User talk:MPinchuk (WMF) (usurped)/Archive 6

PumpkinSky
It's a bit late, but I thought you might be interested in checking out this funeral-of-sorts. I don't know if you've met PumpkinSky, but he's the main author of a number of FA-class articles, including yogo sapphire and Harry S. Truman, and did all sorts of fantastic work at Did You Know. He left two months ago because the community turned out the be fairly unforgiving and IMO, rather stupid when others opened a RfA for him. It's a bit late, and I don't know if you knew PumpkinSky, but if you have some time you might want to look into it and if you like, add your name to the list of people missing him. Again, thanks for the phone conversation last summer. :) &bull; Jesse V.(talk) 20:41, 29 December 2012 (UTC)
 * Bah, I missed this with holiday travel and post-holiday work rush. I didn't know PumpkinSky personally, but he seemed like a great Wikipedian. I hope he comes back :-/ Maryana (WMF) (talk) 23:13, 16 January 2013 (UTC)

Belated Happy New Year with a Toast!


~ TheGeneralUser  (talk)  — is wishing you a Happy New Year! This greeting (and season) promotes WikiLove and hopefully this note has made your day a little better. Spread the WikiLove by wishing another user a Happy New Year, whether it be someone you have had disagreements with in the past, a good friend, or just some random person. Happy New Year!

Spread the New Year cheer by adding {{subst:New Year 1}} to their talk page with a friendly message.

A Very Happy (belated) New Year to you Maryana! Enjoy the Whisky ~ TheGeneralUser   (talk)  23:28, 4 January 2013 (UTC)

Working out the details at Today's article for improvement
The RFC for TAFI is nearing it's conclusion, and it's time to hammer out the details over at the project's talk page. There are several details of the project that would do well with wider input and participation, such as the article nomination and selection process, the amount and type of articles displayed, the implementation on the main page and other things. I would like to invite you to comment there if you continue to be interested in TAFI's development. -- Nick Penguin ( contribs ) 02:26, 8 January 2013 (UTC)

Help needed at Community portal/Opentask, please.
Hello, Maryana and Nettrom. Category:All articles that need to be wikified got deleted. Suggestbot cannot post any tasks related to "Add wikilinks" to Opentask, making a hole at the top of Community portal. I have put in a temporary fix for now. I am supposed to be on wikivacation. Could you two help and take over the fixing, and put in a more long-term solution at {Opentask}, please? Many thanks. --PFHLai (talk) 09:43, 10 January 2013 (UTC)


 * FYI, wrote a response on my talk page in case we want to keep the discussion there. Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 12:55, 10 January 2013 (UTC)


 * I noticed that the other day, but I naively figured that some impressive power user had just temporarily cleared the backlog. It's a huge shame; perhaps we can replace it with Adding categories? Is there a way to contest a deletion that's already happened? Maryana (WMF) (talk) 18:11, 10 January 2013 (UTC)


 * Just a ping to let you know that I threw up a request for ideas on rephrasing the description (and perhaps changing the tutorial link) of wikify on Wikipedia talk:Community portal/Opentask. Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 21:55, 14 January 2013 (UTC)

Talkback
⁓ Hello  71  15:51, 13 January 2013 (UTC)

Non WMF account?
Hey Maryana, do you have a non-WMF account? I could use some assistance at Botik of Peter the Great from someone who can improve it with Russian sources. Ryan Vesey 02:09, 21 January 2013 (UTC)
 * Greetings from my volunteer account :) I just took a crack and added a few things; I'll see if I can scare up more sources this afternoon. Are you going to write about Peter's other botik, the Fortuna? If so, I can help! Accedie  talk to me  18:31, 21 January 2013 (UTC)
 * There was an initial moment when I had the boats confused, my first image in the article was actually of the Fortuna. I had a friend  create User:Mishae/Botik of Peter the Great (incorrectly titled) which I thought was the place where the "grandfather of the Russian navy" was stored, but is actually where the Fortuna is stored. Helping him make the translation sound more English and add in some in-text citations is my next focus, but I'd love to get an article on Fortuna written.  My book on Peter the Great has nothing on Fortuna so I've got less to contribute, but I believe it's the only surviving ship that Peter built himself for his toy fleet, correct?  In any case, thanks so much for the assistance with the Russian sources I'll add you to the nomination page.  If you're interested, I'll be churning out a number of articles related to Russian history (I just threw down the bare bones of User:Ryan Vesey/Robert Erskine (surgeon) and User:Ryan Vesey/Peter Postnikov because I've got far too much reading to do before tomorrow). Ryan Vesey 18:42, 21 January 2013 (UTC)
 * Yeah, it's really confusing on ruwiki, too; I'm sure that didn't help. I had to go check the sources to make sure that the St. Nicholas is the one that's called grandfather of the Russian navy (fleet? I don't know the particulars of maritime terminology, I'm afraid), and not the Fortuna. Anyway, yes, Russian history! Exciting :) I'll keep an eye on that. Another good person to ping for help would be Ymblanter, whose Russian is definitely better than mine. Accedie  talk to me  19:04, 21 January 2013 (UTC)
 * Either probably works, the English sources I've used have referred to it as the "grandfather of the Russian navy". I'm attempting to find a source mentioning the stamp to add to the soviet-era section.  Care to see if you can find that in Russian?  I've had no luck. Ryan Vesey 22:41, 21 January 2013 (UTC)
 * Hmm, I looked for a source on the stamp but found nothing particularly reliable – just a bunch of online stamp stores that can't even seem to agree on the date when it was issued. Sorry :-/ Accedie  talk to me  02:14, 22 January 2013 (UTC)

