Old discussions: June 2013 to May 2014, June 2014 to May 2015, June 2015 to May 2016, June 2016 to May 2017, June 2017 to May 2018, June 2018 to May 2019

When you look up Heather Thomson former Real Housewives star, designer, inventor, consultant- Her image comes up with someone else’s BIO. - A New Zealand runners Bio shows up but the image is of Heather Thomson From housewives??? How can we get the image changed??????? Please help!! HeatherThomson (talk) 11:43, 1 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

User:HeatherThomson, I believe that the instructions you are looking for are located at Wikipedia:Contact us/Article subjects. As your account has been blocked for a possible impersonation attempt, the e-mail option might be the most feasible for you. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 00:25, 2 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Not sure if it's the kind of example you're looking for, but I personally think Sissinghurst Castle Garden was a nice example of what collaboration on here can do. KJP1 (talk) 21:52, 21 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks, KJP1. I'll definitely look at that example. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 23:17, 21 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]

• If you're still collecting, there's a modest current example here at Talk:India. Johnbod (talk) 13:09, 7 August 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Actually I did want to stop by days ago, but life tends to get in the way, and then I get distracted. Anyway - I find it much easier to talk to someone like you who actually does or at least has volunteered at our project. It seems there are a few folks at WMF who are simply professional NPO employees (not saying that's good or bad - we need good professionals in important positions). In my mind the folks who should making decisions on members of the community here should BE members of the community here. But I'm getting off track here - while there's folks I don't have much respect for at WMF - you are one that I DO respect, and I appreciate you responding on Iridescent's talk page. I could go on, but it would be pointless venting. Thank you; both for what you've done, and for what you do. All my best. — Ched :  ?  — 11:32, 23 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for the kind note, Ched. The WMF staff seems to have a mix of folks. That can have advantages and disadvantages. I think it shouldn't matter much in background work (who really cares whether the bookkeepers like to edit Wikipedia?), and it can be either an advantage or a disadvantage in other roles. At one point, there was a 50% minimum of volunteers-turned-staff (by CEO decree), but I don't think that the numbers have been officially tracked since Sue quit.

IMO some teams, such as design, probably benefit most from a mix. I'd put both grant-making and design in that list. It might be hard to fairly evaluate a grant applicant that you've worked with on wiki. But if you know a community, you can identify some problems with a proposal that another person would completely miss. On the design side, you want both fresh perspectives and deep knowledge. The "new" designer in the Editing team, for example, wasn't really "one of us" when she was hired a year ago, but she's turning into one of us, and I am so pleased. (It helps that she is absolutely awesome as a designer, which means absolutely awesome at evaluating different processes in context and with as few unidentified preconceived notions as possible.)

On the flip side, everyone in CommTech (or maybe all but one of them now?) is a long-time wiki person, and I think that might make it harder for them to see alternatives. And I know that I have to be vigilant against my own tendency to think the English Wikipedia first and only. So a balance seems indicated. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 22:31, 23 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Another thing: I don't think that most volunteers realize how many staff members are also volunteers.  My "real" team (there's an endless supply of internal re-orgs to change who's on my "official" team at any given moment) has always been 100% Wikipedia editors.  My boss has 30K edits as a volunteer; her boss has 10K edits; until the last re-org, his boss had more than 100K edits (the new C-level is a non-editor).  My team would have put "don't bother applying if you haven't already made a thousand edits to a WMF site already" on our job descriptions years ago, except that the recruiters wouldn't let us.  (We did get them to start asking for applicants' usernames.  Amusingly, a lot of non-Wikipedians then created accounts and told us that they hoped to start editing soon.  But again, it doesn't matter for other things, so when my "official" team hired a graphics artist earlier this year, hiring a long-time Wikipedian wasn't a significant goal.)

To give you an idea of what it feels like for me:  Yesterday started with one of the directors of product telling me how excited he was about an article he created over the weekend.  The dev team I've worked with the most has always had multiple Wikipedia admins on it.  Their new product manager (hired in January) has edited occasionally for several years.  Their project manager doesn't edit much herself, but has worked with local edit-a-thons.  

As you might be able to tell, I've been thinking about this problem for years.  ;-)  I don't know whether the real problem is that almost nobody realizes that "PEarley (WMF)" is the same person as "The Interior" (with my username, which I insisted upon when I was hired, the connection is obvious.  But do watch out for the capitalization...), or if there is some mental shift in which being "one of us" means something other than whether you happen to edit Wikipedia.  I was briefly tempted last month to start replying to some comments about T&S not knowing anything about the English Wikipedia with diffs of that speaker voting in favor of those team members at their (volunteer) RFAs.  But in the end, I don't think that "knowing" is what those people really meant.  I think they meant something more like, "Hey, my values are different from yours".  Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 23:01, 23 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Could you please mentor Stombari8 until they master the basics of translation on wikis? You have invited them to translate VE newsletter, however, applying raw machine translation output only breaks links by inserting spaces to cut _$_ links at least. I hope they will catch up soon, and be a very strong translation hand as well. Yes, I’ve been there, and don’t want them henpecked. (: Cheers, --Omotecho (talk) 16:27, 31 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for the note, Omotecho. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 20:56, 31 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]

... that keepng a list of Things to Not Break is an excellent software engineering practice. I am so glad you are doing this. Cheers, Clayoquot (talk | contribs) 19:57, 31 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Hi, Clayoquot,

Thanks for the note. I find it helpful, and the title seems to provide clarity. From a purely selfish point of view, it's important to me that the things that I do (as a volunteer) to not get screwed up. I'm willing to make a fair trade, but not to just have stuff break. On Friday, I walked a designer through a normal morning: Step one, wake up. Step two, find out what happened at WT:MED while I was asleep, so I know who needs help today. Step three, do my bit to respond to a request for help. She and I went through everything that I did on Friday morning before work, so she could see how I did it. I want all of that to keep working.

You are always (at any time, even next year, without any need for an excuse) welcome to ping me or leave a note here with ideas that you think belong on such a list, or a "case study" that you think worked particularly well (or poorly). You are always welcome to tell me what matters to you. I can also set up video calls if you want to show someone on the team how you edit (or in person, if you'll be at Wikimania). Just let me know. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 21:06, 31 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]

(slowest answer ever) Did you try sending me wikipedia email? I'll reply with my contact info.

--Kim Bruning (talk) 18:40, 7 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Hi Kim! What a delight to find your name on wiki today. I'll send you e-mail in case you want to follow up off wiki, but first I'd like you to take a look at https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Talk_pages_consultation_2019/Discussion_tools_in_the_past since that was what I was working on at the time. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 04:46, 8 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Over two months ago Katherine said she would find out why the Foundation continued to host the Detox tool, despite knowing it produced racist and homophobic results, and with no indication on the project page that it was deprecated, or the nature of its unacceptable results. She has not bothered found time in between tweeting managed to answer yet. I understand from her latest post that she leaves answering things on her talk page to the "Community Relations" team. So is there any chance the Foundation will answer, or is it just hoping that people will lose interest? DuncanHill (talk) 20:25, 13 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]

I have replied to your email, twice. DuncanHill (talk) 21:40, 13 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks. I'm not sure whether it's realistically possible to get a satisfying answer to how m:Detox got dropped. Most of the people involved are inactive. I'll ask around, and I'll post when (which I suppose means "if") I learn anything potentially useful. What might be most helpful, if you happen to know it offhand, is some notion of the timeline.

