This page is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page.
Nominations now open for "Military historian of the year" and "Military history newcomer of the year" awards
A request for comment is in progress to determine whether members of the Bot Approvals Group should satisfy activity requirements in order to remain in that role.
A request for comment is in progress regarding whether to change the administrator inactivity policy, such that administrators "who have made no logged administrative actions for at least 12 months may be desysopped". Currently, the policy states that administrators "who have made neither edits nor administrative actions for at least 12 months may be desysopped".
Administrators and bureaucrats can no longer unblock themselves unless they placed the block initially. This change has been implemented globally. See also this ongoing village pump discussion (permalink).
To complement the aforementioned change, blocked administrators will soon have the ability to block the administrator that placed their block to mitigate the possibility of a compromised administrator account blocking all other active administrators.
In late November, an attacker compromised multiple accounts, including at least four administrator accounts, and used them to vandalize Wikipedia. If you have ever used your current password on any other website, you should change it immediately. Sharing the same password across multiple websites makes your account vulnerable, especially if your password was used on a website that suffered a data breach. As these incidents have shown, these concerns are not pure fantasies.
Shock Brigade Harvester Boris (Raymond Arritt) passed away on 14 November 2018. Boris joined Wikipedia as Raymond arritt on 8 May 2006 and was an administrator from 30 July 2007 to 2 June 2008.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
Admins will not be able to unblock themselves if they are blocked by someone other than themselves. This is because it can cause damage if someone else takes over an admin account and other admins can't block them. If this is a problem for your community you can report it on Phabricator. You can also ask questions on Meta. There is a discussion on Phabricator about how to solve this if two admins fight with each other on a small wiki. [1]
You can go to a section from the edit summary by clicking on the section name. Before this you had to click on the arrow. [3]
When you jumped to a footnote that was referenced several times in an article it could be difficult to see where you were in the text. Now there are jump marks and highlights to help you find your way back. [4][5]
I run a bot that clears Category:Unsynchronized talk page redirects and your bot's moves are populating that category so fast that I ramped up the speed at which my bot edits so that it could catch up. Mostly it just takes null edits to clear pages there but there are some that either the bot fixes or are left for me to manually fix (e.g. whenever a talk page must be moved to sync with its article or if an article has no talk and one needs to be created – usually I just throw up a WikiProject tag, and done. Anyhow appreciate it if you could pause while my bot catches up (I think you're paused at the moment). Thanks. wbm1058 (talk) 00:39, 30 November 2018 (UTC)
@Wbm1058: Sure! I hadn't fed it the new dataset yet (was just going to when I saw this), so it won't be running. Ping me when it's done, okay? --TheSandDoctorTalk 02:30, 30 November 2018 (UTC)
It appears that only 32 are present? I won't restart it at the moment, but when you have caught up (the cat is empty or you ping), I will restart okay? About 85% of my set to go through (done ~4-5k, approx 35k total) --TheSandDoctorTalk 02:32, 30 November 2018 (UTC)
OK, it's cleared out now. There were over 1,000 there a while ago. Those last 32 I manually made edits to clear them out. My bot clears most of them, but the exceptions need manual processing, or to wait longer for another double-redirwect fixing bot maybe. Anyhow I guess ready for the next onslaught. Probably best if you do them in batches, rather than all in one run. wbm1058 (talk) 03:18, 30 November 2018 (UTC)
@Wbm1058 and Number 57: Started a run again. It is working in batches (can see lists here) and will be over halfway done by the end of this one. There are, however, around 8000 pages in its current batch. I can't view User:Number 57/Elections/Standard titles for some reason, but aside from (possibly) that (whatever it may be, can't check as it crashes), this current one is the largest left (is currently running on User:Number 57/Elections/American sub-articles). I can kill the task at any time (per request), or you yourself can by going to User:TheSandBot/status and changing the "true" beside "election_converter" to "false" (case sensitive, other changes will break page/has to be JSON safe). --TheSandDoctorTalk 17:23, 4 December 2018 (UTC)
@Wbm1058 and Number 57: Scratch that. Task paused. Database went read-only. Will restart in a bit. --TheSandDoctorTalk 17:26, 4 December 2018 (UTC)
Internal error
