User talk:TheSandDoctor/Archives/2023/July

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Administrators' newsletter – July 2023

News and updates for administrators from the past month (June 2023).

Administrator changes

Novem Linguae

Bureaucrat changes

MBisanz

Guideline and policy news

Contributions to the English Wikipedia are now released under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC BY-SA 4.0) license instead of CC BY-SA 3.0. Contributions are still also released under the GFDL license.

Technical news

Discussion is open regarding a proposed global policy regarding third-party resources. Third-party resources are computer resources that reside outside of Wikimedia production websites.

Arbitration

Two arbitration cases are currently open. Proposed decisions are expected 5 July 2023 for the Scottywong case and 9 July 2023 for the AlisonW case.

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 12:59, 1 July 2023 (UTC)

Tech News: 2023-27

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

As part of the rolling out of the audio links that play on click wishlist proposal, small wikis will now be able to use the inline audio player that is implemented by the Phonos extension. [1]
From this week all gadgets automatically load on mobile and desktop sites. If you see any problems with gadgets on your wikis, please adjust the gadget options in your gadget definitions file. [2]

Changes later this week

The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 4 July. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 5 July. It will be on all wikis from 6 July (calendar).

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

MediaWiki message delivery 22:49, 3 July 2023 (UTC)

Sock investigation

Hey TheSandDoctor

Do sockpuppet investigations not mean anything anymore?

I posted this 15 days ago:

Wikipedia:Sockpuppet investigations/Arjun19990012

Will this get looked at before I die?

(141.132.22.19 (talk) 08:07, 10 July 2023 (UTC))

Tech News: 2023-28

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

The Section-level Image Suggestions feature has been deployed on seven Wikipedias (Portuguese, Russian, Indonesian, Catalan, Hungarian, Finnish and Norwegian Bokmål). The feature recommends images for articles on contributors' watchlists that are a good match for individual sections of those articles.
Global abuse filters have been enabled on all Wikimedia projects, except English and Japanese Wikipedias (who opted out). This change was made following a global request for comments. [3]
Special:BlockedExternalDomains is a new tool for administrators to help fight spam. It provides a clearer interface for blocking plain domains (and their subdomains), is more easily searchable, and is faster for the software to process for each edit on the wiki. It does not support regex (for complex cases), nor URL path-matching, nor the MediaWiki:Spam-whitelist, but otherwise it replaces most of the functionalities of the existing MediaWiki:Spam-blacklist. There is a Python script to help migrate all simple domains into this tool, and more feature details, within the tool's documentation. It is available at all wikis except for Meta-wiki, Commons, and Wikidata. [4]
The WikiEditor extension was updated. It includes some of the most frequently used features of wikitext editing. In the past, many of its messages could only be translated by administrators, but now all regular translators on translatewiki can translate them. Please check the state of WikiEditor localization into your language, and if the "Completion" for your language shows anything less than 100%, please complete the translation. See a more detailed explanation.

Changes later this week

The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 11 July. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 12 July. It will be on all wikis from 13 July (calendar).
The default protocol of Special:LinkSearch and API counterparts has changed from http to both http and https. [5]
Special:LinkSearch and its API counterparts will now search for all of the URL provided in the query. It used to be only the first 60 characters. This feature was requested fifteen years ago. [6]

Future changes

There is an experiment with a ChatGPT plugin. This is to show users where the information is coming from when they read information from Wikipedia. It has been tested by Wikimedia Foundation staff and other Wikimedians. Soon all ChatGPT plugin users can use the Wikipedia plugin. This is the same plugin which was mentioned in Tech News 2023/20. [7]
There is an ongoing discussion on a proposed Third-party resources policy. The proposal will impact the use of third-party resources in gadgets and userscripts. Based on the ideas received so far, policy includes some of the risks related to user scripts and gadgets loading third-party resources, some best practices and exemption requirements such as code transparency and inspectability. Your feedback and suggestions are warmly welcome until July 17, 2023 on on the policy talk page.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

MediaWiki message delivery 19:52, 10 July 2023 (UTC)

Feedback request: All RFCs request for comment

Your feedback is requested at Wikipedia:Reliable sources/Noticeboard on a "All RFCs" request for comment. Thank you for helping out!
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Tech News: 2023-29

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

We are now serving 1% of all global user traffic from Kubernetes (you can read more technical details). We are planning to increment this percentage regularly. You can follow the progress of this work.

Changes later this week

The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 18 July. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 19 July. It will be on all wikis from 20 July (calendar).
MediaWiki system messages will now look for available local fallbacks, instead of always using the default fallback defined by software. This means wikis no longer need to override each language on the fallback chain separately. For example, English Wikipedia doesn't have to create en-ca and en-gb subpages with a transclusion of the base pages anymore. This makes it easier to maintain local overrides. [8]
The action=growthsetmentorstatus API will be deprecated with the new MediaWiki version. Bots or scripts calling that API should use the action=growthmanagementorlist API now. [9]

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

MediaWiki message delivery 23:06, 17 July 2023 (UTC)

Tech News: 2023-30

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

On July 18, the Wikimedia Foundation launched a survey about the technical decision making process for people who do technical work that relies on software that is maintained by the Foundation or affiliates. If this applies to you, please take part in the survey. The survey will be open for three weeks, until August 7. You can find more information in the announcement e-mail on wikitech-l.

Changes later this week

The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 25 July. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 26 July. It will be on all wikis from 27 July (calendar).

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

MediaWiki message delivery 02:19, 25 July 2023 (UTC)

Question from Man In M1A1 (08:43, 27 July 2023)

Hi, how to create a new Wikipedia page for a specific thing like about a ship profile? --Man In M1A1 (talk) 08:43, 27 July 2023 (UTC)

Small error with TheSandBot edit

With this edit the bot replaced the closing > of an html comment and replaced it with three new lines (c.f. the corresponding edit to the archive page). I have fixed the mistake, but have not investigated to see if it is a one-off. Thryduulf (talk) 00:43, 25 July 2023 (UTC)

Thanks for the heads up, @Thryduulf:. I looked into its edits today for this task and this does, thankfully, appear to have been a one-off. Looking through its last two runs for this task (which were, admittedly, last year), I don't think it has ever run into a line with a comment like that before, so it might've been a bug inherited from Ronhjones' day.

My first instinct was to think that perhaps it was because this was its first run with Python 3 (so a change in how the language functioned) as Ronhjones had written it all in Python 2. However, I am honestly doubting that and rather confused given that it encountered the same thing...and did it perfectly at Wikipedia:Editing restrictions/Archive/Placed by the Wikipedia community today. (I didn't want to upgrade it to Python 3 but 2 has been abandoned and my installation broke on the old laptop it ran off of and, once I addressed that, then the laptop decided it didn't want to run it as anything but Python 3...so I converted it using the built-in utility "2to3" to avoid further headache; functionally it appears to behave the same as before, which was something I paid close attention to for the first couple edits.)

I run it periodically and will now keep a close eye on all edits for this task to see if this was a fluke or a larger problem. Normally I do glance over the edits for this specific task -- and did here -- but evidently this one now needs closer attention. Thank you once again for the heads up, it is greatly appreciated! TheSandDoctor ^Talk 03:17, 25 July 2023 (UTC)

I've now logged the issue on the task's GitHub. --TheSandDoctor ^Talk 03:30, 25 July 2023 (UTC)

I don't know if it's relevant, but in the edit the bot got wrong the comment is between two fully independent rows, while in the edit the bot got right the comment is in the middle of a block that starts with a cell spanning multiple rows. (Yes, this has been bugging me!) Thryduulf (talk) 09:53, 28 July 2023 (UTC)