As for the overall problem of what to do in the future, I'm currently thinking that experimental tools are a bit like a draft article in userspace. Anyone could improve it; some of them are worth doing that, and you wouldn't want to demolish the house while it's still being built, but at some undefinable point, which is likely variable across projects (e.g., much sooner if it's producing bad results), the odds of it actually getting improved could be small enough that you might as well delete it. I don't think that we (that's the volunteer-we) sorted out the ideal way of doing that for articles, and they have many years' less experience with doing it for tools. It feels like the bigger problem of maintaining software. Everyone wants to create the shiny new thing, but nobody wants to spend a year, or even a quarter, doing boring maintenance work. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 23:06, 13 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]

What I know of the timeline is it was dropped over two years ago and nobody was told, nobody on wiki even knew it even existed until Framgate when another editor found it and several of us had a lot of fun putting innocuous sentences into it and getting appalling results, and after a lot of prodding in lots of places someone else eventually admitted it was crap and not used. After a lot more prodding it was eventually marked as "completed" - not as deprecated or rubbish, mind you, just "completed", and someone else removed it from the "Community Health Initiative" - again with no in article deprecation of it, just a "we don't use it anymore" comment in an edit summary. I also had to point out other outdated pages such as this. I really don't care to dig up all the old posts across enwiki and meta and mediawiki, but I'm told there's a Community Relations team that keeps an eye on things like that and will have flagged it up if they thought it needed any WMF action or feedback. I'm sorry that last bit reads like a dig, but if we're to take Katherine's word for it that discussions on wiki are actually picked up by the Foundation then that's what you're going to get. I'm sick of management-speak and shiny-happy-oh-we-do-value-you crap from the Foundation when the actions give the lie to the words. I'm sure I'm not alone in that. DuncanHill (talk) 23:28, 13 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]

m:Template:Research project doesn't support a status of "rubbish". The available options are draft, proposed, planned, active, and completed. I believe that the usual approach is to describe the limitations of any software used in the research in prose, especially since you can have a highly successful research project about a bad idea (the success being in conclusively determining that it was a bad idea). If I were designing the template, I'd consider including an option for |status=stalled or |status=abandoned, as I think that might be more descriptive in this case, but to the extent that |status=completed communicates that nobody's researching that question any longer, that's probably not wrong.

I understand that the code itself is held off wiki. I don't know if there is a process at Github for discouraging the use of individual code repositories.

I see that others have replied to your questions elsewhere. I'm not clear whether those replies answer your real questions, though. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 02:58, 15 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]

A reader of the Detox page would have no idea of the limitations of the software. He'd see some links to stories making claims about "toxic editors" based on Detox - claims which he would have no way of knowing were based on rubbish, and which the Foundation has done nothing to correct.

"Other editors have replied elsewhere" - well if you mean the "some people left and we were hoping it would get better" answers on Katherine's talk page, well I think you will see from my responses that I don't find them acceptable.

I don't think you are in a position to help much more on this. You don't know the history of Detox, so can't help me understand it. DuncanHill (talk) 09:04, 15 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]

I saw your comment over at User talk: Iridescent, & felt I should share one issue that will discourage new editors, of any age, at least to en.wikipedia: the lack of low-hanging fruit. This was brought forceably to my attention this weekend when I attempted to update some articles on ancient Egyptian history. I had some weighty reliable sources at hand (such as Kitchen's The Third Intermediate Period in Egypt (1100-650 BC)), & lots of experience in writing articles, yet I found time & again that it was a challenge to improve these articles. They're currently a level that it would require several hours of dedicated research to improve on, time I didn't happen to have. And for a new editor, who is not quite confident about participating & is no more than casually interested in the subject, this would have been a disincentive.

I know this situation is not limited to just a few instances. Other examples I've encountered include many history topics (e.g. ancient Chinese, & Roman). Even to improve pop culture topics, say a television series, would require countless hours of searching for information to add, then learning how to properly add the source. (Which is a problem for new users, & notorious for discouraging many of them from continuing to contribute.) About the easiest low-hanging fruit I can think of would be to find & add the Native American names for prominent landmarks, a chore I've been pondering recently. Or, if one owns a copy, verifying all the citations of the Elder Pliny's Natural History, & adding useful information from it to the relevant articles. (I consider that easy because one needs simply to extract relevant information as one reads through the whole work, a tactic I have found works from experience.)

I hope I'm not coming across as somehow biassed against fresh blood, or defeatist, but IMHO the chief barrier now to people becoming regular contributors is finding something they can write about without needing to spend hours of prep beforehand. (Back in the Stone Age, when I first joined, the challenge wasn't finding something to contribute, but finding articles with enough content to be useful.) Further, it is an issue that will only grow in importance as time continues. To be honest, I would rather have a Wikipedia full of useful content that is a challenge for newbies to contribute than the opposite. I don't have a solution for this, but any campaign to recruit new editors needs to at least acknowledge this issue so that they aren't disappointed when their work doesn't result with the success they expect. (For example, no matter what shape Visual Editor is given, no matter how easy it makes editing an article, it won't solve the problem of providing the content an editor wants to contribute.) -- llywrch (talk) 18:20, 30 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]

For anyone with some liking for the subject, and a willingness to use a library or spend say $10-20 on books from Amazon, I can recommend the great majority of our articles on Indian art or architecture, and similar subjects such as PreColumbian South American art (not Mesoamerica so much). Or even well-known English or European churches & country houses etc, where our articles rarely analyse the architecture at all, beyond dating it. Also almost all our articles on the decorative arts are pretty poor, where they even exist. Johnbod (talk) 19:14, 30 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]

There are some general-interest subjects, but I agree with llywrch that there are fewer obvious gaps at the English Wikipedia than there used to be. I could expand Johnbod's list by saying that most articles about rare diseases need someone to add the prevalence/incidence information, and a new editor turned up at WT:MED this week to say that we are missing articles about medieval physicians. As a first approximation, we can assume that everything about cosmetology is in poor shape (during a review of Acne, my dear friends at WPMED tried to prevent anyone from mentioning Concealer in the article, on the grounds that there was no good scientific evidence for it), and most things about children and parenting are weak. I expanded Baby food and one of the childcare articles some years back, and that would have been within the reach of a new editor, except as we noted elsewhere, there seems to be a dearth of parents (or apparently even doting aunts and uncles) and therefore of people who are interested in that kind of subject. We are also short on articles about politicians in non-English-speaking countries.

There are also difficult subjects that need re-written. Updating Multiple chemical sensitivity has been on my list for over a year (I find that being employed significantly interferes with my ability to write articles), but I don't think that's an appropriate article for a new editor to attempt.

