User talk:Miniapolis/Archives/2022/March

Administrators' newsletter – March 2022
News and updates for administrators from the past month (February 2022).

Administrator changes
 * Gnome-colors-list-add.svg Modussiccandi
 * Gnome-colors-list-remove.svg BOZ • Brookie (deceased) • Jackmcbarn • Jamesday • Jonathunder • Master of Puppets • Saravask



CheckUser changes
 * Gnome-colors-list-remove.svg Callanecc

Oversighter changes
 * Gnome-colors-list-remove.svg Callanecc

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

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

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 * Several unused discretionary sanctions and article probation remedies have been rescinded.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

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

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Archive Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 01:46, 2 March 2022 (UTC)

Merging edit history
Hi Miniapolis, sorry to bother you but you're the only admin I know off the top of my head. Is there such a thing as merging edit history on articles? I'm just thinking because I'm doing these big expansions on articles and I think I recall something about merging article histories so my edits will be on record in the main article. Is that something you're aware of and if so could you help me with it? Thanks Darkwarriorblake / SEXY ACTION TALK PAGE! 18:19, 15 March 2022 (UTC)
 * See WP:HISTMERGE, but your contributions are always visible in the history of an article. A history merge fixes a history which was separated by a cut-and-paste move. All the best,  Mini  apolis  19:14, 15 March 2022 (UTC)

Rejuvenate WikiProject Skepticism
Hello - my name is Susan Gerbic (Sgerbic) and I'm writing to you because at some point you joined WikiProject Skepticism. This might have been months ago - or even years ago. With the best of intentions the project was created years ago, and sadly like many WikiProjects has started to go dormant. A group of us are attempting to revitalize the Skepticism project, already we have begun to clean up the main page and I've just redone the participant page. No one is in charge of this project, it is member directed, which might have been the reason it almost went dormant. We are attempting to bring back conversations on the talk page and have two subprojects as well, in the hopes that it might spark involvement and a way of getting to know each other better. One was created several years ago but is very well organized and a lot of progress was made, WikiProject Skepticism/Skeptical organisations in Europe. The other I created a couple weeks ago, it is very simple and has a silly name WikiProject Skepticism/Skepticism Stub Sub-Project Project (SSSPP). This sub-project runs from March 1 to June 1, 2022. We are attempting to rewrite skepticism stubs and add them to this list. As you can see we have already made progress.

The reason I'm writing to you now is because we would love to have you come back to the project and become involved, either by working on one of the sub-projects, proposing your own (and managing it), or just hanging out on the talk page getting to know the other editors and maybe donate some of your wisdom to some of the conversations. As I said, no one is in charge, so if you have something in mind you would like to see done, please suggest it on the talk page and hopefully others will agree. Please add the project to your watchlist, update your personal user page showing you are a proud member of WikiProject Skepticism. And DIVE in, this is what the work list looks like frightening at first glance, but we have already started chipping away at it.

The WikiProject Skepticism/Participants page has gone though a giant change - you may want to update your information. And of course if this project no longer interests you, please remove your name from the participant list, we would hate to see you go, but completely understand.

Thank you for your time, I hope to edit with you in the future.Sgerbic (talk) 07:18, 17 March 2022 (UTC)

The Signpost: 27 March 2022
 * Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 20:51, 27 March 2022 (UTC)

Sima Yi
Hi Miniapolis, I fear I may be out of my depth with the requested c/e of Sima Yi, which is over 177 kb. There are many sourced quotations that are enclosed with and these appear in the normal references section under reflist. As I work through the article, I'm moving them into efn so they appear under notelist in the footnotes section. Many of these are cited to two main sources, which I'm thinking to enclose in tags within the efn templates. So now I've made a whole heap of extra work for myself that isn't copy-editing at all! Am I taking a reasonable approach here? I could put them all back as they were but that seems like a waste of effort expended. Any advice would be welcome. Cheers,  Baffle☿gab  02:44, 25 March 2022 (UTC)
 * Your effort is noble, Baffle, and I've also been known to do a lot more than copyedit (although I don't think I've ever gone to the lengths that you have). A baseball player is charged with an error if "ordinary effort" would have made the play; given the article's length, if I were you I'd cut my losses and finish with an ordinary-effort copyedit. It's awful to go down a rabbit hole like this . Stay sane and all the best,  Mini  apolis  13:17, 25 March 2022 (UTC)
 * Thank you, as always. :) You're correct, getting bogged down there wasn't the best plan. Using find --> replace on a word processor might help a little. Before I start feeling bad for not finishing, I'll note the requester has only made two edits to that article to tag it. Sanity comes in form of the "log out" link! :) Cheers as ever,  Baffle☿gab  05:26, 26 March 2022 (UTC)
 * Hi again; I did manage to convert the refs using a word processor, and the copy-edit is now much easier than I anticipated as most of the article's prose in a fair condition. That's as far as I'm going though; I need to draw the line somewhere! Thanks again for being a sounding board; it was good to have some feedback. :) Cheers,  Baffle☿gab  16:48, 27 March 2022 (UTC)
 * Glad your job is now easier. When you have time, please tell me how you converted the refs with a word processor (I use LibreOffice). Have fun and all the best,  Mini  apolis  17:04, 27 March 2022 (UTC)
 * No problem; it's a bit nerdy but I hope you don't mind. In the manual edit window (not Visual Editor), I selected, copied and pasted the article sections into LibreOffice Writer using right-click --> "Paste special --> unformatted text" (if you use the regular "paste" function, LibreOffice imports Wikipedia formatting and images), then brought up the "Find and replace" dialog (Ctrl+H or top menu --> Edit --> Find & replace). The plan was to convert the   formatting into   , moving the footnotes from references into their own section. Some of the ref tags also had the markup  "long, long quotation" . First, I searched for   with  }} . There were some oddities to fix too; I replaced in-article line breaks with     to force the short citations to appear on a new line beneath the quotations. I was also careful not to disturb the Chinese-language quotations. Some manual cleanup like removing odd spaces was needed but the word processor method was far quicker than manually replacing each piece of markup, which would probably have taken a month to complete. Finally, I copied and pasted the article back into the manual edit window and published.
 * I hope that's useful and what you needed; if not, feel free to ask and I'll try to help. :-) Cheers,  Baffle☿gab  01:53, 28 March 2022 (UTC)
 * Wow, thanks! All the best,  Mini  apolis  01:58, 28 March 2022 (UTC)