This is an archive of past discussions with User:Sirdog. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page.
The October drive reduced the backlog from 9,700 to an amazing 0! Congratulations to WaddlesJP13 who led with 2084 points. See this page for further details. The queue is steadily rising again and is approaching 2,000. It would be great if <2,000 were the “new normal”. Please continue to help out even if it's only for a few or even one patrol a day.
2022 Awards
Onel5969 won the 2022 cup for 28,302 article reviews last year - that's an average of nearly 80/day. There was one Gold Award (5000+ reviews), 11 Silver (2000+), 28 Iron (360+) and 39 more for the 100+ barnstar. Rosguill led again for the 4th year by clearing 49,294 redirects. For the full details see the Awards page and the Hall of Fame. Congratulations everyone!
Minimum deletion time: The previous WP:NPP guideline was to wait 15 minutes before tagging for deletion (including draftification and WP:BLAR). Due to complaints, a consensus decided to raise the time to 1 hour. To illustrate this, very new pages in the feed are now highlighted in red. (As always, this is not applicable to attack pages, copyvios, vandalism, etc.)
New draftify script: In response to feedback from AFC, the The Move to Draft script now provides a choice of set messages that also link the creator to a new, friendly explanation page. The script also warns reviewers if the creator is probably still developing the article. The former script is no longer maintained. Please edit your edit your common.js or vector.js file from User:Evad37/MoveToDraft.js to User:MPGuy2824/MoveToDraft.js
Redirects: Some of our redirect reviewers have reduced their activity and the backlog is up to 9,000+ (two months deep). If you are interested in this distinctly different task and need any help, see this guide, this checklist, and spend some time at WP:RFD.
Discussions with the WMF The PageTriage open letter signed by 444 users is bearing fruit. The Growth Team has assigned some software engineers to work on PageTriage, the software that powers the NewPagesFeed and the Page Curation toolbar. WMF has submitted dozens of patches in the last few weeks to modernize PageTriage's code, which will make it easier to write patches in the future. This work is helpful but is not very visible to the end user. For patches visible to the end user, volunteers such as Novem Linguae and MPGuy2824 have been writing patches for bug reports and feature requests. The Growth Team also had a video conference with the NPP coordinators to discuss revamping the landing pages that new users see.
Reminders
Newsletter feedback - please take this short poll about the newsletter.
Voting in the 2023 Community Wishlist Survey will begin on 10 February 2023 and end on 24 February 2023. You can submit, discuss and revise proposals until 6 February 2023.
Tech tip: Syntax highlighting is available in both the 2011 and 2017 Wikitext editors. It can help make editing paragraphs with many references or complicated templates easier.
Following a request for comment, the Portal CSD criteria (P1 (portal subject to CSD as an article) and P2 (underpopulated portal)) have been deprecated.
The Terms of Use update cycle has started, which includes a [p]roposal for better addressing undisclosed paid editing. Feedback is being accepted until 24 April 2023.
Hello and welcome to the March 2023 newsletter, a quarterly digest of Guild activities since December and our Annual Report for 2022. Don't forget you can unsubscribe at any time; see below. We extend a warm welcome to all of our new members, including those who have signed up for our current March Backlog Elimination Drive. We wish you all happy copy-editing.
Election results: In our December 2022 coordinator election, Reidgreg and Tenryuu stepped down as coordinators; we thank them for their service. Incumbents Baffle gab1978, Dhtwiki, Miniapolis and Zippybonzo were returned as coordinators until 1 July. For the second time, no lead coordinator was chosen. Nominations for our mid-year Election of Coordinators open on 1 June (UTC).
Drive: 21 editors signed up for our January Backlog Elimination Drive, 14 of whom claimed at least one copy-edit. Between them, they copy-edited 170 articles totaling 389,737 words. Barnstars awarded are here.
Blitz: Our February Copy Editing Blitz focused on October and November 2022 requests, and the March and April 2022 backlogs. Of the 14 editors who signed up, nine claimed at least one copy-edit; and between them, they copy-edited 39,150 words in 22 articles. Barnstars awarded are here.
Progress report: As of 12:08, 19 March 2023 (UTC), GOCE copyeditors have processed 73 requests since 1 January 2023, all but five of them from 2022, and the backlog stands at 1,872 articles.
Thank you all again for your participation; we wouldn't be able to achieve what we have without you! Cheers from your GOCE coordinators Baffle gab1978, Dhtwiki, Miniapolis and Zippybonzo.
To discontinue receiving GOCE newsletters, please remove your name from our mailing list.
The rollback of Vector 2022 RfC has found no consensus to rollback to Vector legacy, but has found rough consensus to disable "limited width" mode by default.
