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GA Cup - September 2014 Newsletter[edit]

WikiProject Good Articles's 2014-15 GA Cup - September 2014

Welcome to the GA Cup! In less than 72 hours, the competition will begin! Before you all start reviewing nominations we want to make sure you understand the following:

  • This is a friendly competition so we don't want any cheating/breaking of the rules. However, if you do believe someone is going against the rules, notify the judges. All the rules are listed here.
  • If you are a new editor or new to reviewing Good article nominations, it is imperative that you read the 4 essays/guides listed under FAQ #4. If you do not understand something, ask a judge for clarification ASAP!
  • The competition is not entirely about who can review the most nominations. Per the "Scoring" page, there is different criteria in which you can earn more points. Theoretically, you could review 10 nominations and have 80 points but another user could have reviewed 5 nominations and have 100 points. Yes, we want you to review as many nominations as you can as this will greatly increase the number of points you earn, but you must also keep in mind that every single review will be looked over by a judge. If we find that you are "rubber-stamping" (in other words, the review is not complete but you still passed/failed the article) you may be disqualified without warning.

Also, rather than creating a long list on what to remember, make sure you have read the "Scoring", "Submissions", and "FAQ" pages.

Now for the one question that we guarantee you have: how on earth will the rounds work???

Yes, we never actually had a solid platform regarding how the rounds would work because we had no idea how many people would sign-up. Even though the competition is about to begin, because sign-ups are still open, it is impossible to say exactly how each round will work. As of now, we can confirm that Round 1 will have everyone compete in one big pool. Depending on the final number of participants after sign-ups close, a to-be-determined number of participants will move on (highest scorers will move on) to Round 2. We guarantee that the top 15 will move on, so make sure you aim for those top positions! Moving on to Round 2, participants will be split into pools of even numbers (for example, every pool will have 6 participants). The pools will be determined by a computer program that places participants by random. More details regarding Round 2 will be sent out at the end of Round 1.

It is important to note that the GA Cup will run on UTC time, so make sure you know what time that is for where you live! On that note, the GA Cup will start on October 1 at 0:00:01 UTC; Round 1 will end on October 29 at 23:59:59 UTC; Round 2 will commence on November 1 at 0:00:01 UTC. All reviews must be started after or on the start time of the round. If you qualify for Round 2 but do not complete a review before the end of Round 1, the review can be carried over to Round 2; however that review will not count for Round 1. Prior to the start of the the second round, participants who qualify to move on will be notified.

Finally, if you know anyone else that might be interesting in participating, let them know! Sign-ups close on October 15 so there is still plenty of time to join in on the action!

If you have any further questions, contact one of the judges or leave a message here.

On October 16 or 17, 2014, check the Pools page as we will post the exact number of participants that will move on to the next round. Because this number will be determined past the halfway mark of Round 1, we encourage you to aim to be in the top 15 as the top 15 at the end of the round are guaranteed to move on.

Cheers from NickGibson3900, Dom497, TheQ Editor and Figureskatingfan.

To subscribe or unsubscribe to future GA Cup newsletter, please add or remove your name to our mailing list. If you are a participant, you will be on the mailing list no matter what as this is the easiest way to communicate between all participants.

--MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 00:49, 28 September 2014 (UTC)[reply]

The Signpost: 24 September 2014[edit]

October 2014 Wikification Drive[edit]

This message was delivered on behalf of WikiProject Wikify. To stop receiving messages from WikiProject Wikify, remove your name from the recipients page. -- MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 16:09, 29 September 2014 (UTC)[reply]

The Signpost: 01 October 2014[edit]

VisualEditor newsletter—September and October 2014[edit]

Did you know?

TemplateData is a separate program that organizes information about the parameters that can be used in a template. VisualEditor reads that data, and uses it to populate its simplified template dialogs.

With the new TemplateData editor, it is easier to add information about parameters, because the ones you need to use are pre-loaded.

