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Hello SD0001,

Much has happened since the last newsletter over two months ago. The open letter finished with 444 signatures. The letter was sent to several dozen people at the WMF, and we have heard that it is being discussed but there has been no official reply. A related article appears in the current issue of The Signpost. If you haven't seen it, you should, including the readers' comment section.

Awards: Barnstars were given for the past several years (thanks to MPGuy2824), and we are now all caught up. The 2021 cup went to John B123 for leading with 26,525 article reviews during 2021. To encourage moderate activity, a new "Iron" level barnstar is awarded annually for reviewing 360 articles ("one-a-day"), and 100 reviews earns the "Standard" NPP barnstar. About 90 reviewers received barnstars for each of the years 2018 to 2021 (including the new awards that were given retroactively). All awards issued for every year are listed on the Awards page. Check out the new Hall of Fame also.

Software news: Novem Linguae and MPGuy2824 have connected with WMF developers who can review and approve patches, so they have been able to fix some bugs, and make other improvements to the Page Curation software. You can see everything that has been fixed recently here. The reviewer report has also been improved.

Suggestions:

• There is much enthusiasm over the low backlog, but remember that the "quality and depth of patrolling are more important than speed".
• Reminder: an article should not be tagged for any kind of deletion for a minimum of 15 minutes after creation and it is often appropriate to wait an hour or more. (from the NPP tutorial)
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• This user script puts a link to the feed in your top toolbar.

Backlog:

Saving the best for last: From a July low of 8,500, the backlog climbed back to 11,000 in August and then reversed in September dropping to below 6,000 and continued falling with the October backlog drive to under 1,000, a level not seen in over four years. Keep in mind that there are 2,000 new articles every week, so the number of reviews is far higher than the backlog reduction. To keep the backlog under a thousand, we have to keep reviewing at about half the recent rate!

Can we get the draftify variant of {{UND}} added to the tool in a similar manner to userify? For now, I've been using the userify option and then moving the page to draftspace manually. Thanks! UtherSRG (talk) 11:52, 14 December 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Hi @UtherSRG, apologies for the delayed response.
In this case, should the talk page also be undeleted and moved to draft talk namespace (assuming the undelete talk page checkbox is checked)? Current behaviour for userfication is to not undelete the talk. – SD0001 (talk) 17:38, 25 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, although I'm curious as to the reason talk isn't userified. - UtherSRG (talk) 17:56, 25 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

 Partly done Support added for draftification, but not for the talk page. Yes I suppose undeleting and moving the talk also makes sense in case of userfication. Will implement that tomorrow. Ideally there's more work to be done – commenting out categories, commenting out non-free images, adjusting class in assessment templates on the talk page, and so on. – SD0001 (talk) 19:30, 25 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Also noticed that there was a bug in the way the section is live-reloaded after response is saved. Fixed now. – SD0001 (talk) 19:31, 25 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, I'd noticed that, but thought it was an issue with Vector2022. Thanks for fixing that, too! - UtherSRG (talk) 20:22, 25 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

You da best! :) - UtherSRG (talk) 20:22, 25 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Hrm. I think the task ordering for this could be improved. I think a check of whether a draft already exists should happen before the article is undeleted, so that if the draft is there already, the user can decide to cancel the process. I just ran into this with Draft:Alexander Blockx and had to manually re-delete the restored article. I do like the option to choose another draft title, though. Perhaps also have a link to the existing draft to make checking to see if the draft article is about the same topic? - UtherSRG (talk) 12:48, 26 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Hello SD0001,

Backlog

The October drive reduced the backlog from 9,700 to an amazing 0! Congratulations to WaddlesJP13 who led with 2084 points. See this page for further details. The queue is steadily rising again and is approaching 2,000. It would be great if <2,000 were the “new normal”. Please continue to help out even if it's only for a few or even one patrol a day.

2022 Awards

Onel5969 won the 2022 cup for 28,302 article reviews last year - that's an average of nearly 80/day. There was one Gold Award (5000+ reviews), 11 Silver (2000+), 28 Iron (360+) and 39 more for the 100+ barnstar. Rosguill led again for the 4th year by clearing 49,294 redirects. For the full details see the Awards page and the Hall of Fame. Congratulations everyone!

