Wikimedia:Village pump

Village pump

Skip to: Table of contents • First discussion • Bottom of page • New post

---

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.

Important:

• Requests for suppression of private information can be made to the stewards at this page on meta. Do not post in public to request suppression.
• Requests for permissions should be made on the respective page.

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

« Older discussions | Archives: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6

Contents archived

I moved the contents of this page to Wikimedia:Village pump/Archive 6. ↠Pine (✉) 19:58, 1 June 2020 (UTC)

Possible use of JavaScript in NavWiki project space

I am considering an idea that would involve using JavaScript in the NavWiki project space.

@Koavf: do you know if it is possible to implement JavaScript in NavWiki project space without the interface administrator permission? ↠Pine (✉) 20:11, 1 June 2020 (UTC)

@Pine: I do not know for sure but I would be very surprised if you could use scripts without that permission. Koavf (talk) 21:07, 1 June 2020 (UTC)

@Koavf: OK. I have not made up my mind about this, and even if I decide that I want to use JavaScript, I probably would have the time to work on this in July at the earliest. In the meantime I will ask for advice on Meta. ↠Pine (✉) 22:09, 1 June 2020 (UTC)

@Pine: Sure. If you want the user rights, I would support that. I also have them here. I'm a very novice JavaScript guy. Koavf (talk) 23:26, 1 June 2020 (UTC)

@Koavf: thanks. On Meta, I was told that the interface administrator permission is required for using JavaScript on a subset of pages. I'll probably wait until July or later before further work on this. ↠Pine (✉) 04:18, 2 June 2020 (UTC)

Thumbs up emoji. As always, ping me if you need me. Koavf (talk) 04:20, 2 June 2020 (UTC)

Request for removal of administrator permissions

Hi @Koavf: I am thinking about leaving the Wikiverse. I have not made up my mind, but please remove my administrator permissions for the Outreach wiki. This will reduce the harm that someone can do if they manage to take over my account. If I decide to stay then I can request that you return the the administrator permissions. Thanks, ↠Pine (✉) 18:55, 28 June 2020 (UTC)

@Pine: While it's logistically easy to do, it's a little emotional. I hope you make the best decision, whatever that is and I'm grateful for all the good work you've done here. Koavf (talk) 19:00, 28 June 2020 (UTC)

Hi @Koavf: thank you for the supportive comments. Unless I think of something that I hadn't considered, or someone offers serious money to support my work on Wikimedia projects such as NavWiki, then I think that I should leave. I will be available by email if you want to contact me. Best wishes, ↠Pine (✉) 19:20, 28 June 2020 (UTC)

I'd like to help out where I can on this, and other smaller wikis, particularly in the way of categorization improvements, general maintenance, and filing in content pages, so I'm new here. Nevertheless, I've seen @Pine: active here, from my perusing the arrangement and scope of the content here, but one option you might want to consider before giving up your administrator permissions (not sure if they can be re-added without going through another RfA on this wiki) might be to enable two-factor authentication on your account, which would have the practical effect of requiring a second level of authorization from logins on unfamiliar devices. I think it would just mean a quick request over on Meta to add the two-factor authentication testers global group to your account. Dmehus (talk) 22:49, 28 June 2020 (UTC)

Feedback on movement names

Hello. Apologies if you are not reading this message in your native language. Please help translate to your language if necessary. Thank you!

There are a lot of conversations happening about the future of our movement names. We hope that you are part of these discussions and that your community is represented.

Since 16 June, the Foundation Brand Team has been running a survey in 7 languages about 3 naming options. There are also community members sharing concerns about renaming in a Community Open Letter.

Our goal in this call for feedback is to hear from across the community, so we encourage you to participate in the survey, the open letter, or both. The survey will go through 7 July in all timezones. Input from the survey and discussions will be analyzed and published on Meta-Wiki.

Thanks for thinking about the future of the movement, --The Brand Project team, 20:33, 2 July 2020 (UTC)

Note: The survey is conducted via a third-party service, which may subject it to additional terms. For more information on privacy and data-handling, see the survey privacy statement.

180.214.232.49

bug: that IP address is still blocked after the block expired 95.49.81.129 22:23, 7 July 2020 (UTC)

Thanks, I reported it on phabricator phab:T257393 --Samuele2002 (Talk!) 00:53, 8 July 2020 (UTC)

Announcing a new wiki project! Welcome, Abstract Wikipedia

Hi all,

It is my honor to introduce Abstract Wikipedia, a new project that has been unanimously approved by the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees. Abstract Wikipedia proposes a new way to generate baseline encyclopedic content in a multilingual fashion, allowing more contributors and more readers to share more knowledge in more languages. It is an approach that aims to make cross-lingual cooperation easier on our projects, increase the sustainability of our movement through expanding access to participation, improve the user experience for readers of all languages, and innovate in free knowledge by connecting some of the strengths of our movement to create something new.

