User talk:TheSandDoctor/Archives/2022/February

Appeal
Arbitration/Requests/Enforcement. FDW777 (talk) 17:46, 30 January 2022 (UTC)


 * Please see my suggestion here. FDW777 (talk) 18:53, 31 January 2022 (UTC)
 * Vacated. -- The SandDoctor Talk 15:45, 2 February 2022 (UTC)

Protected edit request
Het TSD, hope all is well. Category:Million Award was recently renamed at CfD, here; would you mind editing your protected user subpage User:TheSandDoctor/userpage/stuff to reflect that change, so that your userpage no longer shows the deleted category and it no longer appears on the Wanted categories report? Thanks in advance, UnitedStatesian (talk) 16:46, 1 February 2022 (UTC)
 * Done -- The SandDoctor  Talk 03:18, 2 February 2022 (UTC)

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

Administrator changes
 * Gnome-colors-list-remove.svg AustralianRupert • Cimon Avaro • Euryalus • Jehochman • Nunh-huh
 * Gnome-colors-view-refresh.svg 28bytes

Bureaucrat changes
 * Gnome-colors-view-refresh.svg 28bytes



Interface administrator changes
 * Gnome-colors-view-refresh.svg Evad37 • Galobtter
 * Gnome-colors-list-remove.svg Ragesoss

Guideline and policy news
 * The Universal Code of Conduct enforcement guidelines have been published for consideration. Voting to ratify this guideline is planned to take place 7 March to 21 March. Comments can be made on the talk page.

Technical news
 * The user group  will be renamed   in around 3 weeks. This will not affect the name shown to users and is simply a change in the technical name of the user group. The change is being made for technical reasons. You can comment in Phabricator if you have objections.
 * The Reply Tool feature, which is a part of Discussion Tools, will be opt-out for everyone logged in or logged out starting 7 February 2022. Editors wishing to comment on this can do so in the relevant Village Pump discussion.

Arbitration
 * Community input is requested on several motions aimed at addressing discretionary sanctions that are no longer needed or overly broad.
 * The Arbitration Committee has published a generalised comment regarding successful appeals of sanctions that it can review (such as checkuser blocks).
 * A motion related to the Antisemitism in Poland case was passed following a declined case request.

Miscellaneous
 * Voting in the 2022 Steward elections will begin on 07 February 2022, 14:00 (UTC) and end on 26 February 2022, 13:59 (UTC). The confirmation process of current stewards is being held in parallel. You can automatically check your eligibility to vote.
 * Voting in the 2022 Community Wishlist Survey is open until 11 February 2022.

Discuss this newsletter

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Archive Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 03:02, 3 February 2022 (UTC)

Feedback request: All RFCs request for comment
Your feedback is requested &#32;at Wikipedia:Reliable sources/Noticeboard&#32; on a "All RFCs" request for comment. Thank you for helping out! You were randomly selected to receive this invitation from the list of Feedback Request Service subscribers. If you'd like not to receive these messages any more, you can opt out at any time by removing your name. Message delivered to you with love by Yapperbot :) &#124; Is this wrong? Contact my bot operator. &#124; Sent at 03:30, 5 February 2022 (UTC)

Question from Redsea178561 (05:57, 5 February 2022)
How do I edit a page with semi protected page? --Redsea178561 (talk) 05:57, 5 February 2022 (UTC)
 * Which page are you attempting to edit? You can read more about protection here and here. -- The SandDoctor Talk 06:41, 5 February 2022 (UTC)

Tech News: 2022-06
 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
 * English Wikipedia recently set up a gadget for dark mode. You can enable it there, or request help from an interface administrator to set it up on your wiki (instructions and screenshot).
 * Category counts are sometimes wrong. They will now be completely recounted at the beginning of every month.

Problems
 * A code-change last week to fix a bug with Live Preview may have caused problems with some local gadgets and user-scripts. Any code with skin-specific behaviour for  should be updated to also check for  . A code-snippet, global search, and example are available.

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

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe. 

21:15, 7 February 2022 (UTC)

Tech News: 2022-07
 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
 * Purging a category page with fewer than 5,000 members will now recount it completely. This will allow editors to fix incorrect counts when it is wrong.

Changes later this week
 * Octicons-sync.svg The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from . It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from . It will be on all wikis from (calendar).
 * Octicons-tools.svg In the AbuseFilter extension, the  function has been updated so that it does not remove the "space" character. Wikis are advised to wrap all the uses of   with   wherever necessary to keep filters' behavior unchanged. You can use the search function on Special:AbuseFilter to locate its usage.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe. 