My application for WP Online Ambassador
I just applied to be a WP Online Ambassador. Online Ambassadors help out newcomers or students learn Wikipedia's key processes, policies, guidelines, and norms, and guide new users to the appropriate resources. They help answer questions on the wiki, by email, or on IRC. I'd like to help out there, but I need endorsements. If you'd like to endorse me, please visit my application page. Thanks. &bull; Jesse V.(talk) 00:20, 30 January 2013 (UTC)
 * It looks like you already got your two required endorsements – very cool, and I'm sure you'll do an amazing job with this! Thanks for applying :) Maryana (WMF) (talk) 21:02, 30 January 2013 (UTC)

Top level navigation
You mentioned 'top level navigation' when we were talking about the watchlists - it didn't occur to me at the time to ask, but what does that mean? -— Isarra ༆ 01:55, 5 February 2013 (UTC)
 * What, you mean you can't read my mind?! :) Sorry about that. By "top-level navigation" I mean everything above the actual meat of the watchlist (e.g., the list of revisions) in the default skin: the view relevant changes/view and edit/edit raw watchlist toggles, time and namespace filters, hide X checkboxes, the area where watchlist notices potentially appear, etc. Not sure what this looks like in other skins, but in Vector it's hard to even recognize it as a navigation layer... I do think it has potential with some minor UI tweaks, though.
 * Actually, would you mind poking around and taking a look at some of the other skins to see if the watchlist looks significantly different? I haven't done a proper audit yet, and that would be very useful. Maryana (WMF) (talk) 19:18, 5 February 2013 (UTC)
 * Watchlist is the same cross-skin: fieldset at top, list-table of changes underneath. For folks who have js, why don't we just move the options themselves into a popout thing like the newpagesfeed uses? Reword and restructure a bit, and it should make it easier to actually find if folks are looking for it. I've been fiddling with some mockups and should be able to send you some ideas soon as I find where I actually put them... -— Isarra ༆ 21:10, 5 February 2013 (UTC)

Nomination for deletion of Template:ISP test
Template:ISP test has been nominated for deletion. You are invited to comment on the discussion at the template's entry on the Templates for discussion page. PCHS-NJROTC (Messages) 20:26, 13 February 2013 (UTC)

It would really help if you took a look at it and left a comment... - Nabla (talk) 20:08, 3 March 2013 (UTC)
 * ✅ Maryana (WMF) (talk) 18:48, 4 March 2013 (UTC)
 * Thank you - Nabla (talk) 20:35, 4 March 2013 (UTC)

Reducing the number of Shared templates
Maryana, I suggested what you're suggesting (getting rid of the various shared templates and just using Shared IP for all shared IPs) back in 2008, as can be seen here, and unfortunately there was a snowball keep. I was, however, able to replace the one specific to the U.S. Military with one covering government agencies in general, and get rid of a redundant template that was seemingly identical to Shared IP edu. Since you're with the Wikimedia Foundation, I see an opportunity here, not to bypass consensus, but to get the foundation's input regarding the age old practice of stereotyping IP addresses, particularly "alleged" school IPs. I believe this practice is at odds with our policy of assuming good faith, but administrators have been doing it so long that it will be difficult to change. Once upon a time, it was probably a real pain to deal with all of the vandalism from students, things have changed in the age of edit filters and anti-vandal bots, it should be more manageable. Blocks are preventative; IPs that do nothing but pump out hoards of vandalism day after day with no good edits whatsoever should probably be blocked for a good year, but IPs like 204.86.170.3 with a mixture of good and bad edits and don't pump out a stream of vandalism on a daily basis could be blocked for 48 hours to prevent vandalism from one person rather than blocking >15,000 users for six months or a year because one middle school student thought it'd be funny to write her best friend's name on an article. Escalating blocks on IPs like that one are obviously punitive rather than preventative. I work in the service industry, and I will tell you, kids are going to be kids; administrators need to stop expecting school IPs to ever be completely free of occasional vandalism, and to me, blocking a shared IP because "there's more vandalism than legitimate edits" would be like looking at all edits from a particular zip code and blocking that zip code because 85% of the contributions were either vandalism or unacceptable edits made in good faith. If anything, having a Shared IP edu tag on an IP address should tell administrators "oh, that IP is used by students, so of course there's going to be some vandalism, but it might not be all vandalism, so I shouldn't escalate the block unless the vandalism is truly persistent to the point that it has to be blocked on a daily basis". In my opinion, the templates that need to go are Shared IP edu, Schoolblock (merge with Anonblock), ISP, Shared IP Public, and MobileIP. Shared IP gov should perhaps be kept at least for major government agencies per User:Gladys j cortez's comment in 2008 (I would rather not lose the military one either, if only because I'd like to know when I could potentially be ticking off a government agency.), and Shared IP corp could be useful in a similar way, in that major corporations with mega money to put towards lawyers and smear campaigns could do about as much damage as major government agencies. We don't need the other one's though; they should all be merged into Shared IP. PCHS-NJROTC (Messages) 23:13, 13 March 2013 (UTC)
 * First of all, I'm so happy that you're bringing this up again, even after the snowball keep! I know it's hard to fight for an amorphous blob of anonymous users that often seems more trouble than it's worth to most Wikipedians, but a small number of those very users could be our next top FA authors and new page patrollers if we stopped treating them all so crummily. So thank you, most sincerely and heartily, for looking out for the newbies :)


