Information on how to proceed to have removal of a ban considered

Courcelles:

I am presently bound by an old ban that arose over controversy concerning the article Speed of light. This ban has led in recent years to actions brought by my addition of "See also" links, corrections of typos and other infractions of the ban that are not germane to disruption of WP. I think it may be time to broach the rescinding of this ban, and hope you can spell out how that can be done. I also would appreciate any advice you might have about the process.

Thanks for any help you can offer. Brews ohare (talk) 15:39, 7 April 2015 (UTC)

The only way to do this is to file a request at WP:ARCA, though I'm not sure it would go anywhere given last week's AE thread. Were I you, I'd wait a few months and file a request. Courcelles (talk) 20:37, 7 April 2015 (UTC)

Thanks

Why did you have to make an issue out of it when it was clear that I had already settled on this account and was using it exclusively, per WP:VALIDALT; "Clean start under a new name"? There was no disruption being caused. It did not violate WP:SOCK as there was no intent to mislead, deceive, vandalize or disrupt. You could have just left it alone and it wouldn't have been a problem. Instead, you made an issue out of something so minor and non-disruptive and sullied this accounts reputation forever. I took a very long time to settle on this username and you ruined it. My Little Question Can't be This Interesting (talk) 23:20, 4 April 2015 (UTC)

You were using 18 accounts, all to edit the same pages. Courcelles (talk) 17:40, 8 April 2015 (UTC)

The Signpost: 08 April 2015

A new reference tool

Hello Books & Bytes subscribers. There is a new Visual Editor reference feature in development called Citoid. It is designed to "auto-fill" references using a URL or DOI. We would really appreciate you testing whether TWL partners' references work in Citoid. Sharing your results will help the developers fix bugs and improve the system. If you have a few minutes, please visit the testing page for simple instructions on how to try this new tool. Regards, MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 18:47, 10 April 2015 (UTC)

Vacation

Saw you folks were headed out, and just wanted to drop a "have a good time" note. Leaving on the 12th myself for a while. Stay safe. — Ched :  ?  22:39, 10 April 2015 (UTC)

Have fun! OccultZone (Talk • Contributions • Log) 15:02, 11 April 2015 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #153

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

• Events/Blogs/Press
  • Wikidata by country, or: The Wealth of Nation's Data
  • Wikidata the Game - one year in
  • Ongoing: GLAM-Wiki 2015
• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • Build a RSS image feed based on a query
  • Periodic table based on Wikidata data by Ricordisamoa
  • ~8000 biographical items with dates in the description, but no birth/death date statements
  • Magnus says ~8% (~1.4M) of all Wikidata items do not have any site links to Wikipedia etc.; knowledge that exists exclusively on Wikidata
  • Bene* wrote a user script that adds a filter bar above the statement section and lets you filter it
  • Magnus wrote a quick user script to move identifiers into the right sidebar to show how a statement section without identifiers would look like. This came up as part of a longer discussion on the mailinglist about moving identifier statements into their own section. Progress is being tracked at phabricator:T95287.
  • Samsung releases Freebase-Wikidata mappings in CC0: 4.4M pairs generated from Wikipedia links and custom code
  • Thanks to Bene* hovercards now also work for items and properties
  • New tool by Magnus for Wikidata item labels
• Did you know?
  • Newest properties: short name, list of episodes, named as
  • New task forces: Star Wars, Open Access
• Development
  • We are going to change the way value suggestions are ranked when entering a new statement. This will help with "male" and "female" not showing up among the top suggestions. Previously we ranked by number of sitelinks. We will change this to the maximum of sitelinks and labels. So if an item has labels in many languages but no sitelinks like "male" and "female" it will still show up high in the suggestions. (phabricator:T94404)
  • Discussed how to move forward with identifiers. Outcome: They should get their own datatype. (phabricator:T95287)
  • Implemented arbitrary access for the {{#property:…}} parser function. This can be invoked on the wikis that have arbitrary access enabled by using {{#property:P123|from=Q42}}. So far this is only Wikidata itself.
  • Did further performance work on the client (Wikipedia and co) in preparation for arbitrary access
  • Improved the performance of wbgetentities significantly when loading a large number of entities
  • Wrote more browser tests for different datavalues
  • Further work on RDF mapping and dumps
  • Fixed in other language box showing old data (phabricator:T90893)
  • Fixed language fallback on Special:Recent changes and Special:Contributions
  • Added language fallback for the tooltip on badge icons
• Monthly Tasks
  • Hack on one of these.
  • Help fix these items which have been flagged using Wikidata - The Game.
  • Help develop the next summary here!
  • Contribute to a Showcase item
  • Help translate or proofread pages in your own language!

