User talk:Northamerica1000/Archive 83

NPR Newsletter No.11 25 May 2018
Hello, thank you for your work reviewing New Pages!

ACTRIAL:
 * WP:ACREQ has been implemented. The flow at the feed has dropped back to the levels during the trial. However, the backlog is on the rise again so please consider reviewing a few extra articles each day; a backlog approaching 5,000 is still far too high. An effort is also needed to ensure that older unsuitable older pages at the back of the queue do not get automatically indexed for Google.

Deletion tags
 * Do bear in mind that articles in the feed showing the trash can icon may have been tagged by inexperienced or non NPR rights holders. They require your further verification.

Backlog drive:
 * A backlog drive will take place from 10 through 20 June. Check out our talk page at WT:NPR for more details. NOTE: It is extremely important that we focus on quality reviewing. Despite our goal of reducing the backlog as much as possible, please do not rush while reviewing.

Editathons
 * There will be a large increase in the number of editathons in June. Please be gentle with new pages that obviously come from good faith participants, especially articles from developing economies and ones about female subjects. Consider using the 'move to draft' tool rather than bluntly tagging articles that may have potential but which cannot yet reside in mainspace.

Paid editing - new policy
 * Now that ACTRIAL is ACREQ, please be sure to look for tell-tale signs of undisclosed paid editing. Contact the creator if appropriate, and submit the issue to WP:COIN if necessary. There is a new global WMF policy that requires paid editors to connect to their adverts.

Subject-specific notability guidelines
 * The box at the right contains each of the subject-specific notability guidelines, please review any that are relevant BEFORE nominating an article for deletion.
 * Reviewers are requested to familiarise themselves with the new version of the notability guidelines for organisations and companies.

Not English News Go here to remove your name if you wish to opt-out of future mailings. MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 20:34, 24 May 2018 (UTC)
 * A common issue: Pages not in English or poor, unattributed machine translations should not reside in main space even if they are stubs. Please ensure you are familiar with WP:NPPNE. Check in Google for the language and content, tag as required, then move to draft if they do have potential.
 * Development is underway by the WMF on upgrades to the New Pages Feed, in particular ORES features that will help to identify COPYVIOs, and more granular options for selecting articles to review.
 * The next issue of The Signpost has been published. The newspaper is one of the best ways to stay up to date with news and new developments. between our newsletters.

Whoa, I missed one...
There's an article about the Portals WikiProject in the new issue of Signpost:

Wikipedia Signpost/2018-05-24/WikiProject report

Enjoy.

P.S.: We now have 80 members. Evad37 just joined! &mdash; The Transhumanist  01:37, 25 May 2018 (UTC)

Freestyle Script
Please expand this article, you will find some information about this font. Thanks! -- Cyrus noto3at bulaga Talk to me 03:07, 26 May 2018 (UTC)

G13 Eligibility Notice
The following pages will become eligible for CSD:G13 shortly. Thanks, HasteurBot (talk) 03:01, 27 May 2018 (UTC)
 * Draft:Mount Shoria Siberia Wall

Tech News: 2018-22
 Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent changes
 * You can now use global preferences on most wikis. This means you can set preferences for all wikis at the same time. Before this you had to change them on each individual wiki. Global preferences will come to the Wikipedias later this week.
 * It is now easier for blocked mobile users to see why they were blocked.
 * Wikidata now supports lexicographical data. This helps describe words.
 * There is now a checkbox on Special:ListUsers to let you see only users in temporary user groups.
 * Some rare invisible Unicode characters have recently been banned from page titles. This includes soft hyphens (U+00AD) and left-to-right (U+2066) and right-to-left (U+2067) isolate markers. Existing pages with these characters will soon be moved by a script.
 * Octicons-tools.svg There's a new Wikimedia Foundation team to support the Wikimedia technical communities. It's called the Technical Engagement team. Most of the team members did similar work in other teams before this.

Problems
 * Some translatable pages are showing old translations instead of latest ones. The cause of this issue has been fixed. We will update all pages automatically to show the latest translations.