This is our first new project in over seven years. Abstract Wikipedia was submitted as a project proposal by Denny Vrandečić in May 2020 after years of preparation and research, leading to a detailed plan and lively discussions in the Wikimedia communities. We know that the energy and the creativity of the community often runs up against language barriers, and information that is available in one language may not make it to other language Wikipedias. Abstract Wikipedia intends to look and feel like a Wikipedia, but build on the powerful, language-independent conceptual models of Wikidata, with the goal of letting volunteers create and maintain Wikipedia articles across our polyglot Wikimedia world.

The project will allow volunteers to assemble the fundamentals of an article using words and entities from Wikidata. Because Wikidata uses conceptual models that are meant to be universal across languages, it should be possible to use and extend these building blocks of knowledge to create models for articles that also have universal value. Using code, volunteers will be able to translate these abstract “articles” into their own languages. If successful, this could eventually allow everyone to read about any topic in Wikidata in their own language.

As you can imagine, this work will require a lot of software development, and a lot of cooperation among Wikimedians. In order to make this effort possible, Denny will join the Foundation as a staff member in July and lead this initiative. You may know Denny as the creator of Wikidata, a long-time community member, a former staff member at Wikimedia Deutschland, and a former Trustee at the Wikimedia Foundation . We are very excited that Denny will bring his skills and expertise to work on this project alongside the Foundation’s product, technology, and community liaison teams.

It is important to acknowledge that this is an experimental project, and that every Wikipedia community has different needs. This project may offer some communities great advantages. Other communities may engage less. Every language Wikipedia community will be free to choose and moderate whether or how they would use content from this project.

We are excited that this new wiki-project has the possibility to advance knowledge equity through increased access to knowledge. It also invites us to consider and engage with critical questions about how and by whom knowledge is constructed. We look forward to working in cooperation with the communities to think through these important questions.

There is much to do as we begin designing a plan for Abstract Wikipedia in close collaboration with our communities. I encourage you to get involved by going to the project page and joining the new mailing list . We recognize that Abstract Wikipedia is ambitious, but we also recognize its potential. We invite you all to join us on a new, unexplored path.

Yours,

Katherine Maher (Executive Director, Wikimedia Foundation)

Sent by m:User:Elitre (WMF) 19:56, 9 July 2020 (UTC) - m:Special:MyLanguage/Abstract Wikipedia/July 2020 announcement

Important: maintenance operation on September 1st

Read this message in another language • Please help translate to your language

The Wikimedia Foundation will be testing its secondary data centre. This will make sure that Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia wikis can stay online even after a disaster. To make sure everything is working, the Wikimedia Technology department needs to do a planned test. This test will show if they can reliably switch from one data centre to the other. It requires many teams to prepare for the test and to be available to fix any unexpected problems.

They will switch all traffic to the secondary data centre on Tuesday, September 1st 2020.

Unfortunately, because of some limitations in MediaWiki, all editing must stop while the switch is made. We apologize for this disruption, and we are working to minimize it in the future.

You will be able to read, but not edit, all wikis for a short period of time.

• You will not be able to edit for up to an hour on Tuesday, September 1st. The test will start at 14:00 UTC (15:00 BST, 16:00 CEST, 10:00 EDT, 19:30 IST, 07:00 PDT, 23:00 JST, and in New Zealand at 02:00 NZST on Wednesday September 2).
• If you try to edit or save during these times, you will see an error message. We hope that no edits will be lost during these minutes, but we can't guarantee it. If you see the error message, then please wait until everything is back to normal. Then you should be able to save your edit. But, we recommend that you make a copy of your changes first, just in case.

Other effects:

• Background jobs will be slower and some may be dropped. Red links might not be updated as quickly as normal. If you create an article that is already linked somewhere else, the link will stay red longer than usual. Some long-running scripts will have to be stopped.
• There will be code freezes for the week of September 1st, 2020. Non-essential code deployments will not happen.

This project may be postponed if necessary. You can read the schedule at wikitech.wikimedia.org. Any changes will be announced in the schedule. There will be more notifications about this. Please share this information with your community.

