User talk:Wittylama/Archive8

GWToolset
Hi Liam. I'm the guy seated on your left, and I'm pretty bored with the talk right now. I have 25k photos worth 6 years of my heritage documentation work that I'm planning to upload on Commons; would you be able to help me on this thru GWToolset? Thanks. Joelaldor (talk) 14:20, 7 August 2014 (UTC)

VisualEditor global newsletter—June 2014
Did you know? The character formatting menu, or "" menu lets you set bold, italic, and other text styles. "Clear formatting" removes all text styles and removes links to other pages.

Do you think that clear formatting should remove links? Are there changes you would like to see for this menu? Share your opinion at MediaWiki.org.

The user guide has information about how to use VisualEditor. The VisualEditor team is mostly working to fix bugs, improve performance, reduce technical debt, and other infrastructure needs. You can find on Mediawiki.org weekly updates detailing recent work.


 * They have moved the "" link out of the "" menu, into the "" menu. Within dialog boxes, buttons are now more accessible (via the Tab key) from the keyboard.
 * You can now see the target of the link when you click on it, without having to open the inspector.
 * The team also expanded TemplateData: You can now add a parameter type  "  for dates and times in the ISO 8601 format, and  "  for values which are true or false. Also, templates that redirect to other templates (like   →  ) now get the TemplateData of their target (bug 50964).  You can test TemplateData by editing mw:Template:Sandbox/doc.
 * Category: and File: pages now display their contents correctly after saving an edit (bug 65349, bug 64239)
 * They have also improved reference editing: You should no longer be able to add empty citations with VisualEditor (bug 64715), as with references.  When you edit a reference, you can now empty it and click the "use an existing reference" button to replace it with another reference instead.
 * It is now possible to edit inline images with VisualEditor. Remember that inline images cannot display captions, so existing captions get removed.  Many other bugs related to images were also fixed.
 * You can now add and edit   and   in the "" menu, rounding out the full set of page options currently planned.
 * The tool to insert special characters is now wider and simpler.

Looking ahead
The VisualEditor team has posted a draft of their goals for the next fiscal year. You can read them and suggest changes on MediaWiki.org.

The team posts details about planned work on VisualEditor's roadmap. You will soon be able to drag-and-drop text as well as images. If you drag an image to a new place, it won't let you place it in the middle of a paragraph. All dialog boxes and windows will be simplified based on user testing and feedback. The VisualEditor team plans to add autofill features for citations. Your ideas about making referencing quick and easy are still wanted. Support for upright image sizes is being developed. The designers are also working on support for viewing and editing hidden HTML comments and adding rows and columns to tables.

Supporting your wiki
Please read VisualEditor/Citation tool for information on configuring the new citation template menu, labeled "". This menu will not appear unless it has been configured on your wiki.

If you speak a language other than English, we need your help with translating the user guide. The guide is out of date or incomplete for many languages, and what's on your wiki may not be the most recent translation. Please contact me if you need help getting started with translation work on MediaWiki.org.

VisualEditor can be made available to most non-Wikipedia projects. If your community would like to test VisualEditor, please contact product manager James Forrester or file an enhancement request in Bugzilla.

Please share your questions, suggestions, or problems by posting a note at mw:VisualEditor/Feedback or by joining the office hours on Saturday, 19 July 2014 at 21:00 UTC (daytime for the Americas and Pacific Islands) or on Thursday, 14 August 2014 at 9:00 UTC (daytime for Europe, Middle East, Asia).

To change your subscription to this newsletter, please see the subscription pages on Meta or the English Wikipedia. Thank you! Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 04:59, 25 June 2014 (UTC)

Balaichak Raja Rammohan Vidyapith
Hi. Just to remind you that A7 doesn't apply to educational establishments. Exactly what an educational establishment is, that's a subject of desultory discussion, but schools and universities definitely are. It's the converted office suite on the third floor of a probably run-down block that claim to teach English to would-be emigrants (or immigrants depending on location...) places that are dubious, along with degree mills, etc. PROD and AfD are available, but high schools and unis are generally considered notable per se, like railway stations. (Like bus stations, junior and middle schools are not so considered, but can't be A7ed.) Peridon (talk) 18:34, 5 July 2014 (UTC)
 * Thanks Peridon, I wasn't aware that high schools are now considered inherently notable - I recall some debate years ago about my own high school on that basis and hadn't followed that particular area of consensus since. I agree - the definition of what actually counts as a 'real' school is a whole different problem... :-) Wittylama 00:00, 9 July 2014 (UTC)

This Month in GLAM: June 2014
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Discretionary sanctions notification
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DYK for Statue of Queen Victoria, Sydney
— Crisco 1492 (talk) 15:10, 2 August 2014 (UTC)

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VisualEditor newsletter—July and August 2014
''The VisualEditor team is currently working mostly to fix bugs, improve performance, reduce technical debt, and other infrastructure needs. You can find on Mediawiki.org weekly updates detailing recent work.'' VisualEditor - Link editing inline box.png.

The user guide is also being updated.
 * alt=Screenshot of VisualEditor's link tool|240px]]

The biggest visible change since the last newsletter was to the dialog boxes. The design for each dialog box and window was simplified. The most commonly needed buttons are now at the top. Based on user feedback, the buttons are now labeled with simple words (like "Cancel" or "Done") instead of potentially confusing icons (like "<" or "X"). Many of the buttons to edit links, images, and other items now also show the linked page, image name, or other useful information when you click on them.
 * Hidden HTML comments (notes visible to editors, but not to readers) can now be read, edited, inserted, and removed. A small icon (a white exclamation mark on a dot) marks the location of each comments.  You can click on the icon to see the comment.
 * You can now drag and drop text and templates as well as images. A new placement line makes it much easier to see where you are dropping the item.  Images can no longer be dropped into the middle of paragraphs.
 * All references and footnotes (  tags) are now made through the "" menu, including the "" (manual formatting) footnotes and the ability to re-use an existing citation, both of which were previously accessible only through the "" menu. The "" is still added via the "" menu.
 * When you add an image or other media file, you are now prompted to add an image caption immediately. You can also replace an image whilst keeping the original caption and other settings.
 * All tablet users visiting the mobile web version of Wikipedias will be able to opt-in to a version of VisualEditor from 14 August. You can test the new tool by choosing the beta version of the mobile view in the Settings menu.
 * The link tool has a new "Open" button that will open a linked page in another tab so you can make sure a link is the right one.
 * The "Cancel" button in the toolbar has been removed based on user testing. To cancel any edit, you can leave the page by clicking the Read tab, the back button in your browser, or closing the browser window without saving your changes.

Looking ahead
The team posts details about planned work on the VisualEditor roadmap. The VisualEditor team plans to add auto-fill features for citations soon. Your ideas about making referencing quick and easy are still wanted. Support for upright image sizes is being developed. The designers are also working on support for adding rows and columns to tables. Work to support Internet Explorer is ongoing.

Feedback opportunities
The Editing team will be making two presentations this weekend at Wikimania in London. The first is with product manager James Forrester and developer Trevor Parscal on Saturday at 16:30. The second is with developers Roan Kattouw and Trevor Parscal on Sunday at 12:30.

Please share your questions, suggestions, or problems by posting a note at the VisualEditor feedback page or by joining the office hours discussion on Thursday, 14 August 2014 at 09:00 UTC (daytime for Europe, Middle East and Asia) or on Thursday, 18 September 2014 at 16:00 UTC (daytime for the Americas; evening for Europe).

If you'd like to get this newsletter on your own page (about once a month), please subscribe at w:en:Wikipedia:VisualEditor/Newsletter for English Wikipedia only or at Meta for any project. Thank you! Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 18:14, 8 August 2014 (UTC)

This Month in GLAM: July 2014
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This Month in GLAM: August 2014
Subscribe/Unsubscribe · Global message delivery · Romaine 13:16, 12 September 2014 (UTC)

Bd Photograph on Chytridiomycota
Does wiki allow the appearance of the same photo on more than one page? If so, I think the image you added to Chytridiomycota should also be placed on Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis. TelosCricket (talk) 13:38, 19 September 2014 (UTC) P.S. Very cool image.
 * Hi user:TelosCricket - I think you'll find that the image already is used in both those pages! Wittylama 14:03, 19 September 2014 (UTC)
 * Oh, haha! I guess I just missed it or it didn't load when I went to see if it was there. It is an awesome pic! TelosCricket (talk) 20:17, 21 September 2014 (UTC)

Disambiguation link notification for September 28
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Books and Bytes - Issue 8
 The Wikipedia Library Books & Bytes

Issue 8, August-September2014 by, ,

 Read the full newsletter   MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 04:51, 7 October 2014 (UTC)
 * TWL now a Wikimedia Foundation program, moves on from grant status
 * Four new donations, including large DeGruyter parntership, pilot with Elsevier
 * New TWL coordinators, Wikimania news, new library platform discussions, Wiki Loves Libraries update, and more
 * Spotlight: "Traveling Through History" - an editor talks about his experiences with a TWL newspaper archive, Newspapers.com

VisualEditor newsletter—September and October 2014
Did you know? TemplateData is a separate program that organizes information about the parameters that can be used in a template. VisualEditor reads that data, and uses it to populate its simplified template dialogs.

