User talk:Redalert2fan/Archive 26

Editing news 2020 #3


Seven years ago this week, the Editing team made the visual editor available by default to all logged-in editors using the desktop site at the English Wikipedia. Here's what happened since its introduction:


 * The 50 millionth edit using the visual editor on desktop was made this year. More than 10 million edits have been made here at the English Wikipedia.
 * More than 2 million new articles have been created in the visual editor. More than 600,000 of these new articles were created during 2019.
 * Almost 5 million edits on the mobile site have been made with the visual editor. Most of these edits have been made since the Editing team started improving the mobile visual editor in 2018.
 * The proportion of all edits made using the visual editor has been increasing every year.
 * Editors have made more than 7 million edits in the 2017 wikitext editor, including starting 600,000 new articles in it. The 2017 wikitext editor is VisualEditor's built-in wikitext mode.  You can enable it in your preferences.
 * On 17 November 2019, the first edit from outer space was made in the mobile visual editor.
 * In 2019, 35% of the edits by newcomers, and half of their first edits, were made using the visual editor. This percentage has been increasing every year since the tool became available.

Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 02:06, 3 July 2020 (UTC)

Happy First Edit Day!
 Happy First Edit Day! Have a very happy first edit anniversary!

From the Birthday Committee, Megan Barris   (Lets talk📧)  06:16, 11 August 2020 (UTC)
 * , Thanks! Redalert2fan (talk) 20:56, 16 August 2020 (UTC)

Happy First Edit Day!
 Happy First Edit Day! Have a very happy first edit anniversary!

From the Birthday Committee, CAPTAIN RAJU (T) 22:19, 11 August 2020 (UTC)
 * , Thanks! Redalert2fan (talk) 20:57, 16 August 2020 (UTC)

September Women in Red edithons
--Megalibrarygirl (talk) 17:53, 29 August 2020 (UTC) via MassMessaging

Editing news 2020 #4
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Reply tool


The Reply tool  has been available as a Beta Feature at the Arabic, Dutch, French and Hungarian Wikipedias since 31 March 2020. The first analysis showed positive results.


 * More than 300 editors used the Reply tool at these four Wikipedias. They  posted more than 7,400 replies during the study period.
 * Of the people who posted a comment with the Reply tool, about 70% of them used the tool multiple times. About 60% of them used it on multiple days.
 * Comments from Wikipedia editors are positive. One said, أعتقد أن الأداة تقدم فائدة ملحوظة؛ فهي تختصر الوقت لتقديم رد بدلًا من التنقل بالفأرة إلى وصلة تعديل القسم أو الصفحة، التي تكون بعيدة عن التعليق الأخير في الغالب، ويصل المساهم لصندوق التعديل بسرعة باستخدام الأداة.  ("I think the tool has a significant impact; it saves time to reply while the classic way is to move with a mouse to the Edit link to edit the section or the page which is generally far away from the comment. And the user reaches to the edit box so quickly to use the Reply tool.")

The Editing team released the Reply tool as a Beta Feature at eight other Wikipedias in early August. Those Wikipedias are in the Chinese, Czech, Georgian, Serbian, Sorani Kurdish, Swedish, Catalan, and Korean languages. If you would like to use the Reply tool at your wiki, please tell User talk:Whatamidoing (WMF).

The Reply tool is still in active development. Per request from the Dutch Wikipedia and other editors, you will be able to customize the edit summary. (The default edit summary is "Reply".) A "ping" feature is available in the Reply tool's visual editing mode. This feature searches for usernames. Per request from the Arabic Wikipedia, each wiki will be able to set its own preferred symbol for pinging editors. Per request from editors at the Japanese and Hungarian Wikipedias, each wiki can define a preferred signature prefix in the page MediaWiki:Discussiontools-signature-prefix. For example, some languages omit spaces before signatures. Other communities want to add a dash or a non-breaking space.

New requirements for user signatures

 * The new requirements for custom user signatures began on 6 July 2020. If you try to create a custom signature that does not meet the requirements, you will get an error message.
 * Existing custom signatures that do not meet the new requirements will be unaffected temporarily . Eventually, all custom signatures will need to meet the new requirements. You can check your signature and see lists of active editors whose custom signatures need to be corrected.  Volunteers have been contacting editors who need to change their custom signatures.  If you need to change your custom signature, then please read the help page.

Next: New discussion tool
Next, the team will be working on a tool for quickly and easily starting a new discussion section to a talk page. To follow the development of this new tool, please put the New Discussion Tool project page on your watchlist.

Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 18:48, 31 August 2020 (UTC)

October editathons from Women in Red
--Megalibrarygirl (talk) 15:11, 21 September 2020 (UTC) via MassMessaging

November edith-a-thons from Women in Red
--Megalibrarygirl (talk) 18:49, 28 October 2020 (UTC) via MassMessaging

December with Women in Red
--Megalibrarygirl (talk) 16:41, 26 November 2020 (UTC) via MassMessaging

New Page Patrol December Newsletter
Hello ,



It has been a productive year for New Page Patrol as we've roughly cut the size of the New Page Patrol queue in half this year. We have been fortunate to have a lot of great work done by who was the reviewer of the most pages and redirects this past year. Thanks and credit go to and  who join Rosguill in repeating in the top 10 from last year. Thanks to, , and who all got the NPR permission this year and joined the top 10. Also new to the top ten is DannyS712 bot III, programmed by which has helped to dramatically reduce the number of redirects that have needed human patrolling by patrolling certain types of redirects (e.g. for differences in accents) and by also patrolling editors who are on on the redirect whitelist.
 * Year in review

has been named reviewer of the year for 2020. John has held the permission for just over 6 months and in that time has helped cut into the queue by reviewing more than 18,000 articles. His talk page shows his efforts to communicate with users, upholding NPP's goal of nurturing new users and quality over quantity.
 * Reviewer of the Year

As a special recognition and thank you has been awarded the first NPP Technical Achievement Award. His work programming the bot has helped us patrol redirects tremendously - more than 60,000 redirects this past year. This has been a large contribution to New Page Patrol and definitely is worthy of recognition.
 * NPP Technical Achievement Award

Six Month Queue Data: Today – 2262 Low – 2232 High – 10271

To opt-out of future mailings, please remove yourself here 18:16, 10 December 2020 (UTC)

A New Year With Women in Red!
--Megalibrarygirl (talk) 03:02, 29 December 2020 (UTC) via MassMessaging

Editing news 2021 #1
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Reply tool
The Reply tool  is available at most other Wikipedias.


 * The Reply tool has been deployed as an opt-out preference to all editors at the Arabic, Czech, and Hungarian Wikipedias.
 * It is also available as a Beta Feature at almost all Wikipedias except for the English, Russian, and German-language Wikipedias. If it is not available at your wiki, you can request it by following these simple instructions.

Research notes:


 * As of January 2021, more than 3,500 editors have used the Reply tool to post about 70,000 comments.
 * There is preliminary data from the Arabic, Czech, and Hungarian Wikipedia on the Reply tool. Junior Contributors who use the Reply tool are more likely to publish the comments that they start writing than those who use full-page wikitext editing.
 * The Editing and Parsing teams have significantly reduced the number of edits that affect other parts of the page. About 0.3% of edits did this during the last month. Some of the remaining changes are automatic corrections for Special:LintErrors.
 * Венов_дијаграм.svg A large A/B test will start soon. This is part of the process to offer the Reply tool to everyone.  During this test, half of all editors at 24 Wikipedias (not including the English Wikipedia) will have the Reply tool automatically enabled, and half will not. Editors at those Wikipeedias can still turn it on or off for their own accounts in Special:Preferences.

New discussion tool
The new tool for starting new discussions (new sections) will join the Discussion tools in Special:Preferences at the end of January. You can try the tool for yourself. You can leave feedback in this thread or on the talk page.

Next: Notifications
During Talk pages consultation 2019, editors said that it should be easier to know about new activity in conversations they are interested in. The Notifications project is just beginning. What would help you become aware of new comments? What's working with the current system? Which pages at your wiki should the team look at? Please post your advice at mw:Talk:Talk pages project/Notifications.

–Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 01:02, 23 January 2021 (UTC)

Happy Birthday!
 Happy Birthday! Have a very happy birthday on your special day!

Best wishes, CAPTAIN RAJU (T) 07:03, 3 March 2021 (UTC)
 * Thanks!! Redalert2fan (talk) 12:37, 3 March 2021 (UTC)

April editathons from Women in Red
--Megalibrarygirl (talk) 20:17, 22 March 2021 (UTC) via MassMessaging

May 2021 at Women in Red
--Rosiestep (talk) 21:37, 28 April 2021 (UTC) via MassMessaging

Editing news 2021 #2
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Earlier this year, the Editing team ran a large study of the Reply Tool. The main goal was to find out whether the Reply Tool helped newer editors communicate on wiki. The second goal was to see whether the comments that newer editors made using the tool needed to be reverted more frequently than comments newer editors made with the existing wikitext page editor.

The key results were:


 * Newer editors who had automatic ("default on") access to the Reply tool were more likely to post a comment on a talk page.
 * The comments that newer editors made with the Reply Tool were also less likely to be reverted than the comments that newer editors made with page editing.

These results give the Editing team confidence that the tool is helpful.

