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
There is a new version of the
Wikimedia Commons app for Android. It should fix the failed uploads problem.
[1]
Problems
There was a problem with the new MediaWiki version last week. It deleted some messages by accident. The new version was late because it was stopped to fix things.
[2]
Changes later this week
The
MediaWiki action API is used by various tools like bots and gadgets. Some error codes will change. Some parameter values that do not follow the standard will no longer work.
[3]
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 11 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 12 February. It will be on all wikis from 13 February (
calendar).
The first
NPP source guide discussion is now underway. It covers a wide range of sources in Ghana with the goal of providing more guidance to reviewers about sources they might see when reviewing pages. Hopefully, new page reviewers will join others interested in reliable sources and those with expertise in these sources to make the discussion a success.
Redirects
New to NPP? Looking to try something a little different? Consider patrolling some redirects. Redirects are relatively easy to review, can be found easily through the
New Pages Feed. You can find more information about how to patrol redirects at
WP:RPATROL.
Discussions and Resources
There is an
ongoing discussion around changing notifications for new editors who attempt to write articles.
A
resource page with links pertinent for reviewers was created this month.
A
proposal to increase the scope of G5 was withdrawn.
Refresher
Geographic regions, areas and places generally do not need
general notability guideline type sourcing. When evaluating whether an article meets this notability guideline please also consider whether it might actually be a form of
WP:SPAM for a development project (e.g. PR for a large luxury residential development) and not actually covered by the guideline.
Six Month Queue Data: Today – 7095 Low – 4991 High – 7095
To opt-out of future mailings, please remove yourself
here
The article will be discussed at
Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Murder of Tessa Majors until a consensus is reached, and anyone, including you, 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.
Black Kite (talk)00:11, 17 February 2020 (UTC)reply
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 18 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 19 February. It will be on all wikis from 20 February (
calendar).
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 25 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 26 February. It will be on all wikis from 27 February (
calendar).
Future changes
There will be a
reply button after each post on a talk page if you want one. This will soon be a beta feature on the Arabic, French, Dutch and Hungarian Wikipedias. You will have to turn it on if you want to use it. It will come to more wikis later. You can
test the reply button. It was briefly shown earlier than planned by mistake on the four first wikis last week.
Hi there, I'm pleased to inform you that I've begun reviewing the article
Horseshoe bat you nominated for
GA-status according to the
criteria. This process may take up to 7 days. Feel free to contact me with any questions or comments you might have during this period. Message delivered by
Legobot, on behalf of
Chiswick Chap --
Chiswick Chap (
talk)
11:41, 26 February 2020 (UTC)reply
I think it's more of a lack of controversy. The palaontological community isn't really convinced of the quadrapedal, fully-aquatic version, but the public seems to accept it without much debate. just an idea. --
awkwafaba (
📥)
17:41, 28 February 2020 (UTC)reply
WikiCup 2020 March newsletter
And so ends the first round of the competition. Everyone with a positive score moves on to Round 2, with 57 contestants qualifying. We have abolished the groups this year, so to qualify for Round 3 you will need to finish Round 2 among the top thirty-two contestants.
Our top scorers in Round 1 were:
Epicgenius, a WikiCup newcomer, led the field with a featured article, five good articles and an assortment of other submissions, specialising on buildings and locations in New York, for a total of 895 points.
Gog the Mild came next with 464 points, from a featured article, two good articles and a number of reviews, the main theme being naval warfare.
Raymie was in third place with 419 points, garnered from one good article and an impressive 34 DYKs on radio and TV stations in the United States.
Harrias came next at 414, with a featured article and three good articles, an English civil war battle specialist.
CaptainEek was in fifth place with 405 points, mostly garnered from bringing
Cactus wren to featured article status.
The top ten contestants at the end of Round 1 all scored over 200 points; they also included L293D, Kingsif, Enwebb, Lee Vilenski and CAPTAIN MEDUSA. Seven of the top ten contestants in Round 1 are new to the WikiCup.
These contestants, like all the others, now have to start scoring points again from scratch. In Round 1 there were four featured articles, one featured list and two featured pictures, as well as around two hundred DYKs and twenty-seven ITNs. Between them, contestants completed 127 good article reviews, nearly a hundred more than the 43 good articles they claimed for, thus making a substantial dent in the review backlog. Contestants also claimed for 40 featured article / featured list reviews, and most even remembered to mention their WikiCup participation in their reviews (a requirement).
Remember that any content promoted after the end of Round 1 but before the start of Round 2 can be claimed in Round 2. Some contestants made claims before the new submissions pages were set up, and they will need to resubmit them. Invitations for collaborative writing efforts or any other discussion of potentially interesting work is always welcome on the WikiCup talk page. Remember, if two or more WikiCup competitors have done significant work on an article, all can claim points. If you are concerned that your nomination—whether it is at good article candidates, a featured process, or anywhere else—will not receive the necessary reviews, please list it on
Wikipedia:WikiCup/Reviews.
There was an error in the WikiCup 2020 March newsletter; L293D should not have been included in the list of top ten scorers in Round 1 (they led the list last year), instead, Dunkleosteus77 should have been included, having garnered 334 points from five good articles on animals, living or extinct, and various reviews.
MediaWiki message delivery (
talk)
09:30, 2 March 2020 (UTC)reply
The
Great Britain and Ireland Destubathon began on 1 March and runs for the entire month. Expansion of any stubs related to Great Britain and Ireland is welcome, inclusive of taxa. There are also monetary prizes for winners of specific categories in the form of Amazon gift cards. PetScan could be useful here to find the intersection of Stub-class articles and other categories:
Biota of Ireland;
Biota of Great Britain;
Biota of the Isle of Man
Immunofluorescence staining of a mouse intestine, "Microscopy" (Australia)
Bat scientist Lauri Lutsar determining the age of a bat, "People In Science" (Estonia)
Close-up view of a bioluminescent beetle
Elateroidea, "Wildlife and Nature" (France)
Coral fluorescence, "General Category" (Russia)
Paleoanthropologist at work, "People in Science" (Italy)
Ammonite fossil from Morocco, "General Category" (Spain)
Yellow orange-tip male (Ixias pyrene), "Wildlife and Nature" (India)
The spread of coronavirus across Wikipedia
With the outbreak of a novel coronavirus dominating news coverage, Wikipedia content related to the virus has seen much higher interest. Tree of Life content of particular interest to readers has included viruses, bats, pangolins, and masked palm civets. Viruses saw the most dramatic growth in readership:
Coronavirus, which was the 105th most popular virus article in December 2019 with about 400 views per day, averaged over a quarter million views each day of January 2020. Total monthly viewership of the top-10 virus articles ballooned from about 1.5 million to nearly 20 million.
From October 2019 – December 2019, the top ten most popular bat articles fluctuated among 16 different articles, with the December viewership of those 10 articles at 209,280. For
January 2020, three articles broke into the top-10 that were not among the 16 articles of the prior three months:
Bat as food,
Horseshoe bat, and
Bat-borne virus. Viewership of the top-10 bat articles spiked nearly 300% to 617,067 in January.
While bats have been implicated as a possible natural reservoir of
SARS-CoV-2, an intermediate host may be the bridge between bats and humans.
Pangolins have been hypothesized as the intermediate host for the virus, causing
a large spike in typical page views of 2-3k each day up to more than 60k in a day.
Masked palm civets, the intermediate host of
SARS, saw a
modest yet noticeable spike in page views as well, from 100 to 300 views per day to as many as 5k views per day.
With an increase in viewers came an increase in editors. In an interview, longtime virus editor Awkwafaba identified the influx of editors as the biggest challenge in editing content related to the coronavirus. They noted that these newcomers include "novices who make honest mistakes and get tossed about a bit in the mad activity" as well as "experienced editors who know nothing about viruses and are good researchers, yet aren't familiar with the policies of WP:ToL or WP:Viruses." Disruption also increased, with
extended confirmed protection (also known as the 30/500 rule, which prevents editors with fewer than 30 days tenure and 500 edits from making edits and is typically used on a very small subset of Wikipedia articles) temporarily applied to
Coronavirus and still active on
Template:2019–20 coronavirus outbreak data. New editors apparently seeking to correct misinformation continuously edited the article
Bat as food to remove content related to China:
Videos of Chinese people eating bat soup were misrepresented to be current or filmed in China, when at least one such video was several years old and filmed in Palau. However, reliable sources confirm that bats are eaten in China, especially Southern China, so these well-meaning edits were mostly removed.
Another level of complexity was added by the fluctuating terminology of the virus.
Over a dozen moves and merges were requested within WikiProject Viruses. To give you an idea of the musical chairs happening with article titles, here are the move histories of two articles:
Awkwafaba noted that "the main authorities,
WHO and
ICTV, don't really have a process for speedily naming a virus or disease." Additionally, they have different criteria for naming. They said, "I remember in a move discussion from the article then called Wuhan coronavirus that a virus name cannot have a geographical location in it, but this is a WHO disease naming guideline, and not an ICTV virus naming rule. ICTV may have renamed Four Corners virus to Sin Nombre orthohantavirus but there are still plenty of official virus species names that don't abide by WHO guidelines."
February DYKs
Thistle broomrape
Painting of the Shelton Oak
Female A. diabolicum flowers with curled stigmas
... that juvenile ornate surgeonfish are quite different in colouring from the adult fish? (1 February)
... that Quarry Moor is one of the few locations in England where the rare parasitic plant thistle broomrape(example pictured) grows? (2 February)
... that the hollow Shelton Oak(pictured) near
Shrewsbury was so big that a party of eight could dance a
quadrille inside it? (3 February)
... that growth in the brown seaweed Zanardinia typus occurs at the base of the hairs that grow around the edge of the frond? (4 February)
... that entomologist Karim Vahed led the team that found
a cricket species in which the
testes accounted for 14 percent of the insect's body mass? (4 February)
... that although the bird of paradise fly was first described from an Angophora tree, it is quite likely that this is not the insect's host plant? (11 February)
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
Problems
Readers who were not logged in briefly saw the interface in a language decided by their browser. It should normally be in the language of the wiki. This happened for a short period of time last week. This was because of a bug.
[6]
Changes later this week
If you forget your password you can ask for a new one to be sent to your email address. You need to know your email address or your username. You will now be able to choose that you need to enter both your email address and your username. This will be a preference. This is to get fewer password reset emails someone else asked for.
[7]
When you asked for a new password you could see if the username didn't exist on
Special:PasswordReset. Now the page will show the username you entered and tell you an email has been sent if the username exists. This is for better security.
[8]
On
Special:WhatLinksHere you can see what other pages link to a page. You can see if the link is from a redirect. You can now see which section the redirect links to.
[9]
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 3 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 4 March. It will be on all wikis from 5 March (
calendar).
There is a
vote on the creation of a new user group called
abuse filter manager. The vote runs from March 1 to March 31 on Meta.
wgMFSpecialCaseMainPage was used for the mobile site. It was deprecated in 2017. It will stop working in April. Wikis should see if they use it. If they do they should fix it. You can
read more and ask for help. This affects 183 wikis. There is a
list.
[11]
Shohei Otomo's usage of Pilot/Namiki pens 'in an advertisement'
I'm beginning revisions to the
Ballpoint pen artwork wikipedia page and among my first edits I added a link to the wiki page about Shohei Otomo which I happened to come across by accident. Heads up: I'll also be making edits to link Otomo's wiki to related pages.
And... sorry BUT: I happen to know that the 'Pilot advertisement' you noted in his article is mistaken or at least misleading; the 'ad' was nothing more than a promotional video produced by Otomo or a collaborator (perhaps to gain Pilot's interest?), but the way it is written in the wiki makes it seem as if Pilot commissioned the video and it was used for advertising purposes.
The video in question shows Otomo cracking open a beer before drawing, something I highly doubt such a respected Japanese institution as Namiki pens would allow to be depicted, even in the 21st century. That beer also happens to be identifiably a Kirin brand beer, something for which I doubt Pilot/Namiki & Kirin would be in cooperation. On top of that, the video shows no identifying credit at all, nothing to identify the video as an 'ad' and I can't think of any company who doesn't include a logo in an ad. If I remember correctly, only some kind of narration by Otomo himself, unrelated to the pens, runs through the so-called 'ad'.
On top of that, Otomo's artwork basically subverts classic Japanese imagery and the artist himself openly criticizes Japan's consumerist culture, a trait which I highly doubt such a corporation would align itself with.
Unless it can be clearly proven otherwise, any text referring to Otomo's video as a Pilot/Namiki-commissioned ad is misleading and must therefore be reworded for accuracy and clarity. This is no slight to Otomo or his artwork; surely worthy of a wiki page but anything less than the facts should be relegated to the artist's own websites or social media.
Penwatchdog (
talk)
08:35, 7 March 2020 (UTC)reply
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
There is a new search word called articletopic. You can use it to search for articles on a specific topic. It is available on the Arabic, Czech, English and Vietnamese Wikipedias. It will come to more Wikipedias soon.
[12][13][14]
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 10 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 11 March. It will be on all wikis from 12 March (
calendar).
The
Wikipedia Android app will do
push notifications if users want them. This could help you see for example when someone wrote on your talk page or your edit was reverted. This will come later this year.
[15]
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
There is a new
API module for changing the content model of existing pages. Use action=changecontentmodel to specify the new model. You can read the
documentation on mediawiki.org.
[16]
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 17 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 18 March. It will be on all wikis from 19 March (
calendar).
Future changes
If you edit a page at the same time as someone else you can get an edit conflict. There is
a new two-column interface to make it easier to solve this. It will soon be active by default on the German, Arabic, and Farsi Wikipedias. It will be on by default on more wikis within the next months. You will be able to opt out of the new interface.
[17][18]
You can see
a proposed design for replying to comments in an easier way.
Peer review for FL proposition of List of horseshoe bats
Hello Enwebb, thanks for creating the
List of horseshoe bats. I think that list has a potential to be a FL but it needs some review. I have some questions but could be more to correct before proposint the list to be a FL. Is it possible to make a peer review with the help of Bats TF? I will write some of my questions here:
As I'm not a native speaker, I have some difficulty about the use of "in/on", especially for the islands. In the text, when I put the range for subspecies I used Csorba et al. as the reference, and there for all islands only "in" was used. I have corrected for some small islands by using "on" but for bigger islands "in" is used, e.g. for Borneo, it should be in or on?
In the opening it is said there are 106 species, but I counted 103 species. There are still many different classifications. I don't know which one is valid.
Handbook of the Mammals of the World - Volume 9 (2019) could be used as the reference for the species, but I don't have access. Is it possible to find somebody to help with it?
For synonyms, I have used again Csorba et al. But I have another question. When a taxon is considered a subspecies after its description as a species, we could consider it as a junior synonym or not?
Also I think we need more header text before proposal.
Mskyrider, I'm not enwebb, but your question about in vs on for islands is intriguing. I'd say "on Corsica" but "in Sicily." I want to say "on Borneo." I am going to have to think about why.
--valereee (
talk)
19:24, 19 March 2020 (UTC)reply
@
Mskyrider: I'll be a
WikiJaguar too, and say that 'in' is for political areas, and 'on' if for physical islands. One is 'in' (the country of} Australia, and 'on' {the island of) Australia. So either really works. English can take it however you want to do it. --
awkwafaba (
📥)
00:19, 20 March 2020 (UTC)reply
Mskyrider, agreed with awkwafaba about the use of on and in.
As for your 2nd point, I don't have access to that work either. My typical
less than legal approach to obtaining books doesn't happen to have this title--probably because it's pretty new. All my local libraries are closed right now, but you can try posting on the
resource request page. Conversely, I saw
4444hhhh adding a reference to Mammals of the World Vol. 9 on
Bat, so maybe they can help you out
If I understand your question correctly for point 4, yes, a taxon that has been demoted from species to a subspecies is almost certainly going to have its name considered as a junior synonym, as long as that is consistent with the
Principle of Priority
I've never reviewed a Featured List or helped make one, but I can contribute more here if that would be helpful to you!
Enwebb (
talk)
16:10, 20 March 2020 (UTC)reply
map
Hey, Enwebb! Did you make the map? There'd been one there a few days ago, but it became outdated so I pulled it, it's good to have it again. Do you know how to do one of those sliding-scale thingies so you can see the development over time?
--valereee (
talk)
15:52, 19 March 2020 (UTC)reply
Valereee, yes, I made the map! I can commit to updating it every day after 2pm when the new numbers come out. Can you think of an example of an article that has what you're talking about with the sliding scale? I'm not sure I've seen that before.
Enwebb (
talk)
15:54, 19 March 2020 (UTC)reply
Hm...I feel like I've seen one on a wp page, but maybe it's been in some source. Things blur together in my memory. :D Let me see if I can find an example of what I mean.
--valereee (
talk)
16:25, 19 March 2020 (UTC)reply
Spread the WikiLove by giving someone else a tea, especially if it is someone you have had disagreements with in the past or someone putting up with some stick at this time. Enjoy!
Spread the lovely, warm, refreshing goodness of tea by adding {{
subst:wikitea}} to their talk page with a friendly message.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
Problems
Some development will be slower than planned. This is because of the
current pandemic. You can see
the new deployment guidelines. This is to avoid risks when some persons could be unavailable.
There was a problem when adding interwiki links. The tool you use to add interwiki links could suggest the wrong project to link to. This has now been fixed.
[19][20]
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 24 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 25 March. It will be on all wikis from 26 March (
calendar).
Future changes
There is
a project to make editing easier for newcomers. The developers are trying to understand what initiatives different Wikipedias have to welcome newcomers. They also want to know which templates are often used for maintenance activities. You can help this project by
checking if your wiki's pages are listed on Wikidata.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 31 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 1 April. It will be on all wikis from 2 April (
calendar).
Future changes
The video player will change to be simpler and more modern. The current beta feature will become the video player for everyone. The old player will be removed.
[22]
There is a project to make templates easier to use. The next few weeks the developers will present ideas on the
project page. You can watch that page if you are interested in giving feedback.
[23]
A year of the Tree of Life Newsletter: Thank you to all the subscribers who have been with us from the beginning or have joined along the way, and to those who have contributed their time to producing this newsletter. I've really valued your ideas, copyediting, and willingness to be interviewed. Onwards and upwards!
April marks the start of the
GAN Backlog Drive, which continues through the end of May. The goal of this backlog elimination drive is to cut the number of outstanding GANs, in particular those which have been in the queue 90 days or more. All hands welcome, new and old.
The finalists of the US Wiki Science Competition have
been announced. Illustrating Wikipedia articles can be challenging, so these new images represent a chance to find suitable media for our articles. For all images uploaded in the Wiki Science Competition, see
here and click "all images" in the upper right corner.
Fly's mouth and tongue (Microscopy)
Killer whales hunting a crabeater seal (Wildlife)
Fossilized tooth of a Squalicorax shark (Microscopy)
This interview has been edited for length. Find the full interview
here.
Number of participants of WikiProject Covid-19
Graphs are unavailable due to technical issues. There is more info on
Phabricator and on
MediaWiki.org.
Please describe how you went about creating WikiProject COVID-19. What made you think a project was needed?
I've been following the outbreak and editing related Wikipedia articles since January. I'm not particularly interested in infectious diseases or viruses, but I've been to China a few times and wanted to monitor the outbreak's impact on society as well as the government's response. For a while, I was casually tracking updates to the first couple pages about the outbreak. Then a pattern began to emerge as February saw the creation of separate articles about outbreaks in
Iran,
Italy, and
South Korea. New Wikipedia articles continued being created in early March, and the outbreak was recognized as a pandemic by the World Health Organization on March 11. Knowing there would many more articles, lists, templates, illustrations, and other pages on Wikipedia, I created WikiProject COVID-19 on March 15. My goal was simply to create a temporary or permanent space for editors to collaborate, communicate, and focus specifically on content related to this ongoing pandemic. I'm a member of many WikiProjects and have created several before, but this one definitely felt more necessary and urgent. Most WikiProjects unite editors with similar interests, which is fine and serves a purpose, but I felt this project could have a much bigger real life impact. I don't think I was alone in my thinking; the project had
80 members by March 20 and 100 members by March 26.
Who or what was invaluable to getting off the ground?
If I'm being honest, getting this project off the ground required little work on my part. All I did was create the space and post invitations to existing talk pages related to the outbreak. Editors joined the project very quickly; 30 members joined on the same day I started the project, and there were more than 50 participants one day later. I've been a daily Wikipedia editor for more than 12 years, and I've never seen so much interest in a project or content added to Wikipedia about a specific topic in such a short period of time. WikiProject members worked expeditiously to build a framework and hang a
barnstar, tagging related pages, assessing content, and starting
talk page discussions about the project's goals and scope. I'm thankful to the many editors who pitched in to get the project established, and I look forward to seeing how editors collaborate in this space as we move forward.
What are the short-term goals of the project?
No specific goals have been posted to the project page yet, but I'd like to think members share a collective desire to ensure Wikipedia has accurate and reliable information about the disease and pandemic. Disinformation and misinformation seem rampant these days, so we're working to give readers around the globe access to accurate, objective, and possibly even life-saving information. Unlike some WikiProjects which may take a more historical approach to documenting certain topics, WikiProject COVID-19 members have the ability to mitigate the disease's spread in real time by arming communities with facts about outbreaks in their region as well as information about prevention, testing, vaccine research, societal impact, etc.
What are the long-term goals? English Wikipedia has many of 'lumpers' who think there are too many projects already. The project has also inspired the creation of two portals, which I imagine caused some raised eyebrows in this trend of portal deletionism. What will come of the WP after the current outbreak subsides?
After creating WikiProject COVID-19, a couple editors said I should have created a task force instead of a standalone WikiProject. I wasn't bothered. The number of 'thank you' notifications I received for creating the page vastly outweighed these critical comments. I knew the page I created was much needed, and I would be fine if editors decide to call the page by another name. I understand some editors think there are too many WikiProjects. No one's required to join WikiProject COVID-19, but the 100+ of us who have already joined invite you to help with our efforts, if you're interested. As for the project's future, I would be fine if editors decided to convert the WikiProject into a task force, or even put the project into retirement if the time comes. Given the level of interest and impact the pandemic has already had on a global scale, I have a feeling the WikiProject will be active for a long time.
Another criticism of the project is its narrow focus. It is focused on only one
strain of virus, and the disease it causes. Even
WikiProject AIDS is about
two species of virus. Is the scope of the project too small? What would an expanded scope look like? Why would including another virus strain in the same species,
Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus which causes
SARS, not be wanted? or is it wanted?
Narrow focus? I disagree. The project may focus on a single virus and disease, but the pandemic has resulted in the creation of hundreds of Wikipedia articles documenting outbreaks in most countries and territories. There are pages covering the pandemic's impact on
aviation,
cinema,
education,
politics,
religion,
sports, and
television, not to mention others related to the
resulting economic turmoil. Additionally, there are hundreds of templates, charts, and other graphics. Who knows how many thousands of images and other media will be uploaded at Wikimedia Commons by the time this pandemic subsides? There's also
COVID-19 WikiProject COVID-19 at Wikidata, and I wouldn't be surprised if similar spaces are created for other Wikimedia projects soon. Even if the focus is narrow, there's plenty of content for Wikimedians to improve and protect.
