User talk:Quiddity (WMF)/Archive 1

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Staff list

Are you listed on wmf:Template:Staff_and_contractors? PiRSquared17 (talk) 20:55, 30 September 2013 (UTC)

Not yet, I was planning to do that in a few minutes. :) Quiddity (WMF) (talk) 21:00, 30 September 2013 (UTC)

Hovercards - el-Wikipedia

Hi Quiddity. I am an admin in el-wikipedia. Your message to another admin[1] came into my attention. Hovercards have been discussed last month in the Greek Village Pump (Agora) in September el:Βικιπαίδεια:Αγορά/Αρχείο 2014/Σεπτέμβριος#Μόνιμη ενεργοποίηση των αναδυόμενων, as well as in June el:Βικιπαίδεια:Αγορά/Αρχείο 2014/Ιούνιος 1-15#Αιωρούμενες κάρτες. The outcome of the discussion is that:

  • there is no objection in having the hover cards features pre-selected for all users
  • there is a request for a delay of appearance of the content (indicatively +0,2 sec - others talk about seconds) (apparently some users find the current reaction time too fast)

Regards from el-wikipedia.
Please reply to the el-village pump (el:Βικιπαίδεια:Αγορά). --FocalPoint (talk) 08:46, 5 October 2014 (UTC)


Hi! Great news about Hovercards! I did the translation at User:Quiddity (WMF)/Hovercards trial/el. I have left out the mention of Navigation Popups, we don't have it as gadget in el.wikipedia. I calculated that only 7 active users have it as a script in their common.js and I believe the ones that have it in their global.js are a lot less. Apparently these users will know what to do, so I believe it's better not to bother the rest of the users and readers with something they are not aware of. -Geraki TL 15:24, 2 March 2015 (UTC)

Hi there. Greek Wikipedia community has decided that we want the hovercards active for all users as a default, before autumn of 2014, as FocalPoint states above. Geraki is the only one who opposes to that decision ever since and the only one who has the knowlegde to enable it and he strongly opposes saying that Wikipedia is sometimes designed to be used by completely idiots navigating it and that he stands for users that really use it for deep knowledge. I run Wikipedia School for Wikipedia writers in Athens, Greece and every one of my students has hovercards enabled, they choose to. It is a feature new users always love and in all the years I have been lecturing in favor of Wikipedia I did have an everlasting complaint from Greek readers that they had to chaotically open many windows in order to be able to understand an article and that this was very confusing and let them pretty soon out of focus, before this. We, as a community, have also decided to provide User:P.a.a with Interface Editor rights to have an alternative in all cases Geraki decides he does not like something the community does, but he is the only active bureaucrat, so this is also paused from December 2014. Please help.--ManosHacker (talk) 03:09, 13 March 2015 (UTC)

ManosHacker: Hi there. I think there must be some confusion - Geraki is the person who asked us to enable Hovercards at elwiki, in this email reply! (Perhaps he personally disagrees with it? If so, he's still spending significant time to help the community-consensus be done. :)
Regardless of that, Hovercards is indeed coming to elwiki, and as soon as possible. As the messaging says, that Geraki translated at User:Quiddity (WMF)/Hovercards trial/el, it will be turned on for everyone as soon as the last crucial bits of code are written and reviewed.
Sorry it hasn't been sooner, but every small delay gives time for another bug to be fixed or feature added. :)
Hope that helps! Quiddity (WMF) (talk) 03:57, 13 March 2015 (UTC)
Hi Quiddity (WMF). Just read above what he suggests. We have also decided for an estimate of a 0.2 seconds delay for enabling it, please consider. Regards, ManosHacker (talk) 04:12, 13 March 2015 (UTC)
I read again and again and maybe I am missimg something technical that makes me get the wrong picture. It's been quite long since we had any answer from Geraki on this, despite we ask for it from time to time. Sorry for the inconvenience, since the tool is to be enabled.--ManosHacker (talk) 12:39, 13 March 2015 (UTC)


Please don't bother Quiddity, the above is a response to his block after his previous personal attack. ManosHacker, please don't make collages from out of context discussions such as about the naming of articles about governments to advance your point. :-) Geraki TL 12:58, 13 March 2015 (UTC)

Ontopic and onpoint, if you care for Wikipedia and Geraki impact just read this from the village pump:

There are tenths of examples on Geraki impact, just make sure we have the hovercards enabled for all and we will wait for interface editor rights to solve the rest. I rest here.--ManosHacker (talk) 12:35, 14 March 2015 (UTC)

Notice to el-wikipedia

Please note that in your message, the link to the survey does not work.

See

Κάνουμε μια μικρή τροποποίηση στις Αιωρούμενες Κάρτες κατά τη διάρκεια της δοκιμής ώστε να περιλαμβάνει μια σύνδεση σε μια σύντομη έρευνα

--FocalPoint (talk) 19:00, 12 April 2015 (UTC)

@FocalPoint: Hi, the survey link that I included, is just meant to be a preview for regular editors to glance at in order to know what is coming, it is not the active survey. Perhaps that is confusing, and we should remove the link from the announcement? Please edit freely! I'm going to an airport soon, and will not be able to reply after this, for a day or so.
Also, I meant to mention the Hovercards open/close time-delay, that had previously been discussed. The developers working on Hovercards have requested that the El-wiki not change the site-wide default, because that will alter the data obtained from analytics, and therefor it would make the research either more complicated, or less useful. Instead, they recommend that editors who individually wish to override the defaults, should use the personal user.css config that is described at mw:Extension:Popups#Show.2Fhide_timing. Could you either tell me where to post that message, or perhaps translate it and place it wherever most appropriate?
Thanks again. Quiddity (WMF) (talk) 20:08, 12 April 2015 (UTC)

I understand that you were in a hurry, so you did not realize that the link was not working. I looked at it again, and there was a space missing (I am correcting it here as well as in Agora in el-wiki). I will translate your comment about defaults etc. --FocalPoint (talk) 19:51, 14 April 2015 (UTC)

Done. Kalo apogevma (have a nice afternoon). --FocalPoint (talk) 20:09, 14 April 2015 (UTC)

Community Engagement (Product)/Process ideas

I see that you were the last member of staff to edit this, nearly two months ago. Do you or anyone else plan any further work on this page? If not, perhaps someone could formally close it down and say what, if anything, has been or will be done with the results. Rogol Domedonfors (talk) 21:23, 24 September 2015 (UTC)

Yes, I/we do plan to work on it more. There are just many (so many) other tasks that have (slightly or greatly) more priority or urgency. Thanks for the nudge though. Quiddity (WMF) (talk) 21:31, 24 September 2015 (UTC)
At the present rate of progress it will take you colleagues at least two years to complete. I think it fair to say that before the end of that time the value of the results will have declined to pretty near zero. If you do not have the resources to complete this task before that happens, then I suggest that you bite the bullet, declare it defunct and devote the effort instead to analysing why it did not succeed and developing lessons on how not to keep on repeating the same pattern of ineffectivity. Rogol Domedonfors (talk) 21:40, 24 September 2015 (UTC)

Post moves

Thanks for cleaning after Flow bugs, but I'm not interested in having my messages moved to Flow posts. Please instead move it to a wikitext page. Nemo 20:19, 5 November 2015 (UTC)

I've changed the note, into a pointer to your other comment. Hope that works. Quiddity (WMF) (talk) 20:50, 5 November 2015 (UTC)

Zatul zara Zaharzara (talk) 09:07, 10 February 2018 (UTC)

Don't delete redirects

Re mw:Talk:WMF Product Development Process. Nemo 20:23, 5 November 2015 (UTC)

Fixed, thanks, sorry. Quiddity (WMF) (talk) 20:42, 5 November 2015 (UTC)
Thanks! Nemo 08:37, 7 November 2015 (UTC)

Link problem!

Hey, there!

I finished doing the translation, but there's a wrong link in the first page

https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/2016_Strategy/Community_consultation/es

This one: Ir al área temática 1: "Alcance"... goes to https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/2016_Strategy/Reach (the english version).

All the other pages are correctly linked.

This one: Ir al área siguiente: "Comunidades"... goes right to https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/2016_Strategy/Communities/es (<--here is the language) as the next one (https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/2016_Strategy/Knowledge/es) also does.

But i can't seem to edit any link. I'll appreciate if you might fix it.

Thank you in advance!