Minimum deletion time: The previous WP:NPP guideline was to wait 15 minutes before tagging for deletion (including draftification and WP:BLAR). Due to complaints, a consensus decided to raise the time to 1 hour. To illustrate this, very new pages in the feed are now highlighted in red. (As always, this is not applicable to attack pages, copyvios, vandalism, etc.)

New draftify script: In response to feedback from AFC, the The Move to Draft script now provides a choice of set messages that also link the creator to a new, friendly explanation page. The script also warns reviewers if the creator is probably still developing the article. The former script is no longer maintained. Please edit your edit your common.js or vector.js file from User:Evad37/MoveToDraft.js to User:MPGuy2824/MoveToDraft.js

Redirects: Some of our redirect reviewers have reduced their activity and the backlog is up to 9,000+ (two months deep). If you are interested in this distinctly different task and need any help, see this guide, this checklist, and spend some time at WP:RFD.

Discussions with the WMF The PageTriage open letter signed by 444 users is bearing fruit. The Growth Team has assigned some software engineers to work on PageTriage, the software that powers the NewPagesFeed and the Page Curation toolbar. WMF has submitted dozens of patches in the last few weeks to modernize PageTriage's code, which will make it easier to write patches in the future. This work is helpful but is not very visible to the end user. For patches visible to the end user, volunteers such as Novem Linguae and MPGuy2824 have been writing patches for bug reports and feature requests. The Growth Team also had a video conference with the NPP coordinators to discuss revamping the landing pages that new users see.

Reminders

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Hi SD, I was wondering whether there was a way of increasing the frequency that the bot makes changes to the AfC article sorting page? I (personally) feel it should be more often, but if it's restricted to that (or if there was a discussion about it, etc), do let me know. Thx Mattdaviesfsic (talk) 20:07, 5 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

SD0001, any thoughts on this? Mattdaviesfsic (talk) 13:49, 16 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

It was initially once per 24 hours, but was reduced to once per 6 hours on User:KylieTastic's request, though I can't find the discussion. But since each update causes about 67 edits (one main page and 66 subpages), it was later reduced to once per 8 hours as that cuts 25% of the proliferation in contribs logs and page histories.

@Mattdaviesfsic Is there a reason why you think it should be updated more frequently? – SD0001 (talk) 16:08, 16 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

SD0001, just purely think it would be good to have it updated more frequently, no particular reason in all honesty. I presume it's a coding thing which sets it to update 3x a day? Mattdaviesfsic (talk) 16:17, 16 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

(edit conflict) discussion twas: AfC sorting updates — KylieTastic (talk) 16:19, 16 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Hi there. Do you think you could include an option to ping the requesting user when handling a request at WP:RFUD using your excellent script? The admin instructions tell us that we should ping people because they probably won't see it otherwise but that currently requires manually adding a comment with the username only. Regards SoWhy 11:09, 23 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

@SoWhy  Done. Thanks for the suggestion. Detecting username programmatically from the request text is easier now because of DiscussionTools. In case it can't be detected due to some reason, there will be an option to enter it manually. – SD0001 (talk) 06:16, 24 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Great job as always Thanks for handling it so quickly! Regards SoWhy 08:37, 24 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

	The Technical Barnstar
	For creating and contributing to a lot of scripts that make our life maintaining this project so much easier. SoWhy 08:39, 24 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Hi SD0001! Your DYK and easy-merge tools have been an enormous help to me over the last few years, so let me second SoWhy's barnstar above.

Now that I have the flattery out of the way, I was wondering if you'd be interested in writing a tool similar to your GAN helper, but for GARs. We've recently gotten consensus to streamline the previously-byzantine process, and are working on the final version of the new process. It would be really useful to have a tool that could create the GAR subpage, add it to the article talk, and list the GAR at the central GAR page. Is that something you might be interested in looking at? ♠PMC♠ (talk) 15:56, 30 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Hi @Premeditated Chaos. It already exists! User:SD0001/GAR-helper. – SD0001 (talk) 16:52, 30 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

All that technical prowess and you're psychic too! ;) It will likely need updating soon once the streamlined process is settled. Do you want me to drop you a line? ♠PMC♠ (talk) 17:11, 30 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

This is absolutely amazing, thanks :). We'll link it more prominently on the GAR instructions! I'll leave a few comments on the script's talk page. —Femke 🐦 (talk) 17:57, 30 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I'm concerned that this may be overlapping with what Novem Linguae is working on at my talk page ?? See also User:SandyGeorgia/sandbox9. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 14:52, 31 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

