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News and updates for administrators from the past month (January 2018).

Administrator changes

None

Blurpeace • Dana boomer • Deltabeignet • Denelson83 • Grandiose • Salvidrim! • Ymblanter

Guideline and policy news

• An RfC has closed with a consensus that candidates at WP:RFA must disclose whether they have ever edited for pay and that administrators may never use administrative tools as part of any paid editing activity, except when they are acting as a Wikipedian-in-Residence or when the payment is made by the Wikimedia Foundation or an affiliate of the WMF.
• Editors responding to threats of harm can now contact the Wikimedia Foundation's emergency address by using Special:EmailUser/Emergency. If you don't have email enabled on Wikipedia, directly contacting the emergency address using your own email client remains an option.

Technical news

• A tag will now be automatically applied to edits that blank a page, turn a page into a redirect, remove/replace almost all content in a page, undo an edit, or rollback an edit. These edits were previously denoted solely by automatic edit summaries.

Arbitration

• The Arbitration Committee has enacted a change to the discretionary sanctions procedure which requires administrators to add a standardized editnotice when placing page restrictions. Editors cannot be sanctioned for violations of page restrictions if this editnotice was not in place at the time of the violation.

Hi Mike, I was just thinking about the Dec 12th bot edit that pulled all the Withdrawn reviews. Do you mind if I remove these from this main list? I was thinking it may be confusing for new editors. Just to confirm, as of Jan1/Feb1, is the bot ignoring withdrawn reviews? Thanks again for all your help!! Jenny JenOttawa (talk) 03:42, 7 February 2018 (UTC)[reply]

@JenOttawa: It's entirely up to you. It might be worth double-checking them to make sure that the update-inline is no longer in the articles as well, though. All edits by the code this year ignore the withdrawn updates. Thanks. Mike Peel (talk) 10:00, 7 February 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks Mike. IMO, if a Cochrane citation already in a WP article is "withdrawn", it is very important to remove it and replace with the non-withdrawn older or newer (as appropriate) review version. If a Cochrane citation already in a WP article is updated and the new update is "withdrawn", this could be ignored for now. What do you think Doc James? I am going to try to clean up the Aug2017 (verify all the "withdrawn" reviews that are listed and remove them), and then the page may be fine with the way you adjusted to bot to function as of Jan1. One thought: One way to get a feel that the bot is working is between each monthly run, we should mostly only be seeing freshly published updates being pulled up. E.g: If we see a 2015 update to a 2014 Cochrane that is pulled in Feb but not in January, either an editor added the old, no longer relevant version of the review or the bot is missing things. Does this make sense? Another way for quality control (a bit time consuming, but at least to make sure things are running as we wish): I can get a list of all new updates published on MedLine by Cochrane in a month and double check which of the older versions are already in WP articles and that the bot successfully identified these. Thanks again for all your help. None of this is an emergency of course! In general, the feedback has been extremely positive, things are running smoothly, and the WikiProject Medicine community is very happy with the project. (see feedback:Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Medicine#Cochrane_profile_in_The_Signpost). Have a great day! JenOttawa (talk) 15:31, 7 February 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Sometimes I have seen reviews withdrawn by Cochrane not because anything was wrong with them but just because a group felt they were a little old. Being a little old I do not see as justification for removal if their is not a newer version. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 00:51, 8 February 2018 (UTC)[reply]

@Doc James: without more information as to why a review was withdrawn, would it not make sense to set the evidence back to the last published non-withdrawn review? I know we discussed this before and how it is not clear why reviews are withdrawn. I am working my way through the list right now. Thanks! JenOttawa (talk) 01:15, 8 February 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Folks at Cochrane were saying they were going to look into this. Any word on that side of things? Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 01:20, 8 February 2018 (UTC)[reply]

I will inquire again @Doc James:. It looks to range from missing info to inaccuracies if a "version" of the review is withdrawn. If an actual review "protocol" is withdrawn, it may be because of a dead-end question / no longer relevant / or the question is asked in a different manner in a new review protocol. This was updated in 2016: [[1]]

I have not come across any reviews that have retracted protocols, only versions that are withdrawn. As of now, if I find a withdrawn version, I have been reverting it to the most recent non-withdrawn version. I think I have only had to do this twice ;). For the purposes of this bot, I think it makes sense to use the most recently published non-withdrawn review version, as I think the bot is doing now. If a entire "protocol" with withdrawn, we could try to manually find the most recent relevant Cochrane protocol or take a closer look as to why it is withdrawn. What do you think? Thanks again for your feedback. JenOttawa (talk) 01:41, 8 February 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Okay sounds reasonable. I remember asking Amir for a method to have the bot ignore certain reviews we wanted to keep regardless of their retraction. Not sure if this new bot has the same? Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 01:46, 8 February 2018 (UTC)[reply]