--Dportak (talk) 01:39, 3 February 2016 (UTC)

@Dportak: I think this edit should have fixed it. Please let me know if it doesn't. (You might need to bypass your browser cache). Thanks :-) Quiddity (WMF) (talk) 18:46, 3 February 2016 (UTC)

It is fixed! Thank you... --Dportak (talk) 21:12, 4 February 2016 (UTC)

Hey! Another issue... This page https://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?action=edit&preload=Template:StrategyButton2016/preload/Reach/es&editintro=Template:StrategyButton2016/editintro/Reach/es&summary=Posting+my+thoughts+on+the+strategic+question&preloadparams%5b%5d=REVISIONUSER&section=new&preloadtitle=Dportak&title=Talk:2016_Strategy/Reach

leads to an automatic translation, but i can't seem to be able to edit it to make it fit mine.

Thanks! --Dportak (talk) 21:25, 4 February 2016 (UTC)

@Dportak: Hi, do you mean the content above the edit-window? (That is coming from Template:StrategyButton2016/editintro/Reach/es). If not, (and if you can't find it with the link below), please tell me which text you mean (just copy&paste the first few words, so that I can identify which part of the screen you mean!)
The full list of all the parts, with links, is at 2016 Strategy/Translations, in case that helps. :) Quiddity (WMF) (talk) 01:16, 5 February 2016 (UTC)

Hi

Hi. I've reverted this edit on your page as it came from an anon. contributor which also broke your page. If it was you, my apologies, but don't forget to log-in next time :-) Best regards, —MarcoAurelio 10:38, 7 June 2016 (UTC)

That was not me (I was fast asleep), thanks for the revert. :) Quiddity (WMF) (talk) 15:50, 7 June 2016 (UTC)

Mbox to Ambox

Hello. I don't understand the reasoning behind changing the style of some templates that used mbox to ambox. Those templates can be used on other namespaces apart from the main namespace, and mbox has autonamespace detection. Best regards, —MarcoAurelio 13:23, 13 August 2016 (UTC)

Hmm, you're right, I was mistaken or confused (A few templates were using custom style overrides, which is possibly what confused me). Thanks for pointing that out, I will revert/fix. Quiddity (WMF) (talk) 21:50, 13 August 2016 (UTC)

Overview #2 of updates on Wikimedia movement strategy process

Note: Apologies for cross-posting and sending in English. This message is available for translation on Meta-Wiki.

As we mentioned last month, the Wikimedia movement is beginning a movement-wide strategy discussion, a process which will run throughout 2017. This movement strategy discussion will focus on the future of our movement: where we want to go together, and what we want to achieve.

Regular updates are being sent to the Wikimedia-l mailing list, and posted on Meta-Wiki. Each month, we are sending overviews of these updates to this page as well. Sign up to receive future announcements and monthly highlights of strategy updates on your user talk page.

Here is a overview of the updates that have been sent since our message last month:

More information about the movement strategy is available on the Meta-Wiki 2017 Wikimedia movement strategy portal.

Posted by MediaWiki message delivery on behalf of the Wikimedia Foundation, 19:43, 9 March 2017 (UTC) • Please help translate to your language • Get help

We invite you to join the movement strategy conversation (now through April 15)

This message, "We invite you to join the movement strategy conversation (now through April 15)", was sent through multiple channels by Gregory Varnum on 15 and 16 of March 2017 to village pumps, affiliate talk pages, movement mailing lists, and MassMessage groups. A similar message was sent by Nicole Ebber to organized groups and their mailing lists on 15 of March 2017. This version of the message is available for translation and documentation purposes

Dear Wikimedians/Wikipedians:

Today we are starting a broad discussion to define Wikimedia's future role in the world and develop a collaborative strategy to fulfill that role. You are warmly invited to join the conversation.

There are many ways to participate, by joining an existing conversation or starting your own:

Track A (organized groups): Discussions with your affiliate, committee or other organized group (these are groups that support the Wikimedia movement).

Track B (individual contributors): On Meta or your local language or project wiki.

This is the first of three conversations, and it will run between now and April 15. The purpose of cycle 1 is to discuss the future of the movement and generate major themes around potential directions. What do we want to build or achieve together over the next 15 years?

We welcome you, as we create this conversation together, and look forward to broad and diverse participation from all parts of our movement.

Sincerely,

Nicole Ebber (Track A Lead), Jaime Anstee (Track B Lead), & the engagement support teams

05:02, 18 March 2017 (UTC)

Flow bot

Dear Quiddity,

while going through the nl.wikipedia list of bot users for an activity review, I came upon the following Flow related bot account: [2]. The name translates to "Userpagemanagement for flow". I noticed this account because it does not have a userpage, as is required by local and global bot policy. On a second check I found it is a localised account, while all accounts should be global. Finally, I could not find any logs that indicate how this account got its userrights. As such I came to you, as a flow community liaison. I hope you can shine some light on the matter.

I would like to know if the account is functioning and needed. If yes, please make it into a global account and create a user page. If it is not needed, I would like to remove its userrights.

Please note there is also another flow related bot account on nl.wikipedia [3]. There are no issues with this account.

I look forward to your response.

Sincerely, Taketa (talk) 08:19, 20 March 2017 (UTC)

@Taketa: (Replying since Taketa also asked on IRC to see if other team members were available): These are internal accounts handled by the software. Previously, the name of this account was localized (into Dutch and other languages). "Overlegpaginabeheer voor Flow" should be the username for that. Now, the name is always in English, so it is the same cross-wiki ("Flow talk page manager"). So you can remove the rights from "Overlegpaginabeheer voor Flow" if you want. Mattflaschen-WMF (talk) 13:59, 20 March 2017 (UTC)

Join the next cycle of Wikimedia movement strategy discussions (underway until June 12)

Message is available for translation on Meta-Wiki

The Wikimedia movement strategy core team and working groups have completed reviewing the more than 1800 thematic statements we received from the first discussion. They have identified 5 themes that were consistent across all the conversations - each with their own set of sub-themes. These are not the final themes, just an initial working draft of the core concepts.

You are invited to join the online and offline discussions taking place on these 5 themes. This round of discussions will take place between now and June 12th. You can discuss as many as you like; we ask you to participate in the ones that are most (or least) important to you.

Here are the five themes, each has a page on Meta-Wiki with more information about the theme and how to participate in that theme's discussion:

On the movement strategy portal on Meta-Wiki, you can find more information about each of these themes, their discussions, and how to participate.

Posted by MediaWiki message delivery on behalf of the Wikimedia Foundation • Please help translate to your language • Get help

19:30, 16 May 2017 (UTC)

Translation of Turkish Strategy comments

Hi Quiddity! i did make the translations of Turkish comments at Survey collectors page. Let me share that it's clear that 132-133-134-135-136 were written by the same person and actually every statement is not one summary statement but rather they were thought like the parts of a text. Later, the user also shared the same text within our email group for strategy discussion and i had put written one summary statement here: Sources page, line 2 So maybe you may want to put only one statement into consideration--Basak (talk) 22:33, 13 June 2017 (UTC)
@Basak: Perfect, thank you for that work, and the context. :) Quiddity (WMF) (talk) 22:51, 13 June 2017 (UTC)

Do we change double byte punctuation to comma in graphs?

Quiddity, hi, your edits including this looks odd to me. I have reverted one you edited 3 hours back (Cycle 1?), then found it needs to be clarified before it gets too complicated. We usually don't apply comma in ja sentences, with the exceptions of accademic theses. Any standards/kind of rules I have missed? ----Omotecho (talk) 19:46, 10 July 2017 (UTC)

(Note for onlookers: We posted at each other's talkpages at the same time: further details at User talk:Omotecho#Commas for graph support) --Quiddity (WMF) (talk) 20:34, 10 July 2017 (UTC)

About Cycle 3, Week 2 Challenge

I told Szymon that local wikis, including English Wikipedia, may be unaware about Challenge #2, oral knowledge. What to do about it? --George Ho (talk) 00:47, 11 July 2017 (UTC)

Thanks for the note. Different communities and groups are progressing/updating at different speeds. However I'll send out some reminder notices, to previous Enwiki participants, and other group communication channels, later today. Quiddity (WMF) (talk) 17:39, 11 July 2017 (UTC)

Indonesia Salon Meeting

Hello Quiddity, could you please add this information into this page. I'm not sure if I'm allowed or not to add the information. Terima kasih (thank you) --Beeyan (talk) 06:47, 2 August 2017 (UTC)

@Beeyan: Done! Thanks. (Yes you could have added it, but the translate-markup makes things complicated, so I'm happy to help. Plus it gave me a reminder to sort the list chronologically. :) Quiddity (WMF) (talk) 19:19, 2 August 2017 (UTC)

Update regarding Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons tutorial videos

Hello,

I regret to inform you that the series of motivational and educational videos project, which had been planned introduce Wikipedia and some of its sister projects to new contributors, is being discontinued.

