7 July 2017 (UTC)
i see wikidata has an item "This Month in GLAM" d:Q15868218. without a link to outreach. Slowking4 (talk) 01:10, 8 July 2017 (UTC)

Well I guess we want this because of Structured Commons? From Outreach we link all over the place, and it would be e.g. beneficial to be able to have GLAM pages on Outreach that are linked from the GLAM's item on Wikidata, since that is the hub for all things wiki to do with that GLAM. Jane023 (talk) 06:16, 11 July 2017 (UTC)

If there's no opposition comments before July 20, then I will file a task on Phabricator. --Liuxinyu970226 (talk) 14:50, 15 July 2017 (UTC)
I don't see any harm in taking this action, and perhaps it will be beneficial, so I support proceeding in the absence of objections prior to July 20, per Liuxinyu970226. --Pine✉ 07:09, 16 July 2017 (UTC)
@Koavf, Slowking4, Jane023, Pine: Requested at phab:T171140. --Liuxinyu970226 (talk) 03:32, 20 July 2017 (UTC)

The occasion is smart with few animations[edit]

<--Yes of cause the inventer of the wikifoundation has never thought his administrators would be sluggish and call noble editors names disgraced above the universe.Most think their jurisdiction is to block,revert and condemn editorials at their own discression forming giberish and nonsensial poor judgements.to support their iliteracy and boosy influencess that are either cultural/political,religiuos for goodness sake.the choice is so poor and tantamount to imperialism and bad manner -->[Djs](41.138.78.55 12:53, 12 July 2017 (UTC))

Sorry, what? Koavf (talk) 15:54, 12 July 2017 (UTC)
I would guess a poor google translation of a specific problem. The 64 cent question is which language wiki did he/she come from and what wiki did he/she think this village pump is for? Jane023 (talk) 16:42, 13 July 2017 (UTC)
by global [1] you might speculate an editor from Botswana . there is an unfortunate tendency to logout from the SUL. did he mean bossy or boosy ? Slowking4 (talk) 07:32, 14 July 2017 (UTC)

Archival note[edit]

I have boldly moved several older Village Pump discussions to Wikimedia:Village pump/Archive 5. If someone wants to resume a discussion that I archived, please feel free to cut and paste it from Archive 5 back to this page. --Pine✉ 07:00, 16 July 2017 (UTC)

+1 --Liuxinyu970226 (talk) 07:41, 16 July 2017 (UTC)

Requirements for new administrators for the Outreach wiki[edit]

This discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. You may start a new discussion on the same topic if you wish. There was a time when this wiki didn't have many administrators, especially active administrators. Spam and vandalism currently seem to be well under control, so I think that we aren't desperate for new administrators and can set some formal expectations for people who wish to offer their services as administrators on Outreach. (Addition to original proposal: I suggest that the length of time for this discussion should be 10 days so that there is a reasonable length of time for people to comment.)

I propose the following requirements for new administrators (these requirements wouldn't be retroactive):

  • 10,000 global edits under all registered accounts
  • At least 1 year as a registered user under the account which the requester proposes to use for admin activity on Outreach
  • No more than 1 active block across all Wikimedia projects on all of the user's accounts
  • The account which the user proposes for administrator activity on Outreach already has administrator permissions on at least one other Wikimedia wiki, with
  • at least 3,000 edits on that wiki
  • at least 1 year as an administrator on that wiki
  • at least 300 logged admin actions on that wiki
  • no blocks (other than self-requested blocks) within the past 5 years on that wiki. (The account doesn't need to be 5 years old.)

What do others think? Pinging User:Koavf in particular, as the bureaucrat who has been recently active on Outreach's request for permissions page.

--Pine✉ 18:25, 20 July 2017 (UTC)

  • Symbol support vote.svg Support I do not see any problem with these requirements. —Alvaro Molina (✉ - ✔) 19:21, 20 July 2017 (UTC)
  • Conditional Symbol support vote.svg Support. I think this is very sensible but I would leave a caveat for someone who may be associated with some outside organization who is editing here and may need to (e.g.) delete a page. As long as there is a reasonable process for bureaucrats to use their discretion and as long as it's made clear that those admin rights would be exceptional but are acceptable, then that would be good for me. Koavf (talk) 20:24, 20 July 2017 (UTC)
  • Hi Koavf, in the case of someone from an outside organization who would like to delete a page, that person can make a deletion request here at the Village pump. That is a much less risky method than assigning admin rights to that person. --Pine✉ 20:32, 20 July 2017 (UTC)
  • @Pine: I'm sensitive to reducing overhead. Whatever would be easiest is what I'll support. Either way, I don't oppose your initial language, so if that's what others think is best, then I am on board. Koavf (talk) 20:38, 20 July 2017 (UTC)
  • By the way, I suggest that we give this proposal 10 days for people to comment. Having a broad consensus would be nice. I will add this comment to my proposal above --Pine✉ 20:46, 20 July 2017 (UTC)

