Wikimedia Forum/Archives/2017-12

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Confirming users

Hello,

I need to set up OAuth consumers for some bot accounts that I manage:

However when I log in as one of these accounts and try to propose a consumer, I receive the message: 

   You do not have permission to propose new OAuth consumers, for the following reason:
   The action you have requested is limited to users in one of the groups: Autoconfirmed users, Confirmed users.

Is it possible for an administrator to confirm these users so that I can propose the OAuth consumers, please? Thanks. Smith609 (talk) 13:19, 2 December 2017 (UTC)

The first four accounts are already autoconfirmed. The last two will be by 7 December. Ruslik (talk) 17:54, 2 December 2017 (UTC)
This section was archived on a request by:  — billinghurst sDrewth 21:04, 21 December 2017 (UTC)

Closed/Locked wiki

Is it just me or is it even harder for a closed/locked wiki to gain contributor than a wiki than a placed in incubator? As in, in incubator, at least every user can be able to help out and contribute freely, while it is not possible to do so in a closed/locked wiki where the user must be part of a special user group in order to do so? In this case it would make those project even harder to find new contributor and return to an open status. Is it possible to make some changes to how wiki are locked in order to foster the possibility that new contributors are recruited into those projects? C933103 (talk) 20:42, 3 December 2017 (UTC)

Please, see Incubator:Incubator:Coordination_for_importing_closed_projects. Ruslik (talk) 18:25, 4 December 2017 (UTC)
@C933103: When wikis are actually closed and locked, by intention they are not to be rebuilt from scratch where they are. Assuming there is some content of value, that content is moved to Incubator. Then if the test project on Incubator becomes active enough and has enough content, it is reopened in place of the closed and locked project.
Understand, though, that it has been three years since a project has been closed (see PCP). I expect new project closures to be rare—almost nonexistent—in the future. There are reasons that there were more closures in the past, and why there will be fewer going forward.
  • Early in the history of Wikimedia, it was pretty easy to start projects, and a number of projects were started that never developed much content. (As somewhat of an analogy, of the approximately 1,000 tests currently in Incubator, 400 of those have fewer than 25 mainspace pages and no mainspace page creation since 1/1/2016.) It was felt better to have such projects developed at Incubator, where there was more oversight.
Current practice requires projects to reach a certain critical mass before they are moved to their own subdomains in the first place, making them much less likely to be tiny and neglected. Essentially, most projects currently that "tiny and neglected" are in Incubator, where they remain open.
  • In a related way, spambots riddled those small, sparsely edited projects with all kinds of junk. Project closures were intended in great measure to protect against that.
Currently, automatic protection against spambots is far more robust than it used to be, and that is backed up by the SWMT. So even wikis that are pretty small are no longer likely to need closure as protection against spambots and vandalism.
  • On the whole, the Language Committee's preference is to leave existing projects open, to make it easier to restore them to activity, for all the reasons you said above.
A possibility exists for a "soft closure"—see the recent Proposals for closing projects/Closure of Norwegian Wikinews 3. I expect that use of this outside Wikinews will be unusual; the reason to do something like this for Wikinews is that to have the front page of a news site have only old content is a bit embarrassing. But LangCom still prefers that to closure and locking.
To summarize, I really doubt there are closed and locked projects still out there with much content worth saving. If there are, let us know, and we will import that content to Incubator (or Old Wikisource or Beta Wikiversity), and the projects can be revived there. And at the same time, unless a currently existing project is subject to vandalism that cannot be prevented or reversed, you won't find many new project closures facing you. StevenJ81 (talk) 19:46, 4 December 2017 (UTC)
  • @StevenJ81: What I mean is, for example, if a user was looking for wikiproject of a language in Incubator with some amount of activity, then the user typed for example Pu Xian Wikipedia or Manchu Wikipedia in search engines would get directed to the language opening proposal somewhere on the Google front page, which would have link to their incubator site that could allow users to contribute. However, if you search e.g. marshallese language wikipedia insearch engine, then the first most relevant result that come up after a few pages of english wikipedia articles, would be a link to the project closure/deletion proposal discussion. On these discussion pages, there are some links to the original wikipedia site, however there are no direct mention to readers about the existence of an incubator wiki in either those proposals or on the locked w:mh site itself either. There are passing mention in both discussions about how it could/would/had work in incubator, and there is also a non-human-readable link to list of all pages for its test project in incubator, however readers will no be able to get the information that "it is possible for us to contribute to the development of the language's wikiproject by going to the incubator" by just reading these pages.
  • (Conclusion and tldr:) As such, I think, there could at least have some form of global notice, homepage banner announcement, and such, to tell readers of the closed site the message that they can contribute to the wiki by going to the incubator. C933103 (talk) 23:28, 4 December 2017 (UTC)
  • @C933103: Odd. I see them. Check each and every one of the following: mh:, wikt:mh:, b:ie:, b:ang:, q:tt:. I see notices on all. If you don't, check and make sure you haven't done something to suppress the display of banners, because I think these have been set up as banners to display on any page you open. StevenJ81 (talk) 17:34, 5 December 2017 (UTC)
    • @StevenJ81: I can see the banner on wikt:mh:, b:ie:, b:ang:, and q:tt:, however I can't see the banner on mh: in my current setting on the browser I am using. Not sure why is that, that is not blocked by adblocker as indicated in the display and that is not affected by any personal setting as I did not log in to the wiki (indicated by existence of the login button on the top right hand corner in the screenshot), and I don't have any memory about seeing it or disabling it before. On the other hand, the notice come up just fine in Incognito mode of the browser, and also in some other devices I have. I have checked the page's source code when the notice does not display, and the notice somehow exists in the webpage sourcecode. [2]. Not sure what's wrong here. C933103 (talk) 23:34, 5 December 2017 (UTC)
  • @C933103: I'm not sure, either. Truthfully, though, people do not hit these pages so very often, and I'm not inclined to spend a lot of time fussing to fix them. I'd recommend going to the page, bypassing your cache to see if that helps, and then in any event moving on. StevenJ81 (talk) 14:51, 6 December 2017 (UTC)
This section was archived on a request by:  — billinghurst sDrewth 21:03, 21 December 2017 (UTC)