Changes later this week
 * There will be a new special page named PasswordPolicies. This page gives information about the password rules for each user group on that wiki.
 * A new way to see moved paragraphs in diffs is coming to most wikis. This is to make it easier to find the moved paragraphs and the changes in them.
 * Octicons-sync.svg The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 29 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 30 May. It will be on all wikis from 31 May (calendar).
 * Octicons-tools.svg Wikis can enable Citoid to provide automatic reference look-up in the visual editor and the 2017 wikitext editor. This is complex. The tool will now disable itself if the configuration isn't correct. It has warned about this in the JavaScript console since February. Check that your wiki is configured correctly. You can ask for help if you need it.

Meetings
 * Octicons-sync.svg You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 29 May at 18:30 (UTC). See how to join.
 * Octicons-sync.svg Octicons-tools.svg You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 30 May at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes
 * Content Translation drafts which have not been updated in over a year will be removed. This allows other users to translate those articles.
 * A survey is collecting information on what users think about how Wikimedia wiki pages are loaded. This information could be used in future development.
 * Octicons-tools.svg Some wikis will switch to use the Remex parsing library. This is to replace Tidy. It will happen on 30 May and 13 June. Wikis with fewer than 100 linter issues in the main namespace in all high-priority linter categories will switch. This includes Wikidata. Tidy will probably be removed on all wikis in the first week of July.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.  12:40, 29 May 2018 (UTC)

G13 Eligibility Notice
The following pages will become eligible for CSD:G13 shortly. Thanks, HasteurBot (talk) 03:00, 30 May 2018 (UTC)
 * Draft:Ach Yacoubou
 * Draft:Bajju
 * Draft:Cap-Rouge, Haiti
 * Draft:Enrique Jose Mayer
 * Draft:Euroschool
 * Draft:Hershel L. Herzog
 * Draft:Jaquard's Web
 * Draft:Neotibicen cultriformis
 * Draft:Tulku Thondup

G13 Eligibility Notice
The following pages will become eligible for CSD:G13 shortly. Thanks, HasteurBot (talk) 03:01, 31 May 2018 (UTC)
 * Draft:Hidasie Telecom
 * Draft:Particle dispersion
 * Draft:Patent foreign filing restrictions

Portals WikiProject update #007, 31 May 2018
We have grown to 89 members.

This is the seventh issue of this newsletter. For previous issues, see our newsletter archive.

Welcome
A warm welcome to our nearly one dozen new members...

Our new members include:
 * Evad37
 * Checkingfax
 * Grey Wanderer
 * Voceditenore
 * TestPAKISTAN
 * Godsy
 * Greatedits1
 * Charlesdrakew
 * Ww2censor
 * Simon Burchell
 * TheGridExe

Be sure to say "hi" and welcome them to the team.

The portal set has shrunk
There were 1515 portals, but now we have 1475, because we speedy deleted a bunch of incompleted portals that had been sitting around for ages, that were empty shells or had very little content. Because they were speedied, they can be rebuilt from scratch without acquiring approval from WP:DRV.

Maintenance runs on the portals set have begun
This is what we have been gearing up for: upgrading the portals en masse, using AWB.

More than half of the Associated Wikimedia sections have been converted to no longer use a subpage. This chore will probably be completed over the next week or two. Many thanks to the WikiGnome Squad, who have added an Associated Wikimedia section to the many geography-related portals that lacked one. The rest of the subjects await. :)

The next maintenance drive will be on the intro sections. Notices have gone out to the WikiProjects for which one or more portals fall within their subject scope. Once enough time has elapsed for them to respond (1 week), AWB processing of intro sections will begin.

Thank you, you
I'd like to take this opportunity to thank you all for your part in the RfC. I went back and reread much of it. I believe your enthusiasm played a major part in turning the tide on there. I'm proud of all of you.

Why reread that mess, you ask?

To harvest ideas, and to keep the problems that need to be fixed firmly in mind. But, also to keep in touch. See below...