With the new TemplateData editor, it is easier to add information about parameters, because the ones you need to use are pre-loaded.

See the help page for TemplateData for more information about adding TemplateData. The user guide has information about how to use VisualEditor. Since the last newsletter, the Editing team has reduced technical debt, simplified some workflows for template and citation editing, made major progress on Internet Explorer support, and fixed over 125 bugs and requests. Several performance improvements were made, especially to the system around re-using references and reference lists. Weekly updates are posted on Mediawiki.org.

There were three issues that required urgent fixes: a deployment error that meant that many buttons didn't work correctly (bugs 69856 and 69864), a problem with edit conflicts that left the editor with nowhere to go (bug 69150), and a problem in Internet Explorer 11 that caused replaced some categories with a link to the system message, MediaWiki:Badtitletext (bug 70894) when you saved. The developers apologize for the disruption, and thank the people who reported these problems quickly.

Increased support for devices and browsers
Internet Explorer 10 and 11 users now have access to VisualEditor. This means that about 5% of Wikimedia's users will now get an "Edit" tab alongside the existing "Edit source" tab. Support for Internet Explorer 9 is planned for the future.

Tablet users browsing the site's mobile mode now have the option of using a mobile-specific form of VisualEditor. More editing tools, and availability of VisualEditor on smartphones, is planned for the future. The mobile version of VisualEditor was tweaked to show the context menu for citations instead of basic references (bug 68897). A bug that broke the editor in iOS was corrected and released early (bug 68949). For mobile tablet users, three bugs related to scrolling were fixed (bug 66697, bug 68828, bug 69630). You can use VisualEditor on the mobile version of Wikipedia from your tablet by clicking on the cog in the top-right when editing a page and choosing which editor to use.

TemplateData editor
A tool for editing TemplateData will be deployed to more Wikipedias soon.  Other Wikipedias and some other projects may receive access next month. This tool makes it easier to add TemplateData to the template's documentation. When the tool is enabled, it will add a button above every editing window for a template (including documentation subpages). To use it, edit the template or a subpage, and then click the "" button at the top. Read the help page for TemplateData. You can test the TemplateData editor in a sandbox at Mediawiki.org. Remember that TemplateData should be placed either on a documentation subpage or on the template page itself. Only one block of TemplateData will be used per template.

Other changes
Several interface messages and labels were changed to be simpler, clearer, or shorter, based on feedback from translators and editors. The formatting of dialogs was changed, and more changes to the appearance will be coming soon, when VisualEditor implements the new MediaWiki theme from Design. (A preview of the theme is available on Labs for developers.) The team also made some improvements for users of the Monobook skin that improved the size of text in toolbars and fixed selections that overlapped menus.

VisualEditor-MediaWiki now supplies the  or   class on links to redirects and disambiguation pages, so that user gadgets that colour in these in types of links can be created.

Templates' fields can be marked as ' required ' in TemplateData. If a parameter is marked as required, then you cannot delete that field when you add a new template or edit an existing one (bug 60358).

Language support improved by making annotations use bi-directional isolation (so they display correctly with cursoring behaviour as expected) and by fixing a bug that crashed VisualEditor when trying to edit a page with a  attribute but no   set (bug 69955).

Looking ahead
The team posts details about planned work on the VisualEditor roadmap. The VisualEditor team plans to add auto-fill features for citations soon, perhaps in late October.

The team is also working on support for adding rows and columns to tables, and early work for this may appear within the month. Please comment on the design at Mediawiki.org.

In the future, real-time collaborative editing may be possible in VisualEditor. Some early preparatory work for this was recently done.

Supporting your wiki
At Wikimania, several developers gave presentations about VisualEditor. A translation sprint focused on improving access to VisualEditor was supported by many people. Deryck Chan was the top translator. Special honors also go to संजीव कुमार (Sanjeev Kumar), Robby, Takot, Bachounda, Bjankuloski06 and Ата. A summary of the work achieved by the translation community has been posted here. Thank you all for your work.

VisualEditor can be made available to most non-Wikipedia projects. If your community would like to test VisualEditor, please contact product manager James Forrester or file an enhancement request in Bugzilla.

Please join the office hours on Saturday, 18 October 2014 at 18:00 UTC (daytime for the Americas; evening for Africa and Europe) and on Wednesday, 19 November at 16:00 UTC on IRC.

''Give feedback on VisualEditor at mw:VisualEditor/Feedback. Subscribe or unsubscribe at Meta. To help with translations, please subscribe to the Translators mailing list or contact Elitre at Meta. Thank you!''

— Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 00:11, 8 October 2014 (UTC)

This Month in GLAM: September 2014
Subscribe/Unsubscribe · Global message delivery · Romaine 17:31, 11 October 2014 (UTC)

October 2014
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 * * Monumento a Colón, 1877, in the Paseo de la Reforma, Mexico City
 * Christopher Columbus and His Voyages] Selections from the Collections of the Library of Congress This link takes you to a page with thumb images but link chain is defunct. -->

Madero street
Hey! I see you arevworking on translating the Madero Street article. Were you thinking of doing other streets in the historic center? One reason im curious is that it might be worth making a section ffor streets in the bottom navbox. There is an English article for Eje Central, which runs through the area.Thelmadatter (talk) 18:03, 2 November 2014 (UTC)
 * Hi Leigh, yes I am working on the article - and I think it's ready for a local to have a look to see if my translation is factually correct from the ES version! I've used several of your pictures too. And I agree, the navbox for mexico city historical centre needs to be cleaned up. I don't think I'll be doing another street, but already it's pretty messy. Also, there isn't a navbox for mexico city in general, which is something I noticed when I wrote Monument to Cuauhtémoc recently. Also - do you think you could help insert a map (like I did in the monument article)? I can't make it work for this infobox and it's frustrating me. Wittylama 18:45, 2 November 2014 (UTC)
 * i took a quick look at both. I made only a couple of tiny changes to the Madero Street article and one somewhat sugnificant one to the monument article, in the lead. Porfirio Diaz was anything but a promoter of indigenismo. In the body it states that the statue was created to promote Diaz's then new regime. Neo indigenismo was a short lived movement the depicted indigenous themes in European style, in a sense co-opting indigenous themes for the ruling Spanish/Creole class, which is why Diaz supported this work. However during his 30-some-odd-year reign Diaz had tried to "modernize" Mexico, especially economically and culturally, which for him meant injection as much Europe as he could, especially French influence. The Palacio de Bellas Artes was probably his piece de resistance (sp?), about as gaudily "French" as you can get, (oddly the interior is Art Deco with murals from the Mexican muralism movement, both later additions) The Mexican Revolution was in reaction to Diaz's economic policies and Mexican muralism against his Euro-centrist cultural policies. How do I know all this? Ive been writing a lot of Mexican art articles, including Mexican art and Mexican muralism. Im not an art fanatic but I just kind of drifted there from all my articles on places and Mexican handcrafts. BTW Im traveling and stuck with an iPad,which I dont like but Ill see what I can do about the map.Thelmadatter (talk) 20:12, 2 November 2014 (UTC)

New Wikipedia Library Accounts Now Available (November 2014)
Hello Wikimedians! The Wikipedia Library is announcing signups today for, free, full-access accounts to published research as part of our Publisher Donation Program. You can sign up for:


 * DeGruyter: 1000 new accounts for English and German-language research. Sign up on one of two language Wikipedias:
 * English signup
 * Deutsch signup
 * Fold3: 100 new accounts for American history and military archives
 * Scotland's People: 100 new accounts for Scottish genealogy database
 * British Newspaper Archive: expanded by 100+ accounts for British newspapers
 * Highbeam: 100+ remaining accounts for newspaper and magazine archives
 *  Questia: 100+ remaining accounts for journal and social science articles
 * JSTOR: 100+ remaining accounts for journal archives

Do better research and help expand the use of high quality references across Wikipedia projects: sign up today! --The Wikipedia Library Team 23:25, 5 November 2014 (UTC)


 * You can host and coordinate signups for a Wikipedia Library branch in your own language. Please contact Ocaasi (WMF).
 * This message was delivered via the Mass Message to the Book & Bytes recipient list.

