User talk:Billinghurst

"Da mihi basium"

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billinghurst (talk page)

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Wikisource has a number of active Wikiprojects that could use your help in tackling these large additions to our library. New Student's Reference Work Project Work: New Student's Reference Work

Category:Authors with missing death dates -> Category:Authors without death dates

explore making this change. They are not missing if they are not dead, so we should cater for both scenarios without confusing things. Only would be missing of the person is alive 130 years after death. — billinghurst sDrewth 12:43, 20 March 2018 (UTC)

link templates — to build

• Dictionary of Indian Biography
  • ... link Y
  • ... lkpl Y

— billinghurst sDrewth 23:47, 20 September 2018 (UTC)

• The Builders of American Literature
• check whether useful for Oregon: Her history, her great men, her literature

• Convert Template:American Review link
• Build Template:American Historical Review link

DNB contributor template cleanup

Hi. I've been recently working on cleaning up the DNB contributor templates for ambiguous ones to match in line with existing similar ones. Can you please turn these into disambiguation pages similar to what's in Category:Dictionary of National Biography ambiguous contributor templates and disambiguate these with AWB? They're transcluded in so many pages, so they would require too many tabs to be opened if done manually.

• Template:DNB CM: ambiguous given Template:DNB CM Maclean
• Template:DNB EG: ambiguous given Template:DNB EG Green
• Template:DNB FR: ambiguous given Template:DNB FR Rogers
• Template:DNB GCB: ambiguous given Template:DNB GCB Bourne
• Template:DNB HMS: ambiguous given Template:DNB HMS Spooner
• Template:DNB JAH: ambiguous given Template:DNB JAH Herbert
• Template:DNB JHL: ambiguous given Template:DNB JHL Longford
• Template:DNB AM: redundant to Template:DNB AM Miller. but Template:DNB AM Mackie exists.
• Template:DNB JH: redundant to Template:DNB JH Humphreys, but Template:DNB JH Hooper exists.
• Template:DNB TS: redundant to Template:DNB TS Seccombe, but Template:DNB TS Sinclair exists.

During the cleanup, I also ran into Template:DNB AH Hartshorne, which seems to have been created in error since none of the DNB contributor lists attach Albert Hartshorne to any initial but "A.H-e." Making it a redirect to Template:DNB AH-e would be misleading because "A.H." was never used for his work on the DNB, so I might consider it for deletion. ミラP@Miraclepine 03:03, 28 January 2023 (UTC)

@Miraclepine: Please leave them for the moment as I am talking about Xover about a better way to deal with these. The current situation is ugly, and it is just getting more complex and unsustainable. — billinghurst sDrewth 03:30, 28 January 2023 (UTC)

Thank you. I've subscribed to the conversation on Xover's talk page for further developments in the meanwhile. ミラP@Miraclepine 04:29, 28 January 2023 (UTC)

August 2023 to do

• records checks
  • track death for Author:Michael Barrett
  • detail for Author:John George Anthony Skerl
  • Author:Thomas Helsby
  • Author:Charles Everitt
  • revisit author:Robert Edward Anderson
  • Author:Adam Luke Gowans
  • Author:Reginald Littleboy
  • Author:Griffith Price Williams
  • Author:Mrs. Ernest Newman
  • Author:John Pre Vanewords
  • Author:Laura Ensor
  • author:Armin Tenner
  • author:Ponsonby Annesley Lyons
  • Author:Patrick Laurence Connellan
  • Author:John Fraser (fl. 1883) US cleric
  • Author:George Hay (Physiologist) Glasgow 1883, though apparently visiting and living western side of Atlantic
  • Author:William Simons, Charleston, SC, 1880s
  • Author:Wilfred L. Steel , can see person b. 1890, though that doesn't seem right, living vicinity of Stone, Staffs in 1913, though no clear records for person of that name in 1911
  • Author:William Browning Smith, is it really William?
  • Author:Robert Edward Anderson London 1880s
  • Author:John Gibson (d. 1887) Scottish scientist
  • Author:Herbert Rix
  • Author:John Stephen EB9
  • Author:Montagu Browne or is it Alexander Montagu Browne
• Author:Algernon Blackwood continue moving works to subpages of parents
• ponder St. Nicholas pages, have edited by through subpages, not just volumes, and the illustrators have been added as related_authors; definitely needs work, apply {{default layout|Layout 2}} to the pages, and remove the css code that sets a max-width
• {{al}} set this up so it substitutes automatically, then clean up
• {{pol}} set this up so it substitutes automatically, then clean up
• Translations from Camoens; and Other Poets, with Original Poetry needs a AuxToC built, and contributor components rather than authors, maybe also use override_translator rather than translator for cleanliness
• Works to consider
  • find the best ocr of https://archive.org/search?query=Peasant+Proprietorship
• Think about "redirects here" for disambig pages (The ..., The ...s, A ..., ...s)
• DNB contributor => 1st supplement separation from 1885-1900, and each their own? also remove {{sc}} from usages
• bring over my /archive/ edit filters from metawiki
• more work to do on Index:Notes on the churches in the counties of Kent, Sussex, and Surrey.djvu/styles.css and template:hussey Churches table header related pages
• EB9 contributor => {{contributed to}}, will need noinit variable, and also formatting internal
• transcribe obit noted at Author talk:William Prideaux Courtney
• transcribe obit noted at Author talk:Israel Davis