Thank yous all around
I've contacted all of the other opposers of the RfC proposal to delete portals, to thank them for their support, and to assure them that their decision was not made in vain. I updated them on our activities, provided the link to the interviews about this project in the Signpost, pointed out our newsletter archive so they can keep up-to-date with what we are doing, and I invited them all to come and have a look-see at our operations (on our talk page).

Sockpuppet, and reverting his work
It so happened that one of our members was a sockpuppet: JLJ001. According to the admin who blocked him, he was a particularly tricky long term abuser. This is a weird situation, since the user was quite helpful. He will be missed.

This has been somewhat disruptive, because admins are doing routine deletions of the pages (portals, templates, etc.) he created, and reversion of his edits (I don't know if they will be reverting all of them). Please bear with them, as they are only doing what is best in the long run.

The following pages have been deleted by the admins so far, that I know of:
 * Portal:Plymouth
 * Portal:Bedfordshire
 * Portal:Suffolk
 * Portal:Norfolk
 * User:JLJ001/tag
 * Template:Non-standard portal flag
 * Template:Portal flag

Automation so far, section by section...

 * Intro – Transclude lead excerpt
 * Selected article – Transclude random excerpt
 * In the news – Transclude selected current events
 * Associated Wikimedia –
 * Categories –

Automatic article alerts is up and running
Automatic article alerts are now featured on the project page.

Some super out-of-date entries kept showing up on there, so posting it on the Project page was delayed. Thanks to Evad37 and AfroThundr for providing solutions on this one. Evad37 adjusted the workflow settings per Article alerts/Subscribing, to make sure only the appropriate page types show up. AfroThundr removed the tags from the old entries that caused them to keep showing up in the article alerts.

Other things that could use some automation
Noyster pointed out that it would be nice to automate the updating of the portals section at the Community bulletin board.

Another major component of the portal system is the main list of portals, at Portal:Contents/Portals. How would we go about automating the updating of that?

Please post your ideas on the WikiProject's talk page. Thank you.

Deletion discussion survivors
Keep in mind that we have already speedy deleted almost all of the nearly empty portals, which can be rebuilt without approval whenever it is convenient to do so. Other portals should be completed if at all possible rather than delete them through MfD (which requires approval from Deletion review to rebuild).


 * Portal:Juanes – see the discussion

(Current deletion discussions are posted on our WikiProject page).

Portals needing repair

 * Portal:Toys

Wrapping up
There's still more, but it will have to wait until next issue.

Until then, see ya around the project. &mdash; The Transhumanist  12:02, 31 May 2018 (UTC)

G13 Eligibility Notice
The following pages will become eligible for CSD:G13 shortly. Thanks, HasteurBot (talk) 03:00, 1 June 2018 (UTC)
 * Draft:Holzmasch

G13 Eligibility Notice
The following pages will become eligible for CSD:G13 shortly. Thanks, HasteurBot (talk) 03:27, 3 June 2018 (UTC)
 * Draft:Oil spin
 * Draft:Point2 Homes
 * Draft:School Oz

Tech News: 2018-23
 Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent changes
 * The MonoBook skin has been optimised for mobile devices. It now looks different.
 * Planet Wikimedia collects blogs about Wikimedia. It will now use the Rawdog feed aggregator to do this instead of Planet.
 * Redirect links in Special:WhatLinksHere now link to the original page and not the target page. This was done earlier and changed the used messages on some pages. This was a problem for wikis that customized the message. A new change fixed this by using the old messages with one more parameter for customization. Wikis that already changed their customized messages will have to move the customization back again.

Problems
 * You will not be able to edit some wikis between 06:00 and 06:30 UTC on 13 June. You can see if your wiki is one of them.
 * MassMessage did not work 24–28 May. This is also why last week's Tech News was late.

Changes later this week
 * Octicons-sync.svg The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 5 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 6 June. It will be on all wikis from 7 June (calendar).