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · John F. Lewis 21:02, 11 April 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-16

16:40, 13 April 2015 (UTC)

Kohs vandalism

Hi. In this post at Wikipediocracy, Greg links to this Google spreadsheet which appears to list the diffs for all of his experimental vandalism. --Anthonyhcole (talk · contribs · email) 02:51, 14 April 2015 (UTC)

April 29: WikiWednesday Salon and Skill-Share NYC

Wednesday April 29, 7pm: WikiWednesday Salon and Skill-Share NYC

You are invited to join the Wikimedia NYC community for our inaugural evening "WikiWednesday" salon and knowledge-sharing workshop by 14th Street / Union Square in Manhattan. We also hope for the participation of our friends from the Free Culture movement and from educational and cultural institutions interested in developing free knowledge projects. We will also follow up on plans for recent and upcoming editathons, and other outreach activities. After the main meeting, pizza and refreshments and video games in the gallery! Wednesday April 29 WikiWednesday Salon and Skill-Share NYC (RSVP on-wiki or at meetup.com). 7:00pm - 9:00 pm at Babycastles, 137 West 14th Street Featuring a keynote talk this month on Lady Librarians & Feminist Epistemologies! We especially encourage folks to add your 5-minute lightning talks to our roster, and otherwise join in the "open space" experience! Newcomers are very welcome! Bring your friends and colleagues! --Pharos (talk) 18:28, 14 April 2015 (UTC)

(You can subscribe/unsubscribe from future notifications for NYC-area events by adding or removing your name from this list.)

The Signpost: 15 April 2015

Wikidata weekly summary #154

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

• Discussions
  • Open RfA: Aldnonymous
  • RfC: Review of "change datatype to monolingual" actions for some properties, Adopt Help:Classification as an official help page
• Events/Blogs/Press
  • Redirects on Wikidata
• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • Tool by Magnus to find wrong nationalities on Wikidata
  • Where am I? (figuring out your location based on geocoordinates in Wikidata)
  • Map of French national parks
  • Histropedia published 5 query generator spreadsheets
  • Wikimedia's monthly GLAM (Galleries, Libraries, Archives, Museums) newsletter now includes a Wikidata report. The draft for the first edition, covering April, may be edited and your contributions will be welcome.
• Did you know?
  • Newest properties: Baseball-Reference.com minor league player ID, Baseball-Reference.com major league player ID, road number, BAnQ ID, DSH object ID, Open Food Facts food category slug, Open Food Facts food additive slug, genealogics.org personID, Kaiserhof ID, addressee, National Portrait Gallery (London) person identifier, RSL book's identifier, name in kana
• Development
  • Made label, description and aliases special pages easier to use
  • Bene* created a new Special:ListProperties special page to list properties by data type
  • Expanded our set of automated browser tests
  • Made language fallbacks work in more situations and more consistently. In particular, the entity selector now uses language fallback. This should benefit especially people who want to use Wikidata in a variant such as en-gb.
  • Continued work on the planned DataModel 3.0 release
  • Continued discussing and documenting future calendar model support
  • Continued work on our RDF generator
  • Continued work on usage tracking for labels on multilingual sites
  • Addshore worked on various issues regarding redirects
  • Addshore worked on a special page to turn an item into a redirect
  • Work on showing entity labels in edit summaries on history pages
  • Implemented change dispatching based on the new usage tracking mechanism
  • Fixed issue with page deletions on some Wikipedias not being reported to Wikidata
  • More work on straightening out date formatting and parsing
  • Fixed handling of scientific notation for quantity values
  • Term box: fixed bug causing stale info to be show, and another bug causing babel languages to be ignored sometimes.
  • Implemented access to other arbitrary items via the #property parser function
  • Bene* implemented check to make sure two properties can not have the same alias only differing in capitalization
• Monthly Tasks
  • Hack on one of these.
  • Help fix these items which have been flagged using Wikidata - The Game.
  • Help develop the next summary here!
  • Contribute to a Showcase item
  • Help translate or proofread pages in your own language!
  • Add labels, in your own language, for the new properties listed above.