There are multiple factors that have led to this decision. The initial budget and time estimates were far too small for a project of this scale and complexity. Also, my simultaneous involvement in Cascadia Wikimedians User Group was problematic due to the shortage of human resources for the user group, which resulted in my spending far more time trying to help the user group than I had planned, so my time and attention were diverted from this video project to assisting the user group.

You can find more information in the final report for the grant.

I regret that this project did not fulfill the hopes that many of us had for it, and I hope that in the future someone with the necessary resources will choose to resume work on it or a similar project. If you are interested in working on this or a similar project then please contact the WMF grants team.

On a personal note, I am retiring from the Wikimedia community. Perhaps I will return someday.

Regards,

--Pine✉ 23:20, 30 August 2017 (UTC)

Series director and screenwriter

Structured Commons newsletter, October 25, 2017

Welcome to the newsletter for Structured Data on Wikimedia Commons! You can update your subscription to the newsletter. Do inform others who you think will want to be involved in the project!

Community updates
Things to do / input and feedback requests
Presentations / Press / Events
Audience at Structured Commons design discussion, Wikimania 2017
Team updates
The Structured Commons team at Wikimania 2017

Two new people have been hired for the Structured Data on Commons team. We are now complete! :-)

  • Ramsey Isler is the new Product Manager of the Multimedia team.
  • Pamela Drouin was hired as User Interface Designer. She works at the Multimedia team as well, and her work will focus on the Structured Commons project.
Partners and allies
  • We are still welcoming (more) staff from GLAMs (Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums) to become part of our long-term focus group (phabricator task T174134). You will be kept in the loop of the project, and receive regular small surveys and requests for feedback. Get in touch with Sandra if you're interested - your input in helping to shape this project is highly valued!
Research

Design research is ongoing.

  • Jonathan Morgan and Niharika Ved have held interviews with various GLAM staff about their batch upload workflows and will finish and report on these in this quarter. (phabricator task T159495)
  • At this moment, there is also an online survey for GLAM staff, Wikimedians in Residence, and GLAM volunteers who upload media collections to Wikimedia Commons. The results will be used to understand how we can improve this experience. (phabricator task T175188)
  • Upcoming: interviews with Wikimedia volunteers who curate media on Commons (including tool developers), talking about activities and workflows. (phabricator task T175185)
Development

In Autumn 2017, the Structured Commons development team works on the following major tasks (see also the quarterly goals for the team):

  • Getting Multi-Content Revisions sufficiently ready, so that the Multimedia and Search Platform teams can start using it to test and prototype things.
  • Determine metrics and metrics baseline for Commons (phabricator task T174519).
  • The multimedia team at WMF is gaining expertise in Wikibase, and unblocking further development for Structured Commons, by completing the MediaInfo extension for Wikibase.
Stay up to date!

Warmly, your community liaison, SandraF (WMF) (talk)

Message sent by MediaWiki message delivery - 14:26, 25 October 2017 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Notifications

Hi Quiddity (WMF)/Archive 1, I use Wikipedia:Notifications extensively, but am unable to post questions to the en-wiki (I am indef blocked). Where can editors who cannot/would not post questions on the en-wiki ask questions/ provide feedback about this tool? Thanks in advance, Ottawahitech (talk) 14:09, 12 December 2017 (UTC) Please ping me

@Ottawahitech: The main page is at mw:Notifications on mediawiki-wiki. Quiddity (WMF) (talk) 16:31, 12 December 2017 (UTC)

Structured Commons newsletter, December 13, 2017

Welcome to the newsletter for Structured Data on Wikimedia Commons! You can update your subscription to the newsletter. Do inform others who you think will want to be involved in the project!

Community updates
Things to do / input and feedback requests
A multi-licensed image on Wikimedia Commons, with a custom {{EthnologyItemMHNT}} Information template. Do you also know media files on Commons that will be interesting or challenging to model with structured data? Add them to the Interesting Commons files page.
Presentations / Press / Events
Presentation about Structured Commons and Wikidata, at WikimediaCon in Berlin.
  • Sandra presented the plans for Structured Commons during WikidataCon in Berlin, on October 29. The presentation focused on collaboration between the Wikidata and Commons communities. You can see the full video here.
Partners and allies
  • We are still welcoming (more) staff from GLAMs (Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums) to become part of our long-term focus group (phabricator task T174134). You will be kept in the loop of the project, and receive regular small surveys and requests for feedback. Get in touch with Sandra if you're interested - your input in helping to shape this project is highly valued!
Research
  • Research findings from interviews and surveys of GLAM project participants are being published to the research page. Check back over the next few weeks as additional details (notes, quotes, charts, blog posts, and slide decks) will be added to or linked from that page.
Development
  • The Structured Commons team has written and submitted a report about the first nine months of work on the project to its funders, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. The 53-page report, published on November 1, is available on Wikimedia Commons.
  • The team has started working on designs for changes to the upload wizard (T182019).
  • We started preliminary work to prototype changes for file info pages.
  • Work on the MediaInfo extension is ongoing (T176012).
  • The team is continuing its work on baseline metrics on Commons, in order to be able to measure the effectiveness of structured data on Commons. (T174519)
  • Upcoming: in the first half of 2018, the first prototypes and design sketches for file pages, the UploadWizard, and for search will be published for discussion and feedback!
Stay up to date!

Warmly, your community liaison, SandraF (WMF) (talk)

Message sent by MediaWiki message delivery - 16:32, 13 December 2017 (UTC)

Join us tomorrow for the last event in the series Women in the Wikimedia movement: Women in technical spaces!

Hi! Thank you for signing up to attend one or multiple virtual events in the conversations series Women in the Wikimedia movement [1]. Your participation has made the events and conversation really interesting and good so far.

In about 12 hours, we will be hosting the last event of the series, Women in technical spaces. The virtual event will take place on BlueJeans, and will be broadcasted on YouTube. Our presenters will be Josephine Lim, who will be presenting about her work contributing to the Wikimedia Commons Android app, and Ciell and Ecritures, who will be sharing their experience creating an all-women and non-binary people hackathon in the Netherlands. After their presentations, there will be some time for conversations. I want to encourage everyone to participate! To this end, please join us on the BlueJeans link if you are able.

I look forward to seeing you tomorrow! María Cruz


MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 02:42, 21 March 2018 (UTC)

References
  1. ↑ If you would like to unsubscribe from further updates about this series, please go to the sign up page, and delete your name

Structured Data on Commons Newsletter - Spring 2018

Welcome to the newsletter for Structured Data on Wikimedia Commons! You can update your subscription to the newsletter and contribute to the next issue. Do inform others who you think will want to be involved in the project!

Community updates
  • Our dedicated IRC channel: wikimedia-commons-sd webchat
  • Several Commons community members are working on ways to integrate Wikidata in Wikimedia Commons. While this is not full-fledged structured data yet, this work helps to prepare for future conversion of data, and helps to understand how Wikidata and Commons can work better together.
Things to do / input and feedback requests
Discussions held
Events
Partners and allies
  • We are still welcoming (more) staff from GLAMs (Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums) to become part of our long-term focus group (phabricator task T174134). You will be kept in the loop of the project, and receive regular small surveys and requests for feedback. Get in touch with Sandra if you're interested - your input in helping to shape this project is highly valued!
Research
Development
  • Prototypes will be available for Multilingual Captions soon.
Stay up to date!

-- Keegan (WMF) (talk)

Message sent by MediaWiki message delivery - 19:48, 3 April 2018 (UTC)

Talkback

You have new messages
You have new messages
Hello, Quiddity (WMF). You have new messages at Xiplus's talk page.
You can remove this notice at any time by removing the {{Talkback}} or {{Tb}} template.

Structured Data on Commons Newsletter - Summer 2018

Welcome to the newsletter for Structured Data on Wikimedia Commons! You can update your subscription to the newsletter and contribute to the next issue. Do inform others who you think will want to be involved in the project!

Community updates
  • Our dedicated IRC channel: wikimedia-commons-sd webchat
  • Since our last newsletter, the Structured Data team has moved into designing and building prototypes for various features. The use of multilingual captions in the UploadWizard and on the file page has been researched, designed, discussed, and built out for use. Behind the scenes, back-end work on search is taking place and designs are being drawn up for the front-end. There will soon be specifications published for the use of the first Wikidata property on Commons, "Depicts," and a prototype is to be released to go along with that.
Things to do / input and feedback requests
Discussions held
Wikimania 2018
Partners and allies
Research

Two research projects about Wikimedia Commons are currently ongoing, or in the process of being finished:

  1. Research:Curation workflows on Wikimedia Commons—a project that seeks to understand the current workflows of Commons contributors who curate media (categorize it, delete it, link to it from other projects, etc.).
  2. Research:Technical needs of external re-users of Commons media—soliciting feedback from individuals and organizations that re-use Commons content outside of Wikimedia projects, in order to understand their current painpoints and unmet needs.
Development
  • Prototypes will be available for Depicts soon.
Stay up to date!