 * Second, from a Wikimedia Foundation perspective, the Resolution on Openness unanimously approved by our Board of Trustees and our Executive Director states very clearly that it is our mission to encourage "improving communication on the projects; simplifying policy and instructions; and working with colleagues to improve and make friendlier policies and practices regarding templates, warnings, and deletion." So, yes, absolutely, the simplification/archiving/deletion of these outdated and not-really good-faith templates is not just something I personally encourage, but a goal we should all (the editing community and the Foundation) be striving for, collectively.


 * A year ago, I was more heavily involved in template improvements (you might find the results of this warning template A/B testing project interesting) than I am now; I'm now helping out the Wikimedia mobile team, so unfortunately I don't have quite as much bandwidth as I'd like for participating in these kinds of discussions. However, I do want to help, and I'd be thrilled to lend my voice to any wider community discussion – if you can promise to keep bothering me about it until I do :) I would suggest starting a Request for Comment, which would open up the conversation to a larger swath of the active editing community. What do you think? Maryana (WMF) (talk) 00:58, 19 March 2013 (UTC)
 * I think we're on the same page with this. I think shared templates serve an important purpose, to let anonymous editors know that their IP seems to represent many users, and to disregard warnings intended for other users of their network, but the stereotyping of IPs (particularly schools) needs to stop per WP:AGF. These IPs not only represent immature students inclined to vandalize, they also represent teachers, support staff (food service, for example), administration, and students acting in good faith, just as DSL and cable providers have subscribers of all sorts. If we are to expect the newbies to follow our policies, than we as experienced contributors and administrators certainly need to abide by our policies, including AGF. PCHS-NJROTC  (Messages) 10:25, 19 March 2013 (UTC)

Mobile editing
Hi there, I saw your post on VPT and then followed up by reading the minutes of your latest mobile team quarterly meeting. I'm pleased to see real momentum building but I'd like to give you some feedback on my experience mobile editing. In regards to your "apps vs web" preference, I am not sure if it is an android thing, a browser thing or my device thing, but the biggest impediment to mobile editing on my fairly high powered recent android tablet is loss of data mid edit. I started writing this on my tablet, but then switched to Tune-up to turn off the radio, then read an email, and when I returned to the browser, it reloaded the page and I lost what I had written. That is something that any app SHOULD focus on - ensure that any in progress-edits are auto-saved and not lost - and it's something that a mobile-web focused strategy is unable to solve.

Your comment about DabSolver being suitable for mobile is a great idea, and (without understanding toolserver coding at all), something who's framework could be used for other link checking (something like the pop-ups we have when we hover over internal links) or tasks.

Enabling an auto-cite function from other sites would be awesome, - press a "reference this" button from the edit window, then it opens google, gnews, highbeam, trove or other search engine (in an "in-app" browser window) with the page name pre-filled, but you can edit the search term, then search, then find a page, press a "insert reference" button and let it at least suck in the page title, url, date, accessdate and maybe guess at author/publisher into a prove-it style page, then slots it back into the edit window (without losing the previous entered text!) to be refined, corrected. Small form screens are not a problem if multi-windows/tabs or saved previous windows are able to be saved/maintained.

