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This page contains discussions dated during the month of August 2012 from User talk:Hersfold. Please direct all current discussions there. Thank you.


UTRS task for TPBot

Hey, I was thinking about it a few hours ago and wanted your input. What do you think about a UTRSBot or even using TPBot and setting it up so when a user appeals on UTRS, a template is placed on their user talk page notifying anyone watching that there is an appeal and the appeal id number for transparency. This could be done on IPs and user accounts. Your opinion?--v/r - TP 19:01, 2 August 2012 (UTC)

(talk page stalker) I would at least like to see the API for the blockinfo transferred directly to the forums first so we have the correct information, especially when people have the tendency to have an account and click no account or the other way around. I also think there will be some privacy issues, I can't think of any at this second, but give me a day. Also we will have to disclose in our privacy policy that we are disclosing the fact that they are appealing a block. Can I ask what you see as the potential benefits, and maaybe the potential downfalls? (Sorry for stealing the thunder Hersfold) -- DQ (ʞlɐʇ) 21:08, 2 August 2012 (UTC)
Well unblock appeals shouldn't be private. There may be private data to consider, yes, but there shouldn't be privacy that a block has been appealed. On Wikipedia, we use a category for the unblock template. I believe the benefit will be added transparency in the way UTRS works as well as giving administrators who do not have a UTRS account a hit on their watchlist if a user they have blocked appeals; especially if they lose talk page access in which case a non-blocked bot would leave an appropriate notification. I understand the concern on accounts, but let me turn this back on you. Wouldn't it be beneficial if a user who isn't blocked gets a notification from TPBot (or UTRSBot) saying an appeal has been submitted in their name? Again, I can't see any privacy issues. Even an IP address that appeals would be public. The only information that would be posted on Wikipedia would be "This user has appealed on ticket number ####." Downfalls? I really can't see any except that some folks may want to know the contents of an appeal. But I think that once knowledge of UTRS becomes more widespread, that will become an issue anyway. This is a little off topic, but if there are non-administrators on the BASC, it might be an idea to grant them some sort of "reader" access.--v/r - TP 00:44, 3 August 2012 (UTC)
The only issue I can see is - like DQ said - is if someone who does have an account says they don't, the bot will disclose their IP address inadvertently. I'd be fine with this if it was limited only to registered blocked users, not to anonymous users. Otherwise it sounds like a good idea. Hersfold (t/a/c) 02:10, 3 August 2012 (UTC)

Administrator

Hello! I have graduated today. Can you tell me what I should do to move forward? Many thanks! -- RexRowan  Talk  15:43, 5 August 2012 (UTC)

Graduated what? Hersfold (t/a/c) 17:13, 5 August 2012 (UTC)

Your propsal on leaving Wikipedia

Just read your essay/proposal on this and find it sensible and well-written. I'm trying to encourage more careful vetting of requests at WT:CHU, and you may want to weigh in there as well.

The Uninvited Co., Inc. 21:40, 6 August 2012 (UTC)

Thanks! I'll take a look soon. Hersfold (t/a/c) 22:51, 6 August 2012 (UTC)

The Signpost: 06 August 2012

At this year's Wikimania, I [Brandon Harris] gave a talk entitled The Athena Project: Wikipedia in 2015. The talk broadly outlined several ideas the foundation is exploring for planned features, user interface changes, and workflow improvements. We expect that many of these changes will be welcomed, while others will be controversial. During the question-and-answer period, I was asked whether people should think of Athena as a skin, a project, or something else. I responded, "You should think of Athena as a kick in the head" – because that's exactly what it's supposed to be: a radical and bold re-examination of some of our sacred cows when it comes to the interface.
On August 1, the Funds Dissemination Committee (FDC) portal was launched on Meta. The FDC will implement the Wikimedia movement's new grant-orientated finance structure in accordance with the WMF board's recent resolutions. As a volunteer committee, the FDC will make recommendations to the WMF board on a $11.4 million budget for 2012–13.
Arbitrator Kirill Lokshin proposed a motion for a procedure on the alteration of an editor's previous username(s) in arbitration decisions to reflect their name change(s). ... The Devil's Advocate initiated an amendment request for the controversial Race and intelligence case.
This week the Signpost interviews Casliber, an editor who has written or contributed significantly to a startling 69 featured articles. We learn what makes him tick, why he edits, and why he can write on everything from vampires to dinosaurs, birds to plants. He also gives some advice to budding featured article writers.
The Wikimedia Foundation's engineering report for July 2012 was published this week on the Wikimedia Techblog and on the MediaWiki wiki, giving an overview of all Foundation-sponsored technical operations in that month (as well as brief coverage of progress on Wikimedia Deutschland's Wikidata project). ... At least one fibre-optic cable was damaged at the WMF's Tampa site on August 6, leading to a sharp downwards spike in traffic lasting over an hour and almost three hours of disruption for readers around the globe.
This week, we spent some time with WikiProject Martial Arts. Since April 2004, the project has been the hub for discussion and improvement of martial arts articles, including all disciplines and national origins. The project maintains a variety of conventions for handling the names and descriptions of Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, Indian, Sikh, Filipino, Okinawan, and hybrid martial arts. WikiProject Martial Arts has spawned or absorbed several subprojects focusing on boxing, kickboxing, sumo, and mixed martial arts.