VisualEditor newsletter—November 2014
Did you know? VisualEditor is also available on the mobile version of Wikipedia. Login and click the pencil icon to open the page you want to edit. Click on the gear-shaped settings in the upper-right corner, to pick which editor to use. Choose "Edit" to use VisualEditor, or "Edit source" to use the wikitext editor.

It will remember whether you used wikitext or VisualEditor, and use the same editor the next time you edit an article.

The user guide has information about how to use VisualEditor. Not all features are available in Mobile Web. Since the last newsletter, the Editing Team has fixed many bugs and requests, and worked on support for editing tables and for using non-Latin languages. Their weekly updates are posted on Mediawiki.org. Informal notes from the recent quarterly review were posted on Meta.

Recent improvements
The French Wikipedia should see better search results for links, templates, and media because the new search engine was turned on for everyone there. This change is expected at the Chinese and German Wikipedias next week, and eventually at the English Wikipedia.

The "pawn" system has been mostly replaced. Bugs in this system sometimes added a chess pawn character to wikitext. The replacement provides better support for non-Latin languages, with full support hopefully coming soon.

VisualEditor is now provided to editors who use Internet Explorer 10 or 11 on desktop and mobile devices. Internet Explorer 9 is not supported yet.

The keyboard shortcuts for items in the toolbar's menus are now shown in the menus. VisualEditor will replace the existing design with a new theme from the User Experience / Design group. The appearance of dialogs has already changed in one Mobile version. The appearance on desktops will change soon. (You can see a developer preview of the old "Apex" design and the new "MediaWiki" theme which will replace it.)

Several bugs were fixed for internal and external links. Improvements to MediaWiki's search solved an annoying problem: If you searched for the full name of the page or file that you wanted to link, sometimes the search program could not find the page. A link inside a template, to a local page that does not exist, will now show red, exactly as it does when reading the page. Due to a error, for about two weeks this also affected all external links inside templates. Opening an auto-numbered link node like with the keyboard used to open the wrong link tool. These problems have all been fixed.

TemplateData
''' The tool for quickly editing TemplateData will be deployed to all Wikimedia Foundation wikis on Thursday, 6 November. '''   This tool is already available on the biggest 40 Wikipedias, and now all wikis will have access to it. This tool makes it easier to add TemplateData to the template's documentation. When the tool is enabled, it will add a button above every editing window for a template (including documentation subpages). To use it, edit the template or a subpage, and then click the "" button at the top. Read the help page for TemplateData. You can test the TemplateData editor in a sandbox at Mediawiki.org. Remember that TemplateData should be placed either on a documentation subpage or on the template page itself. Only one block of TemplateData will be used per template.

You can use the new autovalue setting to pre-load a value into a template. This can be used to substitute dates, as in this example, or to add the most common response for that parameter. The autovalue can be easily overridden by the editor, by typing something else in the field.

In TemplateData, you may define a parameter as "required". The template dialog in VisualEditor will warn editors if they leave a "required" parameter empty, and they will not be able to delete that parameter. If the template can function without this parameter, then please mark it as "suggested" or "optional" in TemplateData instead.

Looking ahead
Basic support for inserting tables and changing the number of rows and columns in tables will appear next Wednesday. Advanced features, like dragging columns to different places, will be possible later. The VisualEditor team plans to add auto-fill features for citations soon. To help editors find the most important items more quickly, some items in the toolbar menus will be hidden behind a "More" item, such as "underlining" in the styling menu. The appearance of the media search dialog will improve, to make picking between possible images easier and more visual. The team posts details about planned work on the VisualEditor roadmap.

The user guide will be updated soon to add information about editing tables. The translations for most languages except Spanish, French, and Dutch are significantly out of date. Please help complete the current translations for users who speak your language. Talk to us if you need help exporting the translated guide to your wiki.  You can influence VisualEditor's design . Tell the VisualEditor team what you want changed during the office hours via IRC. The next sessions are on Wednesday, 19 November at 16:00 UTC and on Wednesday 7 January 2015 at 22:00 UTC. You can also share your ideas at mw:VisualEditor/Feedback. Also, user experience researcher Abbey Ripstra is looking for editors to show her how they edit Wikipedia. Please sign up for the research program if you would like to hear about opportunities.

If you would like to help with translations of this newsletter, please subscribe to the Translators mailing list or contact us directly, so that we can notify you when the next issue is ready. Subscribe or unsubscribe at VisualEditor/Newsletter. Thank you!

— Whatamidoing (WMF) 20:41, 6 November 2014 (UTC)

This Month in GLAM: October 2014
Subscribe/Unsubscribe · Global message delivery · Romaine 23:35, 11 November 2014 (UTC)

Companies/organisations releasing photos - is there a fact sheet?
Hi Liam,

I've often thought about approaching organisations, primarily (Australian) sporting ones, requesting that they releasing official photos to commons, so that "their" players are shown looking good, not blurred, looking away, in old team colours etc like most of our user submitted photos of BLPs are. But I've never really known what is the "cost" to them of releasing photos under suitable licences. If there a fact sheet that we could supply to them explaining what CC-by licensing is all about?

Has any professional sporting organisation ever released photos to Wikipedia, or is the "cost" (loss of control) of releasing them too great? To me, the benefits are as I listed above, and the cost is the same as if I took a decent photo of a player and uploaded it. Having a single page factsheet of info that you could provide to the media manager/legal team/promotions guy would make the approach much easier. OTRS is one thing, but I wouldn't be able to explain to anyone what a cc-by-sa-#.# vs any other licence type really means (ie does it mean that anyone can use those images in adverts, without their consent, if they acknowledge the source?).

Did an Aussie political party once release a heap of photos? Obviously in the US you have the whole government photos being available. Thanks for any help you can give, or if you could point me in the right direction is someone else has already done something like this.

Regards from a non-lawyer, The-Pope (talk) 11:48, 20 November 2014 (UTC)
 * The Australian Paralympic Committee has released many photos under the CC-by-SA. Graham 87 14:07, 22 November 2014 (UTC)

Disambiguation link notification for December 3
Hi. Thank you for your recent edits. Wikipedia appreciates your help. We noticed though that when you edited Trove (website), you added a link pointing to the disambiguation page GLAM. Such links are almost always unintended, since a disambiguation page is merely a list of "Did you mean..." article titles. Read the FAQ* Join us at the DPL WikiProject.

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This Month in GLAM: November 2014
Subscribe/Unsubscribe · Global message delivery · Romaine 22:30, 13 December 2014 (UTC)

New Wikipedia Library Accounts Now Available (December 2014)
Hello Wikimedians! The Wikipedia Library is announcing signups today for, free, full-access accounts to published research as part of our Publisher Donation Program. You can sign up for:


 * Elsevier - science and medicine journals and books
 * Royal Society of Chemistry - chemistry journals
 * Pelican Books - ebook monographs
 * Public Catalogue Foundation- art books

Other partnerships with accounts available are listed on our partners page. Do better research and help expand the use of high quality references across Wikipedia projects: sign up today! --The Wikipedia Library Team.00:25, 18 December 2014 (UTC)


 * You can host and coordinate signups for a Wikipedia Library branch in your own language. Please contact Ocaasi (WMF).
 * This message was delivered via the Mass Message tool to the Book & Bytes recipient list.

VisualEditor newsletter—December 2014


Did you know?

Basic table editing is now available in VisualEditor. You can add and remove rows and columns from existing tables at the click of a button.

The user guide has more information about how to use VisualEditor. Since the last newsletter, the Editing Team has fixed many bugs and worked on table editing and performance. Their weekly status reports are posted on Mediawiki.org. Upcoming plans are posted at the VisualEditor roadmap.

VisualEditor was deployed to several hundred remaining wikis as an opt-in beta feature at the end of November, except for most Wiktionaries (which depend heavily upon templates) and all Wikisources (which await integration with ProofreadPage).

Recent improvements
Basic support for editing tables is available. You can insert new tables, add and remove rows and columns, set or remove a caption for a table, and merge cells together. To change the contents of a cell, double-click inside it. More features will be added in the coming months. In addition, VisualEditor now ignores broken, invalid  and   elements, instead of trying to repair them.

You can now use find and replace in VisualEditor, reachable through the tool menu or by pressing  ⌃ Ctrl + F  or  ⌘ Cmd + F.

