Wikimedia Forum/Archives/2016-03

On the issue of volumetric assignment of distributed data by peers

In the delivery of collaborative projects, there is an idea among aristocrat (print their own money and smuggle it into the common world money system) and oligarch (same thing, just live in colder fort), there is the idea of monetizing things on the internet in a way which destroys the internet. The use of an alternative way of pipelining content would include something like tor for use of tunnels and sockets, but if kademlia is farged, then it behooves us who live in freedom fort nation-states to replace it with something that actually works, and does not fix fixed data (just a few glyphs) at one of five and four of five in the hash string. -User:Stevertigo (talk) 19:31, 1 March 2016 (UTC)

tw.wikipedia

A student of mine who is a native speaker of this language pointed out that it is rather difficult to contribute to Twi - wikipedia, because the language requires letters like ɛ and ɔ in its orthography. People generally do not have that on their keyboards, so I had to resort to character map to write this. To promote growth of this wiki it might be a good this to put a drop box underneath the edit page where people can insert these characters more easily. Another possibility is to advertise where people can obtain a virtual Akan / Twi keyboard if such a thing exists. Jcwf (talk) 21:40, 22 February 2016 (UTC)

It's possible to add a menu to insert these letters by creating a local version of MediaWiki:Edittools. Which characters are all needed? --MF-W 02:12, 23 February 2016 (UTC)

There's also ak.wikipedia which is Akan. They should have been merged into one wiki long ago, imo. PiRSquared17 (talk) 22:56, 2 March 2016 (UTC)

Inspire Campaign: Making our content more meaningful

The second Inspire Campaign has launched to encourage and support new ideas focusing on content review and curation in Wikimedia projects. Wikimedia volunteers collaboratively manage vast repositories of knowledge in our projects. What ideas do you have to manage that knowledge to make it more meaningful and accessible? We invite all Wikimedians to participate and submit ideas, so please get involved today! The campaign runs until March 28th.

All proposals are welcome - research projects, technical solutions, community organizing and outreach initiatives, or something completely new! Funding is available from the Wikimedia Foundation for projects that need financial support. Constructive, positive feedback on ideas is appreciated, and collaboration is encouraged - your skills and experience may help bring someone else’s project to life. Join us at the Inspire Campaign and help your project better represent the world’s knowledge! I JethroBT (WMF) 19:54, 2 March 2016 (UTC)

What's going on with the search engine?

Hello! I haven't been very active lately, but I've seen some media attention about a Wikimedia search engine, and apparently there was some drama. What is actually happening? PiRSquared17 (talk) 22:58, 2 March 2016 (UTC)

Hi! Welcome back. Have you read <http://mollywhite.net/wikimedia-timeline/>? --MZMcBride (talk) 02:00, 3 March 2016 (UTC)

Requests for comment/Indefinite block the user:6AND5 in the armenian Wikipedia

Please help me. In addition can read this page - Talk:Affiliate-selected Board seats/2016/Nominations/Susanna Mkrtchyan--6AND5 (talk) 11:25, 3 March 2016 (UTC)

Violations of Wikietiquette by Aram Soghomonyan

I quote two Aram Soghomonyan's (Արամ Սողոմոնյան) made phrases in Armenian Wikipedia: "Hayk jan, to your mentioned "two heroes"[means me and 6AND5] imagination and nonsense does lessened your merit or smalls your contribution? You have a great contribution (that realized all), and no need to spend time someone bent on palace intrigues. "The King" and his "favorite" makes intrigue, after us even if be deluge principle."[1], and "This already is end of patience, let deems to violation of Wikietiquette, but I must a say, that it's time to clear off all this and do with serious works. Erjanik, Geo, Beko, stop all this. Enough! two days of that person[6AND5] is on Wiki, and look what do, like the moth demolishes everything. For god's sake, stop this evil. Block her and with her retinue throw out of here!"[2]. By law of Armenian Wikipedia, for one unethical phrase, must be warned, but he continued violation of wikietiquette. --Vadgt (talk) 16:27, 3 March 2016 (UTC)

he maked that phrases, and how he must be punished? --Vadgt (talk) 21:20, 6 March 2016 (UTC)

Bot spamming the English Wikipedia

I cannot edit Wikipedia but since this seems to be driven by employees at the WMF I thought I would comment here.