I'm really glad that mobile editing is getting closer, and I can appeal that you don't focus solely on the 'new editors' and think that us experienced ones will make do with what we have, nor ignore the modern "bigger screen" devices to ensure it works on 2005 era basic Nokia's. We have such a backlog of so may things, just think about how many hours we all spend each day on trains, buses, waiting rooms etc. If we could use that time to do some referencing, dabsolving, persondata entering, hotcatting etc... we might actually bring down some of the backlogs. Regards, The-Pope (talk) 03:14, 30 March 2013 (UTC)
 * Hi, thanks so much for your feedback! I've actually had a hard time getting Wikipedians interested in mobile, so it's really great to hear from you. Maybe things are finally changing :) In response to some of your points:


 * Loss of session data. Absolutely, this is a huge problem (on desktop, too). We also recently realized that when users log into any Wikimedia project and check the "remember me" box, the token that remembers you only works for one device, so you might notice that when you log into the mobile site and then visit desktop, you'll be logged out. This isn't a new problem, but one that's becoming particularly painful in today's multi-device world. We're working closely with the WMF Ops and Platform team to figure out ways to modernize our core code, but since these are foundational issues, they'll take some time to tackle.
 * Dabsolver and other backlog clearing mini-tasks. This is something that the folks from wikiHow have experimented with in their mobile apps, and something I've been agitating for us to try out, too :) Many of the volunteer-created tools like Dabsolver and Hotcat are great proofs of concept for giving people small, easy-to-repeat tasks that can be done for five minutes or five hours and require little to no complex textual input. It may not be something we get to this quarter (busy getting editing and uploads out the door), but I'd like to spend some time on it next fiscal year, for sure.
 * Auto-cite. Very cool idea – we'll definitely need to find ways to make referencing easier, because few people are going to want to mess with curly brackets on tiny touchscreens.


 * Out of curiosity, have you just been using the standard desktop view on your tablet, or have you switched to the mobile view at all? I'd love to hear your thoughts about the mobile view and some of the early features we've got housed there – login, watchlist, and uploads in particular. (If you switch to the mobile view, go to Settings, and opt into the experimental beta mode, you'll be able to see our editing prototype, too.) If you have some spare time this weekend, you should play around with it and let me know what you think. Any comments/critiques you can offer would be tremendously helpful! More experienced user feedback = better features. Maryana (WMF) (talk) 22:19, 30 March 2013 (UTC)
 * I only use desktop mode in Opera browser on my tablet. I just tried mobile mode in the stock standard Android browser, and despite logging in, turning on beta, and them the "surely you can't be serious" "there be dragons" mode, I never got an edit link. Nor links to history or talk. Add for the watchlist, there is too much white space, separating each field to a new line is a waste of space. Forcing wrapping would be good, forcing new lines is too wasteful of space.  Not having the collapsed multi-edits to a single article or the diff/article links isn'tgood either. Watchlist for desktop is pretty close to perfect for use, so why deviate from it?
 * I have no problem with being logged out on new devices, and I've found each device remembers the login well, until you log out on any one, then you are logged out on all. This is probably a good safeguard, so I wouldn't worry to much about this detail. Having desktop and mobile sharing a common login would be good. The old switch between modes was better than the current system that makes it harder to switch on the go. The-Pope (talk) 05:57, 31 March 2013 (UTC)

Newbie Engagment Issue
Hi Maryana,

Perhaps you can have a look at User talk:Anne Delong/AfcBox. This is a kind of situation where the community, hoping to reduce their workload by throwing the hot potato of citation creation back to the newbies who will only be able to respond by not becoming wikipedians. Perhaps you can comment on how this suggestion could be tested before it is actually implemented ? BO &#124; Talk 13:08, 30 April 2013 (UTC)

EMERGENCY
EMERGENCY

There are NO articles linked from the TAFI Page!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! — Preceding unsigned comment added by Panpog1 (talk • contribs) 01:20, 20 May 2013 (UTC)

This week's articles for improvement - 22 July 2013 to 28 July 2013
posted by Northamerica1000(talk) 10:27, 23 July 2013 (UTC)

I've added an opt-in section for those interested in receiving TAFI notifications on the project's main page, located here. Those that don't opt-in won't receive this message again. Also, a revised notification template has been created, located at Template:TAFI weekly selections notice. Northamerica1000(talk) 04:12, 24 July 2013 (UTC)

