Following a
motion, the Arbitration Committee rescinded the restrictions on the page name move discussions for the two Ireland pages that were
enacted in June 2009.
An
RfC about increasing the inactivity requirement for Interface administrators is open for feedback.
Technical news
Pages that use the JSON contentmodel will now use tabs instead of spaces for auto-indentation. This will significantly reduce the page size. (
T326065)
Arbitration
Following a
motion, the Arbitration Committee adopted a new enforcement restriction on January 4, 2024, wherein the Committee may apply the 'Reliable source consensus-required restriction' to specified topic areas.
Community feedback is
requested for a draft to replace the "Information for administrators processing requests" section at
WP:AE.
A vote to ratify the charter for the
Universal Code of Conduct Coordinating Committee (U4C) is open till 2 February 2024, 23:59:59 (UTC) via
Secure Poll. All eligible voters within the Wikimedia community have the opportunity to either support or oppose the adoption of the U4C Charter and share their reasons. The details of the voting process and voter eligibility can be found
here.
Community Tech has made some preliminary decisions about the future of the
Community Wishlist Survey. In summary, they aim to develop a new, continuous intake system for community technical requests that improves prioritization, resource allocation, and communication regarding wishes.
Read more
The Toolforge Grid Engine services have been shut down after the final migration process from Grid Engine to Kubernetes. (
T313405)
Arbitration
An
arbitration case has been opened to look into "the intersection of managing conflict of interest editing with the harassment (outing) policy".
Miscellaneous
Editors are invited to sign up for
The Core Contest, an initiative running from April 15 to May 31, which aims to improve
vital and other core articles on Wikipedia.
Backlog update: The October drive reduced the article backlog from 11,626 to 7,609 and the redirect backlog from 16,985 to 6,431! Congratulations to Schminnte, who led with over 2,300 points.
Following that, New Page Patrol organized another backlog drive for articles in January 2024. The January drive started with 13,650 articles and reduced the backlog to 7,430 articles. Congratulations to JTtheOG, who achieved first place with 1,340 points in this drive.
Looking at the graph, it seems like backlog drives are one of the only things keeping the backlog under control. Another backlog drive is being planned for May. Feel free to participate in the
May backlog drive planning discussion.
It's worth noting that both queues are gradually increasing again and are nearing 14,034 articles and 22,540 redirects. We encourage you to keep contributing, even if it's just a single patrol per day. Your support is greatly appreciated!
2023 Awards
Onel5969 won the 2023 cup with 17,761 article reviews last year - that's an average of nearly 50/day. There was one Platinum Award (10,000+ reviews), 2 Gold Awards (5000+ reviews), 6 Silver (2000+), 8 Bronze (1000+), 30 Iron (360+) and 70 more for the 100+ barnstar. Hey man im josh led on redirect reviews by clearing 36,175 of them. For the full details, see the
Awards page and the
Hall of Fame. Congratulations everyone for their efforts in reviewing!
Recruitment: A couple of the coordinators have been inviting editors to become reviewers, via mass-messages to their talk pages. If you know someone who you'd think would make a good reviewer, then a personal invitation to them would be great. Additionally, if there are Wikiprojects that you are active on, then you can add a post there asking participants to join NPP. Please be careful not to double invite folks that have already been invited.
Reviewing tip: Reviewers who prefer to patrol new pages within their most familiar subjects can use the regularly updated
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Djong (ship) has an RfC for possible consensus. A discussion is taking place. If you would like to participate in the discussion, you are invited to add your comments on the discussion page. Thank you.
Let me begin by thanking you for commenting on my case at AN/I. I hesitated about writing here, so it does not seem like I'm litigating the issue further; the fact is that I actually fully agree with 95% of your latest comments, and the remaining 5% that I somewhat disagree I don't think compelled I should be commenting on it without it seeming that I am wasting the community's time. I have read your comment carefully, and you are obviously correct about at least some of those edit summaries being, well, juvenile, even disregarding what behavior I was answering to. I have never in fact said that that the past edit summaries were ever warranted in themselves -- I merely objected that they aren't, as had been argued by one editor who revived them, persistent and disqualifying bad behavior.