I noticed tonight that the English Wikipedia bot Wikipedia:User:Hazard-Bot is spamming thousands of articles on with an unclear and meaningless link called "Using Wikipedia for research" such as this link.

It appears this is being done to help people do research but all this does is clutter up articles with useless crap. If this should go anywhere it should be on the talk page. We should be trying to build an encyclopedia not spamming garbage across tens of thousands of articles.

Maybe it's just me, but I fail to see how spamming thousands of links will do anything but needlessly clutter up articles. Perhaps someone could explain the bigger picture to me so that I may understand why this would be beneficial to anyone and where there is a consensus to do this? Reguyla (talk) 04:44, 8 March 2016 (UTC)

the character of Tibetan Wikipedia is too small to read

The character of Tibetan Wikipedia is too small to read (example), can you make it larger?

P.S., the characters of "edit page" is normal (example).--122.90.103.187 11:16, 7 March 2016 (UTC)

Fixed. Ruslik (talk) 08:21, 8 March 2016 (UTC)

something wrong with the character of Dzongkha Wikipedia

The character of Dzongkha Wikipedia is normal (example), but the characters of "edit page" is too small to read (example). can you make it larger?--122.90.103.187 11:20, 7 March 2016 (UTC)

I think I fixed this problem. Ruslik (talk) 16:18, 7 March 2016 (UTC)

@Ruslik0:The account line becomes two lines in local language. I suggest the following code for the 2 wikis, to apply only in Vector.css:

/* Enlarge font-size */
#bodyContent {
	font-size: 100%; /* 16px */
}

#wpTextbox1 {
	font-size: large;
}

--Lt2818 (talk) 14:53, 8 March 2016 (UTC)

Why 100% for #bodycontent? Is not it too small? And why #bodycontent but not whole "body"? Ruslik (talk) 17:23, 8 March 2016 (UTC)

@Ruslik0: #bodycontent is also set by jawiki, to minimize effect on the interface. 100% is to override the default value 87.5%, enlarging font-size from 14px to 16px.

Your code seems too large on my platform (Firefox, Linux). Also, use of !important makes font-size config invalid on the site.--冷月无声念桥边 (talk) 01:14, 9 March 2016 (UTC)

Problem on Windows is that Latin characters in font "Himalaya" is too small. To solve it, add the following code:

body {
	font-family: Arial, sans-serif;
}

--冷月无声念桥边 (talk) 01:29, 9 March 2016 (UTC)

The Latin characters are fine. The problem is in non-Latin characters. Ruslik (talk) 11:59, 9 March 2016 (UTC)

@Ruslik0: Hello, the problem of Latin characters happens on Firefox, so I think above code is necessary. No other problem now.--冷月无声念桥边 (talk) 10:44, 10 March 2016 (UTC)

Cross-wiki notifications available as a Beta feature on your wiki by March 11.

Hello!

That news concerns all users, and may be particularly useful for Meta users active on other wikis.

Cross-wiki Notifications will be activated soon as a beta feature on all WMF wikis. This deployment, scheduled for March 10 has been postponed to March 11, 00:00 UTC.

Information and feedback on the dedicated talk page.

All the best, Trizek (WMF) (talk) 13:45, 10 March 2016 (UTC)

Dear Forum Please Help our Place

Someone to become hacker and has manupalation publlic you can cheque Identity or paspor pleaase hellp me Dellette Wiki Project siister because thiis use for manipulation in our place Thank

Please provide a link to your problem. --Gereon K. (talk) 06:58, 14 March 2016 (UTC)

Help

Hello. My IP-Address is blocked on the English Wikipedia for no reason. --2003:70:CF58:9E01:2422:98F5:B185:977E 03:54, 13 March 2016 (UTC)