You can now create and edit simple  paragraphs for quoting and indenting content. This changes a "" into a "".

Some new keyboard sequences can be used to format content. At the start of the line, typing " *  " will make the line a bullet list; " 1.  " or " # " will make it a numbered list; " == " will make it a section heading; " : " will make it a blockquote. If you didn't mean to use these tools, you can press undo to undo the formatting change. There are also two other keyboard sequences: " [[ " for opening the link tool, and " {{ " for opening the template tool, to help experienced editors. The existing standard keyboard shortcuts, like ⌃ Ctrl + K to open the link editor, still work.

If you add a category that has been redirected, then VisualEditor now adds its target. Categories without description pages show up as red.

You can again create and edit galleries as wikitext code.

Looking ahead
VisualEditor will replace the existing design with a new theme designed by the User Experience group. The new theme will be visible for desktop systems at MediaWiki.org in late December and at other sites early January. (You can see a developer preview of the old "Apex" theme and the new "MediaWiki" one which will replace it.)

The Editing team plans to add auto-fill features for citations in January. Planned changes to the media search dialog will make choosing between possible images easier.

Help
If you would like to help with translations of this newsletter, please subscribe to the Translators mailing list or contact us directly, so that we can notify you when the next issue is ready. Subscribe or unsubscribe at Meta.
 * Share your ideas and ask questions at mw:VisualEditor/Feedback.
 * Translations of the user guide for most languages are oudated. Ukrainian, Portuguese, Spanish, French, and Dutch translators are nearly current. Please help complete the current translations for users who speak your language.
 * Talk to the Editing team during the office hours via IRC. The next session is on Wednesday, 7 January 2015 at 22:00 UTC.
 * File requests for language-appropriate "" and "" icons for the character formatting menu in Phabricator.
 * The design research team wants to see how real editors work. Please sign up for their research program.

Thank you! WhatamIdoing (WMF) (talk) 23:37, 20 December 2014 (UTC)

DYK for Trove
 Harrias  talk 00:02, 21 December 2014 (UTC)

Nomination of Illridewithyou for deletion
A discussion is taking place as to whether the article Illridewithyou is suitable for inclusion in Wikipedia according to Wikipedia's policies and guidelines or whether it should be deleted.

The article will be discussed at Articles for deletion/Illridewithyou until a consensus is reached, and anyone is welcome to contribute to the discussion. The nomination will explain the policies and guidelines which are of concern. The discussion focuses on high-quality evidence and our policies and guidelines.

Users may edit the article during the discussion, including to improve the article to address concerns raised in the discussion. However, do not remove the article-for-deletion notice from the top of the article. Jeffro 77 (talk) 00:59, 23 December 2014 (UTC)

Books and Bytes - Issue 9
 The Wikipedia Library Books & Bytes

Issue 9, November-December 2014 by, ,

 Read the full newsletter MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 23:36, 8 January 2015 (UTC)
 * New donations, including real-paper-and-everything books, e-books, science journal databases, and more
 * New TWL coordinators, conference news, a new open-access journal database, summary of library-related WMF grants, and more
 * Spotlight: "Global Impact: The Wikipedia Library and Persian Wikipedia" - a Persian Wikipedia editor talks about their experiences with database access in Iran, writing on the Persian project and the JSTOR partnership

This Month in GLAM: December 2014
Subscribe/Unsubscribe · Global message delivery · Romaine 11:31, 11 January 2015 (UTC)

VisualEditor News 2015—#1


Since the last newsletter, the Editing Team has fixed many bugs and worked on VisualEditor's appearance, the coming Citoid reference service, and support for languages with complex input requirements. Status reports are posted on Mediawiki.org. Upcoming plans are posted at the VisualEditor roadmap.

The Wikimedia Foundation has named its top priorities for this quarter (January to March). The first priority is making VisualEditor ready for deployment by default to all new users and logged-out users at the remaining large Wikipedias. You can help identify these requirements. There will be weekly triage meetings which will be open to volunteers beginning Wednesday, 11 February 2015 at 12:00 (noon) PST (20:00 UTC). Tell Vice President of Engineering Damon Sicore, Product Manager James Forrester and other team members which bugs and features are most important to you. The decisions made at these meetings will determine what work is necessary for this quarter's goal of making VisualEditor ready for deployment to new users. The presence of volunteers who enjoy contributing MediaWiki code is particularly appreciated. Information about how to join the meeting will be posted at mw:Talk:VisualEditor/Portal shortly before the meeting begins. Due to some breaking changes in MobileFrontend and VisualEditor, VisualEditor was not working correctly on the mobile site for a couple of days in early January. The teams apologize for the problem.

Recent improvements
The new design for VisualEditor aligns with MediaWiki's Front-End Standards as led by the Design team. Several new versions of the OOjs UI library have also been released, and these also affect the appearance of VisualEditor and other MediaWiki software extensions. Most changes were minor, like changing the text size and the amount of white space in some windows. Buttons are consistently color-coded to indicate whether the action: The TemplateData editor has been completely re-written to use a different design (T67815) based on the same OOjs UI system as VisualEditor (T73746). This change fixed a couple of existing bugs (T73077 and T73078) and improved usability.
 * starts a new task, like opening the dialog: blue ,
 * takes a constructive action, like inserting a citation: green ,
 * might remove or lose your work, like removing a link: red, or
 * is neutral, like opening a link in a new browser window: gray.

Search and replace in long documents is now faster. It does not highlight every occurrence if there are more than 100 on-screen at once (T78234).

Editors at the Hebrew and Russian Wikipedias requested the ability to use VisualEditor in the "Article Incubator" or drafts namespace (T86688, T87027). If your community would like VisualEditor enabled on another namespace on your wiki, then you can file a request in Phabricator. Please include a link to a community discussion about the requested change.

Looking ahead
The Editing team will soon add auto-fill features for citations. The Citoid service takes a URL or DOI for a reliable source, and returns a pre-filled, pre-formatted bibliographic citation. After creating it, you will be able to change or add information to the citation, in the same way that you edit any other pre-existing citation in VisualEditor. Support for ISBNs, PMIDs, and other identifiers is planned. Later, editors will be able to contribute to the Citoid service's definitions for each website, to improve precision and reduce the need for manual corrections.

We will need editors to help test the new design of the special character inserter, especially if you speak Welsh, Breton, or another language that uses diacritics or special characters extensively. The new version should be available for testing next week. Please contact User:Whatamidoing (WMF) if you would like to be notified when the new version is available. After the special character tool is completed, VisualEditor will be deployed to all users at Phase 5 Wikipedias. This will affect about 50 mid-size and smaller Wikipedias, including Afrikaans, Azerbaijani, Breton, Kyrgyz, Macedonian, Mongolian, Tatar, and Welsh. The date for this change has not been determined.

Let's work together

 * Share your ideas and ask questions at mw:VisualEditor/Feedback.
 * Please help complete translations of the user guide for users who speak your language.
 * Join the weekly bug triage meetings beginning Wednesday, 11 February 2015 at 12:00 (noon) PST (20:00 UTC). Information about how to join the meeting will be posted at mw:Talk:VisualEditor/Portal shortly before the meeting begins. Contact James F. for more information.
 * Talk to the Editing team during the office hours via IRC. The next session is on Thursday, 19 February 2015 at 19:00 UTC.

Subscribe or unsubscribe at VisualEditor/Newsletter. Translations are available through Meta. Thank you! Whatamidoing (WMF) 20:23, 2 February 2015 (UTC)

WikiProject X Newsletter • Issue 1
Hi! Thank you for subscribing to the WikiProject X Newsletter. For our first issue...

'''Has WikiProject X changed the world yet? No.'''

We opened up shop last month and announced our existence to the world. Our first phase is the "research" phase, consisting mostly of reading and listening. We set up our landing page and started collecting stories. So far, 28 stories have been shared about WikiProjects, describing a variety of experiences across numerous WikiProjects. A recurring story involves a WikiProject that starts off strong but has trouble continuing to stay active. Most people describe using WikiProjects as a way to get feedback from other editors. Some quotes:
 * "Working on requested articles, utilising the reliable sources section, and having an active WikiProject to ask questions in really helped me learn how to edit Wikipedia and looking back I don't know how long I would have stayed editing without that project." – Sam Walton on WikiProject Video Games
 * "I believe that the main problem of the Wikiprojects is that they are complicated to use. There should be a a much simpler way to check what do do, what needs to be improved etc." – Tetra quark
 * "In the late 2000s, WikiProject Film tried to emulate WP:MILHIST in having coordinators and elections. Unfortunately, this was not sustainable and ultimately fell apart." – Erik

Of course, these are just anecdotes. While they demonstrate what is possible, they do not necessarily explain what is typical. We will be using this information in conjunction with a quantitative analysis of WikiProjects, as documented on Meta. Particularly, we are interested in the measurement of WikiProject activity as it relates to overall editing in that WikiProject's subject area.

