User talk:Billinghurst/2015

William Dodd

I have created a wikipedia bio for him which you might cast your eye over. The main non primary source I could find was the school history site. If you know of another then that would be useful. Best for new year. Victuallers (talk) 09:01, 3 January 2015 (UTC)

@Victuallers: Wow! Many thanks for your efforts in that place. There is next to no genealogy records for the bloke, and 1841 census was going to take lots of effort for presumably little reward. US census for 1850 and 1860 didn't show anything likely. — billinghurst sDrewth 12:26, 3 January 2015 (UTC)

A Voice from the Factories

If alright with you, I can validate the poem and make formatting changes eliminating shift-left and adding gaps... but only if you wish for the changes to be made; otherwise, I can just validate as is. Londonjackbooks (talk) 00:38, 11 January 2015 (UTC)

Adding gaps and removing shift left would seem pointless to me for no benefit for a supposition of one thinks is better when a work is block centred anyway. Taht said do as you please. I have moved on. — billinghurst sDrewth 06:16, 11 January 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-03

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

Recent software changes

• Rotated PDF files in landscape format used to show too small. They will now display correctly. You may need to purge older files. [1]
• You can now use the {{!}} magic word instead of Template:!. Many wikis used the template to create a pipe (|) in tables and templates. You can delete the template. [2]

Software changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki (1.25wmf14) has been on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since January 7. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from January 13. It will be on all Wikipedias from January 14 (calendar).
• A bug in VisualEditor sometimes added a ☀ (Sun) character. This is now fixed. [3]
• The search and replace tool in VisualEditor is now much faster in long pages. [4]
• The TemplateData editor now uses the same design as VisualEditor. [5] [6] [7]
• The thumb option is now shown in your language in the help of the classic editor toolbar. [8]

Future changes

• You can sign up to answer questions from designers. It will help them make editing easier. [9]

Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

16:47, 12 January 2015 (UTC)

The Laboring Classes of England

Your brilliant work is now validated .... what happens now? Victuallers (talk) 23:10, 12 January 2015 (UTC)

@Victuallers: We find relevant pages to add it enWP where the addition of a contemporaneous work for the period of the article can be support this as further reading. I need to get off my arse to add it to WD. Then I find other quirky works by lesser known authors, pamphleteers, ... and start on them. — billinghurst sDrewth 12:53, 14 January 2015 (UTC)

Thanks - actually I couldnt see how to change its status as it didnt seem obvious. I can see its done now. Pity that we/I missed a chance to get it mentioned at DYK if William Dodd article ran there. However, its an interesting story. Victuallers (talk) 17:09, 14 January 2015 (UTC)

New Proposal Notification - Replacement of common main-space header template

Announcing the listing of a new formal proposal recently added to the Scriptorium community-discussion page, Proposals section, titled:

• Switch header template foundation from table-based to division-based

The proposal entails the replacement of the current Header template familiar to most with a structurally redesigned new Header template. Replacement is a needed first step in series of steps needed to properly address the long time deficiencies behind several issues as well as enhance our mobile device presence.

There should be no significant operational or visual differences between the existing and proposed Header templates under normal usage (i.e. Desktop view). The change is entirely structural -- moving away from the existing HTML all Table make-up to an all Div[ision] based one.

Please examine the testcases where the current template is compared to the proposed replacement. Don't forget to also check Mobile Mode from the testcases page -- which is where the differences between current header template & proposed header template will be hard to miss.

For those who are concerned over the possible impact replacement might have on specific works, you can test the replacement on your own by entering edit mode, substituting the header tag {{header with {{header/sandbox and then previewing the work with the change in place. Saving the page with the change in place should not be needed but if you opt to save the page instead of just previewing it, please remember to revert the change soon after your done inspecting the results.

Your questions or comments are welcomed. At the same time I personally urge participants to support this proposed change. -- George Orwell III (talk) 02:04, 13 January 2015 (UTC)

President Kocharyan's interview to Armenian National TV 02/11/2000

I left a comment, would you care to clarify or follow up? https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Wikisource:Possible_copyright_violations#President_Kocharyan.27s_interview_to_Armenian_National_TV_02.2F11.2F2000 Jeepday (talk) 14:57, 13 January 2015 (UTC)

Done — billinghurst sDrewth 13:16, 14 January 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-04

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

Recent changes

• You can download the new version of the Wikipedia app for Android. The new version shows lead images, better galleries and content from Wikidata. It also has many other new features.[10] [11]
• Programs and bots still can't read information about images on many wikis. You can see the list of wikis with the most files to fix. Wikipedia in Italian, Indonesian and Japanese language have the most files to fix. On the biggest wikis you should use bots. Bots can add information templates to groups of files. You can ask other tech users to help you.

Problems

• All JavaScript on Commons was broken for a few minutes on Tuesday. It was because of old code in the HotCat tool. The same problem happened on some Wikipedias on Wednesday. It is now fixed. [12]

Software changes this week

• There are no software changes this week and next week due to annual meetings. [13]

Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

18:12, 19 January 2015 (UTC)

Request your input

Hi,

I've come to the realization what I thought I knew about IRC from 15 years ago apparently no longer applies (if it ever did). I tried to catch Technical 13 before he vanished back into IRC but I missed him as well.

Not that he is the only one in particular that can help, but can you get on there and draw attention to my post left on his talk page? Somebody has got to have a better way re: the same vein as that whole "jumpy" license banner effect I botched the other day that you caught. TIA. -- George Orwell III (talk) 04:07, 22 January 2015 (UTC)

I have poked his IRC nick, and will watch for when he awakens. We generally are on different timezones with slim overlap. You could poke their page at m:user talk:Technical 13 they do haunt that one. — billinghurst sDrewth 06:19, 24 January 2015 (UTC)

I did manage to get T13 at the end of their day. So you may wish to ping them again. — billinghurst sDrewth 00:19, 25 January 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-05

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

Recent software changes

• You can now translate articles with the new ContentTranslation tool on several wikis. [14]

This week

• There are no software changes this week due to annual meetings. [15]

Future changes

• You can join a project to improve WikiProjects. [16]
• The Compact Personal Bar will be removed for now. It has a bug that breaks the tool to choose your language. It will come back when the bug is fixed. [17]

Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

16:08, 26 January 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-06

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

Problems

• There was a security issue on Wikimedia Labs. Many Labs tools were down after the issue was fixed. [18]

Software changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki has been on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since January 14. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from February 3. It will be on all Wikipedias from February 4 (calendar).
• The "Save page" button in the VisualEditor toolbar is now blue rather than green. This is the same as on the mobile site. [19]
• You can now edit pages on the draft namespace with VisualEditor on the Russian Wikipedia and Hebrew Wikipedia. You can ask to get VisualEditor for a namespace on your wiki. When your community agrees, ask in Phabricator. [20] [21]

Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

16:31, 2 February 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-07

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

Recent software changes

• You can now use {{#lsth: PageName | SectionName }} to transclude a section with its title. [22]

Problems

• MediaWiki was reverted to the previous version on February 4. It was because of a performance issue. It was restored later. [23]
• UploadWizard was broken on February 4 because of the revert of MediaWiki. [24]
• All sites were broken for 30 minutes on February 5. It was due to a network problem. [25]

Software changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki has been on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since February 5. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from February 10. It will be on all Wikipedias from February 11 (calendar).
• You can have one user page for all wikis. Your Meta user page will show if you don't have a user page on a wiki. You can test this tool on test wikis. [26] [27] [28]
• You can search for media files in VisualEditor more easily. Images are bigger and you see the size and license. [29] [30]
• It is easier to review your changes when you save the page in VisualEditor. The window is wider. [31]
• You can read the latest news about VisualEditor. You can now join weekly meetings with developers. During the meetings you can tell developers which bugs are the most important. The first meeting is on February 11 at 20:00 (UTC).

Future changes

• Administrators will soon be able to delete change tags used fewer than 5,000 times. [32]
• In the future you will be able to have personal lists of articles on the mobile site. [33]

Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

16:26, 9 February 2015 (UTC)

Thank you

Thanks for the style guide. That's exactly the page I needed. Still very new here. Thanks again. - Beelerb (talk) 13:54, 12 February 2015 (UTC)

Spaces before ellipses

Hello. Administrator Beeswaxcandle, who validated many pages of the book I’ve worked on, adds a space before every …, while You don’t. You have to reach some agreement in order not to make book look unarranged. Nonexyst (talk) 15:37, 14 February 2015 (UTC)

I've set them with spaces because they are breaks in thought, rather than representing omitted words. Ellipses of omission should be unspaced, those for breaks of thought should be spaced as in the original text. Beeswaxcandle (talk) 18:40, 14 February 2015 (UTC)

It is consistent throughout the book now.--Mpaa (talk) 19:45, 14 February 2015 (UTC)

Consistency: Collective work link

In {{Collective work link}}, I am wondering what you found inconsistent about the period. Many times I and others put comments after the citation, and they look a little awkward now without the period. See, for example, William Wallace. I think that template had a period for an awful long time, and I would appreciate it if it could be restored. Library Guy (talk) 17:51, 12 December 2014 (UTC)

Author pages have generally not had the use of terminating periods, hence there was inconsistency. I have added a comment field to {{EB1911 link}} and this will add your terminating period when you have an additional comment. I will run my bot through and grab all comments into the templates. — billinghurst sDrewth 10:54, 13 December 2014 (UTC)

Thank you. Library Guy (talk) 18:15, 13 December 2014 (UTC)

I have seen two styles in author page citations. There is the style that terminates with a year in parentheses (no period). There is another style that imitates the "Cite" style in Wikipedia, which does terminate with a period. I still can see no basis for your claim. Library Guy (talk) 18:50, 26 January 2015 (UTC)

That you have found inconsistency does not surprise me. We fix as we go. If you can identify other templates that need fixing then please identify them to me. — billinghurst sDrewth 11:46, 7 February 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-08

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

Software changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki has been on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since February 11. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from February 17. It will be on all Wikipedias from February 18 (calendar).
• On Wednesday your Meta user page will be shown if you don't have a user page on a wiki. [34] [35] [36]
• You can now change the order of categories in VisualEditor using drag-and-drop. [37]
• In VisualEditor, you now need to make a change before you can "Apply Changes" to citations and templates. [38]
• The way the cursor moves in VisualEditor is changing. Your browser now handles the cursor directly. Most of you will see no change. In right-to-left text, the cursor now moves in a 'visible' rather than 'logical' way. This is like other sites but you may be surprised at first.​ [39]

Meetings

• The VisualEditor Team had their first public bug triage meeting on February 11. They will post the results on the meeting page. [40]
• You can join the second weekly meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meetings you can tell developers which bugs are the most important. The meeting will be on February 18 at 16:00 (UTC). See how to join. [41]
• You can join a meeting with the developers of the Content Translation tool. It will be on February 18 at 13:00 (UTC). [42]

Future changes

• You can comment on a proposal about abandoned Labs tools.

Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

17:57, 16 February 2015 (UTC)

Thanks for the welcome

I appreciate the welcome. One question, if you don't mind, at your leisure: I feel I'd most like to do (and be best at) is doing raw transcription. But it's unclear to me whether there's a central place for this, or whether perhaps 99% of works are being OCRed in at this point.

Additionally, I see some incomplete works that aren't set up in the color-coded system, and am unsure what to make of that.

What areas do you think would benefit most from gruntwork from a rookie? I'd be happy to pitch in. (I don't feel I know enough, yet, to really jump into dealing with DjVu, creating index pages, etc. at this point...) Woodshed (talk) 06:37, 17 February 2015 (UTC)

@Woodshed: Usually best place for a newbie to see what and how we do things is Wikisource:Proofread of the Month and tag along with our shared work. If you are looking at typing works for yourself, then we have the US NARA records, or you could look to do some validation on proofread once works, eg. Category:Index proofread. We want to find works that suit your interests, so maybe you can give some indication of what are your interests then we can point you in the right direction or work with them. Again welcome, great to have you on board. To also note that we have a community that is willing to assist, and WS:S and WS:Scriptorium/Help are very responsive. [@Beeswaxcandle, @Ineuw, @William Maury Morris: you might have some ability to assist or suggest.] — billinghurst sDrewth 13:28, 17 February 2015 (UTC)

Structured Data on Commons update

Greetings,

After a delay in updates to the Structured data on Commons project, I wanted to catch you up with what has been going on over the past three months. In short: The project is on hold, but that doesn't mean nothing is happening.

The meeting in Berlin in October provided the engineering teams with a lot to start on. Unfortunately the Structured Data on Commons project was put on hold not too long after this meeting. Development of the actual Structured data system for Commons will not begin until more resources can be allocated to it.

The Wikimedia Foundation and Wikimedia Germany have been working to improve the Wikidata query process on the back-end. This is designed to be a production-grade replacement of WikidataQuery integrated with search. The full project is described at Mediawiki.org.This will benefit the structured data project greatly since developing a high-level search for Commons is a desired goal of this project.

The Wikidata development team is working on the arbitrary access feature. Currently it's only possible to access items that are connected to the current page. So for example on Vincent van Gogh you can access the statements on Q5582, but you can't access these statements on Category:Vincent van Gogh or Creator:Vincent van Gogh. With arbitrary access enabled on Commons we no longer have this limitation. This opens up the possibility to use Wikidata data on Creator, Institution, Authority control and other templates instead of duplicating the data (what we do now). This will greatly enhance the usefulness of Wikidata for Commons.

To use the full potential of arbitrary access the Commons community needs to reimplement several templates in LUA. In LUA it's possible to use the local fields and fallback to Wikidata if it's not locally available. Help with this conversion is greatly appreciated. The different tasks are tracked in phabricator, see https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T89594 .

Volunteers are continuing to add data about artworks to Wikidata. Sometimes an institution website is used and sometimes data is being transfered from Commons to Wikidata. Wikidata now has almost 35.000 items about paintings. This is done as part of the WikiProject sum of all paintings. This helps us to learn how to d:Wikidata:WikiProject Visual arts/Item structuremodel and refine metadata about artworks. Experience that will of course be very useful for Commons too.

Additionally, the metadata cleanup drive continues to produce results. The drive, which is intended to identify files missing {{information}} or the like structured data fields and to add such fields when absent, has reduced the number of files missing information by almost 100,000 on Commons. You can help by looking for files with similarly-formatted description pages, and listing them at Commons:Bots/Work requests so that a bot can add the {{information}} template on them.

At the Amsterdam Hackathon in November 2014, a couple of different models were developed about how artwork can be viewed on the web using structured data from Wikidata. You can browse two examples here and here. These examples can give you an idea of the kind of data that file pages have the potential to display on-wiki in the future.

The Structured Data project is a long-term one, and the volunteers and staff will continue working together to provide the structure and support in the back-end toward front-end development. There are still many things to do to help advance the project, and I hope to have more news for you in the near future. Contact me any time with questions, comments, concerns.

-- User:Keegan (WMF) (talk) 19:46, 19 February 2015 (UTC)

Upload fails

Hello. I thought I'd give uploading this document a go, but only managed to produce the Google project page. Any chance you could give me a hand with it? All the best --Andreas Philopater (talk) 01:24, 18 February 2015 (UTC)

@Andreas Philopater: Personally I would check archive.org first, as they often have better quality scans already ready to go. Otherwise to do it manually you would have to download the pdf, then upload to commons. There is a tool setup to make it easier and you can find and access it at toollabs:bub/, it may take a little longer, that doing it manually. — billinghurst sDrewth 10:39, 18 February 2015 (UTC)

Thanks. I had checked archive.org, but I'll look into the tool. --Andreas Philopater (talk) 10:19, 19 February 2015 (UTC)

@Andreas Philopater: Done: Index:The Political State of Europe for the Year MDCCXCII.djvu Hrishikes (talk) 07:58, 21 February 2015 (UTC)

Userpage deletion

Hello. Could you please delete my userpage (for GlobalUserPage's display)? Thanks. Hausratte (talk) 22:44, 20 February 2015 (UTC)

Done — billinghurst sDrewth 07:36, 21 February 2015 (UTC)

Global user pages and our local PotM awards

Hi, any thoughts on how we should manage the PotM awards in conjunction with the new Global user pages that people seem to be rushing towards? Beeswaxcandle (talk) 08:43, 21 February 2015 (UTC)

No, I don't have an immediate answer to how the local community can keep adding the Proofread of the Month award to user pages in conjunction with a global user page. /me prods @Legoktm: to see if he has had any thoughts about this, and not sure that it entered into his considerations when he did the design. — billinghurst sDrewth 12:38, 21 February 2015 (UTC)

Billinghurst, can you remember who suggested the "awards" for works done? In the background there was a historical reminder of why Napoleon gave out so many medals. —Maury (talk) 16:44, 21 February 2015 (UTC)

They weren't suggested, I just did them. They are a celebration for participation back when PotM was not enjoying wide participation. — billinghurst sDrewth 05:18, 22 February 2015 (UTC)

I remember that one of Napoleon's staff officers asked Napoleon why he gave out so many medals. In reply, Napoleon stated that one medal was worth 10,000 fighting men. The reason was each man would seek out a Napoleonic medal--or several of them. Thus their obedience, hopes for higher rank and/or pay, risks, -- all possible endeavors were increased. —Maury (talk) 10:06, 22 February 2015 (UTC)

Task (publishers)

Sql query to look at publisher fields of works in the Index: ns to see what we can and should link to portal namespace. Also to look at the progression of companies through iterations of name histories. — billinghurst sDrewth 01:31, 23 February 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-09

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

Recent software changes

• All new accounts are now global. [43]
• Your Meta user page is now shown if you don't have a user page on a wiki. You can report problems if you see any. You can ask a bot to delete your old user pages. [44] [45] [46]

Software changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki has been on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since February 18. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from February 25. It will be on all Wikipedias from February 26 (calendar).
• It is now easier to see template fields in VisualEditor. The fields are bigger. [47]
• It is now easier to see when a button is disabled in VisualEditor. [48]
• Sometimes when you copy-pasted a template in VisualEditor, it was replaced by HTML. This problem is now fixed. [49]
• Tools in Labs will stop working for a few hours on February 24. [50]

Meetings

• You can read the notes from the last meeting with the VisualEditor team.
• You can join the next weekly meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meetings you can tell developers which bugs are the most important. The meeting will be on February 26 at 00:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• At the moment you need to log in to edit Wikimedia wikis on mobile devices. You can say if anyone should be allowed to edit on the mobile sites. The discussion ends on March 15.
• Images in the interface will soon work better in Opera 12. [51]

Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

16:28, 23 February 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-10

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

Recent software changes

• A Lua function to use Wikidata has changed. You need to update the pages that use it. [52]
• You can use the Content Translation tool on Wikipedia in Uzbek and Minangkabau. You need to enable it in your Beta options.
• You can now hide banners if you don't have an account. [53] [54]