See the help page for TemplateData for more information about adding TemplateData. The user guide has information about how to use VisualEditor.

Since the last newsletter, the Editing team has reduced technical debt, simplified some workflows for template and citation editing, made major progress on Internet Explorer support, and fixed over 125 bugs and requests. Several performance improvements were made, especially to the system around re-using references and reference lists. Weekly updates are posted on Mediawiki.org.

There were three issues that required urgent fixes: a deployment error that meant that many buttons didn't work correctly (bugs 69856 and 69864), a problem with edit conflicts that left the editor with nowhere to go (bug 69150), and a problem in Internet Explorer 11 that caused replaced some categories with a link to the system message, MediaWiki:Badtitletext (bug 70894) when you saved. The developers apologize for the disruption, and thank the people who reported these problems quickly.

Increased support for devices and browsers[edit]

Internet Explorer 10 and 11 users now have access to VisualEditor. This means that about 5% of Wikimedia's users will now get an "Edit" tab alongside the existing "Edit source" tab. Support for Internet Explorer 9 is planned for the future.

Tablet users browsing the site's mobile mode now have the option of using a mobile-specific form of VisualEditor. More editing tools, and availability of VisualEditor on smartphones, is planned for the future. The mobile version of VisualEditor was tweaked to show the context menu for citations instead of basic references (bug 68897). A bug that broke the editor in iOS was corrected and released early (bug 68949). For mobile tablet users, three bugs related to scrolling were fixed (bug 66697, bug 68828, bug 69630). You can use VisualEditor on the mobile version of Wikipedia from your tablet by clicking on the cog in the top-right when editing a page and choosing which editor to use.

TemplateData editor[edit]

A tool for editing TemplateData will be deployed to more Wikipedias soon. Other Wikipedias and some other projects may receive access next month. This tool makes it easier to add TemplateData to the template's documentation. When the tool is enabled, it will add a button above every editing window for a template (including documentation subpages). To use it, edit the template or a subpage, and then click the "Edit template data" button at the top. Read the help page for TemplateData. You can test the TemplateData editor in a sandbox at Mediawiki.org. Remember that TemplateData should be placed either on a documentation subpage or on the template page itself. Only one block of TemplateData will be used per template.

Other changes[edit]

Several interface messages and labels were changed to be simpler, clearer, or shorter, based on feedback from translators and editors. The formatting of dialogs was changed, and more changes to the appearance will be coming soon, when VisualEditor implements the new MediaWiki theme from Design. (A preview of the theme is available on Labs for developers.) The team also made some improvements for users of the Monobook skin that improved the size of text in toolbars and fixed selections that overlapped menus.

VisualEditor-MediaWiki now supplies the mw-redirect or mw-disambig class on links to redirects and disambiguation pages, so that user gadgets that colour in these in types of links can be created.

Templates' fields can be marked as 'required' in TemplateData. If a parameter is marked as required, then you cannot delete that field when you add a new template or edit an existing one (bug 60358).

Language support improved by making annotations use bi-directional isolation (so they display correctly with cursoring behaviour as expected) and by fixing a bug that crashed VisualEditor when trying to edit a page with a dir attribute but no lang set (bug 69955).

Looking ahead[edit]

The team posts details about planned work on the VisualEditor roadmap. The VisualEditor team plans to add auto-fill features for citations soon, perhaps in late October.

The team is also working on support for adding rows and columns to tables, and early work for this may appear within the month. Please comment on the design at Mediawiki.org.

In the future, real-time collaborative editing may be possible in VisualEditor. Some early preparatory work for this was recently done.

Supporting your wiki[edit]

At Wikimania, several developers gave presentations about VisualEditor. A translation sprint focused on improving access to VisualEditor was supported by many people. Deryck Chan was the top translator. Special honors also go to संजीव कुमार (Sanjeev Kumar), Robby, Takot, Bachounda, Bjankuloski06 and Ата. A summary of the work achieved by the translation community has been posted here. Thank you all for your work.