We also have 50 people and projects signed up for pilot testing, which is an excellent start! (An important caveat: one person volunteering a WikiProject does not mean the WikiProject as a whole is interested; just that there is at least one person, which is a start.)

While carrying out our research, we are documenting the problems with WikiProjects and our ideas for making WikiProjects better. Some ideas include better integration of existing tools into WikiProjects, recommendations of WikiProjects for people to join, and improved coordination with Articles for Creation. These are just ideas that may or may not make it to the design phase; we will see. We are also working with WikiProject Council to improve the directory of WikiProjects, with the goal of a reliable, self-updating WikiProject directory. Stay tuned! If you have any ideas, you are welcome to leave a note on our talk page.

That's all for now. Thank you for subscribing!

– Harej 17:21, 9 February 2015 (UTC)

This Month in GLAM: January 2015
Subscribe/Unsubscribe · Global message delivery · Romaine 05:58, 11 February 2015 (UTC)

Disambiguation link notification for February 24
Hi. Thank you for your recent edits. Wikipedia appreciates your help. We noticed though that when you edited Hostile architecture, you added a link pointing to the disambiguation page Social engineering. Such links are almost always unintended, since a disambiguation page is merely a list of "Did you mean..." article titles. Read the FAQ* Join us at the DPL WikiProject.

It's OK to remove this message. Also, to stop receiving these messages, follow these opt-out instructions. Thanks, DPL bot (talk) 09:04, 24 February 2015 (UTC)

Books and Bytes - Issue 10
 The Wikipedia Library <span style="font-size: 2em; font-family: Copperplate, 'Copperplate Gothic Light', serif">Books & Bytes

Issue 10, January-February 2015 by, ,

<div style = "margin-top: 1.5em; border: 3px solid #ae8c55; border-radius: .5em; padding: 1em 1.5em; font-size: .9em"> Read the full newsletter MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 17:41, 4 March 2015 (UTC)
 * New donations - ProjectMUSE, Dynamed, Royal Pharmaceutical Society, and Women Writers Online
 * New TWL coordinator, conference news, and a new guide and template for archivists
 * TWL moves into the new Community Engagement department at the WMF, quarterly review

This Month in GLAM: February 2015
<div style="margin-top:10px; font-size:90%; padding-left:5px; font-family:Georgia, Palatino, Palatino Linotype, Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Subscribe/Unsubscribe · Global message delivery · Romaine 23:30, 11 March 2015 (UTC)

DYK nomination of Australian Women's Weekly Children's Birthday Cake Book
Hello! Your submission of Australian Women's Weekly Children's Birthday Cake Book at the Did You Know nominations page has been reviewed, and some issues with it may need to be clarified. Please review the comment(s) underneath your nomination's entry and respond there as soon as possible. Thank you for contributing to Did You Know! 97198 (talk) 07:55, 14 March 2015 (UTC)

Invitation


Hello, Wittylama,

The Editing team is asking very experienced editors like you for your help with VisualEditor. The team has a list of top-priority problems, but they also want to hear about small problems. These problems may make editing less fun, take too much of your time, or be as annoying as a paper cut. The Editing team wants to hear about and try to fix these small things, too.

You can share your thoughts by clicking this link. You may respond to this quick, simple, anonymous survey in your own language. If you take the survey, then you agree your responses may be used in accordance with these terms. This survey is powered by Qualtrics and their use of your information is governed by their privacy policy.

More information (including a translateable list of the questions) is posted on wiki at mw:VisualEditor/Survey 2015. If you have questions, or prefer to respond on-wiki, then please leave a message on the survey's talk page.

Unsubscribe from this list •  Sign up for VisualEditor's multilingual newsletter  •   Translate the user guide

Thank you, Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 23:31, 16 March 2015 (UTC)

WikiProject X Newsletter • Issue 2
For this month's issue...

Making sense of a lot of data.

Work on our prototype will begin imminently. In the meantime, we have to understand what exactly we're working with. To this end, we generated a list of 71 WikiProjects, based on those brought up on our Stories page and those who had signed up for pilot testing. For those projects where people told stories, we coded statements within those stories to figure out what trends there were in these stories. This approach allowed us to figure out what Wikipedians thought of WikiProjects in a very organic way, with very little by way of a structure. (Compare this to a structured interview, where specific questions are asked and answered.) This analysis was done on 29 stories. Codes were generally classified as "benefits" (positive contributions made by a WikiProject to the editing experience) and "obstacles" (issues posed by WikiProjects, broadly speaking). Codes were generated as I went along, ensuring that codes were as close to the original data as possible. Duplicate appearances of a code for a given WikiProject were removed.

We found 52 "benefit" statements encoded and 34 "obstacle" statements. The most common benefit statement referring to the project's active discussion and participation, followed by statements referring to a project's capacity to guide editor activity, while the most common obstacles made reference to low participation and significant burdens on the part of the project maintainers and leaders. This gives us a sense of WikiProjects' big strength: they bring people together, and can be frustrating to editors when they fail to do so. Meanwhile, it is indeed very difficult to bring editors together on a common interest; in the absence of a highly motivated core of organizers, the technical infrastructure simply isn't there.

We wanted to pair this qualitative study with quantitative analysis of a WikiProject and its "universe" of pages, discussions, templates, and categories. To this end I wrote a script called ProjAnalysis which will, for a given WikiProject page (e.g. WikiProject Star Trek) and WikiProject talk-page tag (e.g. Template:WikiProject Star Trek), will give you a list of usernames of people who edited within the WikiProject's space (the project page itself, its talk page, and subpages), and within the WikiProject's scope (the pages tagged by that WikiProject, excluding the WikiProject space pages). The output is an exhaustive list of usernames. We ran the script to analyze our test batch of WikiProjects for edits between March 1, 2014 and February 28, 2015, and we subjected them to further analysis to only include those who made 10+ edits to pages in the projects' scope, those who made 4+ edits to the projects' space, and those who made 10+ edits to pages in scope but not 4+ edits to pages in the projects' space. This latter metric gives us an idea of who is active in a certain subject area of Wikipedia, yet who isn't actively engaging on the WikiProject's pages. This information will help us prioritize WikiProjects for pilot testing, and the ProjAnalysis script in general may have future life as an application that can be used by Wikipedians to learn about who is in their community.

Complementing the above two studies are a design analysis, which summarizes the structure of the different WikiProject spaces in our test batch, and the comprehensive census of bots and tools used to maintain WikiProjects, which will be finished soon. With all of this information, we will have a game plan in place! We hope to begin working with specific WikiProjects soon.

As a couple of asides...


 * Database Reports has existed for several years on Wikipedia to the satisfaction of many, but many of the reports stopped running when the Toolserver was shut off in 2014. However, there is good news: the weekly New WikiProjects and WikiProjects by Changes reports are back, with potential future reports in the future.
 * WikiProject X has an outpost on Wikidata! Check it out. It's not widely publicized, but we are interested in using Wikidata as a potential repository for metadata about WikiProjects, especially for WikiProjects that exist on multiple Wikimedia projects and language editions.

That's all for now. Thank you for subscribing! If you have any questions or comments, please share them with us.

Harej (talk) 01:43, 21 March 2015 (UTC)

Your help on Ella Orr Campbell article
I just wanted to express my personal thanks with regard to the above article. Up until reading your comment that "it is also clear that the article as a whole is not a mere copy-paste but includes well formatted references from half a dozen reliable source." I was feeling completely demoralised and to be frank hurt. I'm still very much in the learning phrase of how to edit Wikipedia and the issues that need to be confronted to create an appropriate article. I know "tone" is hard to convey in type but I've found reading the feedback and debate over this article very difficult. I'm one of those people who hates anything that approaches confrontation and was seriously considering deleting my account and walking away after meeting my obligations to the Smithsonian Archives Editathon. Without that one sentence I probably would have done so. That one sentence really made a difference to me, so thanks. Ambrosia10 (talk) 18:47, 23 March 2015 (UTC)


 * actually, that was more of a personal attack than sarcasm. (i compared them to the spanish inquisition) not making a case; they are not prepared to reason. by their treatment of you, they prove they are here to dictate, not collaborate. i don't think we're on the same team. they have a vision of wikipedia that is nupedia or wikinews; you have a vision that is glam-wiki. i like your vision better, but if they want to battle, then i will accomodate them. Duckduckstop (talk) 20:54, 28 March 2015 (UTC)

DYK for Australian Women's Weekly Children's Birthday Cake Book
Thanks for your contribution Victuallers (talk) 00:01, 30 March 2015 (UTC)

VisualEditor News #2—2015
Did you know?