In your opinion, what should be the guidelines for creating a new project, as opposed to creating a task force or working under an existing WikiProject?
I don't feel strongly about new project creation guidelines, or the differences between WikiProjects and task forces. Project members should decide what structure works for them and call themselves whatever name they prefer. I understand project construction requires maintenance and can come at an administrative cost, but we should be careful about discouraging editors from proposing new projects.
Ideally, editors would only create a new WikiProject if at least a few others were committed to joining. I created WikiProject COVID-19 without conferring with others because I assumed the interest would be there. I encourage people to be bold and create project pages, but maybe ask a few other editors for feedback first. I'll let other editors worry about the guidelines.
What tools (templates, bots, etc.) are essential, or even just really helpful, for organizing and maintaining a successful project? What is something every WP should do, that maybe isn't doing now?
I don't have any sort of medical background, and I'm more interested in the pandemic's impact than details about the disease or virus. Most surprising to me has been the lack of preparedness for combating outbreaks by governments around the world, including here in the United States. I don't know how COVID-19's spread compares to other infectious diseases, but as I've watched the outbreak develop I've continually wondered why governments did not start preparing earlier. What was happening in China, Iran, Italy, and South Korea should have prompted action sooner.
What important things about
2019–20 coronavirus pandemic do you think folks should know and maybe have missed in the deluge of information coming at people?
1. Know the most common symptoms: cough, fever, and difficulty breathing.
2. Learn what behavioral adjustments you should make to protect yourself and reduce transmission, and remember to wash your hands.
3. Get your information from reputable sources. I'd like to think Wikipedia editors are pretty good at this last bit of advice.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
Problems
There was a problem with user pages not being shown properly on desktop. This was because of a bug. It will soon be fixed.
[24]
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 7 April. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 8 April. It will be on all wikis from 9 April (
calendar).
Future changes
MediaWiki will use a newer version of
Unicode. Some characters that did not have an upper case equivalent before do now. Titles beginning with one of these characters will be moved. A list of these titles can be seen
on Phabricator. The titles will be renamed by the user Maintenance script. This will start on 13 April 2020. You can rename them before this if you wish and the new title can be different from the one the script would rename it to.
[25]
Hey Enwebb, thanks for your comments they were really nice. I'm trying to fully create this wikipedia page as a class assignment. I don't want to be rude but since this is going to be graded I'd really appreciate it if I could fill out this article in it's entirety, just trying to get that undergrad degree but I really do wanna stress how much I appreciate your comments.
Mutchroom (
talk)
21:08, 9 April 2020 (UTC)reply
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
Recent changes
You can now use the articletopic search word on all Wikipedias. It searches articles by topic.
[26]
There was a problem with the Wikidata database last week. Some wikis went down for twenty minutes. Wikidata and other projects showed error messages. Interwiki links were not shown, some tools did not work and other problems. Some of this was fixed quickly. The developers are working on fixing the rest.
[30][31][32]
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from April 14. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from April 15. It will be on all wikis from April 16 (
calendar).
Future changes
Some graphs have not worked on mobile. This will soon be fixed.
[33]
The article tab on talk pages of redirects links to the target of the redirect. It could link to the redirect page itself instead. You can
leave feedback on this.
For pages using
syntax highlighting, the use of the deprecated <source> tag, as well as the use of the deprecated enclose parameter, will add tracking categories.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
Tech News
The next issue of Tech News will be sent out on 4 May 2020.
Recent changes
The
small wiki toolkits is to help smaller wikis that need technical skills. They can learn and share technical skills.
[34]
Over-qualified CSS selectors in Wikimedia skins have been removed. div#content is now .mw-body. div.portal is now .portal. div#footer is now #footer. This is so the skins can use
HTML5 elements. If your gadgets or user styles used them you will have to update them.
[35]
Changes later this week
There is no new MediaWiki version this week.
Future changes
Some things on the wikis might look weird or not work in
Internet Explorer 8 in the future. Internet Explorer 8 was replaced in 2011.
[36]
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 28 April next week. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 29 April next week. It will be on all wikis from 30 April next week (
calendar).
The second round of the 2020 WikiCup has now finished. It was a high-scoring round and contestants needed 75 points to advance to round 3. There were some very impressive efforts in round 2, with the top ten contestants all scoring more than 500 points. A large number of the points came from the 12 featured articles and the 186 good articles achieved in total by contestants, and the 355 good article reviews they performed; the GAN backlog drive and the stay-at-home imperative during the COVID-19 pandemic may have been partially responsible for these impressive figures.
Our top scorers in round 2 were:
Epicgenius, with 2333 points from one featured article, forty-five good articles, fourteen DYKs and plenty of bonus points
Gog the Mild, with 1784 points from three featured articles, eight good articles, a substantial number of featured article and good article reviews and lots of bonus points
The Rambling Man, with 1262 points from two featured articles, eight good articles and a hundred good article reviews
Harrias, with 1141 points from two featured articles, three featured lists, ten good articles, nine DYKs and a substantial number of featured article and good article reviews
The rules for featured article reviews have been adjusted; reviews may cover three aspects of the article, content, images and sources, and contestants may receive points for each of these three types of review. Please also remember the requirement to mention the WikiCup when undertaking an FAR for which you intend to claim points. Remember also that DYKs cannot be claimed until they have appeared on the main page. As we enter the third round, any content promoted after the end of round 2 but before the start of round 3 can be claimed now, and anything you forgot to claim in round 2 cannot! Remember too, that you must claim your points within 14 days of "earning" them. When doing GARs, please make sure that you check that all the GA criteria are fully met.
Hi there, I'm pleased to inform you that I've begun reviewing the article
Cinnamon red bat you nominated for
GA-status according to the
criteria. This process may take up to 7 days. Feel free to contact me with any questions or comments you might have during this period. Message delivered by
Legobot, on behalf of
Dunkleosteus77 --
Dunkleosteus77 (
talk)
17:41, 3 May 2020 (UTC)reply
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
Problems
Some wikis will be on read-only for a few minutes on 5 May. This will happen around
05:00 UTC. This is for database maintenance.
[38]
Some wikis will be on read-only for a few minutes on 7 May. This will also affect
CentralAuth. This can for example affect global renames, password changes, changing or confirming your email address and logging in to new wikis. This will happen around
05:00 UTC. This is for database maintenance.
[39]
Changes later this week
You can get a notification when someone links to a page you created. You can soon turn these notifications off for individual pages.
[40]
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 5 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 6 May. It will be on all wikis from 7 May (
calendar).
WikiProject Birds gained a new task force.
A discussion determined that WikiProject Poultry might be more successful as a task force, with the move completed 15 April.
Round 2 of the
WikiCup wrapped up this month. Several editors moved on to Round 3 by scoring points in biodiversity-related areas, including Sainsf, Casliber, Dunkleosteus77, CaptainEek, Guettarda, and Enwebb. Dunkleosteus77 finished at the top of the Tree of Life pack with 608 points, finishing 9th overall in the round.
After a relatively quiet February and March, with only 11 total articles nominated for GA and none for FAC, April brought a shower of nominations. In total, 5 articles were nominated for FAC, 1 for FLC, and 11 for GA.
Tree of Life's growing featured content
Inspired by a
March 2020 post at WikiProject Medicine detailing the growth of Featured Articles over time, we decided to reproduce that table here, adding a second table showing the growth of Good Articles. Tree of Life articles are placed in the "Biology" category for FAs, which has seen a growth of 381% since 2008. Only two other subjects had a greater growth than Biology: Business, economics, and finance; and Warfare.
Percentage Growth in FA Categories, 2008–2019, Legend: Considerably above average, Above average, AverageBelow average , Considerably below average, Poor
Note A: Total is off by one; not worth looking for the error.
Note B Three food biographies moved
[41] per discussion at
WT:FAC
Note: The very odd dates used in earlier years result from pulling old data from the
talk page at WP:FAS.
Good Article Category as of
Feb 23, 2008
Sep 16, 2008
Sep 16, 2010
Dec 1, 2011
Jan 1, 2015
Jan 1, 2020
Pct chg Feb 2008 to 2011
Pct chg Feb 2008 to 2020
Agriculture, food and drink
27
34
37
55
113
226
104%
737%
Art and architecture
134
188
321
450
683
1022
236%
663%
Engineering and technology
256
396
882
1198
1828
2407
368%
840%
Geography and places
191
248
424
523
716
1052
174%
451%
History
261
312
651
825
1219
1894
216%
626%
Language and literature
173
215
377
462
686
982
167%
468%
Mathematics
19
22
27
30
36
67
58%
253%
Media and drama
403
658
1352
1300
3070
3961
223%
883%
Music
357
527
997
1437
2532
3892
303%
990%
Natural sciences
544
686
1275
1717
2404
3426
216%
530%
Philosophy and religion
134
174
244
294
365
557
119%
316%
Social sciences and society
468
549
790
998
1430
1854
113%
296%
Sports and recreation
384
546
1074
1402
2350
3802
265%
890%
Video games
168
220
373
443
684
1349
164%
703%
Warfare
155
241
989
1654
2544
3996
967%
2478%
Total
3674
5016
9813
12788
20660
30487
248%
730%
Organisms*
119
130
402
528
685
1017
344%
755%
*subset of natural sciences
Unsurprisingly, the number of GAs has increased more rapidly than the number of FAs. Organisms, which is a subcategory of Natural sciences, has seen a GA growth of 755% since 2008, besting the Natural sciences overall growth of 530%. While Warfare had far and away the most significant growth of GAs, it's a clear outlier relative to other categories.
... that although the alpine bartsia has a wide range in Europe and North America, it is known in the British Isles only from a few locations in northern England and the central
Scottish Highlands? (19 April)
... that the orange-band surgeonfish(pictured) can change colour from dark to light almost instantaneously? (21 April)
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
Everyone can now import photos from
Flickr to Commons with the
UploadWizard. Before this only autopatrollers on Commons could import photos from Flickr.
[42]
Problems
Commons will be on read-only for a few minutes on 12 May. This will happen around
05:00 UTC. This is for database maintenance.
[43]
Several wikis including Wikidata will be on read-only for a few minutes on 19 May. This will happen around
05:00 UTC. English Wikipedia will be on read-only for a few minutes on 21 May
05:00 UTC. This is for database maintenance.
[44][45]
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 12 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 13 May. It will be on all wikis from 14 May (
calendar).
Future changes
JavaScript scripts and gadgets can no longer check multiple keys at once via mw.config.exists() or mw.user.tokens.exists(). You can use exists() or get() to check one at a time instead.
[46]
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
If you forget your password you can ask for a new one to be sent to your email address. You need to know your email address or your username. You can choose that you need to enter both your email address and your username. This is a preference. This is to get fewer password reset emails someone else asked for. This is now available on all Wikimedia wikis.
[47][48]
Problems
There is a bug that creates problems for iPhone users with
iOS 13 and
Safari. If you use an iPhone to read or edit Wikipedia and see bugs on the mobile site you can
report them.
[49]
Several wikis including Wikidata will be on read-only for a few minutes on 19 May. This will happen around
05:00 UTC. English Wikipedia will be on read-only for a few minutes on 21 May
05:00 UTC. This is for database maintenance.
[50][51]
Graphs will be
rendered in the reader's browser. This will use
Javascript. Graphs will hopefully work better for everyone who uses Javascript. It will not work for users who don't use Javascript. This will not affect diagrams in image files.
[53]
Some CSS for the skins has been simplified. This affects div#p-personal, div#p-navigation, div#p-interaction, div#p-tb, div#p-lang, div#p-namespaces, div#p-variants and div#footer. They will have to remove div. You will have to update your gadgets, scripts or user styles. This is so we can use
HTML5.
[54]
Some CSS for
the Vector skin has been changed. This affects #p-variants, #p-namespaces, #p-personal, #p-views and #p-cactions. They can no longer use > ul. You might need to update your gadgets, scripts or user styles.
See how.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
Changes later this week
The visual editor will now work in the
Modern skin. The changes that needed to happen for this to work could cause problems for some scripts or gadgets.
[55]
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from May 26. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from May 27. It will be on all wikis from May 28 (
calendar).
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
There is a new beta version of the
Wikimedia Commons app for Android. It has a new zoom function when you look at images. It can also suggest places when you upload geotagged photos.
[56]
Problems
There was a problem with the Commons database on 27 May. Commons could not be edited for eight minutes. Because of this problem the database was moved. This caused another short read-only time on 29 May.
[57][58][59]
The
Vector skin had a problem where you couldn't add links to the article in other languages. You couldn't see the section if there were no links to other languages already. It also removed
content translation links and links to language settings. This has now been fixed.
[60]
Changes later this week
You can get a notification when someone links to a page you created. You can turn these notifications off for individual pages. You can soon turn them off also in the notifications you get.
[61]
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 2 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 3 June. It will be on all wikis from 4 June (
calendar).
This month saw two Tree of Life editors
gain the mop: CaptainEek (WikiProjects Birds and Plants) and Cwmhiraeth (familiar name at DYK, WikiProjects Plants, Animals, and Insects)
The April – May
GAN backlog drive finished up, clearing the queue from nearly 700 outstanding nominations to about 350.
Interview with Jts1882
This month we're joined by Jts1882, who is active in depicting evolutionary relationship of taxa via
cladograms. Part of this includes responding to
cladogram requests, where interested editors can have cladograms made without using the templates themselves.
How did you come to be interested in systematics? Are you interested in systematics broadly, or is there a particular group you're most fond of?
As long as I can remember I’ve been interested in nature, starting with the animals and plants in the garden, school grounds, and local wood, and then more general wildlife worldwide. An interest in how things are classified grew from this. I like things to be organised and understanding the relationships between things and systems (not just living things) is a big part of that. Biology was always my favourite subject in school and took up a disproportionate part of my time. My interest in systematics is broad as I’d like to comprehend the whole tree of life, but the cat family is my favourite group.
What's the background behind cladogram requests? I see that it isn't a very old part of the Tree of Life
Well I can’t take any credit for the cladogram requests page, although I help out there sometimes. It was created by IJReid and there are several people who have helped there more than me. I think the motivation is that creating cladograms requires a knowledge of the templates that is daunting for many editors. It was one way of helping people who want to focus on content creation.
My main contribution to the cladograms is converting the {{clade}} template to use a Lua module. The template code was extremely difficult to follow and had to be repetitive (I can only admire the efforts of those who got the thing to work in the first place). The conversion to Lua made it more efficient, allowed larger and deeper cladograms, plus facilitating the introduction of new features. The cladogram request page was recently the venue for discussion on making time calibrated cladograms, which is now possible, if not particularly user friendly.
What advice do you have for an editor who wants to learn how to make cladograms?
The same advice I would give to someone facing any computer problem, just try it out. Start by taking existing code for a cladogram and make changes yourself. The main advice would be to format it properly so indents match the brackets vertically. Of course, not everyone wants to learn and if someone prefers to focus on article content there is the cladogram request page.
Examples of cladograms Jts1882 has created, showing different proposed clades for
Neoaves
Do you have any personal projects or goals you're working towards on Wikipedia?
As I said I like organisation and systems. So I find efforts like the
automated taxobox system and {{taxonbar}} appealing. I would like to see more reuse of the major phylogenetic trees on Wikipedia with more use of consensus trees on the higher taxa. Too often they get edited based on one recent report and/or without proper citation.
Animals and
bilateria are examples where this is a problem.
Towards this I have been working on a system of phylogeny templates that can be reused flexibly. The {{Clade transclude}} template allows selective transclusion, so the phylogenetic trees on one page can be reused with modifications, i.e. can be pruned and grafted, used with or without images, with or without collapsible elements, etc. I have an example for the Angiosperm Phylogeny Group classification (see {{Phylogeny/APG IV}}) and one for squamates that also includes collapsible elements (see {{Phylogeny/Squamata}}).
A second project is to have a modular reference system for taxonomic resources. I have made some progress along this lines with the {{BioRef}} template. This started off simply as a way of hardlinking to
Catalog of Fishes pages and I’ve gradually expanded it to cover other groups (e..g.
FishBase,
AmphibiaWeb and
Amphibian Species of the World,
Reptile Database, the Mammalian Diversity Database). The modular nature is still rudimentary and needs a rewrite before it is ready for wider use.
What would surprise your fellow editors to learn about your life off-Wikipedia?
I don’t think there is anything particularly surprising or interesting about my life. I’ve had an academic career as a research scientist but I don't think anyone could guess the area from my Wikipedia edits. I prefer to work on areas where I am learning at the same time. This why I spend more time with neglected topics (e.g. mosses at the moment). I start reading and then find that I’m not getting the information I want.
Anything else you'd like us to know?
My interest in the classification of things goes beyond biology. I am fascinated by mediaeval attempts to classify knowledge, such as
Bacon in his The Advancement of Learning and
Diderot and
d’Alembert in their Encyclopédie. They were trying to come up with a universal scheme of knowledge just as the printing press was allowing greater dissemination of knowledge.
With the internet we are seeing a new revolution in knowledge dissemination. Just look at how we could read research papers on the COVID virus within weeks of its discovery. With an open internet, everyone has access, not just those with the luxury of books at home or good libraries. Sites like the
Biodiversity Heritage Library allow you to read old scientific works without having to visit dusty university library stack rooms, while the taxonomic and checklist databases provide instant information on millions of living species. In principle, the whole world can now find out about anything, even if
Douglas Adams warned we might be disinclined to do so.
This is why I like Wikipedia, with all its warts, it’s a means of organising the knowledge on the internet. In just two decades it’s become a first stop for knowledge and hopefully a gateway to more specialised sources. Perhaps developing this latter aspect, beyond providing good sources for what we say, is the next challenge for Wikipedia.
... that Tetraponera penzigi is one of several species of ant that protect
whistling thorn trees in East Africa from grazing giraffes and rhinoceroses? (3 May)
... that the Vietnam mouse-deer, which had been feared to have gone extinct nearly 30 years ago, was sighted again in 2019? (4 May)
... that most branchiobdellids use
crayfish as hosts, living on their heads,
carapaces, or
claws, but in some instances inside their gill cavities? (5 May)
... that the northern plains gray langur monkey (example pictured) is killed in India for food and to prevent crop raiding, despite being considered sacred by Hindus? (12 May)
... that the leech Limnatis nilotica can affect humans and livestock, entering hosts through the mouth, nose, or other orifices? (12 May)
... that the tree Barteria fistulosa is associated with Tetraponera aethiops, an aggressive species of ant that lives in its hollow branches and twigs? (15 May)
... that Miller's langur, one of the rarest primates in
Borneo, was feared to be extinct until a 2012 study rediscovered it in an area where it was previously unknown? (16 May)
... that most of the known Gigantopithecus fossils are of teeth because the other bones are likely to have been eaten by
porcupines? (17 May)
... that Tetraponera tessmanni, a very aggressive ant, is able to establish dominance over the whole of the liana in which it lives, which may be 50 m (164 ft) long? (17 May)
... that the Arizona dampwood termite exclusively colonizes dead parts of standing trees? (22 May)
... that Megaceroides algericus is one of only two deer species known to have been native to Africa, alongside the
Barbary stag? (23 May)
... that besides eating ants and termites, the waved woodpecker feeds on fruits, berries, and seeds? (24 May)
... that populations of the Canada lynx(pictured) undergo cyclic rises and falls in line with those of the
snowshoe hare? (25 May)
... that despite being known as the Mexican hydrangea, Clerodendrum bungei is neither from Mexico nor a species of
hydrangea? (25 May)
... that meerkats(examples pictured) use
alarm calls that can identify the type of predator posing the risk, the level of danger, and the caller itself? (27 May)
... that the frog Boophis fayi can be identified by its unusual green-and-turquoise eyes? (30 May)
... that members of the fly family Apystomyiidae(example depicted) have been found in Late Jurassic sediments in
Kazakhstan? (30 May)
... that the sun bear(pictured) is the smallest of all
bear species? (31 May)
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
Some articles have tables that can be sorted in different ways. For example a list of countries can be sorted alphabetically but you can click on the size column to sort them by size. If you clicked on the column a second time it would sort the countries from the bottom to the top instead. A third click will now take you back to the original sorting.
[62]
Self-closed tags now work as in the
HTML5 specifications. This means you should stop using some of them. <b/> is an example of a self-closed tag that won't work. area, base, br, col, embed, hr, img, input, keygen, link, meta, param, source, track, wbr can be self-closed. Pages with tags that should not be self-closed have been listed in
a tracking category since 2016. They will be listed in
Special:LintErrors/self-closed-tag. This doesn't affect <references /> or <ref />.
[63]
There is a banner called WikidataPageBanner. It is for example used by the Wikivoyages, Wikimedia Russia and the Catalan, Basque, Galician and Turkish Wikipedias. It will now been seen by mobile visitors too. Before this it was only seen on desktop. The wikis should update instructions on MediaWiki:Sitenotice so that editors know to test and style for mobile too.
[64][65]
Changes later this week
You can now edit
MassMessage descriptions through the
API. This is useful for tools and gadgets.
[66]
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 9 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 10 June. It will be on all wikis from 11 June (
calendar).
Future changes
A temporary fix helped wikis make their main pages more mobile friendly. This was in 2012. It has not been recommended since 2017. It will not work after 13 July. Wikis should use
TemplateStyles instead. 118 wikis need to fix this. You can
read more and see if your wiki is affected.
[67]
NPP Sorting can be a great way to find pages needing new page patrolling that match your strengths and interests. Using ORES, it divides articles into topics such as Literature or Chemistry and on Geography. Take a look and see if you can find time to patrol a couple pages a day. With over 10,000 pages in the queue, the highest it's been since
ACPERM, your help could really make a difference.
Google Adds New Languages to Google Translate
In late February, Google added 5 new languages to Google Translate: Kinyarwanda, Odia (Oriya), Tatar, Turkmen and Uyghur. This expands our ability to find and evaluate sources in those languages.
Discussions and Resources
A
discussion on handling new article creation by paid editors is ongoing at the Village Pump.
Also at the Village Pump is a
discussion about limiting participation at Articles for Deletion discussion.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
Problems
There are some
new tools to make it easier for newcomers to start editing. They are available on
some wikis. These wikis had a problem with the visual editor for a short period of time last week. This was because of a bug in the new tools. It was soon fixed.
[68]
Some user scripts and gadgets stopped working because of a change to
CSS selectors. .vectorTabs should be replaced with .vector-menu-tabs to fix this.
[69]
Changes later this week
The developers are working on a
new interface to solve edit conflicts on talk pages. This will be released on 24 June. You can
give feedback.
