In case you're not following on-wiki - Office S&T blocked English Wikipedia
user / administrator Fram for a year and desysopped, for unspecified
reasons in the Office purview. There was a brief statement here from
Office regarding it which gave no details other than that normal policy and
procedures for Office actions were followed, which under normal
circumstances preclude public comments.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Bureaucrats%27_noticeboard#User:Fra…
Several people on Arbcom and board have commented they're making private
inquiries under normal reporting and communication channels, due to the
oddity and essentially uniqueness of the action.
There was an initial surge of dismay which has mellowed IMHO into "Ok,
responsible people following up".
I understand the sensitivity of some of the topics under Office actions,
having done OTRS and other various had-to-stay-private stuff myself at
times in the past. A high profile investigation target is most unusual but
not unheard of.
I did send email to Fram earlier today asking if they had any public
comment, no reply as yet.
--
-george william herbert
george.herbert(a)gmail.com
Forwarding news that may be of interest.
Pine
( https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Pine )
---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: Léa Lacroix <lea.lacroix(a)wikimedia.de>
Date: Thu, Mar 14, 2019 at 8:05 PM
Subject: [Wikidata] New data type: musical notation with Lilypond format
To: Discussion list for the Wikidata project. <wikidata(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
Hello all,
Following a request from community members, we just deployed a new data
type called “Musical Notation” in order to store musical notation in
Wikidata. Property creators can now find this new data type in the list and
create new properties with it.
A property with musical notation data type will display the notation in
Lilypond <https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q195946> format, using the score
extension <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Score>.
For example, if you enter this code as a value: \relative c' { c d e f | g2
g | a4 a a a | g1 |}, it will be displayed as a score:
[image: Screenshot musical notation Wikidata 1.png]
<https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Screenshot_musical_notation_Wikidat…>
The score also appears on the diff pages.
[image: Screenshot musical notation Wikidata 2.png]
<https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Screenshot_musical_notation_Wikidat…>
The existing property LilyPond notation (P5482)
<https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Property:P5482> is used on around 300 items
<https://www.wikidata.org/w/index.php?title=Special%3AWhatLinksHere&target=P…>.
If you need any help from the developers to change the datatype of the the
property or to migrate the content, please let me know.
One bug is already known and we’re working on fixing it: if the score is
long, it gets out of the statement box and overlaps with the edit button.
If you encounter any issue, feel free to create a subtask of this ticket
<https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T208489>.
Cheers,
--
Léa Lacroix
Project Manager Community Communication for Wikidata
Wikimedia Deutschland e.V.
Tempelhofer Ufer 23-24
10963 Berlin
www.wikimedia.de
Wikimedia Deutschland - Gesellschaft zur Förderung Freien Wissens e. V.
Eingetragen im Vereinsregister des Amtsgerichts Berlin-Charlottenburg unter
der Nummer 23855 Nz. Als gemeinnützig anerkannt durch das Finanzamt für
Körperschaften I Berlin, Steuernummer 27/029/42207.
_______________________________________________
Wikidata mailing list
Wikidata(a)lists.wikimedia.org
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikidata
Forwarding.
Pine
( https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Pine )
---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: Leila Zia <leila(a)wikimedia.org>
Date: Wed, Mar 6, 2019 at 9:13 PM
Subject: [Wikimedia-l] How diverse are your readers?
To: Wikimedia Mailing List <wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
Hi all,
As I mentioned in an earlier thread [1], we will be running reader
surveys across a number of Wikipedia languages to learn about the
reader needs and motivations in these languages as well as some of
their demographic information (and perhaps the correlations between
demographics and user motivations and characteristics).
If your language community is interested to have statistics on the
distribution of reader gender, age, education, native language, and
geographic region (rural/urban) in your language (and depending on how
much data we collect in your language, perhaps more insights), this is
your chance to indicate interest at:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research_talk:Characterizing_Wikipedia_Read…
I initially communicated 2019-02-15 as the deadline to sign up. Since
then, we have run a pilot test on enwiki and we are investigating some
of the results to see if any changes in the survey questions are
needed. You have now time until 2019-03-15 to indicate interest.