Trizek (WMF) (talk) 13:48, 26 August 2020 (UTC)

Invitation to participate in the conversation

Hello. Apologies for cross-posting, and that you may not be reading this message in your native language: translations of the following announcement may be available on Meta. Please help translate to your language. Thank you!

We are excited to share a draft of the Universal Code of Conduct, which the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees called for earlier this year, for your review and feedback. The discussion will be open until October 6, 2020.

The UCoC Drafting Committee wants to learn which parts of the draft would present challenges for you or your work. What is missing from this draft? What do you like, and what could be improved?

Please join the conversation and share this invitation with others who may be interested to join, too.

To reduce language barriers during the process, you are welcomed to translate this message and the Universal Code of Conduct/Draft review. You and your community may choose to provide your opinions/feedback using your local languages.

To learn more about the UCoC project, see the Universal Code of Conduct page, and the FAQ, on Meta.

Thanks in advance for your attention and contributions, The Trust and Safety team at Wikimedia Foundation, 17:55, 10 September 2020 (UTC) 

m:Requests for comment/Global ban of James Salsman

This is to notify you a previously active editor, James Salsman, has an active ongoing ban discussion per the global banning policy. –MJL ‐Talk‐^☖ 14:45, 26 September 2020 (UTC)

Wiki of functions naming contest

Please help translate to your language.

Hello. Please help pick a name for the new Wikimedia wiki project. This project will be a wiki where the community can work together on a library of functions. The community can create new functions, read about them, discuss them, and share them. Some of these functions will be used to help create language-independent Wikipedia articles that can be displayed in any language, as part of the Abstract Wikipedia project. But functions will also be usable in many other situations.

There will be two rounds of voting, each followed by legal review of candidates, with voting beginning on 29 September and 27 October. Our goal is to have a final project name selected on 8 December. If you would like to participate, then please learn more and vote now at meta-wiki. Thank you! --Quiddity (WMF)

20:53, 29 September 2020 (UTC)

Call for feedback about Wikimedia Foundation Bylaws changes and Board candidate rubric

Hello. Apologies if you are not reading this message in your native language. Please help translate to your language.

Today the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees starts two calls for feedback. One is about changes to the Bylaws mainly to increase the Board size from 10 to 16 members. The other one is about a trustee candidate rubric to introduce new, more effective ways to evaluate new Board candidates. The Board welcomes your comments through 26 October. For more details, check the full announcement.

Thank you! Qgil-WMF (talk) 17:09, 7 October 2020 (UTC)

Important: maintenance operation on October 27

Read this message in another language • Please help translate to your language

The Wikimedia Foundation tests the switch between its first and secondary data centers. This will make sure that Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia wikis can stay online even after a disaster. To make sure everything is working, the Wikimedia Technology department needs to do a planned test. This test will show if they can reliably switch from one data centre to the other. It requires many teams to prepare for the test and to be available to fix any unexpected problems.

They will switch all traffic back to the primary data center on Tuesday, October 27 2020.

Unfortunately, because of some limitations in MediaWiki, all editing must stop while the switch is made. We apologize for this disruption, and we are working to minimize it in the future.

You will be able to read, but not edit, all wikis for a short period of time.

• You will not be able to edit for up to an hour on Tuesday, October 27. The test will start at 14:00 UTC (14:00 WET, 15:00 CET, 10:00 EDT, 19:30 IST, 07:00 PDT, 23:00 JST, and in New Zealand at 03:00 NZDT on Wednesday October 28).
• If you try to edit or save during these times, you will see an error message. We hope that no edits will be lost during these minutes, but we can't guarantee it. If you see the error message, then please wait until everything is back to normal. Then you should be able to save your edit. But, we recommend that you make a copy of your changes first, just in case.

Other effects:

• Background jobs will be slower and some may be dropped. Red links might not be updated as quickly as normal. If you create an article that is already linked somewhere else, the link will stay red longer than usual. Some long-running scripts will have to be stopped.
• There will be code freezes for the week of October 26, 2020. Non-essential code deployments will not happen.

This project may be postponed if necessary. You can read the schedule at wikitech.wikimedia.org. Any changes will be announced in the schedule. There will be more notifications about this. A banner will be displayed on all wikis 30 minutes before this operation happens. Please share this information with your community.