As there has been no further discussion, I am closing this. I will add the information to the Requests for Permissions page. --Pine✉ 22:15, 3 August 2017 (UTC)

Hm, this turned Outreach wiki policy orthogonally. This used to be a wiki where it is the easiest to obtain admin rights. Even after the times when every non-vandal account here was given admin rights it still was easy. Now with such criteria especially of being an admin elsewhere for a year it is very difficult. --Base (talk) 19:37, 16 August 2017 (UTC)

  • @Base: I agree that it represents a pretty big shift in the way things are done around here. This is also one of the very few WMF wikis where a bureaucrat can make someone else a bureaucrat or take away that user right. I don't know that it's an improvement or a detriment but it's clear that this is what the community wants or at least tacitly accepts. If you feel like it's a problem, then I'm open to hearing your concerns. Do you think this is a bad thing? Does it help the wiki to mature? Koavf (talk) 19:45, 16 August 2017 (UTC)
    Well, the way this wiki was it was one of the few examples of actually following the "adminship is not a bit deal" principle. Now it is, you have to meet very strict criteria. I do not believe creating strict policies equals wiki maturing. Oh I do like policies, I love them, but they make things more complicated. And unfriendly. --Base (talk) 19:59, 16 August 2017 (UTC)
(editconflict) No blocks for 5 years is also a crazy requirement. I would not meet this criterium for even now, but I cannot remember this creating any problems on this wiki in 4 years I am an admin here. Blocks often stem of particular community problems and are absolutely irrelevant in different community. Furthermore I believe there is no such requirement even for running for Steward rights, it seems most unreasonable to request it for adminship in this quiet wiki.
  • 10k edits globally is not a good criterion as well. GLAM and Education focused people often do a lot of stuff offline and are not that active onwiki to have such numbers of edits. It is not a reference I like, but Jimbo Wales, the co-founder of Wikipedia has only 14,194 edits globally.
  • 3k edits on a wiki is a lot too. I cannot say that doing admin actions on this wiki is too much different from my experience on Ukrainian Wikinews and Ukrainian Wikiquote where I am an admin as well (and just as with this wiki my adminship there had seen better days activity wise). I do not have 3k edits in those wikis though. There is just no way to get them not being a very active content contributor, and contributing content actively is not what administrators are required to do (though they are encouraged to do that for sure).
  • 1 active block is fair, but I would like it to be applied not blindly.
I suggest to reconsider the new policy. It is unreasonably too strict. --Base (talk) 19:54, 16 August 2017 (UTC)
Thank you to bring the idea out, @Base:. In my humble opinion, I don't like the rule to be this strict, either. I once was introduced to this wiki two years ago by the Wikipedia Education Program staff. I tried to become an translation admin but I can't understand the documentation of translation administration and its example, so I just stopped there and not applying the translation administration right. Just last few days I got a chance to see what @Trizek (WMF): has created for the explanation of translation extension and then understand what most of the documentation implies. I think my case just shows how other people might have. If the rule to become an admin is so difficult then I am afraid this wiki will not be an environment welcome enough for people who do outreach, it will be less friendly for the user and make the time longer to make this wiki be matured. --Liang_(WMTW) (talk) 21:57, 17 August 2017 (UTC)

Perhaps making a policy exception for WMF employees working on Outreach-related topics may be a solution. Thoughts? —Alvaro Molina (✉ - ✔) 15:13, 22 September 2017 (UTC)

Improved search in deleted pages archive[edit]

During Wikimedia Hackathon 2016, the Discovery team worked on one of the items on the 2015 community wishlist, namely enabling searching the archive of deleted pages. This feature is now ready for production deployment, and will be enabled on all wikis, except Wikidata.

Right now, the feature is behind a feature flag - to use it on your wiki, please go to the Special:Undelete page, and add &fuzzy=1 to the URL, like this: https://test.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special%3AUndelete&fuzzy=1. Then search for the pages you're interested in. There should be more results than before, due to using ElasticSearch indexing (via the CirrusSearch extension).

We plan to enable this improved search by default on all wikis soon (around August 1, 2017). If you have any objections to this - please raise them with the Discovery team via email or on this announcement's discussion page. Like most Mediawiki configuration parameters, the functionality can be configured per wiki. Once the improved search becomes the default, you can still access the old mode using &fuzzy=0 in the URL, like this: https://test.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special%3AUndelete&fuzzy=0

Please note that since Special:Undelete is an admin-only feature, this search capability is also only accessible to wiki admins.