Software changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki has been on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since February 25. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from March 3. It will be on all Wikipedias from March 4 (calendar).
• You can use the Content Translation tool on Wikipedia in Punjabi and Kyrgyz. You can ask for the tool in other languages.
• Editing the fake blank line in VisualEditor is now simpler. This change also fixed a few bugs. [55] [56] [57] [58]
• The TemplateData editor now warns you if a related page already has TemplateData. [59]
• The TemplateData table now tells you if a template doesn't take any parameters. [60]

Meetings

• You can read the notes from the last meeting with the VisualEditor team.
• You can join the next weekly meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meetings you can tell developers which bugs are the most important. The meeting will be on March 4 at 16:00 (UTC). See how to join.
• You can join technical meetings in France and Mexico this year. You will be able to ask for help if you can't pay yourself. [61]

Future changes

• You will be able to get a direct link for a section of a page. [62]

Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

16:41, 2 March 2015 (UTC)

This month's PotM

Hi, just a heads-up that I'm going to need help with the list of contributors for this month's PotM because of mass AWB use by BD2412. I can only see the last 500 related edits and as s/he's made >1000 edits I don't know who else has been editing. Beeswaxcandle (talk) 06:11, 3 March 2015 (UTC)

March POTM? — billinghurst sDrewth 12:05, 3 March 2015 (UTC)

Which BTW in many cases could be optimized in a single edit ... I think in some cases, the use of AWB by BD2412 could be optimised, to say the least. --Mpaa (talk) 18:58, 3 March 2015 (UTC)

Yes, March is what I meant. Beeswaxcandle (talk) 04:59, 4 March 2015 (UTC)

@Mpaa: Yes, we should inform him of having a crat to have the flood flag switched on and off on his request. — billinghurst sDrewth 10:07, 4 March 2015 (UTC)

• I'm not sure what all of the above is about but I will state that I work on PotM every month and more times than just once on each of them. I also backtrack to the previous month if that is not completed. I believe that there should be a required 5-10 edits for everyone on each PotM/ I don't know if each edit can be counted? Not long ago I think we were getting several edits/person but then the statement came out that even 1 edit was enough. I don't think that is good enough and that it has slowed us down in completed PotM/s. Increase the # of edits required. If the number of edits can be counted individually then it should be done and perhaps have a different "award" indicating the # of edits. It creates competition. This is just a basic suggestion, no big deal over it other than increasing works completed. —Maury (talk) 16:45, 4 March 2015 (UTC)

  Nothing to worry about Maury, it is just the tool that we use to get data is swamped by someone using AWB to do a series of text replacements, such that we need an alternate tool. — billinghurst sDrewth 02:25, 5 March 2015 (UTC)

@Beeswaxcandle: and billinghurst, I tried this query, in case it might help you. Would you mind to see if result make some sense for the past month?--Mpaa (talk) 23:38, 5 March 2015 (UTC)

@Mpaa: Yes, that makes sense as the source query, and from that I think that we should pair to that, a query to output a simple list of distinct users to make life easy. Ultimately, we can get really lazy. Prepare a list of works, set a start date, and get a distinct list of users, and that will get us through the Page: ns list, voila an output each month. There is plenty of good stuff we can get stats-wise too that can generate a narrative around PotM, though that discussion may be better on WT:Proofread of the Month. — billinghurst sDrewth 02:26, 6 March 2015 (UTC)

Yep, looks useful and the users match the list I've manually created. Beeswaxcandle (talk) 06:12, 6 March 2015 (UTC)

@AuFCL: has improved it further, see my talk page. I think is a tas that could be automated for WS-bot and a cron job.--Mpaa (talk) 10:41, 6 March 2015 (UTC)

Blocked IP

Hi, I see you recently blocked 172.56.0.0/16, without permitting logged-in users to get around the block, with the reason "crosswiki lta." This range (or at least my part of it) is the U.S. cell phone provider T-Mobile. So it presumably includes a huge number of users. Any issue with changing it to permit edits from logged-in users? I don't know how bad the abuse was, but it seems natural to expect a great deal of abuse from a major ISP - along with a (hopefully much) greater deal of beneficial contribution. Thoughts? -Pete (talk) 01:55, 23 February 2015 (UTC)

@Peteforsyth: There were no users in the range bar our vandal. The issue with anonymous only is that this user creates accounts on other wikis then comes to vandalise. — billinghurst sDrewth 08:54, 23 February 2015 (UTC)

Please understand, I'm not criticizing your decision, just trying to offer up new information. I have certainly made non-vandalism edits from that service, under my account, but it's possible T-Mobile has switched its IP ranges around since I did. T-Mobile is one of the four major mobile phone service providers in the USA, and with many phones and tablets offers free tethering -- I know people who have given up their home Internet in favor of tethering to their phones. Also, there are recently expanded editing capabilities in WMF mobile apps. With all this in mind, it seems worthwhile to consider lifting the block for logged-in users; I realize that I can't see the scale of the vandalism, so I am not as confident in my conclusion as I could be, but I just want to be sure you have all relevant info available, and I hope you'll reconsider. -Pete (talk) 17:53, 24 February 2015 (UTC)

Any comments? This continues to prevent me from working in some circumstances (but my main concern is not for myself, but for others in this IP range who might find it impossible to get started with Wikisource). -Pete (talk) 00:25, 7 March 2015 (UTC)

Had to delete the Margaret Thatcher piece

A while ago, you deleted a page I created citing that I was allegedly breaking the copyright of the MT foundation. I asked if you could temporarily undelete so I could find the Hansard reference again. Could you do that please so that I can fix the licensing information. Wee Curry Monster (talk) 00:07, 7 March 2015 (UTC)

@Wee Curry Monster: Done — billinghurst sDrewth 14:20, 7 March 2015 (UTC)

Think thats done, would you mind checking I've done the license and source correctly. Thanks. Wee Curry Monster (talk) 18:05, 8 March 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-11

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

Recent changes

• You can now create books on almost all wikis. It doesn't work yet on wikis using the language converter. [63] [64]
• VisualEditor had problems with categories in Safari. It sometimes moved or removed the categories. The issue is now fixed. [65] [66] [67]

Changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki has been on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since March 4. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from March 10. It will be on all Wikipedias from March 11 (calendar).
• In VisualEditor the "Edit ^beta" button is now called "Edit" on the English Wikipedia. [68] [69]
• The feedback tool in VisualEditor now looks like the other tools. It also asks for information about your browser to help fix bugs. [70] [71]
• You now see the VisualEditor toolbar even if the rest of the page is still loading. [72] [73]
• You now see more information when you edit a link, a reference or other items in VisualEditor. You also see a clearer edit button in those tools. [74] [75]
• If you use the ContentTranslation tool you now see red links in the list of articles in other languages. The link is red if the article doesn't exist in the language of your options or of your browser. You can translate the article by clicking on the red link.

Meetings

• You can read the notes from the last meeting with the VisualEditor team.
• You can join the next weekly meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meetings you can tell developers which bugs are the most important. The meeting will be on March 11 at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.
• You can join a technical meeting in France in May. You can ask for help if you can't pay yourself. [76]

Future changes

• You can get help to become a developer. You can learn more on the Google Summer of Code and Outreachy pages. [77]
• You will soon be able to read technical reports in Phabricator. [78]

Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

15:18, 9 March 2015 (UTC)

Wrong page moving by a user

Hi, Billinghurst!

Thanks once again for you previous help! At this time, your look as an admin is needed. Please take a glance to this topic in user talk: User talk:Captain Nemo#Wrong_page_moving, maybe some admin's actions should be applied to fix the mistake of that user, e.g.: recreate the page Author:Henry Rosher James with full edit history, or (if it's possible) just merge the lost edits from Author:H. R. James to Author:Henry Rosher James? Of course, if this case just a trifle — then you can merely ignore it. --Nigmont (talk) 16:14, 14 March 2015 (UTC)

I addressed this already (did not see this note before, otherwise I would have not acted). Hope I fixed it properly. Bye.--Mpaa (talk) 18:26, 14 March 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-12

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

Recent changes

• The servers that resize images are using new software. You should report new problems that you notice with images. [79]
• You can now see lists of bugs about Commons, Wikisource and Wiktionary. [80]
• It is now easier to add special characters in VisualEditor. You can edit the list of characters for your wiki. [81] [82]

Problems

• Wikis were broken for a few minutes on Thursday due to a code error.

Changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki has been on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since March 11. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from March 17. It will be on all Wikipedias from March 18 (calendar).
• A puzzle piece icon () now shows hidden templates in VisualEditor. You can edit the template by clicking the icon. For example, you can now edit anchor templates. [83] [84]
• You can now add examples, and details about old parameters, in TemplateData. [85] [86]

Meetings

• You can read the notes from the last meeting with the VisualEditor team.
• You can join the next weekly meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meetings you can tell developers which bugs are the most important. The meeting will be on March 18 at 23:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• The list of bad user names on your wiki will no longer work. The global list will replace it. You can ask to add rules for bad user names on Meta. [87] [88]
• You can comment on how you want to see Wikidata edits in your watchlist on other wikis. [89]
• The final steps of single user login (SUL) will happen in April. You can see the rules to rename accounts. [90]

Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

15:14, 16 March 2015 (UTC)

Index:The American Cyclopædia (1879) Volume XII.djvu (pagescan non-display)

This is puzzling me as well, because I can't find a logical reason WHY it's not displaying the page-scans for me, this was after switching off everything I could think of, such as firewalls, Anti-virus and various ad blockers.

It's annoying as I was wanting to make progress on checking it's page-list.

It's obviously not the file, as you claim it displays without issue for you. ShakespeareFan00 (talk) 19:00, 17 March 2015 (UTC)

solved. ShakespeareFan00 (talk) 22:05, 17 March 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-13

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

Changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki has been on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since March 18. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from March 24. It will be on all Wikipedias from March 25 (calendar).
• The text of a reference is now more visible when you click on it. It has a blue background. Many wikis already have the blue color. Those wikis can now remove it from their CSS page. [91]
• VisualEditor is now much faster. For many users it is now at least as fast as the wikitext editor. [92] [93] [94]
• When you add a list of references in VisualEditor, you now see it right away. You can still change its group by editing it. [95]

Meetings

• You can read the notes from the last meeting with the VisualEditor team.
• You can join the next weekly meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meetings you can tell developers which bugs are the most important. The meeting will be on March 25 at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• Talk pages using "LiquidThreads" on mediawiki.org will soon use the new system. [96]

Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

15:09, 23 March 2015 (UTC)

Telugu wikisource needs help

@Billinghurst:

Three years back you helped Telugu wikisource get started with Proofread. I am happy to inform that we have close to 10000 pages validated. I once again would like to thank you for your support. I tried to improve the setup, to show page numbers along site transcluded text, by using enws .js code. I realized enws code is not stable. I need your help to display the page numbers beside text on Telugu wikisource, without upsetting section insertion (## label ##) on page views, which was happening when I tried to use a version of the Common.js code from enws. --Arjunaraoc (talk) 11:08, 24 March 2015 (UTC)

I was able to sort it out myself. Thanks. --Arjunaraoc (talk) 11:47, 27 March 2015 (UTC)

Apologies @Arjunaraoc:, RL (and its altered reality) and stewardry have my life somewhat occupied at the moment. Generally if you have css-related issues and problems with page numbering and display, then you would be better off addressing those to George Orwell III. — billinghurst sDrewth 12:39, 28 March 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-14

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

Recent changes

• You can now hide site banners even if you don't have an account. [97]
• You can now add citations more easily with VisualEditor on the French and Italian Wikipedia. The tool adds the information when you add some types of links. In the future you will be able to add this tool to your wiki. [98] [99] [100]
• All sites should now be faster if you have a recent browser. [101]
• You could see a serious bug when editing some templates with VisualEditor. It was fixed quickly. [102]
• VisualEditor could break when you edited an image. The issue was fixed quickly. [103]

Changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki has been on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since March 25. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from March 31. It will be on all Wikipedias from April 1 (calendar).
• VisualEditor is now the main editing tool on 53 more Wikipedias. [104]
• You can now edit the mobile site of all wikis without an account. [105]
• You can test a new tool on the beta mobile site on the English Wikipedia. With the new tool, you can create lists of articles. [106]
• You can now see that VisualEditor is opening even if you're not looking at the top of the page. [107]
• VisualEditor doesn't leave empty titles with just nowiki tags any more. [108] [109] [110] [111]

Meetings

• You can join a meeting with the Wikidata team. The meeting will be on IRC on March 31 at 16:00 (UTC). [112]
• You can read the notes from the last meeting with the VisualEditor team.
• You can join the next weekly meeting with the Editing team. During the meetings you can tell developers which bugs are the most important. The meeting will be on April 1 at 18:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

15:18, 30 March 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-15

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

Recent changes

• You can join a new email list for important news about Wikimedia Labs. [113]
• You can read the last monthly report. In the future you can read team reports every three months. You can see current work on the roadmap. [114] [115]
• The number of articles in Special:Statistics is now updated once a month. [116]
• You can use a new version of the Wikipedia app for Android. Using the app, you can now share a fact with your friends. [117]

Problems

• The import tool was broken for a few days. Imports didn't add log entries. You can delete and import pages again if necessary. [118]
• Labs was broken several times this week. [119] [120] [121] [122]

Changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki has been on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since April 1. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from April 7. It will be on all Wikipedias from April 8 (calendar).
• You can now add the same special characters with VisualEditor as with the wikitext editor. [123]
• Many bugs around copy-paste in VisualEditor are now fixed. [124] [125]
• You can now use basic tools of VisualEditor in the new talk tool. You can add links, bold and italics. You can also mention people. [126]

Meetings

• You can join the next weekly meeting with the Editing team. During the meetings you can tell developers which bugs are the most important. The meeting will be on April 8 at 18:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• You can again comment on how you want to see Wikidata edits in your watchlist on other wikis. [127]

Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

15:41, 6 April 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-16

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

Recent changes

• You can read the latest news about VisualEditor.
• You can now use the new translation tool on 22 Wikipedias. You now see the tool the first time you create a new page. [128]
• The list of bad user names on your wiki no longer works. The global list replaces it. You can ask to add rules for bad user names on Meta. [129] [130]

Problems

• Some wikis had issues on Wednesday. [131] [132]

Changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki has been on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since April 8. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from April 14. It will be on all Wikipedias from April 15 (calendar).
• Developers will start to rename 1.5 million accounts on Wednesday. After that all accounts will be unique and will work on all wikis. [133] [134]
• All users can now test link previews ("Hovercards") on several Wikipedias. [135]

Meetings

• You can join the next weekly meeting with the Editing team. During the meetings you can tell developers which bugs are the most important. The meeting will be on April 15 at 18:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

16:40, 13 April 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-17

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

Recent changes

• There was sometimes a problem when saving a page in VisualEditor. It is now fixed on all wikis. [136]
• VisualEditor sometimes showed empty warnings for wikis using Flagged Revisions. This is now fixed on all wikis. [137]
• You can get the new version of the Wikipedia app for iOS. With it you can share facts with your friends. [138]
• If you write JavaScript, you should stop using importScript and importStylesheet. [139]

Problems

• There was a problem with Labs on Monday. [140]

Changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki has been on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since April 15. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from April 21. It will be on all Wikipedias from April 22 (calendar).
• Developers are renaming 1.5 million accounts. After that all accounts will be unique and will work on all wikis. [141] [142] [143]
• If your wiki has the auto-fill tool for citations, you can now use it when you edit a reference. [144]
• You can now give examples for template options in TemplateData. [145]

Meetings

• You can join the next weekly meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs are the most important. The meeting will be on April 22 at 18:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• You will soon be able to add and remove tags on edits. [146] [147]

Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

15:29, 20 April 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-18

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

Recent changes

• All accounts are now unique and work on all wikis. [148] [149]
• You can read a report from experts who tested the security of MediaWiki. [150]
• There was a problem between VisualEditor and an antivirus software. It is now fixed. [151]
• You can help test VisualEditor to see if it works in your language. [152]

Problems

• Some Labs tools had problems due to a software bug. [153]

Changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki has been on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since April 22. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from April 28. It will be on all Wikipedias from April 29 (calendar).
• It is now clearer that you can delete several rows and columns when you edit tables in VisualEditor. [154]
• You now see more information when you search for a template in VisualEditor. [155]
• You can now cancel when you add citations on desktop, or edit links on mobile, in VisualEditor. [156]
• You can now see the list of other formats for videos only after they're ready. [157]

Meetings

• You can join the next weekly meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs are the most important. The meeting will be on April 29 at 18:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

15:10, 27 April 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-19

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

Recent changes

• You can now chat with other users in Phabricator. [158]
• There was a rare problem with VisualEditor. The text of another wiki could be added to your edit. The issue is now fixed. [159] [160]

Changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki has been on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since April 29. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from May 5. It will be on all Wikipedias from May 6 (calendar).
• It is now easier to add a link in VisualEditor. You can see an image and a description about the page. [161]

Meetings

• You can join a meeting with the Language team. The meeting will be on May 5 at 14:30 (UTC). [162]
• You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs are the most important. The meeting will be on May 6 at 18:00 (UTC). See how to join.
• You can join an event in France on May 22−25. You need to sign up before May 8. [163]

Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

15:03, 4 May 2015 (UTC)

Hi,

With reference to this old discussion between us about copyright status of one author named Rev.Alfred Manwaring. After recent close look at the issue I realised that applicable law would be UK copyright act of 1842 or Indian copyright act 1847 and for that act the copyright is limited up to 7 years only after death of the author so logically book ought to be in public domain. So I have uploaded the same at commons and imported on en wikisource vide Index:Marathiproverbs00manwgoog.djvu since there are some refs to google books and all I request you to peer review the upload of this books to confirm that, it is in accordance with commons and wikisource.