-- Keegan (WMF) (talk)

Message sent by MediaWiki message delivery - 21:07, 6 July 2018 (UTC)

Structured Data Newsletter - Research link fix

Greetings,

The newsletter omitted two interwiki prefixes, breaking the links on non-meta wikis as you might see above. Here are the correct links:

  1. m:Research:Curation workflows on Wikimedia Commons—a project that seeks to understand the current workflows of Commons contributors who curate media (categorize it, delete it, link to it from other projects, etc.).
  2. m:Research:Technical needs of external re-users of Commons media—soliciting feedback from individuals and organizations that re-use Commons content outside of Wikimedia projects, in order to understand their current painpoints and unmet needs.

My apologies, I hope you find the corrected links helpful.

- Keegan (WMF) (talk) 21:21, 6 July 2018 (UTC)

The Community Wishlist Survey

Hi,

You get this message because you’ve previously participated in the Community Wishlist Survey. I just wanted to let you know that this year’s survey is now open for proposals. You can suggest technical changes until 11 November: Community Wishlist Survey 2019.

You can vote from November 16 to November 30. To keep the number of messages at a reasonable level, I won’t send out a separate reminder to you about that. /Johan (WMF) 11:24, 30 October 2018 (UTC)

Structured Data on Commons Newsletter - Fall 2018 edition

Welcome to the newsletter for Structured Data on Wikimedia Commons! You can update your subscription to the newsletter. Do inform others who you think will want to be involved in the project!

Community updates
Things to do / input and feedback requests

Current:

Since the last newsletter:

Presentations / Press / Events
Partners and allies
  • The info portal on Structured Commons now includes a section on GLAM (Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums).
  • We are currently planning the first GLAM pilot projects that will use structured data on Wikimedia Commons. One project has already started: the Swedish Heritage Board researches and develops a prototype tool to provide improved metadata (translations, data additions...) from Wikimedia Commons back to the source institution. Read the project brief.
  • The documentation for batch uploads of files to Wikimedia Commons will be improved in 2019, as part of preparing for Structured Data on Wikimedia Commons. To prepare, the GLAM team at the Wikimedia Foundation wants to understand better which types of documentation you already use, and how you like to learn new GLAM-Wiki skills and knowledge. Fill in a short survey to provide input!
Stay up to date!

-- Keegan (WMF) (talk)

Message sent by MediaWiki message delivery - 17:58, 7 December 2018 (UTC)

Attracting your attention to a comment on Wikidata Project Chat

Please see here. Pdehaye (talk) 09:37, 3 January 2019 (UTC)

Captions in January

The previous message from today says captions will be released in November in the text. January is the correct month. My apologies for the potential confusion. -- Keegan (WMF) (talk) 20:43, 7 January 2019 (UTC)

Structured Data - file captions coming this week (January 2019)

My apologies if this is a duplicate message for you, it is being sent to multiple lists which you may be signed up for.

Hi all, following up on last month's announcement...

Multilingual file captions will be released this week, on either Wednesday, 9 January or Thursday, 10 January 2019. Captions are a feature to add short, translatable descriptions to files. Here's some links you might want to look follow before the release, if you haven't already:

  1. Read over the help page for using captions - I wrote the page on mediawiki.org because captions are available for any MediaWiki user, feel free to host/modify a copy of the page here on Commons.
  2. Test out using captions on Beta Commons.
  3. Leave feedback about the test on the captions test talk page, if you have anything you'd like to say prior to release.

Additionally, there will be an IRC office hour on Thursday, 10 January with the Structured Data team to talk about file captions, as well as anything else the community may be interested in. Date/time conversion, as well as a link to join, are on Meta.

Thanks for your time, I look forward to seeing those who can make it to the IRC office hour on Thursday. -- Keegan (WMF) (talk) 21:09, 7 January 2019 (UTC)

Video tutorial regarding Wikipedia referencing with VisualEditor

Hi, I have received a grant from WMF to support production of a video tutorial regarding creating references with VisualEditor. I anticipate that the video will be published in March 2019. If this tutorial is well received then I may produce additional tutorials in the future for English Wikipedia and possibly other projects such as Commons and Spanish Wikipedia. If you would like to receive notifications on your talk page when drafts and finished products from this project are ready for review, then please sign up for the project newsletter.
Regards, --Pine✉ 00:32, 28 February 2019 (UTC)

Documentation

Hi.

So, your user page says that you deal with "documentation". Is that just technical documentation (of software and such), or are you also involved in documenting things like WMF internal processes and structure? If not, do you know if there is anyone who deals with documenting those things? --Yair rand (talk) 21:21, 26 June 2019 (UTC)

@Yair rand: Hi, it's been a while! I currently deal with a little bit of everything, but I might know if/who is more formally responsible for specific aspects. What in particular are you interested in? (This might be a good time to mention the 4 problems of documentation!) Quiddity (WMF) (talk) 00:51, 27 June 2019 (UTC)
(Accurate. Too accurate. :)
So, I've been trying to look into what work could be done toward documenting some stuff about the WMF on Meta, and it's looking to be a bit difficult without any source material other than the scraps of information that come out here and there. (The WMF is occasionally frustratingly opaque.) I was wondering if the WMF itself might have a pile of information somewhere documenting who does what inside the organization (especially regarding those who interact directly with the community; there's a recurring problem of someone leaving the WMF and there being no way to find out who handles things now), how various processes work (I proposed moving the current page "Fundraising" so the space could be converted to an actual general description of Wikimedia's fundraising, but it occurs to me that I don't have the information to fill it with), and so on.
Perhaps there's some information on one of the WMF's internal wikis, which could be imported here? Or maybe there's some giant PDF somewhere that could be uploaded, which would then allow users to copy over some information? If the WMF has a lot of stuff within Meta's scope already documented internally, it would be useful to know about and, if possible, work with.
Looking through a lot of the gaps, the thought keeps popping into my head that we should have a template saying something like "The precise [responsibilities of this team/workings of this process/structure of this group] are unknown. If you have any further information which may hint at the answer, please post it on the talk page", which would, of course, be extremely silly :) . It probably would be possible to get a reasonable picture of some things just by raw investigative work, but we'd ideally avoid speculation, and I don't even know if anyone's ever tried just asking people in the WMF for some data, in case it's just sitting there. There might be an outline of team responsibilities somewhere, or explanations of decision-making processes, internal histories, or even a list of job descriptions.
Sounds worth at least trying. --Yair rand (talk) 03:00, 28 June 2019 (UTC)
@Yair rand: These are really good questions, some of which I've been wrestling with for years, and I have been thinking about it more over the last couple of days since you asked. There aren't any simple answers (otherwise it would've been resolved already!). I'll give a more substantial answer or ideas later, this is just a ping for "I'm still thinking" for now. :) Quiddity (WMF) (talk) 20:42, 2 July 2019 (UTC)

Structured Data - blogs posted in Wikimedia Space

There are two separate blog entries for Structured Data on Commons posted to Wikimedia Space that are of interest:

  • Working with Structured Data on Commons: A Status Report, by Lucas Werkmeister, discusses some ways that editors can work with structured data. Topics include tools that have been written or modified for structured data, in addition to future plans for tools and querying services.
  • Structured Data on Commons - A Blog Series, written by me, is a five-part posting that covers the basics of the software and features that were built to make structured data happen. The series is meant to be friendly to those who may have some knowledge of Commons, but may not know much about the structured data project.
I hope these are informative and useful, comments and questions are welcome. All the blogs offer a comment feature, and you can log in with your Wikimedia account using oAuth. I look forward to seeing some posts over there. -- Keegan (WMF) (talk) 21:33, 23 September 2019 (UTC)

Mediawiki

Is this message still in use or can it be deleted from the wiki? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki:Watcheditlist

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki:Wlhideshowown https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki:Wlhideshowbots https://translatewiki.net/wiki/MediaWiki:Wlhideshowown --Sunpriat (talk) 12:48, 6 October 2019 (UTC)

This message are different on the wiki. Is it reasonable to make them so right through the site? https://translatewiki.net/wiki/MediaWiki:Wikimedia-copyright/en https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki:Wikimedia-copyright --Sunpriat (talk) 12:48, 6 October 2019 (UTC)

https://translatewiki.net/wiki/MediaWiki:Wikibase-repo-name/ru Used in several messages. Can plural be added to it? --Sunpriat (talk) 12:48, 6 October 2019 (UTC)