[70]
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 23 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 24 June. It will be on all wikis from 25 June (
calendar).
Future changes
A temporary fix helped wikis make their main pages more mobile friendly. This was in 2012. It has not been recommended since 2017. It will not work after 13 July. Wikis should use
TemplateStyles instead. 91 wikis still need to fix this. You can
read more and see if your wiki is affected.
[71]
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
Problems
Everyone was logged out. This was because a few users saw the wikis as if they were logged in to someone else's account. The problem should be fixed now.
[72]
Some readers didn't see new edits to pages. If the page had been recently changed they saw an older version of the page instead. This only affected readers who were logged out. It lasted for ten days. It has been fixed.
[73]
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 30 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 1 July. It will be on all wikis from 1 July (
calendar).
Future changes
The
Modern and
Monobook skins use the ID searchGoButton for the go button. This is searchButton for
Vector. To have the same ID for all skins it will change to searchButton in Monobook and Modern too. This will affect gadgets and user scripts. It will happen on 23 July. They should be updated to use searchButton. You can
read more and see a list of affected scripts.
Thank you for your interest and contributions to WikiLoop Battlefield.
We are holding a voting for proposed new name. We would like to invite you to this voting. The voting
is held at
m:WikiProject_WikiLoop/New_name_vote and ends on July 13th 00:00 UTC.
The third round of the 2020 WikiCup has now come to an end. The 16 users who made it into the fourth round each had at least 353 points (compared to 68 in 2019). It was a highly competitive round, and a number of contestants were eliminated who would have moved on in earlier years. Our top scorers in round 3 were:
Epicgenius, with one featured article, 28 good articles and 17 DYKs, amassing 1836 points
The Rambling Man , with 1672 points gained from four featured articles and seventeen good articles, plus reviews of a large number of FACs and GAs
Gog the Mild, a first time contestant, with 1540 points, a tally built largely on 4 featured articles and related bonus points.
Between them, contestants managed 14 featured articles, 9 featured lists, 3 featured pictures, 152 good articles, 136 DYK entries, 55 ITN entries, 65 featured article candidate reviews and 221 good article reviews. Additionally, MPJ-DK added 3 items to featured topics and 44 to good topics. Over the course of the competition, contestants have completed 710 good article reviews, in comparison to 387 good articles submitted for review and promoted. These large numbers are probably linked to a GAN backlog drive in April and May, and the changed patterns of editing during the COVID-19 pandemic. As we enter the fourth round, remember that any content promoted after the end of round 3 but before the start of round 4 can be claimed in round 4. Please also remember that you must claim your points within 14 days of "earning" them. When doing GARs, please make sure that you check that all the GA criteria are fully met. Please also remember that all submissions must meet core Wikipedia policies, regardless of the review process.
The article
Dwarf dog-faced bat you nominated as a
good article has passed ; see
Talk:Dwarf dog-faced bat for comments about the article. Well done! If the article has not already appeared on the main page as a "Did you know" item, or as a bold link under "In the News" or in the "On This Day" prose section, you can
nominate it within the next seven days to appear in DYK. Bolded names with dates listed at the bottom of the "On This Day" column do not affect DYK eligibility. Message delivered by
Legobot, on behalf of
Dunkleosteus77 --
Dunkleosteus77 (
talk)
20:02, 3 July 2020 (UTC)reply
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
Problems
The
Score extension has been disabled for now. This is because of a security issue. It will work again as soon as the security issue has been fixed.
[74]
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 7 July. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 8 July. It will be on all wikis from 9 July (
calendar).
Future changes
Abstract Wikipedia is a new Wikimedia project. It will collect language-independent information that can be easily read in different languages. It builds on Wikidata. The name is preliminary. You can
read more.
[75]
Some
rules for user signatures will soon be enforced.
Lint errors and invalid HTML will no longer be allowed in user signatures. Nested substitution will not be allowed. A link to your user page, user talk page or user contributions will be required. You can
check if your signature works with the new rules. This is because the signatures can cause problems for tools or other text on the page.
Hi there, I'm pleased to inform you that I've begun reviewing the article
Bat virome you nominated for
GA-status according to the
criteria. This process may take up to 7 days. Feel free to contact me with any questions or comments you might have during this period. Message delivered by
Legobot, on behalf of
Chidgk1 --
Chidgk1 (
talk)
12:01, 7 July 2020 (UTC)reply
The article
Bat virome you nominated as a
good article has been placed on hold . The article is close to meeting the
good article criteria, but there are some minor changes or clarifications needing to be addressed. If these are fixed within 7 days, the article will pass; otherwise it may fail. See
Talk:Bat virome for issues which need to be addressed. Message delivered by
Legobot, on behalf of
Chidgk1 --
Chidgk1 (
talk)
06:41, 12 July 2020 (UTC)reply
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
Users can
thank others for their edits.
Checkusers can now see user data related to that action. This can help identify
sock puppets who harass others using thanks.
[76]
Problems
Everyone was logged out a couple of weeks ago to fix a security problem. The problem was not entirely fixed. Because of this everyone was logged out once again last week.
[77][78]
Changes later this week
Wikis that are not for one specific language can
translate pages. Sometimes parts of translations are outdated or missing. Outdated translations are marked with a pink background. Missing translations will also be marked in the future. This markup can sometimes break things. It can soon be disabled by using <translate nowrap></translate> on the source page.
[79]
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 14 July. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 15 July. It will be on all wikis from 16 July (
calendar).
Future changes
Wikimedia code review plans to use
GitLab. It would be hosted on Wikimedia servers.
[80][81][82][83]
The article
Bat virome you nominated as a
good article has passed ; see
Talk:Bat virome for comments about the article. Well done! If the article has not already appeared on the main page as a "Did you know" item, or as a bold link under "In the News" or in the "On This Day" prose section, you can
nominate it within the next seven days to appear in DYK. Bolded names with dates listed at the bottom of the "On This Day" column do not affect DYK eligibility. Message delivered by
Legobot, on behalf of
Chidgk1 --
Chidgk1 (
talk)
07:02, 18 July 2020 (UTC)reply
Merlin Tuttle
Hello! Thank you for informing me of my violation of Wikipedia's COI policy as I was previously unaware when making edits to
Merlin Tuttle. I have publicly disclosed on my talk page my COI with the subject and I would like to move forward with properly contributing to Merlin's page if that is a possibility. I am new to Wikipedia and am a bit overwhelmed by the rules and complexities so my apologies for my ignorance! Please let me know if you would be interested in reviewing Merlin's page or what the appropriate procedure is for contributing to his page. Thank you!
Dmil3422 (
talk)
22:43, 18 July 2020 (UTC)reply
Thank you for the clarification and glad to learn that you are a bat fan! About the photo, would it be possible to use it if I uploaded a signed consent form from Merlin and MTBC granting permission to use it?
The article
Hammer-headed bat you nominated as a
good article has passed ; see
Talk:Hammer-headed bat for comments about the article. Well done! If the article has not already appeared on the main page as a "Did you know" item, or as a bold link under "In the News" or in the "On This Day" prose section, you can
nominate it within the next seven days to appear in DYK. Bolded names with dates listed at the bottom of the "On This Day" column do not affect DYK eligibility. Message delivered by
Legobot, on behalf of
Jens Lallensack --
Jens Lallensack (
talk)
22:02, 19 July 2020 (UTC)reply
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
A temporary fix helped wikis make their main pages more mobile friendly. This was in 2012. It has not been recommended since 2017. The mobile main page special casing stopped working 14 July. 60 wikis now have main pages that don't work well on mobile. You can see which ones, how to fix it and how to get help
in Phabricator. This is the same problem that was reported in Tech News
2020/24 and
2020/26.
Problems
There is a problem with the interlanguage links. The interlanguage links are the links that help you find a specific page in a different language. The sorting is broken. The developers are working on a solution.
[84]
Some users keep getting the notifications for the same event. Some of these are old events.
[85]
Some users have trouble logging in. This is probably a
browser cookie problem. The developers are working on understanding the problem. If you have trouble logging in you can see the details
on Phabricator.
[86]
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 21 July. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 22 July. It will be on all wikis from 23 July (
calendar).
Future changes
There is a Printable version link. This will disappear. That is because web browsers today can create a printable version or show how it will look in print anyway.
[87]
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
Recent changes
The
Starter kit is now available for wiki communities. This page lists technical resources, tools, and recommendations. These are essential to operate a wiki project. This is mostly useful for smaller wikis where the community has limited experience with this.
[88]
The first features of the
Desktop Improvements project are available for logged-in users on all wikis. In order to use them, uncheck Use Legacy Vector in your
local or
global preferences in section Skin preferences. More improvements are planned.
Feedback is welcome.
The deployment train for MediaWiki has been blocked this week.
[89][90]
Translation Notification Bot was sending the same message multiple times to every translator. This has been fixed.
[91]
Some users were receiving the same notification multiple times. This has been fixed.
[92]
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from July 28. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from July 29. It will be on all wikis from JUly 30 (
calendar).
This issue is a double issue, but the plan is to return to monthly henceforth.
A
discussion at
WikiProject Palaeontology about internal peer review processes led to the creation of
a peer review space. In contrast to the more formal
Peer Review, PalaeoPR focuses on short "fact checks", emphasizing content over style. Reviews are meant to be low commitment, with "drive-by reviews" encouraged. Since its inception on 8 July, seven articles have been submitted to PalaeoPR.
After a highly competitive third round, two Tree of Life editors advanced to the fourth round of the
WikiCup: Dunkleosteus77 and Sainsf
A
February 2020 paper published in PLOS noted that Mammalian Species is one of the most over-cited journals on Wikipedia relative to how frequently it is cited in other academic works.
Categorizing life with DexDor
DexDor is a WikiGnome with a particular interest in article categorization, including how organisms are categorized.
How did you become interested in editing biodiversity topics on Wikipedia?
I'm a wikignome who tries to remove unnecessary complexity and confusion in Wikipedia. I specialise in categorization. I've worked on categorization of several topic areas (e.g. military equipment) - anywhere where I see things like category tags on articles that the category text doesn't support. Categorization of organisms is one area I'm currently looking at (
my essay on this).
You seem to be particularly interested in geographic categorization of organisms. What are some issues in this area?
One issue is that there are several possible relationships between an organism and a region (i.e. what the "of" in a "Xs of Y" means) - the organism may be found throughout the region, somewhere in the region, only in the region (i.e. endemic to that region) - there are categories for each of these (and others) and some categories have been unclear about their exact meaning. Then there's introductions by man, locally extinct species, occasional visitors...
Another issue is that some editors have thought it's appropriate to create categories for very small areas ("Spiders of Vatican City" is only a slight exaggeration) and put a few articles in them, thus creating a category that is both massively incomplete and non-defining for the articles in it.
There have been several (now blocked) editors who have been disruptive in this area, but a confusing and sprawling categorization scheme is also partly due to editors from a particular background categorizing a particular article in a way that appears to make sense, but doesn't really make sense in the wider categorization scheme - for example, if an article mentions the countries at the extremes of an animal's distribution, the animal is categorized just for those countries.
What potential solutions do you see for categorizing organisms by geography? How can other editors help address this issue, or at least, not make it worse?
We should have some guidelines that tell editors how to categorize any article about an organism (including any geographical categorization). I've started drafting guidelines at
User:DexDor/BioCat. The guidelines are also a good way to ensure that the categorization of articles about organisms is aligned with categorization of other articles and may help us to identify where there are problems, inconsistencies etc in the categorization. I welcome suggestions for improvement of the guidelines (which should at some point be moved into WP:TOL).
Regarding geographical categorization of animals the main advice for editors would be to not create categories for any new areas and to only create a new category if you intend to populate it.
What have you learned from being a Wikipedia editor?
That lots of people (from varied backgrounds) each making (mostly) small improvements (like ants in an ants nest?) and only understanding some parts of Wikipedia can produce such a wonderful resource. But also, how that tends to result in ever-increasing complexity which negatively affects editors and readers.
Is there anything about your life outside Wikipedia that would surprise us?
... that despite being a member of the
cat family, the jaguarundi has several features in common with
mustelids such as otters and weasels? (2 June)
... that scientists were unsure whether the blue calamintha bee(pictured) still existed until it was observed again in March 2020? (2 June)
... that many of the animals regarded as pests have co-evolved with humans, adapting to the warm, sheltered conditions that a building provides? (3 June)
... that the banteng is the second
endangered species to be successfully
cloned, and the first clone to survive beyond infancy? (5 June)
... that cattle and deer sometimes stand under trees where southern plains gray langurs are feeding in order to consume the edible pieces that the monkeys drop? (10 June)
... that when boiled in milk, black coral(example pictured) emits a faint scent of
myrrh? (21 June)
... that one of the factors affecting the future of the Huanchaca mouse is the increased cultivation of
biofuels? (22 June)
... that the Strawberries and Cream Tree(pictured) is noted for producing pink blossoms on one side of the tree and white on the other, when it blooms every spring? (23 June)
... that the Chilean seaside cinclodes bobs its tail while it walks and flares its wings while it sings? (24 June)
... that Boie's frog(pictured) and the Banhado frog both resemble dead leaves on the floor of the forest? (25 June)
... that Markham's storm petrel, which nests in Peru and northern Chile, has been described as "one of the least known seabirds in the world"? (7 July)
... that the frog Corythomantis greeningi retreats into a hole, blocks the entrance with its spiny head, and injects venom into anything that tries to dislodge it? (18 July)
... that the reef box crab uses its powerful pincers to break open the shells of snails? (21 July)
... that the genus Pterodactylus(species depicted), the scientific name for a pterodactyl, had been considered a "
wastebasket taxon" as many species were assigned to it and later reassigned? (23 July)
... that the sea urchin Abatus cordatus broods its young for nine months in pockets on its upper surface? (24 July)
... that Harold Clyde Bingham trailed a troop of gorillas for 100 hours in 1929? (25 July)
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
Problems
All queries to the
Wikidata Query Service failed between 17:50 and 17:59 UTC on Thursday 23 July. Some queries failed during a longer period.
[93]
Interlanguage links were ordered incorrectly for the past few weeks. This problem was also mentioned in
Tech News two weeks ago. The problem is now fixed.
[94]
There is a problem with the
global preferences for the "Use Legacy Vector" option. Developers are working on fixing it.
[95]
A bug in the Wikibase extension had disabled the "move" and "create" types of protection in the main (Gallery) namespace on Wikimedia Commons. New protections could not be added, and existing protections were not enforced, allowing some page moves and page creations that should not have been possible. This has now been fixed.
[96]
Changes later this week
The
video player will change to be simpler and more modern. This week, the current beta feature will become the video player for everyone on most non-Wikipedia wikis. The old player will be removed.
[97]
Users' global.js and global.css pages will now also be loaded on the mobile site. You can read
documentation for how to avoid applying styles to the mobile skin.
[98]
In the
MonoBook skin, the searchGoButton identifier is now searchButton. This may affect CSS and JS gadgets. Migration instructions can be found in
T255953. This was previously mentioned in
issue 27.
Bot operators can use Pywikibot to regularly archive discussions. The behavior when the bot uses counter to prevent large archives was changed.
[99]
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from August 4. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from August 5. It will be on all wikis from August 6 (
calendar).
Hi, I'm one of the Catalan Wikipedia users who regularly write about mammals. Thanks for the heads-up on the Mustelodon hoax. It does look like this could be the longest-lived hoax we've ever had, at least on the English-language Wikipedia. Have a great day!--
Leptictidium (mt)
06:44, 8 August 2020 (UTC)reply
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
FileImporter and FileExporter became standard features on all Wikis during the first week of August. They help you transfer files from local wikis to Wikimedia Commons with the original file information and history intact.
[100]
Problems
The mobile skin displays a message at the bottom of the page about who edited last. This message showed raw wikitext. This has now been fixed. Some messages in
Structured Discussions and
content translation may still appear as raw wikitext. Developers are working on it.
[101]
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from August 11. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from August 12. It will be on all wikis from August 13 (
calendar).
Future changes
All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes on September 1. This is planned between 13:30 and 15:30 UTC. More information will be published in Tech News and will also be posted on individual wikis in the coming weeks.
[102][103]
Nightsmaiden, I imagine most people find learning easiest when they are not being belittled :) Happy to help, please drop me a line if you have questions while editing.
Enwebb (
talk)
20:05, 16 August 2020 (UTC)reply
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
If you revert an edit using the undo link your edit is marked with an undo tag. This will now only happen if you don't change anything in the edit window before publishing the undo. This is to keep users from marking edits as undos when they actually do something else.
[104]
The new
OOUI version will not work with
Internet Explorer 8. This means the wikis will look strange and not work well in Internet Explorer 8. This was reported in
Tech/News/2020/17. This is because keeping the wikis working with very old browsers creates other problems.
[105]
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 18 August. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 19 August. It will be on all wikis from 20 August (
calendar).
Future changes
All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes on September 1. This is planned between 13:30 and 15:30 UTC. More information will be published in Tech News and will also be posted on individual wikis next week. This is a reminder. You can help by
translating the announcement message.
[106][107]
Egyptian Rousette bat: A natural reservoir for MARV
On the Egyptian Rousette bat being a reservoir for Marbug, there is a CDC dispatch in regards to this. The discovery gives credence to specific populations of the Egyptian Rousette as being a natural reservoir for MARV. Here is a link to the dispatch:
https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/24/6/17-2165_article
Join the RfC to define trust levels for WikiLoop DoubleCheck
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 25 August. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 26 August. It will be on all wikis from 27 August (
calendar).
Hi there, I'm pleased to inform you that I've begun reviewing the article
Great flying fox you nominated for
GA-status according to the
criteria. This process may take up to 7 days. Feel free to contact me with any questions or comments you might have during this period. Message delivered by
Legobot, on behalf of
FunkMonk --
FunkMonk (
talk)
15:40, 25 August 2020 (UTC)reply
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
Problems
This is a reminder. All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes on September 1. This is planned between 14:00 and 15:00 UTC. Please check on the details on
the announcement message.
[108][109]
The fourth round of the competition has finished, with 865 points being required to qualify for the final round, nearly twice as many points as last year. It was a hotly competitive round with two contestants with 598 and 605 points being eliminated, and all but two of the contestants who reached the final round having achieved an FA during the round. The highest scorers were
Bloom6132, with 1478 points gained mainly from 5 featured lists, 12 DYKs and 63 in the news items;
HaEr48 with 1318 points gained mainly from 2 featured articles, 5 good articles and 8 DYKs;
Lee Vilenski with 1201 points mainly gained from 2 featured articles and 10 good articles.
Between them, contestants achieved 14 featured articles, 14 featured lists, 2 featured pictures, 87 good articles, 90 DYK entries, 75 ITN entries, 95 featured article candidate reviews and 81 good article reviews. Congratulations to all who participated! It was a generally high-scoring and productive round and I think we can expect a highly competitive finish to the competition.
Remember that any content promoted after the end of round 4 but before the start of round 5 can be claimed in round 5. Remember too that you must claim your points within 10 days of "earning" them. If you are concerned that your nomination will not receive the necessary reviews, please list it on
Wikipedia:WikiCup/Reviews. It would be helpful if this list could be cleared of any items no longer relevant. If you want to help out with the WikiCup, please do your bit to keep down the review backlogs! Questions are welcome on
Wikipedia talk:WikiCup, and the judges are reachable on their talk pages or by email. If you wish to start or stop receiving this newsletter, please feel free to add or remove yourself from
Wikipedia:WikiCup/Newsletter/Send.
Godot13 (
talk),
Sturmvogel 66 (
talk),
Vanamonde (
talk),
Cwmhiraeth (
talk)
MediaWiki message delivery (
talk)
19:52, 1 September 2020 (UTC)reply
On August 7,
WikiProject Palaeontology member Rextron discovered a suspicious taxon article, Mustelodon, which was created in November 2005. The article lacked references and the subsequent discussion on
WikiProject Palaeontology found that the alleged type locality (where the fossil was first discovered) of Lago Nandarajo "near the northern border of Panama" was nonexistent. In fact, Panama does not even really have a northern border, as it is bounded along the north by the Caribbean Sea. No other publications or databases mentioned Mustelodon, save a fleeting mention in a 2019 book that presumably followed Wikipedia, Felines of the World.
The article also appeared in four other languages, Catalan, Spanish, Dutch, and Serbian. In Serbian Wikipedia, a note at the bottom of the page warned: "It is important to note here that there is no data on this genus in the official scientific literature, and all attached data on the genus Mustelodon on this page are taken from the English Wikipedia and are the only known data on this genus of mammals, so the validity of this genus is questionable."
Editors took action to alert our counterparts on other projects, and these versions were removed also. As the editor who reached out to Spanish and Catalan Wikipedia, it was somewhat challenging to navigate these mostly foreign languages (I have a limited grasp of Spanish). I doubted that the article had very many watchers, so I knew I had to find some WikiProjects where I could post a machine translation advising of the hoax, and asking that users follow local protocols to remove the article. I was surprised to find, however, that Catalan Wikipedia does not tag articles for WikiProjects on talk pages, meaning I had to fumble around to find what I needed (turns out that WikiProjects are Viquiprojectes in Catalan!) Mustelodon remains
on Wikidata, where its "instance of" property was swapped from "taxon" to "fictional taxon".
How did this article have such a long lifespan? Early intervention is critical for removing hoaxes. A 2016 report found that a hoax article that survives its first day has an 18% chance of lasting a year.[1] Additionally, hoax articles tend to have longer lifespans if they are in inconspicuous parts of Wikipedia, where they do not receive many views. Mustelodon was only viewed a couple times a day, on average.
Mustelodon survived a brush with death three years into its lifespan. The article was proposed for deletion in September 2008, with a deletion rationale of "No references given; cannot find any evidence in peer-reviewed journals that this alleged genus actually exists". Unfortunately, the proposed deletion was contested and the template removed, though the declining editor did not give a rationale. Upon its rediscovery in August 2020, Mustelodon was tagged for speedy deletion under
CSD G3 as a "blatant hoax". This was challenged, and an
Articles for Deletion discussion followed. On 12 August, the AfD was closed as a SNOW delete. WikiProject Palaeontology members ensured that any trace of it was scrubbed from legitimate articles. The fictional mammal was finally, truly extinct.
At the ripe old age of 14 years, 9 months, this is the longest-lived documented hoax on Wikipedia, topping the previous documented record of 14 years, 5 months, set by
The Gates of Saturn, a fictitious television show, which was incidentally also discovered in August 2020. How do we discover other hoax taxa? Could we use Wikidata to discover taxa are not linked to databases like ITIS, Fossilworks, and others?
This month's spotlight is with Mattximus, author of two Featured Articles and 29 Featured Lists at current count.
How did you become involved with editing biodiversity articles?
I think I have a compulsion to make lists, it doesn't show up in my real life, but online I secretly get a lot of satisfaction making orderly lists and tables. It's a bit of a secret of mine, because it doesn't manifest in any other part of my life. My background is in biology, so this was a natural (haha) fit.