However, the WMF's focus is theoretically less on whether the English Wikipedia is complete and more on other language editions of Wikipedia. If you click, say, ht:Special:Random or so:Special:Random ten times, I think you'll notice plenty of opportunities for expansion. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 14:21, 31 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]

There are two issues here I must mention. One is that there are some topics which are difficult to write about to Wikipedia standards. I am the father of two adopted girls, one of whom we were foster parents for, which required I & my wife to take 20+ hours of professionally-taught classes. One would think this gave me access to a chunk of reliable sources that would enable me to write useful articles on the subject of adoption (or at least adoption in the state of Oregon), but the printed materials we were given were print-outs that are not easily accessible to anyone not involved in the system, & are subject to revision at any time. (And the rest of the material -- verbal & audio-visual -- fail to meet Wikipedia standards due to WP:VERIFY.) In brief, it will take a lot of work & imagination to write Adoption in Oregon, even for an experienced Wikipedian with knowledge of the subject.

The other is that en.wikipedia far too often exerts a hegemony over the other language Wikipedias, much to the injury of all projects involved. The case I have direct experience with was the articles relating to the Empire of Trebizond, admittedly an obscure subject yet having high quality information in many languages. In fact, the most recent work on the subject is in modern Greek & Russian. Notwithstanding, when I turned to the relevant articles in el.wikipedia & ru.wikipedia, they were translations of an older version of the equivalent article in en.wikipedia, which at that time was based on a book written in 1926! (It remains the standard reference in English.) This led to the situation that in some articles I was using a contemporary French-language source, meanwhile the French articles were citing an older English source! In short, there are many languages where the information for some subjects is more full &/or up to date than in English. And this does not apply only to major languages (e.g. German, Spanish, Japanese, Chinese), or specific subjects (e.g. modern Arabic publications on Arab or Muslim history), but in many other situations. Some an educated American like myself has no inkling of. (One area I do suspect exists would be Turkish & Portuguese-language works on computer technology: Turkey & Brazil both have very active technology industries & a large enough educated population to support a non-English audience in those disciplines.) Not only does this benefit those smaller Wikipedias, but by publishing this information it allows other Wikipedians to find this information & add it to our Wikipedias. (When writing on a subject, I for one make it a habit to look at the equivalent articles in other languages, if for no other reason than to assure myself I haven't missed including something important in the English-language article.) -- llywrch (talk) 15:56, 31 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]

There's still a significant quantity of low-hanging fruit waiting to be plucked, as soon as you step outside the period where all the details were logged online in real-time, and especially once you take even the most tentative step outside the Anglosphere. (There are still redlinks on Panthéon#List of people interred or commemorated, and these people are quite literally officially the most important people in the history of France, and France is hardly some obscure backwater where nobody's bothered to write the histories.) Pick any popular author or artist, and provided they were active before c. 2000, in almost every case at least half their works will either be redlinks or ultrastubs—Here's one of the most successful authors of all time, almost all of whose works are still in print and who has been the subject of multiple biographies, but only ≈5% of whose works have a stand-alone article to get you started. Even when it comes to the most familiar topics in the arts, there's still plenty of low-hanging fruit, e.g. most of the entries on List of works by Vincent van Gogh are either ultrastubs or just redirects to lists. When you move away from "topics which North American, Aus/NZ and UK/IE audiences find interesting", the low-hanging fruit swells to the size of melons—head on over to something like Category:National anthems and count how many of the articles are more than three sentences long.

The "Wikipedia is largely written and attention should now turn to maintenance" meme is one that refuses to die—and one that certain people at the WMF who should know better (not WAID) continue to propagate—but is not remotely true. If I were approached by someone who wanted to write a bunch of articles, I'd advise getting hold of the catalog for a prestigious exhibition at a major national museum and getting to work on the redlinks—selection for inclusion in the exhibition will be prima facie evidence of notability, and the catalog will say enough about each entry to write an adequate stand-alone summary, even if the author never bothers to flesh it out from other sources. If you'd rather work on high-traffic topics, there are still boatloads of genuinely core topics that are in a wretched state—Speech, Industry, Performing arts, Adult, Human behavior… (To take WAID's example of medical topics, Injury and Disease—which surely are the coriest of core topics when it comes to medicine—both read like the half-finished homework of a bored 12-year-old.) If, instead of using Special:Random, you use the "third link" method—pick an article at random, click on the third link in the text, and repeat—you'll come to a really, really bad core-topic article (frequently Existence for some reason) in fairly short order. ‑ Iridescent 16:40, 31 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]

First, I want to acknowledge that there is a clear consensus here on one point: would-be new editors are better introduced to Wikipedia by taking a generally-accepted reliable source, & mining it to improve/create articles, than writing an article on some subject that interests them. (Unless they are very well informed on some obscure topic.) And I agree with Iridescent about the "Wikipedia is largely written" meme. (Want article ideas? I can supply you with article ides.) That said, there are speedbumps with the tactic of mining a reliable source. A few months ago I obtained a copy of The National Audubon Society Guide to Fishes of North America, & thought I'd work my way thru it fleshing out the inevitable stubs on North American fish I know exist, only to encounter a significant problem off the bat which I detailed here. I am still waiting on an answer from one of our biologists.

I don't mean to shame anyone with that link -- after all, most editors are more interested in writing than scouting thru talk pages for questions to answer. And if I wanted an immediate answer, I would know how to find a better place to ask. (FWIW, I am also waiting on an answer on this question. But if none is forthcoming, I'll repeat it over at the Village Pump. And if I still can't interest a discussion on this, I might just be bold. Or drop the issue.) My point is that besides suggesting this tactic of introduction, there needs to be some form of mentoring -- if not from more experienced Wikipedians, then from outside experts. (My question about Hagfish species probably could be answered by anyone with a biology degree.) And, of course, money would help to ensure they are available. -- llywrch (talk) 18:16, 31 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]

On the hagfish one, I'd have thought Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Fishes would be the place to ask, since it's the one page (almost) anyone with an interest in fish can be expected to be watching. On the stub one, I'm not touching that; as far as I'm concerned the whole concept of formally tagging pages as "stubs" is about a decade out of date (either a page is useful, or we shouldn't be hosting it; my views on 'quality assessment' are on the record), although I would say that regardless of formal definitions I'd consider year articles to be an extension of Wikipedia:Set index articles rather than "true" articles, and as such not subject to quality or importance ratings. ‑ Iridescent 18:42, 31 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Good suggestions, but they miss my point: how is a beginner supposed to know where to ask questions? If a beginner asks in the wrong forum, they may not get useful answer -- or no answer at all. Both of these will discourage a new user -- far more than trying to figure out how to embed an image or what template to use -- who will then leave & may never return. In short, Wikipedia has become difficult to edit, in large part because it has become useful. And being useful means it has become complex. Yet this is not a problem that can be solved with simplistic solutions. (One being "software can solve all problems", a view too many have.) -- llywrch (talk) 22:11, 31 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]

The new Signpost has something too long and boring to read from the WMF that might be relevant here. Johnbod (talk) 22:28, 31 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Re your (llywrch) point, I can see a hypothetical way to address it within current limitations, but it would either involve resurrecting the corpse of the unlamented Flow, or huge gobbets of complex autogenerated wiki-markup code which would clog the edit window and be very unstable; on creating a new section on an article talk page, the software grabs a list of the Wikiprojects from the banners at the top of the talk page, and prompts the editor to ask whether they only want to post the question on the article talk page, or whether they want it transcluded to the project talk pages and/or the reference desks as well. It's certainly theoretically possible through the judicious use of noinclude tags to treat a section as an editable template and have it simultaneously visible—and editable—in multiple places (we do it occasionally with appeals or evidence from banned users who are restricted to only editing their talk page, to allow them to participate in a particular discussion elsewhere). It would be messy to do it using the existing wikitext editor, but it's theoretically possible if there's a will for it and it's certainly something we could lean on the WMF to consider for their next attempt to redesign talk pages. ‑ Iridescent 22:47, 31 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Ugh. Why not set up a mentoring or outreach system? -- llywrch (talk) 22:58, 31 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Well, they're thinking about it. So lemme tell you about the three most closely connected ideas – I'm going to assign them to individual people, because I think it'll help us keep them straight, and just trust that you understand how completely unfair that always is in reality.