I am trying to edit the article on Sheol. It mentions a derivation of the true name of God that is absolutely blasphemous to the Jewish community. It keeps getting reverted despite being offensive. Is there a way to correct this? I replaced the word with "The Hebrew God" and linked to the names of God in the torah to try and compromise but the person reverting sees zero issue with the blasphemy and is defending keeping it as preventing censorship (bs) and being inclusive of other religions (very slightly true but they are all religions that co-opted the name) that use it while ignoring that the article is primarily focused on the Hebrew/Jewish interpretation. Please help. --RedactedHash (talk) 14:16, 27 April 2023 (UTC)
Hello RedactedHash, and welcome to Wikipedia! While I sympathize that this may be very frustrating, Equine-man is correct to mention Wikipedia's policy of not censoring it's content, as your argument appears to focus on the potential offending of a group of people. Were Wikipedia to adjust it's own content to minimize the potential for offense, it would be a herculean task to write articles about a wide array of subjects, such as articles detailing varying belief systems. Wikipedia's sole focus is on what reliable secondary sources say about a given topic, which Wikipedia then summarizes faithfully at the relevant article.
One of the core aspects of Wikipedia is collaboration, which means that whenever a change you desire to present on an article is reverted or undone, you are obligated to attempt to start a discussion on the relevant article talk page (in this instance, Talk:Sheol) to attempt to garner consensus for your desired edit. In other words, you would discuss with the objecting editor - alongside anyone else who decides to contribute - until some kind of agreement on what to do is made. If the discussion does not result in a consensus among editors for a change, the article would remain as it was prior to any change, so as to maintain the status quo.
You can make use of various tools to help generate consensus - referred to as dispute resolution - such as requesting a 3rd opinion, posting a request for mediation at the dispute resolution noticeboard, or creating a formal request for comment. Please make sure to read the relevant guidelines for these tools should you decide to make use of them. None of these tools should be used until an attempt for discussion at the talk page is attempted and fails to bare fruit after roughly 7 days (this isn't a hard rule but I think it's a good baseline).
In this instance, I would strongly advise you not continue to edit the article to invoke your desired change and start a discussion on Talk:Sheol. I see that there is a somewhat relevant discussion on your talk page, but discussing a potential change to article content should really not be on an individual editor's talk page.
A request for comment about removing administrative privileges in specified situations is open for feedback.
Technical news
Progress has started on the Page Triage improvement project. This is to address the concerns raised by the community in their 2022 WMF letter that requested improvements be made to the tool.
Hello John Dalton Piercy. Could you elaborate as to what you mean by an "id"? Wikipedia only makes use of usernames. If you are referring to having another Wikipedia account, so long as you remember your username and password you can simply login and change the email. If you don't remember the password or username, and you lost access to the account's email address, then unfortunately the account is lost forever. More information about this is available at Help:Logging in. —Sirdog(talk) 19:37, 8 May 2023 (UTC)
New Page Review article queue, March to September 2023
Backlog update:
At the time of this message, there are 11,300 articles and 15,600 redirects awaiting review. This is the highest backlog in a long time. Please help out by doing additional reviews!
October backlog elimination drive:
A one-month backlog drive for October will start in one week! Barnstars will be awarded based on the number of articles and redirects patrolled. Articles will earn 4x as many points compared to redirects. You can sign up here.
PageTriage code upgrades:
Upgrades to the PageTriage code, initiated by the NPP open letter in 2022 and actioned by the WMF Moderator Tools Team in 2023, are ongoing. More information can be found here. As part of this work, the Special:NewPagesFeed now has a new version in beta! The update leaves the NewPagesFeed appearance and function mostly identical to the old one, but updates the underlying code, making it easier to maintain and helping make sure the extension is not decommissioned due to maintenance issues in the future. You can try out the new Special:NewPagesFeed here - it will replace the current version soon.
Notability tip:
Professors can meet WP:PROF #1 by having their academic papers be widely cited by their peers. When reviewing professor articles, it is a good idea to find their Google Scholar or Scopus profile and take a look at their h-index and number of citations. As a very rough rule of thumb, for most fields, articles on people with a h-index of twenty or more, a first-authored paper with more than a thousand citations, or multiple papers each with more than a hundred citations are likely to be kept at AfD.
Reviewing tip:
If you would like like a second opinion on your reviews or simply want another new page reviewer by your side when patrolling, we recommend pair reviewing! This is where two reviewers use Discord voice chat and screen sharing to communicate with each other while reviewing the same article simultaneously. This is a great way to learn and transfer knowledge.