Category:Fictional women soldiers and warriors

Category:Fictional women soldiers and warriors, which you created, has been nominated for possible deletion, merging, or renaming. If you would like to participate in the discussion, you are invited to add your comments at the category's entry on the Categories for discussion page. Thank you. JDDJS (talk) 23:02, 8 August 2012 (UTC)

MfD nomination of Wikipedia:My little brother did it

Wikipedia:My little brother did it, a page you substantially contributed to, has been nominated for deletion. Your opinions on the matter are welcome; please participate in the discussion by adding your comments at Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Wikipedia:My little brother did it and please be sure to sign your comments with four tildes (~~~~). You are free to edit the content of Wikipedia:My little brother did it during the discussion but should not remove the miscellany for deletion template from the top of the page; such a removal will not end the deletion discussion. Thank you. Ibicdlcod (talk) 05:56, 9 August 2012 (UTC)

A kitten for you!

kittie.

deadpig5 21:51, 11 August 2012 (UTC)

The Signpost: 13 August 2012

In a certain way, writing Wikipedia is the same everywhere, in every language or culture. You have to stick to the facts, aiming for the most objective way of describing them, including everything relevant and leaving out all the everyday trivia that is not really necessary to understand the context. You have to use critical thinking, trying to be independent of your own preferences and biases. To some effect, that's all there is to it. Naturally, Wikipedians have their biases, some of which can never be cured. Most Wikipedians tend to like encyclopedias; but millions of people in the world don't share that bias, and we represent them rather poorly. I'm also quite sure that an overwhelming majority of Wikipedia co-authors are literate. Again, that's not true for everyone in this world. Yet we have other, less noticeable but barely less fundamental biases.
The Bangla language, also known as Bengali, is spoken by some 200 million people in Bangladesh and India. The Bangla Wikipedia has a very small active community of about ten to fifteen very active editors, with another 35–40 as less active editors. The project faces particular challenges in being a small Wikipedia, and Dhaka-based WMF community fellow User:Tanvir Rahman is working to understand these challenges and to develop strategies that can improve small wikis that have strong potential to expand their editing communities.
A request for arbitration was filed late last week, ending the three-week long absence of pending cases.
Six featured articles were promoted this week, including Business US Highway 41, which was a state trunkline highway that served as a business loop in Marquette in the US state of Michigan.
Three weeks into a month-long evaluation of code review tool Gerrit, a serious alternative has finally gained traction in the review process: Facebook-developed but now independently operated Phabricator and its sister command-line tool Arcanist.
This week, we interviewed the lively bunch at WikiProject Dispute Resolution. Started in November 2011 to study and discuss improvements to Wikipedia's resources for resolving disputes between editors, the young project has supplemented dispute resolution efforts currently handled at the Dispute Resolution Noticeboard, Mediation Committee, and other venues. Over 40 editors have signed up to provide feedback, a variety of ideas have been proposed, and a manual for dispute resolution has been created.
Current proposals and requests for comments include a competition to redesign the main page ...

Global account

Hello I'm Tajniak from Polish wikipedia. I tried to make global account, but on English version somebody created acocunt with the same nick like me. He isn't active, haven't done any edits and uploads. Could you rename thid account?
Tajniak from Polish wikipedia 

195.114.170.145 (talk) 14:18, 14 August 2012 (UTC)
You'll need to fill out a request at WP:USURP - while you're right that the account doesn't have any edits here, we still have to give the user a week to let us know if they'd like a new username. Hersfold (t/a/c) 22:21, 14 August 2012 (UTC)

AFC Backlog

Articles for Creation urgently needs YOUR help!

Articles for Creation is desperately short of reviewers! We are looking for urgent help, from experienced editors, in reviewing submissions in the pending submissions queue. Currently there are 690 submissions waiting to be reviewed and many help requests at our Help Desk.

Do you have what it takes?
  1. Are you familiar with Wikipedia's policies and guidelines?
  2. Do you know what Wikipedia is and is not?
  3. Do you have a working knowledge of the Manual of Style, particularly article naming conventions?
  4. Are you autoconfirmed?
  5. Can you review submissions based on their individual merits?

If the answer to these questions is yes, then please read the reviewing instructions and donate a little of your time to helping tackle the backlog. You might wish to add {{AFC status}} or {{AfC Defcon}} to your userpage, which will alert you to the number of open submissions.

PS: we have a great AFC helper script at User:Timotheus Canens/afchelper4.js which helps in reviewing in just few edits easily!

