Much has happened since the last newsletter over two months ago. The open letter finished with 444 signatures. The letter was sent to several dozen people at the WMF, and we have heard that it is being discussed but there has been no official reply. A related article appears in the current issue of The Signpost. If you haven't seen it, you should, including the readers' comment section.
Awards: Barnstars were given for the past several years (thanks to MPGuy2824), and we are now all caught up. The 2021 cup went to John B123 for leading with 26,525 article reviews during 2021. To encourage moderate activity, a new "Iron" level barnstar is awarded annually for reviewing 360 articles ("one-a-day"), and 100 reviews earns the "Standard" NPP barnstar. About 90 reviewers received barnstars for each of the years 2018 to 2021 (including the new awards that were given retroactively). All awards issued for every year are listed on the Awards page. Check out the new Hall of Fame also.
Software news: Novem Linguae and MPGuy2824 have connected with WMF developers who can review and approve patches, so they have been able to fix some bugs, and make other improvements to the Page Curation software. You can see everything that has been fixed recently here. The reviewer report has also been improved.
NPP backlog May – October 15, 2022
Suggestions:
There is much enthusiasm over the low backlog, but remember that the "quality and depth of patrolling are more important than speed".
Reminder: an article should not be tagged for any kind of deletion for a minimum of 15 minutes after creation and it is often appropriate to wait an hour or more. (from the NPP tutorial)
Reviewers should focus their effort where it can do the most good, reviewing articles. Other clean-up tasks that don't require advanced permissions can be left to other editors that routinely improve articles in these ways (creating Talk Pages, specifying projects and ratings, adding categories, etc.) Let's rely on others when it makes the most sense. On the other hand, if you enjoy doing these tasks while reviewing and it keeps you engaged with NPP (or are guiding a newcomer), then by all means continue.
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Backlog: Saving the best for last: From a July low of 8,500, the backlog climbed back to 11,000 in August and then reversed in September dropping to below 6,000 and continued falling with the October backlog drive to under 1,000, a level not seen in over four years. Keep in mind that there are 2,000 new articles every week, so the number of reviews is far higher than the backlog reduction. To keep the backlog under a thousand, we have to keep reviewing at about half the recent rate!
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Hi, I just noticed that this category was deleted. Since you closed the discussion, I thought I would ask if there is there any way to have that decision reconsidered? Frankly, the comments from the proposer and some of the others demonstrated a lack of knowledge of Upper Canada politics in the 19th century. The descendants of the Loyalists, born in Upper Canada, were a very influential political group, even though they themselves were not political refugees from the US, and don't fit within the definition of "Loyalist" used in either of the two articles on the topic. Mr Serjeant Buzfuz (talk) 13:09, 17 October 2022 (UTC)[reply]
It was the defining characteristic of the politics of two provinces which did not exist prior to the arrival of the Loyalists, Upper Canada and New Brunswick, as well as an entire sector of settlement in Lower Canada. Loyalty to the Crown became the significant ideology of those provinces. They were the descendants of political refugees who fled a revolution after losing their homes and property. Asking if it is a defining characteristic is sort of like asking if being the son or daughter of a political refugee from Cuba in Miami is a defining characteristic, or if being the son of an American revolutionary was a defining characteristic for politicians in the next generation after the Revolution. The ideology of the Revolution permeated US politics; the ideology of loyalty to the Crown permeated politics in Upper Canada, New Brunswick, and to some extent Lower Canada. I can give you a list of descendants of the political refugees from the US who were then involved in politics and governance in Upper Canada and New Brunswick in the first half of the 19th century. But it's not like there was a "United Empire Party" that elected members; it's that being the descendants of political refugees who lost their homes and fled for ideological reasons was the defining feature of politics in those provinces for a half-century. I'm also curious why there are categories for Sons of the American Revolution and Daughters of the American Revolution. Do you apply the same standard of defining characteristic to those categories? For people born two hundred years after the Revolution? Mr Serjeant Buzfuz (talk) 12:42, 19 October 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Following up on that last point, I notice that Rosalynn Carter is listed in the category of "Daughters of the American Revolution", but there is nothing in her article that suggests that is a defining feature of her life and political views. Should she be deleted from that category? Similarly, George W. Bush is listed in the category of "Sons of the American Revolution", but there is nothing in his wiki article that suggests it is a defining feature for him, either. Should he be included in the category, if there is nothing in his article that mentions it? Mr Serjeant Buzfuz (talk) 13:27, 19 October 2022 (UTC)[reply]
there’s also a process issue. For an issue that relates specifically to Canadian history, I think this deletion should have been listed at some of the Canadian wiki pages, so you would get comment from people with some knowledge of Canadian history, instead of comments from editors who have no idea why the category could be significant. Two good places to list it would be Wikipedia talk:WikiProject History of Canada and Wikipedia talk:Canadian Wikipedians' notice board. I only learnt the category had been deleted when editors started deleting it from bio pages of Upper Canadian politicians I follow. Advance notice would have been preferable. Mr Serjeant Buzfuz (talk) 15:37, 19 October 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Wikidata weekly summary #542
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
Task/s: I'm using Openrefine to edit items related to Wikidata:Wikiproject Lieder, beginning by adding the new subclass lyrico-musical work (Q114586269) to the actual lieder in WD. I hope to gain some experience before going with further edits.
Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call October 18th: session where community members can share their favorite Wikidata gadgets, user scripts, or SPARQL queries Agenda
Learn Wikidata and celebrate #WikidataBirthday in Sydney! (An introduction to wikidata: how worlds of wikimedia link). Saturday 22 October from 11am to 2pm. Sign up.
The Welsh Government's new mapping platform Data Map Wales (for publishing public geo data) now has an optional base layer entirely in Welsh. This is largely based on OSM data with additional place names from 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.
A bug that caused problems in loading article thumbnails in Special:Search has been fixed. Further details are in T320406.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 18 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 19 October. It will be on all wikis from 20 October (calendar).
The next Wikidata+Wikibase office hours will take place on Wednesday, November 9th 2022 at 17:00 UTC (18:00 Berlin time) in the Wikidata Telegram group. The Wikidata and Wikibase office hours are online events where the development team presents what they have been working on over the past quarter, and the community is welcome to ask questions and discuss important issues related to the development of Wikidata and Wikibase.
Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group Wikidata Working Hour October 24, 2022: ninth Wikidata Working Hour in the series will be batch loading data using QuickStatements to create items for works and editions in Wikidata. You are, as always, welcome to bring your own data to work on. All sessions in our project series will be recorded for those who cannot attend. Links will be added to the event page when available. Event page
The Biodiversity Information Standards annual conference (TDWG 2022) took place from 17-21 October in Sofia, Bulgaria, and online. It included a session about the role of the Wikimedia ecosystem in linking biodiversity data, which featured six talks, all of which with strong Wikidata components. Slides and/ or video recordings are already available for some (more to follow):
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 have been some minor visual fixes in Special:Search, regarding audio player alignment and image placeholder height. Further details are in T319230.
On Wikipedias, a new preference has been added to hide article thumbnails in Special:Search. Full details are in T320337.
Problems
Last week, three wikis (French Wikipedia, Japanese Wikipedia, Russian Wikipedia) had read-only access for 25 minutes. This was caused by a hardware problem. [5]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 25 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 26 October. It will be on all wikis from 27 October (calendar).
Some wikis will be in read-only for a few minutes because of a switch of their main database. It will be performed on 25 October at 07:00 UTC (targeted wikis) and on 27 October at 7:00 UTC (targeted wikis).
Starting on Wednesday, a new set of Wikipedias will get "Add a link" (Assamese Wikipedia, Bashkir Wikipedia, Balinese Wikipedia, Bavarian Wikipedia, Samogitian Wikipedia, Bikol Central Wikipedia, Belarusian Wikipedia, Belarusian (Taraškievica) Wikipedia, Bulgarian Wikipedia, Bhojpuri Wikipedia, Bislama Wikipedia, Banjar Wikipedia, Bambara Wikipedia, Bishnupriya Wikipedia, Breton Wikipedia, Bosnian Wikipedia, Buginese Wikipedia, Buryat Wikipedia, Indonesian Wikipedia). This is part of the progressive deployment of this tool to more Wikipedias. The communities can configure how this feature works locally. [6]
Pages with titles that start with a lower-case letter according to Unicode 11 will be renamed or deleted. There is a list of affected pages at m:Unicode 11 case map migration. More information can be found at T292552.
The Vector 2022 skin will become the default across the smallest Wikipedias. Learn more.
I kept seeing Category:17th-century British literature and Category:Gladiators (UK TV series) on the nightly Empty Categories list and I finally looked at them again tonight. I found you had closed the CFDs that involved these categories yesterday. Is there a reason that you didn't tag these categories for deletion after you closed the CFDs? They were already emptied so they didn't require any removal of pages/categories by a bot.
You and Marco use to do this when you were done closing CFDs but for some reason, over the past month or so, I never see categories deleted through CFDs come up as uncontroversial deletions, CSD G6, any more. Was there some problem with how you were handling these closures? Because I thought that it was a very efficient system. LizRead!Talk!01:17, 31 October 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call November 1, 2022: Egon Willighagen (d:User:Egonw) on SARS-CoV-2 queries, a a well-documented series of Wikidata queries around the SARS-CoV-2 virus and the pandemic. This work contributes to d:Wikidata:Wikiproject COVID-19 and documentation is currently available in Japanese, Dutch, Spanish, and Portuguese. Agenda.
