User talk:StefenTower
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Archive of news items over 5 years old
Board Elections
Hi Stefen, It's Annointed777 - I just received a 2nd notice regarding the board elections. I have read about the candidates but I do not know enough to determine who the best ones are to vote for, what are the top priorities. If you have a chance would you mind emailing me at derosasongs@gmail.com with who you think would be the best choices and I will pay extra attention to them? Thank you Stefen. (Annointed777 (talk) 02:31, 13 September 2024 (UTC))
- Sorry, I don't pay attention to this aspect of Wikipedia as I'm too busy with other things. Stefen 𝕋owers among the rest! Gab • Gruntwerk 18:39, 13 September 2024 (UTC)
User:Velma Larkin has falsely accusing me of vandalism
Hi there, a user named User:Velma Larkin has falsely accusing me of vandalism and User:Velma Larkin must be indefinitely blocked. I hope you understand. Thanks. 2001:569:74E3:4000:D86:8CFC:FC26:86AC (talk) 05:41, 13 September 2024 (UTC)
- That user has been reported to WP:AIV. I expect they will be blocked soon. Stefen 𝕋owers among the rest! Gab • Gruntwerk 05:43, 13 September 2024 (UTC)
- Thank you! I didn't know to look here. 166.194.200.16 (talk) 05:51, 13 September 2024 (UTC)
Help! There is a persecutor run amok on Wikipedia
You warned user:Velma Larkin about an improper warning of an IP editor, well, I am getting the same treatment.
Please help me with a dispute with user:Velma Larkin, because they are acting like a corrupt enforcement officer of Wikipedia by falsely accusing me of vandalism. Please investigate their reverts and their patrolling of IP edits.
I stand by my recent edit of USS San Francisco (SSN-711) as a model of IP editing for the good of the planet. Doesn't everyone live a good IP edit around here? You should! 166.194.200.16 (talk) 05:50, 13 September 2024 (UTC)
- I restored your edit, and then another editor came along and partly changed it back, then changed their mind. It should be all right now. Stefen 𝕋owers among the rest! Gab • Gruntwerk 05:55, 13 September 2024 (UTC)
Tech News: 2024-38
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Improvements and Maintenance
Editors interested in templates can help by reading the latest Wishlist focus area, Template recall and discovery, and share your feedback on the talkpage. This input helps the Community Tech team to decide the right technical approach to build. Everyone is also encouraged to continue adding new wishes.- The new automated Special:NamespaceInfo page helps editors understand which namespaces exist on each wiki, and some details about how they are configured. Thanks to DannyS712 for these improvements. [1]
- References Check is a feature that encourages editors to add a citation when they add a new paragraph to a Wikipedia article. For a short time, the corresponding tag "Edit Check (references) activated" was erroneously being applied to some edits outside of the main namespace. This has been fixed. [2]
- It is now possible for a wiki community to change the order in which a page’s categories are displayed on their wiki. By default, categories are displayed in the order they appear in the wikitext. Now, wikis with a consensus to do so can request a configuration change to display them in alphabetical order. [3]
Tool authors can now access ToolsDB's public databases from both Quarry and Superset. Those databases have always been accessible to every Toolforge user, but they are now more broadly accessible, as Quarry can be accessed by anyone with a Wikimedia account. In addition, Quarry's internal database can now be queried from Quarry itself. This database contains information about all queries that are being run and starred by users in Quarry. This information was already public through the web interface, but you can now query it using SQL. You can read more about that, and 20 other community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.- Any pages or tools that still use the very old CSS classes
mw-message-boxneed to be updated. These old classes will be removed next week or soon afterwards. Editors can use a global-search to determine what needs to be changed. It is possible to use the newercdx-messagegroup of classes as a replacement (see the relevant Codex documentation, and an example update), but using locally defined onwiki classes would be best. [4]
Technical project updates
- Next week, all Wikimedia wikis will be read-only for a few minutes. This will start on September 25 at 15:00 UTC. This is a planned datacenter switchover for maintenance purposes. This maintenance process also targets other services. The previous switchover took 3 minutes, and the Site Reliability Engineering teams use many tools to make sure that this essential maintenance work happens as quickly as possible. [5]
Tech in depth
- The latest monthly MediaWiki Product Insights newsletter is available. This edition includes details about: research about hook handlers to help simplify development, research about performance improvements, work to improve the REST API for end-users, and more.
- To learn more about the technology behind the Wikimedia projects, you can now watch sessions from the technology track at Wikimania 2024 on Commons. This week, check out:
- Hackathon Showcase (45 mins) - 19 short presentations by some of the Hackathon participants, describing some of the projects they worked on, such as automated testing of maintenance scripts, a video-cutting command line tool, and interface improvements for various tools. There are more details and links available in the Phabricator task.