You have an impressive number of FAs under your belt. Two of your more recent ones, Apororhynchus and Gigantorhynchus, are part of what you referred to as an "experiment". How did you choose these articles, and what's next for you in this experiment?
This experiment was just to see if I could get any random article to FA status, so I picked the very first alphabetical animal species according to the taxonomy and made that attempt. Technically, there isn't enough information for a species page so I just merged the species into a genus and went from there. It was a fun exercise, but doing it alone is not the most fun so it's probably on pause for the foreseeable future.
Note: Aporhynchus is the first alphabetical taxon as follows: Animalia, Acanthocephala, Archiacanthocephala, Apororhynchida, Apororhynchidae, Apororhynchus
What advice would you give to someone who wants to nominate their first FAC?
I would recommend getting a good article nominated, then a featured list up before tackling the FA. Lists are a bit more forgiving but give you a taste of what standards to expect from FA. The most time consuming thing is proper citations so make sure that is in order before starting either.
Is there anything that would surprise us to learn about your life off-Wikipedia?
My personality in real life does not match my wikipedia persona. I'm not a very organized, or orderly in real life, but the wikipedia pages I brought to FL or FA are all very organized. Maybe it's my outlet for a more free-flowing life as a scientist/teacher.
Anything else you'd like us to know?
The fact that wikipedia exists free of profit motive and free for everyone really is something special and I encourage everyone to donate a few dollars to the cause.
... that the flower buds of the woolly thistle(pictured) can be eaten in a similar way to
artichokes? (8 August)
... that the French peanut is native to Brazil? (10 August)
... that the 800-year-old Minchenden Oak is one of the oldest trees in London? (14 August)
... that the forward-facing
incisors of the extinct dolphin Ankylorhiza(restoration pictured) may have been used for ramming their prey, similar to a hunting method used by modern
orcas? (16 August)
... that scientists accidentally created a
hybrid of two endangered fish species, called the sturddlefish? (17 August)
... that despite having the widest distribution in the United States, the arid-land subterranean termite causes less structural damage than other members of its genus? (19 August)
... that in 2021, the dwarf periodical cicada(pictured) is due to emerge in parts of eastern North America, not having been seen for 17 years? (24 August)
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
Changes later this week
Normally pages can be moved to a title that has no existing page yet or to a page that has only one revision, which is a redirect to the page to be moved. A new user right allows editors to move pages over one-revision pages that redirect to anywhere.
[110]
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 8 September. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 9 September. It will be on all wikis from 10 September (
calendar).
All MediaWiki
API modules will now use watchlist instead of watch. This was inconsistent before.
[111]
Future changes
The
Wikipedia Android app team might work on patrolling tools in the future. You can let them know what tools would be useful for you or for less experienced patrollers. See the
page on mediawiki.org.
OTRS will be updated to a new version. This will probably take around two days. OTRS agents will not have access to the system during these days. Emails that come in during the update will be delivered when the update is done. The plan is to start around 08:00 UTC on 14 September. This could change.
[112]
The Wikipedia Android app will send
push notifications if users want them. This could help you see for example when someone wrote on your talk page or your edit was reverted. This will need
Google Play Services to work. It will also be possible to get the app without Google Play Services but push notifications will not work. Google Play Services is also used to make the app work for
Android 4.4 users.
[113][114]
Wikimedia code review could move to
GitLab. It would be hosted on Wikimedia servers. You can take part in the
consultation.
Dropdown menus in
the Vector skin use a .menu class. This will not work in the future. Scripts can use nav ul instead. .vectorTabs and .vectorMenu will also not work. Some scripts need to be updated. You can
read more in Phabricator.
Hello, Enwebb. Please check your email; you've got mail! It may take a few minutes from the time the email is sent for it to show up in your inbox. You can remove this notice at any time by removing the {{You've got mail}} or {{ygm}} template.
Gen. Quon, yeah absolutely, the last one is great and I also like the second one. The article could stand to have more pictures in general, especially considering what a common and well-photographed species it is. When's our next GA collab? A big "pie in the sky" I've thought about is a
WP:GT of
Bats of the United States. So any US species would work if you have interest.
Enwebb (
talk)
01:35, 11 September 2020 (UTC)reply
Gen. Quon, eastern red would be good! It is mostly already in the structure used in other bat GAs like little brown bat, big brown bat, and tricolored bat:
Taxonomy
Description
Biology / Biology and ecology
Range and habitat
Conservation
Definitely would want more about the effect of wind turbines--I think that's a pretty serious source of mortality for these guys.
Enwebb (
talk)
02:28, 11 September 2020 (UTC)reply
Yes definitely. I've tried doing stuff like this before on Facebook with the North American Society of Bat Research. People always express interest and then just...don't follow through and upload the pics. Maybe it would work out with more follow-up, though.
Enwebb (
talk)
16:00, 11 September 2020 (UTC)reply
Side question: While doing some preliminary work for the eastern red bat, I decided to really quickly make an article for Lasiurus frantzii. However, some sources, such as
this show it as a subspecies, whereas others, like
this contend it is its own species. Is there a good way to handle this?--Gen. Quon(Talk)18:35, 12 September 2020 (UTC)reply
Gen. Quon, yeah, that's a hard one. Lasiurus is tricky. I went ahead and followed the ASM mammal diversity database in recognizing three genera in Lasiurini (Lasiurus + Dasypterus and Aeorestes), so that could be precedent for following
ASM again and recognizing L. frantzii as distinct. Whenever MSW4 eventually comes out we can clean up inconsistencies. I think it's justifiable either way.
Enwebb (
talk)
18:44, 12 September 2020 (UTC)reply
Yes, it's a solidly decent stub. I added a couple of categories, did the stub sorting, and added needs-photo and needs-map parameters to the talk page template.
Enwebb (
talk)
20:23, 12 September 2020 (UTC)reply
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
Problems
The
Wikipedia apps briefly showed pages without
CSS last week. This meant they looked wrong. It was quickly fixed but cached pages without CSS were shown for a few hours.
[119][120]
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 15 September. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 16 September. It will be on all wikis from 17 September (
calendar).
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
There is a new tag for reverted edits. For example you can see it in the recent changes feed or in the article history. It is added to edits when they have been undone, rollbacked or manually reverted to an older version of the page.
[121][122]
Changes later this week
The number of times you can do something in a period of time on wiki is limited. This could be the number of edits per minute or the number of users you email in a day. Some users are not affected by all limits because of their user rights. They could soon see the limit even if it does not affect them.
[123]
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 22 September. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 23 September. It will be on all wikis from 24 September (
calendar).
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
Editors are automatically added to some user groups. For example editors are added to
autoconfirmed users when they have edited enough times and long enough.
Abuse filters can hinder users from automatically getting user rights for a period of time. They can also remove rights user have. Wikis can now ask to change how long this period of time is for their wiki
in Phabricator. It is currently five days.
[125]
Problems
Last year some abuse filters stopped working because of a new change. If they tried to use variables that were unavailable for that action they would fail. This has now been fixed.
[126]
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 29 September. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 30 September. It will be on all wikis from 1 October (
calendar).
Future changes
You can't see the language links to other language versions from the talk page or history page. They are also not shown when you edit an article. This could change. It is not decided if for example the history page should link to another history page or to the article. You can take part in the
discussion in Phabricator.
The link colours could change. This is to make the difference between links and other text more clear. You can
read more in Phabricator.
In your preferences you can choose to get different notifications on the web or by email. You will see Apps as one of the alternatives later this week. This is because the
Android and iOS Wikipedia apps will use push notifications for those who want them. You can see the
preferences on the test wiki. The goal is to have push notifications on Android in October and on iOS in early 2021.
[127]
You can soon put pages on your watchlist for a limited time. This could be useful if you want to watch something for a shorter time but don't want it on your watchlist forever. It now works on
mediawiki.org and will come to more wikis later. You can
read more and
see when it will come to other wikis.
The article
Great flying fox you nominated as a
good article has passed ; see
Talk:Great flying fox for comments about the article. Well done! If the article has not already appeared on the main page as a "Did you know" item, or as a bold link under "In the News" or in the "On This Day" prose section, you can
nominate it within the next seven days to appear in DYK. Bolded names with dates listed at the bottom of the "On This Day" column do not affect DYK eligibility. Message delivered by
Legobot, on behalf of
FunkMonk --
FunkMonk (
talk)
16:03, 5 October 2020 (UTC)reply
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
There is a
new tool where you can see which home wiki users have in discussions on Meta. This can help show which communities are not part of the discussion on wikis where we make decisions that affect many other wikis.
You can now thank users for file uploads or for changing the language of a page.
[128]
Problems
There were many errors with the new MediaWiki version last week. The new version was rolled back. Updates that should have happened last week are late.
[129]
Everyone was logged out. This was because a user reported being logged in to someone else's account. The problem should be fixed now.
[130]
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 6 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 7 October. It will be on all wikis from 8 October (
calendar).
Letters immediately after a link are shown as part of the link. For example the entire word in [[Child]]ren is linked. On Arabic wikis this works at both the start and end of a word. Previously on Arabic wikis numbers and other non-letter Unicode characters were shown as part of the link at the start of a word but not at the end. Now only Latin and Arabic letters will extend links on Arabic wikis.
[131]
Future changes
You will be able to read but not to edit the wikis for up to an hour on
27 October around 14:00 (UTC). It will probably be shorter than an hour.
[132]
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
Problems
Because of the problems with the MediaWiki version two weeks ago last week's updates are also late.
[133][134][135]
Changes later this week
Live previews didn't show the templates used in the preview if you just edited a section. This has now been fixed. You can also test
CSS and
JavaScript pages even if you have the live preview enabled. Previously this didn't work well.
[136][137]
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 13 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 14 October. It will be on all wikis from 15 October (
calendar).
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 20 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 21 October. It will be on all wikis from 22 October (
calendar).
Future changes
You will be able to read but not to edit the wikis for up to an hour on
27 October around 14:00 (UTC). It will probably be shorter than an hour.
[139]
In the
AbuseFilter extension, the rmspecials() function will be updated soon so that it does not remove the "space" character. Wikis are advised to wrap all the uses of rmspecials() with rmwhitespace() wherever necessary to keep filters' behavior unchanged. You can use the search function on
Special:AbuseFilter to locate its usage.
[140]
Some gadgets and user-scripts use the HTML div with the ID #jump-to-nav. This div will be removed soon. Maintainers should replace these uses with either #siteSub or #mw-content-text. A list of affected scripts is at the top of
phab:T265373.
HickoryOughtShirt?4, I think the election project page would need to be roughly doubled, but that sounds good. I just wanted to get something started, I'm sure there's more to be added. I'm having a hard time locating when the project was founded, though.
Enwebb (
talk)
20:05, 22 October 2020 (UTC)reply
HickoryOughtShirt?4, now-defunct elections.gmu.edu website. that makes it sound like it was somewhere else before 2014, George Mason University, not that it was founded in 2014. Which makes sense because McDonald worked there. Wayback Machine might be able to help, but I gotta run for now.
Enwebb (
talk)
21:05, 22 October 2020 (UTC)reply
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
Problems
You will be able to read but not to edit the wikis for up to an hour on
October 27 around 14:00 (UTC). It will probably be shorter than an hour.
[141]
Last week, links to "diffs" from mobile watchlists and recentchanges were linking to page-revisions instead of diffs. This has now been fixed.
[142]
Changes later this week
There is no new MediaWiki version this week.
Future changes
Since the introduction of the
interface administrators user group in 2018, administrators couldn’t view the deleted history of CSS/JS pages. Now they can.
[143]
There was a problem with the
Change Tags. The software would apply the "Reverted" tag to any page actions such as page-protection changes if they came directly after a reverted edit. This has now been fixed for new edits.
[144]
The
Reply tool will be offered as an opt-in
Beta Feature on most Wikipedias in November. Another announcement will be made once the date is finalized.
[145]
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
Recent changes
You can no longer read Wikimedia wikis if your browser uses very old
TLS. This is because it is a security problem for everyone. It could lead to
downgrade attacks. Since October 29, 2020, users who use old TLS versions will not be able to connect to Wikimedia projects. A list of
browser recommendations is available. All modern operating systems and browsers are always able to reach Wikimedia projects.
[146]
There is a new automatic
tracking category available:
Pages with non-numeric formatnum arguments. It collects pages which use the {{formatnum}} parser function with invalid (non-numeric) input, e.g.{{formatnum:TECHNEWS}}. Note that {{formatnum:123,456}} is also invalid input: as described in the
documentation, the argument should be unformatted so that it can be reliably and correctly localised. The tracking category will help identify problematic usage and double-formatting. The new tracking category's name can be
translated at translatewiki.
[147]
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from November 3. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from November 4. It will be on all wikis from November 5 (
calendar).
Administrators and stewards will be able to use a special page (Special:CreateLocalAccount) to force local account creation for a global account. This is useful when account creation is blocked for that user (by a block or a filter).
[148]
The
Reply tool will be offered as an opt-in
Beta Feature on most Wikipedias on November 4. This change excludes the English, Russian, and German-language Wikipedias, plus a few smaller Wikipedias with special circumstances. You can read
the help page and
the troubleshooting guide for more information.
[149]
Future changes
A discussion has been restarted about using a Unicode minus sign (− U+2212) in the output of {{formatnum}} when it is given a negative argument.
[150]
In the future
IP addresses of unregistered users will not be shown for everyone. They will get an alias instead. There will be a new user right or an opt-in function for more vandal fighters to see the IPs of unregistered users. There would be some criteria for who gets the user right or opt-in. There will also be other new tools to help handle vandalism. This is early in the process and the developers are still collecting information from the communities before they suggest solutions.
The 2020 WikiCup has come to an end, with the final round going down to the wire. Our new Champion is Lee Vilenski (
submissions), the runner-up last year, who was closely followed by Gog the Mild (
submissions). In the final round, Lee achieved 4 FAs and 30 GAs, mostly on cue sport topics, while Gog achieved 3 FAs and 15 GAs, mostly on important battles and wars, which earned him a high number of bonus points. The Rambling Man (
submissions) was in third place with 4 FAs and 8 GAs on football topics, with Epicgenius (
submissions) close behind with 19 GAs and 16 DYK's, his interest being the buildings of New York.
The other finalists were Hog Farm (
submissions), HaEr48 (
submissions), Harrias (
submissions) and Bloom6132 (
submissions). The final round was very productive, and besides 15 FAs, contestants achieved 75 FAC reviews, 88 GAs and 108 GAN reviews. Altogether, Wikipedia has benefited greatly from the activities of WikiCup competitors all through the contest. Well done everyone!
All those who reached the final will receive awards and the following special awards will be made, based on high performance in particular areas of content creation. So that the finalists do not have an undue advantage, these prizes are awarded to the competitor who scored the highest in any particular field in a single round, or in the event of a tie, to the overall leader in this field.
Gog the Mild (
submissions) wins the featured article prize, for a total of 14 FAs during the course of the competition.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
Changes later this week
There is no new MediaWiki version this week.
Future changes
You can see
reference previews. This shows a preview of the footnote when you hover over it. This has been a
beta feature. It will move out of beta and be enabled by default. There will be an option not to use it. The developers are looking for small or medium-sized wikis to be the first ones. You can
let them know if your wiki is interested.
[151]
From November 16 the categories will not be sorted in order for a short time. This is because the developers are upgrading to a new version of the
internationalisation library. They will use a script to fix the existing categories. This can take a few hours or a few days depending on how big the wiki is. You can
read more.
[152][153]
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
Listings on category pages are sorted on each wiki for that language using a
library. For a brief period on 16 November, changes to categories will not be sorted correctly for most languages. This is because the developers are upgrading to a new version of the library. They will then use a script to fix the existing categories. This will take a few hours or a few days depending on how big the wiki is. You can
read more.
[154][155]
Changes later this week
If you merged two pages in a
namespace where pages can't redirect this used to break the merge history. This will now be fixed.
[156]
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 17 November. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 18 November. It will be on all wikis from 19 November (
calendar).
Future changes
The
Community Wishlist Survey is now open for proposals. The survey decides what the
Community Tech team will work on. You can post proposals from 16 to 30 November. You can vote on proposals from 8 December to 21 December.
New, simpler RfC to define trust levels for WikiLoop DoubleCheck
HI Enwebb/Archive 4,
I'm writing to let you know we have simplified the
RfC on trust levels for the tool WikiLoop DoubleCheck. Please join and share your thoughts about this feature! We made this change after hearing users' comments on the first RfC being too complicated. I hope that you can participate this time around, giving your feedback on this new feature for WikiLoop DoubleCheck users.
Thanks and see you around online, María Cruz MediaWiki message delivery (
talk)
20:05, 19 November 2020 (UTC)reply
If you would like to update your settings to change the wiki where you receive these messages, please do so
here.
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
Timestamps in
Special:Log are now links. They go to Special:Log for only that entry. This is how timestamps work on for example the history page.
[157]
Changes later this week
There is no new MediaWiki version this week.
Future changes
The Wikimedia
Cloud VPS hosts technical projects for the Wikimedia movement. Developers need to
claim projects they use. This is because old and unused projects are removed once a year. Unclaimed projects can be shut down from 1 December. Unclaimed projects can be deleted from 1 January.
[158]
Hello! Voting in the 2020 Arbitration Committee elections is now open until 23:59 (UTC) on Monday, 7 December 2020. All eligible users are allowed to vote. Users with alternate accounts may only vote once.
The
Arbitration Committee is the panel of editors responsible for conducting the
Wikipedia arbitration process. It has the authority to impose binding solutions to disputes between editors, primarily for serious conduct disputes the community has been unable to resolve. This includes the authority to impose
site bans,
topic bans, editing restrictions, and other measures needed to maintain our editing environment. The
arbitration policy describes the Committee's roles and responsibilities in greater detail.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 1 December. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 2 December. It will be on all wikis from 3 December (
calendar).
Future changes
The
iOS Wikipedia app will show readers more of the article history. They can see new updates and easier see how the article has changed over time. This is an experiment. It will first be shown only to some iOS app users as a
test.
[159][160]
The
Wiki Replicas can be used for
SQL queries. You can use
Quarry,
PAWS or other ways to do this. To make the Wiki Replicas stable there will be two changes. Cross-database JOINS will no longer work. You can also only query a database if you connect to it directly. This will happen in February 2021. If you think this affects you and you need help you can
post on Phabricator or on
Wikitech.
[161]
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
Recent changes
You can now put pages on your watchlist for a limited period of time. Some wikis already had this function.
[162][163]
Changes later this week
Information from Wikidata that is used on a wiki page can be shown in recent changes and watchlists on a Wikimedia wiki. To see this you need to turn on showing Wikidata edits in your watchlist in the preferences. Changes to the Wikidata description in the language of a Wikimedia wiki will then be shown in recent changes and watchlists. This will not show edits to languages that are not relevant to your wiki.
[164][165]
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 8 December. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 9 December. It will be on all wikis from 10 December (
calendar).
This is to let you know that the
Horseshoe bat article has been scheduled as
today's featured article for January 7, 2021. Please check the article needs no amendments. If you're interested in editing the main page text, you're welcome to do so at
Wikipedia:Today's featured article/January 7, 2021, but note that a coordinator will trim the lead to around 1000 characters anyway, so you aren't obliged to do so.
For Featured Articles promoted recently, there will be an existing blurb linked from the FAC talk page, which is likely to be transferred to the TFA page by a coordinator at some point.
Thank you today for the article "about a family of bats that have been quite relevant in the news lately as the possible origin of SARS-CoV. They have a lot of diversity and some strange features, even for bats (pubic nipples!)"! --
Gerda Arendt (
talk)
11:20, 7 January 2021 (UTC)reply
New Page Patrol December Newsletter
Hello Enwebb,
Year in review
It has been a productive year for New Page Patrol as we've roughly cut the size of the New Page Patrol queue in half this year. We have been fortunate to have a lot of great work done by Rosguill who was the reviewer of the most pages and redirects this past year. Thanks and credit go to JTtheOG and Onel5969 who join Rosguill in repeating in the top 10 from last year. Thanks to John B123, Hughesdarren, and Mccapra who all got the NPR permission this year and joined the top 10. Also new to the top ten is DannyS712 bot III, programmed by DannyS712 which has helped to dramatically reduce the number of redirects that have needed human patrolling by patrolling certain types of redirects (e.g. for differences in accents) and by also patrolling editors who are on on the
redirect whitelist.
John B123 has been named reviewer of the year for 2020. John has held the permission for just over 6 months and in that time has helped cut into the queue by reviewing more than 18,000 articles. His talk page shows his efforts to communicate with users, upholding NPP's goal of nurturing new users and quality over quantity.
NPP Technical Achievement Award
As a special recognition and thank you DannyS712 has been awarded the first NPP Technical Achievement Award. His work programming the bot has helped us patrol redirects tremendously - more than 60,000 redirects this past year. This has been a large contribution to New Page Patrol and definitely is worthy of recognition.
Six Month Queue Data: Today – 2262 Low – 2232 High – 10271
To opt-out of future mailings, please remove yourself
here
18:17, 10 December 2020 (UTC)
Merry Christmas and a Prosperous 2021!
Hello Enwebb, may you be surrounded by peace, success and happiness on this
seasonal occasion. Spread the
WikiLove by wishing another user a
Merry Christmas and a
Happy New Year, whether it be someone you have had disagreements with in the past, a good friend, or just some random person. Sending you heartfelt and warm greetings for Christmas and New Year 2021. Happy editing, ReaderofthePack(formerly Tokyogirl79)
(。◕‿◕。)03:32, 11 December 2020 (UTC)reply
Hello Enwebb, may you be surrounded by peace, success and happiness on this
seasonal occasion. Spread the
WikiLove by wishing another user a
Merry Christmas and a
Happy New Year, whether it be someone you have had disagreements with in the past, a good friend, or just some random person. Sending you heartfelt and warm greetings for Christmas and New Year 2021. Happy editing, ReaderofthePack(formerly Tokyogirl79)
(。◕‿◕。)04:08, 24 December 2020 (UTC)reply
Happy New Year and Happy New WikiCup! The competition begins today and all article creators, expanders, improvers and reviewers are welcome to take part. If you have already signed up, your submissions page can be found here. If you have not yet signed up, you can add your name here and the judges will set up your submissions page. Any questions on the rules or on anything else should be directed to one of the judges, or posted to the
WikiCup talk page. Signups will close at the end of January, and the first round will end on 26 February; the 64 highest scorers at that time will move on to round 2. We thank
Vanamonde93 and
Godot13, who have retired as judges, and we thank them for their past dedication. The judges for the WikiCup this year are
Sturmvogel 66 (
talk·contribs·email) and
Cwmhiraeth (
talk·contribs·email). Good luck!