FYI. Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)#Internal error. How is your bot handling moves over redirects? Does it have admin privileges, or does it do page-mover swaps (I hope not the latter; that's a kludge to be avoided for mass-moves like this, in my opinion). wbm1058 (talk) 15:13, 30 November 2018 (UTC)
@Wbm1058 and Number 57: The bot isn't moving over redirects and is not an adminbot. --TheSandDoctorTalk 17:02, 30 November 2018 (UTC)
Election changes
Status
What's the status of the big election article name changing, please? —GoldRingChip 14:11, 4 December 2018 (UTC)
@GoldRingChip: Responded on Number 57's talk page a few minutes ago, but basically I was asked above to slow down to give another bot time to catch up. I did that, but then got bogged down with some big final projects to complete and a nasty bug...at the same time. Will try and get it up and running again today. --TheSandDoctorTalk 16:49, 4 December 2018 (UTC)
Is this still in progress? I see that some General elections in New Zealand have been done, but not the most recent ones, at least. Nurg (talk) 04:41, 8 December 2018 (UTC)
@Nurg: The bot has completed its run through the lists, moving over 45k. It did, however, miss some. Once the General list is broken up we can fully assess what is left to be moved and I will probably attempt another run on those at that time. That said, I am not around much until the 13th (PST) due to finals. --TheSandDoctorTalk 05:05, 8 December 2018 (UTC)
Templates
What about templates? Hayholt (talk) 17:34, 4 December 2018 (UTC)
@Hayholt: The bot does not touch templates. Number 57 has stated previously that he will take care of updating them. In the meantime, no links are broken. --TheSandDoctorTalk 17:53, 4 December 2018 (UTC)
Subject: Lists of UK top ten singles and albums pages
Hello, TheSandDoctor. This is 1996Larry here. I was wondering if you and some other users could edit these pages and include sources in them. Wikipedia has a policy of challanging and removing unsourced material from its pages.
@1996Larry: I am confused as to why you are asking this? Why don't you fix them yourself? Are you afraid that adding reliable sources/citations would get you blocked? If so, that is the exact opposite. Please also see what 331dotleft on your talk page. --TheSandDoctorTalk 23:40, 8 December 2018 (UTC)
Reply: TheSandDoctor, the UK top ten single and album pages are usually created/edited by another user called 03md. He hasn't edited them in a while, so if he's back editing these pages, you could assist him in editing them, as he also got a warning recently about adding unsourced material, just like myself. - 1996Larry --— Preceding unsigned comment added by 1996Larry (talk • contribs) 07:15, 9 December 2018 (UTC)
@1996Larry: I am in the same boat as 331dot I am afraid. As for 03md being recently warned about the addition of unsourced material, I can find no such warning on User talk:03md? Where did you see the warning directed at 03md? The best way to avoid such warnings is to source your edits. Considering that you are on WP:SECONDCHANCE in relation to the addition of unsourced content, I would strongly recommend (reliably) sourcing your edits to articles and updating the article yourself. If you wish to edit it in your sandbox and have someone look it over first, I imagine that would be okay as well, so long as you copied the minimum necessary for your update (ie a specific section). I would also recommend looking at Help:Signature to learn how to properly sign your messages on talk pages. --TheSandDoctorTalk 07:27, 9 December 2018 (UTC)
Reply: TheSandDoctor, I wouldn't risk editing the pages without anyone's help. It wasn't me who started those pages, it was 03md. - 1996Larry — Preceding unsigned comment added by 1996Larry (talk • contribs)
Looks like you're running a bot that helps with renaming pages. Tehse bulk renames really do a number on navigation boxes because the boxes now link (completely!) to redirects. That breaks the context of the box, and is probably a little confuising for users, too. I think that good automation makes less work for people (and not more), so I'm wondering if you'd consider enhancing your bot to take care of the issues it creates when performing renames. -- Mikeblas (talk) 13:20, 9 December 2018 (UTC)
@Mikeblas: As mentioned in one of the sections above, I'm cleaning up all the navboxes, which will take a few days. However, if you are going to edit the templates in the meantime, it would be helpful if you could fix all of the links rather than just some of them. Cheers, Number57 17:12, 9 December 2018 (UTC)
@Number 57: I'm doing my best! In some cases, the redirects weren't renamed, so they end up as red links. And, sometimes, life calls and I can't quite finish in one swat. Sounds like you're more comfortable working on it alone, so I'll leave you to it. -- Mikeblas (talk) 17:24, 9 December 2018 (UTC)
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 11 December. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 12 December. It will be on all wikis from 13 December (calendar).
Meetings
You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 12 December at 16:00 (UTC). See how to join.