We would greatly appreciate your help. Currently, only a small handful of users are reviewing articles. Any help, even if it's just 2 or 3 reviews, it would be extremely beneficial.
On behalf of the Articles for Creation project,
TheSpecialUser TSU

The Signpost: 20 August 2012

The Wikimedia Foundation sometimes proposes new features that receive substantive criticism from Wikimedians, yet those criticisms may be dismissed on the basis that people are resistant to change—there's an unjustified view that the wikis have been overrun by vested contributors who hate all change. That view misses a lot of key details and insight because there are good reasons that Wikimedians are suspicious of features development, given past and present development of bad software, growing ties with the problematic Wikia, and a growing belief that it is acceptable to experiment on users.
The Core Contest is a month-long competition among editors to improve Wikipedia's most important "core" articles—especially those that are in a relatively poor state. Core articles, such as Music, Computer, and Philosophy, tend to lie in the trunk of the tree of knowledge; by analogy, featured-and good-article processes generally attract more specialist topics out on the branches.
In the Utah Court of Appeals this week, the majority opinion in Fire Insurance Exchange v. Robert Allen Oltmanns and Brady Blackner relied on Wikipedia for the basic premise of their legal opinion, and included a concurring opinion devoted solely to the issue of citing Wikipedia in a legal opinion.
Thirteen featured articles were promoted this week, including pelicans, which are a genus of large water birds comprising the family Pelecanidae, characterised by a long beak and large throat-pouch. They have a fossil record dating back at least 30 million years and are most closely related to the Shoebill and Hammerkop. These fish-feeders have a patchy relationship with humans: the birds are sometimes persecuted and sometimes feature in mythology.
New embeddable scripting ("template replacement") language Lua received considerable scrutiny this week when it began its long road to widespread deployment, landing on the test2wiki test site on Wednesday (wikitech-l mailing list). ... the fourth in our series profiling participants in this year's Google Summer of Code (GSoC) programme.
This week, we spent some time with WikiProject Korea. Started in September 2006, WikiProject Korea covers the history and culture of the Korean people, including both countries that currently occupy the Korean peninsula. This task has proven difficult with North Koreans notably absent from the Wikipedia community due to tight control over access to external media. The project is home to over 16,000 pages, including 15 pieces of Featured material and 66 Good and A-class Articles.

Status template script

Hi. I used your status template for my userpage, but the script you told me to install at User:Thekillerpenguin/vector.js doesn't seem to be working. What do you think is the problem? Thekillerpenguin (talk) 01:40, 26 August 2012 (UTC)

Are you using the vector skin? If not you could install it in a monobook.js or in common.js. Ryan Vesey 01:45, 26 August 2012 (UTC)
In addition, did you remember to bypass your cache? Ryan Vesey 01:46, 26 August 2012 (UTC)
I use vector. Is there something wrong with the formatting? Bypassing the cache doesn't work. Thekillerpenguin (talk) 06:05, 26 August 2012 (UTC)
It's a common complaint, and I really don't know what causes it. Unfortunately, without knowing the cause, I've no ideas of how to fix it. 03:43, 26 August 2012 (UTC)

Might be back again

I'm not sure how Wikipedia's blocking system works but I have been watching User Creation logs for any new registrations by SkepticAnonymous. See: [1] ViriiK (talk) 04:40, 29 August 2012 (UTC)

The Signpost: 27 August 2012

Wikimedia editors have been debating a community proposal for the adoption of a new project to host free travel-guide content. The debate reached a new stage when a three-month request for comment on Meta came to an end, with a decision to set up the first new type of Wikimedia project in half a decade. The original proposal for the travel guide unfolded during April on Meta and the Wikimedia-l mailing lists, centring around the wish of volunteer contributors to the WikiTravel project to work in a non-commercial environment.
A monthly overview of recent academic research about Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects, edited jointly with the Wikimedia Research Committee and republished as the Wikimedia Research Newsletter.
Developers were left one step closer to an understanding of the code review outlook this week after the creation of a graph plotting "number changesets awaiting review" over time. The chart, which also shows the number of new changesets created on a daily basis, reveals a peak in the number of unreviewed changesets in mid-July, followed by a short drop. The current figure stands at approximately 219 unreviewed changesets.
This week the Signpost interviews Mark Arsten, who has written or contributed significantly to ten featured articles; most have related to new religious movements, and some have touched on other controversial or quirky topics. Mark gives us a rundown on how he keeps neutral and what drives him to write featured content; he also gives some hints for aspiring writers.
This week, we hopped in a little blue box with a batch of companions from WikiProject Doctor Who. Started in April 2005, the project has grown to include about 4,000 pages about the world's longest-running science fiction television show, its spinoffs, and various related material. The project is the parent of the Torchwood Taskforce and a child of WikiProject British TV and WikiProject Science Fiction. With new Doctor Who episodes airing this week and a 50th anniversary celebration around the corner, we thought now would be a good time to inquire about the famed Time Lord.
Current discussions on the English Wikipedia.
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