DNB contributor

• DNB contributor
• DNB contributor 2ndSupp
• DNB contributor 3rdSupp

1. need to ensure that all data is present on author pages
2. push "contributor to creative work" / "biographer" / "initials"
3. construct the QS components (see if we can do anything with harvest tool first)

Petscan / QS pushes

• Category:Ornithologists as authors needs push in, then tidy up

— billinghurst sDrewth 23:49, 1 June 2023 (UTC)

Sep 2023 to do

• Template:ShowTransclude

  Look to convert this template to instead utilise <ref follow=...>

• Fix ToC Page:Horses and roads.djvu/11++ to use css
• double transclusion of same index: The Haughs of Crumdel / Haughs of Crumdel (2) => shuffling, editing and deletions required

— billinghurst sDrewth 22:31, 11 September 2023 (UTC)

Tech News: 2025-06

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Updates for editors

• Editors who use the "Special characters" editing-toolbar menu can now see the 32 special characters you have used most recently, across editing sessions on that wiki. This change should help make it easier to find the characters you use most often. The feature is in both the 2010 wikitext editor and VisualEditor. [1]
• Editors using the 2010 wikitext editor can now create sublists with correct indentation by selecting the line(s) you want to indent and then clicking the toolbar buttons.[2] You can now also insert <code> tags using a new toolbar button.[3] Thanks to user stjn for these improvements.
• Help is needed to ensure the citation generator works properly on each wiki.
  • (1) Administrators should update the local versions of the page MediaWiki:Citoid-template-type-map.json to include entries for preprint, standard, and dataset; Here are example diffs to replicate for 'preprint' and for 'standard' and 'dataset'.
  • (2.1) If the citoid map in the citation template used for these types of references is missing, one will need to be added. (2.2) If the citoid map does exist, the TemplateData will need to be updated to include new field names. Here are example updates for 'preprint' and for 'standard' and 'dataset'. The new fields that may need to be supported are archiveID, identifier, repository, organization, repositoryLocation, committee, and versionNumber. [4]
• One new wiki has been created: a Wikipedia in Central Kanuri (w:knc:) [5]
• View all 27 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, the OCR (optical character recognition) tool used for Wikisource now supports a new language, Church Slavonic. [6]

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MediaWiki message delivery 00:08, 4 February 2025 (UTC)

Tech News: 2025-07

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Weekly highlight

• The Product and Technology Advisory Council (PTAC) has published a draft of their recommendations for the Wikimedia Foundation's Product and Technology department. They have recommended focusing on mobile experiences, particularly contributions. They request community feedback at the talk page by 21 February.

Updates for editors

• The "Special pages" portlet link will be moved from the "Toolbox" into the "Navigation" section of the main menu's sidebar by default. This change is because the Toolbox is intended for tools relating to the current page, not tools relating to the site, so the link will be more logically and consistently located. To modify this behavior and update CSS styling, administrators can follow the instructions at T385346. [7]
• As part of this year's work around improving the ways readers discover content on the wikis, the Web team will be running an experiment with a small number of readers that displays some suggestions for related or interesting articles within the search bar. Please check out the project page for more information.
• Template editors who use TemplateStyles can now customize output for users with specific accessibility needs by using accessibility related media queries (prefers-reduced-motion, prefers-reduced-transparency, prefers-contrast, and forced-colors). Thanks to user Bawolff for these improvements. [8]
• View all 22 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, the global blocks log will now be shown directly on the Special:CentralAuth page, similarly to global locks, to simplify the workflows for stewards. [9]