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · John F. Lewis 09:52, 19 April 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-17

15:30, 20 April 2015 (UTC)

pls unprotect my page

this is ms weir here — Preceding unsigned comment added by 94.185.135.199 (talk) 09:47, 21 April 2015 (UTC)

The Signpost: 22 April 2015

Wikidata weekly summary #155

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

• Discussions
  • RfC: Opting out of Global sysops 2
• Events/Blogs/Press
  • Wikidata emerges as central element of GLAM-WIKI 2015
  • ongoing: Coding DaVinci
• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • The question that started Wikidata has finally been answered! Thank you Markus! ;-)
  • Wikimedia Sverige adapted two brochures about Wikidata, one for GLAMs and one for researchers.
  • Bene* has been working on making Wikidata work nicely on mobile. You can check the current status on a demo system.
  • Amir could use your help with automatic transliteration of human names
  • Commons-WD: a tool to edit Wikidata based on a Commons category
  • Various improvements to the Primary Sources Tool including:
    • Edits made with it will now say so in the edit summary
    • It now uses the URL blacklist to not suggest low-quality references
    • Caching issues were fixed
• Did you know?
  • Newest properties: Kiev street code, blood type, Perry Index, input set, SSR Name ID, SSR WrittenForm ID, INPN Code, Nasjonalbiblioteket photographer ID, distribution map, anti-virus alias, HathiTrust id, common name, Global Anabaptist Mennonite Encyclopedia Online identifier, Swedish district code, investigated by, US Federal Election Commission identifier, PSS-archi ID, Gaoloumi ID, draft pick number, GrassBase ID, electorate, owner of, Roud Folk Song Index, IPI Code, ISWC
  • There are a number of user boxes you can add to your user page to indicate interests and which wiki projects you belong to.
• Development
  • On Tuesday, we are deploying usage tracking (no arbitrary access yet) to Dutch Wikipedia and French Wikisource, and subscription tracking on Wikidata. There should be no noticeable changes for users. These are necessary steps towards enabling arbitrary access in clients.
  • Worked on making language fallback work in the suggester (when adding a new statement or searching for an item)
  • More work on RDF output and the query service
  • Added Special:RedirectEntity for redirecting items
  • Investigated and working to fix JS bug on items with “invalid” values (phabricator:92975)
  • Did work towards having entity ids in revision histories and in diffs linked with their label (like on watchlists or in the recentchanges)
• Monthly Tasks
  • Hack on one of these.
  • Help fix these items which have been flagged using Wikidata - The Game.
  • Help develop the next summary here!
  • Contribute to a Showcase item
  • Help translate or proofread pages in your own language!
  • Add labels, in your own language, for the new properties listed above.