As always: this call is primarily a service to your language
community. If you like it, take action on it. If you don't, no action
is needed. :)
Best,
Leila
[1]
https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimedia-l/2019-February/091762.html
_______________________________________________
Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l
New messages to: Wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l,
<mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe>
Hi,
I don't usually forward Search Platform meeting announcements to project
lists, but I'll do so this month while I'm thinking about it. If you're
interested in future meeting announcements and other news from the Search
Platform team then you can subscribe to the Discovery email list at
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/discovery.
Pine
( https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Pine )
---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: Trey Jones <tjones(a)wikimedia.org>
Date: Tue, Mar 5, 2019 at 7:58 PM
Subject: Re: [Wikitech-l] Upcoming Search Platform Office Hours—March 6th
To: Wikimedia developers <wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
This is a reminder that the Search Platform Office Hours are tomorrow!
On Wed, Feb 27, 2019 at 11:34 AM Trey Jones <tjones(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
> The Search Platform Team
> <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Search_Platform> usually holds
> office hours the first Wednesday of each month. Come ask us anything about
> Wikimedia search!
>
>
> We’re particularly interested in:
>
> * Opportunities for collaboration—internally or externally to the
> Wikimedia Foundation
>
> * Challenges you have with on-wiki search, in any of the languages we
> support
>
>
> But we're happy to talk about anything search-related. Feel free to add
> your items to the Etherpad Agenda for the next meeting.
>
>
> Details for our next meeting:
>
> Date: Wednesday, March 6th, 2018
>
> Time: 16:00-17:00 GMT / 08:00-9:00 PST / 11:00-12:00 EST / 17:00-18:00 CET
>
> Etherpad: https://etherpad.wikimedia.org/p/Search_Platform_Office_Hours
>
> Google Meet link: https://meet.google.com/vyc-jvgq-dww
>
>
> *N.B.:* Google Meet System Requirements
> <https://support.google.com/meet/answer/7317473>
>
>
> Trey Jones
> Sr. Software Engineer, Search Platform
> Wikimedia Foundation
>
_______________________________________________
Wikitech-l mailing list
Wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
I think that this tech talk might be of interest to content contributors on
some of the projects, including English Wikipedia where there has been much
discussion though the years regarding VisualEditor and related topics.
Pine
( https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Pine )
---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: Sarah R <srodlund(a)wikimedia.org>
Date: Mon, Feb 25, 2019 at 5:17 PM
Subject: [Wikitech-l] [Wikimedia Tech Talks] New Season Begins: February
27, 2019 at 19:00 UTC
To: <wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
I'm excited to announce the return of *Wikimedia Tech Talks!* Tech talks
are short presentations by and for members of the technical community. Tech
talks are intended to create better understanding about technical topics
related to our projects.
*The next Wikimedia Tech Talk, The long and winding road to making Parsoid
the default MediaWiki parser
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Tech_talks#Upcoming_tech_talks> by Subbu
Sastry, Principal Software Engineer, will be live-streamed Wednesday,
February 27, 2019 at 19:00 UTC*
Summary:
This will be a talk in 3 (unequal) parts: (a) Parsoid history (b) Porting
Parsoid to PHP: the whys and wherefores (c) From here to Parsoid as the
default.
Parsoid started in 2012 as a project to support Visual Editing and since
then has gone on to support a number of products (Flow, Content
Translation, Kiwix, and Android app). Given that (a) Parsoid's annotated
HTML output enables clients to infer things about wikitext without having
to parse wikitext, (b) the PHP parser cannot support Visual Editor and
other products, and (c) we cannot continue to have two parsers, it is
inevitable that Parsoid will be the default parser for MediaWiki. This has
been known since at least 2015 but while we are nearer to that goalpost, we
are still not quite there yet. In this talk, we'll talk about what else
needs to be completed, and what the porting of Parsoid to PHP means for
this goal.
YouTube stream for viewers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lQGfuLP9MqA
During the live talk, you are invited to join the discussion on IRC at
#wikimedia-office
You can watch past Tech Talks here:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Tech_talks
If you are interested in giving your own tech talk, you can learn more
here:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Project:Calendar/How_to_schedule_an_event#Te…
As always, feel free to reach out to me with any questions!