Hello, the reason given was that your IP address has been used by a blocked user in the past. He/she seems to have the same internet provider than you. One thing you could do to contribute to Wikipedia again is to request getting an account at en:Wikipedia:Request an account. --Gereon K. (talk) 06:57, 14 March 2016 (UTC)

Alerts

Why did this edit not generate a ping on Echo? --Gereon K. (talk) 06:53, 14 March 2016 (UTC)

Gereon K., Echo only pings in certain namespaces. (I have no idea why -- but I'll stay on topic.) I believe it's only in "talk" namespaces that will generate Echo pings. -Pete F (talk) 07:13, 14 March 2016 (UTC)

Oh, ok. Thanks. I thought linking the name was equivalent to {{U}} and Grants:TPS/Wikimania scholars was part of "Project: namespace" as defined in Echo (Notifications). Maybe what accounts for namespace is defined differently than I interpreted from Namespace. --Gereon K. (talk) 07:21, 14 March 2016 (UTC)

Pete F, I checked with the devs, and namespace restrictions were completely removed from the mention feature. Just FYI :) Quiddity (WMF) (talk) 21:23, 15 March 2016 (UTC)

Gereon K. Echo only pings us if a number of criteria are matched. For example, a ~~~~ is required, which the example diff you linked to does not have. Full details on the criteria are in mw:Manual:Echo.

It has these restrictions to avoid all the edge cases where people would not want to be pinged, or where it is hard to programmatically interpret the diff correctly as a pure addition, such as talkpage-refactoring, talkpage/section-archiving, alphabetical list sorting, and others. The number of false-positives must be kept to a minimum, to avoid the feature annoying any editors enough that they disable the feature in their preferences. The devs would like to change/overhaul/improve this feature (phab:T128535 and others), but it's a complicated piece of work (and might have user-facing ramifications) that would take a lot of time to do right. HTH. Quiddity (WMF) (talk) 18:21, 15 March 2016 (UTC)

Speech engine

There has been a fair amount of news coverage about a "Wikipedia speech Engine" e.g. [3] and [4]. Is there anything Meta can do to support this initiative by the Swedish chapter.--KTo288 (talk) 08:41, 15 March 2016 (UTC)

Open call for Individual Engagement Grants

Hey folks! The Individual Engagement Grants (IEG) program is accepting proposals from March 14th to April 12th to fund new tools, research, outreach efforts, and other experiments that enhance the work of Wikimedia volunteers. Whether you need a small or large amount of funds (up to $30,000 USD), IEGs can support you and your team’s project development time in addition to project expenses such as materials, travel, and rental space.

• Submit a grant request or draft your proposal in IdeaLab
• Get help with your proposal in an upcoming Hangout session
• Learn from examples of completed Individual Engagement Grants

Also accepting candidates to join the IEG Committee through March 25th.

With thanks, I JethroBT (WMF) 23:01, 16 March 2016 (UTC)

Everything is probably going to "break" for 10 or 15 minutes later this month

Tracked in Phabricator:
Task T124671

This is early notice for everyone, and a request to share the news:

The Ops team is planning a major change to the servers, (very) tenatively scheduled for Tuesday, 22 March 2016. One probable result is that when this happens, all wikis will be in read-only mode for a short time, likely less than 15 minutes for all editors. You will be able to read pages, but not edit them. "All wikis" means all of the WMF wikis, including Meta, Commons, the Wikipedias, and all the sister projects. It may affect some related sites, such as mw:Wikimedia Labs (including the Tool Labs). There will also be no non-emergency updates to MediaWiki software around that time.

Many details are still being sorted out. I am asking you to please share the word with your friends and fellow contributors now. This will be mentioned in m:Tech/News (subscribe now! ;-) and through all the other usual channels for Ops, but 99% of contributors don't follow those pages. If you are active in other projects or speak other languages, then please share the news with your fellow contributors at other projects, so that whenever it happens, most people will know that everything should be back online in 10 or 15 minutes.

