Mindspillage

Hello,

Please note that TOTP based two-factor authentication is now available for all administrators. In light of the recent compromised accounts, you are encouraged to add this additional layer of security to your account. It may be enabled on your preferences page in the "User profile" tab under the "Basic information" section. For basic instructions on how to enable two-factor authentication, please see the developing help page for additional information. Important: Be sure to record the two-factor authentication key and the single use keys. If you lose your two factor authentication and do not have the keys, it's possible that your account will not be recoverable. Furthermore, you are encouraged to utilize a unique password and two-factor authentication for the email account associated with your Wikimedia account. This measure will assist in safeguarding your account from malicious password resets. Comments, questions, and concerns may be directed to the thread on the administrators' noticeboard. MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 20:33, 12 November 2016 (UTC)Reply

Hi Mindspillage.

A new user group, New Page Reviewer, has been created in a move to greatly improve the standard of new page patrolling. The user right can be granted by any admin at PERM. It is highly recommended that admins look beyond the simple numerical threshold and satisfy themselves that the candidates have the required skills of communication and an advanced knowledge of notability and deletion. Admins are automatically included in this user right.

It is anticipated that this user right will significantly reduce the work load of admins who patrol the performance of the patrollers. However,due to the complexity of the rollout, some rights may have been accorded that may later need to be withdrawn, so some help will still be needed to some extent when discovering wrongly applied deletion tags or inappropriate pages that escape the attention of less experienced reviewers, and above all, hasty and bitey tagging for maintenance. User warnings are available here but very often a friendly custom message works best.

If you have any questions about this user right, don't hesitate to join us at WT:NPR. (Sent to all admins).MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 13:47, 15 November 2016 (UTC)Reply

Your expertise in a tricky DR would be appreciated:

Commons:Commons:Deletion_requests/File:High_School_Geometry_Cover.jpg

tl:dr summary... Current TOU for the source listed says content is NC (and seemingly has a clause revoking/superceeding previous CC licenses), an archived version of the TOU(for the source listed), and the releavnt PDF (also on Commons) gives a Commons compatible license.

There was also some concern expressed on the Commons IRC, that the licensing of the content concerned might also be slightly inconsistent depending on precisly where the claimed CC license was.

Your expertise is untangling whether Commons can retain this media (and others originating from the identifed source party) appreciated. Sfan00 IMG (talk) 16:57, 11 December 2016 (UTC)Reply

News and updates for administrators from the past month (January 2017). This first issue is being sent out to all administrators, if you wish to keep receiving it please subscribe. Your feedback is welcomed.

  Administrator changes

  NinjaRobotPirate • Schwede66 • K6ka • Ealdgyth • Ferret • Cyberpower678 • Mz7 • Primefac • Dodger67

  Briangotts • JeremyA • BU Rob13

  Guideline and policy news

• A discussion to workshop proposals to amend the administrator inactivity policy at Wikipedia talk:Administrators has been in process since late December 2016.
• Wikipedia:Pending changes/Request for Comment 2016 closed with no consensus for implementing Pending changes level 2 with new criteria for use.
• Following an RfC, an activity requirement is now in place for bots and bot operators.

  Technical news

• When performing some administrative actions the reason field briefly gave suggestions as text was typed. This change has since been reverted so that issues with the implementation can be addressed. (T34950)
• Following the latest RfC concluding that Pending Changes 2 should not be used on the English Wikipedia, an RfC closed with consensus to remove the options for using it from the page protection interface, a change which has now been made. (T156448)
• The Foundation has announced a new community health initiative to combat harassment. This should bring numerous improvements to tools for admins and CheckUsers in 2017.

  Arbitration

• The Arbitration Committee released a response to the Wikimedia Foundation's statement on paid editing and outing.

  Obituaries

• JohnCD (John Cameron Deas) passed away on 30 December 2016. John began editing Wikipedia seriously during 2007 and became an administrator in November 2009.

13:37, 1 February 2017 (UTC)

I created an article on it. I'm telling you since you wanted the redirect deleted. --Ysangkok (talk) 10:17, 12 May 2017 (UTC)Reply

 

Great to catch up with you at Wikimania! Deryck C. 13:10, 21 August 2017 (UTC)Reply

• @Deryck Chan:Thanks, great to catch up with you too! Kat Walsh (spill your mind?) 03:46, 22 August 2017 (UTC)Reply

 

A discussion is taking place as to whether the article Michael Anissimov is suitable for inclusion in Wikipedia according to Wikipedia's policies and guidelines or whether it should be deleted.