VisualEditor can be made available to most non-Wikipedia projects. If your community would like to test VisualEditor, please contact product manager James Forrester or file an enhancement request in Bugzilla.

Please join the office hours on Saturday, 18 October 2014 at 18:00 UTC (daytime for the Americas; evening for Africa and Europe) and on Wednesday, 19 November at 16:00 UTC on IRC.

Give feedback on VisualEditor at mw:VisualEditor/Feedback. Subscribe or unsubscribe at Meta. To help with translations, please subscribe to the Translators mailing list or contact Elitre at Meta. Thank you!

— Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 00:10, 8 October 2014 (UTC)[reply]

The Signpost: 08 October 2014[edit]

GA Cup -Round 1 Newsletter[edit]

WikiProject Good Articles's 2014-15 GA Cup - Round 1

As we move into the middle of Round 1, we wanted to report some of the lessons we've learned thus far, as well as announce a major rule change going into Round 2, which begins November 1. Remember, sign-ups for this year's Cup ends on September 15.

Thus far, we're very happy with the results of the competition. One of our major goals, reducing the long backlog at GAN, is well on the way to being accomplished, mostly due to the enthusiastic efforts of Jonas Vinther, who has earned over 250 points. Over 80 reviews have been made thus far. Thank you all for your efforts and for your part in making the GA Cup a success.

However, this is the inaugural year of the GA Cup, so there have been some unforeseen circumstances that have come up. One has been a glaring inadequacy with the rules, which the judges feel makes the competition unfair. As a result, there will be a major change in the rules, starting at the beginning of Round 2:

  • Your review must provide feedback/suggestions for improvement, and then you must wait until the nominator has responded and all issues/suggestions have been resolved before you can pass the article. Failure to follow this rule will result in disqualification.

What this means is that you must provide some feedback to the article's nominator, and must wait for him or her to respond before passing the article. If the nominator has not responded in the standard 7 days, you can fail the article. We're instituting this rule change to prevent the possibility of competitors passing articles for the sake of passing articles (or failing them) and to gain more points. We believe that the change will make it more fair to all competitors in the GA Cup.

Also, in case you haven't noticed, we increased the "guarantee" for Round 2 to 25 participants. The exact number will be decided in the near future.

We thank your for your participation, and for your flexibility and understanding as we learn what works and what doesn't work in this competition.

Cheers from NickGibson3900, Dom497, TheQ Editor and Figureskatingfan.

To subscribe or unsubscribe to future GA Cup newsletter, please add or remove your name to our mailing list. If you are a participant, you will be on the mailing list no matter what as this is the easiest way to communicate between all participants.

--MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 14:26, 12 October 2014 (UTC)[reply]

GA Cup Newsletter Correction[edit]

Hi everyone,

It was brought to the attention of the judges that there was an error in the newsletter sent out earlier today.

Sign-ups for the GA Cup will close on October 15, 2014, not September 15, 2014 (as mentioned in the newsletter).

Sorry for any confusion.

Cheers from NickGibson3900, Dom497, TheQ Editor and Figureskatingfan.

--MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 00:03, 13 October 2014 (UTC)[reply]

GA Cup - Round 1 Newsletter #2[edit]

WikiProject Good Articles's 2014-15 GA Cup - Round 1

Hello GA Cup competitors!

The judges have learned a great deal in this first part of the competition, and we appreciate your patience with us as we've figured out what works and what doesn't work. As we reported in our last newsletter, an inadequacy in the scoring system has been illuminated in the past 15 days, which has resulted in a major change in the rules. It has also resulted in one withdrawal.

To ensure fairness, we've decided to further increase the number of participants moving onto Round 2. Everyone who has reviewed at least one article will automatically be moved forward, and will be placed in pools. You have until October 29 to take advantage of this opportunity. It is our hope that this will make up for the unforeseen glitch in our scoring system.

Best of wishes to all of you as you continue to help improve articles and make Wikipedia a better place.