Future changes
New accounts will need passwords that are at least 8 characters long. Admins, interface admins, bureaucrats, oversighters, CentralNotice admins, global renamers, check users, stewards and some other user groups will need passwords that are at least 10 characters long. This is because an attacker could cause damage to the wikis if they took over these accounts. [6][7]
When you hover over a footnote it will show you the reference as a pop-up. This is so you don't have to jump down to the bottom of the page to see a reference. This will happen in 2019. Some wikis already have gadgets that do this. You will be able to turn it off. [8]
Howdy. So it looks like some of the conversions that you and I did broke some of the song pages. See this diff for example. [[Category:Music infoboxes with Module:String errors{{!}}S]]<strong class="error">String Module Error: Match not found</strong> got introduced a number of times. NOT pointing fingers!!! I did this a bunch as well. But, if you have some time and feel like helping clean up I'd sure appreciate it. There were about 400 of them, I've got it down to 300 now. heres a search that shows them all. Any help would be appreciated. --Zackmann (Talk to me/What I been doing) 23:18, 8 December 2018 (UTC)
@Zackmann08: I was working to undo it. I'm a bit confused here? Special:Diff/872749421. Sorry if I am missing something. I am quite busy between now and Wednesday (inclusive) as I have finals coming up. --TheSandDoctorTalk 23:35, 8 December 2018 (UTC)
My point was to try and fix them... Not to just revert the change. See this diff. You don't have to do them nevermind. --Zackmann (Talk to me/What I been doing) 23:37, 8 December 2018 (UTC)
@Zackmann08: Sorry for the confusion. I have done about half a dozen. If there are any left by Wednesday night or Thursday, I will deal with them more in depth. I am sorry that I cannot be of much use before then, but I seriously have to get back to my studies. --TheSandDoctorTalk 23:56, 8 December 2018 (UTC)
No apologies necessary!! School and the real world come first, ALWAYS. --Zackmann (Talk to me/What I been doing) 00:09, 9 December 2018 (UTC)
@Zackmann08: I think they went fine, but ultimately I won't know until some point between now and January. Thanks for asking! How many do you think you left in that cat? --TheSandDoctorTalk 17:34, 13 December 2018 (UTC)
I'm sure you did great! Don't stress. I'm showing 82 pages left: [9]. I've just been comparing the before and after diffs and manually fixing the pages. For example: [10]. If you have some time that'd be awesome. If not no worries! --Zackmann (Talk to me/What I been doing) 17:50, 13 December 2018 (UTC)
Thanks Zackmann08. I will take a look at them in a bit. Still waking up . --TheSandDoctorTalk 17:54, 13 December 2018 (UTC)
An editor has asked for a discussion to address the redirect 2012 World Twenty20 Stadiums. Since you had some involvement with the 2012 World Twenty20 Stadiums redirect, you might want to participate in the redirect discussion if you have not already done so. Stefan2 (talk) 21:08, 14 December 2018 (UTC)
NPR Newsletter No.16 15 December 2018
Hello TheSandDoctor/Archives/2018,
Reviewer of the Year
This year's award for the Reviewer of the Year goes to Onel5969. Around on Wikipedia since 2011, their staggering number of 26,554reviews over the past twelve months makes them, together with an additional total of 275,285edits, one of Wikipedia's most prolific users.
Thanks are also extended for their work to JTtheOG (15,059 reviews), Boleyn (12,760reviews), Cwmhiraeth (9,001reviews), Semmendinger (8,440reviews), PRehse (8,092reviews), Arthistorian1977 (5,306reviews), Abishe (4,153 reviews), Barkeep49 (4,016reviews), and Elmidae (3,615reviews). Cwmhiraeth, Semmendinger, Barkeep49, and Elmidae have been New Page Reviewers for less than a year — Barkeep49 for only sevenmonths, while Boleyn, with an edit count of 250,000 since she joined Wikipedia in 2008, has been a bastion of New Page Patrol for many years.
The backlog is now approaching 5,000, and still rising. There are around 640holders of the NPR flag, most of whom appear to be inactive. The 10% of the reviewers who do 90% of the work could do with some support especially as some of them are now taking a well deserved break.
Really good news - NPR wins the Community Wishlist Survey 2019
At #1 position, the Community Wishlist poll closed on 3December with a resounding success for NPP, reminding the WMF and the volunteer communities just how critical NPP is to maintaining a clean encyclopedia and the need for improved tools to do it. A big 'thank you' to everyone who supported the NPP proposals. See the results.
Training video
Due to a number of changes having been made to the feed since this three-minutevideo was created, we have been asked by the WMF for feedback on the video with a view to getting it brought up to date to reflect the new features of the system. Please leave your comments here, particularly mentioning how helpful you find it for new reviewers.