The article will be discussed at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Michael Anissimov (2nd nomination) until a consensus is reached, and anyone is welcome to contribute to the discussion. The nomination will explain the policies and guidelines which are of concern. The discussion focuses on high-quality evidence and our policies and guidelines.

Users may edit the article during the discussion, including to improve the article to address concerns raised in the discussion. However, do not remove the article-for-deletion notice from the top of the article. DGG ( talk ) 09:25, 16 October 2017 (UTC)Reply

Facto Post – Issue 12 – 28 May 2018   ScienceSource funded edit The Wikimedia Foundation announced full funding of the ScienceSource grant proposal from ContentMine on May 18. See the ScienceSource Twitter announcement and 60 second video. A medical canon? The proposal includes downloading 30,000 open access papers, aiming (roughly speaking) to create a baseline for medical referencing on Wikipedia. It leaves open the question of how these are to be chosen. The basic criteria of WP:MEDRS include a concentration on secondary literature. Attention has to be given to the long tail of diseases that receive less current research. The MEDRS guideline supposes that edge cases will have to be handled, and the premature exclusion of publications that would be in those marginal positions would reduce the value of the collection. Prophylaxis misses the point that gate-keeping will be done by an algorithm. Two well-known but rather different areas where such considerations apply are tropical diseases and alternative medicine. There are also a number of potential downloading troubles, and these were mentioned in Issue 11. There is likely to be a gap, even with the guideline, between conditions taken to be necessary but not sufficient, and conditions sufficient but not necessary, for candidate papers to be included. With around 10,000 recognised medical conditions in standard lists, being comprehensive is demanding. With all of these aspects of the task, ScienceSource will seek community help. Links edit   d:Wikidata:Lexicographical data, Wikidata's multi-lingual dictionary project gets going Ordia tool, a basic search interface for Wikidata lexemes and forms OpenRefine tool 3.0, May update allows wrangling of tabular information into Wikidata d:Wikidata:WikiProject British Politicians pushes ahead with data modelling and imports #1Lib1Ref Returns for a Second Time in 2018, IFLA blogpost 25 May 2018, second chance this year to participate in referencing Wikipedia To subscribe to Facto Post go to Wikipedia:Facto Post mailing list. For the ways to unsubscribe, see below. Editor Charles Matthews, for ContentMine. Please leave feedback for him. Back numbers are here. Reminder: WikiFactMine pages on Wikidata are at WD:WFM. ScienceSource pages will be announced there, and in this mass message. If you wish to receive no further issues of Facto Post, please remove your name from our mailing list. Alternatively, to opt out of all massmessage mailings, you may add Category:Wikipedians who opt out of message delivery to your user talk page. Newsletter delivered by MediaWiki message delivery

MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 10:16, 28 May 2018 (UTC)Reply

Facto Post – Issue 13 – 29 May 2018   The Editor is Charles Matthews, for ContentMine. Please leave feedback for him, on his User talk page. To subscribe to Facto Post go to Wikipedia:Facto Post mailing list. For the ways to unsubscribe, see the footer. Back numbers are here. Respecting MEDRS Facto Post enters its second year, with a Cambridge Blue (OK, Aquamarine) background, a new logo, but no Cambridge blues. On-topic for the ScienceSource project is a project page here. It contains some case studies on how the WP:MEDRS guideline, for the referencing of articles at all related to human health, is applied in typical discussions. Close to home also, a template, called {{medrs}} for short, is used to express dissatisfaction with particular references. Technology can help with patrolling, and this Petscan query finds over 450 articles where there is at least one use of the template. Of course the template is merely suggesting there is a possible issue with the reliability of a reference. Deciding the truth of the allegation is another matter. This maintenance issue is one example of where ScienceSource aims to help. Where the reference is to a scientific paper, its type of algorithm could give a pass/fail opinion on such references. It could assist patrollers of medical articles, therefore, with the templated references and more generally. There may be more to proper referencing than that, indeed: context, quite what the statement supported by the reference expresses, prominence and weight. For that kind of consideration, case studies can help. But an algorithm might help to clear the backlog.   Links World Cup scorers bubble chart, by the league in which they play, query run on Wikidata Timeline of discoveries of natural satellites in the solar system, query run on Wikidata 4800 Welsh portraits added to Wikimedia Commons and Wikidata, National Library of Wales blogpost 27 June 2018, by Jason.nlw The "deaditors" of Wikipedia, Hay Kranen blogpost, 15 June 2018 Six dimensions of open access, polemical tweet, 17 June 2018 If you wish to receive no further issues of Facto Post, please remove your name from our mailing list. Alternatively, to opt out of all massmessage mailings, you may add Category:Wikipedians who opt out of message delivery to your user talk page. Newsletter delivered by MediaWiki message delivery

MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 18:19, 29 June 2018 (UTC)Reply

Facto Post – Issue 14 – 21 July 2018   The Editor is Charles Matthews, for ContentMine. Please leave feedback for him, on his User talk page. To subscribe to Facto Post go to Wikipedia:Facto Post mailing list. For the ways to unsubscribe, see the footer. Back numbers are here. Plugging the gaps – Wikimania report Officially it is "bridging the gaps in knowledge", with Wikimania 2018 in Cape Town paying tribute to the southern African concept of ubuntu to implement it. Besides face-to-face interactions, Wikimedians do need their power sources.   Facto Post interviewed Jdforrester, who has attended every Wikimania, and now works as Senior Product Manager for the Wikimedia Foundation. His take on tackling the gaps in the Wikimedia movement is that "if we were an army, we could march in a column and close up all the gaps". In his view though, that is a faulty metaphor, and it leads to a completely false misunderstanding of the movement, its diversity and different aspirations, and the nature of the work as "fighting" to be done in the open sector. There are many fronts, and as an eventualist he feels the gaps experienced both by editors and by users of Wikimedia content are inevitable. He would like to see a greater emphasis on reuse of content, not simply its volume. If that may not sound like radicalism, the Decolonizing the Internet conference here organized jointly with Whose Knowledge? can redress the picture. It comes with the claim to be "the first ever conference about centering marginalized knowledge online".   Links ScienceSource focus list (shortcut WD:SSFL on Wikidata), project to tag a first-pass open access medical bibliography on Wikidata, and also overcome the systematic biases in the medical literature by curation. Wikimedia Foundation and Kiwix partner to grow offline access to Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation blogpost 18 July 2018. Wikipedia's upcoming Cape Town conference will tackle the issue of diversity, Jamie Matroos, 2 July 2018. VideoWiki, a video version of Wikipedia. Search Full-Text within 4M+ Books, by MEK, The Open Library Blog, 14 July 2018 More than 5,000 German scientists have published papers in pseudo-scientific journals, NDR, 19 July 2018. If you wish to receive no further issues of Facto Post, please remove your name from our mailing list. Alternatively, to opt out of all massmessage mailings, you may add Category:Wikipedians who opt out of message delivery to your user talk page. Newsletter delivered by MediaWiki message delivery

MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 06:10, 21 July 2018 (UTC)Reply

Facto Post – Issue 15 – 21 August 2018   The Editor is Charles Matthews, for ContentMine. Please leave feedback for him, on his User talk page. To subscribe to Facto Post go to Wikipedia:Facto Post mailing list. For the ways to unsubscribe, see the footer. Back numbers are here. Neglected diseases   To grasp the nettle, there are rare diseases, there are tropical diseases and then there are "neglected diseases". Evidently a rare enough disease is likely to be neglected, but neglected disease these days means a disease not rare, but tropical, and most often infectious or parasitic. Rare diseases as a group are dominated, in contrast, by genetic diseases. A major aspect of neglect is found in tracking drug discovery. Orphan drugs are those developed to treat rare diseases (rare enough not to have market-driven research), but there is some overlap in practice with the WHO's neglected diseases, where snakebite, a "neglected public health issue", is on the list. From an encyclopedic point of view, lack of research also may mean lack of high-quality references: the core medical literature differs from primary research, since it operates by aggregating trials. This bibliographic deficit clearly hinders Wikipedia's mission. The ScienceSource project is currently addressing this issue, on Wikidata. Its Wikidata focus list at WD:SSFL is trying to ensure that neglect does not turn into bias in its selection of science papers. Links Wikipedia, Wikidata, and citations, a census, August 2 2018, blogpost by Magnus Manske The rise of Wikidata as a linked data source August 6, 2018, by Karen Smith-Yoshimura on OCLC Research blog Where do Mayors Come From: Querying Wikidata with Python and SPARQL, August 1 2018, Parametric Thoughts blog Newspapers On Wikipedia Update: Initial Wikidata Pass 9 August 2018, Mike Caulfield Google Scholar, Web of Science, and Scopus: a systematic comparison of citations in 252 subject categories Alberto Martín-Martín, Enrique Orduna-Malea, Mike Thelwall, Emilio Delgado López-Cózar, arxiv.org, submitted on 15 August 2018 If you wish to receive no further issues of Facto Post, please remove your name from our mailing list. Alternatively, to opt out of all massmessage mailings, you may add Category:Wikipedians who opt out of message delivery to your user talk page. Newsletter delivered by MediaWiki message delivery

MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 13:23, 21 August 2018 (UTC)Reply

Facto Post – Issue 16 – 30 September 2018   The Editor is Charles Matthews, for ContentMine. Please leave feedback for him, on his User talk page. To subscribe to Facto Post go to Wikipedia:Facto Post mailing list. For the ways to unsubscribe, see the footer. Back numbers are here. The science publishing landscape   In an ideal world ... no, bear with your editor for just a minute ... there would be a format for scientific publishing online that was as much a standard as SI units are for the content. Likewise cataloguing publications would not be onerous, because part of the process would be to generate uniform metadata. Without claiming it could be the mythical free lunch, it might be reasonably be argued that sandwiches can be packaged much alike and have barcodes, whatever the fillings. The best on offer, to stretch the metaphor, is the meal kit option, in the form of XML. Where scientific papers are delivered as XML downloads, you get all the ingredients ready to cook. But have to prepare the actual meal of slow food yourself. See Scholarly HTML for a recent pass at heading off XML with HTML, in other words in the native language of the Web. The argument from real life is a traditional mixture of frictional forces, vested interests, and the classic irony of the principle of unripe time. On the other hand, discoverability actually diminishes with the prolific progress of science publishing. No, it really doesn't scale. Wikimedia as movement can do something in such cases. We know from open access, we grok the Web, we have our own horse in the HTML race, we have Wikidata and WikiJournal, and we have the chops to act.   Links ImageGrid SPARQL query for the Art+Feminism focus list on Wikidata. Run and then scroll ... The TABernacle tool for Wikidata editing, by Magnus Manske, has been upgraded. Demo with the ScienceSource focus list and main subjects: with a WiDar login you can edit directly in the table cells. Enslaved: People of the Historic Slave Trade, Michigan State University project for a linked open data platform. Quote: "Disambiguating and merging individuals across multiple datasets is nearly impossible given their current, siloed nature." As the Linked Data for Production (LD4P) project finishes its initial two-year cycle and moves into LD4P2, a list of its BIBFRAME and other RDF tools. Machine Learning with and for Semantic Web Knowledge Graphs, detailed slide pack by Heiko Paulheim, University of Mannheim. In Europe, Scientists Need to Share Their Research for Free if They Want Government Funding, Futurism, by Kristin House, 5 September 2018. If you wish to receive no further issues of Facto Post, please remove your name from our mailing list. Alternatively, to opt out of all massmessage mailings, you may add Category:Wikipedians who opt out of message delivery to your user talk page. Newsletter delivered by MediaWiki message delivery

MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 17:57, 30 September 2018 (UTC)Reply

Awesome

Ten years!

--Gerda Arendt (talk) 09:06, 7 January 2019 (UTC)Reply

Administrators must secure their accounts The Arbitration Committee may require a new RfA if your account is compromised. Use strong, unique passwords for your Wikipedia account and associated email Change your password now if your Wikipedia account password or email password is reused on another website, exposed, or weak Enable two-factor authentication now for improved security

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This message was sent to all administrators following a recent motion. Thank you for your attention. For the Arbitration Committee, Cameron11598 02:21, 4 May 2019 (UTC)Reply

ArbCom would like to apologise and correct our previous mass message in light of the response from the community.