idea

The new potential net neutrality rules could impact wikipedia badly, and so I ask, is the WMF going to do anything about it? Say add this code <script src="https://widget.battleforthenet.com/widget.js" async></script> to enwiki? 68.233.214.74 17:54, 4 December 2017 (UTC)

It have already been discussed in sections above. C933103 (talk) 03:02, 5 December 2017 (UTC)
This section was archived on a request by:  — billinghurst sDrewth 21:02, 21 December 2017 (UTC)

Wiki Club metapage

Currently, I am working on Education Outreach and coordinating in a Project of Srilankan University. So they University have created a Wiki Club in their University. Can we create a Wiki Club Page in meta for future works and objectives along with updates? Mohammed Galib Hasan (talk) 15:38, 5 December 2017 (UTC)

@Mohammed Galib Hasan: I reckon so, personally. That's what we've done with WikiClubWest. —Sam Wilson 05:39, 6 December 2017 (UTC)
@Samwilson: thanks for your reply. Need any permission or any paperwork there? or just create it simply like other page. Mohammed Galib Hasan (talk) 09:48, 6 December 2017 (UTC)
@Mohammed Galib Hasan: I don't think so. :-) Just create it, and link from where-ever else. Sam Wilson 23:51, 6 December 2017 (UTC)
@Samwilson: Thanks. Cheers! Mohammed Galib Hasan (talk) 06:45, 7 December 2017 (UTC)
This section was archived on a request by:  — billinghurst sDrewth 21:02, 21 December 2017 (UTC)

Transition to the Babel extension

Hello! I want to share a Russian Wikipedia's experience of a transition to the Babel extension. We completely abandoned the usage of individual templates for languages that are included in ISO standard. What did we do to achieve this?