Thanks, Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 16:31, 2 March 2016 (UTC)

Update

The Wikimedia Technical Operations department is planning an important test of the new "full" data center in Texas. The test will result in about 30 minutes of downtime for all the wikis, including Meta, on two days that week. This work was originally scheduled for this coming week, but has been postponed until the week of 18 April 2016. The official schedule is kept on Wikitech; more information is at m:Tech/Server switch 2016. More announcements and notifications for editors are planned.

If you experienced problems with the five-minute read-only test on Tuesday, 15 March around 07:05 UTC, or if you have suggestions for places to announce this, then please contact me directly at w:en:User talk:Whatamidoing (WMF). Thanks, Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 01:55, 18 March 2016 (UTC)

Learning Engines

I became most disturbed when I was reading about the proposed Knowledge Engine[5] earlier today. Thinking it over, I found that I had two grave misgivings. The first was that Wikimedia's trying to compete with Google was rather stupid. After all there are other competitors, many excellent (for example kartoo[6]), so why join the crowd? The second is that it would be vastly better to regard and to promote Wikimedia, particularly Wikipedia and the Wiktionary, as resources for learning rather than for mere answering of questions. This could be done through a Wikimedia project with a name such as Wikiportal that emphasises the broadness and depth of the extremely valuable data provided within the various Wikimedia projects.

This could be done in three overlapping stages, regarded as three distinct projects, the simplest first, of course.

The first might be called Wikindices and/or Wikindexes, and could be promptly started.

At its bottom level there would be web pages that collect links to Wikimedia pages with some commonality of content, pages that would attract people who simply want to browse (in the old meaning of the word) in a particular area or style, that is, to learn in an idle or unexpected manner. I have three HTML files of this kind that I use myself to collect (mainly) Wikipedia links that I might like to spend time going through when I can get some spare time. Maybe I could email them to someone who could put them up somewhere on Wikimedia where people could look at them and I could comment here on them (I'm a computing very oldie, so need help with this).

Above this level there would need to be at least one level of indexes to the bottom level indexes. There would need to be guidance for newbies. Also, as an additional attraction for users, the targets of the bottom level indices (for example in Wikipedia) could be given reverse links to bottom level Wikindices (automatically??).

The second stage might be called Wikitopics or Wikisubjects or, maybe, Wikisummaries.

The idea of this would be to provide summaries of topics or subjects that a user might be wanting to study, to learn about in a focussed way. The summaries would be rich in links to Wikimedia pages where further information on items in the summary could be found. Of course Wikipedia pages of such a summary nature exist already and could be used as is, or as a starting point, within this stage.

There would need to be be different levels of summaries, for example a penultimate layer mainly linking to the bottom layer, and so on, thus forming trees or vines of knowledge.

This stage should be aimed both at independent users who have some reason for wanting to learn more about a particular area, or subject within an area, or topic within a subject, and at students in higher education who need to pass examinations. To support teachers and mentors of such students, it would perhaps be very useful and attractive to provide for students to be able to log in so that summaries of their activities could be provided for their supervisors.

The third stage might be called Wikitutor or Wikischool.

The idea of this would be to provide a way for elementary level students to learn basic abstract skills, with the focus on vocabulary and grammar, and to provide data about student activity to their teachers/supervisors so that the students could be effectively guided in their learning and so that the students could be given group activities based on commonality of interests to learn basic social skills[7].

This stage could be a front end to stage 2 so that students who have learnt (and been tested for) the vocabulary, both written and spoken, suitable for particular stage 2 topics, then they could be directed to those topics in stage 2 to enable them, on an individual basis, to satisfy their interests and acquire learning that they can use in a social context.

I feel these possibilities are tremendously important. I only hope my briefly describing them here will cause a change in direction by the leaders of Wikimedia. Maybe the money acquired for the Knowledge Engine could be diverted to these three Learning Engines?  Wnholmes (talk) 11:44, 15 March 2016 (UTC)

@Wnholmes: Items number 2 and 3 in your list are part of the Wikiversity scope. Maybe you can check in their colloquium (or in the other language versions) to see if the work they do over there matches your ideas. How is #1 different from the cathegory pages? --Lsanabria (talk) 17:19, 17 March 2016 (UTC)

New Wikipedia Library Accounts Available Now (March 2016)

Hello Wikimedians!