MediaWiki message delivery (
talk)
11:10, 1 January 2021 (UTC)reply
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
There is a new version of the
Wikimedia Commons app for Android. It should fix the failed uploads problem.
[1]
Problems
There was a problem with the new MediaWiki version last week. It deleted some messages by accident. The new version was late because it was stopped to fix things.
[2]
Changes later this week
The
MediaWiki action API is used by various tools like bots and gadgets. Some error codes will change. Some parameter values that do not follow the standard will no longer work.
[3]
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 11 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 12 February. It will be on all wikis from 13 February (
calendar).
The first
NPP source guide discussion is now underway. It covers a wide range of sources in Ghana with the goal of providing more guidance to reviewers about sources they might see when reviewing pages. Hopefully, new page reviewers will join others interested in reliable sources and those with expertise in these sources to make the discussion a success.
Redirects
New to NPP? Looking to try something a little different? Consider patrolling some redirects. Redirects are relatively easy to review, can be found easily through the
New Pages Feed. You can find more information about how to patrol redirects at
WP:RPATROL.
Discussions and Resources
There is an
ongoing discussion around changing notifications for new editors who attempt to write articles.
A
resource page with links pertinent for reviewers was created this month.
A
proposal to increase the scope of G5 was withdrawn.
Refresher
Geographic regions, areas and places generally do not need
general notability guideline type sourcing. When evaluating whether an article meets this notability guideline please also consider whether it might actually be a form of
WP:SPAM for a development project (e.g. PR for a large luxury residential development) and not actually covered by the guideline.
Six Month Queue Data: Today – 7095 Low – 4991 High – 7095
To opt-out of future mailings, please remove yourself
here
The article will be discussed at
Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Murder of Tessa Majors until a consensus is reached, and anyone, including you, 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.
Black Kite (talk)00:11, 17 February 2020 (UTC)reply
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 18 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 19 February. It will be on all wikis from 20 February (
calendar).
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 25 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 26 February. It will be on all wikis from 27 February (
calendar).
Future changes
There will be a
reply button after each post on a talk page if you want one. This will soon be a beta feature on the Arabic, French, Dutch and Hungarian Wikipedias. You will have to turn it on if you want to use it. It will come to more wikis later. You can
test the reply button. It was briefly shown earlier than planned by mistake on the four first wikis last week.
Hi there, I'm pleased to inform you that I've begun reviewing the article
Horseshoe bat you nominated for
GA-status according to the
criteria. This process may take up to 7 days. Feel free to contact me with any questions or comments you might have during this period. Message delivered by
Legobot, on behalf of
Chiswick Chap --
Chiswick Chap (
talk)
11:41, 26 February 2020 (UTC)reply
I think it's more of a lack of controversy. The palaontological community isn't really convinced of the quadrapedal, fully-aquatic version, but the public seems to accept it without much debate. just an idea. --
awkwafaba (
📥)
17:41, 28 February 2020 (UTC)reply
WikiCup 2020 March newsletter
And so ends the first round of the competition. Everyone with a positive score moves on to Round 2, with 57 contestants qualifying. We have abolished the groups this year, so to qualify for Round 3 you will need to finish Round 2 among the top thirty-two contestants.
Our top scorers in Round 1 were:
Epicgenius, a WikiCup newcomer, led the field with a featured article, five good articles and an assortment of other submissions, specialising on buildings and locations in New York, for a total of 895 points.
Gog the Mild came next with 464 points, from a featured article, two good articles and a number of reviews, the main theme being naval warfare.
Raymie was in third place with 419 points, garnered from one good article and an impressive 34 DYKs on radio and TV stations in the United States.
Harrias came next at 414, with a featured article and three good articles, an English civil war battle specialist.
CaptainEek was in fifth place with 405 points, mostly garnered from bringing
Cactus wren to featured article status.
The top ten contestants at the end of Round 1 all scored over 200 points; they also included L293D, Kingsif, Enwebb, Lee Vilenski and CAPTAIN MEDUSA. Seven of the top ten contestants in Round 1 are new to the WikiCup.
These contestants, like all the others, now have to start scoring points again from scratch. In Round 1 there were four featured articles, one featured list and two featured pictures, as well as around two hundred DYKs and twenty-seven ITNs. Between them, contestants completed 127 good article reviews, nearly a hundred more than the 43 good articles they claimed for, thus making a substantial dent in the review backlog. Contestants also claimed for 40 featured article / featured list reviews, and most even remembered to mention their WikiCup participation in their reviews (a requirement).
Remember that any content promoted after the end of Round 1 but before the start of Round 2 can be claimed in Round 2. Some contestants made claims before the new submissions pages were set up, and they will need to resubmit them. Invitations for collaborative writing efforts or any other discussion of potentially interesting work is always welcome on the WikiCup talk page. Remember, if two or more WikiCup competitors have done significant work on an article, all can claim points. If you are concerned that your nomination—whether it is at good article candidates, a featured process, or anywhere else—will not receive the necessary reviews, please list it on
Wikipedia:WikiCup/Reviews.
There was an error in the WikiCup 2020 March newsletter; L293D should not have been included in the list of top ten scorers in Round 1 (they led the list last year), instead, Dunkleosteus77 should have been included, having garnered 334 points from five good articles on animals, living or extinct, and various reviews.
MediaWiki message delivery (
talk)
09:30, 2 March 2020 (UTC)reply
The
Great Britain and Ireland Destubathon began on 1 March and runs for the entire month. Expansion of any stubs related to Great Britain and Ireland is welcome, inclusive of taxa. There are also monetary prizes for winners of specific categories in the form of Amazon gift cards. PetScan could be useful here to find the intersection of Stub-class articles and other categories:
Biota of Ireland;
Biota of Great Britain;
Biota of the Isle of Man
Immunofluorescence staining of a mouse intestine, "Microscopy" (Australia)
Bat scientist Lauri Lutsar determining the age of a bat, "People In Science" (Estonia)
Close-up view of a bioluminescent beetle
Elateroidea, "Wildlife and Nature" (France)
Coral fluorescence, "General Category" (Russia)
Paleoanthropologist at work, "People in Science" (Italy)
Ammonite fossil from Morocco, "General Category" (Spain)
Yellow orange-tip male (Ixias pyrene), "Wildlife and Nature" (India)
The spread of coronavirus across Wikipedia
With the outbreak of a novel coronavirus dominating news coverage, Wikipedia content related to the virus has seen much higher interest. Tree of Life content of particular interest to readers has included viruses, bats, pangolins, and masked palm civets. Viruses saw the most dramatic growth in readership:
Coronavirus, which was the 105th most popular virus article in December 2019 with about 400 views per day, averaged over a quarter million views each day of January 2020. Total monthly viewership of the top-10 virus articles ballooned from about 1.5 million to nearly 20 million.
From October 2019 – December 2019, the top ten most popular bat articles fluctuated among 16 different articles, with the December viewership of those 10 articles at 209,280. For
January 2020, three articles broke into the top-10 that were not among the 16 articles of the prior three months:
Bat as food,
Horseshoe bat, and
Bat-borne virus. Viewership of the top-10 bat articles spiked nearly 300% to 617,067 in January.
While bats have been implicated as a possible natural reservoir of
SARS-CoV-2, an intermediate host may be the bridge between bats and humans.
Pangolins have been hypothesized as the intermediate host for the virus, causing
a large spike in typical page views of 2-3k each day up to more than 60k in a day.
Masked palm civets, the intermediate host of
SARS, saw a
modest yet noticeable spike in page views as well, from 100 to 300 views per day to as many as 5k views per day.
With an increase in viewers came an increase in editors. In an interview, longtime virus editor Awkwafaba identified the influx of editors as the biggest challenge in editing content related to the coronavirus. They noted that these newcomers include "novices who make honest mistakes and get tossed about a bit in the mad activity" as well as "experienced editors who know nothing about viruses and are good researchers, yet aren't familiar with the policies of WP:ToL or WP:Viruses." Disruption also increased, with
extended confirmed protection (also known as the 30/500 rule, which prevents editors with fewer than 30 days tenure and 500 edits from making edits and is typically used on a very small subset of Wikipedia articles) temporarily applied to
Coronavirus and still active on
Template:2019–20 coronavirus outbreak data. New editors apparently seeking to correct misinformation continuously edited the article
Bat as food to remove content related to China:
Videos of Chinese people eating bat soup were misrepresented to be current or filmed in China, when at least one such video was several years old and filmed in Palau. However, reliable sources confirm that bats are eaten in China, especially Southern China, so these well-meaning edits were mostly removed.
Another level of complexity was added by the fluctuating terminology of the virus.
Over a dozen moves and merges were requested within WikiProject Viruses. To give you an idea of the musical chairs happening with article titles, here are the move histories of two articles:
Awkwafaba noted that "the main authorities,
WHO and
ICTV, don't really have a process for speedily naming a virus or disease." Additionally, they have different criteria for naming. They said, "I remember in a move discussion from the article then called Wuhan coronavirus that a virus name cannot have a geographical location in it, but this is a WHO disease naming guideline, and not an ICTV virus naming rule. ICTV may have renamed Four Corners virus to Sin Nombre orthohantavirus but there are still plenty of official virus species names that don't abide by WHO guidelines."
February DYKs
Thistle broomrape
Painting of the Shelton Oak
Female A. diabolicum flowers with curled stigmas
... that juvenile ornate surgeonfish are quite different in colouring from the adult fish? (1 February)
... that Quarry Moor is one of the few locations in England where the rare parasitic plant thistle broomrape(example pictured) grows? (2 February)
... that the hollow Shelton Oak(pictured) near
Shrewsbury was so big that a party of eight could dance a
quadrille inside it? (3 February)
... that growth in the brown seaweed Zanardinia typus occurs at the base of the hairs that grow around the edge of the frond? (4 February)
... that entomologist Karim Vahed led the team that found
a cricket species in which the
testes accounted for 14 percent of the insect's body mass? (4 February)
... that although the bird of paradise fly was first described from an Angophora tree, it is quite likely that this is not the insect's host plant? (11 February)
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
Problems
Readers who were not logged in briefly saw the interface in a language decided by their browser. It should normally be in the language of the wiki. This happened for a short period of time last week. This was because of a bug.
[6]
Changes later this week
If you forget your password you can ask for a new one to be sent to your email address. You need to know your email address or your username. You will now be able to choose that you need to enter both your email address and your username. This will be a preference. This is to get fewer password reset emails someone else asked for.
[7]
When you asked for a new password you could see if the username didn't exist on
Special:PasswordReset. Now the page will show the username you entered and tell you an email has been sent if the username exists. This is for better security.
[8]
On
Special:WhatLinksHere you can see what other pages link to a page. You can see if the link is from a redirect. You can now see which section the redirect links to.
[9]
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 3 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 4 March. It will be on all wikis from 5 March (
calendar).
There is a
vote on the creation of a new user group called
abuse filter manager. The vote runs from March 1 to March 31 on Meta.
wgMFSpecialCaseMainPage was used for the mobile site. It was deprecated in 2017. It will stop working in April. Wikis should see if they use it. If they do they should fix it. You can
read more and ask for help. This affects 183 wikis. There is a
list.
[11]
Shohei Otomo's usage of Pilot/Namiki pens 'in an advertisement'
I'm beginning revisions to the
Ballpoint pen artwork wikipedia page and among my first edits I added a link to the wiki page about Shohei Otomo which I happened to come across by accident. Heads up: I'll also be making edits to link Otomo's wiki to related pages.
And... sorry BUT: I happen to know that the 'Pilot advertisement' you noted in his article is mistaken or at least misleading; the 'ad' was nothing more than a promotional video produced by Otomo or a collaborator (perhaps to gain Pilot's interest?), but the way it is written in the wiki makes it seem as if Pilot commissioned the video and it was used for advertising purposes.
The video in question shows Otomo cracking open a beer before drawing, something I highly doubt such a respected Japanese institution as Namiki pens would allow to be depicted, even in the 21st century. That beer also happens to be identifiably a Kirin brand beer, something for which I doubt Pilot/Namiki & Kirin would be in cooperation. On top of that, the video shows no identifying credit at all, nothing to identify the video as an 'ad' and I can't think of any company who doesn't include a logo in an ad. If I remember correctly, only some kind of narration by Otomo himself, unrelated to the pens, runs through the so-called 'ad'.
On top of that, Otomo's artwork basically subverts classic Japanese imagery and the artist himself openly criticizes Japan's consumerist culture, a trait which I highly doubt such a corporation would align itself with.
Unless it can be clearly proven otherwise, any text referring to Otomo's video as a Pilot/Namiki-commissioned ad is misleading and must therefore be reworded for accuracy and clarity. This is no slight to Otomo or his artwork; surely worthy of a wiki page but anything less than the facts should be relegated to the artist's own websites or social media.
Penwatchdog (
talk)
08:35, 7 March 2020 (UTC)reply
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
There is a new search word called articletopic. You can use it to search for articles on a specific topic. It is available on the Arabic, Czech, English and Vietnamese Wikipedias. It will come to more Wikipedias soon.
[12][13][14]
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 10 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 11 March. It will be on all wikis from 12 March (
calendar).
The
Wikipedia Android app will do
push notifications if users want them. This could help you see for example when someone wrote on your talk page or your edit was reverted. This will come later this year.
[15]
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
There is a new
API module for changing the content model of existing pages. Use action=changecontentmodel to specify the new model. You can read the
documentation on mediawiki.org.
[16]
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 17 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 18 March. It will be on all wikis from 19 March (
calendar).
Future changes
If you edit a page at the same time as someone else you can get an edit conflict. There is
a new two-column interface to make it easier to solve this. It will soon be active by default on the German, Arabic, and Farsi Wikipedias. It will be on by default on more wikis within the next months. You will be able to opt out of the new interface.
[17][18]
You can see
a proposed design for replying to comments in an easier way.
Peer review for FL proposition of List of horseshoe bats
Hello Enwebb, thanks for creating the
List of horseshoe bats. I think that list has a potential to be a FL but it needs some review. I have some questions but could be more to correct before proposint the list to be a FL. Is it possible to make a peer review with the help of Bats TF? I will write some of my questions here:
As I'm not a native speaker, I have some difficulty about the use of "in/on", especially for the islands. In the text, when I put the range for subspecies I used Csorba et al. as the reference, and there for all islands only "in" was used. I have corrected for some small islands by using "on" but for bigger islands "in" is used, e.g. for Borneo, it should be in or on?
In the opening it is said there are 106 species, but I counted 103 species. There are still many different classifications. I don't know which one is valid.
Handbook of the Mammals of the World - Volume 9 (2019) could be used as the reference for the species, but I don't have access. Is it possible to find somebody to help with it?
For synonyms, I have used again Csorba et al. But I have another question. When a taxon is considered a subspecies after its description as a species, we could consider it as a junior synonym or not?
Also I think we need more header text before proposal.
Mskyrider, I'm not enwebb, but your question about in vs on for islands is intriguing. I'd say "on Corsica" but "in Sicily." I want to say "on Borneo." I am going to have to think about why.
--valereee (
talk)
19:24, 19 March 2020 (UTC)reply
@
Mskyrider: I'll be a
WikiJaguar too, and say that 'in' is for political areas, and 'on' if for physical islands. One is 'in' (the country of} Australia, and 'on' {the island of) Australia. So either really works. English can take it however you want to do it. --
awkwafaba (
📥)
00:19, 20 March 2020 (UTC)reply
Mskyrider, agreed with awkwafaba about the use of on and in.
As for your 2nd point, I don't have access to that work either. My typical
less than legal approach to obtaining books doesn't happen to have this title--probably because it's pretty new. All my local libraries are closed right now, but you can try posting on the
resource request page. Conversely, I saw
4444hhhh adding a reference to Mammals of the World Vol. 9 on
Bat, so maybe they can help you out
If I understand your question correctly for point 4, yes, a taxon that has been demoted from species to a subspecies is almost certainly going to have its name considered as a junior synonym, as long as that is consistent with the
Principle of Priority
I've never reviewed a Featured List or helped make one, but I can contribute more here if that would be helpful to you!
Enwebb (
talk)
16:10, 20 March 2020 (UTC)reply
map
Hey, Enwebb! Did you make the map? There'd been one there a few days ago, but it became outdated so I pulled it, it's good to have it again. Do you know how to do one of those sliding-scale thingies so you can see the development over time?
--valereee (
talk)
15:52, 19 March 2020 (UTC)reply
Valereee, yes, I made the map! I can commit to updating it every day after 2pm when the new numbers come out. Can you think of an example of an article that has what you're talking about with the sliding scale? I'm not sure I've seen that before.
Enwebb (
talk)
15:54, 19 March 2020 (UTC)reply
Hm...I feel like I've seen one on a wp page, but maybe it's been in some source. Things blur together in my memory. :D Let me see if I can find an example of what I mean.
--valereee (
talk)
16:25, 19 March 2020 (UTC)reply
Spread the WikiLove by giving someone else a tea, especially if it is someone you have had disagreements with in the past or someone putting up with some stick at this time. Enjoy!
Spread the lovely, warm, refreshing goodness of tea by adding {{
subst:wikitea}} to their talk page with a friendly message.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
Problems
Some development will be slower than planned. This is because of the
current pandemic. You can see
the new deployment guidelines. This is to avoid risks when some persons could be unavailable.
There was a problem when adding interwiki links. The tool you use to add interwiki links could suggest the wrong project to link to. This has now been fixed.
[19][20]
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 24 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 25 March. It will be on all wikis from 26 March (
calendar).
Future changes
There is
a project to make editing easier for newcomers. The developers are trying to understand what initiatives different Wikipedias have to welcome newcomers. They also want to know which templates are often used for maintenance activities. You can help this project by
checking if your wiki's pages are listed on Wikidata.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 31 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 1 April. It will be on all wikis from 2 April (
calendar).
Future changes
The video player will change to be simpler and more modern. The current beta feature will become the video player for everyone. The old player will be removed.
[22]
There is a project to make templates easier to use. The next few weeks the developers will present ideas on the
project page. You can watch that page if you are interested in giving feedback.
[23]
A year of the Tree of Life Newsletter: Thank you to all the subscribers who have been with us from the beginning or have joined along the way, and to those who have contributed their time to producing this newsletter. I've really valued your ideas, copyediting, and willingness to be interviewed. Onwards and upwards!
April marks the start of the
GAN Backlog Drive, which continues through the end of May. The goal of this backlog elimination drive is to cut the number of outstanding GANs, in particular those which have been in the queue 90 days or more. All hands welcome, new and old.
The finalists of the US Wiki Science Competition have
been announced. Illustrating Wikipedia articles can be challenging, so these new images represent a chance to find suitable media for our articles. For all images uploaded in the Wiki Science Competition, see
here and click "all images" in the upper right corner.
Fly's mouth and tongue (Microscopy)
Killer whales hunting a crabeater seal (Wildlife)
Fossilized tooth of a Squalicorax shark (Microscopy)
This interview has been edited for length. Find the full interview
here.
Number of participants of WikiProject Covid-19
Graphs are unavailable due to technical issues. There is more info on
Phabricator and on
MediaWiki.org.
Please describe how you went about creating WikiProject COVID-19. What made you think a project was needed?
I've been following the outbreak and editing related Wikipedia articles since January. I'm not particularly interested in infectious diseases or viruses, but I've been to China a few times and wanted to monitor the outbreak's impact on society as well as the government's response. For a while, I was casually tracking updates to the first couple pages about the outbreak. Then a pattern began to emerge as February saw the creation of separate articles about outbreaks in
Iran,
Italy, and
South Korea. New Wikipedia articles continued being created in early March, and the outbreak was recognized as a pandemic by the World Health Organization on March 11. Knowing there would many more articles, lists, templates, illustrations, and other pages on Wikipedia, I created WikiProject COVID-19 on March 15. My goal was simply to create a temporary or permanent space for editors to collaborate, communicate, and focus specifically on content related to this ongoing pandemic. I'm a member of many WikiProjects and have created several before, but this one definitely felt more necessary and urgent. Most WikiProjects unite editors with similar interests, which is fine and serves a purpose, but I felt this project could have a much bigger real life impact. I don't think I was alone in my thinking; the project had
80 members by March 20 and 100 members by March 26.
Who or what was invaluable to getting off the ground?
If I'm being honest, getting this project off the ground required little work on my part. All I did was create the space and post invitations to existing talk pages related to the outbreak. Editors joined the project very quickly; 30 members joined on the same day I started the project, and there were more than 50 participants one day later. I've been a daily Wikipedia editor for more than 12 years, and I've never seen so much interest in a project or content added to Wikipedia about a specific topic in such a short period of time. WikiProject members worked expeditiously to build a framework and hang a
barnstar, tagging related pages, assessing content, and starting
talk page discussions about the project's goals and scope. I'm thankful to the many editors who pitched in to get the project established, and I look forward to seeing how editors collaborate in this space as we move forward.
What are the short-term goals of the project?
No specific goals have been posted to the project page yet, but I'd like to think members share a collective desire to ensure Wikipedia has accurate and reliable information about the disease and pandemic. Disinformation and misinformation seem rampant these days, so we're working to give readers around the globe access to accurate, objective, and possibly even life-saving information. Unlike some WikiProjects which may take a more historical approach to documenting certain topics, WikiProject COVID-19 members have the ability to mitigate the disease's spread in real time by arming communities with facts about outbreaks in their region as well as information about prevention, testing, vaccine research, societal impact, etc.
What are the long-term goals? English Wikipedia has many of 'lumpers' who think there are too many projects already. The project has also inspired the creation of two portals, which I imagine caused some raised eyebrows in this trend of portal deletionism. What will come of the WP after the current outbreak subsides?
After creating WikiProject COVID-19, a couple editors said I should have created a task force instead of a standalone WikiProject. I wasn't bothered. The number of 'thank you' notifications I received for creating the page vastly outweighed these critical comments. I knew the page I created was much needed, and I would be fine if editors decide to call the page by another name. I understand some editors think there are too many WikiProjects. No one's required to join WikiProject COVID-19, but the 100+ of us who have already joined invite you to help with our efforts, if you're interested. As for the project's future, I would be fine if editors decided to convert the WikiProject into a task force, or even put the project into retirement if the time comes. Given the level of interest and impact the pandemic has already had on a global scale, I have a feeling the WikiProject will be active for a long time.
Another criticism of the project is its narrow focus. It is focused on only one
strain of virus, and the disease it causes. Even
WikiProject AIDS is about
two species of virus. Is the scope of the project too small? What would an expanded scope look like? Why would including another virus strain in the same species,
Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus which causes
SARS, not be wanted? or is it wanted?
Narrow focus? I disagree. The project may focus on a single virus and disease, but the pandemic has resulted in the creation of hundreds of Wikipedia articles documenting outbreaks in most countries and territories. There are pages covering the pandemic's impact on
aviation,
cinema,
education,
politics,
religion,
sports, and
television, not to mention others related to the
resulting economic turmoil. Additionally, there are hundreds of templates, charts, and other graphics. Who knows how many thousands of images and other media will be uploaded at Wikimedia Commons by the time this pandemic subsides? There's also
COVID-19 WikiProject COVID-19 at Wikidata, and I wouldn't be surprised if similar spaces are created for other Wikimedia projects soon. Even if the focus is narrow, there's plenty of content for Wikimedians to improve and protect.