- Co-Creating a Sustainable Future for the Toolforge Ecosystem (40 mins) - a roundtable discussion for tool-maintainers, users, and supporters of Toolforge about how to make the platform sustainable and how to evaluate the tools available there.
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
MediaWiki message delivery 23:59, 16 September 2024 (UTC)
Fun
Always fun to encounter a "not an improvement" change, fix it (completing one aspect to be an actual but minor improvement and reverting another aspect), be personally attacked by that non-improving editor in a subsequent edit, then after calling the "not an improvement" change to that editor's attention, they remove the discussion and slough it off as "not serious", like they're entitled to go around making "not an improvement" changes and attacking fellow editors. This editor literally just changed dates in maintenance templates from a few months ago to this month and finds that actually disruptive edit is useful somehow. Egad. Hopefully this isn't the kind of editor Wikipedia is cultivating in 2024. Stefen 𝕋owers among the rest! Gab • Gruntwerk 22:34, 19 September 2024 (UTC)
New message from Shearonink
You are invited to join the discussion at Talk:Wounded Knee Massacre § Massacre? Mass Shooting? - what to state in the lead section. Shearonink (talk) 20:46, 20 September 2024 (UTC)
Tech News: 2024-39
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Weekly highlight
- All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes on Wednesday September 25 at 15:00 UTC. Reading the wikis will not be interrupted, but editing will be paused. These twice-yearly processes allow WMF's site reliability engineering teams to remain prepared to keep the wikis functioning even in the event of a major interruption to one of our data centers.
Updates for editors
- Editors who use the iOS Wikipedia app in Spanish, Portuguese, French, or Chinese, may see the Alt Text suggested-edit experiment after editing an article, or completing a suggested edit using "Add an image". Alt-text helps people with visual impairments to read Wikipedia articles. The team aims to learn if adding alt-text to images is a task that editors can be successful with. Please share any feedback on the discussion page.
- The Codex color palette has been updated with new and revised colors for the MediaWiki user interfaces. The most noticeable changes for editors include updates for: dark mode colors for Links and for quiet Buttons (progressive and destructive), visited Link colors for both light and dark modes, and background colors for system-messages in both light and dark modes.
- It is now possible to include clickable wikilinks and external links inside code blocks. This includes links that are used within
<syntaxhighlight>tags and on code pages (JavaScript, CSS, Scribunto and Sanitized CSS). Uses of template syntax{{…}}are also linked to the template page. Thanks to SD0001 for these improvements. [6] - Two bugs were fixed in the GlobalVanishRequest system by improving the logging and by removing an incorrect placeholder message. [7][8]
- View all 25 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.
Updates for technical contributors
- From Wikimedia Enterprise:
- The API now enables 5,000 on-demand API requests per month and twice-monthly HTML snapshots freely (gratis and libre). More information on the updates and also improvements to the software development kits (SDK) are explained on the project's blog post. While Wikimedia Enterprise APIs are designed for high-volume commercial reusers, this change enables many more community use-cases to be built on the service too.
- The Snapshot API (html dumps) have added beta Structured Contents endpoints (blog post on that) as well as released two beta datasets (English and French Wikipedia) from that endpoint to Hugging Face for public use and feedback (blog post on that). These pre-parsed data sets enable new options for researchers, developers, and data scientists to use and study the content.
In depth
- The Wikidata Query Service (WDQS) is used to get answers to questions using the Wikidata data set. As Wikidata grows, we had to make a major architectural change so that WDQS could remain performant. As part of the WDQS Graph Split project, we have new SPARQL endpoints available for serving the "scholarly" and "main" subgraphs of Wikidata. The query.wikidata.org endpoint will continue to serve the full Wikidata graph until March 2025. After this date, it will only serve the main graph. For more information, please see the announcement on Wikidata.
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
MediaWiki message delivery 23:33, 23 September 2024 (UTC)
The Signpost: 26 September 2024
- In the media: Courts order Wikipedia to give up names of editors, legal strain anticipated from "online safety laws"
- Community view: Indian courts order Wikipedia to take down name of crime victim, editors strive towards consensus
- Serendipity: A Wikipedian at the 2024 Paralympics
- Opinion: asilvering's RfA debriefing
- News and notes: Are you ready for admin elections?
- Recent research: Article-writing AI is less "prone to reasoning errors (or hallucinations)" than human Wikipedia editors
- Traffic report: Jump in the line, rock your body in time
The I-265 page is rife with all kinds of errors.