First, there's DannyH's idea of "neighborhoods". I like this idea a lot, but I don't think it scales downwards to small wikis. Think of this as the "send me straight to WikiProject Medicine" idea.

Next, there's the problem of getting people to ask questions in the right place. For the next 14 months, that problem belongs to Peter on the Editing team. I wish him lots of luck, especially since the answer is different in every wiki. This is not merely a matter of scale; it's a matter of how communities choose to organize themselves. Enwiki and dewiki and frwiki aren't that different in scale, and the best place to ask is not the same in those three wikis. However, for the enwiki model, I think there's another way to reach the WikiProjects, which is to put the WikiProjects into a proper metadata space. Then you can run the Feedback tool, which is what dumps auto-signed wikitext-based messages from newbies onto WP:VEF. The Feedback tool could be updated to the "structured feedback" model that Abbey Ripstra and I talked about a few years ago: You click one of ~four options as the destination for your comment, and the tool routes it to the right place. That plus generous pinging with replies ought to get newbies the answers they need.

(Two small points about Flow: First, the decision to "physically" de-install Flow to placate a few users here (don't you think we could trust enwiki admins not to set up a Flow board against consensus? I do, anyway, and it's not something that a non-admin can do) not only created long-term extra complexity for Ops, which is Not Nice, but it also means that I can't get the Feedback tool to send that feedback to mw.org, where the devs would actually see it. Second, IMO Flow should not return to active development unless someone's ready to devote four or five years to it. It has great potential, but what we've got barely resembles the goal.)

Third, Marshall (Growth team) is working on mentoring, and it turns out that this is more complicated and culture-specific than I would have guessed.

(Must run for now.) Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 22:47, 1 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Hello!

The Wikimedia Foundation is seeking to improve the community consultation outreach process for Foundation policies, and we are interested in why you didn't participate in a recent consultation that followed a community discussion you’ve been part of.

Please fill out this short survey to help us improve our community consultation process for the future. It should only take about three minutes.

The privacy policy for this survey is here. This survey is a one-off request from us related to this unique topic.

Thank you for your participation, Kbrown (WMF) 10:45, 13 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Hi @Whatamidoing (WMF): - the reply tool works on en.wp now with ?dtenable=1 added to the url. Ad Huikeshoven (talk) 18:39, 4 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]

the Editing Team keep any tab over Wikipedia:The Wikipedia Library/Citoid, anymore ? ∯WBG^converse 08:19, 8 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Not that I know of. I'll mark the page {{historical}}. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 17:29, 8 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

... is this, meaning, where do we weigh in? SandyGeorgia (Talk) 00:51, 24 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Hi SandyGeorgia,

Anyone can post to Meta, of course, but they meant to have separate discussions at the bigger communities. People usually find it more convenient. There's no need to post in both places, as it will all end up in the same spreadsheet. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 17:40, 24 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

I can't find any place to comment? SandyGeorgia (Talk) 17:41, 24 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

On the talk page for whichever thing you want to talk about, e.g., Wikipedia talk:Wikimedia Strategy 2018–20/Narrative of Change if you want to talk about the overall story, or Wikipedia talk:Wikimedia Strategy 2018–20/Manage Internal Knowledge if you want to talk about how hard it is to find someone with a specialized skill. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 17:58, 24 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks! SandyGeorgia (Talk) 17:59, 24 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Ouch. In the spirit of cooperation, I went to the beta cluster and got the "Do not log in using your single user login (SUL)" sign-in. Naturally, this means I need to go thru some pain to revisit what I did some years ago using (trying to use the WMF lab -- I gave up, just so you know.) --Ancheta Wis   (talk | contribs) 20:59, 28 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

To avoid exposing your single user login (SUL) password, here are some hints:

1. I think it is OK to use your SUL account ID, but do not use your SUL password.
2. At Create Account be prepared to write down your suggested new password
3. Confirm your new password
4. Fill in the Captcha text you are reading. (Note: the image came up blank on my 3rd try)
5. I think this will create the new account on beta.wmflabs

--Ancheta Wis   (talk | contribs) 21:15, 28 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for this note. I can see that an account named Ancheta Wis was created. The Reply tool seems to be broken at the moment – it should have a blue "Reply" link/button after each timestamp, and it's not showing for me right now. (Yes, using the same username is okay. The key is that it's separate [so you have to go through the hassle of creating an account] and to use a different password [in case something goes wrong and it gets hacked]). Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 05:06, 29 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Good morning/good afternoon WAID. I'm wondering if you could help me with a statistics question: How many (or what percentage) of articles in the English Wikipedia are under some kind of protection at the current time, e.g. how many are semi-protected, how many are under extended confirmed protection, etc.? I asked this at the Teahouse and didn't get a response. If you don't know, can you suggest who might be a good person to ask? Cheers, Clayoquot (talk | contribs) 18:27, 30 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Hi Clayoquot, I don't remember seeing a convenient report, but let's see what we can find:

Category:Wikipedia protected pages lists the number of pages under protection at any given point in time.

Wikipedia:Database reports/Semi-protected articles with unusually long expiries (412 right now) and Wikipedia:Database reports/Fully protected articles with unusually long expiries (just one) list the ones that are protected from editing for longer than one year. I don't see a similar report for long-term extended-confirmed protection. (Protection can apply separately to editing, moving and uploading; I'm assuming that editing is the one you care about).

Special:ProtectedPages lists all of them, and lets you filter out any non-article pages, but it includes redirects. So if we skip short "articles", we might lose a few brief disambiguation pages, but we should exclude most redirects. This combination of settings gives me about 11,900 articles (>250 bytes in length) that have some sort of editing-related protection applied.