Since November 2018, six administrator accounts have been compromised and temporarily desysopped. In an effort to help improve account security, our intention was to remind administrators of existing policies on account security — that they are required to "have strong passwords and follow appropriate personal security practices." We have updated our procedures to ensure that we enforce these policies more strictly in the future. The policies themselves have not changed. In particular, two-factor authentication remains an optional means of adding extra security to your account. The choice not to enable 2FA will not be considered when deciding to restore sysop privileges to administrator accounts that were compromised.

We are sorry for the wording of our previous message, which did not accurately convey this, and deeply regret the tone in which it was delivered.

For the Arbitration Committee, -Cameron11598 21:04, 4 May 2019 (UTC)Reply

 

The article Ain't Nobody's Business If You Do has been proposed for deletion because of the following concern:

Tagged as unsourced since 2009

While all constructive contributions to Wikipedia are appreciated, pages may be deleted for any of several reasons.

You may prevent the proposed deletion by removing the {{proposed deletion/dated}} notice, but please explain why in your edit summary or on the article's talk page.

Please consider improving the page to address the issues raised. Removing {{proposed deletion/dated}} will stop the proposed deletion process, but other deletion processes exist. In particular, the speedy deletion process can result in deletion without discussion, and articles for deletion allows discussion to reach consensus for deletion. --Another Believer _(Talk) 15:55, 30 January 2020 (UTC)Reply

  Established policy provides for removal of the administrative permissions of users who have not made any edits or logged actions in the preceding twelve months. Because you have been inactive, your administrative permissions will be removed if you do not return to activity within the next month.

Inactive administrators are encouraged to rejoin the project in earnest rather than to make token edits to avoid loss of administrative permissions. Resources and support for reengaging with the project are available at Wikipedia:WikiProject Editor Retention/administrators. If you do not intend to rejoin the project in the foreseeable future, please consider voluntarily resigning your administrative permissions by making a request at the bureaucrats' noticeboard.

Thank you for your past contributions to the project. — JJMC89 bot 00:03, 1 September 2021 (UTC)Reply

  Established policy provides for removal of the administrative permissions of users who have not made any edits or logged actions in the preceding twelve months. Because you have been inactive, your administrative permissions will be removed if you do not return to activity within the next several days.

Inactive administrators are encouraged to rejoin the project in earnest rather than to make token edits to avoid loss of administrative permissions. Resources and support for reengaging with the project are available at Wikipedia:WikiProject Editor Retention/administrators. If you do not intend to rejoin the project in the foreseeable future, please consider voluntarily resigning your administrative permissions by making a request at the bureaucrats' noticeboard.

Thank you for your past contributions to the project. — JJMC89 bot 00:00, 24 September 2021 (UTC)Reply

  Established policy provides for removal of the administrative permissions of users who have not made any edits or logged actions in the preceding twelve months. Because you have been inactive, your administrative permissions have been removed.

Subject to certain time limits and other restrictions, your administrative permissions may be returned upon request at WP:BN.

Thank you for your past contributions to the project. — xaosflux ^Talk 00:07, 1 October 2021 (UTC)Reply

 

The article Susan Nigro has been proposed for deletion because of the following concern:

Unable to identify reliable source coverage to establish that she passes NMUSIC

While all constructive contributions to Wikipedia are appreciated, pages may be deleted for any of several reasons.

You may prevent the proposed deletion by removing the {{proposed deletion/dated}} notice, but please explain why in your edit summary or on the article's talk page.

Please consider improving the page to address the issues raised. Removing {{proposed deletion/dated}} will stop the proposed deletion process, but other deletion processes exist. In particular, the speedy deletion process can result in deletion without discussion, and articles for deletion allows discussion to reach consensus for deletion. Star Mississippi 18:57, 9 December 2021 (UTC)Reply

Hi Kat, am I correct in remembering that you were at the Wikipedia:GLAM/Smithsonian Institution/2010 Wikipedia editing workshop in August 2010? Cheers! BD2412 T 05:21, 10 October 2023 (UTC)Reply

 Template:OBOD has been nominated for deletion. You are invited to comment on the discussion at the entry on the Templates for discussion page. – Jonesey95 (talk) 15:51, 25 June 2024 (UTC)Reply