19:17, 14 February 2022 (UTC)

WP:AFC Helper News
Hello! I wanted to drop a quick note for all of our AFC participants; nothing huge and fancy like a newsletter, but a few points of interest. Short and sweet, but there's always more to discuss at WT:AFC. Stop on by, maybe review a draft on the way? Whether you're one of our top reviewers, or haven't reviewed in a while, I want to thank you for helping out in the past and in the future. Cheers, Primefac, via MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 16:00, 16 February 2022 (UTC)
 * AFCH will now show live previews of the comment to be left on a decline.
 * The template db-afc-move has been created - this template is similar to db-move when there is a redirect in the way of an acceptance, but specifically tells the patrolling admin to let you (the draft reviewer) take care of the actual move.

TweetCiteBot activity
Hi The Sand Doctor

Hope you are keeping well.

I see that hasn't run since 9 January, which is 5 weeks ago. That leaves a backlog building up, which amounted to 1,107 pages in the 20220201 database dump, and probably closer to 2,000 by by now. Those articles are clogging up the worklist of other tools which fix bare URls, and it seems that a significant minority of them are now being filled in less helpful ways, such as with cite web.

Would it be possible to run TweetCiteBot more often, say every week or two? If it helps, I can send you the lists I create from the database dumps, to save you from making your own worklists. Brown HairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 00:17, 15 February 2022 (UTC)
 * Running it again now and will have to set it up as a chron job. What sort of hits do you include in your list? I would love to compare it to see if it is cleaner than mine, which is just a wiki search. -- The SandDoctor Talk 03:49, 15 February 2022 (UTC)
 * Great that it's running again!
 * I have emailed you my latest set of database scans, with subject line "Database scans 20220201".
 * I do two separate searches:
 * Articles with untagged Twitter bare links including brackets:
 * Articles with tagged Twitter bare links including brackets:
 * In the 20220201 dump, those gave me 1,107 and 12 pages respectively.
 * I find that wiki search is a bit of a nuisance for this sort of task because a) when used via the API it is limited to 1,000 pages at a time; b) it is prone to timeouts, which limits the complexity of the the search.
 * Hope this helps.  Brown HairedGirl  (talk) • (contribs) 04:45, 15 February 2022 (UTC)
 * Thank you! Your query is definitely more efficient. Both searches are coming up empty for me when running on insource on wiki. Can you confirm they are on your end too? Did we get the latest batch? -- The SandDoctor Talk 05:15, 15 February 2022 (UTC)
 * If they are run on wiki, they need to have the follow characters escaped:
 * I will test them with that fix.  Brown HairedGirl  (talk) • (contribs) 05:18, 15 February 2022 (UTC)
 * I got timeouts or no results until I trimmed the wikisearch massively, but I suspect that's mostly due to the weirdnesses of the wiki implementation of regex. It gets upset by a lot of fairly std regexes, so I usually find that wiki searches need an insane mount of trial-and-error, and are rarely more than a crude subset of what I am after.
 * This search for  gave me 215 hits before timing out.  A lot of those look like they should be fixable by TweetCiteBot.
 * Did you get the lists which I emailed you? I think that if you feed them to the bot, it will probably find work to do on them.   Brown HairedGirl  (talk) • (contribs) 05:31, 15 February 2022 (UTC)
 * PS this search for  gives me 107 hits which the bot could safely fill, e.g.     Brown HairedGirl  (talk) • (contribs) 05:37, 15 February 2022 (UTC)


 * Apologies for the delay, things have been a touch hectic lately. Rewrote how the bot collects its list to run off of a text file and ran it over your list you emailed me. It picked up 214 for edits (those are now done). I think that this works well, you running the report and sending it so that I can run the bot over it. Do you think that you could continue doing this or update it on a git or something? -- The SandDoctor Talk 06:07, 20 February 2022 (UTC)
 * Hey no prob. I hope that things get less hectic for you.
 * Glad that list helped. 214 extra fixes all helps.
 * I am v happy to send you my scans as they happen. Today is a dump day, and the usual schedule is that after a humungous amount of processing the dump becomes available late on the following day at https://dumps.wikimedia.org/enwiki/, and I complete my scans on the day after that. So the email will usually be sent on dumpDay+2, i.e. on the 3rd or 22nd of the month. Sometimes it may be a day or two late.
 * The ZIP files I make of my scans of each dump include a plain text file listing the regexes used. So if I get run over by a bus, you can re-create the job   Brown HairedGirl  (talk) • (contribs) 07:03, 20 February 2022 (UTC)

Tech News: 2022-08
 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
 * Special:Nuke will now provide the standard deletion reasons (editable at MediaWiki:Deletereason-dropdown ) to use when mass-deleting pages. This was a request in the 2022 Community Wishlist Survey.
 * At Wikipedias, all new accounts now get the Growth features by default when creating an account. Communities are encouraged to update their help resources. Previously, only 80% of new accounts would get the Growth features. A few Wikipedias remain unaffected by this change.
 * You can now prevent specific images that are used in a page from appearing in other locations, such as within PagePreviews or Search results. This is done with the markup  . For example,.
 * Octicons-tools.svg There has been a change to the HTML of Special:Contributions, Special:MergeHistory, and History pages, to support the grouping of changes by date in the mobile skin. While unlikely, this may affect gadgets and user scripts. A list of all the HTML changes is on Phabricator.