Meetings
 * Octicons-sync.svg You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 5 June at 18:30 (UTC). See how to join.
 * Octicons-sync.svg Octicons-tools.svg You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 6 June at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes
 * The new filters for edit review tools and interface for watchlists will leave beta. This is planned to happen in June or early July.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.  21:54, 4 June 2018 (UTC)

Administrators' newsletter – June 2018
News and updates for administrators from the past month (May 2018). Administrator changes
 * Gnome-colors-list-add.svg None
 * Gnome-colors-list-remove.svg Al Ameer son • AliveFreeHappy • Cenarium • Lupo • MichaelBillington

Guideline and policy news
 * Following a successful request for comment, administrators are now able to add and remove editors to the "event coordinator" group. Users in the event coordinator group have the ability to temporarily add the "confirmed" flag to new user accounts and to create many new user accounts without being hindered by a rate limit. Users will no longer need to be in the "account creator" group if they are in the event coordinator group.
 * Following an AN discussion, all pages with content related to blockchain and cryptocurrencies, broadly construed, are now under indefinite general sanctions.

Technical news
 * IP-based cookie blocks should be deployed to English Wikipedia in June. This will cause the block of a logged-out user to be reloaded if they change IPs. This means in most cases, you may no longer need to do /64 range blocks on residential IPv6 addresses in order to effectively block the end user. It will also help combat abuse from IP hoppers in general. For the time being, it only affects users of the desktop interface.
 * The Wikimedia Foundation's Anti-Harassment Tools team will build granular types of blocks in 2018 (e.g. a block from uploading or editing specific pages, categories, or namespaces, as opposed to a full-site block). Feedback on the concept may be left at the talk page.
 * There is now a checkbox on Special:ListUsers to let you see only users in temporary user groups.
 * It is now easier for blocked mobile users to see why they were blocked.

Arbitration
 * A recent technical issue with the Arbitration Committee's spam filter inadvertently caused all messages sent to the committee through Wikipedia (i.e. Special:EmailUser/Arbitration Committee) to be discarded. If you attempted to send an email to the Arbitration Committee via Wikipedia between May 16 and May 31, your message was not received and you are encouraged to resend it. Messages sent outside of these dates or directly to the Arbitration Committee email address were not affected by this issue.

Miscellaneous
 * In early May, an unusually high level of failed login attempts was observed. The WMF has stated that this was an "external effort to gain unauthorized access to random accounts". Under Wikipedia policy, administrators are required to have strong passwords. To further reinforce security, administrators should also consider enabling two-factor authentication. A committed identity can be used to verify that you are the true account owner in the event that your account is compromised and/or you are unable to log in.

Discuss this newsletter

Subscribe

Archive Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 21:00, 1 June 2018 (UTC)

June 2018 GOCE newsletter
MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 13:26, 5 June 2018 (UTC)

Portals WikiProject update #008, 7 June 2018
The WikiProject now has 92 participants, including 16 admins.

Welcome
A warm welcome to the newest members of the team:
 * Keith D
 * RL0919

Be sure to say hi.

Congrats
Pbsouthwood has just gotten through the grueling RfA process to become a Wikipedia administrator. Be sure to congratulate him.

The reason he went for it was: "For some time I expect to be busy with subpage deletion for Wikipedia:WikiProject Portals as mentioned above. The amount of work is expected to keep me busy for some time. I am primarly a content creator and contributor to policy discussions, but would be willing to consider other admin work on request, providing that I feel that my involvement would be appropriate and not too far outside my comfort zone."

New feature: Picture slideshow
Evad37 has figured out a way to let the user flip through pictures without purging the page. Purging is awkward because there is an intermediary confirmation screen that you have to click on "yes". In the new picture slideshow section, all you have to do is click on the  to go to the next picture or   to instantly show the previous feature. The feature also shuffles the pictures when the page is initiated, so that they are shown in a different order each time the user visits the page (or purges it).

It is featured in Portal:Sacramento, California. Check it out to the right.

Keep in mind that the feature is a beta version. Please share your comments on how to refine this feature, at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Portals.

The one-page portal has been achieved
We now have a one-page portal design. It isn't fully automated, nor is it even fully semi-automated, as there are still some manually filled-in areas. But it no longer requires any subpages in portal space, and that is a huge improvement. For example, Portal:Sacramento, California utilizes the one-page design concept. While is employs heavy use of templates, it does not have any subpages of its own.