Looking ahead

The team is planning to make the Reply tool available to everyone as an opt-out preference in the coming months. This has already happened at the Arabic, Czech, and Hungarian Wikipedias.

The next step is to resolve a technical challenge. Then, they will deploy the Reply tool first to the Wikipedias that participated in the study. After that, they will deploy it, in stages, to the other Wikipedias and all WMF-hosted wikis.

You can turn on "Discussion Tools" in Beta Features now. After you get the Reply tool, you can change your preferences at any time in Special:Preferences.

–Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk)

00:27, 16 June 2021 (UTC)

Articles for Creation July 2021 Backlog Elimination Drive
 Hello :

WikiProject Articles for creation is holding a  month long Backlog Drive!

The goal of this drive is to eliminate the backlog of unreviewed articles. The drive is running until 31 July 2021.

Barnstars will be given out as awards at the end of the drive.

There is currently a backlog of over articles, so start reviewing articles. We're looking forward to your help!

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) on behalf of WikiProject Articles for Creation at 21:54, 7 July 2021 (UTC). If you do not wish to recieve future notification, please remove your name from the mailing list.

August Editathons with Women in Red
--Megalibrarygirl (talk) 22:27, 23 July 2021 (UTC) via MassMessaging

Happy First Edit Day!
 Happy First Edit Day! Have a very happy first edit anniversary!

From the Birthday Committee, CAPTAIN RAJU (T) 08:55, 11 August 2021 (UTC)

New Page Patrol newsletter September 2021
Hello ,

Please join this discussion - there is increase in the abuse of Wikipedia and its processes by POV pushers, Paid Editors, and by holders of various user rights including Autopatrolled. Even our review systems themselves at AfC and NPR have been infiltrated. The good news is that detection is improving, but the downside is that it creates the need for a huge clean up - which of course adds to backlogs.

Copyright violations are also a serious issue. Most non-regular contributors do not understand why, and most of our  Reviewers are not experts on copyright law - and can't be expected to be, but  there is excellent, easy-to-follow advice on COPYVIO detection here.

At the time of the last newsletter (#25, December 2020) the backlog was only just over 2,000 articles. New Page Review is an official system. It's the only firewall against the inclusion of new, improper pages.

There are currently 706 New Page Reviewers plus a further 1,080 admins, but as much as nearly 90% of the patrolling is still being done by around only the 20 or so most regular patrollers.

If you are no longer very active on Wikipedia or you no longer wish to be part of the New Page Reviewer user group, please consider asking any admin to remove you from the list. This will enable NPP to have a better overview of its performance and what improvements need to be made to the process or its software. Various awards are due to be allocated by the end of the year and barnstars are overdue. If you would like to manage this, please let us know. Indeed, if you are interested in coordinating NPR, it does not involve much time and the tasks are described here. To opt-out of future mailings, please remove yourself here. Sent to 827 users. 04:32, 16 September 2021 (UTC)

Your submission at Articles for creation: Heuliez GX 437 (November 15)
 Your recent article submission to Articles for Creation has been reviewed! Unfortunately, it has not been accepted at this time. The reason left by Mikehawk10 was:

Please check the submission for any additional comments left by the reviewer. You are encouraged to edit the submission to address the issues raised and resubmit when they have been resolved.


 * If you would like to continue working on the submission, go to Draft:Heuliez GX 437 and click on the "Edit" tab at the top of the window.
 * If you now believe the draft cannot meet Wikipedia's standards or do not wish to progress it further, you may request deletion. Please go to Draft:Heuliez GX 437, click on the "Edit" tab at the top of the window, add "Db-g7" at the top of the draft text and click the blue "publish changes" button to save this edit.
 * If you do not make any further changes to your draft, in 6 months, it will be considered abandoned and may be deleted.
 * If you need any assistance, or have experienced any untoward behavior associated with this submission, you can ask for help at the [//en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:WikiProject_Articles_for_creation/Help_desk&action=edit&section=new&nosummary=1&preload=Template:AfC_decline/HD_preload&preloadparams%5B%5D=Draft:Heuliez_GX_437 Articles for creation help desk], on the [//en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:Mikehawk10&action=edit&section=new&nosummary=1&preload=Template:AfC_decline/HD_preload&preloadparams%5B%5D=Draft:Heuliez_GX_437 reviewer's talk page] or use Wikipedia's real-time chat help from experienced editors.

— Mikehawk10 (talk) 04:04, 15 November 2021 (UTC)

Thanks for your participation in the November 2021 New Pages Patrol drive
Thank you for reviewing or re-reviewing 11 articles, which helped contribute to an overall 1276-article reduction in the backlog during the drive. (t &#183; c)  buidhe  12:51, 3 December 2021 (UTC)