mobile editing /pending change / gamification
Hey Maryana, congrats to your teams mobile editing release. Just checked it on de.m.wikipedia! I write to your talk page because i don't really see where to give feedback to the mobile team (I used to write here and here, no reactions). I found the login very good, the watchlist very useable and nicely done, and hey: diffs! ;-) I realised in editing mode for the first time that there are no redlinks on mobile?! But they show up in preview mode... strange. I am very grateful that you restricted mobile editing to registered user. I watched the mass mobile uploading to commons and the reactions. Also when the mobile team enabled mobile feedback, the deWP OTRS-team reported a surge in very short, incoherent and useless emails. So it is very much appreciated that you're really careful with enabling mobile contributions..! But i wanted to make a suggestion. For context: Please have a look at "pending changes" (gesichtete Versionen on deWP). Reviewing "pending changes" may be a mobile-friendly activity for mobile contributions by editors, could possibly be gamified and is very needed. On german WP, the "task" for gesichtete Versionen is to revert vandalism, very simple (many users apply higher presonal standards regardless). Since this extension is not really used on english WP, i expect the WMF mobile team to know very little about it. Please read a little analysis about it here: meta:Talk:Flagged Revisions. The delays of pending changes are the shorter the better (newbies are frustrated by waiting half a year for their edit to go live on arWP). --Atlasowa (talk) 12:32, 26 July 2013 (UTC)
 * I remember that the mobile team said that there are concerns about the quality of mobile contributions and that some companies disabled them, because the mobile contributions were so much worse in quality than others (I think restaurant ratings or such).
 * There was an analysis of mobile phone use which may apply to mobile editing too: " You’ll note four major spikes when most of the reading on an iPhone is done: 6am - Early morning, breakfast / 9am - The morning commute, start of the work day / 5pm – 6pm - End of the work day and the commute home / 8pm – 10pm – Couch time, prime time, bed time. In reality, this really is a graph of whitespace time. Whitespace is the time between A and B. It’s the time on the subway or bus. It’s the time standing in line. It’s a spare moment. It is during these moments between tasks and locations that people reach for their phone."
 * Newspaper article by a german admin, describing "recent changes" control as a kind of contemplative computer game: "Wie Türsteher sortieren wir aktiven Nutzer aus den täglich im Sekundentakt eingehenden Neueinträgen und Artikeländerungen Vandalismus und Schleichwerbung heraus. Da es keinen enzyklopädischen Scharfsinn erfordert, Informationen wie »Kevin hat ’nen Kleinen« oder »heilfasten-in-der-pfalz.de« zu entfernen, ähnelt diese Tätigkeit einem kontemplativen Computerspiel. Nicht zuletzt darauf sind die exorbitanten Zahlen einiger Mitstreiter zurückzuführen, die es auf 100.000 Editierungen bringen." Inside Wikipedia: Löschen, sperren, korrigieren. Der Alltag eines Wikipedia-Administrators. Logograph gewährt einen Einblick. 14.01.2011 I was reminded of this when i read a mailinglist thread about gamification of tasks on Wikipedia and your mw:Wikimedia_Mobile_engineering/Strategy/2013-2014_planning.
 * Every "editor" on deWP gets a "backlog" of pending changes on his watchlist. And there are a couple of tools that could be used to create quick tasks, like:
 * [//toolserver.org/~magnus/random_out_of_sight.php Random out of sight] 20 random unreviewed small edits, by Magnus Manske
 * [//toolserver.org/~hroest/cgi-bin/unflagged.py List of articles that have never been reviewed, by age] by Hannes Roest.
 * Deep out of sight unreviewed articles in a chosen category, by Magnus Manske
 * [//toolserver.org/~hroest/flagged.php Hannes’ Tool] similar to Magnus' tool, more features
 * This is the good stuff. --Atlasowa (talk) 10:48, 29 July 2013 (UTC)


 * Thanks, Atlasowa, this is incredibly useful!
 * I'm very interested in turning activities that are usually seen as a chore by the community (e.g., recent changes and new page patrol) into a fun mobile activity, and PC patrol is definitely a strong candidate for the wikis where it's enabled. I'll take a look at those tools and see if we can hook them into MobileFrontend to generate curation tasks on mobile dewiki. As a next step to enabling wiki-text editing, we were going to start investigating ways to serve specific mobile-friendly tasks to users, similar to what the E3 team is experimenting with on desktop. I had a pretty good idea of tasks to serve to enwiki users, but I hadn't thought at all about PC... thanks for bringing it to my attention :) Maryana (WMF) (talk) 20:48, 29 July 2013 (UTC)


 * Hey Maryana, the caveat with reviewing "pending change" is that it's for experienced Wikipedians with the "editor" status, not for newbies. But it would still be really good and important for mobile contributions. Especially [//toolserver.org/~magnus/random_out_of_sight.php Random out of sight (20 random unreviewed small edits)] could be very usable for mobile. The mobile german WP will be a good venue for this task because there are more german "editor" user than in all other WP combined (i think. ~13.000). But finnish WP seems very engaged and successful with pending change and they seem to keep stats and possibly tools, maybe contact User:Zache? In terms of positive impact, arabic Wikipedia might be most important. I think they have a very high mobile adoption rate and their pending-change-backlog is terrible. And there is a Wikipedia Education Program in Egypt and other projects for arabic Wikipedia, there should be competent people to help with implementation and translation issues.
 * 2) Another interesting tool is (interwiki) ChangeDetector by the RENDER project (funded by Wikimedia Germany and European Union) See video. I don't understand why the ChangeDetector doesn't link directly to diffs of the change (but to the present article *facepalm*) but that should be easily fixed and there may be some other improvements needed to make it more usable. This is a little ambitious, because it's about real content contribution and user translation. The (interwiki) ChangeDetector should be interesting to the E3 team, I'll leave them a note on their talk page (and see if anyone responds or if i need to hunt for competent user talk pages...)
 * 3) The most popular "Wikipedia game" is Wiki_Game / http://thewikigame.com/ where you have to find the minimum of wikilinks to get from article A to article B. This is very popular, but it doesn't add to or improve Wikipedia and it could be easily done by a bot ;-) But if you can gamify in the same way the task of resolving wikilinks to disambiguation pages to direct links, that would be great. Or: if you could gamify adding wikilinks to articles? There is LEA – Link ExtrActor by RENDER that proposes wikilinks to add to an (orphaned?) article, based on wikilinks in interwiki articles. This would need better selection of candidate articles, a good user interface and some gamification...
 * 4) Adding images. Finding articles without images and propose images to be included. Suitable images are found from corresponding interwiki articles or commons (see Free Image Search Tool by Magnus Manske and Image Siblings). The user needs to find them suitable, find the place (at top?) and add a caption in the correct language, which could be supported by What is that? (Get an image description in multiple languages from thumbnail texts.) by Magnus Manske.
 * These and similar "tasks" or "tools" or "wikigames" would probably need to be tested on desktop first, because communication with mobile users is hard and we need to be very very careful with mass-mini-contributions ;-) Have a nice day! --Atlasowa (talk) 09:26, 30 July 2013 (UTC)
 * Hello, can you please have a look at this discussion whenever possible? Skronie (talk) 05:49, 10 September 2013 (UTC)