In your opinion, what should be the guidelines for creating a new project, as opposed to creating a task force or working under an existing WikiProject?
I don't feel strongly about new project creation guidelines, or the differences between WikiProjects and task forces. Project members should decide what structure works for them and call themselves whatever name they prefer. I understand project construction requires maintenance and can come at an administrative cost, but we should be careful about discouraging editors from proposing new projects.
Ideally, editors would only create a new WikiProject if at least a few others were committed to joining. I created WikiProject COVID-19 without conferring with others because I assumed the interest would be there. I encourage people to be bold and create project pages, but maybe ask a few other editors for feedback first. I'll let other editors worry about the guidelines.
What tools (templates, bots, etc.) are essential, or even just really helpful, for organizing and maintaining a successful project? What is something every WP should do, that maybe isn't doing now?
I don't have any sort of medical background, and I'm more interested in the pandemic's impact than details about the disease or virus. Most surprising to me has been the lack of preparedness for combating outbreaks by governments around the world, including here in the United States. I don't know how COVID-19's spread compares to other infectious diseases, but as I've watched the outbreak develop I've continually wondered why governments did not start preparing earlier. What was happening in China, Iran, Italy, and South Korea should have prompted action sooner.
What important things about
2019–20 coronavirus pandemic do you think folks should know and maybe have missed in the deluge of information coming at people?
1. Know the most common symptoms: cough, fever, and difficulty breathing.
2. Learn what behavioral adjustments you should make to protect yourself and reduce transmission, and remember to wash your hands.
3. Get your information from reputable sources. I'd like to think Wikipedia editors are pretty good at this last bit of advice.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
Problems
There was a problem with user pages not being shown properly on desktop. This was because of a bug. It will soon be fixed.
[24]
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 7 April. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 8 April. It will be on all wikis from 9 April (
calendar).
Future changes
MediaWiki will use a newer version of
Unicode. Some characters that did not have an upper case equivalent before do now. Titles beginning with one of these characters will be moved. A list of these titles can be seen
on Phabricator. The titles will be renamed by the user Maintenance script. This will start on 13 April 2020. You can rename them before this if you wish and the new title can be different from the one the script would rename it to.
[25]
Hey Enwebb, thanks for your comments they were really nice. I'm trying to fully create this wikipedia page as a class assignment. I don't want to be rude but since this is going to be graded I'd really appreciate it if I could fill out this article in it's entirety, just trying to get that undergrad degree but I really do wanna stress how much I appreciate your comments.
Mutchroom (
talk)
21:08, 9 April 2020 (UTC)reply
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
Recent changes
You can now use the articletopic search word on all Wikipedias. It searches articles by topic.
[26]
There was a problem with the Wikidata database last week. Some wikis went down for twenty minutes. Wikidata and other projects showed error messages. Interwiki links were not shown, some tools did not work and other problems. Some of this was fixed quickly. The developers are working on fixing the rest.
[30][31][32]
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from April 14. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from April 15. It will be on all wikis from April 16 (
calendar).
Future changes
Some graphs have not worked on mobile. This will soon be fixed.
[33]
The article tab on talk pages of redirects links to the target of the redirect. It could link to the redirect page itself instead. You can
leave feedback on this.
For pages using
syntax highlighting, the use of the deprecated <source> tag, as well as the use of the deprecated enclose parameter, will add tracking categories.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
Tech News
The next issue of Tech News will be sent out on 4 May 2020.
Recent changes
The
small wiki toolkits is to help smaller wikis that need technical skills. They can learn and share technical skills.
[34]
Over-qualified CSS selectors in Wikimedia skins have been removed. div#content is now .mw-body. div.portal is now .portal. div#footer is now #footer. This is so the skins can use
HTML5 elements. If your gadgets or user styles used them you will have to update them.
[35]
Changes later this week
There is no new MediaWiki version this week.
Future changes
Some things on the wikis might look weird or not work in
Internet Explorer 8 in the future. Internet Explorer 8 was replaced in 2011.
[36]
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 28 April next week. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 29 April next week. It will be on all wikis from 30 April next week (
calendar).
The second round of the 2020 WikiCup has now finished. It was a high-scoring round and contestants needed 75 points to advance to round 3. There were some very impressive efforts in round 2, with the top ten contestants all scoring more than 500 points. A large number of the points came from the 12 featured articles and the 186 good articles achieved in total by contestants, and the 355 good article reviews they performed; the GAN backlog drive and the stay-at-home imperative during the COVID-19 pandemic may have been partially responsible for these impressive figures.
Our top scorers in round 2 were:
Epicgenius, with 2333 points from one featured article, forty-five good articles, fourteen DYKs and plenty of bonus points
Gog the Mild, with 1784 points from three featured articles, eight good articles, a substantial number of featured article and good article reviews and lots of bonus points
The Rambling Man, with 1262 points from two featured articles, eight good articles and a hundred good article reviews
Harrias, with 1141 points from two featured articles, three featured lists, ten good articles, nine DYKs and a substantial number of featured article and good article reviews
The rules for featured article reviews have been adjusted; reviews may cover three aspects of the article, content, images and sources, and contestants may receive points for each of these three types of review. Please also remember the requirement to mention the WikiCup when undertaking an FAR for which you intend to claim points. Remember also that DYKs cannot be claimed until they have appeared on the main page. As we enter the third round, any content promoted after the end of round 2 but before the start of round 3 can be claimed now, and anything you forgot to claim in round 2 cannot! Remember too, that you must claim your points within 14 days of "earning" them. When doing GARs, please make sure that you check that all the GA criteria are fully met.
Hi there, I'm pleased to inform you that I've begun reviewing the article
Cinnamon red bat you nominated for
GA-status according to the
criteria. This process may take up to 7 days. Feel free to contact me with any questions or comments you might have during this period. Message delivered by
Legobot, on behalf of
Dunkleosteus77 --
Dunkleosteus77 (
talk)
17:41, 3 May 2020 (UTC)reply
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
Problems
Some wikis will be on read-only for a few minutes on 5 May. This will happen around
05:00 UTC. This is for database maintenance.
[38]
Some wikis will be on read-only for a few minutes on 7 May. This will also affect
CentralAuth. This can for example affect global renames, password changes, changing or confirming your email address and logging in to new wikis. This will happen around
05:00 UTC. This is for database maintenance.
[39]
Changes later this week
You can get a notification when someone links to a page you created. You can soon turn these notifications off for individual pages.
[40]
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 5 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 6 May. It will be on all wikis from 7 May (
calendar).
WikiProject Birds gained a new task force.
A discussion determined that WikiProject Poultry might be more successful as a task force, with the move completed 15 April.
Round 2 of the
WikiCup wrapped up this month. Several editors moved on to Round 3 by scoring points in biodiversity-related areas, including Sainsf, Casliber, Dunkleosteus77, CaptainEek, Guettarda, and Enwebb. Dunkleosteus77 finished at the top of the Tree of Life pack with 608 points, finishing 9th overall in the round.
After a relatively quiet February and March, with only 11 total articles nominated for GA and none for FAC, April brought a shower of nominations. In total, 5 articles were nominated for FAC, 1 for FLC, and 11 for GA.
Tree of Life's growing featured content
Inspired by a
March 2020 post at WikiProject Medicine detailing the growth of Featured Articles over time, we decided to reproduce that table here, adding a second table showing the growth of Good Articles. Tree of Life articles are placed in the "Biology" category for FAs, which has seen a growth of 381% since 2008. Only two other subjects had a greater growth than Biology: Business, economics, and finance; and Warfare.
Percentage Growth in FA Categories, 2008–2019, Legend: Considerably above average, Above average, AverageBelow average , Considerably below average, Poor
Note A: Total is off by one; not worth looking for the error.
Note B Three food biographies moved
[41] per discussion at
WT:FAC
Note: The very odd dates used in earlier years result from pulling old data from the
talk page at WP:FAS.
Good Article Category as of
Feb 23, 2008
Sep 16, 2008
Sep 16, 2010
Dec 1, 2011
Jan 1, 2015
Jan 1, 2020
Pct chg Feb 2008 to 2011
Pct chg Feb 2008 to 2020
Agriculture, food and drink
27
34
37
55
113
226
104%
737%
Art and architecture
134
188
321
450
683
1022
236%
663%
Engineering and technology
256
396
882
1198
1828
2407
368%
840%
Geography and places
191
248
424
523
716
1052
174%
451%
History
261
312
651
825
1219
1894
216%
626%
Language and literature
173
215
377
462
686
982
167%
468%
Mathematics
19
22
27
30
36
67
58%
253%
Media and drama
403
658
1352
1300
3070
3961
223%
883%
Music
357
527
997
1437
2532
3892
303%
990%
Natural sciences
544
686
1275
1717
2404
3426
216%
530%
Philosophy and religion
134
174
244
294
365
557
119%
316%
Social sciences and society
468
549
790
998
1430
1854
113%
296%
Sports and recreation
384
546
1074
1402
2350
3802
265%
890%
Video games
168
220
373
443
684
1349
164%
703%
Warfare
155
241
989
1654
2544
3996
967%
2478%
Total
3674
5016
9813
12788
20660
30487
248%
730%
Organisms*
119
130
402
528
685
1017
344%
755%
*subset of natural sciences
Unsurprisingly, the number of GAs has increased more rapidly than the number of FAs. Organisms, which is a subcategory of Natural sciences, has seen a GA growth of 755% since 2008, besting the Natural sciences overall growth of 530%. While Warfare had far and away the most significant growth of GAs, it's a clear outlier relative to other categories.
... that although the alpine bartsia has a wide range in Europe and North America, it is known in the British Isles only from a few locations in northern England and the central
Scottish Highlands? (19 April)
... that the orange-band surgeonfish(pictured) can change colour from dark to light almost instantaneously? (21 April)
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
Everyone can now import photos from
Flickr to Commons with the
UploadWizard. Before this only autopatrollers on Commons could import photos from Flickr.
[42]
Problems
Commons will be on read-only for a few minutes on 12 May. This will happen around
05:00 UTC. This is for database maintenance.
[43]
Several wikis including Wikidata will be on read-only for a few minutes on 19 May. This will happen around
05:00 UTC. English Wikipedia will be on read-only for a few minutes on 21 May
05:00 UTC. This is for database maintenance.
[44][45]
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 12 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 13 May. It will be on all wikis from 14 May (
calendar).
Future changes
JavaScript scripts and gadgets can no longer check multiple keys at once via mw.config.exists() or mw.user.tokens.exists(). You can use exists() or get() to check one at a time instead.
[46]
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
If you forget your password you can ask for a new one to be sent to your email address. You need to know your email address or your username. You can choose that you need to enter both your email address and your username. This is a preference. This is to get fewer password reset emails someone else asked for. This is now available on all Wikimedia wikis.
[47][48]
Problems
There is a bug that creates problems for iPhone users with
iOS 13 and
Safari. If you use an iPhone to read or edit Wikipedia and see bugs on the mobile site you can
report them.
[49]
Several wikis including Wikidata will be on read-only for a few minutes on 19 May. This will happen around
05:00 UTC. English Wikipedia will be on read-only for a few minutes on 21 May
05:00 UTC. This is for database maintenance.
[50][51]
Graphs will be
rendered in the reader's browser. This will use
Javascript. Graphs will hopefully work better for everyone who uses Javascript. It will not work for users who don't use Javascript. This will not affect diagrams in image files.
[53]
Some CSS for the skins has been simplified. This affects div#p-personal, div#p-navigation, div#p-interaction, div#p-tb, div#p-lang, div#p-namespaces, div#p-variants and div#footer. They will have to remove div. You will have to update your gadgets, scripts or user styles. This is so we can use
HTML5.
[54]
Some CSS for
the Vector skin has been changed. This affects #p-variants, #p-namespaces, #p-personal, #p-views and #p-cactions. They can no longer use > ul. You might need to update your gadgets, scripts or user styles.
See how.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
Changes later this week
The visual editor will now work in the
Modern skin. The changes that needed to happen for this to work could cause problems for some scripts or gadgets.
[55]
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from May 26. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from May 27. It will be on all wikis from May 28 (
calendar).
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
There is a new beta version of the
Wikimedia Commons app for Android. It has a new zoom function when you look at images. It can also suggest places when you upload geotagged photos.
[56]
Problems
There was a problem with the Commons database on 27 May. Commons could not be edited for eight minutes. Because of this problem the database was moved. This caused another short read-only time on 29 May.
[57][58][59]
The
Vector skin had a problem where you couldn't add links to the article in other languages. You couldn't see the section if there were no links to other languages already. It also removed
content translation links and links to language settings. This has now been fixed.
[60]
Changes later this week
You can get a notification when someone links to a page you created. You can turn these notifications off for individual pages. You can soon turn them off also in the notifications you get.
[61]
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 2 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 3 June. It will be on all wikis from 4 June (
calendar).
This month saw two Tree of Life editors
gain the mop: CaptainEek (WikiProjects Birds and Plants) and Cwmhiraeth (familiar name at DYK, WikiProjects Plants, Animals, and Insects)
The April – May
GAN backlog drive finished up, clearing the queue from nearly 700 outstanding nominations to about 350.
Interview with Jts1882
This month we're joined by Jts1882, who is active in depicting evolutionary relationship of taxa via
cladograms. Part of this includes responding to
cladogram requests, where interested editors can have cladograms made without using the templates themselves.
How did you come to be interested in systematics? Are you interested in systematics broadly, or is there a particular group you're most fond of?
As long as I can remember I’ve been interested in nature, starting with the animals and plants in the garden, school grounds, and local wood, and then more general wildlife worldwide. An interest in how things are classified grew from this. I like things to be organised and understanding the relationships between things and systems (not just living things) is a big part of that. Biology was always my favourite subject in school and took up a disproportionate part of my time. My interest in systematics is broad as I’d like to comprehend the whole tree of life, but the cat family is my favourite group.
What's the background behind cladogram requests? I see that it isn't a very old part of the Tree of Life
Well I can’t take any credit for the cladogram requests page, although I help out there sometimes. It was created by IJReid and there are several people who have helped there more than me. I think the motivation is that creating cladograms requires a knowledge of the templates that is daunting for many editors. It was one way of helping people who want to focus on content creation.
My main contribution to the cladograms is converting the {{clade}} template to use a Lua module. The template code was extremely difficult to follow and had to be repetitive (I can only admire the efforts of those who got the thing to work in the first place). The conversion to Lua made it more efficient, allowed larger and deeper cladograms, plus facilitating the introduction of new features. The cladogram request page was recently the venue for discussion on making time calibrated cladograms, which is now possible, if not particularly user friendly.
What advice do you have for an editor who wants to learn how to make cladograms?
The same advice I would give to someone facing any computer problem, just try it out. Start by taking existing code for a cladogram and make changes yourself. The main advice would be to format it properly so indents match the brackets vertically. Of course, not everyone wants to learn and if someone prefers to focus on article content there is the cladogram request page.
Examples of cladograms Jts1882 has created, showing different proposed clades for
Neoaves
Do you have any personal projects or goals you're working towards on Wikipedia?
As I said I like organisation and systems. So I find efforts like the
automated taxobox system and {{taxonbar}} appealing. I would like to see more reuse of the major phylogenetic trees on Wikipedia with more use of consensus trees on the higher taxa. Too often they get edited based on one recent report and/or without proper citation.
Animals and
bilateria are examples where this is a problem.
Towards this I have been working on a system of phylogeny templates that can be reused flexibly. The {{Clade transclude}} template allows selective transclusion, so the phylogenetic trees on one page can be reused with modifications, i.e. can be pruned and grafted, used with or without images, with or without collapsible elements, etc. I have an example for the Angiosperm Phylogeny Group classification (see {{Phylogeny/APG IV}}) and one for squamates that also includes collapsible elements (see {{Phylogeny/Squamata}}).
A second project is to have a modular reference system for taxonomic resources. I have made some progress along this lines with the {{BioRef}} template. This started off simply as a way of hardlinking to
Catalog of Fishes pages and I’ve gradually expanded it to cover other groups (e..g.
FishBase,
AmphibiaWeb and
Amphibian Species of the World,
Reptile Database, the Mammalian Diversity Database). The modular nature is still rudimentary and needs a rewrite before it is ready for wider use.
What would surprise your fellow editors to learn about your life off-Wikipedia?
I don’t think there is anything particularly surprising or interesting about my life. I’ve had an academic career as a research scientist but I don't think anyone could guess the area from my Wikipedia edits. I prefer to work on areas where I am learning at the same time. This why I spend more time with neglected topics (e.g. mosses at the moment). I start reading and then find that I’m not getting the information I want.
Anything else you'd like us to know?
My interest in the classification of things goes beyond biology. I am fascinated by mediaeval attempts to classify knowledge, such as
Bacon in his The Advancement of Learning and
Diderot and
d’Alembert in their Encyclopédie. They were trying to come up with a universal scheme of knowledge just as the printing press was allowing greater dissemination of knowledge.
With the internet we are seeing a new revolution in knowledge dissemination. Just look at how we could read research papers on the COVID virus within weeks of its discovery. With an open internet, everyone has access, not just those with the luxury of books at home or good libraries. Sites like the
Biodiversity Heritage Library allow you to read old scientific works without having to visit dusty university library stack rooms, while the taxonomic and checklist databases provide instant information on millions of living species. In principle, the whole world can now find out about anything, even if
Douglas Adams warned we might be disinclined to do so.
This is why I like Wikipedia, with all its warts, it’s a means of organising the knowledge on the internet. In just two decades it’s become a first stop for knowledge and hopefully a gateway to more specialised sources. Perhaps developing this latter aspect, beyond providing good sources for what we say, is the next challenge for Wikipedia.
... that Tetraponera penzigi is one of several species of ant that protect
whistling thorn trees in East Africa from grazing giraffes and rhinoceroses? (3 May)
... that the Vietnam mouse-deer, which had been feared to have gone extinct nearly 30 years ago, was sighted again in 2019? (4 May)
... that most branchiobdellids use
crayfish as hosts, living on their heads,
carapaces, or
claws, but in some instances inside their gill cavities? (5 May)
... that the northern plains gray langur monkey (example pictured) is killed in India for food and to prevent crop raiding, despite being considered sacred by Hindus? (12 May)
... that the leech Limnatis nilotica can affect humans and livestock, entering hosts through the mouth, nose, or other orifices? (12 May)
... that the tree Barteria fistulosa is associated with Tetraponera aethiops, an aggressive species of ant that lives in its hollow branches and twigs? (15 May)
... that Miller's langur, one of the rarest primates in
Borneo, was feared to be extinct until a 2012 study rediscovered it in an area where it was previously unknown? (16 May)
... that most of the known Gigantopithecus fossils are of teeth because the other bones are likely to have been eaten by
porcupines? (17 May)
... that Tetraponera tessmanni, a very aggressive ant, is able to establish dominance over the whole of the liana in which it lives, which may be 50 m (164 ft) long? (17 May)
... that the Arizona dampwood termite exclusively colonizes dead parts of standing trees? (22 May)
... that Megaceroides algericus is one of only two deer species known to have been native to Africa, alongside the
Barbary stag? (23 May)
... that besides eating ants and termites, the waved woodpecker feeds on fruits, berries, and seeds? (24 May)
... that populations of the Canada lynx(pictured) undergo cyclic rises and falls in line with those of the
snowshoe hare? (25 May)
... that despite being known as the Mexican hydrangea, Clerodendrum bungei is neither from Mexico nor a species of
hydrangea? (25 May)
... that meerkats(examples pictured) use
alarm calls that can identify the type of predator posing the risk, the level of danger, and the caller itself? (27 May)
... that the frog Boophis fayi can be identified by its unusual green-and-turquoise eyes? (30 May)
... that members of the fly family Apystomyiidae(example depicted) have been found in Late Jurassic sediments in
Kazakhstan? (30 May)
... that the sun bear(pictured) is the smallest of all
bear species? (31 May)
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
Some articles have tables that can be sorted in different ways. For example a list of countries can be sorted alphabetically but you can click on the size column to sort them by size. If you clicked on the column a second time it would sort the countries from the bottom to the top instead. A third click will now take you back to the original sorting.
[62]
Self-closed tags now work as in the
HTML5 specifications. This means you should stop using some of them. <b/> is an example of a self-closed tag that won't work. area, base, br, col, embed, hr, img, input, keygen, link, meta, param, source, track, wbr can be self-closed. Pages with tags that should not be self-closed have been listed in
a tracking category since 2016. They will be listed in
Special:LintErrors/self-closed-tag. This doesn't affect <references /> or <ref />.
[63]
There is a banner called WikidataPageBanner. It is for example used by the Wikivoyages, Wikimedia Russia and the Catalan, Basque, Galician and Turkish Wikipedias. It will now been seen by mobile visitors too. Before this it was only seen on desktop. The wikis should update instructions on MediaWiki:Sitenotice so that editors know to test and style for mobile too.
[64][65]
Changes later this week
You can now edit
MassMessage descriptions through the
API. This is useful for tools and gadgets.
[66]
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 9 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 10 June. It will be on all wikis from 11 June (
calendar).
Future changes
A temporary fix helped wikis make their main pages more mobile friendly. This was in 2012. It has not been recommended since 2017. It will not work after 13 July. Wikis should use
TemplateStyles instead. 118 wikis need to fix this. You can
read more and see if your wiki is affected.
[67]
NPP Sorting can be a great way to find pages needing new page patrolling that match your strengths and interests. Using ORES, it divides articles into topics such as Literature or Chemistry and on Geography. Take a look and see if you can find time to patrol a couple pages a day. With over 10,000 pages in the queue, the highest it's been since
ACPERM, your help could really make a difference.
Google Adds New Languages to Google Translate
In late February, Google added 5 new languages to Google Translate: Kinyarwanda, Odia (Oriya), Tatar, Turkmen and Uyghur. This expands our ability to find and evaluate sources in those languages.
Discussions and Resources
A
discussion on handling new article creation by paid editors is ongoing at the Village Pump.
Also at the Village Pump is a
discussion about limiting participation at Articles for Deletion discussion.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
Problems
There are some
new tools to make it easier for newcomers to start editing. They are available on
some wikis. These wikis had a problem with the visual editor for a short period of time last week. This was because of a bug in the new tools. It was soon fixed.
[68]
Some user scripts and gadgets stopped working because of a change to
CSS selectors. .vectorTabs should be replaced with .vector-menu-tabs to fix this.
[69]
Changes later this week
The developers are working on a
new interface to solve edit conflicts on talk pages. This will be released on 24 June. You can
give feedback.