Hello and welcome to the September 2023 newsletter, a quarterly digest of Guild activities since June. Don't forget you can unsubscribe at any time; see below.
David Thomsen: Prolific Wikipedian and Guild member David Thomsen (Dthomsen8) died in November 2022. He was a regular copy editor who took part in many of our Drives and Blitzes. An obituary was published in the mid-July issue of The Signpost. Tributes can be left on David's talk page.
Election news: In our mid-year Election of Coordinators, Dhtwiki was chosen as lead coordinator, Miniapolis and Zippybonzo continue as assistant coordinators, and Baffle gab1978 stepped down from the role. If you're interested in helping out at the GOCE, please consider nominating yourself for our next election in December; it's your WikiProject and it doesn't organize itself!
June Blitz: Of the 17 editors who signed up for our June Copy Editing Blitz, 12 copy-edited at least one article. 70,035 words comprising 26 articles were copy-edited. Barnstars awarded are here.
July Drive: 34 of the 51 editors who took part in our July Backlog Elimination Drive copy-edited at least one article. They edited 276 articles and 683,633 words between them. Barnstars awarded are here.
August Blitz: In our August Copy Editing Blitz, 13 of the 16 editors who signed up worked on at least one article. Between them, they copy-edited 79,608 words comprising 57 articles. Barnstars awarded are available here.
September Drive:Sign up here for our month-long September Backlog Elimination Drive, which is now underway. Barnstars awarded will be posted here.
Progress report: As of 14:29, 9 September 2023 (UTC), GOCE copy editors have processed 245 requests since 1 January. The backlog of tagged articles stands at 2,066.
Thank you all again for your participation; we wouldn't be able to achieve what we have without you! Cheers from your GOCE coordinators, Dhtwiki, Miniapolis and Zippybonzo.
To discontinue receiving GOCE newsletters, please remove your name from our mailing list.
Hello ProfessorOfTheFederalRepublic, and welcome to Wikipedia! To get started editing, simply go to any article, click the edit button, make your desired changes, and then publish them! Help:Introduction will give you useful information relating to how to edit Wikipedia. Wikipedia:Task Center has a lot of different tasks to give you ideas on what you can do.
If you are interested in writing a new article, though I would discourage that until you get several hundred edits under your belt first as it's quite cumbersone, Help:Your first article would be the place to go.
Hello Gehna Shop, and welcome to Wikipedia! I see that you recieved a notification from Melcous regarding your name possibly violating our username policy. To change your name you would go to Special:GlobalRenameRequest and fill out that form. You would specify that the reason is due to your name being associated with a company, group, organization, product, service, or website and that you wish to correct it for future editing.
You can choose any name that you like so long as it does not breach any of the rules located at Wikipedia:Username policy.
Following an RfC, TFAs will be automatically semi-protected the day before it is on the main page and through the day after.
A discussion at WP:VPP about revision deletion and oversight for dead names found that [s]ysops can choose to use revdel if, in their view, it's the right tool for this situation, and they need not default to oversight. But oversight could well be right where there's a particularly high risk to the person. Use your judgment.
The SmallCat dispute case has closed. As part of the final decision, editors participating in XfD have been reminded to be careful about forming local consensus which may or may not reflect the broader community consensus. Regular closers of XfD forums were also encouraged to note when broader community discussion, or changes to policies and guidelines, would be helpful.
Miscellaneous
Tech tip: The "Browse history interactively" banner shown at the top of Special:Diff can be used to easily look through a history, assemble composite diffs, or find out what archive something wound up in.
Hello LazyHero192, and welcome to Wikipedia! I apologize for my late reply to your question. To get started editing, simply go to any article, click the edit button, make your desired changes, and then publish them! Help:Introduction will give you useful information relating to how to edit Wikipedia. Wikipedia:Task Center has a lot of different tasks to give you ideas on what you can do.
If you are interested in writing a new article, though I would discourage that until you get several hundred edits under your belt first as it's quite cumbersone, Help:Your first article would be the place to go.
Welcome to Wikipedia, TDphoko! I assume you are wanting to create a page on Wikipedia? Information on doing so is available at Help:Your first article. Feel free to ask me to clarify anything there if you are confused.