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) 14:00, 26 April 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-18

15:10, 27 April 2015 (UTC)

University of Canterbury

You semi-protected University of Canterbury in January and blocked several accounts as {{checkuserblock-account}}. The semi expired recently and a new account started making the same edits so I have blocked it and renewed the protection. You might like to confirm the link between Bblblstr (talk · contribs) and the earlier accounts.-gadfium 19:52, 23 April 2015 (UTC)

I'll take a look when I'm home on Tuesday. Checkyser and on my phone in a foreign country is not going to work in any useful manner. Courcelles (talk) 09:10, 24 April 2015 (UTC)

Block looks good to me, but can't find any sleepers. Courcelles (talk) 19:11, 29 April 2015 (UTC)

Thanks.-gadfium 21:05, 29 April 2015 (UTC)

Bom dia e bemvindo

I hope you enjoyed your holiday. There has been zero vandalism on Valentine's Day since it was unprotected apart from one contribution by our Brazilian friend. As both Passover and Easter are out of the way for another year please unprotect Easter. See the discussion at User talk:Lankiveil/Archive 9#Easter. 156.61.250.250 (talk) 10:42, 30 April 2015 (UTC)

The Signpost: 29 April 2015

Trouble at Standard penetration test

Hi! Can you stop by Standard penetration test and have a look at the edits User:Yoshi123Yoshi has been making? I've tried to explain to him that he's placing undue weight on the material he wants to include, and that it's better to just summarize it and add it further down. Then he goes and adds it all back again. We're getting close to 3rr territory. Argyriou (talk) 04:53, 30 April 2015 (UTC)

Also, unrelated except that it's hit the same article, someone from geotechdata.info has been spamming various articles related to geotechnical engineering. I've warned User talk:212.243.35.196, but this has been going on a while (I found another edit about a year old), from various IP addresses. Is there something that can be done other than just going through and cleaning up? Argyriou (talk) 04:53, 30 April 2015 (UTC)

Seems like a matter for ANI to me. I just don't really have the time in the next 36 hours to deal with anything extra, sorry. Courcelles (talk) 00:55, 1 May 2015 (UTC)

I went to ANI about the spam, and Geni is now aware of that problem. Do you have any recommendation or advice about the other issue, which is much more a good-faith content dispute? Argyriou (talk) 17:08, 1 May 2015 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #156

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

• Events/Blogs/Press
  • Wikidata was presented at a Swedish Linked Data Network Meet-up in Gothenburg.
  • The most important Wikipedia pages
• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • P107 (main type) is finally orphaned and deleted, 20 months after deprecation. This was the first property used 1000000 times.
  • The royal baby was quickly updated on Wikidata. (her family tree)
  • New tool by Magnus: Find pictures on geography.co.uk, upload them to Commons and add them to Wikidata
  • All Van Gogh Museum paintings are now on Commons and Wikidata. Go go SumOfAllPaintings peeps!
  • List of topics with links in at least X Wikipedias
  • All French Senators matched using MixNMatch \o/
• Did you know?
  • Newest properties: represented by, Netflix Identifier, maximum number of players, minimum number of players, CERL ID, Name Assigning Authority Number, Hall of Valor ID, ballots cast, eligible voters, catholic-hierarchy diocese ID, Wikidata example geographic coordinates, Wikidata example monolingual text, Wikidata example property, Wikidata example quantity, Wikidata example time, Wikidata example URL, Wikidata example item value, Wikidata example string, Wikidata example media file, Wikidata property example
• Development
  • We rolled out usage tracking on the first two wikis (French Wikisource and Dutch Wikipedia). Users should not notice anything. More wikis will follow in the next weeks. This is the remaining step for enabling arbitrary access on wikis other than Commons.
  • The students team is working hard to get a first release of the improved constraint reports and checks against 3rd party databases out.
  • Ricordisamoa fixed the issue with long descriptions being cut off.
  • We fixed the focus flow in the property selector.
  • We improved the messages on Special:EntityData to make it more understandable.
• Monthly Tasks
  • Hack on one of these.
  • Help fix these items which have been flagged using Wikidata - The Game.
  • Help develop the next summary here!
  • Contribute to a Showcase item
  • Help translate or proofread pages in your own language!
  • Add labels, in your own language, for the new properties listed above.