Help Project newsletter : Issue 7
The Help Project Newsletter Issue VII - August 2013

Hello from Hong Kong, and the Wikimania DevCamp! Just a quick bulletin to update everyone on recent goings-on:


 * There was a Wikimedia blog post about our experience at the Open Help Conference.
 * Based on discussions at the Open Help Conference, Seeeko, Ocaasi and the wub have drafted a series of guidelines for writing and improving help pages.
 * There is now also a system in place for assessing help pages by quality and importance. See Help Project/Assessment for more details and the two scales we are using.
 * A project collaboration has been started, the first one is focusing on the above mentioned Assessment. Discussions about this are welcome at Wikipedia talk:Help Project.
 * New contributors' help page/questions was merged into Teahouse/Questions
 * A couple of other mergers have been proposed:
 * Questions and Requests
 * How to help and New contributors' help page
 * Help:Introduction to talk pages and Help:Introduction to policies and guidelines have both been overhauled and updated to use the new tutorial design.

Suggestions for future issues are welcome at Help Project/Newsletter.

If you don't wish to receive this newsletter on your talk page in future then just edit the participants page and add "no newsletter" next to your name.

-- EdwardsBot (talk) 06:17, 7 August 2013 (UTC)

Talkback
Concerns about the design strategy you delineated for Flow Diego Moya (talk) 10:20, 15 August 2013 (UTC)

Reaction to design decisions for Flow
Hello. I gather from Wikipedia talk:Flow that as a result of one of the very few decisions made on the design of Flow (namely, to use HTML5+RDFa in the database), it is probable that mathematics and other specialised forms of markup will not be available in normal Flow discussions for some time to come. What I want to express here is not part of the discussion the design of Flow, but a comment on how that sort of decision affects me personally. I contribute almost exclusively to mathematics articles cannot help but see the priority allocated to helping me continue to do the sort of work I do (namely, pretty low) as profoundly dispiriting. Is there anything you can say that would help me and people like me not to feel grossly undervalued by the way the Flow design process is going? Spectral sequence (talk) 17:11, 16 August 2013 (UTC)


 * Hi Spectral sequence,


 * it is probable that mathematics and other specialised forms of markup will not be available in normal discussions for some time to come – yes, but Flow will not be enabled on those discussion spaces until there's a way for you to be able to do that kind of work. Right now we're discussing a feature that will let you add a scratchpad space to any Flow topic or post, where you can use any markup you want. It may not be a first release feature, but since the first release will only be to a limited, opt-in set of talk pages, I'm confident we can solve this problem before it ever actually affects you or other math editors :) Does that make sense/put you at ease at least somewhat? Maryana (WMF) (talk) 17:21, 16 August 2013 (UTC)


 * Thanks for your prompt response. Before I reply at length, I'll challenge you, if I may, to answer your own question.  What do you think my concerns are and how do you think I might feel?  Spectral sequence (talk) 17:56, 16 August 2013 (UTC)


 * I think you're (rightly) concerned that you'll wake up one day, visit an article talk page or your own talk page, and find a strange new interface waiting for you that doesn't seem to accept math syntax or any other kind of advanced markup. Perhaps even with my assurances, you feel that this might happen soon and in spite of your and other community members' protests, and that there won't be anything you can do about it. Is that more or less accurate? Maryana (WMF) (talk) 18:02, 16 August 2013 (UTC)


 * That is certainly a large part, and correct as far as it goes, but it cuts deeper. Your last comment "there won't be anything you can do about it" is the lead in.  Actually there isn't anything I can do about it.  I have been trying to engage constructively and one of your colleagues was kind enough to tell me that at this stage my commenting on mathematics in Flow would be a waste of time, and I should come back in a couple of months and try again.  Now it transpires that a decision has already been made (HTML5+RDFa) with major impact on mathematics and I'm not too early, I'm actually too late to affect that.  So yes to that last point.  Now look at the language used by you and your colleague to describe mathematics-related contribution and discussion: "the tiny area that interests you";  "waste time making a needless speech about the importance of math"; "we can solve this problem".  How do you think I feel about the implication that the way I work is at best an unimportant minority concern and at worst some kind of problem?  Spectral sequence (talk) 18:20, 16 August 2013 (UTC)