With Citoid in VisualEditor, you click the 'book with bookmark' icon and paste in the URL for a reliable source:



Citoid looks up the source for you and returns the citation results. Click the green "Insert" button to accept its results and add them to the article:



After inserting the citation, you can change it. Select the reference, and click the "Edit" button in the context menu to make changes.

The user guide has more information about how to use VisualEditor.

Since the last newsletter, the Editing Team has fixed many bugs and worked on VisualEditor's performance, the Citoid reference service, and support for languages with complex input requirements. Status reports are posted on Mediawiki.org. The worklist for April through June is available in Phabricator.

The weekly task triage meetings continue to be open to volunteers, each Wednesday at 11:00 (noon) PDT (18:00 UTC). You do not need to attend the meeting to nominate a bug for consideration as a Q4 blocker. Instead, go to Phabricator and "associate" the Editing team's Q4 blocker project with the bug. Learn how to join the meetings and how to nominate bugs at mw:Talk:VisualEditor/Portal.

Recent improvements
VisualEditor is now substantially faster. In many cases, opening the page in VisualEditor is now faster than opening it in the wikitext editor. The new system has improved the code speed by 37% and network speed by almost 40%.

The Editing team is slowly adding auto-fill features for citations. This is currently available only at the French, Italian, and English Wikipedias. The Citoid service takes a URL or DOI for a reliable source, and returns a pre-filled, pre-formatted bibliographic citation. After creating it, you will be able to change or add information to the citation, in the same way that you edit any other pre-existing citation in VisualEditor. Support for ISBNs, PMIDs, and other identifiers is planned. Later, editors will be able to improve precision and reduce the need for manual corrections by contributing to the Citoid service's definitions for each website.

Citoid requires good TemplateData for your citation templates. If you would like to request this feature for your wiki, please post a request in the Citoid project on Phabricator. Include links to the TemplateData for the most important citation templates on your wiki.

The special character inserter has been improved, based upon feedback from active users. After this, VisualEditor was made available to all users of Wikipedias on the Phase 5 list on 30 March. This affected 53 mid-size and smaller Wikipedias, including Afrikaans, Azerbaijani, Breton, Kyrgyz, Macedonian, Mongolian, Tatar, and Welsh.

Work continues to support languages with complex requirements, such as Korean and Japanese. These languages use input method editors ("IMEs”). Recent improvements to cursoring, backspace, and delete behavior will simplify typing in VisualEditor for these users.

The design for the image selection process is now using a "masonry fit" model. Images in the search results are displayed at the same height but at variable widths, similar to bricks of different sizes in a masonry wall, or the "packed" mode in image galleries. This style helps you find the right image by making it easier to see more details in images.

You can now drag and drop categories to re-arrange their order of appearance ​on the page.

The pop-up window that appears when you click on a reference, image, link, or other element, is called the "context menu". It now displays additional useful information, such as the destination of the link or the image's filename. The team has also added an explicit "Edit" button in the context menu, which helps new editors open the tool to change the item.

Invisible templates are marked by a puzzle piece icon so they can be interacted with. Users also will be able to see and edit HTML anchors now in section headings.

Users of the TemplateData GUI editor can now set a string as an optional text for the 'deprecated' property in addition to boolean value, which lets you tell users of the template what they should do instead (T90734).

Looking ahead
The special character inserter in VisualEditor will soon use the same special character list as the wikitext editor. Admins at each wiki will also have the option of creating a custom section for frequently used characters at the top of the list. Instructions for customizing the list will be posted at mediawiki.org.

The team is discussing a test of VisualEditor with new users, to see whether they have met their goals of making VisualEditor suitable for those editors. The timing is unknown, but might be relatively soon.

Let's work together

 * Share your ideas and ask questions at mw:VisualEditor/Feedback.
 * Can you translate from English into any other language? Please check this list to see whether more interface translations are needed for your language.  Contact us to get an account if you want to help!
 * The design research team wants to see how real editors work. Please sign up for their research program.
 * File requests for language-appropriate "" and "" icons for the character formatting menu in Phabricator.

Subscribe, unsubscribe or change the page where this newsletter is delivered at Meta. If you aren't reading this in your favorite language, then please help us with translations! Subscribe to the Translators mailing list or contact us directly, so that we can notify you when the next issue is ready. Thank you!

-Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk), 17:50, 3 April 2015 (UTC)

Congrats!
I don't know if you've seen the 60 Minutes broadcast yet, but try http://www.cbs.com/shows/60_minutes/video/ if you haven't (say in about 2 hours from now). You were only on for about 10 seconds, but it was a good 10 seconds. 60 Minutes has been the top US news show for at least 40 years. Again, congrats. Smallbones( smalltalk ) 00:31, 6 April 2015 (UTC)

This Month in GLAM: March 2015
<div style="margin-top:10px; font-size:90%; padding-left:5px; font-family:Georgia, Palatino, Palatino Linotype, Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Subscribe/Unsubscribe · Global message delivery · Romaine 05:36, 9 April 2015 (UTC)

A new reference tool
Hello Books & Bytes subscribers. There is a new Visual Editor reference feature in development called Citoid. It is designed to "auto-fill" references using a URL or DOI. We would really appreciate you testing whether TWL partners' references work in Citoid. Sharing your results will help the developers fix bugs and improve the system. If you have a few minutes, please visit the testing page for simple instructions on how to try this new tool. Regards, MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 18:48, 10 April 2015 (UTC)

WikiProject X Newsletter • Issue 3
Greetings! For this month's issue...

We have demos!

After a lengthy research and design process, we decided for WikiProject X to focus on two things:
 * A WikiProject workflow that focuses on action items: discussions you can participate in and tasks you can perform to improve the encyclopedia; and
 * An automatically updating WikiProject directory that gives you lists of users participating in the WikiProject and editing in that subject area.

We have a live demonstration of the new WikiProject workflow at WikiProject Women in Technology, a brand new WikiProject that was set up as an adjunct to a related edit-a-thon in Washington, DC. The goal is to surface action items for editors, and we intend on doing that through automatically updated working lists. We are looking into using SuggestBot to generate lists of outstanding tasks, and we are looking into additional options for automatic worklist generation. This takes the burden off of WikiProject editors to generate these worklists, though there is also a "requests" section for Wikipedians to make individual requests. (As of writing, these automated lists are not yet live, so you will see a blank space under "edit articles" on the demo WikiProject. Sorry about that!) I invite you to check out the WikiProject and leave feedback on WikiProject X's talk page.

Once the demo is sufficiently developed, we will be working on a limited deployment on our pilot WikiProjects. We have selected five for the first round of testing based on the highest potential for impact and will scale up from there.

While a re-designed WikiProject experience is much needed, that alone isn't enough. A WikiProject isn't any good if people have no way of discovering it. This is why we are also developing an automatically updated WikiProject directory. This directory will surface project-related metrics, including a count of active WikiProject participants and of active editors in that project's subject area. The purpose of these metrics is to highlight how active the WikiProject is at the given point of time, but also to highlight that project's potential for success. The directory is not yet live but there is a demonstration featuring a sampling of WikiProjects.

Each directory entry will link to a WikiProject description page which automatically list the active WikiProject participants and subject-area article editors. This allows Wikipedians to find each other based on the areas they are interested in, and this information can be used to revive a WikiProject, start a new one, or even for some other purpose. These description pages are not online yet, but they will use this template, if you want to get a feel of what they will look like.

We need volunteers!

WikiProject X is a huge undertaking, and we need volunteers to support our efforts, including testers and coders. Check out our volunteer portal and see what you can do to help us!

As an aside...

Wouldn't it be cool if lists of requested articles could not only be integrated directly with WikiProjects, but also shared between WikiProjects? Well, we got the crazy idea of having experimental software feature Flow deployed (on a totally experimental basis) on the new Article Request Workshop, which seeks to be a place where editors can "workshop" article ideas before they get created. It uses Flow because Flow allows, essentially, section-level categorization, and in the future will allow "sections" (known as "topics" within Flow) to be included across different pages. What this means is that you have a recommendation for a new article tagged by multiple WikiProjects, allowing for the recommendation to appear on lists for each WikiProject. This will facilitate inter-WikiProject collaboration and will help to reduce duplicated work. The Article Request Workshop is not entirely ready yet due to some bugs with Flow, but we hope to integrate it into our pilot WikiProjects at some point.