I commend you for your teamwork
This is the most cooperative team I've ever seen. With a strong spirit of working together to get an important job done. Kudos to you.

In conclusion...
There's more. A lot more. But it will have to wait until next issue, but you don't have to wait. See what's going on at the WikiProject's talk page. &mdash; The Transhumanist  02:10, 7 June 2018 (UTC)

List of North Korean dishes
Please see Talk:List of North Korean dishes for a move discussion. It appears you have edited this article in the past. I have no opinion on renaming the article, but it looks like the best arrangement of topics has to be decided. Thanks, EdJohnston (talk) 03:01, 5 June 2018 (UTC)
 * Thanks for the notification. North America1000 03:05, 5 June 2018 (UTC)

Template:Did you know nominations/Haruka Tomatsu
As you've already edited the nomination, would you like to give this nomination a review? Thanks. Narutolovehinata5 tccsdnew 13:27, 6 June 2018 (UTC)
 * has already provided a review. North America1000 07:10, 8 June 2018 (UTC)

Tech News: 2018-24
 Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent changes
 * In the Wikipedia app for Android or iOS users can create reading lists. The reading lists can be seen on different devices if you are logged in to your account. There is now a browser extension so you can add pages to your reading list from a web browser. At the moment it works with Firefox and Chrome.
 * Octicons-tools.svg There is a new version of Pywikibot. Pywikibot is a tool to automate tasks on MediaWiki wikis.

Problems
 * The MonoBook skin was changed to make it work better for mobile users. This caused some problems. The change was rolled back to fix them. The new version is now back on the wikis. MonoBook users can opt out from the new responsive design.

Changes later this week
 * The new filters for edit review tools and interface for watchlists will leave beta. For most wikis this will happen on 18 June. For the rest it will happen on 25 June.


 * Octicons-sync.svg The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 12 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 13 June. It will be on all wikis from 14 June (calendar).

Meetings
 * You can join the Readers Web team IRC office hour. There you can discuss tools to contribute on the mobile web for the existing MediaWiki skins. The meeting will be on 18 June at 16:00 (UTC). See how to join.
 * Octicons-sync.svg You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 12 June at 18:30 (UTC). See how to join.
 * Octicons-sync.svg Octicons-tools.svg You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 13 June at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes
 * You will be able to move local wiki files to Commons and keep their original data intact. This is planned to come to the first wikis in June.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.  21:55, 11 June 2018 (UTC)

Orphaned non-free image File:Paper Boat logo.png
Thanks for uploading File:Paper Boat logo.png. The image description page currently specifies that the image is non-free and may only be used on Wikipedia under a claim of fair use. However, the image is currently not used in any articles on Wikipedia. If the image was previously in an article, please go to the article and see why it was removed. You may add it back if you think that that will be useful. However, please note that images for which a replacement could be created are not acceptable for use on Wikipedia (see our policy for non-free media).

Note that any non-free images not used in any articles will be deleted after seven days, as described in section F5 of the criteria for speedy deletion. Thank you. ShakespeareFan00 (talk) 16:18, 13 June 2018 (UTC)

Happy First Edit Day

 * Thanks for the positive energy! North America1000 01:50, 10 June 2018 (UTC)

You notified the wrong wikiproject
It should be in the video game discussion, not the games discussion, that two different list. Since the talk page has it with the banner for video games, shouldn't it have been added automatically?  D r e a m Focus  19:14, 9 June 2018 (UTC)
 * Hello : Yes indeed, I acted hastily seeing the phrase "puzzle game" in the lead and made an erroneous assumption. I have struck the Games delsort listing from the AfD discussion (diff) and removed it from the Games delsort page (diff). I'm not aware of any deletion sorting that is automatically added based upon talk page project tags and have never seen this, although it would be neat to have a script that performed this. Hope you've been enjoying yourself in Wiki-land and in real life as well. North America1000 01:56, 10 June 2018 (UTC)

NPP Backlog Elimination Drive
Hello, thank you for your work reviewing New Pages!

We can see the light at the end of the tunnel: there are currently 2900 unreviewed articles, and 4000 unreviewed redirects.

