Meta:Babel/Archives/2019-11

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WMF appointment of local administrators on Meta-Wiki

Several weeks ago, WMF Trust & Safety specialist JSutherland (WMF) used his WMF Support and Safety userrights to appoint User:MusikAnimal (WMF) to the administrators usergroup on Meta-Wiki, for purposes of "Community Wishlist Survey page maintainance". These actions include page deletions, moves, and the creation of edit filters for tracking purposes. The appointment did not involve any local community processes.

This is the sixth such time that the WMF has unilaterally given a member of their staff administrator userrights here on Meta-Wiki.

Is this acceptable? I don't recall the community ever approving of giving the WMF unrestrained super-bureaucrat rights for things like page deletions unrelated to either Mediawiki development work or the necessary actions that the communities delegated to T&S. While it would be reasonable for the community processes to take into account a contributor's employment at the WMF, I don't think that allowing staff to bypass approval entirely is a good idea. Thoughts on this? --Yair rand (talk) 09:55, 5 November 2019 (UTC)

WMF has always had the ability to apply rights to staff on this wiki. It has been for pages where they primarily manage. To note that the administrator appointed is already an administrator on this wiki in their own rights, and to separate staff based and volunteer based editing is preferred. Has been this way since WMF created separate staff based accounts to manage the accountability aspects, so one could differentiate between the differing roles.  — billinghurst sDrewth 11:36, 5 November 2019 (UTC)
Of the five current staff Meta admin appointees, four are not currently Meta admins in their own right, and two have never been admins here as volunteers. While all of these individuals presumably should have adminship (temporary or permanent), shouldn't the community have a say in it? In the past, we have had staff request adminship via the regular community channels. (See also 1, 2.) I don't see why there should be T&S involvement in the community's local appointment process. --Yair rand (talk) 17:02, 5 November 2019 (UTC)
We would complain when a problem would happen (i.e. a right abuse). As of now, let’s let the staff do their work: they are not paid for waiting community opinion concerning each of their actions. Adminship let only do office actions, it doesn’t affect editorial policy, especially on Meta. A trust question. —Pols12 (talk) 17:53, 5 November 2019 (UTC)
This. If an actual situation of staffers causing "community" issues arises we would want to deal with it - so if a staffer starts blocking users, deleting pages, adding controversial filters, etc - we should hold them to account and escalate with their management as needed - else I'm not really seeing a problem. — xaosflux Talk 18:38, 5 November 2019 (UTC)

Wikiquote CheckUsers

Hello Wikimedians - I do not know if this is the right place but I just want to express that none of Wikiquotes have local CheckUsers, but we have some problem with a sockpuppeteer called WikiLumber with more than 16 socks and harassing another user called WikiLubber. Can somebody help on this? Josephine W. (talk) 00:02, 10 November 2019 (UTC)

Checkuser requests can be made at SRCU (for wikis without local checkusers). It is used for checking suspected socks whose edits are disruptive but do not yet deserve a block. If their behaviors are obviously similar or they are vandalism-only accounts, they can simply be blocked and there is no apparent need to check them IMO. --94rain Talk 00:16, 10 November 2019 (UTC)

Restrict anonymous users from editing pages in the CNBanner namespace

Tracked in Phabricator:
Task T238723 resolved

Hi, I suggest that we restrict editing to CNBanner namespace from anonymous users and allow only autoconfirmed users to edit that namespace. These (Central Notice banners) attracts a lot of bad faith and test edits because of their high visibility on top of the Wikipedia and other projects. Currently there is Wikipedia Asian Month in progress and the central banner is everywhere asking to translate the 2 short messages. In 3 days I've alone deleted 69 pages in CNBanner namespace (created by anonymous users) and reverted over 30 edits (I colledcted here my logs). It's more useful to use admin and patrollers' resources to something more useful than this. If we get consensus we can ask a configuration change in Phabricator. Best regards, Stryn (talk) 18:12, 12 November 2019 (UTC)

Strong support Strong support --Krd 18:29, 12 November 2019 (UTC)
Yes please. —MarcoAurelio (talk) 19:52, 12 November 2019 (UTC)
Holy yeah — regards, Revi 08:08, 13 November 2019 (UTC)
Is this more of a "don't allow" anonymous creation of translations in that space? This may be able to be done with an edit filter. — xaosflux Talk 12:19, 13 November 2019 (UTC)
A filter in the meanwhile to restrict anons on that namespace is indeed simple and effective, but can only work as a temporary workaround. If we want to put permanent restrictions in place I think they're better handled in the Code itself. Note that each enabled filter does spend at least one condition, and we need them, Meta being the home of local and global abuse filters. Moreover, if a filter gets triggered too much, some actions might get automatically disabled, loosing effectivity. That said, I think a filter until this is implemented would be okay. Thanks. —MarcoAurelio (talk) 15:27, 13 November 2019 (UTC)
Will the filter prevent to start editing the page, or only to save the edit? --Krd 17:06, 13 November 2019 (UTC)
@MarcoAurelio: I'm not exactly sure what needs to be stopped here, but the local MediaWiki:Titleblacklist (along with the noedit and autoconfirmed) parameters may be a solution, without consuming filter cycles. — xaosflux Talk 18:42, 13 November 2019 (UTC)
Probably the best idea! --Krd 19:58, 13 November 2019 (UTC)
@Stryn: can you provide a sample list of pages, especially if the list can determine a "pattern" (e.g. "starts with"; "starts with, then contains"; etc?) — xaosflux Talk 21:13, 13 November 2019 (UTC)
I've just made Special:AbuseFilter/4. —MarcoAurelio (talk) 21:20, 13 November 2019 (UTC)
(ec) There was a link to "logs". The current pertinent string is CNBanner:Asian month 2019-text though maybe we just do the namespace.  — billinghurst sDrewth 21:21, 13 November 2019 (UTC)
Done: phab:T238723. So maybe it can be removed from a local title blacklist + abuse filters. Stryn (talk) 11:13, 21 November 2019 (UTC)
Done — xaosflux Talk 00:29, 22 November 2019 (UTC)
This section was archived on a request by: 94rain Talk 02:59, 14 December 2019 (UTC)