There are 6,006,686 non-redirect (I think?) articles right now, so I'd guess that's about 2% of articles (including some disambiguation pages) under some form of protection. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 21:00, 30 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

That's lovely, thank you! I'd like to play with Special:ProtectedPages a bit - is there a quick way to get a count of the results, e.g. a way to dump it into a CSV file? I'm assuming and hoping you didn't count 11,900 rows manually (but infinitely thank you if you did). Clayoquot (talk | contribs) 22:15, 30 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

There are 250 rows per page, and it took 48 clicks (tabs) to get to the end. The last tab had 162 items on it (counted via ⌘F, not by hand). I don't know of a good way to export it, but maybe someone like User:PrimeHunter or User:Redrose64 would have some ideas. Most things are available by API, which would give you structured data, and then you're usually just one well-written macro away from a CSV file. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 23:58, 30 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Awesome, thanks so much. I'll report back here with any interesting numbers so others can re-use them. Best wishes, Clayoquot (talk | contribs) 00:06, 31 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

FYI, according to Special:Statistics, we have 6,007,178 "content pages", which includes redirects. I'm quite surprised at that because this figure is so often given as the number of "articles". Clayoquot (talk | contribs) 18:45, 31 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Update: Special:Statistics links to https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:AllPages&hideredirects=1 which includes redirects. However https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:$wgArticleCountMethod indicates that redirects are not included in article counts, so I'll assume there is a bug in Special:AllPages. Clayoquot (talk | contribs) 19:12, 31 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Neil, can you enlighten us about what's being counted? Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 21:39, 31 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

As far as I'm aware, "content pages" always excludes redirects, and the 6 M number here definitely does. The canonical definition is at mw:Manual:Article count. It seems like hideredirects=1 in the link is an attempt to exclude redirects from the list, but it's not working. Perhaps Special:AllPages used to have that features but it was removed. I hope that helps!—Neil Shah-Quinn (WMF) (talk) 19:45, 3 February 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Hi, your calculation of 2% sounded in the right ballpark to me, but then I ran the numbers and was surprised. 11,900 articles out of 6,000,000 is 0.2%, not 2%, right? BTW I drilled down more and created Wikipedia:Protection statistics to capture these numbers. Clayoquot (talk | contribs) 19:47, 31 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, you're right. I must have typed the wrong number of zeroes. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 21:37, 31 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Given a URL like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:ProtectedPages?namespace=0&type=edit&level=0&size-mode=min&size=250 this shows 50 rows per page (not 250), but you can adjust that by appending the &limit= query parameter with a positive integer value as in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:ProtectedPages?namespace=0&type=edit&level=0&size-mode=min&size=250&limit=5000 to show 5000 rows instead - this is the maximum. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 13:03, 3 February 2020 (UTC)[reply]

User:Redrose64, I see 250 rows on that page, but I have 250 set in prefs as the "Number of edits to show in recent changes, page histories, and in logs, by default:" Do you have 50 in that slot? Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 20:57, 3 February 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Unless you have altered that setting (apparently you have done so), the system default is 50 as may be seen if you try it when logged out. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 23:34, 3 February 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Is the section of your userpage titled "My work" currently accurate? I've seen a bunch of your interactions which kind of make it seem like you're the WMF's general point of contact on ENWP. Certainly you're the one most often around, or pinged to relevant discussions, on places like the VP. But I'd like to know if pinging you to random WMF-relevant discussions is actually correct, or if we're just piling on things that aren't actually your job to deal with. (I suppose it's possible that the two aren't mutually exclusive, if you're just taking on extra things as a volunteer, which would also be good to know :) .) --Yair rand (talk) 00:18, 31 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Ping away, Yair rand. Let's call it a self-assigned unofficial assignment, which nobody has any incentive to un-assign me from.

A few caveats: It may take me a day to notice a ping, so it's not ideal for emergencies. Also, don't expect a reply from me every time. I may leave that to a relevant team (which might or might not get around to replying, depending on their situation), or it may be something that nobody really ought to talk about in public. You can also send an e-mail message to me, and I'll see that it's routed to a relevant team. (I recommend that for anything involving Legal or otherwise sensitive.) But I do want to hear from you, whether the subject being discussed is good, bad, or interesting. If you ping me to interesting discussions, then you increase the odds that the rest of the WMF will hear about things that matter to you. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 04:21, 31 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

I see. Thank you for the info, and thank you for doing all this.

So, I was wondering whether WMF Legal knows about the Wikipedia:Village_pump_(proposals)#WMF_Legal_should_enforce_the_Terms_of_Use_against_Status_Labs_to_the_fullest_extent_of_the_law result. I suspect that someone's probably informed them, but I'm a bit concerned that everyone was just assuming that someone else would do it. Would you be able to check? (I'm assuming this isn't included in "sensitive", right?) --Yair rand (talk) 02:43, 6 February 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks. I told someone in that department about the discussion. I don't know if they are watching it closely. I doubt that there will be a substantive reply in public. I also don't know if this particular situation was already on their list of concerns. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 18:18, 6 February 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Yair rand, Doc James said in that disucssion that he would bring it to the attention of the WMF Board of Trustees. I'm sure he's looking forward to this. Clayoquot (talk | contribs) 18:40, 6 February 2020 (UTC)[reply]

I have brought this forwards to the board and ED. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 00:10, 7 February 2020 (UTC)[reply]

This. I'm confused and distressed at the moment ... and also busy with wiki-stuff. I think I'll wait for 24 hours and see how others respond. Hopefully this is all a misunderstanding on someone's part, maybe mine. (I'm referring to the fact that the "everything is fine, we're moving ahead" message was posted just today, when the RfC vote stands at 339 to 35 against. And reading what the voters are saying ... words fail me. Like I say, back in 24 hours, maybe this is all a bad dream.) - Dank (push to talk) 22:47, 17 February 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Hi Dank,

This whole thing seems to have been kicked off by a blurb in a Norwegian newspaper about hiring a company to do something about "visual design". I'm a little surprised that editors interpreted "visual design" as changing names, instead of, say, worrying that someone would try to redesign the logos, but at least one of the community-elected Board members has favored this name change for many years, and there was this comment by another, so the idea has certainly been discussed.

More generally, do you think that any of the voters over there have thought about where content creators should fall into a Responsibility assignment matrix for managing trademarks? The project team has said that they'll package up everything that everyone told them and dump it on the Board, but I wonder how you think that the Board ought to treat (this fraction of) the volunteers' responses. Is the decision up to whichever volunteers are willing to comment in public on Meta? If that doesn't sound quite right, then does the decision belong to all the volunteers (e.g., via a well-advertised, fully translated Special:SecurePoll)? Or to the Board? Or to someone else? Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 01:46, 18 February 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Gratified that you're asking my opinion, and I'll be happy to digest all this and try to give you some responses you can use. - Dank (push to talk) 02:06, 18 February 2020 (UTC)[reply]

First reaction: we seem to be talking past each other ... I'm very willing to try to understand what you're saying and to be fully responsive, but first I need to understand the pages I'm looking at that sparked and continue to spark the RfC. meta:Communications/Wikimedia brands/2030 movement brand project starts off: "Building on nearly a year of brand research, strategic planning, and community consultation, this project invites members of the Wikimedia Movement to collaborate on an updated Movement identity using "Wikipedia" in place of Wikimedia." The FAQ doubles down on dropping the name "Wikimedia" in favor of "Wikipedia". There is an ongoing RfC in response on the page in my first link titled "Should the Foundation call itself Wikipedia". It's worth reading. The first link that I gave in this section is an edit just today from ZMcCune, saying that they're sorry for the confusion that sparked the RfC, and that the two pages I've just linked have been updated with accurate information. And yet, those two pages are still quite clearly focused on the plan for "an updated Movement identity using "Wikipedia" in place of Wikimedia", which is exactly what the RfC is rejecting; the voters don't seem to be the ones who are confused here. But I'm also happy to explore what you're asking about above ... I'll try to read up and see how that fits into all of this. - Dank (push to talk) 03:02, 18 February 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, they're concerned that "Wikimedia" doesn't mean anything to anyone. People have been talking about that problem since the idea of "the movement" was invented (by volunteers) years ago. But I've not yet seen a formal proposal from the WMF to rename itself Wikipedia Foundation (specifically). It was suggested by a previous design firm; the project team has not yet decided to propose it to the Board. I think it is likely that they will suggest something along those lines, but I'm also aware that there are ways to drop Wikimedia or to incorporate Wikipedia, without choosing that exact, two-word name (e.g., the Foundation to Support Wikipedia, the Wikipedia and Open Knowledge Foundation, the Wikipedia Movement, the Wikipedia Trust, the Foundation for the Wikipedia Community, the Wikipedia Support Group, the Wikipedia World Foundation – I could probably brainstorm a dozen more options, with an equal [lack of] quality).