Iniquity (talk) 08:20, 12 December 2017 (UTC)

This section was archived on a request by:  — billinghurst sDrewth 21:02, 21 December 2017 (UTC)

Changing the default skin

I noticed this new skin called "timeless" (preview). This looks a lot like wikiHow's and Wikia's skin, which looks so modern. Should we change the default skin to timeless so Wikimedia sites looks more modern? Ups and Downs (↕) Check my status before pinging or posting to my talk page! 03:51, 15 December 2017 (UTC)

That is a huge proposal. What is the benefit of Timeless over Vector? —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 04:10, 15 December 2017 (UTC)
Wouldn't this be a huge change? Changing the current skin radically might scare away editors like what happened with Wikia. --Donald Trung (Talk 🤳🏻) (My global lock 🔒) (My global unlock 🔓) 13:50, 15 December 2017 (UTC)
Not very modern in my eyes. I don't say Vector is modern. Stryn (talk) 14:12, 15 December 2017 (UTC)
  • Comment Comment Timeless is still in development, so is not available to be the default skin for Mediawiki wikis. The timeless is a continuing development project for the first half of 2018 to see if it will work for all sites. To follow its development please search phabricator: for the project timeless. At this stage it has been made available for those who wish to trial it and provide feedback of its issues.  — billinghurst sDrewth 14:54, 15 December 2017 (UTC)
    • This. We'll probably come back to the question of whether or not to even keep it deployed around June/July based on the results of the testing and development, and if results are positive enough we might consider a discussion about defaults or how to move forward with regards to that then, but this is quite premature now. -— Isarra ༆ 05:37, 17 December 2017 (UTC)
  • Please no. The worst thing is how Timeless randomly (and badly) restructures the page when using browser zoom +/-. There more, but I'll cite one bit that really jumps out. The red/blue/green bar is reminiscent of someone who gets their first free webhost page and they start throwing random colors/graphics/gimmicks across a page just because they can. On the plus side, I'm almost surprised that the Timeless skin manages not to throw random color-gradients anywhere. (One of the reasons I use Monobook skin is to get rid of the gradients in Vector.) Alsee (talk) 05:30, 16 December 2017 (UTC)

Finally, it would be good if the Wikimedia logos are redesigned to be flat (flat design looks good on newer OSes like iOS and Windows). However, the logo redesign is not required, and I see it would take lots of effort. Ups and Downs (↕) Check my status before pinging or posting to my talk page! 17:41, 16 December 2017 (UTC)

@UpsandDowns1234: This sort of feedback should be against the phabricator ticket as that sort of decision can be made for the skin, irrespective of whether it is default or not.  — billinghurst sDrewth 13:35, 17 December 2017 (UTC)

Support Support épater les bourgeois. Slowking4 (talk) 18:13, 21 December 2017 (UTC)

This section was archived on a request by:  — billinghurst sDrewth 21:00, 21 December 2017 (UTC)

Invitation to Blocking tools consultation

Hello,

The Wikimedia Foundation's Anti-Harassment Tools team invites all Wikimedians to discuss new blocking tools and improvements to existing blocking tools in December 2017 for development work in early 2018.

How you can help?

  1. Share your ideas on the discussion page or send an email to the Anti-Harassment Tools team.
  2. Spread the word that the consultation is happening; this is an important discussion for making decisions about improving the blocking tools.
  3. Help with translation.
  4. If you know of previous discussions about blocking tools that happened on your wiki, share the links.

We are looking forward to learning your ideas.

For the Anti-Harassment Tools team, SPoore (WMF) (talk) , Community Advocate, Community health initiative (talk) 23:28, 7 December 2017 (UTC)

Wikipedia Montenegrin

Does anyone know when Montenegrins will get their Wikipedia? Since Montenegro has received an international code for the Montenegrin language, so now Montenegrins are entitled to their Wikipedia. --Ookuninusi 21:45, 12 december 2017 (UTC)

I'll be honest: I have seen no source from outside Montenegro to confirm this. We act according to the official ISO 639 tables at SIL's website (http://www-01.sil.org/iso639-3/codes.asp) only, and until the code appears there, there can be no Montenegrin project. (And for what it's worth, the Montenegrin sources I saw seem to say that the advisory committee has recommended approval, not that a final approval has happened. New codes are usually approved in late January.)
Once this code has been approved, it will still be necessary for people to create and contribute to a Wikipedia test project on Incubator (at the presumed address incubator:Wp/cnr). Only once such a test project has been sufficiently developed can it be turned into a freestanding Wikipedia.
I think it would be provisionally acceptable to start the test now at Incubator. But if the code ends up not finally approved, then the test will be deleted. StevenJ81 (talk) 00:13, 13 December 2017 (UTC)

Russian translation of the mission statement

I've compared the Russian translation of foundation:Mission statement foundation:Миссия (contributed by User:Cbrown1023 and User:Kaganer) to the original and found that it diverges significantly. The full text of both below with difference highlighted:

Mission statement.