[70]
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 23 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 24 June. It will be on all wikis from 25 June (
calendar).
Future changes
A temporary fix helped wikis make their main pages more mobile friendly. This was in 2012. It has not been recommended since 2017. It will not work after 13 July. Wikis should use
TemplateStyles instead. 91 wikis still need to fix this. You can
read more and see if your wiki is affected.
[71]
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
Problems
Everyone was logged out. This was because a few users saw the wikis as if they were logged in to someone else's account. The problem should be fixed now.
[72]
Some readers didn't see new edits to pages. If the page had been recently changed they saw an older version of the page instead. This only affected readers who were logged out. It lasted for ten days. It has been fixed.
[73]
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 30 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 1 July. It will be on all wikis from 1 July (
calendar).
Future changes
The
Modern and
Monobook skins use the ID searchGoButton for the go button. This is searchButton for
Vector. To have the same ID for all skins it will change to searchButton in Monobook and Modern too. This will affect gadgets and user scripts. It will happen on 23 July. They should be updated to use searchButton. You can
read more and see a list of affected scripts.
Thank you for your interest and contributions to WikiLoop Battlefield.
We are holding a voting for proposed new name. We would like to invite you to this voting. The voting
is held at
m:WikiProject_WikiLoop/New_name_vote and ends on July 13th 00:00 UTC.
The third round of the 2020 WikiCup has now come to an end. The 16 users who made it into the fourth round each had at least 353 points (compared to 68 in 2019). It was a highly competitive round, and a number of contestants were eliminated who would have moved on in earlier years. Our top scorers in round 3 were:
Epicgenius, with one featured article, 28 good articles and 17 DYKs, amassing 1836 points
The Rambling Man , with 1672 points gained from four featured articles and seventeen good articles, plus reviews of a large number of FACs and GAs
Gog the Mild, a first time contestant, with 1540 points, a tally built largely on 4 featured articles and related bonus points.
Between them, contestants managed 14 featured articles, 9 featured lists, 3 featured pictures, 152 good articles, 136 DYK entries, 55 ITN entries, 65 featured article candidate reviews and 221 good article reviews. Additionally, MPJ-DK added 3 items to featured topics and 44 to good topics. Over the course of the competition, contestants have completed 710 good article reviews, in comparison to 387 good articles submitted for review and promoted. These large numbers are probably linked to a GAN backlog drive in April and May, and the changed patterns of editing during the COVID-19 pandemic. As we enter the fourth round, remember that any content promoted after the end of round 3 but before the start of round 4 can be claimed in round 4. Please also remember that you must claim your points within 14 days of "earning" them. When doing GARs, please make sure that you check that all the GA criteria are fully met. Please also remember that all submissions must meet core Wikipedia policies, regardless of the review process.
The article
Dwarf dog-faced bat you nominated as a
good article has passed ; see
Talk:Dwarf dog-faced bat for comments about the article. Well done! If the article has not already appeared on the main page as a "Did you know" item, or as a bold link under "In the News" or in the "On This Day" prose section, you can
nominate it within the next seven days to appear in DYK. Bolded names with dates listed at the bottom of the "On This Day" column do not affect DYK eligibility. Message delivered by
Legobot, on behalf of
Dunkleosteus77 --
Dunkleosteus77 (
talk)
20:02, 3 July 2020 (UTC)reply
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
Problems
The
Score extension has been disabled for now. This is because of a security issue. It will work again as soon as the security issue has been fixed.
[74]
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 7 July. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 8 July. It will be on all wikis from 9 July (
calendar).
Future changes
Abstract Wikipedia is a new Wikimedia project. It will collect language-independent information that can be easily read in different languages. It builds on Wikidata. The name is preliminary. You can
read more.
[75]
Some
rules for user signatures will soon be enforced.
Lint errors and invalid HTML will no longer be allowed in user signatures. Nested substitution will not be allowed. A link to your user page, user talk page or user contributions will be required. You can
check if your signature works with the new rules. This is because the signatures can cause problems for tools or other text on the page.
Hi there, I'm pleased to inform you that I've begun reviewing the article
Bat virome you nominated for
GA-status according to the
criteria. This process may take up to 7 days. Feel free to contact me with any questions or comments you might have during this period. Message delivered by
Legobot, on behalf of
Chidgk1 --
Chidgk1 (
talk)
12:01, 7 July 2020 (UTC)reply
The article
Bat virome you nominated as a
good article has been placed on hold . The article is close to meeting the
good article criteria, but there are some minor changes or clarifications needing to be addressed. If these are fixed within 7 days, the article will pass; otherwise it may fail. See
Talk:Bat virome for issues which need to be addressed. Message delivered by
Legobot, on behalf of
Chidgk1 --
Chidgk1 (
talk)
06:41, 12 July 2020 (UTC)reply
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
Users can
thank others for their edits.
Checkusers can now see user data related to that action. This can help identify
sock puppets who harass others using thanks.
[76]
Problems
Everyone was logged out a couple of weeks ago to fix a security problem. The problem was not entirely fixed. Because of this everyone was logged out once again last week.
[77][78]
Changes later this week
Wikis that are not for one specific language can
translate pages. Sometimes parts of translations are outdated or missing. Outdated translations are marked with a pink background. Missing translations will also be marked in the future. This markup can sometimes break things. It can soon be disabled by using <translate nowrap></translate> on the source page.
[79]
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 14 July. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 15 July. It will be on all wikis from 16 July (
calendar).
Future changes
Wikimedia code review plans to use
GitLab. It would be hosted on Wikimedia servers.
[80][81][82][83]
The article
Bat virome you nominated as a
good article has passed ; see
Talk:Bat virome for comments about the article. Well done! If the article has not already appeared on the main page as a "Did you know" item, or as a bold link under "In the News" or in the "On This Day" prose section, you can
nominate it within the next seven days to appear in DYK. Bolded names with dates listed at the bottom of the "On This Day" column do not affect DYK eligibility. Message delivered by
Legobot, on behalf of
Chidgk1 --
Chidgk1 (
talk)
07:02, 18 July 2020 (UTC)reply
Merlin Tuttle
Hello! Thank you for informing me of my violation of Wikipedia's COI policy as I was previously unaware when making edits to
Merlin Tuttle. I have publicly disclosed on my talk page my COI with the subject and I would like to move forward with properly contributing to Merlin's page if that is a possibility. I am new to Wikipedia and am a bit overwhelmed by the rules and complexities so my apologies for my ignorance! Please let me know if you would be interested in reviewing Merlin's page or what the appropriate procedure is for contributing to his page. Thank you!
Dmil3422 (
talk)
22:43, 18 July 2020 (UTC)reply
Thank you for the clarification and glad to learn that you are a bat fan! About the photo, would it be possible to use it if I uploaded a signed consent form from Merlin and MTBC granting permission to use it?
The article
Hammer-headed bat you nominated as a
good article has passed ; see
Talk:Hammer-headed bat for comments about the article. Well done! If the article has not already appeared on the main page as a "Did you know" item, or as a bold link under "In the News" or in the "On This Day" prose section, you can
nominate it within the next seven days to appear in DYK. Bolded names with dates listed at the bottom of the "On This Day" column do not affect DYK eligibility. Message delivered by
Legobot, on behalf of
Jens Lallensack --
Jens Lallensack (
talk)
22:02, 19 July 2020 (UTC)reply
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
A temporary fix helped wikis make their main pages more mobile friendly. This was in 2012. It has not been recommended since 2017. The mobile main page special casing stopped working 14 July. 60 wikis now have main pages that don't work well on mobile. You can see which ones, how to fix it and how to get help
in Phabricator. This is the same problem that was reported in Tech News
2020/24 and
2020/26.
Problems
There is a problem with the interlanguage links. The interlanguage links are the links that help you find a specific page in a different language. The sorting is broken. The developers are working on a solution.
[84]
Some users keep getting the notifications for the same event. Some of these are old events.
[85]
Some users have trouble logging in. This is probably a
browser cookie problem. The developers are working on understanding the problem. If you have trouble logging in you can see the details
on Phabricator.
[86]
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 21 July. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 22 July. It will be on all wikis from 23 July (
calendar).
Future changes
There is a Printable version link. This will disappear. That is because web browsers today can create a printable version or show how it will look in print anyway.
[87]
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
Recent changes
The
Starter kit is now available for wiki communities. This page lists technical resources, tools, and recommendations. These are essential to operate a wiki project. This is mostly useful for smaller wikis where the community has limited experience with this.
[88]
The first features of the
Desktop Improvements project are available for logged-in users on all wikis. In order to use them, uncheck Use Legacy Vector in your
local or
global preferences in section Skin preferences. More improvements are planned.
Feedback is welcome.
The deployment train for MediaWiki has been blocked this week.
[89][90]
Translation Notification Bot was sending the same message multiple times to every translator. This has been fixed.
[91]
Some users were receiving the same notification multiple times. This has been fixed.
[92]
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from July 28. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from July 29. It will be on all wikis from JUly 30 (
calendar).
This issue is a double issue, but the plan is to return to monthly henceforth.
A
discussion at
WikiProject Palaeontology about internal peer review processes led to the creation of
a peer review space. In contrast to the more formal
Peer Review, PalaeoPR focuses on short "fact checks", emphasizing content over style. Reviews are meant to be low commitment, with "drive-by reviews" encouraged. Since its inception on 8 July, seven articles have been submitted to PalaeoPR.
After a highly competitive third round, two Tree of Life editors advanced to the fourth round of the
WikiCup: Dunkleosteus77 and Sainsf
A
February 2020 paper published in PLOS noted that Mammalian Species is one of the most over-cited journals on Wikipedia relative to how frequently it is cited in other academic works.
Categorizing life with DexDor
DexDor is a WikiGnome with a particular interest in article categorization, including how organisms are categorized.
How did you become interested in editing biodiversity topics on Wikipedia?
I'm a wikignome who tries to remove unnecessary complexity and confusion in Wikipedia. I specialise in categorization. I've worked on categorization of several topic areas (e.g. military equipment) - anywhere where I see things like category tags on articles that the category text doesn't support. Categorization of organisms is one area I'm currently looking at (
my essay on this).
You seem to be particularly interested in geographic categorization of organisms. What are some issues in this area?
One issue is that there are several possible relationships between an organism and a region (i.e. what the "of" in a "Xs of Y" means) - the organism may be found throughout the region, somewhere in the region, only in the region (i.e. endemic to that region) - there are categories for each of these (and others) and some categories have been unclear about their exact meaning. Then there's introductions by man, locally extinct species, occasional visitors...
Another issue is that some editors have thought it's appropriate to create categories for very small areas ("Spiders of Vatican City" is only a slight exaggeration) and put a few articles in them, thus creating a category that is both massively incomplete and non-defining for the articles in it.
There have been several (now blocked) editors who have been disruptive in this area, but a confusing and sprawling categorization scheme is also partly due to editors from a particular background categorizing a particular article in a way that appears to make sense, but doesn't really make sense in the wider categorization scheme - for example, if an article mentions the countries at the extremes of an animal's distribution, the animal is categorized just for those countries.
What potential solutions do you see for categorizing organisms by geography? How can other editors help address this issue, or at least, not make it worse?
We should have some guidelines that tell editors how to categorize any article about an organism (including any geographical categorization). I've started drafting guidelines at
User:DexDor/BioCat. The guidelines are also a good way to ensure that the categorization of articles about organisms is aligned with categorization of other articles and may help us to identify where there are problems, inconsistencies etc in the categorization. I welcome suggestions for improvement of the guidelines (which should at some point be moved into WP:TOL).
Regarding geographical categorization of animals the main advice for editors would be to not create categories for any new areas and to only create a new category if you intend to populate it.
What have you learned from being a Wikipedia editor?
That lots of people (from varied backgrounds) each making (mostly) small improvements (like ants in an ants nest?) and only understanding some parts of Wikipedia can produce such a wonderful resource. But also, how that tends to result in ever-increasing complexity which negatively affects editors and readers.
Is there anything about your life outside Wikipedia that would surprise us?
... that despite being a member of the
cat family, the jaguarundi has several features in common with
mustelids such as otters and weasels? (2 June)
... that scientists were unsure whether the blue calamintha bee(pictured) still existed until it was observed again in March 2020? (2 June)
... that many of the animals regarded as pests have co-evolved with humans, adapting to the warm, sheltered conditions that a building provides? (3 June)
... that the banteng is the second
endangered species to be successfully
cloned, and the first clone to survive beyond infancy? (5 June)
... that cattle and deer sometimes stand under trees where southern plains gray langurs are feeding in order to consume the edible pieces that the monkeys drop? (10 June)
... that when boiled in milk, black coral(example pictured) emits a faint scent of
myrrh? (21 June)
... that one of the factors affecting the future of the Huanchaca mouse is the increased cultivation of
biofuels? (22 June)
... that the Strawberries and Cream Tree(pictured) is noted for producing pink blossoms on one side of the tree and white on the other, when it blooms every spring? (23 June)
... that the Chilean seaside cinclodes bobs its tail while it walks and flares its wings while it sings? (24 June)
... that Boie's frog(pictured) and the Banhado frog both resemble dead leaves on the floor of the forest? (25 June)
... that Markham's storm petrel, which nests in Peru and northern Chile, has been described as "one of the least known seabirds in the world"? (7 July)
... that the frog Corythomantis greeningi retreats into a hole, blocks the entrance with its spiny head, and injects venom into anything that tries to dislodge it? (18 July)
... that the reef box crab uses its powerful pincers to break open the shells of snails? (21 July)
... that the genus Pterodactylus(species depicted), the scientific name for a pterodactyl, had been considered a "
wastebasket taxon" as many species were assigned to it and later reassigned? (23 July)
... that the sea urchin Abatus cordatus broods its young for nine months in pockets on its upper surface? (24 July)
... that Harold Clyde Bingham trailed a troop of gorillas for 100 hours in 1929? (25 July)
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
Problems
All queries to the
Wikidata Query Service failed between 17:50 and 17:59 UTC on Thursday 23 July. Some queries failed during a longer period.
[93]
Interlanguage links were ordered incorrectly for the past few weeks. This problem was also mentioned in
Tech News two weeks ago. The problem is now fixed.
[94]
There is a problem with the
global preferences for the "Use Legacy Vector" option. Developers are working on fixing it.
[95]
A bug in the Wikibase extension had disabled the "move" and "create" types of protection in the main (Gallery) namespace on Wikimedia Commons. New protections could not be added, and existing protections were not enforced, allowing some page moves and page creations that should not have been possible. This has now been fixed.
[96]
Changes later this week
The
video player will change to be simpler and more modern. This week, the current beta feature will become the video player for everyone on most non-Wikipedia wikis. The old player will be removed.
[97]
Users' global.js and global.css pages will now also be loaded on the mobile site. You can read
documentation for how to avoid applying styles to the mobile skin.
[98]
In the
MonoBook skin, the searchGoButton identifier is now searchButton. This may affect CSS and JS gadgets. Migration instructions can be found in
T255953. This was previously mentioned in
issue 27.
Bot operators can use Pywikibot to regularly archive discussions. The behavior when the bot uses counter to prevent large archives was changed.
[99]
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from August 4. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from August 5. It will be on all wikis from August 6 (
calendar).
Hi, I'm one of the Catalan Wikipedia users who regularly write about mammals. Thanks for the heads-up on the Mustelodon hoax. It does look like this could be the longest-lived hoax we've ever had, at least on the English-language Wikipedia. Have a great day!--
Leptictidium (mt)
06:44, 8 August 2020 (UTC)reply
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
FileImporter and FileExporter became standard features on all Wikis during the first week of August. They help you transfer files from local wikis to Wikimedia Commons with the original file information and history intact.
[100]
Problems
The mobile skin displays a message at the bottom of the page about who edited last. This message showed raw wikitext. This has now been fixed. Some messages in
Structured Discussions and
content translation may still appear as raw wikitext. Developers are working on it.
[101]
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from August 11. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from August 12. It will be on all wikis from August 13 (
calendar).
Future changes
All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes on September 1. This is planned between 13:30 and 15:30 UTC. More information will be published in Tech News and will also be posted on individual wikis in the coming weeks.
[102][103]
Nightsmaiden, I imagine most people find learning easiest when they are not being belittled :) Happy to help, please drop me a line if you have questions while editing.
Enwebb (
talk)
20:05, 16 August 2020 (UTC)reply
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
If you revert an edit using the undo link your edit is marked with an undo tag. This will now only happen if you don't change anything in the edit window before publishing the undo. This is to keep users from marking edits as undos when they actually do something else.
[104]
The new
OOUI version will not work with
Internet Explorer 8. This means the wikis will look strange and not work well in Internet Explorer 8. This was reported in
Tech/News/2020/17. This is because keeping the wikis working with very old browsers creates other problems.
[105]
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 18 August. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 19 August. It will be on all wikis from 20 August (
calendar).
Future changes
All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes on September 1. This is planned between 13:30 and 15:30 UTC. More information will be published in Tech News and will also be posted on individual wikis next week. This is a reminder. You can help by
translating the announcement message.
[106][107]
Egyptian Rousette bat: A natural reservoir for MARV
On the Egyptian Rousette bat being a reservoir for Marbug, there is a CDC dispatch in regards to this. The discovery gives credence to specific populations of the Egyptian Rousette as being a natural reservoir for MARV. Here is a link to the dispatch:
https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/24/6/17-2165_article
Join the RfC to define trust levels for WikiLoop DoubleCheck
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 25 August. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 26 August. It will be on all wikis from 27 August (
calendar).
Hi there, I'm pleased to inform you that I've begun reviewing the article
Great flying fox you nominated for
GA-status according to the
criteria. This process may take up to 7 days. Feel free to contact me with any questions or comments you might have during this period. Message delivered by
Legobot, on behalf of
FunkMonk --
FunkMonk (
talk)
15:40, 25 August 2020 (UTC)reply
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
Problems
This is a reminder. All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes on September 1. This is planned between 14:00 and 15:00 UTC. Please check on the details on
the announcement message.
[108][109]
The fourth round of the competition has finished, with 865 points being required to qualify for the final round, nearly twice as many points as last year. It was a hotly competitive round with two contestants with 598 and 605 points being eliminated, and all but two of the contestants who reached the final round having achieved an FA during the round. The highest scorers were
Bloom6132, with 1478 points gained mainly from 5 featured lists, 12 DYKs and 63 in the news items;
HaEr48 with 1318 points gained mainly from 2 featured articles, 5 good articles and 8 DYKs;
Lee Vilenski with 1201 points mainly gained from 2 featured articles and 10 good articles.
Between them, contestants achieved 14 featured articles, 14 featured lists, 2 featured pictures, 87 good articles, 90 DYK entries, 75 ITN entries, 95 featured article candidate reviews and 81 good article reviews. Congratulations to all who participated! It was a generally high-scoring and productive round and I think we can expect a highly competitive finish to the competition.
Remember that any content promoted after the end of round 4 but before the start of round 5 can be claimed in round 5. Remember too that you must claim your points within 10 days of "earning" them. If you are concerned that your nomination will not receive the necessary reviews, please list it on
Wikipedia:WikiCup/Reviews. It would be helpful if this list could be cleared of any items no longer relevant. If you want to help out with the WikiCup, please do your bit to keep down the review backlogs! Questions are welcome on
Wikipedia talk:WikiCup, and the judges are reachable on their talk pages or by email. If you wish to start or stop receiving this newsletter, please feel free to add or remove yourself from
Wikipedia:WikiCup/Newsletter/Send.
Godot13 (
talk),
Sturmvogel 66 (
talk),
Vanamonde (
talk),
Cwmhiraeth (
talk)
MediaWiki message delivery (
talk)
19:52, 1 September 2020 (UTC)reply
On August 7,
WikiProject Palaeontology member Rextron discovered a suspicious taxon article, Mustelodon, which was created in November 2005. The article lacked references and the subsequent discussion on
WikiProject Palaeontology found that the alleged type locality (where the fossil was first discovered) of Lago Nandarajo "near the northern border of Panama" was nonexistent. In fact, Panama does not even really have a northern border, as it is bounded along the north by the Caribbean Sea. No other publications or databases mentioned Mustelodon, save a fleeting mention in a 2019 book that presumably followed Wikipedia, Felines of the World.
The article also appeared in four other languages, Catalan, Spanish, Dutch, and Serbian. In Serbian Wikipedia, a note at the bottom of the page warned: "It is important to note here that there is no data on this genus in the official scientific literature, and all attached data on the genus Mustelodon on this page are taken from the English Wikipedia and are the only known data on this genus of mammals, so the validity of this genus is questionable."
Editors took action to alert our counterparts on other projects, and these versions were removed also. As the editor who reached out to Spanish and Catalan Wikipedia, it was somewhat challenging to navigate these mostly foreign languages (I have a limited grasp of Spanish). I doubted that the article had very many watchers, so I knew I had to find some WikiProjects where I could post a machine translation advising of the hoax, and asking that users follow local protocols to remove the article. I was surprised to find, however, that Catalan Wikipedia does not tag articles for WikiProjects on talk pages, meaning I had to fumble around to find what I needed (turns out that WikiProjects are Viquiprojectes in Catalan!) Mustelodon remains
on Wikidata, where its "instance of" property was swapped from "taxon" to "fictional taxon".
How did this article have such a long lifespan? Early intervention is critical for removing hoaxes. A 2016 report found that a hoax article that survives its first day has an 18% chance of lasting a year.[1] Additionally, hoax articles tend to have longer lifespans if they are in inconspicuous parts of Wikipedia, where they do not receive many views. Mustelodon was only viewed a couple times a day, on average.
Mustelodon survived a brush with death three years into its lifespan. The article was proposed for deletion in September 2008, with a deletion rationale of "No references given; cannot find any evidence in peer-reviewed journals that this alleged genus actually exists". Unfortunately, the proposed deletion was contested and the template removed, though the declining editor did not give a rationale. Upon its rediscovery in August 2020, Mustelodon was tagged for speedy deletion under
CSD G3 as a "blatant hoax". This was challenged, and an
Articles for Deletion discussion followed. On 12 August, the AfD was closed as a SNOW delete. WikiProject Palaeontology members ensured that any trace of it was scrubbed from legitimate articles. The fictional mammal was finally, truly extinct.
At the ripe old age of 14 years, 9 months, this is the longest-lived documented hoax on Wikipedia, topping the previous documented record of 14 years, 5 months, set by
The Gates of Saturn, a fictitious television show, which was incidentally also discovered in August 2020. How do we discover other hoax taxa? Could we use Wikidata to discover taxa are not linked to databases like ITIS, Fossilworks, and others?
This month's spotlight is with Mattximus, author of two Featured Articles and 29 Featured Lists at current count.
How did you become involved with editing biodiversity articles?
I think I have a compulsion to make lists, it doesn't show up in my real life, but online I secretly get a lot of satisfaction making orderly lists and tables. It's a bit of a secret of mine, because it doesn't manifest in any other part of my life. My background is in biology, so this was a natural (haha) fit.