-- Trizek (WMF) (talk) 17:09, 21 October 2020 (UTC)

Wiki of functions naming contest - Round 2

Hello. Reminder: Please help to choose the name for the new Wikimedia wiki project - the library of functions. The finalist vote starts today. The finalists for the name are: Wikicode, Wikicodex, Wikifunctions, Wikifusion, Wikilambda, Wikimedia Functions. If you would like to participate, then please learn more and vote now at Meta-wiki. Thank you! --Quiddity (WMF)

22:10, 5 November 2020 (UTC)

Community Wishlist Survey 2021

The 2021 Community Wishlist Survey is now open! This survey is the process where communities decide what the Community Tech team should work on over the next year. We encourage everyone to submit proposals until the deadline on 30 November, or comment on other proposals to help make them better. The communities will vote on the proposals between 8 December and 21 December.

The Community Tech team is focused on tools for experienced Wikimedia editors. You can write proposals in any language, and we will translate them for you. Thank you, and we look forward to seeing your proposals!

SGrabarczuk (WMF) 05:52, 20 November 2020 (UTC)

Wikidata descriptions changes to be included more often in Recent Changes and Watchlist

Sorry for sending this message in English. Translations are available on this page. Feel free to translate it in more languages!

As you may know, you can include changes coming from Wikidata in your Watchlist and Recent Changes (in your preferences). Until now, this feature didn’t always include changes made on Wikidata descriptions due to the way Wikidata tracks the data used in a given article.

Starting on December 3rd, the Watchlist and Recent Changes will include changes on the descriptions of Wikidata Items that are used in the pages that you watch. This will only include descriptions in the language of your wiki to make sure that you’re only seeing changes that are relevant to your wiki.

This improvement was requested by many users from different projects. We hope that it can help you monitor the changes on Wikidata descriptions that affect your wiki and participate in the effort of improving the data quality on Wikidata for all Wikimedia wikis and beyond.

Note: if you didn’t use the Wikidata watchlist integration feature for a long time, feel free to give it another chance! The feature has been improved since the beginning and the content it displays is more precise and useful than at the beginning of the feature in 2015.

If you encounter any issue or want to provide feedback, feel free to use this Phabricator ticket. Thanks!

Lea Lacroix (WMDE) 14:38, 30 November 2020 (UTC)

2020 Coolest Tool Award Ceremony on December 11th

Hello all,

The ceremony of the 2020 Wikimedia Coolest Tool Award will take place virtually on Friday, December 11th, at 17:00 GMT. This award is highlighting tools that have been nominated by contributors to the Wikimedia projects, and the ceremony will be a nice moment to show appreciation to the tools developers and maybe discover new tools!

You will find more information here about the livestream and the discussions channels. Thanks for your attention, Lea Lacroix (WMDE) 10:55, 7 December 2020 (UTC)

Community Wishlist Survey 2021

We invite all registered users to vote on the 2021 Community Wishlist Survey. You can vote from now until 21 December for as many different wishes as you want.

In the Survey, wishes for new and improved tools for experienced editors are collected. After the voting, we will do our best to grant your wishes. We will start with the most popular ones.

We, the Community Tech, are one of the Wikimedia Foundation teams. We create and improve editing and wiki moderation tools. What we work on is decided based on results of the Community Wishlist Survey. Once a year, you can submit wishes. After two weeks, you can vote on the ones that you're most interested in. Next, we choose wishes from the survey to work on. Some of the wishes may be granted by volunteer developers or other teams.

We are waiting for your votes. Thank you!

SGrabarczuk (WMF)

15:03, 11 December 2020 (UTC)

Moving Wikimania 2021 to a Virtual Event

Hello. Apologies if you are not reading this message in your native language. Please help translate to your language. Thank you!

Wikimania will be a virtual event this year, and hosted by a wide group of community members. Whenever the next in-person large gathering is possible again, the ESEAP Core Organizing Team will be in charge of it. Stay tuned for more information about how you can get involved in the planning process and other aspects of the event. Please read the longer version of this announcement on wikimedia-l.

ESEAP Core Organizing Team, Wikimania Steering Committee, Wikimedia Foundation Events Team, 15:15, 27 January 2021 (UTC)

Project Grant Open Call

This is the announcement for the Project Grants program open call that started on January 11, with the submission deadline of February 10, 2021.
This first open call will be focussed on Community Organizing proposals. A second open call focused on research and software proposals is scheduled from February 15 with a submission deadline of March 16, 2021.