The TWL OWL says sign up today!

The Wikipedia Library is announcing signups today for free, full-access accounts to published research as part of our Publisher Donation Program. You can sign up for access to research materials from:

• Cambridge University Press - a major publisher of academic journals and e-books in a variety of subject areas. Access includes both Cambridge Journals Online and Cambridge Books. 25 accounts.
• Alexander Street Academic Video Online - a large academic video collection good for a wide range of subjects, including news programs (such as PBS and BBC), music and theatre, lectures and demonstrations, and documentaries. 25 accounts.
• Baylor University Press - a publisher of academic e-books primarily in religious studies and the humanities. 50 accounts.
• Future Science Group - a publisher of medical, biotechnological and scientific research. 30 accounts.
• Annual Reviews - a publisher of review articles in the biomedical sciences. 100 accounts.
• Miramar Ship Index - an index to ships and their histories since the early 19th century. 30 accounts.

Non-English

• Noormags - Farsi-language aggregator of academic and professional journals and magazines. 30 accounts.
• Kotobna - Arabic-language ebook publishing platform. 20 accounts.

Expansions

• Gale - aggregator of newspapers, magazines and journals. 50 accounts.
• Elsevier ScienceDirect - an academic publishing company that publishes medical and scientific literature. 100 accounts.

Many other partnerships with accounts available are listed on our partners page, including Project MUSE, De Gruyter, EBSCO, Newspapers.com and British Newspaper Archive. Do better research and help expand the use of high quality references across Wikipedia projects: sign up today!
--The Wikipedia Library Team 20:30, 17 March 2016 (UTC)

You can host and coordinate signups for a Wikipedia Library branch in your own language. Please contact Ocaasi (WMF).

This message was delivered via the Global Mass Message tool to The Wikipedia Library Global Delivery List.

Null problem in Chinese Wikipedia

When I connect to Chinese Wikipedia, I get a blank page with just NULL in it.--John123521 (talk) 06:46, 22 March 2016 (UTC)

It should be fixed now, see phab:T130575. If you're still seeing NULL, can you provide the full URL of the page with issues? Legoktm (talk) 07:10, 22 March 2016 (UTC)

Requests for comment/Unfair blocks in local projects

Hi, look this page...--6AND5 (talk) 09:43, 24 March 2016 (UTC)

Global username usurpation policy

Hello. Anyone who is interested in global renaming can take a look at Requests for comment/Global usurpation policy 2. Thanks, Ajraddatz (talk) 21:02, 24 March 2016 (UTC)

Manipulation in Wikipedia

There are a lot of manipulation in Wikipedia. That means a lot of editors are "killed" by opposing editors by means of accusations without evidences.

Is Wikipedia an encyclopedia of gladiators ? I red on the pages of some administrators: I killed 20,000 editors, I killed 19,000 editors... Generally, scientific world try to avoid such horrible source when editors kill other editors to have free way to manipulation. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 79.112.85.70 (talk • contribs) 06:21, 4 February 2016 (UTC)

Wikipedia is broken and has been for quite some time. There's no point in editing any more, too many hostile admins. I used to contribute, but the environment now is too toxic to bother. 82.9.245.63 12:38, 26 March 2016 (UTC)

Difficulties with admins there may be symptom rather than disease. I suspect cumulative damage from core principles such as AGF that focus on superficial tolerance to the point where they can abet subsurface nastiness. --Pi zero (talk) 16:22, 26 March 2016 (UTC)

Pursuing and disturbing with Vadgt

Hi Wikipedians. I have problem with user Vadgt. He disturbed me about Armenian Wikipedia in my Meta discussion page (see 1, 2, 3). Please, help me for solving this issue. Meta is not Armenian Wikipedia. And Wikieditors must not pursue. --Arman musikyan (talk) 05:56, 30 March 2016 (UTC)