@Sunpriat:
Hope that helps. Quiddity (WMF) (talk) 20:56, 6 October 2019 (UTC)
@Sunpriat: Oh! I checked again, and the currently used message is (confusingly) "Wlshowhideown" not "Wlhideshowown" - screenshot, so that one is solved, and yes I think the old one could be deleted.
I think that resolves all the questions in this thread. Quiddity (WMF) (talk) 17:01, 7 October 2019 (UTC)

Translation update timing

@Quiddity (WMF): Is it normal that a translation [4] does not come to ruwiki even after a week? Is it due to undo that there may be delays? Or what is the delivery time (days? weeks? month?) for translations should be considered as normal? --Sunpriat (talk) 03:53, 23 November 2019 (UTC)

@Sunpriat: I believe this is because there was no new version of MediaWiki deployed to the servers for the last 2 weeks (per Tech/News/2019/47 and previous). Those translations should roll out this week (Thursday to Wikipedias). Quiddity (WMF) (talk) 20:45, 25 November 2019 (UTC)
@Sunpriat: Correction: There are more deployment delays due to US Thanksgiving holiday long-weekend. So those translations should appear on Wikipedias on December 6 (per). Quiddity (WMF) (talk) 21:21, 25 November 2019 (UTC)

Statistics

Can we somehow get a comment [5] from the WMF why the data [6] for 60% of editors are hidden for the ruwiki? What risk cases does the WMF see in data how many participants were from Russia? Or at least rename the "blacklist"[7] to the editors’s protection list. This disappoints and worsens the amosphere of the project when the WMF "blacklistes" your country. --Sunpriat (talk) 16:19, 7 December 2019 (UTC)

@Sunpriat: While we try to be as transparent as possible, we must also account for the privacy of community members. In this instance, releasing this data set makes it easier for a potentially malicious actor to identify the country from which an editor posts. For data releases, we conduct a risk analysis that (at a high level) weighs the likelihood of harm * the impact of harm, reduced by our ability to mitigate the harm. Using risk to journalists as a proxy for risk to editors, we decided that one of our mitigations would be to suppress data for countries that have the highest risk of harm for our editors. We do not have the resources to assess the safety of journalists around the world, so we depend on third party surveys. The organizations we rely on identified Russia and 29 other countries as potentially very dangerous for journalists[1].
We understand that we cannot control all of the risk factors (e.g. nation states generally have control over their Internet infrastructure and can monitor traffic), but that does not mean we want to introduce additional risk/exposure without any additional consideration. For example, nation states are not the only potentially malicious actors we are considering. But we also understand concerns from community members regarding their privacy (see, e.g., this comment regarding the release of this particular data set).
Regarding use of the term "blacklist" - we used that term because it's very common in the IT field and is used elsewhere in wiki projects, but we understand your concerns. If you think it's appropriate, we can discuss switching to the term "Protection List" which might alleviate your concern and perhaps be more descriptive. --JFishback (WMF) (talk) 19:48, 12 December 2019 (UTC)
@JFishback (WMF): Thanks for the comment. I translated the message for the topic in that discussion. Regarding the blacklist, the Blacklist is synonymous with ban and sanctions, plus next to the countries in the title it is now close to the sanctions lists in the politics about which there are too many news, therefore the bold "Blacklist of countries" on the wikitech.wikimedia.org does not reflect good intentions, therefore I would suggest point to the wikimedia own data instead of nation states by specifying the title in the text as "Blacklist of countries data". --Sunpriat (talk) 23:24, 21 December 2019 (UTC)
Thank you for the feedback @Sunpriat:. I have updated the Wikitech page to reflect a change to "Protection List" which hopefully alleviates the concerns while still providing useful information. I hope this resolves the issue to the extent possible. --JFishback (WMF) (talk) 23:36, 27 December 2019 (UTC)

update?

Hi - did you have a chance to check on question from User talk:Katherine (WMF)? — xaosflux Talk 21:08, 15 January 2020 (UTC)

@Xaosflux: Hi, yes, and I'd also been looped-in via the other mailing list you contacted! I'm writing a reply to them now. I'll email you, too. Quiddity (WMF) (talk) 21:58, 15 January 2020 (UTC)
Thank you, replied and sent a contact request to that chapter. — xaosflux Talk 00:36, 16 January 2020 (UTC)

Comments at Talk:Fundraising

Hello Quiddity, I heard that you are on temporary loan to Fundraising. Comments at Talk:Fundraising have been going unanswered. Would you please read and respond to the comments there? Thanks, ↠Pine (✉) 06:16, 22 April 2020 (UTC)

FTR: I've noted and apologized to Pine via email that I've not forgotten about this, just delayed. Quiddity (WMF) (talk) 22:24, 6 May 2020 (UTC)

Large bot-generated lists

On Wikipedia, we can make bots that check articles (i.e. by catscan). Bots make a formated list and write it to the page not in the main namespace.

  • the result can be long, so it approaches one of the technical limits for page. For example, a page can be so large that it cannot be included in another page.
  • the result can be updated once a day, once every few days, or once a week.
  • this can be done for many wiki-projects or for monitoring the status of a specific list of articles

Only current data is needed and previous records are not needed. Often several lists are made on separate pages and they are included on one page - only the current lists are visible (similar to the special page of recent changes), and and the history does not need the history of those separate pages.

Hence a couple of questions:

  • How does the Wikimedia Foundation look at the fact that its resources are wasted not for articles, but to save unnecessary bot generated data? For example, a new version of an article is generated every day that is close to the maximum size or several small lists, and all this is done for several wiki projects every day forever. Or maybe we can freely create versions for hundreds of lists every day without hesitation? (on the one hand it's close to the “pillars of wikipedia” and to “what wikipedia is not”, on the other hand, if there was an explicitly declared permission or confidence that this does not create an unnecessary load, then we would deploy such lists more massively (more lists per wikiproject, more often updates, more statistics) and for more wiki-projects with fewer participants.)
  • Is it possible not to save old versions somehow? If this is beneficial for server maintenance and convenient for editors - can there be a namespace where old versions will not be saved or, for example, will be only the last 10, or it would be possible to switch the page to a new mode (Special:ChangeContentModel), or may not save marked pages to dumps - we can re-generate them, or, if it is profitable to maintain, can we make a list of pages / versions that can be permanently deleted after reaching community agreement on them, lists can even be written to another wiki (for example, data in a test wiki can be deleted) if they can be included in Wikipedia pages (non-main space), like files/datasets included from the commons-wiki.
  • Are there other ways to make it easier for servers to work with bot-lists? Are there bottlenecks (perhaps in the long run?) for servers when working with bot-lists?
  • Are there any guidelines, instructions, wishes from the WMF regarding such renewable bot-generated lists?
  • Can it somehow help, that sometimes old versions will be deleted for these pages? (with the current tool, versions are not deleted, but hidden)
  • Can creating and updating such lists in a separate (new?) namespace somehow help?

--Sunpriat (talk) 14:25, 6 May 2020 (UTC)

@Sunpriat: Hi. These are interesting questions, but best directed towards the technical community. I suggest asking at Tech or at mw:Project:Support_desk. It would also help to include a few examples - I can guess you might mean pages like w:en:User:West.andrew.g/Popular_medical_pages and w:en:Wikipedia:WikiProject Medicine/Tools but perhaps there are better or more diverse examples that you can share when you ask this again. I hope that helps. Quiddity (WMF) (talk) 22:41, 6 May 2020 (UTC)
Copied to Tech. --Sunpriat (talk) 06:31, 7 May 2020 (UTC)

Office hours

Hello, I've added an item to IRC office hours but I find it alarming that for so many months nobody bothered to update this page. I suspect that institutional memory went lost with new WMF employees, or whoever was responsible for reminding people to update the page has switched to a new role; do you think this can be remedied? Nemo 14:25, 2 June 2020 (UTC)

@Nemo bis: Sorry for the late reply. FWIW I have been thinking about this. I think part of the problem is that the phrase "office hours" is often used in different ways (and more so in recent years), and it doesn't always refer to "1 hour of IRC discussion" any more. I'm not sure of the best way to resolve it long-term (whether expanding the scope and changing the title of the existing "IRC office hours" page; or making a new page to collect the meeting-notes that are taken in other formats/locations; or something else). But thanks for your fix there in June, and for the nudge to me to think about it (which I'll continue to do). Quiddity (WMF) (talk) 18:07, 7 July 2020 (UTC)
The term "office hours" has always sounded weird to my ears of non-native English speaker, but it does have some understandable meaning: the persons running it open the window of their "shop" or counter for a conversation without appointment, or they set up a booth in the open street à la Lucy. It does imply that some participants are the "office" and others asking questions; this can be perceived either as negative (being elitist vs. proletariat begging) or positive (being democratic, putting yourself at the service of "strangers" and whatever comes up).
It's probably possible to come up with a better and more encompassing term but I don't know what. Nemo 10:28, 13 July 2020 (UTC)

Translation notification: VisualEditor/Newsletter/2020/July

Hello Quiddity (WMF),

You are receiving this notification because you signed up as a translator to Canadian English and Extremaduran on Meta. The page VisualEditor/Newsletter/2020/July is available for translation. You can translate it here:


The deadline for translating this page is the end of this week.