Cheers from NickGibson3900, Dom497, TheQ Editor and Figureskatingfan.

To subscribe or unsubscribe to future GA Cup newsletter, please add or remove your name to our mailing list. If you are a participant, you will be on the mailing list no matter what as this is the easiest way to communicate between all participants.

--MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 19:03, 15 October 2014 (UTC)[reply]

The Signpost: 15 October 2014[edit]

WikiProject Eurovision Newsletter - Issue 42[edit]

Project Euroision News: Issue 42
Brief headlines
Repeated policy breaking and several other issues are causing great concerns within the project.
A few active debates taking place across the project that require urgent attention and participation from many members.
At the time of publication the project statistics were as follows
Number of articles Good articles A-class articles Feature articles Require improvements Number of members
5509 227 25 1 0 0 4 2 2332 17 80 5

You may now unsubscribe from receiving Project Eurovision News, whilst still maintaining membership within the project itself. To unsubscribe, click here.

This newsletter was delivered by MediaWiki message delivery (talk), on behalf of Wesley Mouse 08:37, 20 October 2014 (UTC)[reply]

The Signpost: 22 October 2014[edit]

The Signpost: 29 October 2014[edit]

Happy Halloween!!![edit]

 Wilhelmina Will has given you some caramel and a candy apple! Caramel and candy-coated apples are fun Halloween treats, and promote WikiLove on Halloween. Hopefully these have made your Halloween (and the proceeding days) much sweeter. Happy Halloween!

'"On Psych, A USA Network TV series Episode 8, The Tao of Gus, Season 6, Shawn refers to pumpkins as "Halloween Apples" because he thinks all round fruits are a type of apple.


If Trick-or-treaters come your way, add {{subst:Halloween apples}} to their talkpage with a spoooooky message!


Cheers! "We could read for-EVER; reading round the wiki!" (talk) 17:39, 31 October 2014 (UTC)[reply]

GA Cup - Round 2[edit]

WikiProject Good Articles's 2014-15 GA Cup - Round 2

Greetings, GA Cup competitors!

Wednesday saw the end of Round 1. Jaguar took out Round 1 with an amazing score of 238. In a tight race for second, Peacemaker67 and Ritchie333 finished second and third with 152 and 141 points, respectively.

Two users have scored the maximum five bonus points for article length (60,000 characters+). Anotherclown reviewed Spanish conquest of Yucatán (77,350 characters) and MrWooHoo reviewed Communist Party of China (76,740 characters). The longest review was by Bilorv who reviewed Caldas da Rainha. The review was approximately 22,400 characters which earned s/he two bonus points (20, 000 - 29, 999 characters).

In Round 1, 117 reviews were completed, making the first round of the GA Cup a success! A total of 86 articles were removed from the backlog during the month of October! We hope to see all remaining users fighting it out in Round 2 so we can lower the backlog as much as possible.

To qualify for the second round, one completed review was needed, which 28 users accomplished. Participants have been randomly put into 7 pools of 4; the top 2 in each pool will move onto Round 3. There will also be one wildcard. This means that the participant who comes in 15th place (all pools combined) will also move on. Round 2 will start on November 1 at 0:00:01 UTC and end on November 29 at 23:59:59 UTC. Information about Round 2 and the pools can be found here

Also, remember that a major rule change will go into affect starting on November 1, which marks the beginning of Round Two. Round 1 displayed a weakness in the rules, which we are correcting with this new rule. We believe that this change will make the competition more inherently fair. The new rule is: Your review must provide feedback/suggestions for improvement, and then you must wait until the nominator has responded and all issues/suggestions have been resolved before you can pass the article. Failure to follow this rule will result in disqualification. The judges will strictly enforce this new rule.

Good luck and remember to have fun!

Cheers from NickGibson3900, Dom497, TheQ Editor and Figureskatingfan.