Thanks and Regards

Mahitgar (talk) 07:27, 5 May 2015 (UTC)

Thanks

Thank you for your welcome message. :-) --Phyrexian ɸ 17:29, 9 May 2015 (UTC)

userboxes

I was wondering why would you remove a sophisticated way of userbox implementation, where one module allows for the definition of two different boxes and revert back to old code? — Ineuw talk 19:18, 9 May 2015 (UTC)

@Ineuw: If you are going to talk to me about edit(s), then it would be worthwhile adding diff(s). I have no idea about what you are talking. Specificity beats generalities. — billinghurst sDrewth 07:58, 10 May 2015 (UTC)

Please accept my sincere apologies. An explanation would only make me look worse. Let me blame the late night when I see things that aren't there. — Ineuw talk 08:15, 10 May 2015 (UTC)

Kewl, which would explain my cluelessness for what I was doing late at night. No worries here. — billinghurst sDrewth 11:27, 10 May 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-20

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

Recent changes

• You can now make charts and maps on your wiki with the new "graph" tool. If you have an old browser, you will see images instead. It uses a tool called Vega; you can learn how to use it and write help pages for your wiki. You can use the Vega edit tool to make charts and copy the code to your wiki. Charts and maps use complex code and you should put them into templates. In the future, you will be able to create charts with VisualEditor. [164] [165] [166]
• You can apply for technical jobs to develop tools for the community. [167]
• The logos of all wikis are now in a new place. It will make pages load faster. You can still ask to change the logo. You can also use local CSS for brief changes. [168] [169]

Problems

• There was a problem that caused slow editing. [170]
• Pages were sometimes removed from your watchlist in VisualEditor. This problem is now fixed. [171]

Changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki has been on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since May 6. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from May 12. It will be on all Wikipedias from May 13 (calendar).
• You can now use data from Wikidata on more pages. The page doesn't need to be linked to the Wikidata item. It works on a few wikis and more wikis will be added soon. [172] [173]
• You should get fewer errors when you add files to Commons. [174]
• When you use an external link to link to a wiki page, VisualEditor now converts it to a wiki link. [175]
• When you add a link in VisualEditor, you see pages that match what you type. It is now easier to see where they match. [176]

Meetings

• You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs are the most important. The meeting will be on May 13 at 18:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

15:34, 11 May 2015 (UTC)

WMF Board election

Hi Billinghurst, I'm looking through the current vote totals for the WMF Board election, and there's all of one editor from the English Wikisource. Is there a way to send messages to the active editors here to have their voices heard? Ed ^{[talk] [en]} 08:31, 18 May 2015 (UTC)

@The ed17: Typically editors are interested in doing work, reproducing works, and less so than in the politics. Wikisource:Scriptorium is the central place, and if you think that we should put something for regular edits, then drop a note to WS:AN and suggest something to be added to the announcement component of Special:Watchlist. — billinghurst sDrewth 15:16, 18 May 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-21

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

Recent changes

• You can watch a video about the new graph tool.

Changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki has been on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since May 13. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from May 19. It will be on all Wikipedias from May 20 (calendar).
• References are now always in the right order. Also, the reference list now only shows references used on the page. [177]
• You can no longer create an account with a colon ':' in it. If you already have one, it still works. [178]
• The toolbar in VisualEditor now looks different. It is easier to see the icons. [179]
• You won't be able to use e-mail lists for a few hours on Tuesday. [180] [181]
• UploadWizard now shows better matches when you add a category to your file. [182]
• A test about VisualEditor will start on the English Wikipedia on Thursday. [183]

Meetings

• You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs are the most important. The meeting will be on May 21 at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.
• You can join a technical meeting in France this week.

Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

15:18, 18 May 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-22

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

Problems

• VisualEditor was broken for 30 minutes on Tuesday. The problem was due to a tool it uses. [184]
• Some Labs tools had issues last week. [185] [186]

Changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki has been on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since May 20. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from May 26. It will be on all Wikipedias from May 27 (calendar).

Meetings

• You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs are the most important. The meeting will be on May 28 at 18:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• You can add your ideas of new tools to help active users like you. [187]

Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

16:12, 25 May 2015 (UTC)

Whether CC-Zero is sometimes appropriate for old texts

Hi Billinghurst, I don't feel strongly about this, but here is why I put a CC-Zero tag rather than PD-Old on this text. The 1788 work is of course in the public domain, but to create a version on Wikisource I copied the text from a transcript on an academic site. That version is licenced as CC-Zero, which is why I can copy-and-paste into Wikisource. Part of the point of copying was to make corrections based on checking against other sources, and I'm happy for my edits to also be CC-Zero rather than CC-By-SA. Does this fly as a rationale, or is it only the status of the original publication that matters? Cheers, MartinPoulter (talk) 19:44, 27 May 2015 (UTC)

@MartinPoulter: We publish works as they were in the edition of the publication, warts and all, and we try to produce to a specific version, rather than a conglomeration of editions. If they have a typo, our practice is to leave leave the typo (maybe with a {{SIC}}), if we have an American or an English edition we use the spelling in that edition. You might want to have a poke at Wikisource:Annotations for what we limit ourselves to with inclusions to a work.

For licensing, no one can legitimately republish an 18th century work with a different CC-zero licence as they are not the author(s) of the work. The work had an original copyright protection (or it didn't) and that expired and (at most) 50 years after the author's death would have been PD-old. To note that any minimal corrections to an original would be ineligible for copyright. — billinghurst sDrewth 11:31, 28 May 2015 (UTC)

Thanks. To clear up a misunderstanding, I mean "correction" as in correcting errors in an OCR or partial transcript to reconstruct a single published edition. Creating a specific version rather than a conglomeration of editions is exactly what I thought we were doing.

I'll use PD-old rather than CC-Zero in future. I wasn't sure how to mark typos, but now I know.

Academic projects clearly are creating transcripts with a new licence, whether CC-Zero or a more restrictive licence- one of the reasons Wikisource is such a valuable project. You articulate what I want the law to be as a matter of principle, and what the WMF position is, but is it as clear-cut in law as you suggest? Cheers, MartinPoulter (talk) 13:57, 28 May 2015 (UTC)

cc-zero is just lazy where there expectation is that all contributions are new and personal, and they don't want fuss with a 'complicated' system. We are a little finicky and try to be accurate. People can add a more restrictive licence for other people's work, doesn't make it true or accurate; ultimately a court of law is a final arbitrator, it just hardly ever goes that far. — billinghurst sDrewth 01:13, 30 May 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-23

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

Problems

• Many wikis were slow for a few hours on Wednesday due to a code error. Sometimes the pages did not load at all and showed an error. [188]
• Some tools in Labs were broken on Wednesday and Thursday. [189]
• Edit tags added by the software were broken on all wikis from May 23 to May 28. [190] [191]

Changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki has been on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since May 27. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from June 2. It will be on all Wikipedias from June 3 (calendar).
• You won't be able to use e-mail lists for a few hours on Tuesday. [192]

Meetings

• You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs are the most important. The meeting will be on June 3 at 18:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

15:30, 1 June 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-24

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

Changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from June 9. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from June 10. It will be on all Wikipedias from June 11 (calendar). [193] [194]
• If you use the Monobook skin, the buttons and other controls now look more the same in VisualEditor and other tools. [195]
• When you edit links and other items in VisualEditor, you now need to apply your change before closing the tool. [196]
• The title of dialogs is now easier to see when it is near long buttons. [197]

Meetings

• You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs are the most important. The meeting will be on June 9 at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.
• You can join a meeting with the Language team. The meeting will be on June 10 at 14:30 (UTC). [198]

Future changes

• If you have a bot, you may need to fix it. The default continuation mode of the API for action=query will change at the end of June. [199]

Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

15:21, 8 June 2015 (UTC)

Balnamore

Hi, looks like there might be some confusion over the Balnamore history. See Talk:A social and economic history of Balnamore, 1637 to 1886. from a different User name. There's also been an IP working on the document. Beeswaxcandle (talk) 07:34, 9 June 2015 (UTC)

I don't see that they are different people, maybe different accounts, but same person. Not that I have checked. — billinghurst sDrewth 14:26, 9 June 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-25

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

Recent changes

• Users have created more than 5000 articles with the new translation tool. [200]
• Editing a page is now faster. This is because some statistics about edit filters were removed. [201]

Changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 16 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from 17 June. It will be on all Wikipedias from 18 June (calendar).

Meetings

• You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs are the most important. The meeting will be on June 16 at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.
• You can join a meeting with the Wikidata team. It will be on June 19 at 16:00 (UTC). [202]

Future changes

• Developers are working on a new tool to get and send newsletters. If you read or write a newsletter, share your ideas about it. [203]
• If you use Pywikibot, soon you won't be able to use compat anymore. [204] [205] [206]

Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

15:04, 15 June 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-26

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

Recent changes

• Some wikis can now be used only with HTTPS. This includes the English, Russian and Chinese Wikipedias, among others. Soon all wikis will use only HTTPS for all users. [207] [208]
• You can't use HTTPS wikis with Internet Explorer 6 on Windows XP. You need to use another browser. [209]

Problems

• On June 15, search was broken on all wikis for several hours. [210] [211] [212]
• On June 16, images were broken for several hours on wikis that use InstantCommons. [213] [214] [215]
• Many Labs tools were broken for several days. Almost all of them are back now. They may be missing some data for the last 10 days. [216] [217] [218]

Changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from June 23. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from June 24. It will be on all Wikipedias from June 25 (calendar).

Meetings

• You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs are the most important. The meeting will be on June 23 at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

15:23, 22 June 2015 (UTC)

Thank you!

It's always great to be welcomed, especially by humans. But being around for years now, it really feels weird to me when my talk page link is red (especially at big wikis! especially after several edits there!). Thank you for fixing this :) --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 10:07, 27 June 2015 (UTC)

Elitre for all your tromping around, I was surprised that it was a red link. — billinghurst sDrewth 10:27, 27 June 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-27

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

Recent changes

• Long lines in code blocks now look better. [219]
• You can now see graphs in VisualEditor. [220]
• When you read a page on the mobile site, you can now see a link to go to its talk page. [221]
• The code coloring tool has changed. You can now use many more languages. It now also works on mobile. [222] [223] [224]
• You can look at a new site to learn how to reuse data from Wikimedia sites. [225]

Problems

• JavaScript was broken on some wikis due to a code error. VisualEditor and other tools that use JavaScript were broken. [226]

Changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from June 30. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from July 1. It will be on all Wikipedias from July 2 (calendar).
• You can now use a tool in VisualEditor to add and edit code in color. [227]
• When you edit a sentence in the Translate tool, it can show you older translations. They help you save time if they look alike. The older translations should now work better. If you see problems, you should report them. [228]
• If you are an admin or have other special rights, you now need a strong password. [229]
• Bot and JavaScript coders: The old continuation mode of the API for action=query doesn't work any more. [230]

Meetings

• You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs are the most important. The meeting will be on June 30 at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future

• When you create a new account, it will also create one on Meta-Wiki and mediawiki.org. [231]

Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

15:56, 29 June 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-28

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

Recent changes

• On the mobile site, you now see more information when you search for a page. It now shows the description from Wikidata. [232]

Problems

• The code of long pages is not colored any more. You may see this problem on the pages of long gadgets. [233]

Changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from July 7. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from July 8. It will be on all Wikipedias from July 9 (calendar).
• The "Page information" tool shows how many users watch the page. You can now see how many are active. [234] [235]
• You can now translate articles into English with the new translation tool. [236]

Meetings

• You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs are the most important. The meeting will be on July 7 at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

15:13, 6 July 2015 (UTC)

Index:Chesterton - The Wisdom of Father Brown.djvu

Good progress is being made. However I found a possible problem. namely the illustrator was still alive in the early 1950's meaning that whilst the work is US PD (pre 1923) the illustrations might not be out of copyright in life+70 countries, The illustrators entry didn't give a nationality. Given certain attitudes at Commons, you may wish to consider if the underlying file and others that have the same illustrator, need to be localised. ShakespeareFan00 (talk) 14:01, 7 July 2015 (UTC)

Illustrations are part of the publication and will presumably be contracted through the publisher, rather than independently sourced. If you are concerned, we can probably put the illustrations local, and leave the work. I will continue to put my trust in Commons to do the right thing, and point out to them when they did not. — billinghurst sDrewth 00:48, 8 July 2015 (UTC)

Author:A. Claude Campbell

Hi, there! What's the source for expanding A. to Arthur for the subject? Also, the second viaf=4088698 added to wdata is clearly a different person (born in 1903)! Cheers, Captain Nemo (talk) 23:33, 8 July 2015 (UTC).

I was working off the title for the first, but if you think that it is in doubt, then we can tidy that up. — billinghurst sDrewth 00:32, 9 July 2015 (UTC)

@Captain Nemo: See the reader's comment by his descendant on this page. It is mentioned that the full name was Arthur Claude Campbell, birth year 1852, birth place probably Scotland, father's name Henry Charles Campbell, marriage in 1886 in India, death in 1929 in India. Hrishikes (talk) 01:13, 9 July 2015 (UTC)

@Billinghurst: Sorry, I am very slow-witted today; what do you mean by "working off the title for the first"? @Hrishikes:'s source is interesting but I don't know the prevailing view on Wsource what's "reliable" source for author's data is. Cheers and thank you for quick response, Captain Nemo (talk) 01:51, 9 July 2015 (UTC).

There is no standard for reliability. For me, I will use family history if it is documented and sourced, ie. some evidence of credibility. I will plug these into my available resources when I have a chance. The dates look credible, author in 40-50s for a subject that would be experience-based. — billinghurst sDrewth 04:24, 9 July 2015 (UTC)

As for family history, the descendant's surname in the above-given source is Medland, same as that of the author's Calcutta-based publishing partner (they together published the Bengal book). So there might have been a family connection through marriage. Hrishikes (talk) 04:40, 9 July 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-29

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

Recent changes

• You can now see a list of pages with errors in code coloring. [237]

Problems

• There was a problem with editing on Thursday. Some tools like bots and VisualEditor were broken on all wikis for 10 minutes. [238]
• There was a problem with images on Thursday. They were broken on all wikis for 15 minutes. [239]

Changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from July 14. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from July 15. It will be on all Wikipedias from July 16 (calendar).

Meetings

• You can join a technical meeting at Wikimania in Mexico City this week. [240]

Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

15:06, 13 July 2015 (UTC)

Pages to delete

Hello, I changed chapter titles from Roman numerals to Arabic for the 20 done chapters of A History of the University of Pennsylvania from Its Foundation to A. D. 1770. The links have been fixed on all the pages and I would appreciate it if you could please delete:

Chapter I

Chapter II

Chapter III

Chapter IV

Chapter V

Chapter VI

Chapter VII

Chapter VIII

Chapter IX

Chapter X

Chapter XI, 1

Chapter XI, 2

Chapter XII

Chapter XIII

Chapter XIV

Chapter XV

Chapter XVI, 1

Chapter XVI, 2

Chapter XVII

Chapter XVIII

Chapter XIX

Chapter XX

Thank you, The Haz _talk 00:28, 14 July 2015 (UTC)

Done -- George Orwell III (talk) 01:36, 14 July 2015 (UTC)

Thanks! The Haz _talk 02:02, 14 July 2015 (UTC)

Indian constitution and copyright law

There are two sets for both: one set are scans, the other is Wikisource creation of latest updated version. Template:Constitution of India and Portal:Copyright law/Copyright law of India show the scans: originals as well as amendments. Constitution of India and Indian Copyright Law are Wikisource creations, i.e., not digital re-creations of published documents, but in-house creations based on multiple documents. I am aware of your stand that these in-house creations are not in scope here. But these documents are important, at least the copyright law, for cross-wiki purposes. The copyright document is of critical importance for Indic language Wikisources, where PD-India documents can be hosted even if not PD-US. In Commons, c:Template:PD-India-Gov refers to this document (the template can hardly refer to the 1957 document, that being long outdated). If one of these in-house creations is out-of-scope, then the other is too. So in that case, both should be deleted; else, the matter may be re-considered whether these two parallel sets for both documents can be accommodated side-by-side. With regards, Hrishikes (talk) 12:27, 16 July 2015 (UTC)

@Hrishikes: we don't do living documents, they are just too hard to maintain, and become stale at some point and do not represent a document at a point of time (it gets ugly). Also with legislation, the regulating authorities generally do a better job of maintaining it, so we can reference their living documents as required. As such we try to show a document at its point of time/publication, so we can have multiple documents of the legislation of the copyright of India through time, and that is how we disambiguate. So we can have a current form of a document, if it has been produced in the format. This is a better discussion for WS:S than here on a back-block user talk page. — billinghurst sDrewth 22:43, 24 July 2015 (UTC)

I have not asked you to keep hosting them. I have said that the fate should be same for both of these "living" documents; either both should be kept, or else, both should be deleted. As for govt. maintenance, they are doing a poor job. The copyright act document being maintained by the Indian copyright office here is not updated with the 2012 amendment; the Wikisource creation here is possibly the one and only latest updated version of Indian copyright act available on the net. Hrishikes (talk) 02:20, 25 July 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-30

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

Changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from July 21. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from July 22. It will be on all Wikipedias from July 23 (calendar).
• You now see more warnings in the image viewer. They tell you to be careful when using the image, for example if it shows a person. [241]

Meetings

• You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs are the most important. The meeting will be on July 21 at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• Soon you won't be able to use MathJax to display math. [242]

Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

03:05, 21 July 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-31

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

Recent changes

• You can now use redirects to link to JavaScript pages. [243]
• You cannot use the compact user bar any more. [244]
• You can change your options to see bigger images. [245]
• You can watch short videos about how to use VisualEditor. [246]
• You can now edit pages linked in "what links here" more easily. [247]

Problems

• There was a problem with some Lua modules on July 22 and 23. Some pages using them did not list them in "what links here". You can fix those pages with a null edit: edit and save the page without making any change.
• There was a problem with the abuse filter page on big wikis on July 23. It was due to a code error. [248]

Changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from July 28. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from July 29. It will be on all Wikipedias from July 30 (calendar).
• JavaScript authors: You cannot use wgNoticeUserData to get edit counts anymore. [249]

Meetings

• You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs are the most important. The meeting will be on July 28 at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

15:05, 27 July 2015 (UTC)

Death year check

Can you do a death year check on Author:Harihar Das? He was living in England, so probably died there. His biography in his posthumously published Norris embassy work (starting page link given in description part of author page) gives the death year with a query. With thanks, Hrishikes (talk) 01:17, 28 July 2015 (UTC)

Done — billinghurst sDrewth 11:15, 28 July 2015 (UTC)

Thanks very much. But now what is to be taken as final? Your sources give the range as 1895-1950. I did get 1895-?1952 in my earlier searches (1, 2), but the biography in his own posthumous book is very detailed and gives birth data as:

DOB: November 2, 1892
Place: Sidhipasa, Jessore district, Bengal
Father's name: J. C. Das, lawyer

It details his visit to England as:

Went to England in July 1919, joined the Faculty of Arts, Univ. Coll., London, attended course for two years at School of Librarianship. Simultaneously, was on the staff of India Office Library on voluntary basis. Was elected fellow of Royal Historical Society in 1920, and after high acclaim (Yeats, Princess Victoria, others) of the Toru Dutt bio, was made a fellow of Royal Society of Literature. In 1921, he got admitted in New College, Oxford, and got B. Litt. in 1923. Then he went on to publish articles in plenty of journals as well as Encyclopædia Britannica, the details of which are given in the bio.