Harej (talk) 00:57, 19 April 2015 (UTC)

2014 Sydney hostage crisis terrorism portal
Hi.

I am writing to let you know that, per reading your discussion on the Talk page of the 2014 Sydney hostage crisis, I have removed the reference to it being included in the terrorism portal.

I was also interested in what another user said about the fact that the gunman, Monis, only actually killed 1 person, with the remainder being killed accidentally by police. Do you have any ideas for how to fairly present that in the article? I also wonder if perhaps the term "gunman" is not a good term either. Perhaps simply "culprit" is better, as gunman implies that he fired a lot of shots. Since he only fired 1, and even that is debatable (as other sources suggested that police killed them too), then I for one would prefer the term "culprit". Any help is appreciated thanks. Mister Sneeze A Lot (talk) 02:54, 21 April 2015 (UTC)


 * Actually, cross that, as it is already in there. Silly me should have read the article before commenting about what was said in the talk page!  I still wonder if "culprit" is better than "gunman" though. Mister Sneeze A Lot (talk) 02:56, 21 April 2015 (UTC)

Disambiguation link notification for April 25
Hi. Thank you for your recent edits. Wikipedia appreciates your help. We noticed though that when you edited Sweet Adelines International chorus competitions, 2010-2019, you added a link pointing to the disambiguation page Scottsdale. Such links are almost always unintended, since a disambiguation page is merely a list of "Did you mean..." article titles. Read the FAQ* Join us at the DPL WikiProject.

It's OK to remove this message. Also, to stop receiving these messages, follow these opt-out instructions. Thanks, DPL bot (talk) 09:28, 25 April 2015 (UTC)

Wikipedia email re Newspapers.com signup
HazelAB (talk) 13:12, 27 April 2015 (UTC)


 * Thanks . I've done the registration as requested, and started searching. However, every relevant result I find and try to view, it gives me a screen saying "You need a subscription to view this page. PREMIUM. Start your 7-day Free Trial". I'm logged in via the link you provided, I don't understand how I actually get access to the scans! Help? cc. . Wittylama 13:38, 27 April 2015 (UTC)
 * Thanks for registering and filling out the google form. Access is a two step-process. Now that you've registered, I'll notify our contact at Newspapers.com, who will give you access to all the content. That will take a day or two. I'll let you know when it's been done. All the best, HazelAB (talk) 13:44, 27 April 2015 (UTC)
 * Ah, I understand! I wasn't aware that there was a further step which you had to take to make the system 'fully operational'. Can I suggest that you adjust the standard text of the email that is sent to new subscribers to set out the "1st step, 2nd step, 3rd step..." process in a way that is more visually obvious? Sorry for the hassle, and thanks for your help. Wittylama 14:05, 27 April 2015 (UTC)
 * Hi Wittylama! Thanks for the feedback on the process: we tried to solve this problem at The_Wikipedia_Library/Processes/Partnership_processing_timeline which is the sidebar for all of our partnerships. We seem to have gotten a reduction of comments like yours since implementing it: would it help to have a clear pointer to this process in the emails? Also, who handles the process end for our volunteers, Sadads (talk) 21:54, 27 April 2015 (UTC)
 * Thanks Sadads, that description that you linked me to is indeed exactly the kind of thing I was thinking of - my mistake for not finding it myself. The relevant section of that page is the "Step 3: Waiting for partners to activate accounts" paragraph. The email I received said "Once your account has been upgraded to full access by Customer Support at Newspapers.com, you will have access for one year" which I incorrectly assumed to be an automated process due to the sentence being in the passive voice. Perhaps changing the standard email to include something along the lines of "your account will be manually upgraded by the staff of the organisation you've subscribed to, this may take a week or two..." (or something like that) and also link to the Partnership processing timeline page. I hope that helps, Wittylama 22:22, 27 April 2015 (UTC)
 * Hi Wittylama, just letting you know that Newspapers.com has activated your account and you should have full access now. I see your point about the signup email message and will make the steps more explicit before sending next time. HazelAB (talk) 16:36, 28 April 2015 (UTC)
 * Thanks ! I'm logged in now :-) Wittylama 20:11, 28 April 2015 (UTC)

Books and Bytes - Issue 11
<div style = "color: #936c29; font-size: 4em; font-family: Copperplate, 'Copperplate Gothic Light', serif"> The Wikipedia Library <span style="font-size: 2em; font-family: Copperplate, 'Copperplate Gothic Light', serif">Books & Bytes

Issue 11, March-April 2015 by, , ,

<div style = "margin-top: 1.5em; border: 3px solid #ae8c55; border-radius: .5em; padding: 1em 1.5em; font-size: .9em"> Read the full newsletter MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 23:35, 4 May 2015 (UTC)
 * New donations - MIT Press Journals, Sage Stats, Hein Online and more
 * New TWL coordinators, conference news, and new reference projects
 * Spotlight: Two metadata librarians talk about how library professionals can work with Wikipedia

This Month in GLAM: April 2015
<div style="margin-top:10px; font-size:90%; padding-left:5px; font-family:Georgia, Palatino, Palatino Linotype, Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Subscribe/Unsubscribe · Global message delivery · Romaine 22:09, 10 May 2015 (UTC)

re: terrorism template
Ah, once again, Katie has protected The wrong version. ;-) In all seriousness, as far as I'm concerned, if consensus supports your position, go ahead and make the edit yourself. We only did it this way because the guy is an IP-hopper. Consensus is consensus.  <font color="FireBrick">K <font color="2F4F4F">rakatoa   <font color="FireBrick">K <font color="2F4F4F">atie   13:19, 26 May 2015 (UTC)

DYK for Sweet Adelines International competition
Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 22:46, 2 June 2015 (UTC)

VisualEditor News #3—2015
Did you know?

When you click on a link to an article, you now see more information: The link tool has been re-designed: There are separate tabs for linking to internal and external pages.

The user guide has more information about how to use VisualEditor.

Since the last newsletter, the Editing Team has created new interfaces for the link and citation tools, as well as fixing many bugs and changing some elements of the design. Some of these bugs affected users of VisualEditor on mobile devices. Status reports are posted on Mediawiki.org. The worklist for April through June is available in Phabricator.

A test of VisualEditor's effect on new editors at the English Wikipedia has just completed the first phase. During this test, half of newly registered editors had VisualEditor automatically enabled, and half did not. The main goal of the study is to learn which group was more likely to save an edit and to make productive, unreverted edits. Initial results will be posted at Meta later this month.

Recent improvements
Auto-fill features for citations are available at a few Wikipedias through the citoid service. Citoid takes a URL or DOI for a reliable source, and returns a pre-filled, pre-formatted bibliographic citation. If Citoid is enabled on your wiki, then the design of the citation workflow changed during May. All citations are now created inside a single tool. Inside that tool, choose the tab you want (,, or ). The cite button is now labeled with the word "" rather than a book icon, and the autofill citation dialog now has a more meaningful label, "", for the submit button.

The link tool has been redesigned based on feedback from Wikipedia editors and user testing. It now has two separate sections: one for links to articles and one for external links. When you select a link, its pop-up context menu shows the name of the linked page, a thumbnail image from the linked page, Wikidata's description, and/or appropriate icons for disambiguation pages, redirect pages and empty pages. Search results have been reduced to the first five pages. Several bugs were fixed, including a dark highlight that appeared over the first match in the link inspector (T98085).

The special character inserter in VisualEditor now uses the same special character list as the wikitext editor. Admins at each wiki can also create a custom section for frequently used characters at the top of the list. Please read the instructions for customizing the list at mediawiki.org. Also, there is now a tooltip to describing each character in the special character inserter (T70425).

Several improvements have been made to templates. When you search for a template to insert, the list of results now contains descriptions of the templates. The parameter list inside the template dialog now remains open after inserting a parameter from the list, so that users don’t need to click on "" each time they want to add another parameter (T95696). The team added a new property for TemplateData, "", for template parameters. This optional, translatable property will show up when there is text describing how to use that parameter (T53049).

The design of the main toolbar and several other elements have changed slightly, to be consistent with the MediaWiki theme. In the Vector skin, individual items in the menu are separated visually by pale gray bars. Buttons and menus on the toolbar can now contain both an icon and a text label, rather than just one or the other. This new design feature is being used for the cite button on wikis where the Citoid service is enabled.