To the point that Doc James has made, if it's okay for a user group to say, in its name, that it is connected to Wikipedia (examples: m:North Carolina Wikipedians, m:Florida Librarians of Wikipedia, and m:Wikipedia Asian Month User Group), then it should probably be okay for the WMF and the chapters to do the same. Whatever the naming rules, IMO they should be the same for everyone. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 17:57, 18 February 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Links such as this, this and many others indicate that a lot of time and money have been spent and continue to be spent pushing the idea that the WMF should broadly rebrand its institutions as Wikipedia. If this is allowed to continue, then at some point, RfCs won't be able to change the outcome; maybe even the Board won't be in a position to change the outcome, if enough people have been convinced to see the name "Wikipedia" as highly desirable, and as an entitlement, regardless of whether they have any connection to or interest in encyclopedias. But I hope you can tell me that I'm wrong; I'd love to be wrong (not because of my own preferences, but because of what I'm reading in the RfC, and what that says about how people are likely to respond to the rebranding. If you, or WMF people generally, have any doubts at all that the RfC is representative of, say, en-wp attitudes, then we should have an RfC here on en-wp right away.) - Dank (push to talk) 04:40, 18 February 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Dan, the Board can stop it completely, at any time. It is not possible for the corporation to change its name without the explicit approval of its board, in the form of a formal vote.

I think that the question that needs to be settled isn't what the core community at the English Wikipedia thinks. I think the question that needs to be settled is whether this decision should be made by editors. Are editors "responsible" for making sure that the various movement assets, e.g., the Wikipedia trademark, are deployed in the manner most beneficial (net effects, worldwide, with a long-term view), for the WMF's educational purpose? Are editors "accountable" for doing so (e.g., they have the final decision, and they can be fired if someone decides that they made the wrong one)? Should editors be "consulted" (i.e., responsible people will ask editors [and others] for information, and will seriously consider that information, but those responsible people are still authorized to make the opposite decision from what editors recommend)? Should editors merely be "informed" when it's over? (There are other models, but I picked this one because it's the classic version.) If you were designing this project, where would you put the RFC paritcipants? And does that line up with their expectations? Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 18:27, 18 February 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Those are the wrong questions. I'm going to have to think long and hard on this one; if anyone else wants to jump in here, be my guest. - Dank (push to talk) 19:23, 18 February 2020 (UTC)[reply]

(John tells me "That was a little sharp". I don't mean to be sharp, but I am disappointed.) - Dank (push to talk) 19:45, 18 February 2020 (UTC)[reply]

It's sweet of John to be so nice, but I think you are on to something. We need to figure out what the right questions are. One that I've been thinking about sounds something like "What kind of moral rights does the core enwiki community have over the idea of Wikipedia?" Only that's not quite the right question, either. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 21:24, 18 February 2020 (UTC)[reply]

I like this question. My own opinion is that it would best work like the "developer veto" model we've had at times, for project-centered things that are outwardly in the hands of the WMF. Minor uncontroversial day-to-day actions are handled cooperatively by the WMF and community, with WMF staff frequently in positions of authority. Major changes are proposed by community members, and eventually brought to large-scale RfC if there's enough support that it looks like it could pass. Before and during the RfC, the relevant specialists in the WMF give their opinions on the probable outcomes, reasonable alternatives, major benefits and disadvantages, and sometimes their own opinion on the question itself when relevant. The community takes these opinions into account and gives a unified decision to the WMF. If those WMF specialists think that, entirely because of the community misunderstanding things (and not because of different priorities), the decision has come out to be completely insane, they can veto it and keep things the way they were before. (The developer veto, as much as I sometimes find it annoying, has been necessary in the past. There have been communities that have made decisions that would have had disastrous consequences if implemented, and those communities have generally not pushed the issue when the devs say, "Nope, not happening, everything would crash and burn, seriously".) Both the community and the WMF would generally consider themselves independently "responsible" for the area of work. This model results in a certain amount of lean towards the status quo, but I think that's not that big a problem. --Yair rand (talk) 21:13, 18 February 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Yair rand, what is "the area of work" that each group is independently "responsible" for? Speaking from my POV as an editor, I don't want to be responsible for fundraising or grants to affiliates, or even for things like deciding whether, within the "costs of running workshops" budget, those workshops ought to focus more on Wikisource or Wikipedia or Wikidata, or in Asia or Africa or the Americas, or in English or Spanish or Hindi. I'm pretty certain that the WMF is willing to decide that paying for Wikisource workshops in Indic languages gets more free knowledge online than paying for some other things, but I'm also certain that they're unwilling to tell me and my wiki-friends what to write about COVID-19. So what is the overlapping area of independent responsiblity? Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 21:31, 18 February 2020 (UTC)[reply]

This is in response to a font change. I hate font changes.

I don't know what everyone, or even most people, think about this font change.

What I do know is that there's been research into making visible changes to websites, and that research suggests that even a desirable change can get bad reviews in the early days. It also suggests that the dislike fades. (This research is not based upon counting spontaeous complaints. It's based on actually asking a representative sample of users about what they think of the website, and seeing how their views change over time.) If you're interested in a very easy introduction to some of the common patterns, then this magazine article is not the worst place you could start.

Now about the complaints. If we look at this logically, I can think of two obvious explanations for an end to spontaneous complaints:

1. People might stop complaining because they think complaining has a poor cost–benefit ratio.
2. People might stop complaining because their complaint is gone.

For the first, on the internet, the cost of complaining is extremely low. If you've seen people on Twitter or other social media going on and on about minor things, then you know how low the costs are. On wiki, even if you don't get what you want, your complaint still gets you some social benefits (solidarity with other editors, showing that you care, etc.). It is unlikely that the cost will ever be lower than the benefits, especially if 'everyone' agrees with you. So I think that people are unlikely to be giving up complaining as a worthless endeavor.

For the second, I think this is likely. Change is bad, and surprising change is very bad. But after a while, the surprising change stops being a surprise. It starts being normal. Humans like what they're used to. Or you find that if you make a small adjustment on your end, then it works out. I might be getting the best of both worlds by reducing my in-browser zoom a little, from "large" to "comfortable enough". I'm still not excited about this font change, but it might be okay.