In view of such exhaustive bio, should we consider 1895 or 1892 as birth year? I do not have specific knowledge about the reliability of the sources, I am just asking for your opinion. And should we now show 1950 as the death year in author page? I'll go along with your opinion. With regards, Hrishikes (talk) 11:54, 28 July 2015 (UTC)

The point of death would seem accurate, ie. he is dead, not long dead, all known. Years of birth can always be approximate depending on the information that the person lodging the death knows. So I would be happy with what you stated. I also see a shipping record for a family (H. M. Das mother, 41 and children from 18 to 4 — 3 girls, 2 boys)

Name: Mr. H Das
Arrival Date: 9 Sep 1895
Birth Date: abt 1891
Age: 4
Gender: Male
Ethnicity/ Nationality: Dutch
Place of Origin: Holland, Netherlands
Port of Departure: Rotterdam
Port of Arrival: New York, New York
Ship Name: Amsterdam

which looks aligned, though nothing confirmed. — billinghurst sDrewth 12:51, 28 July 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-32

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

Recent changes

• The ContentTranslation extension has been updated:
  • You can now type in list paragraphs on wikis with right-to-left scripts. [250]
  • Some user interface updates changed how details in the ContentTranslation extension look. [251] [252] [253] [254]
• The error page you see when the sites are not working is now simpler and easier to read. It also shows the Wikimedia logo. [255]
• MediaWiki now supports redirects for CSS pages. [256]
• Bots can't guess captchas unlimited times anymore. [257]

Problems

• There was a problem with thumbnails on wikis with local images on July 24 and 25. It was due to a code error. [258]
• We can't search by file type on Wikimedia wikis now. [259]

Changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from August 4. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from August 5. It will be on all Wikipedias from August 6 (calendar).

Meetings

• You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs are the most important. The meeting will be on August 4 at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

15:51, 3 August 2015 (UTC)

hws template

Is there a reason for which pages in Index:Admiral Phillip.djvu are placing the beginning portion of hyphenated words in the footer rather than using {{hws}} (for example here)? BD2412 T 16:21, 3 August 2015 (UTC)

There is no value in {{hws}}, so I don't use it (page displays as printed, and there is no need to know what is the full word). {{hwe}} is required to display the pages correctly.

I was not aware of that - I've never seen one used without the other. So the beginning of the word is in the footnote so it shows up on the index page but not in the final display? BD2412 T 02:34, 4 August 2015 (UTC)

It's better to be consistent and include it in the body. There are situations where placing {{hws}} in the footer may not display properly, such as when the word appears in a multi-page table. --EncycloPetey (talk) 02:39, 4 August 2015 (UTC)

@BD2412: {{hws}} shows the partial $1, and has a hover of the whole word $2 in page namespace, and is completely concealed when transcluded. {{hwe}} shows does the same in page namespace, though the $2 function handles the display when transcluded. So the end result is the same by putting it inside the footer <noinclude> section for showing in page namespace.

@EncycloPetey: I don't use the "hws" template at all, let alone put it in the footer. It is only a display attribute, and one that pretty well came about due to the difficulties in using the footer section in the early days, which was resolved by this template hide approach (it was a little more complicated discussion, but that is the nutshell). The improvement of the interface by ThomasV took place but the practice of both templates continued, AND it is easier to explain that way to newbies, BUT it is not a requirement of a transcription. — billinghurst sDrewth 03:20, 4 August 2015 (UTC)

Template or not, putting the first part of a hyphenated word in the footer can lead to display problems under certain conditions, such as I mentioned. --EncycloPetey (talk) 03:54, 4 August 2015 (UTC)

How? Where? What? That is going to need an example to be believed that we have a real issue

A <noinclude> versus an #if statement "non-display" should be making no difference, and if it is not to show in a transclusion, it isn't to show in either case. So, if you are telling me that putting it into the footer is displaying it in a transclusion, then we have a very weird situation. If you are saying that it needs to be formatted around a close of a table inside the footer, then that is no different from any other table closure, so is just about appropriate coding, and not the use of the template or not. Further, it would only be a namespace issue in itself. — billinghurst sDrewth 06:09, 4 August 2015 (UTC)

In any case, Admiral Phillip is done. Cheers! BD2412 T 17:45, 6 August 2015 (UTC)

Marvellous, thanks to all who contributed. — billinghurst sDrewth 23:28, 6 August 2015 (UTC)

image tracking categories

Apropos the addition of image tracking categories to author template, why not do the same with birth year and death year? To begin with we could 1)track authors that have death (birth) date on wikidata but not here; 2)track authors that have different death (birth) date on wikidata; 3)track authors that have death (birth) date here but not on wikidata. Bot then can import/export dates for categories 1) and 3) and humans could clean up category 2). Let me know what you think. Cheers, Captain Nemo (talk) 08:26, 5 August 2015 (UTC).

I totally agree (and I am not finished yet, just a slow learner), and it was to be a proof of concept, get it functioning and not scare the sheep with my radical thoughts; and with the recent @T.seppelt: proposal for a bot to do authority control, I see an opportunity to work with him to automate much of our headers data into a productive transfer of data into Wikidata, and the opportunity to look at much in the way of our local data to some more powerful (meta)data components with works and authors. Especially if we can look to utilise local facilities to build the data, and then have a bot grab it and populate WD (and reference).

P.S. What was the bad tooth for? if I may ask :) Cheers, Captain Nemo (talk) 08:28, 5 August 2015 (UTC).

The mischievous smiley? A congrats! :-) — billinghurst sDrewth 09:52, 5 August 2015 (UTC)

The Firm of Gridlestone/Girdlestone

Thank you for checking out some of my proofreading efforts for this project. Also greatly appreciate comments left on my talk page for things I'm not supposed to be doing or should be doing differently. As a complete newbie to the site and lack of documentation on help:proofreading pages as to what to add/remove to "match the scan" as best as can be done, this advice helps. I realize not everything can be or should be documented. Learning as I go. I did leave some thoughts on the discussion page for this project for clarification. Humbug26 (talk) 18:12, 5 August 2015 (UTC)

On author images from Wikidata

Billinghurst, in Template:Author getValue should be used instead of getRawValue to retrieve the image name from Wikidata, because "if values with preferred rank exist, then only they are returned" (from w:Module:Wikidata/doc). And yes (I tried it), with this particular property they are also returned as plain text.--Erasmo Barresi (talk) 10:33, 8 August 2015 (UTC)

@Erasmo Barresi: Thanks, the doc said wikilink'd, which was not wanted, hence why I went with getRawValue. Probably need to get that documentation updated to be specific about how it wikilinks (presumably some sort of #ifexist). — billinghurst sDrewth 11:29, 8 August 2015 (UTC)

I just discovered the sortkey property, which can easily be used for the initials, like this: {{ucfirst:{{lc:{{padright:|2|{{#invoke:Wikidata|getValue|P1964|FETCH_WIKIDATA}} }} }} }}. I also tried the following to retrieve the item description: {{#invoke:Wikidata|ViewSomething|descriptions|en|value}}. Maybe we'll be able to start using {{author}} without parameters sooner than expected!--Erasmo Barresi (talk) 13:36, 8 August 2015 (UTC)

Author template without parameters could be problematic. 1) We don't want variation; 2) Different naming rules; 3) Vandalism that we cannot control or notice; are among some. That said, I can see the time that we can lessen the load, utilise WD to assist in creation of author pages, AND allow for the customisation that users want, ie. we produce a minimum, but allow for users to have additional parameter through gadgets of extra fields they want to see. I see the scope for flexibility, and updatedness, and for tracking well where the data is in disagreement with that source. — billinghurst sDrewth 14:51, 8 August 2015 (UTC)

Okay, I did not mean that parameters should be disallowed or deprecated, only that if all the necessary data is on Wikidata, one should be able to get a meaningful and functioning output just by typing {{author}}. However, the Author namespace is just the easy part, for the real challenge will be getting the main and Translation namespaces aligned. <going off-topic> Just to let you know, on the Italian Wikisource we had a new namespace set up for this a few months ago. It is called "Opera" (Italian for "Work"). The long-term plan is to have "Opera" pages connected to work items and main namespace pages connected to edition items. But this is just one way things can be arranged.--Erasmo Barresi (talk) 17:13, 8 August 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-33

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

Recent changes

• MediaWiki can now hide the signature button when you edit a content page. [260]
• The "Your preferences have been saved" message has changed. You can now see more easily what was saved when you change preferences several times. [261]
• You can now play Ogg video files in some browsers that don't support this format. This solution uses JavaScript and works on desktop browsers only for now. It will work on mobile later. [262]
• You can now use the same tools to edit style in VisualEditor on mobile as in desktop browsers. [263]
• It is now easier to see if there is a JavaScript error in a user or site script. [264]
• JavaScript authors:
  • You can no longer use the Sajax library. You can see a list of pages to fix. [265] [266]
  • You can no longer use document.write on Wikimedia wikis. You can see a list of pages to fix. [267] [268]
• The content translation tool now works better. It is easier to use math, and useless tags are no longer added. [269]

Problems

• More edits have been rejected due to loss of session data lately. This is now fixed. [270]
• Importing a Lua module sometimes didn't work. This is now fixed. [271]
• Text was sometimes lost in the content translation tool. One part of the problem is now fixed. [272]

Changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from August 11. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from August 12. It will be on all Wikipedias from August 13 (calendar).
• UploadWizard is getting a new look. The look of buttons and checkboxes has already changed. This week, UploadWizard gets a new date picker. The other text fields will change soon. [273]
• You can now test VisualEditor on mobile devices of all sizes. [274]

Meetings

• You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs are the most important. The meeting will be on August 11 at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• Some things in the watchlist will get a new look. [275]

Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

14:57, 10 August 2015 (UTC)

bot activity on Swedish Wikisource

Care to explain what you do? This kind of null-edits should be annonounced before start.--Thurs (talk) 15:58, 14 August 2015 (UTC)

@Thur: Damn, phabricator:T108799 I was hoping that as null edits that they would not be showing through (they shouldn't be for null edits). Can you just give it a bot right for the interim. We are fixing up a problem caused by proofread page. — billinghurst sDrewth 16:12, 14 August 2015 (UTC)

OK, I give you a flod/botflag for a week.--Thurs (talk) 16:18, 14 August 2015 (UTC)

Done, You can proceed with the edits.--Thurs (talk) 16:23, 14 August 2015 (UTC)

@Thur: Thanks. it should only be needed for a several hours as I cycle through the Page: ns. — billinghurst sDrewth 16:28, 14 August 2015 (UTC)

Apologies to any other wiki that has a slab of my edits in your recent changes. All those null edits are meant to have been null edits, and not show, seems I will need to add a pywikibot bug :-/ I have shoved flooder on all the major wikis, and will take them off in the (my) morning. — billinghurst sDrewth 16:28, 14 August 2015 (UTC)

For what it is worth, it looks like we are seeing a slight interaction between mediawiki at the time of the pages being saved, and to how mediawiki is today. What is happening is that it is stripping the trailing space off pages that were on pages for some reason. — billinghurst sDrewth 16:41, 14 August 2015 (UTC)

Somehow the floodflag doesnt seem to work. The edits is still showing up in Recent Changes.--Thurs (talk) 16:50, 14 August 2015 (UTC)

@Thur: yes, the fallbacks that I employed all were unsuccessful, and I am digging through that now. <sigh> — billinghurst sDrewth 00:53, 15 August 2015 (UTC)

cleaning on plwikisource

Could you, please, use a bot account for massive automated edits? I can set you bot flag on request. But I doubt you wish bot flag set to this account :) Ankry (talk) 17:11, 14 August 2015 (UTC)

I have set you the bot flag temporarily, as on svwikisource. Ankry (talk) 17:18, 14 August 2015 (UTC)

Thanks @Ankry: That was a noisy and ugly exercise in quietly tidying up. — billinghurst sDrewth 00:51, 15 August 2015 (UTC)

Removed the bot flag already as it did not inflict edits visibility. I also tried to touch pages with the same command as you using a bot account, but my "touches" did not modify anything. Maybe you use another version or different user rights cause different bot behaviour? Ankry (talk) 08:38, 15 August 2015 (UTC)

@Ankry: I have yet to find an explanation for the rights changes have not taken effect, there were numerous attempts by various means to get the rights in place locally and remotely. I halted the jobs, once I was able to work out how fine them and to pull them out of the grid (that is labs submission parlour). In analysis mode. <sigh> — billinghurst sDrewth 13:18, 15 August 2015 (UTC)

Billinghurst, what does "Pywikibot touch edit" mean? Kind regards, —Maury (talk) 01:26, 15 August 2015 (UTC)

It is meant to be a no change edit, checked phab:T108799 for why, and the fix applied. These edits are all meant to be applied locally, so I am not sure why they still showing. Trying to get them marked as bot while the run occurs. — billinghurst sDrewth 03:38, 15 August 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-34

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

Recent changes

• Many Wikipedias can now use information from any Wikidata item in any Wikipedia article. Before they could only use the Wikidata item that matched the subject of the article. [276] [277] [278]
• Some auto-saving problems and other issues in the Content Translation tool are now fixed. Please report to the Content Translation feedback page if you still have problems. [279]

Problems

• Older gadgets that are not using ResourceLoader are not loading anymore. They need to be updated. [280] [281]
• On August 12 the machine translation servers and the Content Translation tool didn't work. This was fixed on the same day. [282]

Changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from August 18. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from August 19. It will be on all Wikipedias from August 20 (calendar).
• You can soon watch when something is added to or removed from a category. [283]

Meetings

• You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs are the most important. The meeting will be on August 18 at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

16:17, 17 August 2015 (UTC)

More Commons deletions of files we are using

Hi, is there some way of finding out what used to be in the PD-UN Commons category that has been deleted over the last few months. I know you've brought the Kosovo files across, but File:Cairo Declaration on Human Rights in Islam.djvu currently has orphaned pages. SFan00 has been finding several in his explorations as well. Beeswaxcandle (talk) 07:05, 23 August 2015 (UTC)

@Beeswaxcandle: File now here. Re missing here, I would suggest looking at something like a search for either djvu and pdf in the deletion requests, or maybe search for PD-UN in the same search if too many. — billinghurst sDrewth 07:17, 23 August 2015 (UTC)

Updated scripts

Hi Billinghurst. I edited your common.js to update you to the latest version of TemplateScript, which makes it easier to write custom scripts. For example, you had many lines like these in your scripts:

// Av -> w
context.$target.val(context.$target.val().replace(/Av(ill|ith)/g, 'w$1'));

// "U" -> "ll" when preceded by a lowercase letter
context.$target.val(context.$target.val().replace(/([a-z])U/g, '$1ll'));

The new version let you write this instead:

editor
   .replace(/Av(ill|ith)/g, 'w$1') // Av -> w
   .replace(/([a-z])U/g, '$1ll');  // "U" -> "ll" when preceded by a lowercase letter

The editor object is meant to help you forget the DOM — if you're using $('#wpTextbox1') or context.$target directly, your scripts will break on pages with editors like VisualEditor or CodeEditor. (Note that context.$target is deprecated and will be removed soon; if you really need it, you should use $('#wpTextbox1') instead.)

You can see m:TemplateScript for the latest documentation. Let me know if anything breaks. :) —Pathoschild 01:30, 24 August 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-35

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

Recent changes

• Disambiguation pages are now excluded from the random page function. [284]

Problems

• There was a problem with CAPTCHAs in VisualEditor. This has now been fixed. [285]

Changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from August 25. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from August 26. It will be on all Wikipedias from August 27 (calendar).

Meetings

• You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs are the most important. The meeting will be on August 25 at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

13:02, 24 August 2015 (UTC)

Shifting from Commons

Hi! Can you take some action for 1, 2, 3? Thanks, Hrishikes (talk) 07:06, 26 August 2015 (UTC)

@Hrishikes: Done You will find them at Special:RecentChanges in the FromCommons section (top right), please pop in, remove that categorisation, and make any amendments like licensing. Also add {{Do not move to Commons}} and look to use the expiry parameter. If you need a hand, please ping me again. — billinghurst sDrewth 13:28, 26 August 2015 (UTC)

Thanks. I have edited file info for all three. Some points. File:Ancient History of the Deccan.djvu was published from Pondicherry in 1920, so French copyright is applicable (of which, I don't know the terms). I could not find the birth/death year of the translator, so data incomplete in fileinfo. File:The Music of India.djvu seems to have been simultaneously published from many places including New York. If so, it would be suitable for Commons. Can you please review the title page? Hrishikes (talk) 15:00, 26 August 2015 (UTC)

For specific copyright issues, it is better to drop questions and referrals to WS:CV. Re migration to Commons, I generally run an annual process for works known to come out of copyright. So for those works they should be formatted appropriately to be received at Commons, and tagged with {{move to Commons}}. — billinghurst sDrewth 22:57, 26 August 2015 (UTC)

More work for you:)

Hi, there! Something should also be done about all maintenance categories of type Category:Author pages not linking to Wikipedia, etc. Cheers, Captain Nemo (talk) 01:29, 27 August 2015 (UTC).

Thanks. I have removed negative categorisation, though we will wish to have a means to readily identify those cases, and we should be able to do it still via a similar means. Will think about that once I have the next batch running tonight. — billinghurst sDrewth 03:09, 27 August 2015 (UTC)

Cambridge County Geographies

Hi! I started a new article w:Cambridge County Geographies; the series is in public domain (at least a big chunk of them) but the source I used does not give the year of publication of the individual books of the series. I suppose they might be a worthy addition to Portal:Counties, if someone can figure out the dates of publication and start the transcription projects. So just a FYI. Best regards. Solomon7968 (talk) 02:00, 11 August 2015 (UTC)

@Solomon7968: A quick look sees Buckinghmashire published in 1912, however, with the author dying in the 1950s, it probably is something that we would need to have the file kept locally rather than at Commons. If they are all the same era then we can probably host them. I have crafted a query that seems to get numbers of them. If you have the time and patience, you can build a portal page for the series and link to those at archive.org. You could look to something like Portal:Notes and Queries as a guide to how we have built one previously, and that will make it easier to organise to get them in when someone has the time. — billinghurst sDrewth 02:58, 11 August 2015 (UTC)

I have created some of the author pages of the authors of the series for whom I can find information on viaf (as you instructed me some time ago) and noted absence of birthyear/deathyear or year of publication in the edit summaries. viaf doesn’t seems to exist/suffice for many of the other authors of the series. Perhaps you can find some more info elsewhere? Solomon7968 (talk) 14:04, 29 August 2015 (UTC)

SDrewthbot is screwing up Copyright-until links

https://en.wikisource.org/w/index.php?title=Author:Isaac_Asimov&diff=5644664&oldid=5530243 has as an edit comment "removal of superfluous sister links in WD, removed: | wikipedia = Isaac Asimov (17) using AWB", but it's screwing up Copyright-until links where it links to Wikipedia.--Prosfilaes (talk) 06:06, 27 August 2015 (UTC)

Thanks. I will go back and play on _that_ baby after a regex change, so please excuse a bit of noise on that one. — billinghurst sDrewth 07:06, 27 August 2015 (UTC)

Reviewed, and amended. I have also again reviewed the templates that look pertinent for the Author: namespace, and could not find any others that are likely to use a wikipedia parameter. I also ran my eye down the Authors-A done, and could not see any other extravagent replacements, so seems that it was one of one or one. — billinghurst sDrewth 10:49, 27 August 2015 (UTC)

Sandboxes?