To subscribe or unsubscribe to future GA Cup newsletter, please add or remove your name to our mailing list. If you are a participant still competing, you will be on the mailing list no matter what as this is the easiest way to communicate between all participants.

--MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 20:04, 31 October 2014 (UTC)[reply]

VisualEditor newsletter—November 2014[edit]

Screenshot on an iPad, showing how to switch from one editor to the other
Did you know?

VisualEditor is also available on the mobile version of Wikipedia. Login and click the pencil icon to open the page you want to edit. Click on the gear-shaped settings in the upper-right corner, to pick which editor to use. Choose "Edit" to use VisualEditor, or "Edit source" to use the wikitext editor.

It will remember whether you used wikitext or VisualEditor, and use the same editor the next time you edit an article.

The user guide has information about how to use VisualEditor. Not all features are available in Mobile Web.

Since the last newsletter, the Editing Team has fixed many bugs and requests, and worked on support for editing tables and for using non-Latin languages. Their weekly updates are posted on Mediawiki.org. Informal notes from the recent quarterly review were posted on Meta.

Recent improvements[edit]

The French Wikipedia should see better search results for links, templates, and media because the new search engine was turned on for everyone there. This change is expected at the Chinese and German Wikipedias next week, and eventually at the English Wikipedia.

The "pawn" system has been mostly replaced. Bugs in this system sometimes added a chess pawn character to wikitext. The replacement provides better support for non-Latin languages, with full support hopefully coming soon.

VisualEditor is now provided to editors who use Internet Explorer 10 or 11 on desktop and mobile devices. Internet Explorer 9 is not supported yet.

The keyboard shortcuts for items in the toolbar's menus are now shown in the menus. VisualEditor will replace the existing design with a new theme from the User Experience / Design group. The appearance of dialogs has already changed in one Mobile version. The appearance on desktops will change soon. (You can see a developer preview of the old "Apex" design and the new "MediaWiki" theme which will replace it.)

Several bugs were fixed for internal and external links. Improvements to MediaWiki's search solved an annoying problem: If you searched for the full name of the page or file that you wanted to link, sometimes the search program could not find the page. A link inside a template, to a local page that does not exist, will now show red, exactly as it does when reading the page. Due to a error, for about two weeks this also affected all external links inside templates. Opening an auto-numbered link node like [1] with the keyboard used to open the wrong link tool. These problems have all been fixed.

TemplateData[edit]

The tool for quickly editing TemplateData will be deployed to all Wikimedia Foundation wikis on Thursday, 6 November. This tool is already available on the biggest 40 Wikipedias, and now all wikis will have access to it. This tool makes it easier to add TemplateData to the template's documentation. When the tool is enabled, it will add a button above every editing window for a template (including documentation subpages). To use it, edit the template or a subpage, and then click the "Edit template data" button at the top. Read the help page for TemplateData. You can test the TemplateData editor in a sandbox at Mediawiki.org. Remember that TemplateData should be placed either on a documentation subpage or on the template page itself. Only one block of TemplateData will be used per template.

You can use the new autovalue setting to pre-load a value into a template. This can be used to substitute dates, as in this example, or to add the most common response for that parameter. The autovalue can be easily overridden by the editor, by typing something else in the field.

In TemplateData, you may define a parameter as "required". The template dialog in VisualEditor will warn editors if they leave a "required" parameter empty, and they will not be able to delete that parameter. If the template can function without this parameter, then please mark it as "suggested" or "optional" in TemplateData instead.

Looking ahead[edit]

Basic support for inserting tables and changing the number of rows and columns in tables will appear next Wednesday. Advanced features, like dragging columns to different places, will be possible later. The VisualEditor team plans to add auto-fill features for citations soon. To help editors find the most important items more quickly, some items in the toolbar menus will be hidden behind a "More" item, such as "underlining" in the styling menu. The appearance of the media search dialog will improve, to make picking between possible images easier and more visual. The team posts details about planned work on the VisualEditor roadmap.