I would personally advise you avoid trying to create a new page, though, until you get several hundred edits under your belt. There are a lot of un-intuitive rules regarding new pages which may result in frustration for you, as simply reading them once tends to not be enough to adequately adhere to them. Wikipedia:Task Center has a list of activities that would be fitting for beginners. —Sirdog(talk) 17:17, 25 August 2023 (UTC)
Welcome to Wikipedia, Badiki hillary! I assume you mean that you want to suggest a college be added to the list? Note that the page in question is a list of lists for universities and colleges, not a list for individual universities or colleges. To add a particular institution, you would click the appropriate link at Lists of American universities and colleges first. You can then either add it yourself or make an edit request by creating a new topic, placing the text {{SPER}} at the top, and then placing the name of the institution below it. Feel free to ask me any further questions if you are confused. —Sirdog(talk) 03:53, 26 August 2023 (UTC)
I have a few questions regarding this. My first issue is that Veloren is a comparatively small scale game and therefore it does not have very large coverage as it is not even backed by a large organization such as GNU or some others. Being relatively small on one hand creates a problem such as described by you. However there are some good points to it such as, it is the best example of (perhaps, only) a 3D open world voxel based RPG game and it's one of its kind and also has a large userbase now (around 10000). My argument here is not to really fight the deletion but I understand that rules are the pillarstone in this case. Games like Veloren really need coverage however due to not being part of a AAA gaming company or a large org, it can not easily get any coverage. Another reason might be that it has still not reached 1.0 as heavy development is still going on at the moment. Perhaps, with a wiki page, the coverage might increase. What's your suggestion on this?
Remember that this is fully open source and Libre and also self-hostable so idealogically Wikimedia should also support it as the latter also promotes open knowledge. PRIYANSHU 06:50, 18 August 2023 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Priyanshu1rai (talk • contribs)
I appreciate you reaching out, Priyanshu1rai, and I want to be the first to say that I hope that the deletion discussion does not dissuade you. The template I left on your talk page was very artificial, and you would have been better served with a more personally crafted message. The deletion of content you contribute to does not in any way reflect whether or not the project wishes for you to continue to contribute. I have nothing against you by nominating it for deletion; I am simply upholding established policy for what I believe is the betterment of Wikipedia.
While I agree that Wikimedia would support this project ideologically, that doesn't necessarily mean Wikipedia is interested in hosting content about it. The Wikimedia Movement is comprised of various communities organized by language, with this being the English Wikipedia. Each community self-governs their own project, with some exceptions (such as all contributors - regardless of language - being beholden to the Terms of Use). The English Wikipedia has set very high standards for inclusion due to it's size, age, and public outreach.
The English Wikipedia project is not interested in, nor designed to, assist with giving a project or person exposure. It exists to create a quality encyclopedia of topics which already have sufficient notoriety and coverage, as old-fashion book encyclopedias used to do (and I suppose still do?) While Wikipedia is in a position to give exposure itself, this project is very much against it, and that's me putting it mildly. I've observed long-standing editors I consider to be quite polite most of the time become very terse and no-nonsense when dealing with what they perceive to be a conflict of interest, undisclosed paid editing, or otherwise a contributor editing in a promotional manner. This harshness is due to elaborate abuse and drama generated by corporations trying to violate what Wikipedia is not, our neutrality policy, and our conflict of interest policy.
My suggestion would be to vote at the deletion discussion based on what you feel is right, though understand that a Keep arguement that isn't based in policy will be given less weight by a reviewing administrator than one that is. If you desire to give this project more coverage, I'd advise using avenues that aren't Wikipedia to do so. If you continue to try, you'll simply be disappointed and receive harsh pushback, and possibly even be blocked if abusive or disruptive in nature. I've never wanted to actively advocate for a project before, so I'm afraid I'm not all that informed on where you could do this. Perhaps raise awareness on social media and/or create content about it?
As a side note, unlike social media platforms, when you write content on an internal page - such as this talk page - you have to manually tell the website to sign your post with your name. This is accomplished by doing ~~~~. A bot has been doing so for you up until now. Please sign your posts yourself moving forward.
I hope my elaborate book above has helped you. I'm always open to further conversation or questions, should you have any. —Sirdog(talk) 07:21, 18 August 2023 (UTC)
Welcome to Wikipedia, Rainmaker rebel! Fighting vandalism is a fantastic way to begin your wiki career, and it's fairly simple.
I would first recommend enabling Twinkle, a specific tool that a lot of editors use for various tasks. This tool is important for 2 things. First, it allows you to use a client-side version of rollback, which will allow you to revert all edits made by a vandal in a row - rather than having to undo all of them manually. Second, it will give you the tools to warn vandals to cease their behavior, which is required when reverting vandalism. This way you can later report the vandal to the noticeboard to report vandals to Wikipedia administrators and easily have them blocked from editing.
You can find a lot more resources on fighting vandalism at our Counter-Vandalism Unit. Should you be interested enough, you could even enroll in the CVU Academy, where an experienced editor will dedicate time to teaching you how to fight and spot vandalism.
