I'm an active volunteer at English Wikipedia, occasionally venturing into other Wikimedia projects. To learn more, please visit my English Wikipedia profile. I also have a profile on Meta.
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Tue, Nov 7
I think that the choice to not have a default license for own work is a really bad decision. See discussion here.
Oct 4 2023
This looks good overall! I was about to make a similar comment to @Tacsipacsi's, though, about "thanks" being a weird option in the topic-level menu. If it is retained there, changing the text to something like "thank topic creator" might clarify a bit.
For comments that have been archived, it may be helpful to look to the find-archived-section gadget from @SD0001 as inspiration. Many experienced editors have this turned on, and it tends to work well.
Welp, that is both a very helpful thing to know, and also points to a severe UI failure of AWB that I've been using it for 18,000 edits and only now just discovered that feature. (I was previously only aware of the double-left-clicking to remove changes to a particular paragraph.)
Can you please say a bit more about where/why the support you have for such a system comes from? Asked in another way: what positive impact(s) do you think a more standardized system has potential to deliver?
Sep 20 2023
This is an interesting, potentially tricky task. The creation of RSP in the first place was controversial, although it's grown more accepted over time. The refrain of opponents is "it's always contextual, and trying to codify it is flattening". Personally, I support a more standardized system, which is what you're going for here, but just be aware that it's a consensus you'll likely have to fight for, and the less expressive the system you propose is, the harder that fight will be.
Aug 20 2023
Aug 15 2023
@Whatamidoing-WMF, I'd be interested to see those discussions if you can find them. But that doesn't seem like a very coherent objection. We already have the ability to reuse references normally, and that's the standard best practice when wanting to use the same reference twice, creating the same 1-2-1 display. Anyone who dislikes that configuration is out of step with consensus (we could run a poll if anyone doubts this and wants it confirmed) and violating DRY. All this ticket is doing is seeking to patch a hole in what is already established software behavior.
Aug 12 2023
Aug 10 2023
It's a bug, and is interfering with my ability to communicate e.g. here.
Aug 9 2023
See https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Topic:Xnih5bh8hqbseivl, where I've requested a special page that lists a user's subscriptions.
This appears to have been effectively resolved through T263821. If someone really wants both current and future topics, they can just subscribe to future ones and then manually subscribe to all the current ones. I think we can close this as declined/fulfilled elsewhere.
Aug 3 2023
Why is it a significant issue? There is a clearly documented workaround
Aug 2 2023
Have there been any updates on this? 2FA usage has risen substantially since this ticket was opened, so this is a quite significant issue.
Aug 1 2023
Jul 24 2023
Jul 22 2023
Thanks for the update! Looking at the listed drawbacks, the first two seem valid, although given that we're already planning to allow the editor to choose the decline reason, having it be editable in the summary isn't really giving them control over anything they weren't already able to control themselves. Regarding the edit summary limit, that could be seen as a feature rather than a bug. We don't want super long edit summaries in anyone's watchlist, and the automatically added decline reason would count toward the optimal limit just as other info would.
Jul 21 2023
I'd be interested to see what sort of edits fall into the third category, but I'd hazard a guess that many of them are not actually going to be [[WP:BLUESKY]] things. The follow-up action might be a dialogue that raises [[WP:BURDEN]]. Basically, to the new editor, "it's easy enough to Google this" might seem reasonable, but to a vandalism patroller going through hundreds of edits, they don't have time to Google each one — they're just going to revert with the default uncited summary. The person adding an edit is always the one best positioned to add the reference, since they already have it on hand, so pushing them a bit to add it may reduce the burden on others/result in more new content getting preserved.
Jul 20 2023
Jul 19 2023
This ticket was prompted by this discussion on how IABot is unable to process articles above a certain (relatively low) size limit. Per Harej, it is not possible to increase the size limit without making this transition.
Jul 12 2023
The edit summary would seem to be the logical place for this to me, since this is ultimately information about the edit they're making, and the edit summary is where we store meta-information about edits.