The user guide will be updated soon to add information about editing tables. The translations for most languages except Spanish, French, and Dutch are significantly out of date. Please help complete the current translations for users who speak your language. Talk to us if you need help exporting the translated guide to your wiki.

You can influence VisualEditor's design. Tell the VisualEditor team what you want changed during the office hours via IRC. The next sessions are on Wednesday, 19 November at 16:00 UTC and on Wednesday 7 January 2015 at 22:00 UTC. You can also share your ideas at mw:VisualEditor/Feedback.

Also, user experience researcher Abbey Ripstra is looking for editors to show her how they edit Wikipedia. Please sign up for the research program if you would like to hear about opportunities.

If you would like to help with translations of this newsletter, please subscribe to the Translators mailing list or contact us directly, so that we can notify you when the next issue is ready. Subscribe or unsubscribe at Wikipedia:VisualEditor/Newsletter. Thank you!

— Whatamidoing (WMF) 20:41, 6 November 2014 (UTC)[reply]

The Signpost: 05 November 2014[edit]

WikiProject Eurovision Newsletter - Issue 43[edit]

→ Issue 43 ←
Headlines
Quality as standard: a few Eurovision articles have been nominated for FA status and one is promoted to GA.
Let Junior Eurovision battle commence!
Project membership breaks through the 100 barrier.
At the time of publication the project statistics were as follows
Number of articles Good articles A-class articles Feature articles Number of members
5590 81 20 5 1 1 4 0 109 29

• HOME • TALK • PORTAL • NEWSDESK • UNSUBSCRIBE • ARCHIVES •
• Published by the Eurovision WikiProject •

This newsletter was delivered by MediaWiki message delivery (talk), on behalf of Wesley Mouse 13:05, 12 November 2014 (UTC)[reply]

The Signpost: 12 November 2014[edit]

Copyright checks when performing AfC reviews[edit]

Hello JordanKyser22. This message is part of a mass mailing to people who appear active in reviewing articles for creation submissions. First of all, thank you for taking part in this important work! I'm sorry this message is a form letter – it really was the only way I could think of to covey the issue economically. Of course, this also means that I have not looked to see whether the matter is applicable to you in particular.

The issue is in rather large numbers of copyright violations ("copyvios") making their way through AfC reviews without being detected (even when easy to check, and even when hallmarks of copyvios in the text that should have invited a check, were glaring). A second issue is the correct method of dealing with them when discovered.

If you don't do so already, I'd like to ask for your to help with this problem by taking on the practice of performing a copyvio check as the first step in any AfC review. The most basic method is to simply copy a unique but small portion of text from the draft body and run it through a search engine in quotation marks. Trying this from two different paragraphs is recommended. (If you have any question about whether the text was copied from the draft, rather than the other way around (a "backwards copyvio"), the Wayback Machine is very useful for sussing that out.)

If you do find a copyright violation, please do not decline the draft on that basis. Copyright violations need to be dealt with immediately as they may harm those whose content is being used and expose Wikipedia to potential legal liability. If the draft is substantially a copyvio, and there's no non-infringing version to revert to, please mark the page for speedy deletion right away using {{db-g12|url=URL of source}}. If there is an assertion of permission, please replace the draft article's content with {{subst:copyvio|url=URL of source}}.

Some of the more obvious indicia of a copyvio are use of the first person ("we/our/us..."), phrases like "this site", or apparent artifacts of content written for somewhere else ("top", "go to top", "next page", "click here", use of smartquotes, etc.); inappropriate tone of voice, such as an overly informal tone or a very slanted marketing voice with weasel words; including intellectual property symbols (™,®); and blocks of text being added all at once in a finished form with no misspellings or other errors.

I hope this message finds you well and thanks again you for your efforts in this area. Best regards--Fuhghettaboutit (talk) 02:20, 18 November 2014 (UTC).[reply]

       Sent via--MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 02:20, 18 November 2014 (UTC)[reply]

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