I am returning here and taking up a bit more of your attention merely to suggest another glance at one of the diffs you brought up in your analysis. Namely
this one. Allow we underscore: you are right in saying that the edit summary had breached
WP:CIV, and I have acknowledged as much by that point the AN/I review. However, you defined the summary as "elicited by your taking exception to the spelling of a proper noun/toponym in it's non-native language". This is not the issue I was addressing, though, and it makes it seem (for instance, to an admin reviewing my case), that I am rude to editors who simply have another spelling preference of "Bukovina".
Please take an additional 10 seconds to review the edits I was reverting:
here. The edit summary
for the one intermediary edit states out the claim that the spelling is "wrong", but this is not simply an issue of "correcting" (or rather, a clumsy attempt at Romanianizing the nomenclature). These edits, which are 100% of that IPs contribution on wikipedia, amount to a degradation of content: they break links by blindly replacing any mention of "Bukovina" with "Bucovina" -- for instance, by creating "
Duchy of Bucovina", a redlink instead of a bluelink on
Duchy of Bukovina. The redlink could technically be filled as a redirect to the "Duchy of Bukovina" article -- though even then, that extremely Romanianized version, changing the name of the polity (and not merely of the region) to one that was only extremely rarely used in Romanian, and possibly never in English, would probably be extremely exotic.
To resume and close this: the
Iacob Zadik article is a B-class one, with me having been the one to bring it there (through expansion of a stubby article). The edits by the IP had went unnoticed for some two months (including by me), with the content effectively degraded for those two months. Again: not the nomenclature itself is at issue, but the blind promotion of the "Bucovina" spelling to the point of disrupting good content. The blindness of the edits was also in proportion to a political agenda: adding "Bucovina" (Romanian-only) or "Bukovyna" (Ukrainian-only) in all-English contexts is not merely a preference, it is a statement about who the region "really belongs to".
I am obviously not right to have called the degradation what I called it, in my exasperation at seeing the claim that content degradation (from bluelinks to redlinks) is presented as a "correction". Nothing of what I'm writing here is along the lines of "come on, both you and I know that the edit was indeed cretinous". But I would appreciate it if you could revisit your description of this dispute between me and the IP: I am not the sort of editor who calls others names just because "I take exception to the spelling of a proper noun/toponym in it's non-native language"; I am the sort of editor who, once in a blue moon, lost his cool at seeing objective degradation of an article, which the IP was using as a pawn in some sort of abstruse political battle. I only insist here (and I do apologize for taking up your time) because an admin reading your good-faith summary of that interaction, and not wishing to revisit the diff themselves, may be promoted to assume that I engage in behavior much more disruptive than it actually was. If, upon reading the above, you see any grounds for marginally adjusting that review of the interaction between me and the IP, I would be thankful to you; either way, thank you for your time.
Dahn (
talk)
05:24, 20 April 2024 (UTC)reply
Hi again, Dahn. That's an entirely reasonable request, and I'll post an amendment to my observations stating that I do believe you when you say that response was animated by a desire to avoid broken links and not merely a disagreement over the spelling.
That said, I hope you'll forgive me for telling you something I think you already know when I re-emphasize that I feel the emotional response was unwarranted helpful, irrespective of whether the original dispute arose primary out of spelling conventions alone, or potentially broken links.
But I have no problem supporting your assertion that the situation tweaked your nose because of a pragmatic concern quite aside from spelling, insofar as I completely believe that. And I want you to know that, anything I said in the ANI discussion not withstanding, I'm sorry things went so roughly for you. I meant what I said when I stated that you seem like an asset. Just do us a favour and try to keep the name-calling out of it. 'Kill them with kindness', my friend--that's my advice when dealing with vandals, SPAs, or even just well-intentioned but wrong-headed editors. Your signal flares attempting to get help will shine much more clearly if the skies are clear of any smoke resulting from the surrounding terrain being torched. If you'll forgive a tortured metaphor. SnowRise let's rap05:53, 20 April 2024 (UTC)reply
Feedback request: History and geography request for comment
Partial action blocks are now in effect on the English Wikipedia. This means that administrators have the ability to restrict users from certain actions, including uploading files, moving pages and files, creating new pages, and sending thanks.