Jul 8 2023
@Novem_Linguae, thanks for taking a look at this. For your first question, I care a lot more about what happens in the published version for the reader than what happens in VisualEditor. If they display as two different independent citations in VE, and then only get merged in the display output once the edit is published, that's fine.
Jun 7 2023
May 24 2023
May 19 2023
@SD0001, just circling back to check in on this, as we were previously discussing notices for draftspace. Is what's currently needed someone to review the patch?
May 15 2023
Apr 4 2023
Our goal should be to get people the best information on the content. It's not surprising that some are going to be confused by a suggestion to switch to a language they don't speak, since most don't understand that different language versions are not just translations of the same content. But that doesn't mean we should give up and just have them read the inferior version. It means that the interface needs to do a better job of teaching them that the different language versions will differ in quality, and that a particular language is being suggested because it appears to be higher-quality.
Apr 3 2023
When will we show the links (e.g. only after you've switched languages once, etc.)?
Which links will we show? (this might already be handled by the existing compact language links logic?)
Mar 30 2023
Approach #2, embedding within timestamps, seems reasonable to me.
Mar 7 2023
As some initial community input, I'm glad to see this being taken up, as I've been wanting T51087 to be addressed for a while.
Mar 3 2023
This task relates to T248330, in that when a mentee potentially worthy of praise is surfaced to me, this feature would help me to be able to review the edits for which they were thanked when determined whether/how to praise them.
Very good point, @Xaosflux. The draft and user namespaces are very often where newcomers write articles, and we'll absolutely want the edit checks to come up when that's happening. Userspace may present a challenge, since sometimes it's just used to create one's userpage or to keep track of tasks, which are not scenarios where we want to prompt people to add references.
Mar 2 2023
Feb 27 2023
@Aklapper , sorry if there was any miscategorization. My understanding was that @Esanders' script represents the prototype version of a feature that will be rolled out as part of the talk pages project, which is why I categorized it here. Ed, feel free to forward/adjust the task so that it reaches wherever it needs to.
Feb 25 2023
Feb 22 2023
Do you think a page like Edit check/Ideas mediawiki.org would work?
Yes, that would be great! Really, the potential domain for this is everything that goes against best practice but isn't so universally guaranteed bad that we block it with an edit filter or fix it with a bot. That's a huge domain that encompasses a good portion of how experienced editors spend our time, and while not everything in it is potentially machine-readable, a sizeable portion of it is.
Ah, that makes sense!
Feb 21 2023
Feb 6 2023
Feb 2 2023
What rules ought to determine whether a change someone is making warrants the reference check being triggered?
I think the ideal situation here is one where there's a medium-importance issue — one not so dire that it warrants an abuse filter, but also not one so minor it can easily just be fixed up later. There are also some issues that are easier to fix when they're introduced rather than later on — citations is the big one here, since it's so much easier for someone to just add the source they used than for someone later to try to find it.
Thinking ahead, what other kinds of checks can you imagine being useful/valuable?
Oh, so many! I'd look through the editnotices to find a bunch of examples, as well as the abuse filters, maintenance tags, and guidance pages. Here are some (some for more specific situations than others):
- Adds a redlinked entry to a dynamic list
- Adds an image lacking alt text to an article related to accessibility, e.g. Blindness
- Links to a projectspace page from the mainspace body of an article
- Links to a disambiguation page from an article body (already implemented)
- Uses a word from a variety of English different from the one the article is tagged as having
- Uses a word that is likely a typo
- Adds a section titled "criticism" or "controversy"
- Adds a link to an article that is already linked in that section (very likely a WP:DUPLINK violation)
- Adds a reference with the same URL as an existing reference (likely a duplicate)
- Uses a relative time word like "recently" in an article body
- Use a word or phrase indicating a likely personal attack on a talk page
- Adds a reference containing only a bare URL
- Adds an external link in an article body
- Adds many entries to an external links section (likely a violation of WP:ELNO)
- Uses a phrase indicative of likely promotional language (e.g. "mission statement", "award-winning")
- Expands a section titled "Plot" beyond, say, 1400 words (recommend max length is 700)
- Uses a word or phrase listed at MOS:Words to Watch
- Adds a link to a word that is likely an overlink (e.g. a year, or a major country/language/ethnicity/etc.)