Extension used by Special:Contact/

Does anyone know what extension is being used, and where that data ends up stored, by the page Special:Contact/affcomusergroup? T.Shafee(Evo﹠Evo)talk 03:41, 25 November 2019 (UTC)

@Evolution and evolvability: its the ContactPage extension - see code on gerrit and documentation on mediawiki --DannyS712 (talk) 04:02, 25 November 2019 (UTC)
@DannyS712: Thank you! —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Evolution and evolvability (talk) 04:35, 25 November 2019‎ (UTC)
This section was archived on a request by: 94rain Talk 02:59, 14 December 2019 (UTC)

How and where to request activation for WMF projects of the Jmol extension?

as the title suggests, I would be interested in understanding how and where to request activation of the Jmol extension, existing on mediawiki, for wikipedia pages. ---Griot Matteo (talk) 21:22, 18 November 2019 (UTC)

Griot Matteo: Tech issues are handled at Phabricator. Usually, a feature (extension, gadget...) is requested after being discussed on a wiki and being accepted by the community. Esteban16 (talk) 23:12, 18 November 2019 (UTC)
thanks -Griot Matteo (talk) 07:08, 19 November 2019 (UTC)
Also please note that extensions which ain't deployed on any Wikimedia site must first pass mw:Review queue, security review, design review and some other approvals. It's a long and complex process. —MarcoAurelio (talk) 17:32, 19 November 2019 (UTC)

Temporary read-only on 26th November 2019

There is a temporary read-only time scheduled for meta-wiki on 26 November at 06:00 (UTC). You will be able to read but not to edit this wikis for up to 30 minutes. It will probably last much shorter than 30 minutes. This will also affect the centralauth database. This could for example affect changing passwords, logging in to new wikis, changing emails or global renames. For more information, see linked phabricator task. -- Kaartic correct me, if i'm wrong 18:02, 19 November 2019 (UTC)

Thanks for the warning. Best regards, —MarcoAurelio (talk) 19:35, 19 November 2019 (UTC)

Bot to automatically protect highly transcluded templates and modules

A few days ago Meta experienced a wave of vandalism to a lot of highly-transcluded templates. We've experienced the same issue time and time again on English Wikipedia, so since January 2019 we've had a bot that automatically protects templates and modules that have a certain number of transclusions. I am proposing we do the same here on Meta. The bot is configurable, where you can define what thresholds should trigger what levels of protection. There is no "template editor" rights on Meta, so I'm recommending something like:

  • Semi-protect templates with over 500 transclusions
  • Fully-protect templates with over 5,000 transclusions

This is ran once a day. The bot only looks for unprotected templates, and will ignore any templates were recently unprotected or if they are title blacklisted. Additionally, you can exclude templates from being automatically protected (by exact title or regular expression). Examples on English Wikipedia are subpages of w:Template:POTD. The subpage for the current day has about ~500 transclusions which include only low-visibility pages, and come the next day that template has zero transclusions. So there's no point in protecting them. All of this configuration can be done on-wiki, so the community can change it without having to go through the bot maintainer.

Thoughts? If you like the idea, do you have any alternative suggestions for the thresholds? Regards — MusikAnimal talk 19:29, 8 November 2019 (UTC)

I think this is a good idea and absent native MediaWiki support to automatically apply protection/restrictions on highly transcluded NS_TEMPLATE/NS_MODULE pages as locally configured (hi Community Tech :-P ) I support the idea of this bot as long as you're the operator. I don't like the idea of adminbots being operated by non-admins. Thanks. —MarcoAurelio (talk) 19:43, 8 November 2019 (UTC)
I was bold and created task T237814 proposing this to be added to MediaWiki core or a separate extension. Until such a thing happens, if ever, I still support your proposal. I'd even go further and make the Module namespace editable only by Autoconfirmed users, but that can be discussed in a separate thread if needed. —MarcoAurelio (talk) 16:31, 9 November 2019 (UTC)
Can you do a dry run and produce a list? — xaosflux Talk 01:04, 10 November 2019 (UTC)
I'm not sure if it'd be a good idea to list all vulnerable templates on-wiki for vandals to have fun in the meanwhile? Maybe a private Phabricator paste. Best regards, —MarcoAurelio (talk) 19:59, 11 November 2019 (UTC)
@Xaosflux and MarcoAurelio: I added you both as subscribers to phab:P9603. This the log output of the bot (apologies for the lack of sorting). I don't immediately see any pages that need to be excluded. — MusikAnimal talk 04:42, 13 November 2019 (UTC)
I don't know if number of transclusions is a good metric for this. Perhaps a better measurement would be the combined number of pageviews from all transcluding pages. --Yair rand (talk) 23:37, 20 November 2019 (UTC)
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