T280531
I mean fair, but
MOS:SMALLFONT says that "[..]the HTML <small>...</small> tag has a semantic meaning of
fine print or side comments[..]", that was a side comment, that's why I made it small. If there is consensus against using small at all, please tell me so I can safely put it in my head to not use it anymore. –
2804:F14:80BE:B501:4013:AA93:E6BD:4D (
talk)
00:47, 3 June 2024 (UTC)reply
Well, the sentence of SMALLFONT that you quote is really talking about rare exceptions to the rule of using the standardized font size in the context of mainspace edits (hence it's location in MoS and the fact that it cites not to a community discussion but to an external page discussing the function of the <small> html tag for the purposes of fine print). For guidance on how to format text in community discussions, see
WP:TPG; the relevant language is spread throughout the article, but see for example "Technical and format standards" section, which advises to avoid "font gimmicks" and the "Good practices for discussions" section (advising to "Keep the format clear: use standard formatting and threading."). I'll grant you it's somewhat oblique in the second instance, but taken in the context of the rest of the page, I think it very much is meant to urge standardization of formatting of discussion to maintain maximum accessibility for all participants. Remember that not all users (and not all editors even) have access to the site through a PC utilizing a monitor, or through other standard devices with large screens or strong auto-refactoring tools. And of course others have vision impairment. In any event, I can tell you that the longstanding community practice is to enforce standardization of font text in normal discussion posts. The one lingering carveout that has failed to go away entirely is that small font is sometimes used to mark joking comments that are completely immaterial the editorial or community issue being discussed. But there's pushback on even that practice. Long story short, if your comment has any kind of even remote direct bearing on the discussion at hand, it should use standard text formatting (size included), even if you would judge it to be a minor point. This forecloses the possibility of someone being left out of loop on information and the potential for confusion. Afterall, a point you regard as minor may very well end up not being so to other editors or the community at large--particularly in a behavioural discussion. Thanks for stopping by; I hope you have a good day, on project and off. SnowRise let's rap01:39, 3 June 2024 (UTC)reply
Thank you for explaining, I'll avoid using small. Wish I had looked up the guidance before I did it in many places over the months(or years? unsure when I started doing it), including when asking slightly off-topic questions, pretty sure I just copied someone doing it...
Well, it's honestly not a huge deal: it's the type of thing you can typically expect a gnome to correct, and usually doesn't get more attention than that. :) And you're welcome--happy to be of help! SnowRise let's rap03:01, 3 June 2024 (UTC)reply
I don't want to derail the discussion at
WP:RSN further, but I have been thinking along the same lines as your recent post on the topic recently, and I have been wondering if the way to address this is by setting clear definitions of reliability, and clear definitions of the evidence required to demonstrate that these expectations are met. This should prevent editors from being able to use RSN to disqualify sources they disagree with unless there is a genuine issue with the source - in which case, we should get rid of it.
A broad definition of a reliable source is one that has sufficiently robust editorial process to prevent major errors and issue corrections and retractions when such errors do occur. Based on this, what I've been thinking for a while now is the following:
Extended content
To determine whether a source is reliable we need to be able to assess whether their process at identifying false and misleading information is sufficiently robust. A reliable source should only place true information in their own voice, should attribute questionable information, and should not publish hoaxes. However, sources are not expected to be perfect; errors which a source retracts in a timely manner do not impact the sources reliability.
Assessing this requires careful and extensive analysis of the sources publications.
Generally reliable sources: These are sources with a robust editorial processes that minimize significant errors and issues timely corrections when mistakes occur. They are defined as sources with unretracted significant errors in less than 0.1% of articles.
Partially reliable sources: These are sources that are still generally reliable but have a slightly higher rate of significant errors. They are are defined as sources with unretracted significant errors in less than 1% of articles. Editors should exercise additional caution when using the source, and when a partially reliable source disagrees with a reliable source on a question of fact editors should defer to the reliable source.