Your help is greatly appreciated. Translators like you help Meta to function as a truly multilingual community.

You can change your notification preferences.

Thank you!

Meta translation coordinators‎, 20:25, 6 July 2020 (UTC)

FLOSS-Exchange‎

Thanks for editing this! I know that you have a lot of stuff on your plate already but it would be great if you could be given some work-time to update this section more comprehensively, e.g. by surveying and talking more directly with people in the various teams. The mw:Upstream projects page was already linked in the "See also" but indeed it should be more visible (and other similar resources should also be highlighted more, if they exist). Nemo 10:19, 13 July 2020 (UTC)

@Nemo bis: Thanks for the thanks. :) Yeah, I made another edit at the same time at Open Source Toolset, and was thinking about the FLOSS-Exchange section and wondering how much of the long-tail it would practically be helpful to add. -- I.e. I didn't add those 2 screencast recording apps into the FLOSS-Exchange page, even though I have used them for my work, because if every WMF employee added in every FLOSS program they have ever used, then the list would (A) be enormous, (B) massively duplicate the Open Source Toolset page.
I agree it would be great to have more items listed (in both pages), but I don't know where the limits/restrictions/overlap should be set at... E.g. I use kruler about once a week, but I don't think that's very useful to add to either page (partially because it's too "niche", and partially because I don't even like the tool, I just haven't found a better alternative yet!)...
Your thoughts? Quiddity (WMF) (talk) 16:51, 13 July 2020 (UTC)

Discussion

Hi greetings, I've started a discussion regarding tech news delivery at Talk:Tech/News. I humbly request you to participate in it. Thank you.--Path slopu (talk) 04:17, 21 July 2020 (UTC)

Discussion

Hi greetings, I've started a discussion regarding tech news notifications at Talk:Tech/News#Tech news notifications. I humbly request you to participate in it. Thank you.--Path slopu (talk) 10:33, 31 July 2020 (UTC)

Template:Abstract Wikipedia navbox : why removing the July 2020 annoucement completely?

You've removed the announcement of Abstract Wikipedia (Abstract Wikipedia/July 2020 announcement, which is in my opinion essential for presenting the project and the formal endorsement by the Foundation, and translated, from the navbox in

https://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Template:Abstract_Wikipedia_navbox&diff=20498011&oldid=20496276

However you're comment not is wrong, because it is not present in any timeline and the page is now orphaned (which "timeline" are you speaking about?). It is not in any archive, while there are other links for historic early talks and mockups before the project was formalized. Shouldn't it be linked at least in the "Presentation" subpage? Thanks. verdy_p (talk) 13:19, 1 October 2020 (UTC)

@Verdy p: Hi. I had added it to the timeline at the main project page, the 3rd item at Abstract Wikipedia#Timeline. I agree it is important, which is why I added it to that key listing. With both the Timeline, and the Navbox, it's best to keep the entries restricted to the most crucial details, otherwise some people can get overwhelmed. Entries in the Navbox should generally just be pages which people might want to regularly look at.
I am not sure why it isn't showing up in Special:WhatLinksHere - If I remember correctly, links with Special:MyLanguage/ normally show up in that page? Ah, no, it's a longstanding bug, phab:T63547. :-( -- But at least that explains the confusion!
Thanks again for all your help with the translation efforts over the last few days. I hope you have a good weekend. Quiddity (WMF) (talk) 17:04, 1 October 2020 (UTC)
Thanks, I did not notice that you had added the timeline in the main page. Even though I check it quite often because there are various things changing. It is now translated there. (I added a small comment in the Phabricator bug to suggest at least one link to the base page of translations). I think that this bug should also be part of the Abstract Wikipedia goals to be solved.
I'm continuing on translating the remaining page, set the correct categories to keep the base one clean and manageable. Not only I prepare the pages, but I also translate them (in French) to make sure everything looks correct. I've also made various fixes to allow correct rendering with Bidi languages, or to solve ambiguities, and add the missing translatable links (Special:MyLanguage/) so that all is navigatable (even if translations to many other languages are not done or incomplete, as this will take a long time). The basic categories for existing languages (that have partial translations) or expected languages (those frequently used in Wikimedia) should all be there already (some are still empty, but I think that this project has the ultimate goal of being accessible to everyone and its description and plan must be translated so that it is understood by everyone). Of course there will be hundreds additional "minor" languages appearing (more if the project progresses as this project will also finally facilitate the growth of their contents in localized wikis or in international wikis including Commons which is very popular and should benefit also a lot from the enhanced wikidata and wiki of functions). verdy_p (talk) 00:00, 2 October 2020 (UTC)
@Verdy p: Thanks again. I've seen the huge amount of improvements you've made, including copying the improvements into the existing translations in other languages, thus reducing work for other translators. It is appreciated. I hope you have a great weekend! Quiddity (WMF) (talk) 21:36, 2 October 2020 (UTC)
Note that I do not just prepare pages for translations, I also make an actual translation (complete in French, and I check some basic things in RTL language to look at the layout): looking at the translator interface, I try to minimize the work of translators. Sometimes, some translators are fast or things have to change and I review the existing translations to make sure that follow the minor changes that are easy to fix but necessary because of my changes (notably hiding as much as possible of the wiki syntax, and solving link problems so that the links can also go to other translated pages as soon as they are ready). When needed I can add some documentation in the "/qqq" subpages for things that could be changed and not shown in the English source. verdy_p (talk) 22:01, 2 October 2020 (UTC)
I also just finished translating your first weekly updates on this wiki to French (and the page is ready to be translated for other languages). I've also added various missing translated categories, so that people can also find them in a comprehensive way. verdy_p (talk) 22:02, 2 October 2020 (UTC)

Abstract Wikipedia (weekly) updates - visual style...

Hi! I saw that you were fixing my suggestions Abstract Wikipedia (weekly) updates - visual style... Actually those were not mistakes but style suggestions :-), but maybe not so good, as you read them as things to fix. Guess by your profile that you could be person to (also) work on this? I am fairly new to Meta and MediaWiki, so not sure how far can/should one go with style, so if there are any guidelines or recommendations - it would be nice to know. Otherwise at least make this a 'good practice' example? Zblace (talk) 05:47, 2 October 2020 (UTC)  

@Zblace: Hallo! I really liked all your styling suggestions!
I do believe those 2 things I tweaked were errors though, because they made the sentence end with ".:" (which isn't standard English formatting, as fullstops are not used before colons), and they made the numbered-list appear broken (because it started at level2 "##"). Here's a screenshot: https://i.postimg.cc/yxvH6FbX/image.png
Apart from that, it was all great! We'll definitely use those improved formatting suggestions in future editions.
I hope you have a good weekend. :-) Quiddity (WMF) (talk) 18:33, 2 October 2020 (UTC)
Glad you liked it! I know it is not a standard English formatting but I was trying to build a downward pointing arrow with .: (which I guess works only as style in terminal fixed sized fonts). With double hashes ## my intention was to both pull in paragraph more and than I also liked the rendering of first tasks 1.1 and 1.2, though I am sure there would be better way to create that. Zblace (talk) 20:25, 2 October 2020 (UTC)
BTW - back to first question are there any guidelines or recommendations on style for communication somewhere? Zblace (talk) 08:10, 6 October 2020 (UTC)
@Zblace: Ah, right! Sort of. In essence, for our purposes here, let's just aim to keep it simple, with some careful bolding of keyphrases to enable easy skimming, as you did in #1.
If you want documentation to read/search through... There is semi-related information at Writing clearly, although that is more aimed at content (and at more formal content than Denny's weekly writings currently are). For style, the most relevant page is probably mw:Documentation/Style guide; afaik there isn't anything beyond "wikitext help" pages at this wiki. Beyond that, I think most editors just re-use the styleguides or best/common practices that they are familiar with from their home-wikis, e.g. the (overwhelmingly detailed, with multiple subpages!) w:en:WP:MOS.
Thanks again! Quiddity (WMF) (talk) 18:05, 6 October 2020 (UTC)
You are welcome! Thank you for links. Will look into this. I am kind of amazed with Wikipedia style (and lack of styled) text is prevailing across most Wikimedia webs. That feels wrong. Zblace (talk) 05:41, 7 October 2020 (UTC)
IMHO, the dot before colon was probably an unexpected change, initially a sentence termianted by a sentence and nother one, that was juges unnecessary before the introductive colon, the second sentend was deleted, the colon was kept as necessary, but the bot was fogotten and not seen. This is just a minor typo and not a question of style. It's easy to fix without long discussion. Everyone can make such minor typos that are not noticed on initial reread. Just imagine your display has some small spots of dust, you won't notice it until you scroll down to see that this was really dust or a true dot, notably if your visual settings uses small fonts (note that this wiki uses small font sizes by default, smaller than the default font size of browsers, many people don't care on their large modern HiDPI screens if they have "good eyes"). Such minor typos are not the primary goal of communications we need to do, it does not make things really less clear, especially fur just punctuation at end of a paragraph. There's much more important things to communicate and explain and many other things to change, that you will notice these typos only on contents that have been stabilized and will stay valid for long (for exampel the text of an article that will be reviewed many, many times, and will slowly converge to some structure agreeds by many more people changing much smaller things. Here very few prople are contributing and are doing that with their best efforts, but they don't have the time to fully and carzefully review every small detail, when there's so much more to explain. Such typos will typically be noticed only when translators will start rereading the text that whose initial author stopped to work on after his own important changes. Anyone can come and fix these later, don't blame the initial author that made the most important work. verdy_p (talk) 13:14, 7 October 2020 (UTC)