Some additional materials have been made available from the Wikimedia session at the Biodiversity Information Standards annual conference (TDWG 2022) that took place from 17-21 October in Sofia, Bulgaria, and online:
sparklis (source) : query builder in natural language that allows people to explore and query SPARQL endpoints with all the power of SPARQL and without any knowledge of SPARQL, nor of the endpoint vocabulary.
✨ Other Noteworthy Stuff
Word Finder is a tool based on Wikidata Lexemes that solves anagrams and find missing letters in crosswords.
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
When using keyboard navigation on a Kartographer map, the focus will become more visible. [11]
In Special:RecentChanges, you can now hide the log entries for new user creations with the filter for "⧼rcfilters-filter-newuserlogactions-label⧽". [12]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 1 November. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 2 November. It will be on all wikis from 3 November (calendar).
The maps dialog in VisualEditor now has some help texts. [13]
It is now possible to select the language of a Kartographer map in VisualEditor via a dropdown menu. [14]
It is now possible to add a caption to a Kartographer map in VisualEditor. [15]
It is now possible to hide the frame of a Kartographer map in VisualEditor. [16]
An RfC is open to discuss having open requests for adminship automatically placed on hold after the seven-day period has elapsed, pending closure or other action by a bureaucrat.
Tech tip: Wikimarkup in a block summary is parsed in the notice that the blockee sees. You can use templates with custom options to specify situations like {{rangeblock|create=yes}} or {{uw-ublock|contains profanity}}.
Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group Wikidata Working Hour November 7, 2022: tenth and final Wikidata Working Hour in the series will be using SPARQL to query and visualize the data we’ve added to Wikidata during our series. You are, as always, welcome to bring your own data to work on. All sessions in our project series will be recorded for those who cannot attend. Links will be added to the event page when available. Event page
Wikidata and Wikibase office hour, taking place online on November 9th at 17:00 UTC (more details here)
Raising an Artist Profile with Wikidata: Thursday November 10, 2022 at 20:00 UTC (Session A) and 23:00 UTC (Session B). This free, step-by-step Wikidata workshop will focus mainly on Indigenous artists. Participants may choose to attend either Session A or Session B: both will cover the exact same material.
Wikidata editathon in Swedish with focus on climate politics and COP27, online and in Stockholm, 11 November 13.00-18.00 UTC
A Hands-On Introduction to Wikidata: Thursday December 1, 2022 at 17:00 UTC. By the end of this session, you will be able to edit Wikidata records about the cultural venues that matter most to you.
Lexicographical data: Replaced the old Special:NewLexeme page with the new one (phab:T307866) - a few remaining issues will still be fixed
Vue 3: Almost finished the Vue 3 migration in Wikibase and WikibaseLexeme (phab:T321595 and (phab:T304534) - this is needed for finalizing the migration in MediaWiki overall
Mismatch Finder: Worked on improving the handling of dates (phab:T288511)
Search: Working with the WMF on making the new Vue-based Vector search understand Wikidata (phab:T316093)), especially regarding “load more” behavior
REST API:
Continued improving error reporting for PATCH routes (phab:T320358)
Ensuring that the API correctly marks bot edits as bot edits and treats them as such in various other places
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
An updated version of the Event Registration tool is now available for testing at testwiki and test2wiki. The tool provides features for event organizers and participants. Your feedback is welcome at our project talkpage. More information about the project is available. [17]
Problems
Twice last week, for about 45 minutes, some files and thumbnails failed to load and uploads failed, mostly for logged-in users. The cause is being investigated and an incident report will be available soon.
This empty category is tagged with a CFD tag that makes it appear to be part of a CFD discussion you closed but I don't see this category in the bundled list. Do you have any ideas of what's going on here? Thanks. LizRead!Talk!01:12, 13 November 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Hi Liz, looks like Hemiauchenia didn't add this to the list after tagging it for discussion, presumably by mistake. I assume it only contained subcats that were deleted due to that discussion, so you can probably just delete it. — Qwerfjkltalk01:18, 13 November 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, it's not unambiguous as a reference to the unduly lenient sentence scheme. But it's also presently a redlink, so it's not helping anyone resolve what it means in any context at all. If someone comes along and writes articles for those other uses (or expands articles, or realises that existing articles already cover those other uses, etc), they can turn the redirect into a disambig as and when; in the meantime, the redirect would be serving a useful purpose to readers. Wikipedia's malleable and we don't need to get it absolutely perfect the first time; we can fix things up and improve them, and make incremental changes that are better than nothing. So, will you please create the redirect, as suggested, so that readers can get some value, even if it's not the absolutely platonic perfect result that an encyclopaedia with infinite resources would have? 80.7.186.76 (talk) 15:34, 13 November 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Search would be useless in this case, as the acronym isn't used in the article (I wrote it talking about 'the scheme'). I also don't see where WP:REDLINK covers this situation - could you please quote the part that you find relevant? 80.7.186.76 (talk) 16:49, 13 November 2022 (UTC)[reply]
It is 11:33 PM where this user lives.