Generally unreliable sources: These are sources with frequent significant errors, indicating less rigorous editorial processes. They are defined as sources with unretracted significant errors in more than 1% of articles. Editors should be very cautious about using the source, and if it is used it should be attributed.
Deprecated sources: These are sources with pervasive and systematic issues, making them unreliable for most purposes. The are defined as sources with unretracted significant errors in more than 5% of articles. They should not be used except for "about-self" statements.
Every effort should be made to permit the continued use of the source in at least some capacity on Wikipedia. This means that when errors are identified editors should determine whether they are systematic to the paper or limited to a definable area. For example,
TRT World is considered unreliable for subjects with which the Turkish government could be construed to have a conflict of interest.
Process
Sources may only be added to
WP:RSP through formal discussion in the form of an RfC.
At least one month prior to opening the RfC an editor must announce their intention to do so on at
WP:RSN. They must at this time publish the systematic review that they will use to contest the current reliability assessment, to give editors who disagree time to review the evidence and counter it.
Reviews must be provably systematic. This means the following requirements must be met:
The methodology for choosing the articles must be described, and it must be sufficiently detailed that any editor can repeat the process and get the same articles.
All reviewed articles must be listed, including those that did not have issues
All identified issues must been proven by reference to reliable sources demonstrating that the claim is false
The discussion should focus solely on any reviews posted. To prevent classification in line with the review, editors must demonstrate that either the
process to select articles was flawed, the evidence is not
significant, or a sufficient number of the errors identified were either not errors or not major errors. For the latter, editors must present reliable sources supporting the claim made by the source under discussion.
The closer must first assess whether there is a consensus that the process to select the articles was appropriate and that the evidence is statistically significant. If there is not, then there is no change to the current classification of the source.
If there is, then the closer must consider each identified error to determine whether there is a consensus that it is a major error. This then produces the adjusted number of errors:
Errors with consensus they are an error add 1
Errors with consensus they are not an error add 0
Errors with no consensus add 0.5
Dividing this by the number of sources considered gives the percentage, and this is directly used to classify the source.
This is intended to provide a structure that prevents cherry picking data and minimizes the ability of editors POV's to impact the result.
Previous classifications
For sources classified under the previous system a streamlined process is provided to review them. Editors may dispute a sources assessment by posting at RSN and adding a {{RSP-disputed}} tag to the entry. Editors who support the current rating then have two months in which to provide a systematic review supporting its current classification. After the two months, if no editor posts such a review, the entry is removed from RSP.
If such a review is posted, either editor may open an RFC after at least one month has passed, which will follow the process defined above. However, if there is not a consensus that the process to select the articles is appropriate or that the evidence is statistically significant then the result in the source is removed from RSP.
Error classification
Minor errors are errors that do not significantly alter the understanding or interpretation of the news story. These errors are usually factual details that, while incorrect, do not change the overall context or meaning of the report.
For example:
Misspelling of a name or a title.
Incorrect dates that do not impact the sequence of events.
Minor numerical inaccuracies that do not affect the overall statistical interpretation.
Typographical errors.
Major errors are significant inaccuracies that can alter the understanding, context, or perception of the news story. These errors can mislead the audience, change the narrative, or damage the credibility of the news source and the individuals involved.
Errors in attributed claims are generally considered minor unless the claim was a major part of the story or was a deliberate hoax, in which case we would still expect a reliable source to issue a correction.
Retractions
Mistakes happen. We do not consider these to affect a sources reliable if they correct them promptly and with due prominence.
This is based on broadly accepted standards:
IPSO says A significant inaccuracy, misleading statement or distortion must be corrected, promptly and with due prominence, and — where appropriate — an apology published.
SPJ says Acknowledge mistakes and correct them promptly and prominently. Explain corrections and clarifications carefully and clearly.
Reuters says Reuters is transparent about errors. We rectify them promptly, clearly and comprehensively, whether in a story, a caption, a graphic or a script.