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) 14:30, 3 May 2015 (UTC)

FYI

You checkuser-blocked Mrashid364 back in January. I've just indef'd Johndavid786 as a sock after an AIV report. Just thought you might want to look into it; I'm not familiar with the background, but the behavioural evidence is pretty conclusive. HJ Mitchell | Penny for your thoughts? 19:20, 1 May 2015 (UTC)

No sleepers (would have been unlikely to find any though, for reasons) Courcelles (talk) 01:43, 4 May 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-19

15:08, 4 May 2015 (UTC)

WikiCup 2015 May newsletter

The second round one has all wrapped up, and round three has now begun! Congratulations to the 34 contestants who have made it through, but well done and thank you to all contestants who took part in our second round. Leading the way overall was Cas Liber (submissions) in Group B with a total of 777 points for a variety of contributions including Good Articles on Corona Borealis and Microscopium - both of which received the maximum bonus.

Special credit must be given to a number of high importance articles improved during the second round.

• Coemgenus (submissions) was one of several users who worked on improving Ulysses S. Grant. Remember, you do not need to work on an article on your own - as long as each person has completed significant work on the article during 2015, multiple competitors can claim the same article.
• Cwmhiraeth (submissions) took Dragonfly to Good Article for a 3x bonus - and if that wasn't enough, they also took Damselfly there as well for a 2x bonus.
• LeftAire (submissions) worked up Alexander Hamilton to Good Article for the maximum bonus. Hamilton was one of the founding fathers of the United States and is a level 4 vital article.

The points varied across groups, with the lowest score required to gain automatic qualification was 68 in Group A - meanwhile the second place score in Group H was 404, which would have been high enough to win all but one of the other Groups! As well as the top two of each group automatically going through to the third round, a minimum score of 55 was required for a wildcard competitor to go through. We had a three-way tie at 55 points and all three have qualified for the next round, in the spirit of fairness. The third round ends on June 28, with the top two in each group progressing automatically while the remaining 16 highest scorers across all four groups go through as wildcards. Good luck to all competitors for the third round! Figureskatingfan (talk · contribs · email), Miyagawa (talk · contribs · email) and Sturmvogel 66 (talk · contribs · email) 16:28, 4 May 2015 (UTC)

Books and Bytes - Issue 11

MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 23:20, 4 May 2015 (UTC)

Invitation to discussion

You have been cordially invited to discuss Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Gymnastics#Major competitions and medal records for athletes following this and this discussions. Thanks for your quick and prompt response. --Osplace 13:01, 5 May 2015 (UTC)