Kindly,
Sarah R. Rodlund
Technical Writer, Developer Advocacy
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Developer_Advocacy>
srodlund(a)wikimedia.org
_______________________________________________
Wikitech-l mailing list
Wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Español: Estoy enviar un correo electrónico de Investigación-l que puede
ser de interés para las personas que se suscriben a las listas de correo de
Wikipedia.
English: I am forwarding an email from Research-l that may be of interest
to people who subscribe to Wikipedia mailing lists.
Pine
( https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Pine )
---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: Leila Zia <leila(a)wikimedia.org>
Date: Fri, Jan 18, 2019, 4:15 PM
Subject: [Wiki-research-l] Why the world reads Wikipedia: beyond English
To: Research into Wikimedia content and communities <
wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
Hi all,
As some of you know, we started a line of research back in 2016 to
understand Wikipedia readers better. We published the first taxonomy
of Wikipedia readers and we studied and characterized the reader types
in English Wikipedia [1]. During the past 1+ year, we focused on
learning about the potential differences of Wikipedia readers across
languages based on the taxonomy built in [1]. We've learned a lot, and
today we're sharing what we learnt with you.
Some pointers:
* Publication: https://arxiv.org/abs/1812.00474
* Data:
https://figshare.com/articles/Why_the_World_Reads_Wikipedia/7579937/1
* (under continuous improvement) Research page on meta:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Characterizing_Wikipedia_Reader_Be…
* Research showcase presentation:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Research/Showcase#December_2018
* A series of presentations to WMF teams and community: Look for tasks
under https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T201699 with title "Present
the results of WtWRW" for link to slides and more info when available.
* We will send out a blog post about it hopefully soon. A blog post
about the intermediate results is at
https://wikimediafoundation.org/2018/03/15/why-the-world-reads-wikipedia/
In a nutshell:
* We ran the taxonomy of Wikipedia readers in 14 languages and
measured the prevalence of Wikipedia use-cases and characterized
Wikipedia readers in these languages.
* While we observe similarities in terms of the prevalence of the use
cases as well as the way we can characterize readers, we can see that
Wikipedia languages lend themselves to different distributions of
readership and characteristics. In many cases, the one-size-fit-all
solutions may simply not work for readers.
* Intrinsic learning remains as the number one motivation for people
to come to Wikipedia in the majority of the languages, followed by
media.
* In-depth reading and the reading of scientific oriented topics is
highly and negatively correlated with the socio-economic status and
Human Development Index of countries the readers in these languages
are coming from. Long articles that may seem just too long for the
bulk of our audience in US, Japan, and the Netherlands is in high
demand in India, Bolivia, Argentina, Panamá, México, …
* ...
This research was not possible without the extensive contributions by
our formal collaborators: Florian Lemmerich (RWTH Aachen University)
and Bob West (EPFL). On the WMF end, I was fortunate to work with
Diego Saez on this project as well as more recently, Isaac Johnson.
And all those in the Reading Web and Legal team who supported us
throughout the process. I also want to underline the amazing work that
the volunteers in the languages in the study did to support us heavily
to learn more about their languages, not only through help with
communications within their communities but also with the translation
task which was not an easy one as they were asked to offer their time
not only to translate but also do in-person meetings with us for us to
make sure the intent of the question is translated the same way across
the languages. Usernames Strainu, Tgr, Amire80, Awossink, Antanana,
Lyzzy, Shangkuanlc, Whym, Kaganer, عباد_ديرانية, Satdeep_Gill, Racso,
Hasive: Thank you!
Next we are going to extend this study to include demographics
information. More information about it coming out in the next few
weeks. (And I will send out a separate email to wikimedia-l about this
topic and future research over the weekend. I need some time to
finalize the message to make the message most useful for that
audience.:)
Best,
Leila
[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/1702.05379
--
Leila Zia
Senior Research Scientist, Lead
Wikimedia Foundation
_______________________________________________
Wiki-research-l mailing list
Wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
Forwarding good news to the Wikipedia-l and WikiEN-l lists. I am guessing
that this tool may be of interest to Wikipedians who contribute in diverse
languages.