And now for a story: A former WMF person was reportedly at eBay when they switched from a yellow background to a white one. It's a classic story of UI change, which I've only heard second hand. But once upon a time, eBay's users woke up in the morning and discovered that the site had gone from yellow-pages yellow to modern white overnight. (You can see a screenshot four or five minutes into this video.) Users immediately started complaining about the change. The sellers were outraged. There were threats to quit, bug reports filed, rants about how little eBay cares about the-sellers-who-are-the-source-of-all-of-eBay's-income, and speeches about this change destroying the site. eBay was flooded with complaints through every contact channel.

After a while, eBay apologized and reverted the change. The complaints stopped.

eBay also started quietly changed the background color a very tiny bit each day – 1% per day or less, depending upon who is telling the story. Eventually, eBay was back to the supposedly "outrageous" white background ...and nobody even seemed to notice. No more hate mail. No more threats to quit. If it was an objectively, inherently bad background color, then it should have been just as bad the second time, and if the complaints "worked" the first time, then surely at least some of the "outraged" people would have tried the same, proven tactic ...but they didn't. I think it's because when they weren't being surprised by the change, they discovered that the change was okay. What do you think? Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 22:38, 8 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Assuming this is about the change to the diff view, I have no particular problem with the monospaced font (I don't like it but I'll get used to it and I can see a legitimate "it makes changes to punctuation and spacing more visible" argument), but whichever dev thought it was a good idea to double the line spacing deserves all the complaints they're getting. It's made previewing/reviewing on a small-screen laptop or tablet more difficult for no obvious benefit; it's made previewing/reviewing on a phone virtually impossible. (A lot of our most active editors are of an age where "reducing my in-browser zoom a little" isn't an option if they still want to be able to read the text.) I know "the devs are deliberately incrementally making the wikitext editor unusable to try to force people to switch to VE" is just a conspiracy theory and the WMF is nowhere near organised enough to actually do something like this, but when something like this happens that breaks things with no possible benefit, you can presumably understand why people believe it. ‑ Iridescent 2 22:30, 8 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Iridescent 2, the vertical line spacing is identical. I can upload a pair of screenshots if you think it'd be useful. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 22:45, 8 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Is it that the font itself is squashed out in some way? A diff which last week took up half the screen now takes up more than a full screen and needs scrolling, but the characters don't appear obviously larger, so the extra space is coming from somewhere. ‑ Iridescent 2 22:48, 8 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]

To state the obvious, the horizontal spacing for monospaced fonts is greater than for proportional fonts. But perhaps you have taken that into account already? (I think the shorter lines are impeding my ability to read through diffs quickly; I'm experimenting with a font with more colour (dark-to-light ratio) right now, and might try different font sizes to increase the length of each line.) isaacl (talk) 17:49, 9 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]

I get about three-quarters as many characters per line, because of the increased width of some common characters (e.g., punctuation, i, and l) in the monospaced font. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 22:25, 9 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]

• I will give you a simple explanation - the more you believe that editors will simply be amenable to any change without doing your due diligence, the more editors you will lose. Everytime there is an misstep on the part of the Foundation, it is an erosion of confidence - and I do not understand why every change has to be justified! How easy is it to just fix the problem? Literally everytime, WP:FRAM, superprotect, you name it - it is absolutely insulting that user feedback is not respected. I'll tell you what - and this is what your eBay example did not cover, in a few weeks, people will finally learn to live with the new font, they will realize complaining is fruitless, but what they will remember is that they complained and no one cared. And the next time there is a misstep, this will be in their list of examples of why they don't think the WMF will do anything to resolve their issue. Take my word for it. --qedk (t 愛 c) 16:49, 9 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • QEDK, I wonder whether I could get you to read https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/2468356.2468767 and particularly to look at the graph on the second page. That is an illustration of common user satisfaction scenarios over time. The user feedback in the first few days is not a strong predictor of the long-term user feedback. Sometimes initial delight fades; sometimes initial aversion eventually produces higher satisfaction than before. The question to ask isn't as simple as "Should you respect user feedback?" One of the questions is about the timing of user feedback. If a software team "respects" user feedback on the first day, they may keep something that is ultimately bad, or they may prematurely remove something that would ultimately have been good. Sustained dissatisfaction would be a problem, but we're not there yet. We're at least a week away from knowing whether spontaneous complaints will still keep appearing past the initial introduction. (Do I want to rely on spontaneous comments? No. Have they built me phab:T89970 yet? Also no. So with respect to changes of this "minor" scale, spontaneous comments are the primary form of feedback that's publicly available.)
    Also, as you know, you can change your own font. It could even be set up as a local gadget for one-click implementation if enough editors wanted it. The low uptake for previous font changes suggests that it might not be a popular gadget, though. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 22:54, 9 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Can I suggest moving this to Wikipedia:Village pump (WMF) rather than having it on your talk page? This is exactly the type of thing the new Village pump is for. Thanks, --DannyS712 (talk) 17:52, 9 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]

I've already moved this conversation once, and I think that moving it again would be a bad idea. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 22:55, 9 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Wikipedia day is the day just like what am asking for but it need some improvement such like fact telling like who was the first set of persons that edited wikipedia and very interesting things. Like discussions on how we have gone so far. Tbiw (talk) 13:20, 29 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]

I think that would be fun, too, Tbiw. A lot of history is known but not written down in one place, as I discovered while writing mw:Talk pages consultation 2019/Discussion tools in the past last year.

Greg, do you know who's working on the next WP:Wikipedia Day? Tbiw has some ideas for it. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 00:31, 30 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]

I think my think let a waste of but let me just ask you prove you username is two ways. 1. What are all editors doing in Wikipedia 2. What is whatamidoing doing is whatamidoing talkpage. Ask me whatamidoing,your pal,Tbiw (talk) 13:14, 18 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

All editors aren't doing the same thing. But what are you doing, Tbiw? Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 16:24, 18 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Am editing.fun,Tbiw (talk) 18:04, 18 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

At WP:VPT, you wrote In the coming months, I'll start contacting active editors whose signatures are invalid. Let me know if you would like help editing such a message once you have some sort of draft. – Jonesey95 (talk) 01:41, 2 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Jonesey95, Yes, yes, yes, yes! I want your help!

Have you looked at https://signatures.toolforge.org/api/ ? We can get a list for a single error at a time, and I think we should send specific messages. That way, if your problem is "A", then you don't have to read/be confused by the instructions for fixing problems B, C, D, and E as well. Also, we can split up the lists, so that we don't have a huge number of people asking for help at the same time. We'll eventually need to contact about a thousand editors here; most of the other big Wikipedias have 100–200 users with errors. At the smaller wikis, there may be very few editors affected.

User:AntiCompositeNumber, is the API limited to the reports that are pre-generated? If I wanted, e.g., to see the list for the Italian Wikipedia or the English Wikivoyage, does that require effort on your part? Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 02:13, 2 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Whatamidoing (WMF), Yes, I have to run the report server-side or add it to the cron job. Unfortunately the site-level reports take a long time to run, much longer than the HTTP timeout. That means I would have to implement some sort of asynchronous queuing system, and that's much more work than logging in to Toolforge and running a command.