- Adds an image gallery to an article on an ethnicity (likely a violation of MOS:PEOPLEGALLERY)
- Adds a short description longer than 40 characters (see WP:SDSHORT)
- Adds a very long quote (likely a summary style violation, if not also a copyright one)
- Adds an article to a category when the article is already in a subcategory
You'd find many more examples talking to other editors. The potential extent of the applications is staggering, which is one reason I hope that once this feature is more fully developed it'll be possible for the community to create our own ones without developer assistance, just as we currently do for e.g. edit filters.
Jan 28 2023
- What patterns have you noticed in the newcomers/edits you feel compelled to assist with (e.g. write a personalized message on their talk page, add a reference to a content addition that lacked one)?
- What patterns have you noticed in the newcomers/edits you do not feel compelled to assist with (e.g. revert the edits they made, post a templated warning message on their talk page)
What additional information/context might you find helpful in assessing the quality of an edit and the intentions of the person making it so that you can decide how best to respond to it/them?
- What edits that involve people adding net new content do NOT require an accompanying reference?
Bad edits.
Jan 19 2023
@Jdlrobson I'm not quite sure what you mean. Is it this? I continue to think that this is the best design option we have with the current en-WP homepage:
Personally, that does not look at all good to me. It creates a blank space, pushing the actual content of the main page down.
Jan 9 2023
Jan 1 2023
@MarkTraceur, you are listed as the contact person for the UploadWizard. Could you look into addressing this?
Dec 8 2022
Agreed with MusikAnimal.
As can be seen from previous comments, the community asked for something , discussion ensued, a solution was not yet found.
(unsubscribing to reduce my notifications, but feel free to ping me in replies)
Overall, this seems like it'd be a nice feature to have!
Nov 16 2022
@matmarex , the unsubst module can be used in most cases to prevent inexperienced editors from accidentally using substitution erroneously. Beyond that, a better version of TemplateData would allow for instruction about substitution for each template.
Nov 4 2022
You're welcome to have a purist view of styling on Wikipedia, but until consensus develops otherwise, such styling exists, and even if it were banned on Wikipedia, there are plenty of other MediaWiki projects that use it. Unless we plan to disable the ability to recolor table backgrounds, we should work to make them accessible.
Oct 27 2022
That's not a viable solution. Currently, the only available arrow color is black, so the only background colors that would sufficiently contrast with it would be light ones. But there are plenty of MediaWiki applications that use darker backgrounds with lighter text, which is a perfectly valid and accessible design choice — except for the current arrows. This task should be taken up to resolve that issue.
Sep 12 2022
I have some concerns about the notifications that were just introduced for topic archiving. Quoting myself from here:
Sep 9 2022
@Whatamidoing-WMF appears to be the community relations person for that team; could you point us to the right person to ask about this?
Aug 21 2022
Here's another possible use case that is blocked by this bug.
Aug 19 2022
Aug 13 2022
I've previously raised a similar thing here. @Whatamidoing-WMF pointed out that there's already a notice of sorts for new editors trying out VisualEditor. We made some adjustments to the wording, stored here (see the talk page), so I'm not sure there's all that much else to do.
I'd like to see this ticket (or another related one) include an exploration of design options, not just name options. I'm not sure you'll ever find a word that's completely unambiguous, but there are lots of other ways to set it off to make it clear it's not a section. Brainstorming some of those:
Jul 29 2022
I'm fully with @Xaosflux here — the major distinction is things about the page vs. things about the topic, and coordinates are clearly about the topic, compared to protection icons/GA and FA stars/etc. which are about the page. One way to conceptualize it: If Wikipedia didn't exist, would this thing still be relevant? If so, it's about the topic, not the page.
Jul 28 2022
Jul 21 2022
@Xaosflux, I really like your thought of separating content from meta things.
Jul 20 2022
I'm not sure about the technical aspects, but once the field is created, just lmk and we'll be able to implement the behavior we want (as shown in the mockup) on-wiki.