Thank you! CKoerner (WMF) (talk) 18:36, 25 July 2017 (UTC)

Requirements for existing admins and bureaucrats[edit]

For those having advanced rights (admin, bureaucrat, check user, oversight), do we want to have a policy on usage of the rights? At the moment, we have (e.g.) a bureaucrat who only edited less than a dozen times a several years ago. Following from the above discussion, do users here have any strong feelings on minimum usage requirements for advanced rights? (Please note that we have no local check users or oversighters but they are advanced local user rights which could in theory be applied to a policy like this.) Koavf (talk) 22:26, 8 August 2017 (UTC)

This wiki, except for the deletion of pages of spam or out of project scope, does not demand much activity in regards to administrative actions. Outreach Wiki is mostly edited by members of Wikimedia chapters (several of them are not administrators here). I believe that applying some policy of local inactivity to existing administrators or bureaucrats is unnecessary since this wiki (in terms of active community) is not very high and most of those who edit have no closeness to the goal itself of Outreach Wiki. I believe that the global inactivity policy is sufficient.
As far as a policy for granting advanced permissions is concerned, I think the current requirements for administrators (it could have been somewhat more flexible), but here anyway, almost no one in the last time has requested to be an administrator here. I believe that a policy could also be implemented to grant the bureaucrat permission (requirements could be the same requirements for being an administrator and at least 6 months as an administrator).
It would be appreciated to read the opinions of other users about it. —Alvaro Molina (✉ - ✔) 04:22, 9 August 2017 (UTC)
  • Wikimedia:Inactivity policy was created based on Wikimedia:Village_pump/Archive_3#Inactivity_policy. Not sure if we should still use it. --Steinsplitter (talk) 17:12, 10 August 2017 (UTC)
  • If there was already an approved policy, then I don't think it is necessary to change it. I read it and it seems fine. —Alvaro Molina (✉ - ✔) 18:06, 13 August 2017 (UTC)
  • I agree but I simply wanted to bring this to the community to discuss since it seemed germane. Koavf (talk) 21:08, 13 August 2017 (UTC)
  • I suggest staying pretty flexible as this is a specialist wiki. There's no standard time between notifying the sysop that they have reached the limit and removing rights. Any thoughts, I believe the norm elsewhere is to give people a month to reply before the housekeeping happens. --Fæ (talk) 23:12, 13 August 2017 (UTC)
    • @Fæ: That's what Wikimedia:Inactivity policy says. Did you read it? Koavf (talk) 01:11, 14 August 2017 (UTC)
      • Yes. It is not especially long, yet I cannot see where the policy specifies the housekeeping time of a month.Thanks --Fæ (talk) 07:34, 14 August 2017 (UTC)
        • Seems reasonable, I think that the "may" is important. I was reminded that I have rights here that I havnt been flexing. However I spend a lot of my time doing outreach so I should be interested in this project. Victuallers (talk) 10:41, 14 August 2017 (UTC)
          • I don't edit much anymore but I do check emails so I've kept the rights if needed. From my memory Outreach has generally been more open to granting admin/crat rights to trusted community members, as per AlvaroMolina and Fae's points above. Thehelpfulone 22:49, 18 August 2017 (UTC)

Update on users with advanced rights[edit]

I recently removed the user rights of 57 admins and bureaucrats per the inactivity policy and conversations on the talk page of everyone who had advanced user rights as of one month ago. Our current list of 54 admins:

And our seven bureaucrats:

If you have any questions or concerns, please feel free to post them here. And if I made a mistake, it's easy to fix, so let me know. Koavf (talk) 18:05, 16 September 2017 (UTC)

Advanced advanced user rights[edit]

I'd like to survey the community here about having local Check Users or Oversighters. I suggest that these two advanced user rights may be useful on this wiki:

  • Oversight is necessary on wikis with Flow enabled in order to complete delete topics. Threads which should be completely deleted such as Topic:Tycmw0e6a2dxs9yd are only actually removed from a user's talk page if you use the "delete" function. Cf. phab:T163061#3210902. Since this wiki is intended to be very outward-facing, it may also be necessary to remove revisions that have personal information.
  • Check User could be helpful for investigating sock puppetry or harassment on this wiki. Again, since the goal of this is to be a very gentle landing pad for persons outside the Wikimedia movement, it's important to be able to investigate these abuses.

One argument against the latter user right is that these investigations may be handled faster if we appeal to the relevant pages on Meta and ask a Steward to come here to address them.

Thoughts? Koavf (talk) 05:03, 18 September 2017 (UTC)

  • @Eloquence, Jami (Wiki Ed), OhanaUnited, Steinsplitter, TFlanagan-WMF, Wittylama: as the local users with the most advanced user rights at the moment. Koavf (talk) 05:05, 18 September 2017 (UTC)
    • I don't see the merits of having local checkuser. I don't ever recall seeing sockpuppet in here without triggering alerts from other wikis. OhanaUnitedTalk page 05:12, 18 September 2017 (UTC)
    • I would like to remind people that if Checkuser or Oversight help is needed, stewards may always be able to help. Just post a CU request on m:SRCU or email for CU/OS requests to stewards﹫wikimedia.org. While I'm not an active member of this community, I think it's not necessary to have advanced rights on this wiki. Trijnstel (talk) 10:29, 22 September 2017 (UTC)
    • I agree with Trijnstel, here there has not been a greater need to have checkusers given that the cases of spam that usually occur here are mostly controlled by the same stewards and I at least have not seen any request or situation that require oversight here. —Alvaro Molina (✉ - ✔) 15:10, 22 September 2017 (UTC)
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