If you wish to opt-out of future mailings, go here.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Tech News
Because of the holidays the next issue of Tech News will be sent out on 7 January 2019.
Recent changes
Some templates that show notices about the content of the page will now be shown on the mobile website. In many cases they were hidden before. [11][12]
Admins can no longer unblock themselves, except for self-blocks. A blocked admin can block the user who blocked them but no one else. This is so no one can block all admins on a wiki without being stopped. [13]
The ParserMigration extension has been removed. It compared the result of two versions of the MediaWiki wikitext parsing pipeline. It was used when we moved to the Remex parsing library instead of Tidy.
Problems
<ref> tags can use parameters such as "name" or "group". For example <ref name="adams" group="books">. If a <ref> tag has more than two parameters all parameters are ignored. You don't get a warning that they don't work. This will soon be fixed. [14]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 18 December. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 19 December. It will be on all wikis from 20 December (calendar).
Meetings
You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 19 December at 16:00 (UTC). See how to join.
Future changes
The Wikimedia Foundation Android app team are working on making it easier to edit on mobile phones. You can read more about these plans. If you have an Android phone and speak at least two languages you can help testing in English. Tell Dchen (WMF) you want to be part of the testing by writing on her talk page or email her.
tiles.wmflabs.org and wma.wmflabs.org will stop working. They have no maintainers and run an old operating system. Tools which use it could stop working. This includes the mapnik gadget, hill shading, and hike and bike layers. New maintainers could help out and keep it going. [15]
Hi TheSandDoctor, I was wondering if you could grant me Page mover rights in order to rename my sandbox? Thanks! --Az1568 (talk) 05:41, 18 December 2018 (UTC)
Thank you! --Az1568 (talk) 06:04, 18 December 2018 (UTC)
Can you please block me for 1 year ?
I do not have that much time(for at least a year) to edit Wikipedia but i can't stop me from editing. I even enforced a wiki break using the enforcer(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Eatcha/common.js) but as you can see i am still able to login. Eatcha (talk) 18:55, 23 December 2018 (UTC)
@Eatcha: It appears that I was beaten to it. If at any point you change your mind, please feel free to email me or ping me on your talk page and I will unblock you. --All the best & happy holidays, TheSandDoctorTalk 00:40, 24 December 2018 (UTC)
Merry Christmas !!!
Merry Christmas everybody!!!
"And the angel said unto them, Fear not: for, behold,
I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people.
For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord."
Spread the cheer by adding {{Subst:Xmas4}} to their talk page with a friendly message.
@CAPTAIN RAJU: Thank you! I am going to be sending those around myself tomorrow morning (PST) probably. --TheSandDoctorTalk 00:40, 24 December 2018 (UTC)
Happy Holidays!
Happy Holidays!
May your winter holidays be filled with joy, laughter and good health. Wishing you all the best in 2019 and beyond.
Just wanted to say a huge thanks for TheSandBot's huge piece of work moving the election articles - it seems to have gone extremely well! Number57 15:58, 8 December 2018 (UTC)
Thank you for this Number 57! Please let me know if you ever need more help in the future (outside of this currently ongoing task, which of course I shall continue, I mean) --TheSandDoctorTalk 23:42, 8 December 2018 (UTC)
Sort of related to the current task, but do you think your bot could help with this? Cheers, Number57 12:33, 10 December 2018 (UTC)
@Number 57: Looks like it was resolved. I seriously am now officially unavailable until Thursday basically, so I am glad to hear someone else is dealing with it. --TheSandDoctorTalk 19:20, 10 December 2018 (UTC)
Request on 11:54:56, 24 December 2018 for assistance on AfC submission by Harix786
Please help me to make a wiki page for my organization my page was rejected because they said that "the page seems to be unambiguous advertising which only promotes a company, group, product, service, person, or point of view and would need to be fundamentally rewritten in order to become encyclopedic"
[REDACTED - TSD]
below is my last submission on wikipedia please help me to resubmit a valid wiki page with valid information.
Haris Naeem 11:54, 24 December 2018 (UTC)
@Harix786: There is no need to copy and paste for two reasons: 1. talk pages are not where drafts/articles go and 2. administrators can view most deleted pages indefinitely.
The reason that it was deleted was provided both at the link where it used to exist (copied below) and implied on your talk page twice.