Thanks for your work, Johanna and the WMDE Technical Wishes Team.
Pine
( https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Pine )
---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: Johanna Strodt via Commons-l <commons-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
Date: Mon, Jan 14, 2019, 4:04 AM
Subject: [Commons-l] Coming soon to all wikis: beta feature FileExporter
To: <commons-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
// sorry for cross-posting
The FileExporter will soon be released as a beta feature to all wikis. The
planned deployment date is January 16.
Some background: Files from local wikis should be transferred to Wikimedia
Commons if their license allows it. This way, they can be used by all
wikis. But if you wanted to import a local file to Commons in the past, you
couldn’t properly transfer its file and page history. It was a wish from a
survey of the German-speaking communities to find a solution to this
problem.
Now, the FileExporter makes it possible to import a file from a local wiki
to Wikimedia Commons, while keeping its history intact. A first version has
already been a beta feature on a few first wikis since June 2018. [1] Since
then, bugs were fixed and features were added.
If you’re interested in importing local files, please give the feature a
try. Even though it’s a beta feature, you can use it for real file
imports. Please
note that in order to get started, you need to
1.
activate the beta feature “FileExporter” on your wiki [2], and
2.
make sure your wiki has a proper configuration file. Configuration files
are maintained by each wiki's community. They define, among other
things, whether a file can be exported. Exports from wikis without a
configuration file are blocked. Find more more information in the
documentation. [3]
We’re looking forward to your feedback on the central feedback page! [4] A
big thanks to everyone who gave feedback so far.
If you wish to learn more about the project, have a look at the page of the
wish. [5]
For the Technical Wishes team,
Johanna
[1] deployment plan:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WMDE_Technical_Wishes/Move_files_to_Commons…
[2] go to Preferences > Beta features, e.g.
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-betafeat…
[3] documentation on configuration files:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WMDE_Technical_Wishes/Move_files_to_Commons…
[4] central feedback page:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help_talk:Extension:FileImporter
[5] project page:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WMDE_Technical_Wishes/Move_files_to_Commons
Johanna Strodt Project Manager Community Communications Technical Wishlist,
Wikimedia Deutschland
_______________________________________________
Commons-l mailing list
Commons-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/commons-l
Hi Janna,
I am forwarding this announcement to the Wikipenia and ENWP mailing lists.
The presentation looks interesting to me.
Do you know which Wikipedia language edition(s) the author studied for this
research?
Pine
( https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Pine )
On Thu, Jan 10, 2019, 10:49 AM Janna Layton <> wrote:
> Hello, everyone,
>
> The next Research Showcase, *Understanding participation in Wikipedia*,
> will be live-streamed next Wednesday, January 16, at 11:30 AM PST/19:30
> UTC. This presentation is about new editors.
>
> YouTube stream: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fc51jE_KNTc
>
> As usual, you can join the conversation on IRC at #wikimedia-research. You
> can also watch our past research showcases here:
> https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Research/Showcase
>
> This month's presentation:
>
> *Understanding participation in Wikipedia: Studies on the relationship
> between new editors’ motivations and activity*
>
> By Martina Balestra, New York University
>
> Peer production communities like Wikipedia often struggle to retain
> contributors beyond their initial engagement. Theory suggests this may be
> related to their levels of motivation, though prior studies either center
> on contributors’ activity or use cross-sectional survey methods, and
> overlook accompanied changes in motivation. In this talk, I will present a
> series of studies aimed at filling this gap. We begin by looking at how
> Wikipedia editors’ early motivations influence the activities that they
> come to engage in, and how these motivations change over the first three
> months of participation in Wikipedia. We then look at the relationship
> between editing activity and intrinsic motivation specifically over time.
> We find that new editors’ early motivations are predictive of their future
> activity, but that these motivations tend to change with time. Moreover,
> newcomers’ intrinsic motivation is reinforced by the amount of activity
> they engage in over time: editors who had a high level of intrinsic
> motivation entered a virtuous cycle where the more they edited the more
> motivated they became, whereas those who initially had low intrinsic
> motivation entered a vicious cycle. Our findings shed new light on the
> importance of early experiences and reveal that the relationship between
> motivation and activity is more complex than previously understood.