Tech news #44 fix

Pls push a small adjustment we need to fix an interwiki link, and thank you always for your hard work. Cheers, --Omotecho (talk) 19:59, 24 October 2020 (UTC)

I did not need to to that, because at that time that ressource was translated in only a couple of languages and were immediately fixed in all of them; for others, they were not translated at all, so translators would have seen it only once)
The fix was simple: as the code generated an external link with an URL and not an wikilink, this was a initial error using a pipe instead of a space, which is a stupid old syntax inconsistancy of MediaWiki when we know that no URL should contain any pipe, the pipe should be recognized directly rather than just the space; it would also facilitate the maintenance of internationalized links possibly containing non URL-encoded characters and not requiring "_" or "%20" or "+" depending on the part of the URL, using the user-friendly syntax which is already recognized in the address bar of almost all modern web browsers). Replacing the pipe did not require any translation skill and could be done very simply. verdy_p (talk) 00:02, 25 October 2020 (UTC)
Note that the diff above was clearly invalid ! It added a duplicate interwiki code "mw:" and I just removed it. There was only a problem in the recent test in Chinese, where a translator typed "$tr" instead of "$rt", and the link was then not working in that language only; I fixed that recent Chinese version which was wrong (but the diff above, and the later attempted "fix" made by "Omotecho" was completely invalid, both were reverted). verdy_p (talk) 00:18, 25 October 2020 (UTC)

Logo vote open for proposals?

I notice that you removed the draft template from Abstract Wikipedia/Wikifunctions logo concept. Does that mean it's now open for proposals? --Yair rand (talk) 23:26, 14 January 2021 (UTC)

@Yair rand: Yup! It's been a slow/soft-launch for a few weeks, hence the existing proposals there. Please do add thoughts, and also let anyone else know. I'll be doing more publicizing of it over the next week at some specific talkpages, VPs, and mailing lists. We're especially looking for brainstorming around concepts (keywords and related ideas), to help other designers come up with actual designs. Quiddity (WMF) (talk) 23:30, 14 January 2021 (UTC)
@Quiddity (WMF): I also made the newsletter update translatable (and made minor visual tweaks; breaking also the text in small translation units and setting navigation links, follwoed by texting it with a full translation in French), so that it now links to the page. Also in the main gallery, I have removed the numeric id (to avoid some implicit ranking). There's been a few more proposals added (if needed the galery will need expansion but now the bottom captions are autotranslated to link to their proposal description and discussion). verdy_p (talk) 11:56, 15 January 2021 (UTC)

Abstract Wikipedia/Wiki of functions naming contest/WikiSetta

Hello, do you know what happened with this one? 𝟙𝟤𝟯𝟺𝐪𝑤𝒆𝓇𝟷𝟮𝟥𝟜𝓺𝔴𝕖𝖗𝟰 (𝗍𝗮𝘭𝙠) 11:14, 25 April 2021 (UTC)

@1234qwer1234qwer4: Hi, that was included in Abstract Wikipedia/Wiki of functions naming contest/Wikirosetta. IIRC, I started to create a separate split-apart entry, but then decided to keep them together as the original proposer had written them. I will tag that incomplete draft page for deletion now. Quiddity (WMF) (talk) 20:13, 26 April 2021 (UTC)

Moving OTRS

Hello,

when going to Special:MovePage/OTRS, I noticed that Unauthorized, You do not have permission to manage translatable pages, for the following reason: The action you have requested is limited to users in the group: Translation administrators. So I thought it is a job for you!

Please move OTRS to VRT using the following summary: OTRS -> VRTS renaming process; see [[Phab:T280392]] and [[Phab:T280396]]

In theory, everything is already set, so just overwrite the already existing redirect VRT. Thanks! --Ruthven (msg) 14:28, 30 May 2021 (UTC)

@DCB: --Ruthven (msg) 06:39, 1 June 2021 (UTC)
@Ruthven: Hmm, I'm getting a different error. I've filed a bug-report at phab:T284116. If that doesn't get resolved by Thursday (is that ok/soon enough?) I'll request assistance at Meta:Requests for help from a sysop or bureaucrat. Quiddity (WMF) (talk) 23:25, 1 June 2021 (UTC)
Partially resolved. Now there's the problem of "More than 500 subpages, ask for technical assistance"! Filed as phab:T284118. Quiddity (WMF) (talk) 23:52, 1 June 2021 (UTC)
and... Resolved with a server-side script. Move done under @Quiddity (WMF)'s account. Martin Urbanec (talk) 09:21, 2 June 2021 (UTC)

Gang stalking on Wikimedia projects

Please help contribute to the survey on Gang stalking on Wikimedia projects.

This is unofficial, and intended to help the Wikimedia Foundation. --Gangstalking-Research-20085 (talk) 19:31, 16 August 2021 (UTC)

Questions

Hello Quiddity, how are you going? I just found about the Abstract Wikipedia/Wikifunctions and since I have been working in the Portuguese and English Wikipedias as a translator, I have some questions:

1. Since the final goal of the project is to create a kind of baseline for all the Wikis, how the project will choose which version of each article (in case where there are several translations) to use as a baseline? The ones acknowledged as a "good article"? Or the longest?

2. The article Santos Dumont is acknowledged as an featured article in the Wikipedia and is the only language where this specific biography is acknowledged. Supposing that the Portuguese language users will want to use it as a base line for all the Wikis (since it is well developed, referenced and so on), how it should look? The Portuguese language users would need to "translate" it to Abstract Wikipedia and always update it or the Abstract could "drink" from an specific version and be automatically updated?

3. How the project could affect the Incubator? In theory it could "build" new Wikipedias, no? I was wondering if it could help minorities and indigenous languages to develop their literature.

4. It may be just an tangent: it could help tools like Wikisource or Wikiquote? An "Abstract Wikisource" could help, at least, to make the most important works from each language to be available on all languages?

I think that is is all. I care a lot about the Wikipedia and always try to let specific articles always updated in Portuguese and English, but sometimes it is just an impossible long work, like with CPI da COVID-19/COVID-19 CPI. Thanks, Erick Soares3 (talk) 14:51, 3 September 2021 (UTC)