 * First and most importantly: I'm truly sorry that the sentiment you're getting from anyone at the WMF is that your concerns or your ability to do the work you've been doing on Wikipedia don't matter. I won't mince words – that sucks and is not acceptable. That is absolutely not how I feel, and while I can't speak for everyone I work with, I am 99.9% certain that's not how they feel, either, even if they may have said things that gave you that impression. I don't know how much good my apologies can do, but I apologize most sincerely.


 * The fact is that no decision has actually been made with regard to data storage yet. I know this for a fact because I'm the one whose job it is to decide those things. There is a strong leaning toward HTML5+RDFa from folks in the design and development team, and right now they're prototyping features on a local mediawiki instance with the assumption that we'll have HTML5+RDFa storage, but that doesn't mean things can't change before we write any production code – which nobody has done yet. If we do go that route, it will be with a crystal-clear understanding of the implications it has on our end-users, and with ample consideration for how to solve any problems it will cause. I would consider "not letting editors of math articles do what they need to do to improve math content on Wikipedia" to be a pretty fundamental, serious problem, and I'm not about to release some feature globally that does that. Maryana (WMF) (talk) 18:55, 16 August 2013 (UTC)


 * Thank you for that -- I appreciate it. It seems churlish to push back yet again but you badly need to get that message out, not only to the community but to some of your colleagues.  For example "The only thing that has been firmly decided about this issue is that Flow will store its material directly as HTML5+RDFa rather than as (exclusively) wikitext that has to be transformed into HTML every time someone wants to read the page."  "Flow discussions will be read (as html) directly out of the cache", each posted from a WMF account, sent out a pretty clear message except that apparently it was incorrect.  Part of my dismay about this whole series of discussions comes from the amount of effort I have to put in to trying to get a clear answer to questions that I at least find important.  I'm trying my best to engage constructively here and finding it considerably harder than, frankly, anyone ought.  The effort I put into trying to find out what's going on is effort I could spend on better things (such as writing mathematics content, or listening to a rather good performance by the Monteverdi Choir on tonight's Prom).  There comes a point where I decide that if WMF can't get its act together on things I find important, then I'm just not going to bother.  Please don't let it come to that.  Spectral sequence (talk) 19:16, 16 August 2013 (UTC)


 * Right, I see where you're coming from. Just to recap from my perspective, what happened was a good-faith effort to do a lot of the preliminary brainstorming and planning around the project onwiki, out in the open, by a subset of the folks who will be involved in the design and development process. While that certainly did kick up some valuable conversations, it also led to lots of churn, since these conversations happened before we'd clearly divvied up team roles & responsibilities. I think it was still worthwhile to have those conversations (they did raise important issues like the one you've been pressing on), but I do wish the tone had been somewhat different. All I can say is that building software in a consensus-driven environment is hard, and finding a way to share ideas and get feedback from the community in a way that's not frustrating and/or confusing for everyone involved is even harder. I want people like you to feel empowered in the process, and not feel like your energy is being wasted on shouting in a wind tunnel. There's probably not a perfect way to do that, but there certainly has to be a better way... Maryana (WMF) (talk) 19:44, 16 August 2013 (UTC)


 * Thanks again. I think we are at least converging on what the issues are! Spectral sequence (talk) 20:11, 16 August 2013 (UTC)


 * What's that bit from 12-step program land? "The first step to recovery is admitting you have a problem"? Something like that ;) Maryana (WMF) (talk) 20:42, 16 August 2013 (UTC)


 * Something like that. It would be interesting to hear how you plan to proceed.  Spectral sequence (talk) 15:44, 17 August 2013 (UTC)


 * @Spectral sequence: The tentative plan right now is to 1) build a prototype so people can see what all the fuss is really about, and 2) talk with some active WikiProjects about whether they'd be willing to try out an onwiki beta for some period of time in their main discussion space. The requirements would be tailored to threaded conversation and peer-to-peer content collaboration; that'll be helpful in showing us how we should handle complex copy-pasted markup (e.g., fleshing out this "scratchpad" idea), without having to worry about all the added complexity of bot- and tool-delivered notifications in user talk. As we gather feedback and build out more features, including a robust API for handling the aforementioned tools and bots, we'll probably move to an opt-in user talk trial, as well – but that's very much tentative fuzzy future stuff.