Events
 * Community Wishlist Survey results have been published. The ranking of prioritized proposals is also available.

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

Future changes
 * The software to play videos and audio files on pages will change soon on all wikis. The old player will be removed. Some audio players will become wider after this change. The new player has been a beta feature for over four years.
 * Octicons-tools.svg Toolforge's underlying operating system is being updated. If you maintain any tools there, there are two options for migrating your tools into the new system. There are details, deadlines, and instructions on Wikitech.
 * Administrators will soon have the option to delete/undelete the associated "talk" page when they are deleting a given page. An API endpoint with this option will also be available. This was a request from the 2021 Wishlist Survey.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe. 

19:11, 21 February 2022 (UTC)

Removal of unreferenced template from drafts
Hi TheSandDoctor! In an effort to help editors who wonder why their drafts are declined, I sometimes add unreferenced or unreferenced section to them. I see your bot removes these templates (e.g. ). I agree with removing the orphan and uncategorized templates, but could you please consider leaving unreferenced or unreferenced section alone, for the benefit of both the draft author and reviewers? Thanks! GoingBatty (talk) 03:50, 21 January 2022 (UTC)
 * This was approved back in 2018. The rationale behind the removals is that the templates are non-applicable to drafts, pollute the tracking categories, and could cause potential confusion because they explicitly call whatever they are placed on an "article" (latter point referring to unreferenced related templates). This was proposed by during his review of the BRFA. Categories are removed because drafts shouldn't be categorized, same with orphan etc. -- The SandDoctor  Talk 04:03, 21 January 2022 (UTC)
 * Before your kind and quick response, I reverted your bot's edit to Draft:Landon Trail so it now contains unreferenced section again.
 * Although you state the templates are non-applicable to drafts, I believe that unreferenced section is applicable because proper referencing is essential to having drafts approved.
 * Although you state the templates pollute the tracking categories, I do not see that unreferenced section adds categories to the draft. (Even if it did, Category:All articles needing additional references states that it "contains non-article pages".)
 * Although you state the templates could cause potential confusion because they explicitly call whatever they are placed on an "article", the unreferenced section template also does not use the word "article".
 * Could you and please look at Draft:Landon Trail and see if I'm missing anything?  Thanks!  GoingBatty (talk) 04:30, 21 January 2022 (UTC)
 * I have disabled the task's automated timer for the time being so that it won't run and cause an edit war while this is addressed. -- The SandDoctor Talk 06:01, 21 January 2022 (UTC)
 * A draft reviewer should not need a banner to see whether a draft (or section of one) is missing or requires references. If they are, and it is enough of a burden to merit declining the draft, then it should be declined as "insufficient sources" or a comment left to that effect. I still maintain that there is little reason to have those maintenance templates in draft space. Primefac (talk) 14:11, 21 January 2022 (UTC)
 * I'll concede that a draft reviewer should not need a banner. However, the Help desk and Teahouse get multiple posts a day from editors who don't understand why their drafts were declined, and I hope that adding citation needed and unreferenced section to their drafts is helpful to them.  I don't see the harm in leaving unreferenced section on a draft.  GoingBatty (talk) 14:16, 21 January 2022 (UTC)
 * In my somewhat-jaded opinion, adding more banners to a page when users refuse to read the existing ones (including the decline message that often indicates a lack of referencing, and notes left by the reviewers indicating a lack of referencing) is less than helpful. Just like at TEA and the HD, every day we see dozens of helpees in our IRC help channel with the exact same questions, and 90% of the time the answer is on the banners already placed at the top of the page. Some people just need it spelled out for them, banner or no.
 * Removal of these banners has generally been supported by WT:AfC project members (which is why I suggested added it in to the bot's task), but if you want to start a thread there and ask if it's worth having these specific banners stay on the page, then I will gladly revoke that section of the bot's remit. Primefac (talk) 14:36, 21 January 2022 (UTC)
 * Thank you for the suggestion. I posted at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Articles for creation.  GoingBatty (talk) 15:00, 21 January 2022 (UTC)


 * Given that the discussion fizzled without an outcome, does the current approval still stand and am I able to start the task back up? -- The SandDoctor Talk 05:44, 20 February 2022 (UTC)
 * Yes, I believe that would be acceptable. Primefac (talk) 11:24, 21 February 2022 (UTC)
 * Thank you for clarifying. Restarted. -- The SandDoctor Talk 06:39, 22 February 2022 (UTC)

Question from ImformationProvider (01:08, 23 February 2022)
Hi, how do I create my own Wikipedia page? --ImformationProvider (talk) 01:08, 23 February 2022 (UTC)
 * I would recommend reviewing this guide, this tutorial, and the Articles for Creation process. Please let me know if you have any other specific questions! -- The SandDoctor  Talk 00:17, 24 February 2022 (UTC)