The Signpost: 06 May 2015

Wikidata weekly summary #157

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

• Discussions
  • Open request for adminship: Mbch331
  • New request for comments: Notability policy overhaul
  • Closed requests for comments: Conflict of Interest (no consensus), Speedy vs Regular deletion (stale)
• Events/Blogs/Press
  • A study has been published about how Wikidata can help significantly improve the quality of medical content on Wikipedia. This is why we do Wikidata! \o/
  • MusicBrainz is migrating to Wikidata for Wikipedia links
  • Past: Open Data for Academics - some media available on Wikimedia Commons.
  • Upcoming: OuiShare Labs Camp in Paris
  • Upcoming: MediaWiki hackathon in Lyon
• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • The Wikidata Visualization Challenge has started. You can enter your submission until June 1 (23:59 CEST).
  • Denny has published a proposed breakdown of tasks for Wiktionary support incl mockups. Please read and comment.
  • The Wikidata Menu Challenge has started and goes on to May 27. Add labels, images and pronunciation audio to a list of around 290 items to help show off the power of Wikidata at a food festival.
  • Dynamic lists on Wikipedia based on Wikidata data
  • The Frick Collection and the Brooklyn Museum both have their paintings on Wikidata now.
  • The most distant known galaxy EGS-zs8-1 (Q19860435) has been discovered and added to Wikidata.
  • Reasonator has been restyled, to work better on mobile devices. It also has an enhanced display on first names (exsample: Paul)
  • Woah! Volcanos! (Help match the Smithonian's volcano identifiers with Wikidata) ;-)
• Did you know?
  • Newest properties: Smithsonian volcano identifier, cathedral, hair color, Declarator.org ID, Web Gallery of Art identifier, list of characters, measured by, income classification (Philippines), Vox-ATypI classification, after a work by, spacecraft
• Development
  • Access to data from arbitrary items is coming to the first wikis on Monday \o/ It'll be Dutch Wikipedia and French Wikisource.
  • Sneak peek at the current state of development for showing constraint violations on statements
  • Hovercards also show the target's label and ID now. (Try them by turning them on in the beta features section of your preferences.)
  • Continued working on RDF export
  • More work on making it possible to add a reference right away when adding a statement (and allowing the full statement incl references to be edited at the same time)
  • Did more work to make usage tracking possible on multilingual wikis (namely Commons)
• Monthly Tasks
  • Hack on one of these.
  • Help fix these items which have been flagged using Wikidata - The Game.
  • Help develop the next summary here!
  • Contribute to a Showcase item
  • Help translate or proofread pages in your own language!
  • Add labels, in your own language, for the new properties listed above.

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) 17:47, 9 May 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-20

15:38, 11 May 2015 (UTC)

June 10: WikiWednesday Salon / Wikimedia NYC Annual Meeting

Wednesday June 10, 7pm: WikiWednesday Salon / Wikimedia NYC Annual Meeting

You are invited to join the Wikimedia NYC community for our next evening "WikiWednesday" salon and knowledge-sharing workshop by 14th Street / Union Square in Manhattan. This month will also feature on our agenda: recent and upcoming editathons, the organization's Annual Meeting, and Chapter board elections. We also hope for the participation of our friends from the Free Culture movement and from educational and cultural institutions interested in developing free knowledge projects. We will also follow up on plans for recent and upcoming editathons, and other outreach activities. After the main meeting, pizza and refreshments and video games in the gallery! Wednesday June 10 WikiWednesday Salon / Wikimedia NYC Annual Meeting (RSVP on-wiki or at meetup.com). 7:00pm - 9:00 pm at Babycastles, 137 West 14th Street Featuring a keynote talk this month to be determined! We especially encourage folks to add your 5-minute lightning talks to our roster, and otherwise join in the "open space" experience! Newcomers are very welcome! Bring your friends and colleagues! --Pharos (talk) 16:00, 12 May 2015 (UTC)

(You can subscribe/unsubscribe from future notifications for NYC-area events by adding or removing your name from this list.)

MIDDAYEXPRESS: supposed involvement in MUSLIM TERRORISM SUPPORT

Middayexpress is supporting Al-Shabaab?

Hi, I have read that you blocked user:Middayexpress in 2011. But this user is becoming more and more "a real problem" and should be blocked again. Anyway, I want to add the following information, in case you want to investigate the "Al-Shabaab-ISIS" issue & presence on Wikipedia. This investigation is being done even on the blog of Mappista59 (read: https://www.blogger.com/profile/17629549463392207787 ). Thanks anyway:

User:Middayexpress is a controversial user of English Wikipedia.

She is a Somali woman (according to user Chuckupd and others) living in the UK, probably in London, who is accused to be with "pathological behavior" while controlling in en.wiki all articles on Somalia. She has caused to abandon Wikipedia at least one user (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Chuckupd), who wrote that "I'm not the only one being attacked (by Middayexpress) without mercy" and "Middayexpress, you are hopelessly insane " and finally "I give up on Wikipedia. Middayexpress has accused me with so many lies that it has become unbearably depressing. I'm not the only one being attacked without mercy. One of these days, I hope she will be banned and then I might consider returning here."