You have an impressive number of FAs under your belt. Two of your more recent ones, Apororhynchus and Gigantorhynchus, are part of what you referred to as an "experiment". How did you choose these articles, and what's next for you in this experiment?
This experiment was just to see if I could get any random article to FA status, so I picked the very first alphabetical animal species according to the taxonomy and made that attempt. Technically, there isn't enough information for a species page so I just merged the species into a genus and went from there. It was a fun exercise, but doing it alone is not the most fun so it's probably on pause for the foreseeable future.
Note: Aporhynchus is the first alphabetical taxon as follows: Animalia, Acanthocephala, Archiacanthocephala, Apororhynchida, Apororhynchidae, Apororhynchus
What advice would you give to someone who wants to nominate their first FAC?
I would recommend getting a good article nominated, then a featured list up before tackling the FA. Lists are a bit more forgiving but give you a taste of what standards to expect from FA. The most time consuming thing is proper citations so make sure that is in order before starting either.
Is there anything that would surprise us to learn about your life off-Wikipedia?
My personality in real life does not match my wikipedia persona. I'm not a very organized, or orderly in real life, but the wikipedia pages I brought to FL or FA are all very organized. Maybe it's my outlet for a more free-flowing life as a scientist/teacher.
Anything else you'd like us to know?
The fact that wikipedia exists free of profit motive and free for everyone really is something special and I encourage everyone to donate a few dollars to the cause.
... that the flower buds of the woolly thistle(pictured) can be eaten in a similar way to
artichokes? (8 August)
... that the French peanut is native to Brazil? (10 August)
... that the 800-year-old Minchenden Oak is one of the oldest trees in London? (14 August)
... that the forward-facing
incisors of the extinct dolphin Ankylorhiza(restoration pictured) may have been used for ramming their prey, similar to a hunting method used by modern
orcas? (16 August)
... that scientists accidentally created a
hybrid of two endangered fish species, called the sturddlefish? (17 August)
... that despite having the widest distribution in the United States, the arid-land subterranean termite causes less structural damage than other members of its genus? (19 August)
... that in 2021, the dwarf periodical cicada(pictured) is due to emerge in parts of eastern North America, not having been seen for 17 years? (24 August)
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
Changes later this week
Normally pages can be moved to a title that has no existing page yet or to a page that has only one revision, which is a redirect to the page to be moved. A new user right allows editors to move pages over one-revision pages that redirect to anywhere.
[110]
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 8 September. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 9 September. It will be on all wikis from 10 September (
calendar).
All MediaWiki
API modules will now use watchlist instead of watch. This was inconsistent before.
[111]
Future changes
The
Wikipedia Android app team might work on patrolling tools in the future. You can let them know what tools would be useful for you or for less experienced patrollers. See the
page on mediawiki.org.
OTRS will be updated to a new version. This will probably take around two days. OTRS agents will not have access to the system during these days. Emails that come in during the update will be delivered when the update is done. The plan is to start around 08:00 UTC on 14 September. This could change.
[112]
The Wikipedia Android app will send
push notifications if users want them. This could help you see for example when someone wrote on your talk page or your edit was reverted. This will need
Google Play Services to work. It will also be possible to get the app without Google Play Services but push notifications will not work. Google Play Services is also used to make the app work for
Android 4.4 users.
[113][114]
Wikimedia code review could move to
GitLab. It would be hosted on Wikimedia servers. You can take part in the
consultation.
Dropdown menus in
the Vector skin use a .menu class. This will not work in the future. Scripts can use nav ul instead. .vectorTabs and .vectorMenu will also not work. Some scripts need to be updated. You can
read more in Phabricator.
Hello, Enwebb. Please check your email; you've got mail! It may take a few minutes from the time the email is sent for it to show up in your inbox. You can remove this notice at any time by removing the {{You've got mail}} or {{ygm}} template.
Gen. Quon, yeah absolutely, the last one is great and I also like the second one. The article could stand to have more pictures in general, especially considering what a common and well-photographed species it is. When's our next GA collab? A big "pie in the sky" I've thought about is a
WP:GT of
Bats of the United States. So any US species would work if you have interest.
Enwebb (
talk)
01:35, 11 September 2020 (UTC)reply
Gen. Quon, eastern red would be good! It is mostly already in the structure used in other bat GAs like little brown bat, big brown bat, and tricolored bat:
Taxonomy
Description
Biology / Biology and ecology
Range and habitat
Conservation
Definitely would want more about the effect of wind turbines--I think that's a pretty serious source of mortality for these guys.
Enwebb (
talk)
02:28, 11 September 2020 (UTC)reply
Yes definitely. I've tried doing stuff like this before on Facebook with the North American Society of Bat Research. People always express interest and then just...don't follow through and upload the pics. Maybe it would work out with more follow-up, though.
Enwebb (
talk)
16:00, 11 September 2020 (UTC)reply
Side question: While doing some preliminary work for the eastern red bat, I decided to really quickly make an article for Lasiurus frantzii. However, some sources, such as
this show it as a subspecies, whereas others, like
this contend it is its own species. Is there a good way to handle this?--Gen. Quon(Talk)18:35, 12 September 2020 (UTC)reply
Gen. Quon, yeah, that's a hard one. Lasiurus is tricky. I went ahead and followed the ASM mammal diversity database in recognizing three genera in Lasiurini (Lasiurus + Dasypterus and Aeorestes), so that could be precedent for following
ASM again and recognizing L. frantzii as distinct. Whenever MSW4 eventually comes out we can clean up inconsistencies. I think it's justifiable either way.
Enwebb (
talk)
18:44, 12 September 2020 (UTC)reply
Yes, it's a solidly decent stub. I added a couple of categories, did the stub sorting, and added needs-photo and needs-map parameters to the talk page template.
Enwebb (
talk)
20:23, 12 September 2020 (UTC)reply
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
Problems
The
Wikipedia apps briefly showed pages without
CSS last week. This meant they looked wrong. It was quickly fixed but cached pages without CSS were shown for a few hours.
[119][120]
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 15 September. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 16 September. It will be on all wikis from 17 September (
calendar).
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
There is a new tag for reverted edits. For example you can see it in the recent changes feed or in the article history. It is added to edits when they have been undone, rollbacked or manually reverted to an older version of the page.
[121][122]
Changes later this week
The number of times you can do something in a period of time on wiki is limited. This could be the number of edits per minute or the number of users you email in a day. Some users are not affected by all limits because of their user rights. They could soon see the limit even if it does not affect them.
[123]
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 22 September. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 23 September. It will be on all wikis from 24 September (
calendar).
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
Editors are automatically added to some user groups. For example editors are added to
autoconfirmed users when they have edited enough times and long enough.
Abuse filters can hinder users from automatically getting user rights for a period of time. They can also remove rights user have. Wikis can now ask to change how long this period of time is for their wiki
in Phabricator. It is currently five days.
[125]
Problems
Last year some abuse filters stopped working because of a new change. If they tried to use variables that were unavailable for that action they would fail. This has now been fixed.
[126]
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 29 September. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 30 September. It will be on all wikis from 1 October (
calendar).
Future changes
You can't see the language links to other language versions from the talk page or history page. They are also not shown when you edit an article. This could change. It is not decided if for example the history page should link to another history page or to the article. You can take part in the
discussion in Phabricator.
The link colours could change. This is to make the difference between links and other text more clear. You can
read more in Phabricator.
In your preferences you can choose to get different notifications on the web or by email. You will see Apps as one of the alternatives later this week. This is because the
Android and iOS Wikipedia apps will use push notifications for those who want them. You can see the
preferences on the test wiki. The goal is to have push notifications on Android in October and on iOS in early 2021.
[127]
You can soon put pages on your watchlist for a limited time. This could be useful if you want to watch something for a shorter time but don't want it on your watchlist forever. It now works on
mediawiki.org and will come to more wikis later. You can
read more and
see when it will come to other wikis.
The article
Great flying fox you nominated as a
good article has passed ; see
Talk:Great flying fox for comments about the article. Well done! If the article has not already appeared on the main page as a "Did you know" item, or as a bold link under "In the News" or in the "On This Day" prose section, you can
nominate it within the next seven days to appear in DYK. Bolded names with dates listed at the bottom of the "On This Day" column do not affect DYK eligibility. Message delivered by
Legobot, on behalf of
FunkMonk --
FunkMonk (
talk)
16:03, 5 October 2020 (UTC)reply
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
There is a
new tool where you can see which home wiki users have in discussions on Meta. This can help show which communities are not part of the discussion on wikis where we make decisions that affect many other wikis.
You can now thank users for file uploads or for changing the language of a page.
[128]
Problems
There were many errors with the new MediaWiki version last week. The new version was rolled back. Updates that should have happened last week are late.
[129]
Everyone was logged out. This was because a user reported being logged in to someone else's account. The problem should be fixed now.
[130]
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 6 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 7 October. It will be on all wikis from 8 October (
calendar).
Letters immediately after a link are shown as part of the link. For example the entire word in [[Child]]ren is linked. On Arabic wikis this works at both the start and end of a word. Previously on Arabic wikis numbers and other non-letter Unicode characters were shown as part of the link at the start of a word but not at the end. Now only Latin and Arabic letters will extend links on Arabic wikis.
[131]
Future changes
You will be able to read but not to edit the wikis for up to an hour on
27 October around 14:00 (UTC). It will probably be shorter than an hour.
[132]
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
Problems
Because of the problems with the MediaWiki version two weeks ago last week's updates are also late.
[133][134][135]
Changes later this week
Live previews didn't show the templates used in the preview if you just edited a section. This has now been fixed. You can also test
CSS and
JavaScript pages even if you have the live preview enabled. Previously this didn't work well.
[136][137]
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 13 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 14 October. It will be on all wikis from 15 October (
calendar).
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 20 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 21 October. It will be on all wikis from 22 October (
calendar).
Future changes
You will be able to read but not to edit the wikis for up to an hour on
27 October around 14:00 (UTC). It will probably be shorter than an hour.
[139]
In the
AbuseFilter extension, the rmspecials() function will be updated soon so that it does not remove the "space" character. Wikis are advised to wrap all the uses of rmspecials() with rmwhitespace() wherever necessary to keep filters' behavior unchanged. You can use the search function on
Special:AbuseFilter to locate its usage.
[140]
Some gadgets and user-scripts use the HTML div with the ID #jump-to-nav. This div will be removed soon. Maintainers should replace these uses with either #siteSub or #mw-content-text. A list of affected scripts is at the top of
phab:T265373.
HickoryOughtShirt?4, I think the election project page would need to be roughly doubled, but that sounds good. I just wanted to get something started, I'm sure there's more to be added. I'm having a hard time locating when the project was founded, though.
Enwebb (
talk)
20:05, 22 October 2020 (UTC)reply
HickoryOughtShirt?4, now-defunct elections.gmu.edu website. that makes it sound like it was somewhere else before 2014, George Mason University, not that it was founded in 2014. Which makes sense because McDonald worked there. Wayback Machine might be able to help, but I gotta run for now.
Enwebb (
talk)
21:05, 22 October 2020 (UTC)reply
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
Problems
You will be able to read but not to edit the wikis for up to an hour on
October 27 around 14:00 (UTC). It will probably be shorter than an hour.
[141]
Last week, links to "diffs" from mobile watchlists and recentchanges were linking to page-revisions instead of diffs. This has now been fixed.
[142]
Changes later this week
There is no new MediaWiki version this week.
Future changes
Since the introduction of the
interface administrators user group in 2018, administrators couldn’t view the deleted history of CSS/JS pages. Now they can.
[143]
There was a problem with the
Change Tags. The software would apply the "Reverted" tag to any page actions such as page-protection changes if they came directly after a reverted edit. This has now been fixed for new edits.
[144]
The
Reply tool will be offered as an opt-in
Beta Feature on most Wikipedias in November. Another announcement will be made once the date is finalized.
[145]
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
Recent changes
You can no longer read Wikimedia wikis if your browser uses very old
TLS. This is because it is a security problem for everyone. It could lead to
downgrade attacks. Since October 29, 2020, users who use old TLS versions will not be able to connect to Wikimedia projects. A list of
browser recommendations is available. All modern operating systems and browsers are always able to reach Wikimedia projects.
[146]
There is a new automatic
tracking category available:
Pages with non-numeric formatnum arguments. It collects pages which use the {{formatnum}} parser function with invalid (non-numeric) input, e.g.{{formatnum:TECHNEWS}}. Note that {{formatnum:123,456}} is also invalid input: as described in the
documentation, the argument should be unformatted so that it can be reliably and correctly localised. The tracking category will help identify problematic usage and double-formatting. The new tracking category's name can be
translated at translatewiki.
[147]
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from November 3. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from November 4. It will be on all wikis from November 5 (
calendar).
Administrators and stewards will be able to use a special page (Special:CreateLocalAccount) to force local account creation for a global account. This is useful when account creation is blocked for that user (by a block or a filter).
[148]
The
Reply tool will be offered as an opt-in
Beta Feature on most Wikipedias on November 4. This change excludes the English, Russian, and German-language Wikipedias, plus a few smaller Wikipedias with special circumstances. You can read
the help page and
the troubleshooting guide for more information.
[149]
Future changes
A discussion has been restarted about using a Unicode minus sign (− U+2212) in the output of {{formatnum}} when it is given a negative argument.
[150]
In the future
IP addresses of unregistered users will not be shown for everyone. They will get an alias instead. There will be a new user right or an opt-in function for more vandal fighters to see the IPs of unregistered users. There would be some criteria for who gets the user right or opt-in. There will also be other new tools to help handle vandalism. This is early in the process and the developers are still collecting information from the communities before they suggest solutions.
The 2020 WikiCup has come to an end, with the final round going down to the wire. Our new Champion is Lee Vilenski (
submissions), the runner-up last year, who was closely followed by Gog the Mild (
submissions). In the final round, Lee achieved 4 FAs and 30 GAs, mostly on cue sport topics, while Gog achieved 3 FAs and 15 GAs, mostly on important battles and wars, which earned him a high number of bonus points. The Rambling Man (
submissions) was in third place with 4 FAs and 8 GAs on football topics, with Epicgenius (
submissions) close behind with 19 GAs and 16 DYK's, his interest being the buildings of New York.
The other finalists were Hog Farm (
submissions), HaEr48 (
submissions), Harrias (
submissions) and Bloom6132 (
submissions). The final round was very productive, and besides 15 FAs, contestants achieved 75 FAC reviews, 88 GAs and 108 GAN reviews. Altogether, Wikipedia has benefited greatly from the activities of WikiCup competitors all through the contest. Well done everyone!
All those who reached the final will receive awards and the following special awards will be made, based on high performance in particular areas of content creation. So that the finalists do not have an undue advantage, these prizes are awarded to the competitor who scored the highest in any particular field in a single round, or in the event of a tie, to the overall leader in this field.
Gog the Mild (
submissions) wins the featured article prize, for a total of 14 FAs during the course of the competition.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
Changes later this week
There is no new MediaWiki version this week.
Future changes
You can see
reference previews. This shows a preview of the footnote when you hover over it. This has been a
beta feature. It will move out of beta and be enabled by default. There will be an option not to use it. The developers are looking for small or medium-sized wikis to be the first ones. You can
let them know if your wiki is interested.
[151]
From November 16 the categories will not be sorted in order for a short time. This is because the developers are upgrading to a new version of the
internationalisation library. They will use a script to fix the existing categories. This can take a few hours or a few days depending on how big the wiki is. You can
read more.
[152][153]
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
Listings on category pages are sorted on each wiki for that language using a
library. For a brief period on 16 November, changes to categories will not be sorted correctly for most languages. This is because the developers are upgrading to a new version of the library. They will then use a script to fix the existing categories. This will take a few hours or a few days depending on how big the wiki is. You can
read more.
[154][155]
Changes later this week
If you merged two pages in a
namespace where pages can't redirect this used to break the merge history. This will now be fixed.
[156]
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 17 November. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 18 November. It will be on all wikis from 19 November (
calendar).
Future changes
The
Community Wishlist Survey is now open for proposals. The survey decides what the
Community Tech team will work on. You can post proposals from 16 to 30 November. You can vote on proposals from 8 December to 21 December.
New, simpler RfC to define trust levels for WikiLoop DoubleCheck
HI Enwebb/Archive 4,
I'm writing to let you know we have simplified the
RfC on trust levels for the tool WikiLoop DoubleCheck. Please join and share your thoughts about this feature! We made this change after hearing users' comments on the first RfC being too complicated. I hope that you can participate this time around, giving your feedback on this new feature for WikiLoop DoubleCheck users.
Thanks and see you around online, María Cruz MediaWiki message delivery (
talk)
20:05, 19 November 2020 (UTC)reply
If you would like to update your settings to change the wiki where you receive these messages, please do so
here.
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
Timestamps in
Special:Log are now links. They go to Special:Log for only that entry. This is how timestamps work on for example the history page.
[157]
Changes later this week
There is no new MediaWiki version this week.
Future changes
The Wikimedia
Cloud VPS hosts technical projects for the Wikimedia movement. Developers need to
claim projects they use. This is because old and unused projects are removed once a year. Unclaimed projects can be shut down from 1 December. Unclaimed projects can be deleted from 1 January.
[158]
Hello! Voting in the 2020 Arbitration Committee elections is now open until 23:59 (UTC) on Monday, 7 December 2020. All eligible users are allowed to vote. Users with alternate accounts may only vote once.
The
Arbitration Committee is the panel of editors responsible for conducting the
Wikipedia arbitration process. It has the authority to impose binding solutions to disputes between editors, primarily for serious conduct disputes the community has been unable to resolve. This includes the authority to impose
site bans,
topic bans, editing restrictions, and other measures needed to maintain our editing environment. The
arbitration policy describes the Committee's roles and responsibilities in greater detail.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 1 December. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 2 December. It will be on all wikis from 3 December (
calendar).
Future changes
The
iOS Wikipedia app will show readers more of the article history. They can see new updates and easier see how the article has changed over time. This is an experiment. It will first be shown only to some iOS app users as a
test.
[159][160]
The
Wiki Replicas can be used for
SQL queries. You can use
Quarry,
PAWS or other ways to do this. To make the Wiki Replicas stable there will be two changes. Cross-database JOINS will no longer work. You can also only query a database if you connect to it directly. This will happen in February 2021. If you think this affects you and you need help you can
post on Phabricator or on
Wikitech.
[161]
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
Recent changes
You can now put pages on your watchlist for a limited period of time. Some wikis already had this function.
[162][163]
Changes later this week
Information from Wikidata that is used on a wiki page can be shown in recent changes and watchlists on a Wikimedia wiki. To see this you need to turn on showing Wikidata edits in your watchlist in the preferences. Changes to the Wikidata description in the language of a Wikimedia wiki will then be shown in recent changes and watchlists. This will not show edits to languages that are not relevant to your wiki.
[164][165]
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 8 December. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 9 December. It will be on all wikis from 10 December (
calendar).
This is to let you know that the
Horseshoe bat article has been scheduled as
today's featured article for January 7, 2021. Please check the article needs no amendments. If you're interested in editing the main page text, you're welcome to do so at
Wikipedia:Today's featured article/January 7, 2021, but note that a coordinator will trim the lead to around 1000 characters anyway, so you aren't obliged to do so.
For Featured Articles promoted recently, there will be an existing blurb linked from the FAC talk page, which is likely to be transferred to the TFA page by a coordinator at some point.
Thank you today for the article "about a family of bats that have been quite relevant in the news lately as the possible origin of SARS-CoV. They have a lot of diversity and some strange features, even for bats (pubic nipples!)"! --
Gerda Arendt (
talk)
11:20, 7 January 2021 (UTC)reply
New Page Patrol December Newsletter
Hello Enwebb,
Year in review
It has been a productive year for New Page Patrol as we've roughly cut the size of the New Page Patrol queue in half this year. We have been fortunate to have a lot of great work done by Rosguill who was the reviewer of the most pages and redirects this past year. Thanks and credit go to JTtheOG and Onel5969 who join Rosguill in repeating in the top 10 from last year. Thanks to John B123, Hughesdarren, and Mccapra who all got the NPR permission this year and joined the top 10. Also new to the top ten is DannyS712 bot III, programmed by DannyS712 which has helped to dramatically reduce the number of redirects that have needed human patrolling by patrolling certain types of redirects (e.g. for differences in accents) and by also patrolling editors who are on on the
redirect whitelist.
John B123 has been named reviewer of the year for 2020. John has held the permission for just over 6 months and in that time has helped cut into the queue by reviewing more than 18,000 articles. His talk page shows his efforts to communicate with users, upholding NPP's goal of nurturing new users and quality over quantity.
NPP Technical Achievement Award
As a special recognition and thank you DannyS712 has been awarded the first NPP Technical Achievement Award. His work programming the bot has helped us patrol redirects tremendously - more than 60,000 redirects this past year. This has been a large contribution to New Page Patrol and definitely is worthy of recognition.
Six Month Queue Data: Today – 2262 Low – 2232 High – 10271
To opt-out of future mailings, please remove yourself
here
18:17, 10 December 2020 (UTC)
Merry Christmas and a Prosperous 2021!
Hello Enwebb, may you be surrounded by peace, success and happiness on this
seasonal occasion. Spread the
WikiLove by wishing another user a
Merry Christmas and a
Happy New Year, whether it be someone you have had disagreements with in the past, a good friend, or just some random person. Sending you heartfelt and warm greetings for Christmas and New Year 2021. Happy editing, ReaderofthePack(formerly Tokyogirl79)
(。◕‿◕。)03:32, 11 December 2020 (UTC)reply
Hello Enwebb, may you be surrounded by peace, success and happiness on this
seasonal occasion. Spread the
WikiLove by wishing another user a
Merry Christmas and a
Happy New Year, whether it be someone you have had disagreements with in the past, a good friend, or just some random person. Sending you heartfelt and warm greetings for Christmas and New Year 2021. Happy editing, ReaderofthePack(formerly Tokyogirl79)
(。◕‿◕。)04:08, 24 December 2020 (UTC)reply
Happy New Year and Happy New WikiCup! The competition begins today and all article creators, expanders, improvers and reviewers are welcome to take part. If you have already signed up, your submissions page can be found here. If you have not yet signed up, you can add your name here and the judges will set up your submissions page. Any questions on the rules or on anything else should be directed to one of the judges, or posted to the
WikiCup talk page. Signups will close at the end of January, and the first round will end on 26 February; the 64 highest scorers at that time will move on to round 2. We thank
Vanamonde93 and
Godot13, who have retired as judges, and we thank them for their past dedication. The judges for the WikiCup this year are
Sturmvogel 66 (
talk·contribs·email) and
Cwmhiraeth (
talk·contribs·email). Good luck!
MediaWiki message delivery (
talk)
11:10, 1 January 2021 (UTC)reply