The mission of the Wikimedia Foundation is to empower and engage people around the world to collect and develop educational content under a free license or in the public domain, and to disseminate it effectively and globally.

In coordination with a network of individual volunteers and our independent movement organizations, including recognized Chapters, Thematic Organizations, User Groups, and Partners, the Foundation provides the essential infrastructure and an organizational framework for the support and development of multilingual wiki projects and other endeavors which serve this mission. The Foundation will make and keep useful information from its projects available on the Internet free of charge, in perpetuity.

Миссия.

Миссия Фонда Викимедиа заключается в расширении возможностей и привлечении людей со всего мира к сбору и развитию образовательных материалов (выдержанных в нейтральной точке зрения) под свободной лицензией или в общественном достоянии, а также в эффективном распространении их по всему миру.

В сотрудничестве с региональными организациями Викимедиа Фонд предоставляет инфраструктуру и организационные рамки, необходимые для поддержания и развития многоязычных вики-проектов и прочих начинаний, служащих этой миссии. Фонд сделает полезные материалы этих проектов свободно доступными в Интернете на безвозмездной основе и будет сохранять их такими в течение неограниченного срока.

So, the Russian text have two major differences: 1. There is an insertion of "(выдержанных в нейтральной точке зрения)" = "(content under a Neutral point of view)" in the first paragraph. 2. Instead of listing "a network of individual volunteers and our independent movement organizations, including recognized Chapters, Thematic Organizations, User Groups, and Partners," as entities to coordinate with Russian version lists only "Regional organizations of the Foundation" which probably corresponds to "recognized Chapters". Also there are some minor issue with wording (e.g. "organizational framework" could be translated as "организационные основы", not "рамки"). I propose to move the Russian translation closer to the original. --M5 (talk) 13:08, 13 December 2017 (UTC)

English source was updated in 2015-17. All translations is outdated. In my opinion, all translations should be removed from wmf:, and all links in the langbar should be leads to translated Mission page in Meta. --Kaganer (talk) 13:46, 13 December 2017 (UTC)
Agree. By the way English text in foundation:Mission statement and Mission differ too. --M5 (talk) 14:55, 13 December 2017 (UTC)

Logo request

Could anybody please tell me whom do I have to address to get the Wikipedia logo done? Kind regards, --Katxis (talk) 09:15, 15 December 2017 (UTC)

What do you mean? Logo already exist. Stryn (talk) 14:13, 15 December 2017 (UTC)
He needs to create a new logo for the new Lingua Franca Nova Wikipedia. I'll take care of him, Stryn. StevenJ81 (talk) 14:25, 15 December 2017 (UTC)
The traditional process is to start by adding your translations on User:Cbrown1023/Logos. --Nemo 15:43, 15 December 2017 (UTC)
Already done. StevenJ81 (talk) 17:48, 15 December 2017 (UTC)

Yet another newby question

To be honest, I don't know where else to post this question. My apologies (as a newby) if it's in the wrong place, but I've not been able to find a better one.

Based on my previous work experience in IT, organizational change management, communications, on-line community management, 'application portfolio management', 'Audience Analytics' and website design, my feeling is that I could perhaps contribute more to the movement in these areas than just by editing/translating individual 'content' pages. I could be completely wrong about this

I've posted some responses on relevant 'talk/discussion' pages. I understand the need to 'time-box' discussions on strategy, annual plans, projects, etc. As far as I can see there is no way that I can now contribute to 'time-boxed' discussions for which the 2017 deadlines have already passed. Most 'policy' or 'annual plan' pages that I've read don't have a discussion page. So as a newby, there doesn't seem to be an easy way of volunteering my contribution other than through 'content'. There are specific projects that I'm interested in contributing to, but many of these seem to have become inactive, abandoned or are focused on local geographies.