Announcing the Backlog Elimination Drive! Go here to remove your name if you wish to opt-out of future mailings. —  Insertcleverphrasehere (or here)  06:57, 16 June 2018 (UTC)
 * As a final push, we have decided to run a backlog elimination drive from the 20th to the 30th of June.
 * Reviewers who review at least 50 articles or redirects will receive a Special Edition NPP Barnstar: NPPbarnstar SE.png. Those who review 100, 250, 500, or 1000 pages will also receive tiered awards: RR3217-0014 100 rubles USSR 1989 Gold avers.png, Swiss-Commemorative-Coin-1991-CHF-250-reverse.png, Coin of Kazakhstan 500Thinker averse.png, US-$1000-SC-1878-FR-346a-PROOF.jpg.
 * Please do not be hasty, take your time and fully review each page. It is extremely important that we focus on quality reviewing.

Portals WikiProject update #009, 15 June 2018
Don't mind that box to the right. We'll be talking about that later, below.

Almost done...
With the portals upgrades?

No. :)

What is almost done is the updating of the main list of portals!

There are 23 portals left to be listed.

Kudos to the WikiGnome Squadron, for spearheading this.

Once it is fully updated, we need to keep it up to date. When you complete a portal, remember to add it to Portal:Contents/Portals.

Concerning portal upgrades, we are working on those section-by-section...

Associated Wikimedia section conversion task complete
The Associated Wikimedia sections of the entire set of portals have been upgraded. These are now handled on each portal base page (bypassing the previously used corresponding subpages), using the Wikimedia for portals template rather than reiterated copied/pasted code.

So, to be more accurate on reporting upgrade progress, that's one section down (for the whole set of portals), with (about) nine sections to go. (Skipping curated portals, regarding custom content sections, of course).

Further section conversions (using AWB)
Work is underway on converting Portals' introduction sections, and the categories sections.

If you would like to help, see WikiProject Portals and WikiProject Portals

Further section conversions (by hand)
Work has also started with converting selected picture sections to picture slideshow sections. See WikiProject Portals.

Quality rating system for portals under development
Currently, there is no quality rating for portals: in the Portals WikiProject box on each portals' talk page, it just says "Portal". But times are a changin'. Quality assessment is on the way, and you can help. See the discussion.

What's coming: excerpt slideshows
Evad37 has figured out a way to apply the picture slideshow feature to displaying article excerpts (now you can check out the provided box above). :) This allows us to bypass page purging to see the next selection, and you can even click through them rather quickly. Currently, the wikicode for doing this for article excerpts is a bit eye-boggling, and so we are looking into simplifying it. A streamlined version may be just around the corner.

Note that this is a prototype, not ready for widespread use. Click on the box in between the lesser than and greater than signs, to see what I mean. It was meant for pictures, and so the thumbnail feature doesn't apply to article prose very well. I've presented it even though it isn't ready, to show the direction portal development is heading. See the discussion.

Wow
I'm amazed at how rapidly portals are evolving. And we're still within a single generation of portal technological evolution. Imagine what they might be in 2 or 3 more generations of developments. Pretty soon, portals will be able to shake your hand. :)   &mdash; The Transhumanist   11:05, 16 June 2018 (UTC)

MfD nomination of Portal:Tamil civilization
Portal:Tamil civilization, a page which you created or substantially contributed to, has been nominated for deletion. Your opinions on the matter are welcome; you may participate in the discussion by adding your comments at Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Tamil civilization (2nd nomination) and please be sure to sign your comments with four tildes ( ~ ). You are free to edit the content of Portal:Tamil civilization during the discussion but should not remove the miscellany for deletion template from the top of the page; such a removal will not end the deletion discussion. Thank you. Greatedits1 (I hope so &#124; If not, let me know) 15:09, 17 June 2018 (UTC)

Tech News: 2018-25
 Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent changes
 * Syntax highlighting has been a beta feature on Wikimedia wikis with text written from left to right. It is now a normal feature. It is based on CodeMirror.

Changes later this week
 * There is no new MediaWiki version this week.