Jul 17 2022
Thanks, @ppelberg! Trying it out, I like it. The main areas for improvement are things around the edges.
Jul 15 2022
Thanks for merging the task, @Esanders! I thought I'd seen something about this before, so glad to know it's being actively considered. I'll unsubscribe from here to avoid a notification blizzard, but feel free to reach out here/on-wiki if you'd like feedback about the feature as you develop it.
@Xaosflux I'd guess the programmatic definition of an article category is one that's not tagged with the maintenance category template. But for our purposes here, I think we can consider any category that's not Category:Wikipedia drafts or one of its subcategories to be something suppressible in draft space.
Jul 9 2022
Jul 6 2022
May 28 2022
Thanks; that's exactly what I have in mind!
Apr 23 2022
I fully concur with AlexisJazz and Ahecht here. This has a clear issue to resolve: make the search results ignore the bad image list. The possible bad outcomes are really bad—@Jdlrobson, can we note that this is a blocking issue for the deployment of New Vector?
Apr 19 2022
@Jdlrobson, per the prototype image that I referred you to, and that I'm attaching below for good measure, the approval is for the language switcher button within the Main Page top banner. There is no approval for placing it above the banner, as in your options above; that would require us to run a brand new RfC, which I predict would fail.
Apr 15 2022
English Wikipedia has just approved placing the language switcher button near the upper right corner of the Main Page (at the right end of the top banner, as depicted in the prototype image) as part of a suite of changes to reduce the prominence of portals. Would you all be able to handle the technical end of development to make this possible?
Mar 11 2022
Thanks, @ppelberg; glad to see it's already on the radar!
Mar 1 2022
FYI, this task was independently raised as a suggestion at the English Wikipedia Village Pump.
Feb 16 2022
As a heads up, there is discussion taking place at English Wikipedia on removing the portal links from the top of the Main Page, which would open up a convenient place to put the language switcher, perhaps like this:
Feb 15 2022
- I'd see myself using it most on large talk pages with a lot of threads. That could be talk pages of controversial topics, e.g. Donald Trump, or user talk pages of active editors. It could also be pages used for discussion that aren't technically talk pages, like the village pumps or Administrators Noticeboard.
Feb 8 2022
Feb 3 2022
One thing I'd like a good talk table of contents to do is to note how many different editors have participated in each discussion. This is because, often, when glancing at a large talk page, I'm looking for the discussions that involve a significant change with a realistic likelihood of passing (things like RfCs or major structural changes), and I'm looking to filter out discussions that are just straightforward edit requests, nonstarter ideas, and other cruft. The threads in the former group will often have many participants, whereas those in the latter will have few.
Jan 31 2022
Thanks for the explanation, Santhosh! I'll just hope it's something Chrome developers eventually fix, then.
Jan 28 2022
Thanks for opening this, Whatamidoing! As background, see this discussion.
Jan 26 2022
@DLynch, someone else replying to the comment would be something I'd want to know, but so would someone else replying at the same level as the comment I'm replying to. In other words, sometimes replies happen by indenting a level further, but sometimes they happen by just making another comment at the same indentation level.
The "polling every X seconds for new changes" approach, if it's not too resource-greedy, appeals, since the sooner I know someone else has commented, the sooner I can start adapting mine to whatever they said. It'd be even better if there's an easy way to load their comment without feeling like the software is going to discard mine.
Jan 25 2022
Awesome; thanks so much!
For the first one, it's normally because I'm looking for a discussion I've contributed to to check if there are updates (less frequent now that I can subscribe) or to link to it from another discussion. (Now that I think about it, having a link icon that would copy the wikilink to a discussion would be super useful.) I currently do that by ctrl+f and typing in my username, but a box would make that easier.
Jan 22 2022
@Aklapper is there anyone at WMF currently working on the page history interface who I could ping about this? It seems like it ought to be a very simple tweak.
@Aklapper, this seems like it should be a very straightforward task. Who at WMF can I ping to get this unstuck?