Press Council of India says When any factual error or mistake is detected or confirmed, the newspaper should suo-motu publish the correction promptly with due prominence and with apology or expression of regrets in a case of serious lapse
Canadian Association of Journalists says When we make a mistake – whether in fact or in context, and regardless of the platform – we correct it promptly, prominently and in a transparent manner, acknowledging the nature of the error
Hey BM. I have feelings too mixed and complicated on the subject to be sharing them in anything approaching an adequate form in the scarce few moments I have available to address such an inquiry today. I promise I'll make it a priority the very next time I can get on project, probably in a day or two. But I didn't want you think I was ignoring you until then. Best wishes to you in the meantime. SnowRise let's rap12:34, 26 June 2024 (UTC)reply
Edit summary at ANI
I was a bit baffled by
this edit summary. I can assure you it would not even occur to me to "disregard the rules merely to jump the queue and get [my] response higher up". I see that you figured it out a couple of edits later, but can I ask how you managed to jump to such a silly conclusion? If, as I suspect, you were influenced by Grorp's refactor and comment
here, then I'll point out that their response was as silly and precipitate as yours. I had responded, correctly, to their assertion at the start of the section, since that was the topic of discussion, and they mistakenly thought I was responding to the collection of "notes" which they had arbitrarily dropped on the talk page (as, incidentally, is their habit – I personally don't think personal 'notes' sections are appropriate for talk pages, particularly in the middle of a focused discussion, but I guess there's nothing in the guidelines about it). They proceeded to move my comment out of place in exactly the way you did, with an equally inappropriate and officious admonition.
In my opinion, your summary analysis of what went on at that page is as hasty and ill-judged as your edit summary, although it's nice that you opined "in the spirit of fairness". It was surprizing to me because I "had you pegged", to employ Grorp's charming turn of phrase, as one of the more sensible editors on wikipedia. I won't be editing the page anymore, but I'll discuss it here if you wish to, but it's not important and I'm happy to drop it.
Harold the Sheep (
talk)
00:50, 23 June 2024 (UTC)reply
Hi Harold. The best I can say to explain my misreading of the situation there was that it was a case of errant pattern recognition. As I recall, your post used one-too-many levels of indent for the message it was meant to respond to, and I momentarily mistook this for being the old trick that some people sometimes use in order to move their responses higher up in the chronology of messages while still making it "clear" who they are responding to--something we see a lot at ANI and other fora where people place a premium on efforts to defend their conduct. This is against policy, of course, because it complicates the normal discussion/thread format, but people still do it from time to time. In reading your message, I thought this was what was going on, because of the extra level of indent. But no sooner had I refactored when I realized that it was clearly an error on my part, so I placed the post back where it belonged and merely corrected the indent level. At least, that's how I recall it. I probably should have known you were too experienced to be employing such formatting, but the misread was a matter of a good faith mistake.Now as for my take on the issues that brought you and the other parties to ANI in the first place, I'm sorry if my analysis feels uncharitable or inaccurate to you, and if it has thus reduced your appreciation for my perspective on such things. Mind you, my first comment and priority there was focused on the fact that I felt the OP had needlessly escalated the matter to ANI and had failed to show due diligence in following normal dispute resolution processes before hand, and that your conduct was well bellow the threshold of anything that needed reporting or correction by the community. I continue to feel that was the case. However, that doesn't mean that I didn't feel there was some blame to be spread around regarding discussion becoming non-productive on the article talk page itself. I do think there were moments there were your tone became a little bit battlegroundish. Again, nothing I thought justified an excursion to ANI (especially without efforts to talk it out with you first), but I can see where your choice of words could have contributed to the other two feeling that you were not super open to contrary opinions. And I continue to stand by that part of the assessment too. It wasn't meant to be a particularly severe or concerned observation so much as a nudge from someone not involved in the dispute which I hoped would therefore give it at least a little bit more credibility. That said, the underlying dispute is obviously moot if you're determined not to involve yourself in that article further. I'm sorry that a more collaborative solution was not achieved, but for what it's worth, I respect an editor who decides that certain disputes represent too much inefficiency in constructive use of one's project time to be worth pursuing them to the end. In any event, best wishes on whatever you're off to work on next. SnowRise let's rap12:30, 26 June 2024 (UTC)reply