Two points:

1. Thanks for cleaning up Index:Sandbox; but that concurrently raises:
2. Why is Index: special? I was specifically testing an issue which may have been namespace specific and was formerly under the impression a sandbox in each possible namespace was normal in all mediawiki installations (obviously false.)

Shouldn't a redirect be left to Wikisource:Sandbox/Index as expecting a user to make the connection between Template: and Index: namespace unprompted is rather a long stretch? And how is one to "properly" test namespace stuff anyway? I'll do it exclusively off-site (and of course I am aware of the test wikis if that is your recommendation) if that is a requirement but it makes the collaboration model a bit farcical. AuFCL (talk) 04:03, 31 August 2015 (UTC)

(ec) We have traditionally done all sandboxes in the Wikisource: namespace. It has been existing practice and a decision prior to my arriving, though I understand it to be to keep all sandboxes out of presentation spaces. A redirect may be possible though not through the Mediawiki: namespace template that currently exists, and which I cannot do with my existing access, and had plans to look at tonight.

If you need to test namespace specific issues, then you should be able to use test2wiki: or the test wiki set up that replicates enWS (and for which I cannot remember the url, Tpt tests there). For me, I just interchange WS: namespace or user: ns for my testing, and change it when implemented. — billinghurst sDrewth 04:15, 31 August 2015 (UTC)

I must be confusing local practice with observation made elsewhere. (It isn't as if the applications come up that often. Also I'd forgotten the no-cross-ns redirect rules.) Oh well thanks. AuFCL (talk) 06:55, 31 August 2015 (UTC)

┌──────┘
Incidentally I suppose I should report upon what I wanted to check in the first place if only for these reasons:

1. it is a piece of ProofreadPage arcana which may actually be useful one day;
2. I probably should record it somewhere outside of just the inside of my own head; and (deliciously):
3. if I make you the new point of contact I can refer all future correspondence... (I think you probably get the point?)

Anyway, arising from comments made variously by yourself and Hrishikes in this discussion I thought it might be worthwhile investigating the level of internal integrity checking on the "Year" field of Index: pages (do you now see why testing in the WikiSource: ns might not necessarily be handled identically cf Index: in this instance?) with regards George Orwell III's list (see what a name dropper I am becoming?)

Specifically what is preventing fl./circa./etc. range/precision modifiers from being applied to works and whether or not the processing chain reacts sensibly if they should happen to have already been entered. Turns out under the current software release only an HTML check applied at point of initial data entry (trivially bypass-able) appears to be the only protection. That is not good but at least the subsequent processing appears to be robust once "bad" data is injected. In short it is a toss-up which is the correct way to go but the system as it stands straddles two incompatible design choices.

On second thoughts probably not such a good situation to advertise widely; though certainly not too damaging either? Ignorance is bliss and all that. AuFCL (talk) 09:03, 31 August 2015 (UTC)

My thoughts in this space is that the amount of information at an index page will diminish in time as we get that data into Wikidata more readily. We will also be able to more readily identify data discrepancies as we start to shove data around and write means to crosscheck data. — billinghurst sDrewth 13:05, 31 August 2015 (UTC)

That is a completely different kettle of fish. I largely agree but if (as somebody observed recently multiple times) LUA developers with a WikiSource bent are hard to come by then PHP ones to get this changed in ProofreadPage.php are near non-existent. I expect you'll have to live with oddities like this for a very long time. AuFCL (talk) 21:16, 31 August 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-36

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

Recent changes

• VisualEditor will now automatically create a link when you type in or paste an ISBN, PMID, or RFC. [286][287]
• The link editor in VisualEditor is now a bit wider. It's now the same width as the automatic citation tool. [288]
• VisualEditor gadget authors can no longer use the backwards-compatibility module ext.visualEditor.viewPageTarget.init. Use ext.visualEditor.desktopArticleTarget.init instead. [289]
• Gadget writers can now use mediawiki.ForeignApi to communicate between different Wikimedia wikis. [290]

Changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from September 1. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from September 2. It will be on all Wikipedias from September 3 (calendar).

Meetings

• You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs are the most important. The meeting will be on September 1 at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• The Wikidata API will be updated with breaking changes. This will probably happen on September 9. [291]

Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

21:36, 31 August 2015 (UTC)

Bots are not capable of proofreading

Hi Billinghurst, Although I was optimistically assuming that my activities as described at Wikisource:Administrators'_noticeboard#Bots_are_not_capable_of_proofreading do not rise to the level of administrative sanction, it just occurred to me that you might merely be waiting for me to respond on your talk page (as opposed to my bot's talk page). Anyhow, I assume if it was a big deal I would have heard something by now, so I'll assume that it's a small deal, fixable with minor sanctions and/or rework, as specified by yourself and others. I would like to resume work on the project with user Maury, and will do so on a "go slow" basis for the next couple of days just in case you're on a summer holiday or have one coming up that you're getting ready for. Anyhow, sorry if I've made any significant amount of extra work for you, I'm optimistic that with a little more fine-tuning my bot could be ready by the end of 2015 to make useful contributions to the project beyond the Southern Historical Society Papers (that particular series is not my passion, but I found a friendly and helpful collaborator in Maury, who would like to see the series completed, and I agreed to do what I could to further that goal in return for his advice on formatting and his help in validating the SHSP series pages). If you'd like to discuss any problems with my approach further, feel free to take that back to the noticeboard or my talk page. Questions about what I'm trying to get the bot to do are welcome on my talk page, and if there is a flag that needs to be set on my bot id, just let me know what I need to request and I'll do it (I believe the lack of a flag or the bot's name on a list may be one source of confusion). Until then, I'll assume that "no news means no sanctions" and continue my work with Maury, with a bit more caution. Thanks for any advice and sorry for any confusion I've created. Dictioneer (talk) 00:10, 1 September 2015 (UTC)

@Dictioneer: Your page was specific, WS:AN was philosophical. We discuss slowly here, so while still an open discussion I think that the summarisation would be

1. If you are manually reviewing each bot edit, then you can change the proofread status
2. If you are not manually reviewing, then do the text edits, and not change the status

All other components the community can discuss through the bot approval process as dictated on Wikisource:Bots. Among other work on-wiki, I haven't been able to give it more time, and my hope that someone else may stand up and take ownership of this was not fulfilled. — billinghurst sDrewth 02:46, 1 September 2015 (UTC)

Thank you for the clarification. I will add that while the discussion is ongoing, I will only change to proofread status under my dictioneer persona. I do have a review process for bot edits before uploading, but it is probably not up to the standard you suggest (the bot in certain circumstances will display a review list of 'similar' edits that are in doubt in a window that allows for cancelling/correcting the edits before they're applied en masse). Until the discussion has reached its logical conclusion, I'll play it safe. BTW, have I mentioned that "go slow" is good as far as I'm concerned? You folks are a good deal less reactive than over at WP, that's one of the reasons I like it here. I'll keep an eye on the philosophical discussion, and thanks again, Dictioneer (talk) 03:50, 1 September 2015 (UTC)

There is a mistaken idea above. I do not care _for me_ to do the SHSP volumes. I stopped that long ago. The only help I gave was the basics of editing which I would have done on any single book or multiple volumes and I would probably still be making mistakes. AdamMorgan set up the volumes. I stepped in to help get them underway. I have done these volumes long ago, for a company, and sold the CDs. I have no desire to do them all over again. Dictioneer, I stepped in again validating for you because you asked for assistance. Your desire was about a "bot" and unusual words as I recall. You chose the SHSP volumes to do starting with a high numbered volume which wasn't what I would have chosen even if I had wanted to work on the SHSP volumes. I wanted the .pdf files placed on Wikisource because of their historical significance and that is all I ever wanted. I got caught up in working on them several times by others especially user: Hydel Dyl (sp?) asking me. I prefer the SHSPbot, wrongly named for other works, to work on the 9 volumes of the History of England vols.1-9 by author:John Cassell (& company). I love doing the illustrations in those volumes. The SHSP volumes have been a pain in several ways and for a long time for me. I just tried to help because I was asked to. I like helping and being helped -- the concept of "working together". I do not care about total 52 SHSP vols. other than they are in PD and others should know this nation's history and terrible in-fighting. Most people here do not care about working on the SHSP volumes about the American Civil War aka War Between the States". (N.B. Billinghurst, my name is not WM nor WMM.) Follow my signature - please. —Maury (talk) 17:18, 1 September 2015 (UTC)

[User:Hywel Dda] is the name that I was trying to recall above who was doing a lot of work on the SHSP including tables and he conversed with AdamBMorgan, Me, and others about some of it. —Maury (talk) 18:04, 1 September 2015 (UTC)

Wrapping scripts in <source>

Hi Billinghurst. I saw you wrapped a few scripts in <source>, probably to keep them out of categories. However this breaks tracking code like [[File:Pathoschild/templatescript.js]], which means the page will no longer be tracked and updated. Please consider wrapping individual sections with <nowiki> instead (excluding script headers so the trackers still work). The approach I've been taking is moving all the custom scripts for TemplateScript into the closure, and wrapping that with <nowiki> (see example). —Pathoschild 21:51, 06 September 2015 (UTC)

Okay and thanks. It is more than the categories, but that is definitely one aspect. I have stopped and restarted the source tag to allow the image tracking hack to work. Pity that there isn't a better way. — billinghurst sDrewth 00:15, 7 September 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-37

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

Recent changes

• You can now mention up to 50 users in a post and they will get a notification. Previously you could notify up to 20 users. [292]
• A new version of the Wikidata Toolkit has been released. It now has Wikibase API support. [293]
• You can now use Wikidata to find all good or featured articles in a Wikipedia version. [294]

Problems

• There was a problem with Tool Labs due to kernel issues. This has been fixed. [295]
• The Content Translation tool published some pages with the same reference repeated several times. This has been fixed. [296][297]

Changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from September 8. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from September 9. It will be on all Wikipedias from September 10 (calendar).
• The maximum character length when you search for something on the Wikimedia wikis is now 300 characters. [298]
• The notifications list has been split into two lists. As a first step, notifications about messages on your user talk page will be placed in the second list. Feedback is requested at the Echo talk page. [299][300]

Meetings

• You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs are the most important. The meeting will be on September 8 at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.
• You can join the Wikitech ambassadors mailing list. The list is for Wikimedians interested in spreading information about Wikimedia technology news. See how to join.

Future changes

• The Wikimedia mailing lists will be moved to a new server and the software will be upgraded. This will happen on September 9 at 14:00 (UTC). The mailing lists will not be working during the move. It can take up to four hours. [301]
• Wikidata will soon be able to store measurements, such as a mountain's height or the distance between two places. [302][303]

Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

17:29, 7 September 2015 (UTC)

Works by Author:Jibanananda Das

Can you please review these? I did not go for proposed deletions because I am not totally sure. The originals are PD-India but not PD-US (published after 1923, author died in 1954). The work Fire Air Water seems to have been added by the translator. Translator not specified for other works, but added here by an admin of bn Wikipedia. The work Banalata Sen (Poem) was translated by the original author, judging from 1st line comparisons of different translations given in the corresponding Wikipedia article, accordingly PD-India. Seems to me that the works are suitable for Wikilivres. Regards, Hrishikes (talk) 05:19, 7 September 2015 (UTC)

@Hrishikes: The appropriate forum for the discussion is WS:CV and it doesn't need to be framed as a deletion discussion. The collective mind is better in such a case. — billinghurst sDrewth 00:05, 8 September 2015 (UTC)

Page:Typescript_copy_of_the_reminiscences_of_John_Caldwell._PRONI,_T3541.5.3.pdf/1

I've converted the red bracketed portions to annotations in references, I can revert if needed, but wanted a second opinion.ShakespeareFan00 (talk) 08:04, 8 September 2015 (UTC)

Table end?

I am sure I shall regret raising this but with respect to this and this "proposed" (now finalised) deletion were you aware of all these templates linking to "table end" alone?

May I ask what are your plans from this point on? The regressive approach would be to restore the deletion; the progressive to start healing the damage. If you intend automating this I shall stay clear but if you want another party to help hunt this junk down I am offering... (providing someone hasn't protected every-bloody-thing of course!) AuFCL (talk) 08:21, 8 September 2015 (UTC)

Scratch above. It appears ShakespeareFan00 has been addressing this at the same time as I was writing up the above. Now a non-issue. AuFCL (talk) 08:40, 8 September 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-38

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

Recent changes

• You can now use the Wikidata query service. [304]
• Belarusian-Taraškievica Wikipedia was moved from be-x-old.wikipedia.org to be-tarask.wikipedia.org. This caused some issues, but most of them were resolved. [305]
• Language preferences might not be changed immediately when you adjust them. Language selection might work slower. Please report any problems. [306][307]

Problems

• There was a problem when editing International Standard Book Numbers in Visual Editor. This has now been fixed. [308]
• The Wikimedia mailing lists should have been upgraded on September 9. It didn't work as planned and will now happen later. [309]

Changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from September 15. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from September 16. It will be on all Wikipedias from September 17 (calendar).

Meetings

• You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs are the most important. The meeting will be on September 15 at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• ContentTranslation will show more data on the Special:ContentTranslationStats page. For example, it will show translation trends and information about deleted translations. [310]
• The first version of the translation suggestions feature will be deployed soon. [311]

Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

16:17, 14 September 2015 (UTC)

6.34 Wikisource:Scriptorium

Billinghurst, I am stuck in one area (as stated and shown) in Wikisource:Scriptorium 6.34 Please help me to get out of there. I got here only because you posted something in Wikisource Scriptorium —Maury (talk) 03:43, 15 September 2015 (UTC)

I have answered your post at Wikisource:Scriptorium/Help, though there is not much clarity to your request. — billinghurst sDrewth 13:07, 15 September 2015 (UTC)

Add source details to new poems

Billinghurst, thanks for the heads-up re need to list the text source in the discussion pages. I've added the relevant details to "After Many Years" and will get the others up to scratch over the coming days. Perry Middlemiss (talk) 04:34, 15 September 2015 (UTC)

Tables

Hi Billinghurst, I appreciated your opinions into Col - Colgroup tag discussion into Phabricator, and browsing here and there I found here many interesting templates. If you like, take a look to mul:Template:Cs, imported from it.source, it calls a simple Lua module that parses characters of a single parameter, so that {{Cs|brCM}} is expanded into "for this cell, put borders on bottom and right sides, and center the text both horizontally (C) and vertically (M)", the full set of parsed characters being "123btlrCMRLTB"; this saved my life dealing with very complex tables.... even if I'd like a loto to have COL tags unfiltered. --Alex brollo (talk) 14:49, 11 September 2015 (UTC)

PS: I posted this message into mul.source.... then I moved it here. --Alex brollo (talk) 16:07, 11 September 2015 (UTC)

Unluckily, I found that there are severe limitations in cell styling by col tags. I didn't realize those limitations before, nor I realized that the same limitations affect "faux tables". There's no alternative to cell-by-cell styling, dealing with columns styling, "border" being the unique property that can be used; nothing to do when text-align and vertical-align are needed (a very common need). --Alex brollo (talk) 08:10, 17 September 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-39

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

Recent changes

• There is now an experimental Wikimedia maps service. You can give feedback here. [312][313]
• Last week a few issues with UploadWizard were fixed. Before this was done, UploadWizard would stop you from uploading your files if something went wrong. [314][315][316][317]
• More Wikipedias can now use information from any Wikidata item in any Wikipedia article. Previously they could only use the Wikidata item that matched the subject of the article. [318]
• The VisualEditor welcome dialogue has been changed. The intention is to make it more helpful for new users. [319]

Problems

• Wikimedia Labs' HTTPS certificate expired for most of Tuesday 15 September. To reach Wikimedia Labs and Tool Labs securely you had to ignore your browser's security error message. There was no risk to data security during this time. [320]
• Last week the notification system was split into two parts. This was temporarily undone because of a bug and performance concerns. It will return to two parts this week. [321][322]
• UploadWizard couldn't upload files larger than 5 MB when using chunked uploads. This has now been fixed. [323]

Changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from September 22. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from September 23. It will be on all Wikipedias from September 24 (calendar).
• The page move tool has been switched over to the new standard look for forms. [324]
• You can now choose whether to extend a link or not when editing one in VisualEditor. This means it is easier to choose how much of what you type before and after the link is part of it. [325]
• Wikibooks can now use data from Wikidata. [326]

Meetings

• You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs are the most important. The meeting will be on 22 September at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.
• You can join a meeting with the Wikidata team. It will be on September 23 at 17:00 (UTC). See how to join.
• You can register to the Wikimedia Developer Summit 2016 in San Francisco 4–6 January 2016. Gadget, template, bot, and tool developers are welcome as well. Call for participation and travel sponsorship requests are open until 2 October.

Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

18:29, 21 September 2015 (UTC)

Note to self

Work to be done to get rid of this mockery

• Portal:Australia#Indigenous_Australia
• Category:Indigenous people of Australia

and to turn it into the showcase that it should be. — billinghurst sDrewth 00:33, 22 September 2015 (UTC)

Flood flag

So this flood flag - not having used it before, I am guessing I turn it on by managing my user rights and checking "bot user" - is this right? BD2412 T 01:07, 22 September 2015 (UTC)

@BD2412: Yep. — billinghurst sDrewth 01:42, 22 September 2015 (UTC)

Good. Thanks! BD2412 T 01:56, 22 September 2015 (UTC)

Author identity

Wondering if you might be able to confirm whether "Evan Morgan" (2nd Lt., Welsh Guards) of the Soldier poets is the same fellow as w:Evan Morgan, 2nd Viscount Tredegar. Thanks, Londonjackbooks (talk) 19:53, 3 September 2015 (UTC)

Yes, it is the same person. Looking at the British Army WWI Medal Rolls Index Cards, 1914-1920 shows Morgan, (The Hon.) Evan Frederick, Welsh Guards, Lieut. ... — billinghurst sDrewth 15:04, 4 September 2015 (UTC)

Thanks much! Londonjackbooks (talk) 15:34, 4 September 2015 (UTC)

Another fellow in question: "Collin Brooks, Sergeant, M.G.C." from More songs... same as w:Collin Brooks? Thanks ahead... Londonjackbooks (talk) 10:46, 23 September 2015 (UTC)

I reckon that I can confirm that one without looking further. MGC = Machine Gun Corps. I see the Victory Medal application in 1925 for W. Collin Brooks Lieut. So yes, confirmed. — billinghurst sDrewth 11:39, 23 September 2015 (UTC)

Thanks. Should I create an author page for "W. Collin Brooks" or "Collin Brooks"? Londonjackbooks (talk) 13:54, 23 September 2015 (UTC)

NVM... I see it is William Collin Brooks... Londonjackbooks (talk) 14:00, 23 September 2015 (UTC)

Cron mails

Hi. Are you also getting mails from Cron for patrol.py? Is it possible to disable it on a user basis? I am getting a new mail every 15 min. It is quite annoying ... :-( --Mpaa (talk) 19:28, 23 September 2015 (UTC)

@Mpaa: Yep, sorry about that, I forgot that would happen, as it doesn't for the other cronjobs. I resolved it (quick and dirty), earlier today, and will fix it up in a different way when I am not operating off my phone. — billinghurst sDrewth 05:43, 24 September 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-40

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

Recent changes

• In UploadWizard, the dialog to see an image preview has been removed. You already see the images in the thumbnails when you upload them. [327]
• UploadWizard dialogs look a bit different now. They have been updated to the new OOUI look. [328]
• You can now edit music scores in VisualEditor. You can add new sheet music scores and get live updates when you edit one. [329]
• When you send an e-mail to another editor using Special:EmailUser, that user will now get a notification on the wiki as well. [330]
• You can now see 500 images when you upload images from Flickr with UploadWizard. Before this change the limit was 50. [331]
• The Wikimedia mailing lists have been upgraded. [332]
• MediaWiki developers spent a day looking at proposed code changes in Gerrit. The goal was to clean up the backlog and give feedback to volunteer developers. [333]

Problems

• Some visitors had problems reaching the Wikimedia sites for an hour on September 24. [334][335]

Changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from September 29. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from September 30. It will be on all Wikipedias from October 1 (calendar).
• There will be a new beta feature that allows editors to use Flow on their user talkpage if they want to. Each wiki can decide if they want to enable it. [336]
• The Content Translation tool can give translation suggestions. This feature will now be available in more languages: English, French, Spanish, Russian, Chinese, Turkish, Japanese, Italian, and Catalan. [337]

Meetings

• You can join the strategy process of the Reading department of Wikimedia Engineering. [338]
• You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs are the most important. The meeting will be on 29 September at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• The Wikimedia Foundation developers want the community to decide who can use OAuth in the future. You can discuss it on Meta.

Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

15:15, 28 September 2015 (UTC)

Converting cl-act-paragraph (and related to Lua)

It would be appreciated if you could recomend someone to convert cl-act-paragraph and dependencies to Lua.

This is because currently the template has reached a level of complexity that makes it harder to maintain, or amend as required. Converting this to a more readable format would be advantegous.

I would also make similar comments about the Statute table series, which are also rather complex.ShakespeareFan00 (talk) 12:01, 29 September 2015 (UTC)

I know not. You might be better seeing if you can poach someone from enwiki or commons. — billinghurst sDrewth 14:39, 29 September 2015 (UTC)

Sig changes by bot

Was this edit done correctly? It looks odd to me. The result leaves red links for both the user and talk pages, but that might have been intended. --EncycloPetey (talk) 14:09, 30 September 2015 (UTC)

The sig file needing updating to take into account the username move. Fixed. — billinghurst sDrewth 14:18, 30 September 2015 (UTC)

Thank you very much for the warm welcome to Wikisource :)

Elad189 (talk) 21:32, 1 October 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-41

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

Recent changes

• The link editor in the visual editor now shows results below the search box. This improves the usability on desktop and mobile. [339]
• The description at Special:ChangeEmail now clearly explains that the page can also be used to remove your email. [340]

Changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from October 6. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from October 7. It will be on all Wikipedias from October 8 (calendar).
• UploadWizard will remind users to add a category. [341]
• UploadWizard's category selectors will be easier to use. [342]
• A new Cite error will be shown if a named reference is defined more than once in the same article. [343]

Meetings

• You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs are the most important. The meeting will be on 6 October at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• Wikidata requests your input on how to improve the editing of Wikidata's data in other locations, such as Wikipedias.

Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

18:32, 5 October 2015 (UTC)

Chronicle of the Law Officers of Ireland

Thank you :)

And on a related issue do you happen to have a means of fixing up the table issue with AWB?

If so can I ask you to look at the Chronological Table of Statutes I spent a while working on it has the same issue I think. ShakespeareFan00 (talk) 14:06, 7 October 2015 (UTC)

I have just resolved two errors in the table that were only made evident with the formatting of the right alignment. Apart from that, I am not sure what to do with your vague comment. AWB doesn't do magic. — billinghurst sDrewth 21:47, 7 October 2015 (UTC)

Ah, sorry... I was referring to the issue that had been uncovered about |- at the end of page vs at the start of a page. ShakespeareFan00 (talk) 21:57, 7 October 2015 (UTC)

That matter has been addressed and resolved. — billinghurst sDrewth 22:04, 7 October 2015 (UTC)

please undo change on User:Mudbringer/common.css

I was trying to prevent a banner from displaying and managed to make all editing impossible. I'd be grateful if you would undo the change I made to my common.css file, and if possible delete this extra account (Mudbringer2) I made to contact you. Sorry for troubling you, and thanks! Mudbringer2 (talk) 01:57, 11 October 2015 (UTC)

Done by deleting your common.css. For the alternate account, it can't be deleted, just don't use it. Beeswaxcandle (talk) 02:02, 11 October 2015 (UTC)

Thanks a lot! Mudbringer (talk) 02:09, 11 October 2015 (UTC)

Need some help

or will go nuts soon:) @Billinghurst: could you please explain to me what populates categories: Category:Author pages with authority control data, Category:Main pages with authority control data and Category:Miscellaneous pages with authority control data. Especially, what bloody thing categorizes Author:Thomas Wilson (1523/4–1581) into Category:Miscellaneous pages with authority control data. Cheeers, Captain Nemo (talk) 10:19, 12 October 2015 (UTC)

@Captain Nemo: One of {{author}}, {{header}}, {{authority control}} with a last guess at {{plain sister}}, or what they imbibe. You should see the potential templates from the bottom of the respective edit page if you expand the templates.. For an exact answer, I will have to go exploring, and that may not be until tomorrow <backlog>. — billinghurst sDrewth 10:35, 12 October 2015 (UTC)

Ugh, the Wilson author page has a slash, which makes it a subpage. It needs to be renamed to something other than a slash, and that probably will resolve the issue. — billinghurst sDrewth 10:38, 12 October 2015 (UTC)

Yep, I started to suspect the slash in wilson author page. But I cannot find categorization with respect to authority control in any of the templates, I am probably missing smth very obvious. When and if you have time to look into it would be greatly appreciated. Cheers, Captain Nemo (talk) 10:48, 12 October 2015 (UTC)

Sorry for bother. Figured it myself, it's Module:Authority control. Cheers, Captain Nemo (talk) 12:08, 12 October 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-42

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

Recent changes

• The database size lists have been updated. These control special page update frequency and which wikis use global abuse filters. [344]

Changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from October 13. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from October 14. It will be on all Wikipedias from October 15 (calendar).
• You will be able to upload images to Wikimedia Commons using the visual editor. When the image is uploaded it will be added to the article you're editing. [345]
• Pages that show citation error messages will automatically be placed in a hidden category. [346]

Meetings

• You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 13 October at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

16:28, 12 October 2015 (UTC)

Page tools library

Hi Billinghurst. I reimplemented the page tools as an experimental TemplateScript library (per discussion). Once released, this will let users enable them from the gadget list and optionally choose individual tools via Special:TemplateScript (replacing the current process). This is the pilot project — the feature is hidden and there are no active users, so we can change the feature based on early feedback.

You have copies of some page tools (like the OCR cleanup) in your personal JavaScript. Since you're the one who encouraged non-technical user-friendliness, I'd love to get your feedback. You can test the new page tools alongside your existing copies to minimise disruption. If you're interested, you can add this code to your personal JavaScript (since it's not a gadget yet):

mw.loader.load('https://en.wikisource.org/w/index.php?title=MediaWiki:TemplateScript/proofreading.js&action=raw&ctype=text/javascript');

That's it! You'll see a new Page tools sidebar when editing works in the Page: namespace. You can optionally visit Special:TemplateScript to choose your scripts (there'll be a sidebar link when this is released).

Let me know whether you're interested in trying it out. (If you're not interested, I'll start a limited rollout instead.) —Pathoschild 17:43, 12 October 2015 (UTC)

Hi @Pathoschild:. Apologies for not responding last week, I was flat-chat with a range of issues before leaving for a stewards' meetup, which will also have me tied up this week. I can see how I go this week, otherwise when I return sometimes next week. Don't let me hold up any implementation. Thanks for your efforts, really appreciate that. — billinghurst sDrewth 08:01, 19 October 2015 (UTC)

ru:User:Wikisource-bot

Hello. Could you please request the bot status for this account in ruwikisource? ru:ВТ:ЗИП#Статус бота / Bot status. Thank you. Hausratte (talk) 23:46, 17 October 2015 (UTC)

Done — billinghurst sDrewth 07:56, 19 October 2015 (UTC)

Thanks. Please check your request in ruWS from time to time — there will be some questions from admins Hausratte (talk) 19:39, 19 October 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-43

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

Recent changes

• Tech News is trying to make reading the newsletter easier. The icon means the item is in the newsletter every week, but with new dates. The icon means the item is mainly relevant for readers with technical knowledge. You can leave feedback on this change.
• Timestamps in the protection log will now be in the user's timezone. Previously they would show Coordinated Universal Time (UTC). [347]

Problems

• A problem with MediaWiki made some pages show no content on October 14. This has now been fixed. [348]
• Some templates were misplaced in the Flow description bar. This could make it impossible to click on links. This will be fixed this week. [349]
• The deployment of the new MediaWiki version was stopped on October 14. No new code was deployed for the rest of week. This meant planned changes did not happen. [350]

Changes this week

• Changes that were planned to happen last week will happen this week. [351]
• Wikispecies, Meta and MediaWiki.org will be able to use Wikidata for sitelinks. [352][353][354][355]

Meetings

• You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 20 October at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

16:02, 19 October 2015 (UTC)

contact

As per our conversation, we are going to talk Wikisource: Boryana.dineva (talk) 22:58, 21 October 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-44

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

Changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from October 27. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from October 28. It will be on all Wikipedias from October 29 (calendar).
• The first time you use the visual editor, pop-ups will explain why and when you should use the citation and link tools. [356]
• You will be able to upload images to Wikimedia Commons from inside the wikitext editor by clicking "Upload" in the "Insert file" dialog. You will also be able to drag and drop them into an article when using the visual editor. [357][358]
• When you edit a code block in visual editor, you will have the syntax highlighted. [359][360]
• Index and Page namespaces on Wikisource will be defined as content namespaces in $wgContentNamespaces. [361]

Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

18:04, 26 October 2015 (UTC)

Pope Francis's Address to a Joint Session of Congress

The Pope Francis's Address to a Joint Session of Congress is in the Public Domain because it is a work of the Federal Government. See[362]. -- Kendrick7 (talk) 03:36, 7 October 2015 (UTC)

@Kendrick7: That the address is published in CR does not make it a work of the US Government. Please find a regarded (legal) opinion that supports that publishing within the Congressional Record overrides the copyright rights of an individual to their work. I have already provided a link to you that the Pope claims copyright of his work. When you have that then please take this as an undelete discussion to WS:CV. Thanks. — billinghurst sDrewth 04:54, 7 October 2015 (UTC)

Sorry, but I find your claim that the Congressional Record isn't a work of the Federal Government frankly (no pun intended!) ridiculous on its face. The speech was also published by WaPo.[363] If Pope Francis didn't want his speech to enter the Public Domain in the United States, he should have given it anywhere else. -- Kendrick7 (talk) 06:15, 8 October 2015 (UTC)

However, your claim that a speech given by the Pope is a work of the US Government is specious. The Pope is not a part of the US Government (conspiracy theories aside). The fact that the Washington Post published the text does not release it into the Public Domain either. You need to come up with something better than that. i.e. either show that Francis has released the speech into the Public Domain or the Vatican has released the speech or that US Copyright Law causes the speech to be released. Beeswaxcandle (talk) 06:50, 8 October 2015 (UTC)

@Kendrick7: How you feel, or how I feel are not particularly pertinent, this should a fact-based discussion. I will not have the argument on my talk page as any argument should be taking place at WS:CV if you wish to pursue as an undelete request. I will happily further expound on the matter when it is there. I ask BWC to not further the discussion here too. — billinghurst sDrewth 09:58, 8 October 2015 (UTC)

Meh, I don't really care to argue in favor of some other user's version. Tell you what: I'll create the article exactly as I would have done it in the first place, then should you wish, you can delete it, and then we can take it to WS:CV. By the way, re: "I have already provided a link to you that the Pope claims copyright of his work." I am most certain you've confused me with someone else, but I'm well aware, and supportive of the Church's stand on the matter as that money goes to help the poor. Still, I've never seen the matter applied to Papal speeches; although I suppose in your estimation the Vatican lawsuits against Congress, C-SPAN, YouTube, WaPo, the NYT, and several dozen other media outlets will be filed any day now, right? There but for the grace of billinghurst go we.... -- Kendrick7 (talk) 02:07, 27 October 2015 (UTC)

@Kendrick7: Please do not simply recreate deleted content. You are aware of the process. Just due to the US Government having printed/published something does not grant them copyright. There are numerous examples of works being reproduced with permission, or being released under a licence that allows reproduction but not one that allows for us to reproduce the work. You need to be more cognizant and respectful of copyright. If you wish for that work to be hosted, then please go through the process to get the author's permission for the work to be hosted under one of our allowable licences. — billinghurst sDrewth 01:17, 28 October 2015 (UTC)

Re the link to copyright claim, I posted that at User talk:98.24.234.10 — billinghurst sDrewth 01:20, 28 October 2015 (UTC)

Eh, well, that's not me. Oh well, while I think you're an asset to this project overall, your continued overscrupulousness on this matter is a disappointment. Were I faced with a choice between either (a) There's a vast conspiracy among the United States Congress, the U.S Printing office, C-SPAN, the NYT, WaPo, the Boston Globe, and a few dozen other media outlets to deliberately undermine the fortunes of the Roman Catholic Church, or (b) I'm completely wrong about how copyright works in regards to speeches in real life, I'd pick (b). Somehow, you instead pick (a), and, despite all evidence to the contrary, want some legal justification to show that your (ongoing) crackpot theory isn't wrong (which, since it's a crackpot theory, can never be found). Why you are an admin on this project, and not living in the park and telling passersby that the CIA is trying to control your thoughts remains a mystery for the ages. But what can I do? You're the boss. -- Kendrick7 (talk) 02:27, 28 October 2015 (UTC)

You misrepresent my opinion, I am neither with a) nor b) and that you try to make it a case of FOR YOU or AGAINST YOU is surely a fun argument, but not pertinent, and does not explore the spectrum between those two positions. There is no fair use allowance at enWS, and that is explained at Wikisource:Copyright policy and WS:WWI; works here are at a higher requirement and it is the component of commercial use that you see to be ignoring. As I said, you are welcome to take this to the community via WS:CV, but it needs a more reasoned and evidence-based position than you have managed so far (IMNSHO). — billinghurst sDrewth 03:14, 28 October 2015 (UTC)

I'm happy to argue that the Congressional Record is a work of the Federal Government. Of course, you didn't delete this particular chapter of it as a copy-vio. But if you are willing to concede that copy-vio is your real concern rather than playing games, we can certainly move on to the WS:CV stage. You have plenty of sycophants who will tell you that you are right, and then I will lose. That's on you.

Yet, in the Pope's own words: "Today I would like not only to address you, but through you the entire people of the United States." How is that not an explicit recognition of the role the Congressional Record plays in our democracy? Be reasonable -- Kendrick7 (talk) 01:32, 31 October 2015 (UTC)

Will you stop playing the person, it is not a good argument. Let me say that there are next to no sycophants here. People here hold each other to account, and me especially.

If truly believe that the Pope wanted the work released, then go and apply to the Vatican for a release to the public domain, or a licensing that allows re-use. — billinghurst sDrewth 02:14, 31 October 2015 (UTC)

Funny how everything Author:Benjamin Netanyahu has ever said to Congress is AOK, since you obviously pay attention. How about you delete those speeches and get back to me? -- Kendrick7 (talk) 22:00, 31 October 2015 (UTC)

Done. Thanks for pointing out what was quietly missed. I checked the Israeli gov't site and their copyright statement is much the same as the Pope's, unfortunately. I'm going to double-check the speeches made in the UN General Assembly when I get some more time. -- George Orwell III (talk) 22:34, 31 October 2015 (UTC)

Yes, they should have been picked up during patrolling. Feel free to link those works through to on-line versions if they exist. — billinghurst sDrewth 00:03, 1 November 2015 (UTC)

Name rendering

I have seen both Herbert Nicholas Todd (For Remembrance...) and Nicholas Herbert Todd (Worldcat) for the same WWI soldier (Private, Queen's Westminsters 1878-1916). Can you confirm which is the correct rendering? Thanks, Londonjackbooks (talk) 19:48, 28 October 2015 (UTC)

@Londonjackbooks: the latter. I will start putting data in place on the author talk. — billinghurst sDrewth 22:14, 28 October 2015 (UTC)

Pseudonyms

Thank you. I have another question but with regard to pseudonyms. "Arthur Scott Craven" is the pseudonym for Arthur Harvey-James (not 100% on the hyphenation) (1874?-1917). He was an author/actor/soldier (Captain, Buffs). How should he be listed here? by his pseudonym (my guess, as he published under Craven at least twice.) or his given name? Thanks, Londonjackbooks (talk) 10:51, 29 October 2015 (UTC)

@Londonjackbooks: Under the real name, redirects from pseudonyms; within the redirects add {{DEFAULTSORT:yyyy, xxx}} and [[Category:Authors-Xx]] so they show on those pages and sort appropriately. — billinghurst sDrewth 22:44, 29 October 2015 (UTC)

Please forgive my dullness, but I don't understand the defaultsort and cat examples. Also, are you able to confirm the hyphenation in the poet's real name? No hurry on any of this; I'm about to call it a night. Thanks, Londonjackbooks (talk) 22:54, 29 October 2015 (UTC)

Here is an extant example: Author:Mark Twain is a redirect to Author:Samuel Langhorne Clemens, as you might well have expected; however the redirect page contains extra directives thus:

#REDIRECT [[Author:Samuel Langhorne Clemens]]
[[Category:Authors-Tw]]
{{DEFAULTSORT:Twain, Mark}}
{{R from pseudonym}}

AuFCL (talk) 00:08, 30 October 2015 (UTC)

Striking the last template. Superfluous, and unnecessary complexity; an abandoned scheme at enWP from whence it was imported. — billinghurst sDrewth 01:17, 30 October 2015 (UTC)

I was in fact hoping you (or somebody) might clarify that very issue. Might it be too much to ask for some kind of indication of deprecation be applied to any or all of the template, its documentation or even the consequent category Category:Redirects from pseudonyms as appropriate?