>
> --
> Janna Layton
> Administrative Assistant - Audiences & Technology
> Wikimedia Foundation <https://wikimediafoundation.org/>
> _______________________________________________
> Analytics mailing list
> Analytics(a)lists.wikimedia.org
> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/analytics
>
Perhaps of interest to others. The use cases for partial blocks with which
I'm most familiar are on ENWP, which is why I'm including the ENWP and
Wikipedia mailing lists in this forward.
Pine
( https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Pine )
---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: Alex Ezell <aezell(a)wikimedia.org>
Date: Fri, Nov 2, 2018 at 7:58 PM
Subject: [Wikitech-l] Changes to User Blocking
To: <wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
Hi all,
I'm Alex Ezell and I'm the Engineering Manager for the Anti-Harassment
Tools team at the WMF. I have some details about user blocking that I'd
like to share.
*tl:dr;*
On a wiki with the new Partial Blocks enabled (currently only testwiki), if
the code is checking User::isBlocked() to determine edit rights, it should
instead check User::isBlockedFrom( Title ). The code could also check
isBlocked()
&& $block->isSitewide(). If it doesn’t, the code may block users that
shouldn’t be blocked.
*More details:*
Recently, the Anti-Harassment Tools team merged code to enable a new
feature called Partial Blocks. This feature lets admins block users from
editing particular pages instead of only being able to block users from the
entire site. It is currently enabled on testwiki.
This means that there are now multiple types of blocks (and more to come in
the future, ie namespace blocks). The specific new types are “partial” as
opposed to “sitewide” and some non-editing types of blocks (send email,
edit talk page, etc.) Previously, a developer could assume that if a user
was “blocked” that meant the user couldn’t do much of anything because that
was a “sitewide” block and the only kind of block. Now, there are more
cases to be concerned about.
Specifically, we’ve seen some extensions using User::isBlocked() and then
assuming that a user can’t edit the particular page that the extension
might be concerned with. User::isBlockedFrom( Title ) with a Title object
will be the more correct way to check because of the possibility that a
user might not be blocked from that particular page. If the code isn’t
concerned with editing, it would be appropriate to use User::isAllowed()
which will determine blocked status by way of User::getRights().
There is also a new method Block::isSitewide() which can help a developer
determine if the block is “sitewide” or some other type. This is useful if
the code doesn’t care about anything but the “sitewide” block type.
We believe that keeping User::isBlocked() in its current state is the safer
way to proceed because in cases where it’s being used incorrectly it would
result in over-enforcing blocks rather than under-enforcing them. A user
who is partially blocked might be treated like a sitewide block by an
extension. That seems safer to us than potentially allowing a user more
freedom than an admin intended with a partial block.
We found at least one extension using User::getRights() in a way that would
over-enforce on a partially blocked user. We created a patch to change how
User::getRights() works
<https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/c/mediawiki/core/+/471210>. In addition to
checking that a block exists, it will also ensure that the block is a
sitewide block. This will spare the partially blocked user from being
blocked in these cases.
In summary, all MediaWiki code (especially extension code) that is
concerned with checking user blocks should be aware of the distinction
between User::isBlocked() and User::isBlockedFrom( Title ) and use the
appropriate method for the kind of blocking the code is concerned with.
Additionally, using the helper method Block::isSitewide() is handy for
certain usages.
Alex Ezell
Engineering Manager, Anti-Harassment Tools Team (WMF)
_______________________________________________
Wikitech-l mailing list
Wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Forwarding news.
Pine
( https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Pine )
---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: Johan Jönsson <jjonsson(a)wikimedia.org>
Date: Tue, Sep 18, 2018 at 5:02 PM
Subject: [Translators-l] MassMessage translation: Commons and GFDL
To: Wikimedia Translators <translators-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
If the wikis in your language allow local uploads, they probably want
to know that Commons has decided not to allow single-license GFDL
licensing for most files:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Alexis_Jazz/GFDL_MassMessage
I will send this out in a couple of days.
//Johan Jönsson
--
_______________________________________________
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https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/translators-l