I would like to better explain the error I am trying to correct then we can work on trying to get sources added. Allindsey1978 (talk) 00:49, 27 September 2024 (UTC)
- There is WP:NODEADLINE to make this change to the article. Please find the source(s) before adding. Unfortunately, if you keep adding unsourced stats, that could lead to an admin blocking you. Stefen 𝕋owers among the rest! Gab • Gruntwerk 00:52, 27 September 2024 (UTC)
Tech News: 2024-40
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Updates for editors
- Readers of 42 more wikis can now use Dark Mode. If the option is not yet available for logged-out users of your wiki, this is likely because many templates do not yet display well in Dark Mode. Please use the night-mode-checker tool if you are interested in helping to reduce the number of issues. The recommendations page provides guidance on this. Dark Mode is enabled on additional wikis once per month.
- Editors using the 2010 wikitext editor as their default can access features from the 2017 wikitext editor by adding
?veaction=editsourceto the URL. If you would like to enable the 2017 wikitext editor as your default, it can be set in your preferences. [9] - For logged-out readers using the Vector 2022 skin, the "donate" link has been moved from a collapsible menu next to the content area into a more prominent top menu, next to "Create an account". This restores the link to the level of prominence it had in the Vector 2010 skin. Learn more about the changes related to donor experiences. [10]
- The CampaignEvents extension provides tools for organizers to more easily manage events, communicate with participants, and promote their events on the wikis. The extension has been enabled on Arabic Wikipedia, Igbo Wikipedia, Swahili Wikipedia, and Meta-Wiki. Chinese Wikipedia has decided to enable the extension, and discussions on the extension are in progress on Spanish Wikipedia and on Wikidata. To learn how to enable the extension on your wiki, you can visit the CampaignEvents page on Meta-Wiki.
- View all 22 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.
Updates for technical contributors
- Developers with an account on Wikitech-wiki should check if any action is required for their accounts. The wiki is being changed to use the single-user-login (SUL) system, and other configuration changes. This change will help reduce the overall complexity for the weekly software updates across all our wikis.
In depth
- The server switch was completed successfully last week with a read-only time of only 2 minutes 46 seconds. This periodic process makes sure that engineers can switch data centers and keep all of the wikis available for readers, even if there are major technical issues. It also gives engineers a chance to do maintenance and upgrades on systems that normally run 24 hours a day, and often helps to reveal weaknesses in the infrastructure. The process involves dozens of software services and hundreds of hardware servers, and requires multiple teams working together. Work over the past few years has reduced the time from 17 minutes down to 2–3 minutes. [11]
Meetings and events
- October 4–6: WikiIndaba Conference's Hackathon in Johannesburg, South Africa
- November 4–6: MediaWiki Users and Developers Conference Fall 2024 in Vienna, Austria
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
MediaWiki message delivery 22:16, 30 September 2024 (UTC)
Category:Louisville White Sox has been nominated for deletion
Category:Louisville White Sox has been nominated for deletion. A discussion is taking place to decide whether it complies with the categorization guidelines. If you would like to participate in the discussion, you are invited to add your comments at the category's entry on the categories for discussion page. Thank you. Omnis Scientia (talk) 14:57, 1 October 2024 (UTC)
Category:Louisville Black Caps has been nominated for deletion
Category:Louisville Black Caps has been nominated for deletion. A discussion is taking place to decide whether it complies with the categorization guidelines. If you would like to participate in the discussion, you are invited to add your comments at the category's entry on the categories for discussion page. Thank you. Omnis Scientia (talk) 14:57, 1 October 2024 (UTC)
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Retired this morning
As I have become increasingly alarmed by bad-faith editing from anonymous IPs becoming too much of a distraction for serious editing, so much so I have truly begun to dread doing any work here, I have decided it is best to quit Wikipedia. Part of the problem is admins pretending not to see the problem, or attacking serious editors who raise the alarm, and that just compounds it. It's part of a growing pattern I have felt as an experienced editor, that those of us who want to do professional-grade work are being ground down and driven out by a platform that seems to encourage gameplay over serious editing. Sometimes even this gameplay pretends to be serious, with bad-faith actors who have figured out how to make their edits look proper when in reality they are destructive.
Further issues I see are increased unchecked POV pushing in articles, particularly history-related ones, as well as the usually unspoken but very clear bureaucratic animus against WikiProjects, especially at a time they are needed more than ever to focus the work.
There are just too many problems now to work against, and it seems in many areas that editors have simply vanished. The pool of editors is obviously dwindling, and the feeling that I'm having to carry the load of those who've left is unsettling. This is supposed to be a joyous volunteer site for doing interesting, productive work, but today's reality is it just feels like grueling, agonizing work for no remuneration, with very little joy.
Unfortunately, I feel that Wikipedia is going down the tubes, and I'm just too small of a voice to help avert this downfall. I'm going to work on things that are much more uplifting, where I can make more of a difference, and get more back for my hard work, including joy. Stefen 𝕋owers among the rest! Gab • Gruntwerk 20:12, 6 October 2024 (UTC)