Meetings
 * Octicons-sync.svg You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 19 June at 18:30 (UTC). See how to join.
 * Octicons-sync.svg Octicons-tools.svg You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 20 June at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes
 * Some old web browsers will not be able to read the Wikimedia wikis. This is because they use an insecure way to connect to them. This means that we get less security for everyone else too. This affects about 0.08% of all traffic to the Wikimedia wikis. This affects for example those who read Wikipedia on a PlayStation 3.
 * The new filters for edit review tools and interface for watchlists will leave beta. Because there is no new MediaWiki version this week it will happen on 25 June for most wikis. For the rest it will happen in early July.
 * Octicons-tools.svg All wikis that have not already done so will switch to use the Remex parsing library on 5 July. This is to replace Tidy. You can help fix remaining errors.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.  21:47, 18 June 2018 (UTC)

Re. your edits to Heroine of Hackney in 2011
Please see Deletion review/Log/2018 June 17, Pauline Pearce. Matt 190417 (talk) 11:05, 17 June 2018 (UTC)
 * Hi : Thanks for the notification, inre Articles for deletion/Heroine of Hackney. North America1000 11:11, 17 June 2018 (UTC)

Discussion at User:Kudpung/What do admins do?
You are invited to join the discussion at User:Kudpung/What do admins do?. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 05:30, 19 June 2018 (UTC)

Draft:Ramzan Miah
Hello Northamerica1000, can you please take a look at Draft:Ramzan Miah if it's eligible for G4 since you nominated this for deletion two months back. The draft was first recreated under Draft:Ramzan Miah M and then under Draft:Ramzan Miah by the same user who was registered a few days back so this appears a case of UPE and sockpuppetry. Thank you. GSS (talk |c|em ) 05:22, 20 June 2018 (UTC)
 * Hello : I have compared the deleted draft with the new draft version, and also the deleted article with the new draft. The new version of the draft is entirely different in prose and style compared to the deleted draft version. Furthermore, the content of the deleted version of the article that was in main namespace is also entirely different compared to the present draft. As such, the new draft does not qualify for WP:G4 deletion. North America1000 10:43, 20 June 2018 (UTC)
 * Also Draft:Ramzan Miah M presently redirects to Draft:Ramzan Miah, which isn't of significant importance, because if the draft were to be deleted, then the redirect would be as well. North America1000 10:48, 20 June 2018 (UTC)
 * Lastly, suspicions of sockpuppetry have to be filed at WP:SPI for administrator consideration. Concerns about WP:UPE can be placed on the article talk page, and you can also discuss your concerns with the user directly on their talk page, if you'd like. North America1000 11:51, 20 June 2018 (UTC)
 * Thank you for looking at this Northamerica1000 and I will take care of the rest also can you please take a quick look at this invesigation so you can just review the off-wiki evidence. Thank you GSS (talk |c|em ) 11:58, 20 June 2018 (UTC)
 * Hi : I am working on other matters and don't plan on becoming involved in the SPI you linked above. North America1000 08:54, 21 June 2018 (UTC)
 * Actually there were some off-wiki evidecne and that was the reason I asked to take a quick look but that's fine as Berean Hunter had already taken care of it. Thank you. GSS (talk |c|em ) 09:12, 21 June 2018 (UTC)

Tech News: 2018-26
 Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent changes
 * Octicons-tools.svg PAWS, our JupyterHub system, got an upgrade and a logo. Several bugs should be fixed.

Problems
 * When a link text was in italics or had other formatting you could sometimes not edit it in the visual editor. This has now been fixed.

Changes later this week
 * Content translation users who translate between any two of Arabic, English, French, Japanese and Russian will be asked to be part of a research project. This is to create better tools for translating articles.
 * Octicons-sync.svg The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 26 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 27 June. It will be on all wikis from 28 June (calendar).

Meetings
 * Octicons-sync.svg You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 26 June at 18:30 (UTC). See how to join.
 * Octicons-sync.svg Octicons-tools.svg You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 27 June at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.  23:10, 25 June 2018 (UTC)

Portals WikiProject update #010, 30 June 2018
We've grown to 94 participants.