I'm happy to help out as best I can. I welcome any suggestions/comments as to how I can best use my experience and talents to support the movement. Either here or on my talk page. Mike (talk) 19:15, 1 December 2017 (UTC)

Hi @Mikemorrell49: it's great to see that you're interested in helping out the movement. See if you find the information you need at the Answers/Volunteer page. Also feel free to ask your questions in w:Wikipedia:teahouse where you might find experienced editors who might know the right place you're seeking. To say something about the missing discussion page, AFAIK I have never seen any page in any of the wikis which doesn't have a discussion/talk page. So, could you be more specific? (I've seen pages for which they haven't been created which should not be an issue as you can always create them). Some pages you might be interested in (which also have a discussion page) are Reports and Policies. There are also Annual Report and Policies page on the wikimediafoundation.org site which you can read. You can discuss about them on meta. Hope that helps. - - Kaartic correct me, if i'm wrong 16:33, 20 December 2017 (UTC)
@Kaartic and Mikemorrell49: Some "Special" pages don't have talk pages. But "Special" pages are themselves dynamic and automatically populated. In general, if you ever want to discuss how a "Special" page is built, you can usually use the forum or village pump of the wiki to discuss them. StevenJ81 (talk) 17:07, 20 December 2017 (UTC)

User group for Military Historians

Greetings,

"Military history" is one of the most important subjects when we speak of sum of all human knowledge. To support contributors interested in the area over various language Wikipedias, we intend to form a user group. It also provides a platform to share the best practices between military historians, and various military related projects on Wikipedias. An initial discussion was has been done between the coordinators and members of WikiProject Military History on English Wikipedia. Now this discussion has been taken to Meta-Wiki. Contributors intrested in the area of military history are requested to share their feedback and give suggestions at Talk:Discussion to incubate a user group for Wikipedia Military Historians.

Regards, Krishna Chaitanya Velaga (talk — mail) 11:26, 21 December 2017 (UTC)

Location of wikisource and wikimedia commons server.

Because of the United States non-acceptance of the rule of the shorter term, it seems like currently content that are not PD in the US but PD elsewhere might be not suitable to be host on commons or wikisource, among other projects. Since the two projects are apparently affected by the rule most, it's probably a good idea to move them away from the US first? Or alternatively, a region with shorter length of copyright protection so that the rule would no longer matter. C933103 (talk) 23:31, 3 December 2017 (UTC)

Am not sure that the rule of shorter term is so important to warrant moving any servers from USA. Ruslik (talk) 18:20, 4 December 2017 (UTC)
As an example, on English wikisource's homepage, the December featured content section, one of those featured text was actually hosted on a non-WMF wiki, explicitly due to the US copyright law. On Chinese wikisource, there are also instructions that recommend users to put content onto the non-WMF wiki instead of wikisource for content that are affected by the rule.C933103 (talk) 03:01, 5 December 2017 (UTC)
You should not forget that that there are a lot of content that can be hosted in USA but may not be hosted in other countries. Ruslik (talk) 19:06, 6 December 2017 (UTC)
What would be some examples of this type of content? And would it be technically possible to have server distributed in different countries and change document storage location according to needs? C933103 (talk) 23:25, 8 December 2017 (UTC)

Recently, on Chinese Wikipedia Village Pump, someone noted a 80000-entries dictionary have become PD in China and rest of the Chinese speaking area, and suggestion have been made to integrate that into Wikiprojects. However that is not possible with the current US copyright law and that wikimedia server follow US law.C933103 (talk) 02:09, 15 December 2017 (UTC)

C933103 - you could also institute an EDP "fair use" of the lesser term at zh:wikisource. en:wikisource has resisted an EDP. both en:wikipedia and zh:wikipedia have it, but are image focused [3]. see also Non-free content. Slowking4 (talk) 18:04, 21 December 2017 (UTC)
But how does that work to consider the total content of entire book to be "fair use" in EDP?C933103 (talk) 05:54, 22 December 2017 (UTC)

Wikidata request for comment on the ideal data import proccess

Dear all

We are currently running a discussion on Wikidata about what the ideal data import process looks like. We want to get the thoughts of people who work on different Wikimedia projects who have different needs and knowledge of different kinds of data to make it our roadmap as inclusive as possible, please take a look.