10:21, 24 December 2018 TheSandDoctor (talk | contribs) deleted page Draft:VinePk (G11: Unambiguous advertising or promotion (TW))
It was written as an unambiguous advertisement and also implied that you have a conflict of interest. Based on this, I would, in the strongest possible terms, recommend that you do not write this yourself and instead request an article be written by a neutral third party on the relevant subpage (follow directions at that link). If you insist on writing this yourself, the next step depends on whether or not you are being paid to write this and/or promote the company. If you are being paid, then you mustdeclare your conflict of interest when writing it. If you are not, then you are strongly encouraged to do the same. Regardless, articles must be notable (backed up by independent reliable sources), written from a neutral point of view, and not be advertisements. I would recommend reading WP:YFA and What Wikipedia is Not before attempting to make any more articles. --TheSandDoctorTalk 18:29, 24 December 2018 (UTC)
Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year
Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year
Hi TheSandDoctor/Archives/2018, I wish you and your family a very Merry Christmas and a very Happy and Prosperous New Year, Thanks for all your help and thanks for all your contributions to the 'pedia,
Thank you Davey! I am just about heading off for the evening as it is just after midnight here, will be handing out more of these in the morning --TheSandDoctorTalk 08:24, 25 December 2018 (UTC)
Merry Christmas and a Prosperous 2019!
Merry Christmas and a Prosperous 2019!
Hello TheSandDoctor, may you be surrounded by peace, success and happiness on this seasonal occasion. Spread the WikiLove by wishing another user a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year, whether it be someone you have had disagreements with in the past, a good friend, or just some random person. Sending you heartfelt and warm greetings for Christmas and New Year 2019. Happy editing, Walk Like an Egyptian (talk) 08:31, 25 December 2018 (UTC)
This greeting (and season) promotes WikiLove and hopefully this note has made your day a little better. Spread the WikiLove by wishing another user a Merry Christmas, whether it be someone you have had disagreements with in the past, a good friend, or just some random person. Happy New Year!
Spread the Christmas cheer by adding {{subst:Xmas3}} to their talk page with a friendly message.
Merry Christmas and happy new year! I was happy to see you have a successful RfA during 2018. I hope you will edit more happily in 2019 Hhkohh (talk) 12:09, 25 December 2018 (UTC)
Merry Christmas to you as well Hhkohh, and thank you. Rest assured, I have no plans of going anywhere. --TheSandDoctorTalk 18:15, 25 December 2018 (UTC)
Thank you Bzuk! Merry Christmas to you as well . --TheSandDoctorTalk 18:15, 25 December 2018 (UTC)
Greetings !
Hello TheSandDoctor: Enjoy the holiday season, and thanks for your work to maintain, improve and expand Wikipedia. Cheers, ---Wikaviani (talk)(contribs) 19:07, 25 December 2018 (UTC)
Congrats on your appointment to the elite force of global renamers. I know you totally didn't eat all the pies...hell, you don't even like pies...but I'm just gonna leave this one here as a token of celebration, because WikiLove doesn't have a "poutine" option. (Is that an offensive stereotype?) Regards, Swarm {talk} 07:55, 28 December 2018 (UTC)
@Swarm: Of course not! Pies aren't totally something I would eat every meal if I could. How preposterous! . I actually dislike poutine. It is honestly more of a French Canadian thing (I am very English Canadian if there is such a thing). also, thank you for the WikiLove. --TheSandDoctorTalk 20:03, 28 December 2018 (UTC)
But the template is in develop mode still, and not in use (not in article space), so not "highly visible". Discussion (including postponement of introduction) is at {{Chembox}} (talk). Please remove the protection. Once fit for live usage, the protection will be appropriate. -DePiep (talk) 01:05, 29 December 2018 (UTC)
@DePiep: Done Lowered to autoconfirmed. Ping/request further protection when necessary. --TheSandDoctorTalk 04:26, 29 December 2018 (UTC)
Administrator changes
Al Ameer son • Randykitty • Spartaz
Boson • Daniel J. Leivick • Efe • Esanchez7587 • Fred Bauder • Garzo • Martijn Hoekstra • Orangemike
Interface administrator changes
Guideline and policy news
Technical news
Arbitration
Miscellaneous
Obituaries
You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 5 December at 16:00 (UTC) and at 23:00 (UTC). See how to join.
In progress on User:Number 57/Elections/American sub-articles. --TheSandDoctor Talk 17:06, 4 December 2018 (UTC)
. I will take a look at them in a bit. Still waking up 
. --TheSandDoctor Talk 17:54, 13 December 2018 (UTC)
Done 
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--TheSandDoctor Talk 08:24, 25 December 2018 (UTC)
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