@Erick Soares3 Hallo! You ask some good questions here. I will respond to 2 now, and the rest next week.
1. Overall, those sorts of details will need extensive community discussion in the future. There have not been any deep discussions yet, about how the social-processes of deciding on what content to include, could or should work. Most of the people that are working on and/or interested in these 2 projects are focusing on Wikifunctions for now, as that is a necessary tool for any of this to work, and once it exists and has some content, then a lot of the possibilities will become more understandable to non-technical folks.
Personally, I imagine/hope we will have a multilingual community, who will bring multiple-perspectives and multilingual references to every entry. I'm also imagining that for the first few years, Abstract Wikipedia content will (probably?!) be very simple and brief. [however, I easily might be wrong and perhaps some Abstract topics will rapidly become very detailed!?].
I.e. I often think of Reasonator as being a great example of a simple predecessor. It can create a few sentences, in a few languages, about some specific topics. The gap between Reasonator-level complexity, and a Ptwiki Featured Article's complexity, is very very big! [I wrote more about Reasonator elsewhere, and I will copy an excerpt here, but I'll replace the examples with Santos Dumont. :) ]:
  • There's also Reasonator (e.g.1 en, e.g.2 fr); However those don't exist for many languages, nor most statements (e.g.3 vi, e.g. pt). In the backend, those short descriptions are actually coming from the AutoDesc tool. (e.g.4). That AutoDesc system currently has 27 translatable word-elements, and can only handle very simple sentences for cases where each word can be separately replaced with a translated word (and the word order tweaked per-language). The most important difference to both ArticlePlaceholder and Reasonator - but also to projects such as LsjBot or Rambot - is that we want to allow the community to take more ownership of the way and the scope of information being rendered into the individual languages.
The other precursor project which attempts to fill the gaps in a simple way is mw:Extension:ArticlePlaceholder (you can see an example at Welsh Wikipedia).
2. I think the details above will answer some of this question. In case it isn't clear, Abstract Wikipedia content will not 'over-ride' or 'replace' any existing local content. The core goal is to help fill in the gaps, where nothing has been written about a topic in that language. Some of the technical notes for how this might work, are at Abstract Wikipedia/Components, but nothing has been decided or coded for any of that, yet.
I'll reply more, next week. Cheers, Quiddity (WMF) (talk) 22:56, 3 September 2021 (UTC)
Hello Quiddity! I understand that the project isn't supposed to override anything, but what about in the cases (still using Santos Dumont as an example) where the articles are so weak that they would have been scrapped in any big project? Just compare the Portuguese version with Mirandese (two non referenced lines without update since 2013), Latin and maybe Esperanto (and probably more). The project could in some way "override" the original in these cases to, at least, add some small paragraphs and references in the same time that it helps the Wikis where nothing have been written at all? I'm using Santos Dumont biography as an example, but I'm certain that there are thousands of articles across all the projects in this same situation ("really dry stubs").
As a suggestion, I'd like to suggest this article to be experimented in the project. Is far less complex than Santos Dumont bio and is relevant for the Wikis in African languages. Thanks, Erick Soares3 (talk) 14:53, 4 September 2021 (UTC)
@Erick Soares3: Ah, I understand more clearly now. I believe a few of the sections in Abstract Wikipedia/Components answer this question (specifically sections 1.2, 1.3, and 1.5). I'm particularly hopeful about the possibilities in 1.5 regarding "Later this will allow to select named sections from the Content", i.e. the idea of being able to show mostly local content, but with specific sections added from the Abstract content. So yes, communities should be able to manually replace or add to the local content, in a few different ways. [But I'll emphasize that no code has been written, and it still needs research and discussion into what is technically feasible and what is needed/wanted.]
Re: example articles - I generally recommend that Foundation's Product teams use very neutral and universal-interest articles for examples (e.g. in screenshots, documentation, announcements, etc), such as "Moon" and "Jupiter", partially to avoid distractions/disputes about article content (when we wanted the viewer to focus on the UI designs!), and partially because those topics exist at the largest number of Wikipedias so are the best for making comparisons (or taking screenshots). That's why we're using Jupiter in Abstract Wikipedia/Examples/Jupiter.
Re: 3. I'm not sure how that will work out. Ideally, we want to encourage a local community of participants in each new language edition of a project, so having all of the Incubator content created via work on Abstract Wikipedia (incl Wikifunctions and Wikidata items and lexemes), would not solve that. It could certainly help a lot, in a few different ways, to expand what content is available to readers in that language; but a (healthily growing) group of people who are dedicated to their local language Wikipedia will always be necessary.
Re: 4. There was a brief discussion about that in the second half of Talk:Abstract Wikipedia/Plan#Non-Wikipedia Content (briefly: "As far as I understand it, the abstract content system should work for any objective content, but probably not be suitable for sentences where nuance and some "poetic word choices" are required such as in Wikiquote or Wikisource contents"). But that's just my perspective. (Sidenote: This topic also reminds me of the long-running debate, and eventual closure (proposal), of the Simple Wikiquote.)
I hope those answers help! Quiddity (WMF) (talk) 22:56, 8 September 2021 (UTC)
Thanks!! Erick Soares3 (talk) 23:00, 10 September 2021 (UTC)

@Erick Soares3: Sorry to barge in. I agree with everything that Quiddity says, but I also want to stress one point: you asks whether we are going to use a specific language Wikipedia's article as the source for Abstract Wikipedia. The answer is no, not automatically. Changes to a local article will not be recognized automatically and propagated to Abstract Wikipedia. The content in Abstract Wikipedia is written (technically) independently of any of the Wikipedias that have an article on it (obvious, a contributor may choose to use a specific language editions as their source, but that's a community process). In this sense, it is adding one more language edition we need to take care of. But then each local Wikipedia can use this common baseline as its source. But Abstract Wikipedia needs to be maintained manually (or partially in tandem with Wikidata).

Just as with Wikidata: a change in the local Wikipedia has no effect on Wikidata (unless done through the Wikidata bridge). But a change in Wikidata can effect the Wikipedias that choose to use Wikidata. --DVrandecic (WMF) (talk) 23:59, 24 September 2021 (UTC)

Removing embarrassing disclaimer

Hello!

Browsing WRC for the first time in forever: it's framed now as resources for the whole wikimedia movement; even though I remember very first instance in '16 or '17 was largely focused on WMF resources. But it has a weirdly divisive vibe we should fix.

The idea of attaching logos to each card to indicate who maintains the resource is good; but then there should be logos for WMF, Wikitech, and other high-level maintenance groups.

The disclaimer is an embarrassment, should lose the second para (I'm not sure it's appropriate to suggest any of these pages are officially maintained, considering), and should not be linked to from any particular logo; let's fix it. I can't figure out how to add / update logos, however...

–SJ talk  19:15, 19 November 2021 (UTC)

Thanks for the note! I've removed some of the sentences, for now. I'm not certain what the long-term plans are for this set of pages, but I know the Movement Communications team is thinking about potential changes to resources like this which need more attention. Therefore I won't attempt to dig deeper, for now. HTH! Quiddity (WMF) (talk) 21:57, 25 November 2021 (UTC)

Patroller-rights?

Hi! I'm regularly translating TechNews to norwegian (nb) and could make use of patroller-rights on metawiki to take care of vandalism. Do I need to ask somewhere or are you able to hand them to me? -- Wkee4ager (👨🏼‍💻💬) 10:51, 15 February 2022 (UTC)

@Wkee4ager Hi! For that kind of thing, the place to ask is at Meta:Requests for help from a sysop or bureaucrat. (Found via the mention at the bottom of this section: Meta:Requests for adminship#Other access). You can use the searchbox near the top of that 1st page to find previous examples, which might help. Cheers, Quiddity (WMF) (talk) 19:42, 15 February 2022 (UTC)

Update distribution list request

Hi, myself CX Zoom, an administrator on Pali Wikipedia. I recently moved pi:Project:Community Portal to pi:Project:Noticeboard. That page should receive evry message, except Bots-related ones which should go to pi:Project:Noticeboard/Bots instead. Can you please review my recent ontributions, and do the needful changes, if necessary? Thanks! —‍CX Zoom (A/अ/অ) (let's talk|contribs) 07:19, 19 March 2022 (UTC)

Hi @CX Zoom. The changes you made look good.
I see that this distribution list has also recently been used for messages there, and needs to be updated: Movement Strategy and Governance/Delivery/Wikipedia.
You may also want to add:
Hope that helps. --Quiddity (WMF) (talk) 16:41, 21 March 2022 (UTC)
Done, as you suggested. Thanks a lot. —‍CX Zoom (A/अ/অ) (let's talk|contribs) 23:03, 21 March 2022 (UTC)

Thanks for the settings fix

Hey, I just wanted to say thanks for this. I had missed your comment in the thread and only now noticed that the settings text has been changed. I really thought it could be a problem, so I'm glad it was fixed! kyykaarme (talk) 09:53, 18 August 2022 (UTC)

Thanks for the followup! It's appreciated. :-) Quiddity (WMF) (talk) 18:28, 18 August 2022 (UTC)

Open letter to the WMF

Hi Nick,

We have posted an open letter to the Foundation and Board of Trustees. It concerns the development of MediaWiki extensions and needs the personal attention of all concerned developers and managers. Please see it at:

meta: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Open_letter_from_English_Wikipedia_New_Page_Reviewers and en.Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:New_pages_patrol/Coordination/2022_WMF_letter

Your comments are welcome. Many thanks.

Kind regards, On behalf of the English Wikipedia Community MB (talk) 02:44, 22 September 2022 (UTC)

Update to commentlinks.js gadget

I am about to update my comment links gadget to link the comment's timestamp rather than add a separate [ link ] button. If you prefer the old style, that gadget will be available at commentlinks-v1.js. As before, this gadget is experimental and may stop working at any time, see T275729 for the task to make this a proper feature. Thanks, ESanders (WMF) (talk) 12:13, 30 September 2022 (UTC)

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