A warm welcome to dcljr and Kpgjhpjm.

Rating system for portals
We are in the process of developing a rating system specifically for portals, as the quality assessment scheme for articles does not apply to portals. It is coming along nicely. Your input would be very helpful. See the discussion at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Portals/General.

Better than a barnstar
One of our participants got involved with this WikiProject through interest in how the new generation of portals would be handled in WP's MOS (Manual of Style). It didn't take long before he got sucked in deeper. This has given him an opportunity to look around, and so, he has made an assessment of this WikiProject's operations:

"I'm quite frankly really impressed and inspired by what's happening here. If you'd asked me a year ago if I thought portals should just be scrapped as a failed, dragged-out experiment, I would have said 'yes'. This planning and the progress toward making it all practical is exemplary of the wiki spirit, in particular of a happy service-to-readers puppy properly wagging its technological and editorial tail instead of the other way around, and without 'drama'. It's also one of the few examples I've seen in a long time of a new wikiproject actually doing something useful and fomenting constructive activity (instead of acting as a barrier to participation, and a canvassing/ownership farm for PoV pushers). Kudos all around. — SMcCandlish"

Congratulations, everyone. Keep up the great work.

Slideshow development
We've run into a glitch with slideshows: they don't work on mobile devices.

Initially, we will need to explore options that allow portals to have slideshows without adversely affecting mobile viewers. See Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Portals/Design.

Eventually, we may need another way to do slideshows. If we do go this route, and I don't see why we wouldn't, then (user configurable) automatic slideshows also become a possibility.

TemplateStyles RfC passed
Once implemented, this will allow editors to create and edit cascading style sheets for use with templates. This will expand what we can do with portals. For more detail, see mw:Extension:TemplateStyles and TemplateStyles.

Automation effort
We've run into an obstacle using Lua-based selective transclusion: Lua is incapable (on Wikipedia) of reading in article names from categories. Because of this, we'll need to seek other approaches for fully automating the Selected article section. We are exploring sources other than categories, and other technologies besides Lua.

Speaking of using other sources, the template Transclude list item excerpt collects list items from a specified page, or from a section of that page, and transcludes the lead from a randomly selected link from that list. Courtesy of Certes. So, if you use this in a portal, and if the template specifies a page or section serviced by JL-Bot, you've now got yourself an automatically updated section in the portal. JL-Bot provides links to featured content and good articles, by subject.

What is "fully automated"? When you create a portal using a creation template, and the portal works thereafter without editor intervention, the portal is fully automated. That is, the portal is supported by features that fetch new content. If you have to add new article names every so often for it to display new content, then it is only semi-automated.

Currently, the Selected article section is semi-automated, because it requires that an editor supplies the names of the various articles for which excerpts are (automatically) displayed. For examples, look at the wikisource code of Portal:Reptiles, Portal:Ancient Tamil civilization, and Portal:Reference works.

So far, 3 sections are fully automatable: the introduction section, the categories section, and the Associated Wikimedia section.

Where is all this heading?
Henry.

Or some other name.

Eventually, the portal department will be a software program. And we won't have to do anything (unless we want to). Not even tell it what portals to create (unless we want to). It will just do it all (plus whatever else we want it to do). And we will of course give it good manners, and a name.

But, that is a few years off.

Until then, building portals is still (partially) up to us. &mdash; The Transhumanist  13:33, 30 June 2018 (UTC)

Tech News: 2018-27
 Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent changes
 * The database for tags will be changed. This will happen on 2 July on French Wikipedia and 9 July on all other wikis. Please report if recent changes get slower or you can't save edits. This could especially affect editors who use the database on ToolForge.

Problems
 * Last week's MediaWiki update was rolled back. This was because of a database problem.

Changes later this week
 * There is no new MediaWiki version this week.

Meetings
 * Octicons-sync.svg You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 3 July at 18:30 (UTC). See how to join.
 * Octicons-sync.svg Octicons-tools.svg You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 4 July at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.  00:46, 3 July 2018 (UTC)