Many thanks

John Cummings (talk) 01:30, 25 December 2017 (UTC)

Module:

Good day!

I am abwiki administrator and want to change Russian version (Module:) "Модуль:" into Abkhazian "Амодуль:", like — Шаблон/Ашаблон. Please help me.--Surprizi (talk) 08:00, 9 December 2017 (UTC)

@Surprizi: Might be worth adding a request at Tech, and please do that with full wikilinks to the relevant templates and modules at each wiki. Without that clarity it is hard to understand exactly what it is that you want done. Most of us will not be familiar with the templates/modules to which you are referring.  — billinghurst sDrewth 00:13, 10 December 2017 (UTC)
Maybe the request is to change the way the namespace is translated into Abkhazian. Local community support would be necessary in the first place. Then a new task could be started on phabricator. --pegasovagante (✉) 12:36, 25 December 2017 (UTC)

Wikibooks

Can you help? Pi zero thinks i'm a block evader while i clearly stated that i'm trying to improve wikibooks (; 83.31.87.95 14:19, 27 December 2017 (UTC)

See here. --Atcovi (Talk - Contribs) 15:51, 27 December 2017 (UTC)

RfC approval question

There's an RfC about 2FA with majority of support or strong support votes. It's hanging there since April and it seems that nothing is gonna change there. Is there any policy to approve or close such RfC? --Rezonansowy (talk) 01:54, 23 December 2017 (UTC)

Main issue still pending here is whether the developers consider it feasible now. I'll look into it over the coming week. (Do keep in mind that people may be away some this week, so I make no promises as to just how quickly I can get an answer.) StevenJ81 (talk) 16:21, 24 December 2017 (UTC)
@Rezonansowy: I have a query in elsewhere to the team that works on 2FA. I hope we'll get an answer shortly. StevenJ81 (talk) 03:26, 28 December 2017 (UTC)
@StevenJ81: Thank you very much for handling this topic and staying with touch. Rezonansowy (talk) 03:49, 28 December 2017 (UTC)

Wikimuseum

New idea for new project. Please check Wikimuseum for more informations.--Felipe da Fonseca (talk) 11:44, 8 December 2017 (UTC)

I would also like to invite those who are interested and have technical knowledge to help me in the prototype being created at: pt:Usuário:Felipe da Fonseca/museum.--Felipe da Fonseca (talk) 21:35, 8 December 2017 (UTC)
What is (going to be) the difference between WikiArt and your proposal? Klaas `Z4␟` V:  20:18, 10 December 2017 (UTC)
IMO it might include objects other than works of art. I might be interested myself, though I am quite busy at the moment. On the other hand, we might ask the Commons community whether they would be willing to host the new pages for the time being; basically, they don't seem to be very different from c:Commons:Galleries. --pegasovagante (✉) 12:48, 25 December 2017 (UTC)
Oppose Oppose, this is what the Commons is. It is a bunch of non-art media arranged in a gallery like a museum. Ups and Downs (↕) 01:25, 30 December 2017 (UTC)
That depends on how much textual content is being envisioned. Commons galleries normally contain only the briefest of explanations (if any) and image captions; extended descriptions would be considered out of scope at present. OTOH this is not set in stone, Commons is already multilingual, and perhaps an additional namespace could be created for ‘exhibits’ with detailed explanations.—Odysseus1479 (talk) 23:45, 5 January 2018 (UTC)
@Felipe da Fonseca:↑ --pegasovagante (✉) 22:24, 17 January 2018 (UTC)

Pegasovagante is right, it's not just about art, but about any museum object, like fossils (but not just that, this Wikiart have, for example, no text.). Is not like Commons, the goal is not to create a file (which is the Commons), but to display the documents in an organized, beautiful and explanatory (text, links etc) way (what commons is not). But commons will be the file for the wikimuseum. Would it be a possibility to change the commons for this? Don't think so, Commons is ok like that, because is a file for many other wikis. I must add that the Wikimuseum will display photos from several angles of the same object in sequence, and perhaps in the future a 3d image. --Felipe da Fonseca (talk) 22:37, 17 January 2018 (UTC)

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