See User talk:SandyGeorgia#GARCloser and mass delisting. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 14:54, 31 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for the ping. I think this script opens GANs and GARs, and mine closes them. While I'm a bit surprised these evolved to not be the same script, for now I think they are non overlapping. Hope this helps. –Novem Linguae (talk) 16:40, 31 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

@Novem Linguae I had been thinking of one uber-script to provide all GAN/GAR/DYK/FAC/FAR/PR opening and closing functionality in one script (User:SD0001/Quart) – kind of a Swiss army knife like Twinkle, though I never had the time to work on it 😅. It'll save everyone the hassle of discovering and installing multiple little-known scripts. Let me know if you or anyone else is interested in something like this – we could collaborate on GitHub. – SD0001 (talk) 17:26, 31 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

You mean what GimmeBot did ? Been asking for it forever. But Gimmetrow also rolled ITN and OTD and AFD as well as Featured Lists and Featured Topics in to {{article history}} before he was chased off by an LTA master sock and accomplices. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 18:13, 31 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

User:SD0001/Quart looks like a very interesting idea. Would be more organized in the long run, but would take a long time to pay dividends. I think it'd be a lot of work to merge in 5 people's scripts. I'm sure they all have their own interfaces, coding styles, etc. I've watchlisted the page... maybe someday :) –Novem Linguae (talk) 19:06, 31 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

You should see the manual work I'm doing on FACs and FARs to roll in outrageous OTD templates, which use a different format for oldid and date from articlehistory, so the work is tedious ... SandyGeorgia (Talk) 19:10, 31 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Reminds me of programming GANReviewTool to convert {{GA}} to {{Article history}}. I wrote a lot of tests to make sure this worked without bugs. These templates are more complicated than people think, eh?

If your OTD to article history project has dozens or hundreds of the same task over and over again, might be worth requesting a user script or requesting a bot. There's dedicated pages to request technical things. That's how I ended up making GANReviewTool. Someone requested it :) –Novem Linguae (talk) 19:34, 31 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I should ask for the OTD/ITN script to be developed ... it's tedious but repetitive, and probably not hard to code ... just haven't found the time. The same script could probably merge in old DYKs, and (then) most talk pages on FAs or former FAs would be clean. GAs are another matter. Those talk pages are a mess. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 19:52, 31 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Finally (like I've got nothing else going on right now): [1] SandyGeorgia (Talk) 20:51, 2 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

One Script to Rule Them All and on the talkpage bind them? ♠PMC♠ (talk) 19:34, 31 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

💍😈😈 –Novem Linguae (talk) 19:46, 31 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

	The Original Barnstar
	For creating User:SDZeroBot which hepls me too much for finding pending articles for creation and articles for deletion. ​​​​​​​𝐋𝐨𝐫𝐝𝐕𝐨𝐥𝐝𝐞𝐦𝐨𝐫𝐭𝟕𝟐𝟖🧙‍♂️Let's Talk ! 11:10, 1 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Hi SD0001. Quick bug report for you about the userfication feature of rfud-helper. When I userfy an article that was deleted at AfD, the script will 1) undelete the article, 2) move it to the User: namespace without leaving a redirect, and 3) add Template:Old AfD in the Talk: namespace rather than the User talk: namespace, creating an orphaned talk page. See here for an example: it undeleted Jacob Ming-Trent, moved it to User:JamesLucas/sandbox/Jacob Ming-Trent, but created Talk:Jacob Ming-Trent rather than User talk:JamesLucas/sandbox/Jacob Ming-Trent. (Let me know if I've explained that poorly.) Hopefully there's an easy fix, and thanks for all you do! Extraordinary Writ (talk) 08:45, 12 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for the bug report. Will take this up along with the remaining work in #RFUD_Helper_tool_update_request. – SD0001 (talk) 14:50, 16 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

