User talk:PPelberg (WMF)/sandbox/Archives/2020-09

Global ban RFC for Nrcprm2026/James Salsman

Nrcprm2026, better known as James Salsman, has an active discussion regarding a possible global ban.--GZWDer (talk) 07:53, 26 September 2020 (UTC)

Wiki of functions naming contest

Please help translate to your language.

Hello. Please help pick a name for the new Wikimedia wiki project. This project will be a wiki where the community can work together on a library of functions. The community can create new functions, read about them, discuss them, and share them. Some of these functions will be used to help create language-independent Wikipedia articles that can be displayed in any language, as part of the Abstract Wikipedia project. But functions will also be usable in many other situations.

There will be two rounds of voting, each followed by legal review of candidates, with voting beginning on 29 September and 27 October. Our goal is to have a final project name selected on 8 December. If you would like to participate, then please learn more and vote now at meta-wiki. Thank you! --Quiddity (WMF)

20:53, 29 September 2020 (UTC)

Global ban RFC for Slowking4

There is a global ban RFC for Slowking4 at m:Requests for comment/Global ban for Slowking4.--GZWDer (talk) 03:30, 30 September 2020 (UTC)

Heads-up about MassMessaging for annual survey

This is a gentle note to mention that I'm posting some messages in a couple of wikis. I apologize if these messages are viewed are disruptive. The intent here is to request users attention about an e-mail they received earlier this month and which may have been marked automatically as spam. The annual survey is an important way for the communities to share their views and concerns with the Foundation. Based on community feedback from the previous years, we’re considering moving away from the three repeated pings historically used. The e-mails we've sent request the consent (opt-in) of contributors so that, moving forward, we can e-mail them instead of sending on-wiki messages. So the plan is to eliminate the annual disruption and rely only on opt-in email recipients. You may read more about the discussion surrounding this survey here.

Should you have any questions or suggestions, please leave me a note.

Many thanks for your understanding. Samuel (WMF) (talk) 17:15, 25 September 2020 (UTC)

I think the message you sent me was deleted long ago: I can't find it, anyway. I'm happy to respond to anything you put on my talk page. Andrew Dalby (talk) 19:01, 25 September 2020 (UTC)

I appreciate Wikipedia and Wikisource. I do think that Wikipedia is no longer an "anyone can edit" place. I was quite annoyed to discover that an article which I compiled about the early 20th century Scottish Bible college principal and currently in-print author David McIntyre (see http://reynoldsbooks.weebly.com/peterreynoldsbookscom-news-9658/david-mcintyre-of-the-bible-training-institute-wikipedia-article) had been deleted by the author of an article about a Canadian hockey player of the same name who may be famous now but will be forgotten pretty soon. OK Rev McIntyre is not particularly famous now, but he influenced a lot of people and was the ministerial colleague and successor of Andrew Bonar who *is* famous - and he is mentioned at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Christian_College. I don't have time to work out how to challenge such practices, and am also disillusioned by the persistent description of Evolution (a theory) as fact - Evolution being a theory involving the gain of information by Natural Selection, as opposed to Natural Selection itself which can be demonstrated but can only be demonstrated to involve at most the loss of information, sometimes only the temporary rearrangement of information. There are powerful people on Wikipedia whose opinions count, regardless of what other people may say. So I hardly ever edit Wikipedia these days, though I've done quite a bit on Wikisource in more recent times. --PeterR2 (talk) 19:20, 25 September 2020 (UTC)

If the emails go to spam, it may be because of poor wording or because Qualtrics.com is perceived as a spammer. Switching to a LimeSurvey instance, which could be configured to send emails from Wikimedia Foundation domains, could help here. Nemo 06:56, 26 September 2020 (UTC)

• @Samuel (WMF): Personally I much prefer stuff onwiki, and wish to see fewer things in my mailbox (grown to hate email) I do hope that an onwiki notification is able to be maintained. I am also a little gobsmacked that people complain about wiki notifications when they are here to edit wikis—that said, people are weird.  — billinghurst sDrewth 23:15, 25 September 2020 (UTC)
• I am a bit astonished by this… "We sent you an e-mail", really? Why not something even less specific like "Notification for you" or "Please respond"? And if you have to link to a diff in the body of the message to avoid spam complaints… perhaps something is wrong here and the message should not be sent at all? I was honestly a bit puzzled to see this originated from the WMF, it seems to be at odds with the communication standards I generally witness from them. And it is just a really bad strategy as far as I can see - if you annoy people about this, at least give them a direct link to the survey in your on-wiki message. If they first have to dig up an email in their spam folder, it is a bad start (see the first reply above). − Pintoch (talk) 06:23, 26 September 2020 (UTC)
  • I suppose the link gets sent by email from Qualtrics.com itself in order to use response tracking (so that each link can only be used once, hopefully by the intended recipient), which is harder if you send a link publicly. WMF's usage of such tracking features is often not clearly specified anywhere, although WMF spends a lot of bytes creating boilerplate pages with a "privacy policy" for each (?) survey. Nemo 06:56, 26 September 2020 (UTC)
• The extremely generic wording of this message is more suitable for phishing than for a legit message about Wikimedia activities. At a minimum, next time please try to follow MassMessage guidelines (such as the usage of a proper signature), otherwise your MassMessage sender rights may be revoked. Thank you, Nemo 06:49, 26 September 2020 (UTC)

  I don't think we've ever revoked anyone's MassMessage rights over using four tildes, even though it results in the bot signing rather than a human. Everyone knows that happens on occasion and is just a harmless mistake. WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:28, 27 September 2020 (UTC)

  I don't think it is worth revoking rights at all if such decisions are simply ignored at the next round… Who cares about what the community thinks, after all? − Pintoch (talk) 12:53, 27 September 2020 (UTC)

  Well, WMF T&S can add any flags they need/want, whatever the community thinks of it. (Well, actually doing it - that is going to be a bit of controversy but that's a different story) — regards, Revi 16:13, 1 October 2020 (UTC)

@Samuel (WMF): maybe forgot that he had left a "heads-up" here, so I've asked him to reply. I could have send an email I suppose :) Andrew Dalby (talk) 16:07, 1 October 2020 (UTC)