The team has released a long-desired improvement to the handling of non-existent images. If a non-existent image is linked in an article, then it is now visible in VisualEditor and can be selected, edited, replaced, or removed.

Let's work together

 * Share your ideas and ask questions at mw:VisualEditor/Feedback.
 * The weekly task triage meetings continue to be open to volunteers, each Wednesday at 12:00 (noon) PDT (19:00 UTC). Learn how to join the meetings and how to nominate bugs at mw:Talk:VisualEditor/Portal.  You do not need to attend the meeting to nominate a bug for consideration as a Q4 blocker.  Instead, go to Phabricator and "associate" the Editing team's Q4 blocker project with the bug.
 * If your Wikivoyage, Wikibooks, Wikiversity, or other community wants to have VisualEditor made available by default to contributors, then please contact James Forrester.
 * If you would like to request the Citoid automatic reference feature for your wiki, please post a request in the Citoid project on Phabricator. Include links to the TemplateData for the most important citation templates on your wiki.

Subscribe, unsubscribe or change the page where this newsletter is delivered at Meta. If you aren't reading this in your favorite language, then please help us with translations! Subscribe to the Translators mailing list or contact us directly, so that we can notify you when the next issue is ready. Thank you! Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 17:31, 6 June 2015 (UTC)

Precious again
<div style="margin: auto; max-width: 60em; box-shadow: 0.1em 0.1em 0.5em rgba( 192, 192, 192, 0.75 ); border-radius: 1em; border: 1px solid #a7d7f9; margin-bottom: 1em; padding: 0.5em 1em 1em; color: black;" class="ui-helper-clearfix"> <div style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; background-color: #ddd; border: 5px solid #ddd; box-shadow: 0.1em 0.1em 0.5em rgba(0,0,0,0.75); border-radius: 0.5em;"> debates on Truth, Authorship and Freedom

Thank you for quality articles on Australian personalities such as Norman Selfe, your plans for, your witty anagram of a user name, and your efforts to promote "debates on such topics as Truth, Authorship and Freedom", - you are an awesome Wikipedian!

--Gerda Arendt (talk) 11:38, 9 June 2013 (UTC) Two year ago, you were the 510th recipient of my Pumpkin Sky Prize, --Gerda Arendt (talk) 06:28, 9 June 2015 (UTC)

This Month in GLAM: May 2015
<div style="margin-top:10px; font-size:90%; padding-left:5px; font-family:Georgia, Palatino, Palatino Linotype, Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Subscribe/Unsubscribe · Global message delivery · Romaine 03:32, 11 June 2015 (UTC)

The Wikipedia Library needs you!
<div style = "color: #936c29; font-size: 4em; font-family: Copperplate, 'Copperplate Gothic Light', serif"> The Wikipedia Library <span style="font-size: 2em; font-family: Copperplate, 'Copperplate Gothic Light', serif">Call for Volunteers

<div style = "margin-top: 1.5em; border: 3px solid #ae8c55; border-radius: .5em; padding: 1em 1.5em; font-size: .9em"> The Wikipedia Library is expanding, and we need your help! With only a couple of hours per week, you can make a big difference in helping editors get access to reliable sources and other resources. Sign up for one of the following roles:
 * Account coordinators help distribute research accounts to editors.
 * Partner coordinators seek donations from new partners.
 * Outreach coordinators reach out to the community through blog posts, social media, and newsletters or notifications.
 * Technical coordinators advise on building tools to support the library's work.

Sign up to help here :)  Delivered on behalf of The Wikipedia Library by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 06:18, 11 June 2015 (UTC)

Interview for The Signpost
This is being sent to you as a member of WikiProject Sydney

The WikiProject Report would like to focus on WikiProject Sydney for a Signpost article. This is an excellent opportunity to draw attention to your efforts and attract new members to the project. Would you be willing to participate in an interview? If so, here are the questions for the interview. Just add your response below each question and feel free to skip any questions that you don't feel comfortable answering. Multiple editors will have an opportunity to respond to the interview questions, so be sure to sign your answers. If you know anyone else who would like to participate in the interview, please share this with them. Thanks,  Rcsprinter123    (quip)  @ 10:10, 15 June 2015 (UTC)

WP:NORUSH
Regarding this, normally I wouldn't dream of nominating something to FAC straight out of the packet but this is one of those rare occasions where there actually is a rush, which is why it's been nominated on the day of creation and why the FAC delegates have temporarily removed the throttle to allow me to nominate it right away. This was written for the GLAM/YMT to have something York Museums Trust-related ready to be TFA on the day of the gallery's reopening; given that the schedulers need a couple of weeks notice and FAC typically takes about four weeks, it's going to be close-run as it is. – iridescent  17:04, 15 June 2015 (UTC)
 * - Ah, I understand. I've had several articles that I've been involved with that have deadlines in the real world. Notably - St James' Church, Sydney which was brought up to FA status as a wedding present for me, and was promoted to FA on the very day that I was married there :-) Wittylama 14:17, 16 June 2015 (UTC)

WikiProject X Newsletter • Issue 4
Newsletter • May/June 2015

Hello friends! We have been hard at work these past two months. For this report:

The directory is live!

For the first time, we are happy to bring you an exhaustive, comprehensive WikiProject Directory. This directory endeavors to list every single WikiProject on the English Wikipedia, including those that don't participate in article assessment. In constructing the broadest possible definition, we have come up with a list of approximately 2,600 WikiProjects. The directory tracks activity statistics on the WikiProject's pages, and, for where it's available, statistics on the number of articles tracked by the WikiProject and the number of editors active on those articles. Complementing the directory are description pages for each project, listing usernames of people active on the WikiProject pages and the articles in the WikiProject's scope. This will help Wikipedians interested in a subject find each other, whether to seek feedback on an article or to revive an old project. (There is an opt-out option.) We have also come up with listings of related WikiProjects, listing the ten most relevant WikiProjects based on what articles they have in common. We would like to promote WikiProjects as interconnected systems, rather than isolated silos.

A tremendous amount of work went into preparing this directory. WikiProjects do not consistently categorize their pages, meaning we had to develop our own index to match WikiProjects with the articles in their scope. We also had to make some adjustments to how WikiProjects were categorized; indeed, I personally have racked up a few hundred edits re-categorizing WikiProjects. There remains more work to be done to make the WikiProject directory truly useful. In the meantime, take a look and feel free to leave feedback at the WikiProject X talk page.

Stuff in the works!

What have we been working on?


 * A new design template—This has been in the works for a while, of course. But our goal is to design something that is useful and cleanly presented on all browsers and at all screen resolutions while working within the confines of what MediaWiki has to offer. Additionally, we are working on designs for the sub-components featured on the main project page.
 * A new WikiProject talk page banner in Lua—Work has begun on implementing the WikiProject banner in Lua. The goal is to create a banner template that can be usable by any WikiProject in lieu of having its own template. Work has slowed down for now to focus on higher priority items, but we are interested in your thoughts on how we could go about creating a more useful project banner. We have a draft module on Test Wikipedia, with a demonstration.
 * New discussion reports—We have over 4.8 million articles on the English Wikipedia, and almost as many talk pages as well. But what happens when someone posts on a talk page? What if no one is watching that talk page? We are currently testing out a system for an automatically-updating new discussions list, like RFC for WikiProjects. We currently have five test pages up for the WikiProjects on cannabis, cognitive science, evolutionary biology, and Ghana.
 * SuggestBot for WikiProjects—We have asked the maintainer of SuggestBot to make some minor adjustments to SuggestBot that will allow it to post regular reports to those WikiProjects that ask for them. Stay tuned!
 * Semi-automated article assessment—Using the new revision scoring service and another system currently under development, WikiProjects will be getting a new tool to facilitate the article assessment process by providing article quality/importance predictions for articles yet to be assessed. Aside from helping WikiProjects get through their backlogs, the goal is to help WikiProjects with collecting metrics and triaging their work. Semi-automation of this process will help achieve consistent results and keep the process running smoothly, as automation does on other parts of Wikipedia.

Want us to work on any other tools? Interested in volunteering? Leave a note on our talk page.

The WikiProject watchers report is back!

The database report which lists WikiProjects according to the number of watchers (i.e., people that have the project on their watchlist), is back! The report stopped being updated a year ago, following the deactivation of the Toolserver, but a replacement report has been generated.

Until next time, Harej (talk) 22:20, 17 June 2015 (UTC)

DYK for Alan Coates
Gatoclass (talk) 13:37, 30 June 2015 (UTC)