Oh, and strikeout does not really work under <syntaxhighlight>. Best it will permit is to highlight the offending line. AuFCL (talk) 01:32, 30 October 2015 (UTC)

It worked good enough for my grade of work, but thanks for a better solution. I was off adding them to WS:PD while you were typing. — billinghurst sDrewth 01:42, 30 October 2015 (UTC)

Thanks to both. Author:Arthur Keedwell Harvey-James created, along with redirect. I will put my research on the Talk page at some point. Appreciated, Londonjackbooks (talk) 10:14, 30 October 2015 (UTC)

Life among the Apaches

Thanks for verifying pages! His writing style and attitudes are typical for his era, which can be a bit tedious. But the book is an American classic, still in print. Can you help with a couple of tech problems?

• The small cap A.M. and P.M. sometimes render as small cap, sometimes all-cap. I don't know why.
• I created chapters 1-12 in name space to start looking for helpful wikilinks. Chapters 1-5 show as created on the index, but chapters 6-12 can only be seen using the "next page" in the chapter headers/footers.

What have I done wrong here? If there are typos, I'm not seeing them. --Outlier59 (talk) 02:32, 27 October 2015 (UTC)

@Outlier59: Our (enWS) {{sc}} will only affect lower case text, so where you have upper case, that has no impact (for us that works better as it means that we can wrap larger swathes of text in the template and it doesn't break search engine searches). Don't (overly) sweat it, I will amend these as I work through validation process. I can have a look at the ToC later (when home); I will hazard a (blind) guess that it is not coded for subpages on the ToC. Generally we have to hardcode those links with BASEPAGENAME/SUBPAGENAME. — billinghurst sDrewth 03:07, 27 October 2015 (UTC)

CYGNIS INSIGNIS found the problem with the ToC and fixed it. Parts of the ToC had capitalized "Among" instead of lower-case "among", so the link didn't work. The Library of Congress record uses lower-case. Outlier59 (talk) 13:55, 27 October 2015 (UTC)

Good. The interoperability of case is a bugbear. The modern style appears to be to remove all case except from the lead and proper nouns; yet the older works (our forte) is not. Do not hesitate to create redirects for whichever form you use modern to old, or old to modern. — billinghurst sDrewth 22:52, 27 October 2015 (UTC)

@Billinghurst: Wikisource "search" seems to redirect automatically, so that looks OK. But there's some sort of page break error between page 2 and the Dedication page on the main page in namespace. I tried adding NOP to page 2, but that didn't work. Page 2 is wrapping into the Dedication page. Any ideas? (p.s. I'm trying a "ping" for the first time. Let me know if it works or not.) Outlier59 (talk) 01:14, 28 October 2015 (UTC)

Oh, I applied a solution that seems to work, but noting it here for Billinghurst's sake. My guideline for title creation is to use sentence-case, unless the text itself shows otherwise, so that I stay consistent. I found out later this had been de facto policy for a long time. CYGNIS INSIGNIS 09:53, 28 October 2015 (UTC)

That works until you get 19th century works like "Australian Legendary Tales"/"Australian legendary tales", so I just say be adept and adapt. — billinghurst sDrewth 10:26, 28 October 2015 (UTC)

How about 'the text, or another appropriate source' for guidance? Your example is a good one. When I redlinked Australian Legendary Tales years ago it was from contemporary reviews of the work from the same publisher, conclusive enough for me then. I think that is what persuaded me to use that style at the other place, more recently, and I never saw it cited another way in any reference or subsequent editions. CYGNIS INSIGNIS 11:03, 28 October 2015 (UTC)

I now follow the principle that "case is in the eye of the beholder / style guide / ..." and redirects were made available to resolve the issue. Ultimately it is the rendering of the work that should win, and not other hang-ups. — billinghurst sDrewth 01:11, 29 October 2015 (UTC)

Many thanks for all the verification work you're doing on this book! I didn't think anyone else would bother verifying it. It really is Classic American literature -- sometimes difficult to relate to these days -- but well worth preserving for us to better understand history. THANK YOU :) ! Outlier59 (talk) 02:15, 31 October 2015 (UTC)

Very welcome. Part of the role of those of us old wikidenizens is to support our new users. I was supported when I joined, and somewhat still these days in other areas. My hope is that you hang around, and can say the same thing to newbies in the years ahead. :-) — billinghurst sDrewth

@Outlier59: You missed strut time! Please look to add Life among the Apaches to the top of the active list in Template:New texts, and bump the bottom from the active list to archive component. Finishing a work is a major achievement and should be celebrated. (as I said STRUT! <g>)

I have been meaning to say, and should have said it earlier, that you have done a great job of your transcription. It has been pretty easy following up on the validation process, and I should be through it in the next few days (hopefully). Congratulations. — billinghurst sDrewth 01:29, 1 November 2015 (UTC)

Um... that's on the Main Page. I think I'll stick with less obvious stuff a bit longer. I still have to "undo" my own edits at times. I'm glad the validation is pretty easy! Maybe you could put Life among the Apaches on the Main Page when you finish validating it? --Outlier59 (talk) 13:20, 1 November 2015 (UTC)

@Outlier59: yes that transcludes to the main page, and we allow logged in users to do so, if we didn't we wouldn't. It is well watched, so we can fix it quickly if anything goes wrong ... let me help ... you want to add the bit
{{new texts/item|Life among the Apaches|John C. Cremony|1868}}
and you will do fine. — billinghurst sDrewth 13:53, 1 November 2015 (UTC)

I added a little image on the title page from the page scan. See if this looks okay - Page:Life_among_the_Apaches.djvu/7. Outlier59 (talk) 14:21, 2 November 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-45

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

Recent changes

• You can now see how many editors are using a gadget on a wiki on Special:GadgetUsage. [364]
• If you are using the mobile version of Wikipedia, you can now see Wikidata descriptions under article titles in search results. [365]
• Editing conflicts are now detected when you edit on a mobile device. Before, this did not work properly on mobile. [366]

Problems

• On October 26 the Wikimedia sites went down for ten minutes. [367]

Changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from November 3. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from November 4. It will be on all Wikipedias from November 5 (calendar).

Meetings

• You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 3 November at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join. You can also read the latest VisualEditor newsletter.

Future changes

• A help link will be added to Special:Search. Administrators might have to update the MediaWiki:Search-summary message to avoid two help links. [368]
• Empty list items could be allowed in the future. If so, this could affect some templates. [369]

Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

16:42, 2 November 2015 (UTC)

hws

Hi. Has something changed in handling {{hws}}? I notice this is now in footer [e.g. https://en.wikisource.org/w/index.php?title=Page%3ALife_among_the_Apaches.djvu%2F229&type=revision&diff=5929250&oldid=5779361].— Mpaa (talk) 19:31, 2 November 2015 (UTC)

Nothing has changed with the template since I last "touched it" well over a year ago. Maybe something is off in @Pathoschild:'s TemplateScript 's application of the template(s)?

Nothing leaps out at me but there have been a few changes made to it today alone never mind over the past few days. -- George Orwell III (talk) 22:29, 2 November 2015 (UTC)

None of the recent TemplateScript changes should cause that, and the proofreading tools will only move content into the footer if it's wrapped with <noinclude>. —Pathoschild 23:40, 02 November 2015 (UTC)

Before anyone else starts puzzling over this, I noticed that Billinghurst placed the hws-text (without a template) in the footer when I was validating a work he did. This has the same effect on the display of a saved page and in main of course, with less effort, but has this unanticipated consequence. CYGNIS INSIGNIS 00:17, 3 November 2015 (UTC) [copyedit 03:19, 3 November 2015 (UTC)]

What is the problem here? What is the unanticipated consequence? Are the pages displaying properly in Page:? Are the pages displaying properly in main ns? — billinghurst sDrewth 01:38, 3 November 2015 (UTC)

[I got an edit conflict with Billinghurst, but here's what I wrote...]

Did anyone notice this happening before about 10 am Oct 29? The earlier edits Billinghurst did to Life among the Apaches did not move the hws to the footer. The first hws move to the footer that I see in Apaches was Oct 29 https://en.wikisource.org/w/index.php?title=Page:Life_among_the_Apaches.djvu/91&curid=1939324&diff=5919344&oldid=5774602. There were a couple of deletion log entries for -- I think -- this talk page about 10 hrs before that edit -- or maybe Cygnis's talk page. Billinghurst wasn't logged on at the time, apparently. Not sure if the deletion log has anything to do with this, I'm just mentioning it.

Most of this is Greek to me, but I know Billinghurst wasn't moving the hws to the footer in Apaches before Oct 29. When I saw it was moved, I just assumed it was something that didn't matter, like expanding "hws" to "hyphenated word start" (which I like to see, because it's clearer for novice editors, but I'm still lazy and use "hws").

I can move the hws in Apaches back from the footer to the body in Apaches if it's important. Let me know. Outlier59 (talk) 01:55, 3 November 2015 (UTC)

(to the milling crowd) "hyphenated word start" is a junk/bloat template, though one of value for newbies. It does give guidance and make things easier to explain when we work it with "hyphenated word end" — that said both are overblown with three #ifeq: and an <includeonly>. We have to tell users how to handle terminating hyphenated words, and it is easier to explain to newbies to use the template pair to achieve the look, especially back at the time of the creation of the template pair in 2008 — when our header/footer component of Proofread Page was trashy. That said, the former template does come with unnecessary burden, and is not a requirement, ie. transcluding a complex template into the main namespace for zero benefit (when display work is done by "hwe"), so sometimes when I am validating I move it out of the way, and I personally never use it when I transcribe a page — as C.I. says, I just put the hyphenated word to the footer.

@Outlier59: You have done absolutely nothing incorrect, and have transcribed beautifully and used the templates properly. If I had had any concerns or suggestions, I would always come to you directly. My expansion of templates is cosmetic, use of the abbreviated templates is fine. My clean up script expands them as I validate. This harks back to c.2010 to a conversation that new users don't have to guess on obscure abbreviations. — billinghurst sDrewth 02:17, 3 November 2015 (UTC)

Just out of curiosity, why did you ignore https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Index_talk:Life_among_the_Apaches.djvu before or when you made your edits? Outlier59 (talk) 02:51, 3 November 2015 (UTC)

There is a script for hws / hwe that a formatted template at the first or last word. The template documentation says they must be used as a pair, it is useful for finding when someone has forgotten to apply one or the other. I don't see this template as junk, the name (if expanded) allows a new or used user to grasp that something is going. CYGNIS INSIGNIS 03:19, 3 November 2015 (UTC)

1) I said junk template, as it throws away its input ... not that it is junk. I said that they were useful for beginners, and I kept it. That does not stop it being bloat, or superfluous. — billinghurst sDrewth 06:53, 3 November 2015 (UTC)

Nevertheless, you're assuming the current solution to hyphenated words split across Page: breaks will be a permanent one while also assuming the properties of the PR extension and/or transclusion itself are never going to change at the same time. Thanks an unnecessary gamble in my book. And any perceived savings in "resources" is a false one since the templates are only in play in the Page: namespace by design regardless of being placed inside or outside of the non-included footer.

And why deviate from the approach basic enough for beginners to easily follow in the first place? Have a preference for introducing confusion? (evidenced by this section). -- George Orwell III (talk) 07:24, 3 November 2015 (UTC)

What?!?

• You are presuming that anything done at any time works, and that our local solution is completely functional anyway, especially when it isn't implemented xwiki. Those statements are presumptuous and scaremongering.
• Have you looked at the number of "hws" are transcluded to the main ns? Then come back and tell me that they are only in play in the Page: ns. Don't confuse visible versus functional and present.
• Re confusion ... I was asked a question, and a number of people jumped in, causing confusion rather than waiting for an informed answer that would have quickly resolved the matter.
• I have commented previously about this wasteful template, I just choose not to make it a song and dance. — billinghurst sDrewth 08:32, 3 November 2015 (UTC)

Ah you are correct about the minor resource hit processing the null end of the #ifeq statement relying on a particular namespace. I totally forgot this silly implementation is all about avoiding the insertion of the unwanted space at page break instead of simply dealing with showing the hyphen in one namespace not the other. And even that wouldn't be too much of an issue to overcome if inline embedded page links were the default rendering instead of off to the left in a faux "margin".

My point nevertheless is reinforced - no scaremongering whatsoever too - by the various requests either to kill this auto-insertion of an extra space altogether or to introduce new a <hyphen /> tag to handle this or the idea to get the parser/Parsoid to fully support the &shy html code-word - all Phabricator tasks you yourself have participated in or know about. I think its safe to presume this implementation won't last forever in light of just those few open avenues mentioned in resolving this. - George Orwell III (talk) 09:55, 3 November 2015 (UTC)

The reason why I asked is that I have always seen it used at the bottom of a page (as indicated in the template doc), so I thought it was a "standard" for some reason. That said, I am for one consistent approach across the project rather than many flavors of it. Easier to maintain. That's it.— Mpaa (talk) 17:28, 3 November 2015 (UTC)

So maybe—to keep things consistent in Apaches—I could nip in and make a few minor page edits to move the hws from the footer to the body, if the hws happened to slip into the footer. I'll start within a day or two, if I don't hear any objections. I could use the editing practice. :) Outlier59 (talk) 02:04, 4 November 2015 (UTC)

Author pages without image

Hi, there! I have noticed that disambiguation pages are sorted into Category:Author pages without image, which albeit correct is probably not desirable. Just a suggestion:) Cheers, Captain Nemo (talk) 03:13, 3 November 2015 (UTC).

I don't think that it is worth fussing. The category can be interpreted as pure authors, author template pages, or author ns pages and they are all the same ideally. There is a means to set categories to null by recoding though I think that it becomes of next to no value. Are you seeing difficulties with the output? — billinghurst sDrewth 07:09, 3 November 2015 (UTC)

I use this (and similar) categories a lot (via dynamic pagelist) to cross-check author space. So the drawback for me is that I need to to add notcategory=author disambiguation pages every time. But you are right, it's not worth the fuss.
A quick question about a (slightly) related issue. There are 37 pages in Category:Author redirects, all manually added. Should this category be added to "Redirect tagging templates" deletion discussion? Cheers, Captain Nemo (talk) 07:32, 3 November 2015 (UTC).

I think that the redirected templates can just be "fixed", and the category will be emptied if the deletion discussion is successful, so it will be deleted without other effort. The addition of defsort and category:Authors-Xx is only for where they need to show where they are required to show a difference from the result. — billinghurst sDrewth 07:56, 3 November 2015 (UTC)

subst:em not working on your AWB edits

Hi, I don't know why you are replacing {{em}} with {{subst:em}}, as it makes the source look like gobbletygook—but regardless, I just wanted to let you know that your substitution isn't working properly and is just inserting {{subst:em}} into the text, see for example Page:The Bab Ballads.djvu/111. —Beleg Tâl (talk) 16:40, 7 November 2015 (UTC)

Thanks. I will put that into the fix queue immediately, it has got caught up with the diacritics template fixed. [Geeze we have some antiquated templates that need to be cleansed more often.] — billinghurst sDrewth 01:37, 8 November 2015 (UTC)

Heads up sequences like {{gap}}{{gap}}{{subst:em}} (no kidding: turns up in places like Page:Ruddigore.djvu/57) still confuse your script. The fact it is even attempting this is impressive but the result has unbalanced braces (above example yielded {{gap|5em}}}—note too many }s.) I have fixed all cases I have observed but please overhaul the script if still applicable. AuFCL (talk) 01:02, 9 November 2015 (UTC)

Yep, I am leaving the remainder of Ruddigore to last, as they need manual attention and I will change out of bot mode, it wasn't working in AWB. It wasn't the script at all (AWB/small screen/... STOP!) — billinghurst sDrewth 01:08, 9 November 2015 (UTC)

Now I am just confused. Have my corrections just made things worse; or should I just hold off looking for a day or so until presumably things settle down? AuFCL (talk) 01:25, 9 November 2015 (UTC)

No, you are perfectly fine. I was more saying that I realised that Ruddigore could have been problematic, and I skipped the remainder and was going to manually review those done already, and those that needed to be done, ie. try to validate the pages in a traditional manner. — billinghurst sDrewth 01:32, 9 November 2015 (UTC)

Just in case you are wondering what all those change notations along the lines of float right is broken in this context on Ruddigore pages, I have finally isolated the trigger (any suggestions why this fails solicited: I'm at a bit of a loss!)

Whenever {{float right}} appears within <poem> the floated content displays with correct left-right alignment but one full line below where it is expected. Worse still it will be found to overlapping the following line if that line happens to be a long one.

I have made an exceptionally ugly work-around but of course might be just trying to second-guess a peculiarity of my own browser? (I've made up a small test/demo matrix here) AuFCL (talk) 09:36, 9 November 2015 (UTC)

It is f'd in FF, so if you are using another browser then the answer is it is not just your browser. <poem> looks nice when it is swimming as a swan, but less pleasant when it is feeding. — billinghurst sDrewth 11:26, 9 November 2015 (UTC)

Good analogy. I should have stated I am using FF so no new info there. <poem> is not at all my favourite fowl and I avoid introducing it on principle; however lots or people luuurrrve it for some reason. AuFCL (talk) 11:37, 9 November 2015 (UTC)

The poem tag is the first example used in Help:Poetry, and appears to be illustrated as the standard formatting for poetry on that page,—even though block center & gaps ("direct formatting") is offered as an alternative. Many just don't like bothering with all the breaks. Perhaps note should be made on the Help page about any technical down-side to the use of the poem tag, and then perhaps many new Users will opt for direct formatting instead from the outset. Londonjackbooks (talk) 11:52, 9 November 2015 (UTC)

Same in Chrome. Convenience. The answer lies in the history, and that was the means to indent without collapsing the spaces or getting the <pre> effect. — billinghurst sDrewth 11:56, 9 November 2015 (UTC)

Oops. I goofed regarding Page:Ruddigore.djvu/43. Got distracted on other matters and made the {{em}}/{{gap}} decision the wrong way. Thanks or pass it on to sdrewthBot as you see fit for correcting the situation. AuFCL (talk) 14:54, 10 November 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-46

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

Recent changes

• Superprotect has been removed. [370]
• You can now switch between the wikitext editor and the visual editor without saving. You will not lose the changes you have made. [371]
• JSON dumps of the production search indexes are now available. They can be imported to Elasticsearch. [372]

Problems

• Some translations for the Thanks and Echo extensions were missing. Translators have been asked to help and this should be solved soon. [373]

Changes this week

• Thumbnails of 16-bit TIFF files will be displayed properly. Before, this didn't work. [374]
• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from November 10. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from November 11. It will be on all Wikipedias from November 12 (calendar).