So if you want the report for a site, just let me know which site and if you want a one-off or recurring run. --AntiCompositeNumber (talk) 02:19, 2 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Upon closer inspection, at the last run, the only wiki taking an excessive amount of time to complete is enwiki. The other wikis in the cronjob take 1-3 minutes to complete, except for Commons at 4 minutes. Enwiki takes 22 minutes to complete. Of course, those other wikis have less than 200 signatures with errors each, while enwiki has 1276. I'll work on adding live generation to the API. --AntiCompositeNumber (talk) 02:40, 2 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]

@AntiCompositeNumber: Is it possible to do live generation with enwiki (and maybe Commons) blocked from that? Live generation for the smallest wikis (because there are hundreds) probably makes more sense than pre-generation. They won't be wanted very frequently.

As for a list, here's the list of Wikipedias that have more than 2,000 active editors each month: frwiki, eswiki, dewiki, jawiki, ruwiki, itwiki, zhwiki, arwiki, ptwiki, fawiki, plwiki, nlwiki trwiki, ukwiki, hewiki, idwiki, cswiki, kowiki, svwiki, viwiki, huwiki (in descending order). The English Wiktionary almost rises to that size, but none of the other language-specific sister projects do, and you already have the reports up for the multi-lingual sites. So maybe we want a total of about 30 pre-generated reports, and the rest can be done live when/if anyone wants them? (Feel free to pick a different cutoff point.) Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 03:37, 2 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]

I've added a ?purge=true parameter to the report APIs. There's not a ton of safety around it and I'm not planning to put it on the frontend version, but it should work for what you need. It'll still store the result as well, which will make it available in the report list for everyone. --AntiCompositeNumber (talk) 04:14, 2 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]

I would be worried about spamming editors with multiple messages if there are multiple errors in the signature should those errors go unfixed between error A FYI message and error B FYI message. --Izno (talk) 04:11, 2 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]

I looked at the reports, but I don't understand them. I understand missing end tags, stripped tags, and misnested tags, but what is "plain-fancy-sig" and why are there so many users with errors? As for sending messages, I think we should focus on editors who have edited in the past few months first. Is there a way to find those? I haven't tried all of the reports, so maybe the data I am looking for is in there somewhere. – Jonesey95 (talk) 04:29, 2 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]

plain-fancy-sig is for signatures that don't contain any wikimarkup at all. That pretty much means that the editor has the "Treat the above as wiki markup" box ticked in their preferences but should have it un-ticked. Most of these are new users who don't know what the signature box even is. The site-level reports only include users with at least 1 edit in the last 30 days. --AntiCompositeNumber (talk) 04:40, 2 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]

@Izno, if you have multiple errors, then the attempt to fix the first error will force you to fix the others, so you are unlikely to get multiple messages (unless we're very fast at sending out the messages).

@AntiCompositeNumber, do you have any way to check Special:GlobalPreferences? Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 16:23, 2 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Then I'd be worry about misleading editors (who likely have no idea what's going on) by saying "you have this error" and then they go to fix that one error and get "no, not good enough". As a certain person has opined about reliable sources and WP:BURDEN, if I recall, not the best interaction. :) --Izno (talk) 16:53, 2 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, but I don't think GlobalPreferences works with signatures. I don't see any option for it in Special:GlobalPreferences at least. --AntiCompositeNumber (talk) 00:34, 3 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]

That may be because of the problems concerned with namespaces translated into the local language. For example, my signature used here on en.wp looks like this:

[[User:Redrose64|<span style="color:#a80000; background:#ffeeee; text-decoration:inherit">Red</span>rose64]] &#x1f339; ([[User talk:Redrose64|talk]])

whereas the one that I use at Wicipedia Cymraeg looks like this:

[[Defnyddiwr:Redrose64|Redrose64]] ([[Sgwrs Defnyddiwr:Redrose64|sgwrs]]; [[:en:User:Redrose64|at English Wikipedia]])

I could use my English signature on every single Wikimedia wiki, and it would work regardless of the local language; but I couldn't use my Welsh signature elsewhere (except b:cy:, q:cy:, s:cy: and wikt:cy:), because Defnyddiwr: and Sgwrs Defnyddiwr: are not recognised in any language other than Welsh. If I carefully set my Welsh signature to

[[User:Redrose64|Redrose64]] ([[User talk:Redrose64|sgwrs]]; [[:en:User:Redrose64|at English Wikipedia]])

it would still work there and could then be universal (other than that untranslated "sgwrs"), but would the residents of non-English wikis be aware of that requirement to use English namespaces? --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 09:54, 3 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Given the wide variety of issues that we are hoping to correct, the desire to minimize the number of messages editors receive, and the inactivity of many editors shown in the report (I did a semi-random sample and found that many recently active editors only had a few edits in the last year, and almost no edits to talk pages), I propose that we send a pretty simple message explaining that there is a problem with their signature and that the easiest way to fix it is to uncheck the custom signature box.

We can provide a link to the relevant user preference, a link the page that attempts to explain the problems (although it will be overwhelming for the vast majority of editors, who hardly know anything about wikicode), and instructions for requesting help with reformatting their custom signature.

How should they ask for help? Ping the person who leaves the message? That may be too complicated for some editors, even if we provide a copy/paste example of how to ping someone, like "Copy this code immediately below this message: :{{ping|Jonesey95}}, please help me fix my custom signature. ~~~~" – Jonesey95 (talk) 04:55, 2 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]

It's probably worth a page at meta or somewhere else with a WP:Fix my sig vibe. Better than pinging the messenger (we don't want poor WAID to be The One). --Izno (talk) 05:23, 2 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]

I might be able to talk them into creating a "role account" (named something like "User:SignatureMessageBot") to deliver the messages. If we put the "Fix my sig" page on MediaWiki.org, then we can get it translated, too.

@Jonesey95, more than 90% of those plain-fancy-sig folks just need to uncheck a box, click the save button, and maybe post a message somewhere to see whether they like the result. Because there are so many of them, I think we could pick the first 50 or 100 and run a "test" message, to see whether it works. So if the first message seems to be ineffective or confusing, then we could change it (e.g., add screenshots, or whatever we need). Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 16:20, 2 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]

I like the idea of a dedicated messaging user. I would be happy to watch the messaging user's talk page for help requests; we'd have to use something other than ping to track help requests though, unless you wanted to deal with all of them (ugh). You might think about making the user name a little bit future-proof, since there may be other change-related messaging to do. New user accounts are cheap, though, so your name idea should work fine. – Jonesey95 (talk) 16:52, 2 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Hello. I received a notice from a user on my talk page on ptwiki. The notice, which I disagree strongly disagree, said that my signature is at odds with the new rules. It turns out that my emoji cannot be characterized as an image, moreover, it does not produce any visual pollution or Christmas tree. Anyway, I did a test, using this tool, and it appears that my signature is all clear. I would very much like to see your opinion on the situation. Best regards. ✍A.WagnerC (talk) 19:22, 4 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]

https://signatures.toolforge.org/check/pt.wikipedia.org/A.WagnerC says that it is likely okay, and I can't think of any reason why it would not be okay. A Unicode character is a Unicode character, no matter how picturesque is appears to humans. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 19:48, 6 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]