For the Round 1 open call, we invite you to propose grant applications that fall under community development and organizing (offline and online) categories. Project Grant funds are available to support individuals, groups, and organizations to implement new experiments and proven ideas, from organizing a better process on your wiki, coordinating a campaign or editathon series to providing other support for community building. We offer the following resources to help you plan your project and complete a grant proposal:

• Weekly proposals clinics via Zoom during the Open Call. Join us for #Upcoming_Proposal_Clinics|real-time discussions with Program Officers and select thematic experts and get live feedback about your Project Grants proposal. We’ll answer questions and help you make your proposal better. We also offer these support pages to help you build your proposal:
• Video tutorials for writing a strong application
  
• General planning page for Project Grants
  
• Program guidelines and criteria
  

Program officers are also available to offer individualized proposal support upon request. Contact us if you would like feedback or more information.

We are excited to see your grant ideas that will support our community and make an impact on the future of Wikimedia projects. Put your idea into motion, and submit your proposal by February 10, 2021!

Please feel free to get in touch with questions about getting started with your grant application, or about serving on the Project Grants Committee. Contact us at projectgrantsTemplate:Atwikimedia.org. Please help us translate this message to your local language. MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 08:00, 28 January 2021 (UTC)

Wikifunctions logo contest

Hello. Please help to choose a design concept for the logo of the new Wikifunctions wiki. Voting starts today and will be open for 2 weeks. If you would like to participate, then please learn more and vote now at Meta-Wiki. Thank you! --Quiddity (WMF)

01:45, 2 March 2021 (UTC)

Outreach wiki shutting down?

I've seen it stated on an email list that this wiki's days are numbered. Is this true? And if so, what is the recommended approach for migrating important pages to Meta Wiki or elsewhere? -Pete (talk) 17:15, 20 March 2021 (UTC)

@Peteforsyth: This has been discussed and rejected by the community. What is the list? Koavf (talk) 07:12, 26 March 2021 (UTC)

@Koavf: March 19 on Wikimedia-L, re: Wikipedia & Education User Group. -Pete (talk) 17:21, 26 March 2021 (UTC)

Thread. Odd. I don't recall a consensus for this. Maybe I'll have to attend. Thanks, Pete. Koavf (talk) 19:30, 26 March 2021 (UTC)

For future reference: this e-mail mentions it. To be this feels a bit weird, as I am editing this wiki many times and got no request to join in the meeting. Something that will be needed as the infrastructure of thousands of pages I maintain needs to be moved to Meta. Romaine (talk) 23:18, 11 April 2021 (UTC)

Recent edits by TMenang

Can an admin please take a look at Special:Contributions/TMenang, specifically the creation of pages about user groups that aren't used here on outreachwiki? I left them a note on their talk page, but they have continued. Thanks, --DannyS712 (talk) 22:34, 9 April 2021 (UTC)

@TMenang: Some of these creations seem confusing at best. E.g. you made Category:Pages using RFC magic links, which is something that is automatically generated via MediaWiki if someone uses a certain syntax. So I can see the value in it not being a redlink, just in case someone actually does make an RFC magic link. I do not see the value in making it a subcategory of Category:Stewards (???), particularly since that is a usergroup at Meta. Nor do I see the value in linking to the equivalent category on Commons. Can you explain more of what your goal is here with these page creations? Koavf (talk) 00:52, 10 April 2021 (UTC)

(edit conflcited) @TMenang: I can't see why these pages would be needed, any local descriptions for global or non-standard groups can point to interwiki links if needed - is there another good reason these are needed before we just speedy delete them as G7 (irrelevant here)? Xaosflux (talk) 00:55, 10 April 2021 (UTC)

No response, I'm deleting any of these that broadly meet the criterion described above. Xaosflux (talk) 12:03, 11 April 2021 (UTC)

Y Done @DannyS712: if there are any others outside of TMenang's userspace meeting the criteria above feel free to tag for speedy deletion per this discussion. Best regards, Xaosflux (talk) 12:13, 11 April 2021 (UTC)

Thank you for helping me, best regard. TMenang(talk) 21:40, 11 April 2021 (UTC)

@Xaosflux, Koavf: still continuing, eg Edu-portaal is an unneeded redirect to Education (unlikely search term), as well as more interwiki redirects for user groups - Wikimedia:Account creators and Wikimedia:Importers, both of which were previously deleted per this discussion. --DannyS712 (talk) 16:35, 14 April 2021 (UTC)

I deleted the recreations and have no strong feelings on the redirect as redirects are cheap and maybe this is a term that means something in his language. Koavf (talk) 16:47, 14 April 2021 (UTC)

Update: account globally locked as an LTA, so no more edits to come, just cleaning up the old ones --DannyS712 (talk) 06:19, 15 April 2021 (UTC)