My GAN userbox now correctly states that I have helped promote 104 GAs. If this was your doing, thank you. But when I click on "104" I get a list of 54 articles [2]. The difference is due to the 50 articles which have been promoted to FA since passing GA not being included. Is it possible for this to be resolved? The 54 total also shows up on the GAN list page, but I am unsure if that number is taken from the same source. Thanks. Gog the Mild (talk) 13:41, 16 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Pardon me for butting in. I don't know if SD0001 keeps a history of pages that used to be GAs, but I have been working on an extract of GA history that includes fails and delists. At the moment it's only about 98% accurate but it does include GAs that have subsequently changed status to FAs. If SD0001 doesn't keep that history, I might be able to provide a report that does something similar. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 13:57, 16 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

@Mike Christie SDZeroBot only maintains the counts using pages currently in Category:Good articles. The database is updated every time a page enters or exits the category. A promotion to FA is treated the same as a GA delisting. – SD0001 (talk) 15:03, 16 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for the clarification. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 15:42, 16 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

@Gog the Mild Yes that count doesn't include FAs, since technically they are no longer GAs. If you maintain a subpage with the list of articles, you can override the link by passing its name as an additional parameter to the userbox template. Thanks for writing so many quality articles! – SD0001 (talk) 15:00, 16 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

In which case, could the userbox language be changed. And the number. At the moment a passing editor clicking on "104" and finding a list of only 54 is likely to, hmm, suspect my ability to count. Or worse. If there has to be a link to a list of articles promoted at GAN which have not since been promoted to FA - and personally I don't believe there should be - could the userbox text and number reflect this? Gog the Mild (talk) 15:06, 16 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

The number shown is whatever you're passing into the template. I meant overriding the link like this, so the number and the list match. – SD0001 (talk) 16:02, 16 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Ah. Apologies and thank you. (A bit technical for me, what you just did.) Gog the Mild (talk) 16:12, 16 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

SD001, can you look at this? All of the DC talk pages and reviewers and nominator have already been notified of WP:DCGAR, and The Rambling Man has specifically asked me not to post to their talk page. I clicked the box saying not to notify, but the script did anyway. This is a problem as I have several more to do. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 21:12, 16 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

As an "experienced" user you should be familiar with the {{noping}} template SandyGeorgia. I suggest you pick up the cues, I don't want you to leave me messages or ping me elsewhere, as, to be explicit, your own behaviour has driven me from this project. Stop doing this, you really should know better. Some would suggest (and some have suggested) that your ongoing behaviour is pure antagonism. The Rambling Man (Keep wearing the mask...) 21:15, 16 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Sheesh, TRM, give it a break; as you should be able to see I am trying to correct the script issue and trying to apologize. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 21:18, 16 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

"Sheesh" stop pinging me. You drove me away from Wikipedia, the last thing I want is to hear more from your foetid pings. The Rambling Man (Keep wearing the mask...) 22:54, 17 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

If that is the case, the driving was a two-way street. I haven't pinged you again since my first attempt to apologize for the extra notification and to let you know I was trying to solve the script problem that caused it. Now if you want to continue this conversation, take it to my talk page and stop bothering SD0001. I don't kick people off my talk page, and it's unkind to further a one-way conversation on a third-party's talk page. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 23:03, 17 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

👏👏👏 . The Rambling Man (Keep wearing the mask...) 08:38, 18 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

SD0001, some ideas so users like me might avoid this kind of unpleasantry.

First, before the GAR-helper submits, can the user get an idea of exactly where the notices are going to go, so they can have a chance to opt out, or even, not initiate the GAR? I got one shot, I clicked something saying not to notify, then submit-- and bam, I get this.

Second, when the GAR-helper sends a notice on behalf of an editor, can the signature indicate that (something like WP:MMS does-- where it uses an MMS signature)?

This was a bad enough experience that I won't ever initiate a GAR again, so sorry to say, after our wonderful experience together in generating WP:URFA/2020. Thanks for all you do, and sorry for this outcome. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 03:16, 17 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Apologies - you are right, it turns out that checkbox does nothing at all. I've temporarily removed it, while I work on displaying a preview of notices to be sent. – SD0001 (talk) 14:48, 17 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks; you're still the best :) SandyGeorgia (Talk) 14:48, 17 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

 Fixed Now there is a preview button which also shows the talk pages where notifications will be placed, and allows unchecking one or more of them. (Submitting without going through preview will notify everyone by default, though.) – SD0001 (talk) 19:48, 17 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Awesome (and speedy); I may try it again sometime when I am sure I won't hit unpleasantness. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 19:52, 17 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]