 * As for the discussion you link to below, I'm not quite sure I understand its purpose. I can only state again that I have no intention of globally releasing a feature that's lacking in core functionality for helping improve the encyclopedia, and that after over three years of researching Wikipedia and over two years of editing as a volunteer, I'm reasonably confident that my ability to judge what does and does not help improve the encyclopedia is pretty sound (not because I personally have some special, magical insight into every discussion process that happens on Wikipedia, but because I know and trust the users who do). It's your choice whether you believe me or not, but if not, nothing I say can really convince you or anyone else otherwise, can it? All I ask is that you reserve judgment about my colleagues' and my ability to understand the needs of the community (or lack thereof) until you actually see what this feature looks like – then, by all means, judge away. Maryana (WMF) (talk) 02:38, 19 August 2013 (UTC)
 * The purpose is to summarise for the benefit of the project members some of the issues arising in the various major changes being proposed to their working environment and to make it clear that they have choices in addition to the least useful, namely burying their heads in the sand and hoping it will all go away. I made it clear that one of those choices is or (should be) an active constructive engagement in the design process, something which I have not myself been finding too easy, and which WMF does not seem to have much interest in.  What I am asking in summary is that you trust us to be able to help you as much us you are asking us to trust you to help us to build the encyclopaedia.  Spectral sequence (talk) 06:40, 19 August 2013 (UTC)


 * I'd like to expand on "that doesn't mean things can't change before we write any production code": it also doesn't mean that things can't change after production code is written.  The WMF has scrapped projects and started over from scratch before, and it probably will do so again in the future.  Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 01:04, 18 August 2013 (UTC)
 * That's interesting, and it cuts both ways. There are now eight possible outcomes, formed from all possible combinations of {I invest my time and effort in engaging with the design process, I do nothing} x {The new product is as good or better for me, The new product is worse for me} x {WMF keeps the new product, WMF scraps the new product}.  Let me list them:
 * I do nothing, The new product is as good or better for me, WMF keeps the new product
 * I invest my time and effort, The new product is as good or better for me, WMF keeps the new product
 * I do nothing, The new product is worse for me, WMF scraps the new product
 * I do nothing, The new product is as good or better for me, WMF scraps the new product
 * I invest my time and effort, The new product is worse for me, WMF scraps the new product
 * I do nothing, The new product is worse for me, WMF keeps the new product
 * I invest my time and effort, The new product is as good or better for me, WMF scraps the new product
 * I invest my time and effort, The new product is worse for me, WMF keeps the new product
 * I have listed them in very roughly decreasing order of desirability for me. How should I assess the probability of each combination?  Spectral sequence (talk) 07:10, 18 August 2013 (UTC)
 * I'd say that the first two are by far the most likely in the end, but it depends on when you take your measurement. On the first day that it's possible to use Flow, the product will probably be worse than what we've already got.  Two years from then, it will very likely be much better.  That's the nature of the software approach, and also the nature of adjusting to new software and new workflows.
 * About whether you personally should invest time and effort in this product, I recommend that you do whatever you feel like doing, which may change repeatedly over time. If the uncertainty of these early planning stages, or the irritation of agile programming, or anything else about this project makes you stressed, then ignore it and do something that you actually enjoy.  If it seems interesting or fun, then join the conversation.  When you don't feel like it, then I think you should trust the other 129,897 active editors to keep an eye on Flow, while you do things that are actually satisfying to you.  You should not feel responsible for Flow or required to participate in its development.  Add your voice if you want to, but only if you actually want to.  Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 05:50, 19 August 2013 (UTC)
 * That's very sensible advice — thank you. Spectral sequence (talk) 06:20, 19 August 2013 (UTC)
 * On a related topic, you may be interested in a discussion at Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject Mathematics Your colleague Whatamidoing (WMF) has already contributed.  Spectral sequence (talk) 20:48, 18 August 2013 (UTC)

Update on the HTML5+RDFa vs mathematics markup issue. I am assured by Jorm (WMF) that developments at the Parsoid project mean that there is good reason to believe that it will be possible to meet the requirement to collaborate by copying mathematics over to discussion pages and back into articles  Naturally this is very welcome news. Spectral sequence (talk) 21:18, 19 August 2013 (UTC)
 * Over on Wikipedia_talk:Flow, I added a screenshot of the Flow prototype handling the math syntax from the diff you offered as an example – simple as cut-and-paste! :) Maryana (WMF) (talk) 23:44, 19 August 2013 (UTC)
 * Thanks for that, on behalf on the mathematics editor community, if I may presume to speak for them on this subject: I personally shall probably not be making use of it. Spectral sequence (talk) 06:08, 20 August 2013 (UTC)

Nomination for deletion of Template:Db-banned-notice-NPF
Template:Db-banned-notice-NPF has been nominated for deletion. You are invited to comment on the discussion at the template's entry on the Templates for discussion page. — SamX‧☎‧✎‧ S  14:06, 21 August 2013 (UTC)

Reminder
We need to update Editor Engagement. For now, this will do. Steven Walling (WMF) &bull; talk   00:10, 18 September 2013 (UTC)
 * @ Steven Yeah, I'll try to chip away at this a bit today. The problem is that those team member profile templates are pretty gnarly... Maryana (WMF) (talk) 18:01, 18 September 2013 (UTC)