Meetings

• You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 10 November at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• A new tool to navigate through diff pages is being developed. You can test it out and give feedback. [375]
• The options on Special:Watchlist will look slightly different. [376]

Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

17:18, 9 November 2015 (UTC)

Author:Archibald Campbell

note to self to find and re-add author research. — billinghurst sDrewth 21:11, 10 November 2015 (UTC)

Leonard-Hampson Rudd

I've another translator who doesn't seem to be listed in the LoC Authority records: Author:Leonard-Hampson Rudd. Everything I know is given on the author page, which isn't much. --EncycloPetey (talk) 03:16, 15 November 2015 (UTC)

Done not going to get a birth date, best we can say is c/1816. — billinghurst sDrewth

Thanks. One of my long-term goals here is to get a really broad range of translations of (and works about) ancient Greek drama. Too much great Victorian scholarship in this area is going unused because it's hard to access. Even the Internet Archive and Google Books don't have some of the key works; Some major US libraries don't own copies; and (as you can see) some of the scholars aren't even in the LoC or VIAF database. It's sad in a way, although it does leave me something very meaningful to work on here, especially knowing as well that the time I'm spending will add value to the internet as a whole. So, thanks again (very much) for the help you've provided. --EncycloPetey (talk) 06:52, 15 November 2015 (UTC)

Ping

Mind resolving the issue with Author:John Gwenogfryn Evans so that the clean-up on Wikidata can proceed? -- Gymel (talk) 09:36, 15 November 2015 (UTC)

Done @Gymel: No need to paste a merge, we are happy for competent people to make one a redirect. — billinghurst sDrewth 10:58, 15 November 2015 (UTC)

Thanks. But emphasis on competent I couldn't even decide which form of name would be the more appropriate... -- Gymel (talk) 13:52, 16 November 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-47

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

Changes this week

• You can use TemplateData to indicate how you want a template to be displayed in wikitext. Tools like VisualEditor that edit templates will soon use this information. [377]
• Echo notification icons in MonoBook will look more like other icons in the theme. [378]
• The Community Tech team is doing a community wishlist survey to understand what they should be working on. They are now accepting proposals in all languages. You can create your proposal in the small box above the blue button and click it when you're done.
• Wikis can make the welcome notification link to a specific page. [379]
• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from November 17. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from November 18. It will be on all Wikipedias from November 19 (calendar).

Meetings

• You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 17 November at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• Internet Explorer 8 will no longer have JavaScript support. You will still be able to browse and edit Wikipedia, but will not be able to use some features. This can be solved by upgrading to a newer version or switching to a different browser. The change will happen in January 2016. [380][381]

Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

19:39, 16 November 2015 (UTC)

Another FYI

Not trying to indict you specifically here ('cause we're all guilty of doing it) here but I came across a recent example of yours that leans heavily towards being a factor as why to 'certain things cached' go buggy all of the sudden while other seemingly similar instances do not. At the worst, the following might be best thought of simply as 'bad practices we should avoid making'.

It seems this sort of practice where a "dependent" page is created prior to the creation of it's "base" or "master" page (e.g. not created as a result of a formal move/merge &action= in this case) may be a factor in a failed (or ridiculously slow) recursive link refresh that is normally invoked whenever certain actions (edits, protection levels, etc.) are made to the "base" page at some point in time later on.

In other more real world terms, we've all seen when any given article/page edit is 'not reflected' in an associated entity within a reasonable amount of time afterwards (if ever) -- particularly when the edit affects things like [re]categorization, Page:/File: moves, changes affecting the PRding status, context changes via redirects and the so on. Typically we can overcome these types of "hangs" easily enough by manual purges or null-edits -- but that's only applicable when we're lucky enough to notice the "hang" individually somehow.

In short: We've all discovered "stuff" last "touched" months ago but still do not reflect that "touch" in the relevant "dependencies" as expected; purging one thing or the other usually "fixes" things in short order. Who knows how many "hangs" go unnoticed, how long they've been that way and what effect that my have elsewhere (if at all). The best way to minimize such know unknowns IMHO is to try to avoid the practices that create such hangs in the first place.

So for the sake of [possibly] averting/reducing such 'lack of refreshing' / 'frozen caching' issues -- geared for dummies, here are some examples we should start considering as bad practices if not proven factors behind documented quirks...

• Do not manually create a redirect to a target article/page before that target article/page actually exists first.
• Do not [in]directly add/modify categorization links to articles/pages before those categories are in place first.
• Do not manually create Page:s until it's host Index: exists first (and I'm guessing a pagelist "touch" should have been applied beforehand as well; ex. <pagelist 1=1 />)
• Do not manually create an Index: unless it's source File: exists first.
• Do not manually create what amounts to orphaned Talk: pages if their associated main page is not "accounted" for first.
• ... I'm sure there are other instances or variations that fall into the same vein that I'm forgetting here; please list them if you can think of any

This phenomenon should not be confused with things like the addition/presence of "red" interlinks found within actual content however. There are class & API(?) mechanisms in place that [supposedly] 'accounts and corrects' for changes similarly affecting such cases. -- George Orwell III (talk) 04:52, 18 November 2015 (UTC)

This is solely a case of prior to hitting save while waiting for someone to do a translation from German I fell asleep driving the keyboard. I normally create redirect and pages in close order. If we are having issues with refreshes not happening, then we raise phabricator requests to get them fixed. — billinghurst sDrewth 09:57, 19 November 2015 (UTC)

Understood and, as I stated, we all seem to do some sort similar "close order" shortcut so this is not meant to be accusatory -- just illustrative. And my points do come from Phabricator findings and/or theories dealing with the "refresh failure" phenomenon -- the point being there are many possible factors in any number of variations that might be causing rFs ; one factor might be how 'timestamp affects listing' in short.

Think of the listed results when selecting What links here; the list of results are ordered from oldest to latest, right? Most other [default] 'listings' are also given in terms of oldest to latest; right?

So there probably is a significance when it comes to timestamp(s) of a "base" article (or &action=) against any of its possible "dependents" (a File: to it's Index:, an Index: to it's Page:s, an ns-0 to it's ns-1 [or it's redirect]) when things (in the API) like the &action=purge&forcerecursivelinkupdate=1 command or anything &iiprop=metadata query are 'involved' with normal "refreshing". Things can get "hung-up" if something like creation timestamps aren't in the expected order or the fact a manual redirect doesn't transfer the PAGEID (w/ an older creation timestamp) to the new target like a formal move action does.

Any of that help make more sense of things up for you? -- George Orwell III (talk) 00:39, 20 November 2015 (UTC)

In relation to page numbering style

Can you PLEASE agree with the other contributor User_talk:ShakespeareFan00#Non-standard_pagelists here on ONE standard style for page-numbering?

Otherwise I am going to get a little frustrated when I am told different things by different contributors. ShakespeareFan00 (talk) 10:21, 19 November 2015 (UTC)

Recent edits

Would you mind providing an explanation? https://en.wikisource.org/w/index.php?title=Index%3AA_biographical_dictionary_of_eminent_Scotsmen%2C_vol_7.djvu&type=revision&diff=5975810&oldid=5975187

In the edit previous to your revert, I'd already updated the pagelist in order to resolve one of the concerns expressed by others, you revert made this volume inconsistent with the others. ShakespeareFan00 (talk) 11:19, 21 November 2015 (UTC)

They are all now consistent. What you are doing is wrong, and you should desist. — billinghurst sDrewth 12:18, 21 November 2015 (UTC)

Well perhaps you could ask the other contributor who asked me to deal with the "non-standard" pagelists to give a further explanation on what the correct style (which can't be contested) is so that we can avoid mis-understandings in the future? ShakespeareFan00 (talk) 13:24, 21 November 2015 (UTC)

And I'd reverted this one Index:A biographical dictionary of eminent Scotsmen, vol 1.djvu back to your last edits based on the reverts on the other vloumes, It is NOT now consistent with the rest of them. Rather than do yet another revert, I will ask a simple question, What numbering style was CORRECT for this work? ShakespeareFan00 (talk) 13:32, 21 November 2015 (UTC)

Pagelists- A Simple question. (Comments left for Beeswaxcandle)

You ask me to have another look at non-standard pagelists, I do this, only to be told by another contributor that I was doing something wrong in updating them per the notes you left on my talk page.

I am now more than a little disappointed,

I will ask a series of simple questions.

1. Which pagelists (specifically those that I directly added) are non-standard? 2. What is the correct numbering style (that can't be contested)?

I'd also appreciate it if you could consult with the other contributor to update the Manual of Style you refer to so that mus-understandings like this can be avoided in the future. ShakespeareFan00 (talk) 13:40, 21 November 2015 (UTC)

OK enough!

I am halting my efforts to cleanup pagelists, until the following occurs:

1. I am provided with a list of which Index's which are considered problematic ( In terms of being inconsistent/non-standard). (I'm more than willing to cleanup anything contentious, provided there's a clear, strategy) 2. There's a consensus about which format to use. 3. The concerns raised earlier in this page concerning specfic reverts to a specfic Index mentioned therein are resolved. It seems my reverts and your talk page message seem to have passed each other by, so it would be appreciated if you could let me know which version of Index concerned is the "correct" version.

Also I'd like to apologise if I seemed a little tetchy in earlier comments. ShakespeareFan00 (talk) 23:05, 21 November 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-48

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

Recent changes

• A new Pageview API has been announced. Feedback is requested to help decide which data to add to it next.

Changes this week

• There are no MediaWiki deployments this week (calendar).

Meetings

• You can join the next meeting with the Language Engineering team. The topic is: Content Translation updates and Questions & Answers. The meeting will be on 25 November at 13:00 (UTC). See how to join.
• You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 24 November at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.
• You can join the next meeting with the Architecture committee. The topic this week is "RfC: Raise MediaWiki's PHP version requirement and update coding standards". The meeting will be on 25 November at 21:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• From 1 December, the MediaWiki API will no longer support the dbg, txt, and yaml output formats. [382]

Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

20:26, 23 November 2015 (UTC)

{{ct}}

Dear B. Recommend you open up proper public consultation upon your crusade to deprecate above before I do. I'll give you a week. Just letting you know as I am sure you really don't want me to get the first word in... AuFCL (talk) 08:37, 18 November 2015 (UTC)

Do as you please AuFCL. Too busy, too tired, too many RL things, for an argument at the moment. Love your language, always use hyperbole, and you seem completely unaware or uncaring about it and its use. — billinghurst sDrewth 09:42, 18 November 2015 (UTC)

Oh goody. A free pass. Don't say I didn't warn. AuFCL (talk) 11:10, 18 November 2015 (UTC)

@AuFCL: I'm sure that's not your intent, but the above came across to me as rather confrontational (a term like "crusade" is not particularly neutral), bordering on being outright threatening; which is likely to be detrimental to good collaboration and achieving consensus. Possibly you've let some accumulated frustration leak through into your prose? In any case, I would suggest you keep an eye out for such issues when copy-editing your consultation to give it the best chance possible of being a constructive discussion and of establishing some more solid community consensus on which to base editing decisions. Nobody is served by conflict and acrimonious discourse. --Xover (talk) 09:13, 20 November 2015 (UTC)

┌─────────┘
To state the obvious, I disagree with your decision in all of policy, detail, (lack of) open consultation and potential abuse of trusted status aspects. However I simultaneously acknowledge in all likelihood you will dismiss any argument I advance as hyperbolic. Thus I shall not waste my time either. Make a fool of yourself as if you do that will be my vindication, if not this time then next or the one after. (And if this happens to prompt you to using a bit of brainpower from time-to-time that might be no loss either.)

I do not want to deal with you in any explicit capacity ever again. Stay out of my way and I'll happily reciprocate. And the same applies in proportionate extent Xover—your involvement may have been well-meant but ignores much accumulated history. AuFCL (talk) 02:25, 28 November 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-49

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

The symbol for advanced news items has been changed. This is because the symbols were too similar. If a news item is for more technical readers it now looks like this: . You can give feedback on this change.

Problems

• On September 29 users' skin preferences were removed by mistake on small and medium-sized wikis. This changed preferences back to Vector. Restoring all data would cause even more problems. Affected users who want to have their preference changed back globally can ask for it as a comment on Phabricator task T119206 until December 21 2015. [383]
• Some scheduled tasks were not working properly from September to recently. This meant some pages in the special pages namespace were not updated. It has now been fixed. [384]

Changes this week

• Wikinews, Wikispecies, MediaWiki.org and Meta will be able to use information from Wikidata. [385][386]
• There are no MediaWiki deployments this week (calendar).

Meetings

• You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 1 December at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.
• You can join the next meeting with the Architecture committee. The topic this week is using the <figure> tag for media. The meeting will be on 2 December at 22:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• Category watchlists are now available on test wikis and MediaWiki.org. The plan is to enable it on most wikis in January. [387]
• Cross-wiki notifications are being developed. When this is done you will not have to go to the wiki where something happened to be notified. [388]

Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

16:16, 30 November 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-50

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

Recent changes

• Revision scoring will help to automatically identify bad-faith and good-faith edits. The point is to make it easier to block vandals and welcome newcomers. It currently supports Wikidata and 14 Wikipedias. [389]

Problems

• Meta was not given access to information from Wikidata last week. This will happen later. [390]

Changes this week

• You will be able to use wikilinks in Flow topic titles. [391]
• IP users will have a toolbar with links to the user talk page and user contributions. Some Wikipedias already have this feature. [392]
• You will be able to edit the graph size in the visual editor. You can either specify the size in the graph dialog or drag it to be the size you want it to be. [393]
• It will be easier to write math in the visual editor if you don't know LaTeX. You can use symbol buttons instead. [394]
• You will be able to use syntax highlighting when you write math with LaTeX in the visual editor. [395]
• UploadWizard will look a bit different. [396]
• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 8 December. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 9 December. It will be on all Wikipedias from 10 December. (calendar).
• New MediaWiki versions will now be on Catalan and Hebrew Wikipedia on Wednesdays. Other Wikipedias get the new MediaWiki version on Thursdays. [397]

Meetings

• You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 8 December at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.
• You can join the next meeting with the Architecture committee. The topics this week are "Graph/Graphoid/Kartographer – data storage architecture" and "Parametric JSON builder". The meeting will be on 9 December at 22:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• A new beta feature will show users links to related articles at the bottom of an article. It will not be enabled by default. [398]

Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

17:52, 7 December 2015 (UTC)

Index:Lovers Legends - The Gay Greek Myths.pdf

I'd like a second opinion, The "text" of this was clearly donated, (and the uploader has sent a notification to the commons permission queue.). However, the book includes 1 poem and a number of musuem collection images where a clear copyright notification is included.

Given that the intention of the "text's" author was to donate this, and given some recent un-helpfulness from Commons, I am not sure if this particular file (suitably redacted) would be better hosted locally, so as to avoid a situation.

The DR I put up at Commons has been withdrawn, because the Uploader clearly intended the text to be donated.ShakespeareFan00 (talk) 11:31, 14 December 2015 (UTC)

We have a page for these things, and at this point of time it would be better for you to use that. — billinghurst sDrewth 11:59, 14 December 2015 (UTC)

Pagelists

https://en.wikisource.org/w/index.php?title=Index:The_three_colonies_of_Australia.djvu&oldid=6012472 - You had your own plans? ShakespeareFan00 (talk) 12:35, 15 December 2015 (UTC)

This isn't a problem, but I'd at the very least like a clarification on how works are now being 'claimed'. ShakespeareFan00 (talk) 12:39, 15 December 2015 (UTC)

Deletion

Template:New texts/2015/12 Why did you delete this? Please using template:Ping if you respond here. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 15:19, 16 December 2015 (UTC)

@Koavf: as we create that in January by taking over the list from new texts, it is not something that we compile separately. — billinghurst sDrewth 11:56, 17 December 2015 (UTC)

Clifton Wilbraham Collins

Could you create an author page for this gentleman? I'm having no luck finding his death date. He wrote a book on Sophocles, and yes, he is listed in the Oxford Alum records. --EncycloPetey (talk) 04:03, 17 December 2015 (UTC)

@EncycloPetey: Done here and WD. I will left you populate. — billinghurst sDrewth 12:43, 17 December 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-52

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

Tech News

• Because of the holidays, the next issue of Tech News will be sent out on 11 January 2016.
• The writers of the technical newsletter are asking for your opinion. Did you get the information you wanted this year? Did we miss important technical news in 2015? What kind of information was too late? Please tell us! You can write in your language. Thank you!

Recent changes

• CompletionSuggester is a new suggestions algorithm for Search. It is available as a Beta feature since 17 December. (more information)
• The Multimedia team is running an A/B test for the cross-wiki upload tool. They are testing four different interfaces. The test is running from 16-23 December. (more information)

Changes this week

• There is no deployment of MediaWiki scheduled until 12 January 2016 (calendar).

Meetings

• Should administrators and other users with advanced tools need stronger passwords? You can discuss about it in a Request for Comments.
• No meeting with the VisualEditor team on 22 and 29 December, and 5 January.

Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

18:29, 21 December 2015 (UTC)

Statutes (redux)

Assume I'm a complete idiot.

https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Short_Titles_Act_1896/First_Schedule/Pre_Union

If I add the footer to close the table , it renders the markup, but if I take out the footer Mediwaiki seems to do an automatic closure. I['d rather not relay on this remaining true. and would appreciate you being exceptionally patient in explaning where my logic has failed.ShakespeareFan00 (talk) 13:49, 25 December 2015 (UTC)

Please do not make things harder than they need to be. We have |} to close a table, you don't need to template it. I hate having to dig into unnecessary templates to find out what they are. You make it inhibitive for people trying to proofread the works, and at some point you are going to hit the template processing limits and the walls will come tumbling down. I simply closed the table in the Page: ns, and removed the table close from the main ns. Try to keep all the necessary formatting together, not try mix'n'match, it is that easy. — billinghurst sDrewth 14:07, 25 December 2015 (UTC)

Ah... I see what you did. Thanks :) If you were willing to apply the same approach elsewhere I've got no objections, but I don't at the moment have the confidence to proceed. Do you know of a third party that would be willing to examine the work in question in depth? I noted a few typos I'd made in any event :) ShakespeareFan00 (talk) 15:44, 25 December 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-51

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

Changes this week

• Meta will be able to use information from Wikidata. [399]
• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 15 December. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 16 December. It will be on all Wikipedias from 17 December. (calendar).

Meetings

• You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 15 December at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.
• You can join the next meeting with the Architecture committee. The topic this week is talking about the agenda for the Wikimedia Developer Summit. The meeting will be on 16 December at 22:00 (UTC). See how to join. [400]

Future changes

• A new gadget manager will come next year. The new gadget system is called Gadgets 2.0. [401]

Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

17:42, 14 December 2015 (UTC)