Updates for technical contributors

• Wikidata now supports a special language as a "default for all languages" for labels and aliases. This is to avoid excessive duplication of the same information across many languages. If your Wikidata queries use labels, you may need to update them as some existing labels are getting removed. [10]
• The function getDescription was invoked on every Wiki page read and accounts for ~2.5% of a page's total load time. The calculated value will now be cached, reducing load on Wikimedia servers. [11]
• As part of the RESTBase deprecation effort, the /page/related endpoint has been blocked as of February 6, 2025, and will be removed soon. This timeline was chosen to align with the deprecation schedules for older Android and iOS versions. The stable alternative is the "morelike" action API in MediaWiki, and a migration example is available. The MediaWiki Interfaces team can be contacted for any questions. [12]

In depth

• The latest quarterly Language and Internationalization newsletter is available. It includes: Updates about the "Contribute" menu; details on some of the newest language editions of Wikipedia; details on new languages supported by the MediaWiki interface; updates on the Community-defined lists feature; and more.
• The latest Chart Project newsletter is available. It includes updates on the progress towards bringing better visibility into global charts usage and support for categorizing pages in the Data namespace on Commons.

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MediaWiki message delivery 00:11, 11 February 2025 (UTC)

Tech News: 2025-08

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Weekly highlight

• Communities using growth tools can now showcase one event on the Special:Homepage for newcomers. This feature will help newcomers to be informed about editing activities they can participate in. Administrators can create a new event to showcase at Special:CommunityConfiguration. To learn more about this feature, please read the Diff post, have a look at the documentation, or contact the Growth team.

Updates for editors

Highlighted talk pages improvements

• Starting next week, talk pages at these wikis – Spanish Wikipedia, French Wikipedia, Italian Wikipedia, Japanese Wikipedia – will get a new design. This change was extensively tested as a Beta feature and is the last step of talk pages improvements. [13]
• You can now navigate to view a redirect page directly from its action pages, such as the history page. Previously, you were forced to first go to the redirect target. This change should help editors who work with redirects a lot. Thanks to user stjn for this improvement. [14]
• When a Cite reference is reused many times, wikis currently show either numbers like "1.23" or localized alphabetic markers like "a b c" in the reference list. Previously, if there were so many reuses that the alphabetic markers were all used, an error message was displayed. As part of the work to modernize Cite customization, these errors will no longer be shown and instead the backlinks will fall back to showing numeric markers like "1.23" once the alphabetic markers are all used.
• The log entries for each change to an editor's user-groups are now clearer by specifying exactly what has changed, instead of the plain before and after listings. Translators can help to update the localized versions. Thanks to user Msz2001 for these improvements.
• A new filter has been added to the Special:Nuke tool, which allows administrators to mass delete pages, to enable users to filter for pages in a range of page sizes (in bytes). This allows, for example, deleting pages only of a certain size or below. [15]
• Non-administrators can now check which pages are able to be deleted using the Special:Nuke tool. Thanks to user MolecularPilot for this and the previous improvements. [16]
• View all 25 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, a bug was fixed in the configuration for the AV1 video file format, which enables these files to play again. [17]

Updates for technical contributors

• Parsoid Read Views is going to be rolling out to most Wiktionaries over the next few weeks, following the successful transition of Wikivoyage to Parsoid Read Views last year. For more information, see the Parsoid/Parser Unification project page. [18][19]
• Developers of tools that run on-wiki should note that mw.Uri is deprecated. Tools requiring mw.Uri must explicitly declare mediawiki.Uri as a ResourceLoader dependency, and should migrate to the browser native URL API soon. [20]

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MediaWiki message delivery 21:16, 17 February 2025 (UTC)

Tech News: 2025-09

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Updates for editors

• Administrators can now customize how the Babel feature creates categories using Special:CommunityConfiguration/Babel. They can rename language categories, choose whether they should be auto-created, and adjust other settings. [21]
• The wikimedia.org portal has been updated – and is receiving some ongoing improvements – to modernize and improve the accessibility of our portal pages. It now has better support for mobile layouts, updated wording and links, and better language support. Additionally, all of the Wikimedia project portals, such as wikibooks.org, now support dark mode when a reader is using that system setting. [22][23][24]
• One new wiki has been created: a Wiktionary in Santali (wikt:sat:) [25]
• View all 30 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, a bug was fixed that prevented clicking on search results in the web-interface for some Firefox for Android phone configurations. [26]

Meetings and events

• The next Language Community Meeting is happening soon, February 28th at 14:00 UTC. This week's meeting will cover: highlights and technical updates on keyboard and tools for the Sámi languages, Translatewiki.net contributions from the Bahasa Lampung community in Indonesia, and technical Q&A. If you'd like to join, simply sign up on the wiki page.

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MediaWiki message delivery 00:41, 25 February 2025 (UTC)