Another wiki user (Buckshot06 (talk) ) wrote that "Middayexpress is in long-standing, continual violation of WP:NPOV, continually rolls back edits that do not reflect his views (IDONTLIKEIT/Disruptive editing, plus WP:UNDUE over-positive views of the Somali situation), and continually attempts to WP:OWN a wide range of Somalia articles." And this statement was supported by User:Bobrayner, who wrote that "I share Buckshot06's concerns. However, I feel the problem may be more widespread, as I have seen Middayexpress doing the same kind of pov-pushing on other articles related to Somalia and the surrounding region".

Buckshot06 wrote (on 17 February 2014): "Middayexpress, I remain increasingly concerned about your distortions of sources in both these articles. Beyond the issue of the TFG's security forces in Mogadishu in December 2006-January 2007, these include putting words in the mouth of a senior Ethiopian official, who did not say that Ethiopia had 8,000 troops in Somalia in November 2013, distorting a meeting between Italian and Somali officials in 2012 into a claim that Somali had started rebuilding its air force in 2000-2010, and inventing aircraft numbers and entire aircraft from the Library of Congress Country Study. Why do you continually readd the SM-1019s that are not listed in the Country Study?".....and user Nick-D (talk) added:" I've noticed that your edits to these articles seem to put an unduly positive "spin" on things. For instance, in your most recent edit to the Somali Civil War article [1] you removed material sourced to a January 2013 academic journal article by Laura Hammond in which she argued that "[M]uch of rural Somalia remains in the hands of Al-Shabaab" and replaced it with more positive material sourced to a November 2012 news story which argues that 85% of the country was under government control at the time. You did not provide a rationale for this change (especially removing material outright rather than noting differing viewpoints) and I'm wondering why you made this change?"

User:Gobonobo added the negative comments that "Middayexpress can be a difficult editor to work with. Middayexpress tends to exert ownership over Somalia-related articles, employing an editing style that is combative and adversarial, often refactoring other's contributions and/or edit-warring to preserve their preferred version of an article. Sometimes Middayexpress exhibits tendentious behavior, removing sourced material that is critical of Somalia or Somali people". Additionally User:StoneProphet pinpointed that Middayexpress did "rampant cherry-picking of sources and content".

Middaexpress had fights from his first wiki-moments even with admins (like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Kwamikagami/old , who accused Middayexpress of "violating basic Wikipedia policy") and with many other users.

Middayexpress has even insulted users, like User:Sherurcij, who was called "racist" ( http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Somalia_Affair&action=historysubmit&diff=303950062&oldid=303948740 ).

Middayexpress was "restricted" from posting by admin EdJohnston for some months in June 2010, after an edit-warring with user StoneProphet (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Middayexpress/Archive_11).

User Baboon43 (talk) accused Middayexpress of meatpuppetry in a sockpuppet investigation (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Sockpuppet_investigations/Runehelmet/Archive ). He wrote:

"Middayexpress is a meatpuppet master for Runehelmet as seen on Runehelmets talk page once middayexpress began into a dispute with me he went over to call runehelmet into the discussion 27 and rune also does the same vice versa 28..These two individuals would rather have a page dominated by somali-centric material and seem to turn a blind eye on other ethnic groups as seen here 29..Gyrofrog does not enter discussion on a wide scale like Runehelmet does so that is not comparable..If an editor pushes pov and seems to take your side in a discussion always and you go invite him then that is not acceptable..also your example about you and runehelmet disagreeing on article doesnt matter because that article is strictly somali oriented(squabbling in your own pot)..runehelmet would rather tag team if possible based on his behavior & he prefers to tag team strictly with Middayexpress....User Runehelmet also seems like a meatpuppet for User_talk:Middayexpress as clearly seen on runehelmets talk page [6]..midday passes on articles for runehelmet to add on his watchlist clearing way for both users to appear on WP:OBSART and wp:CAN..it seems other users have brought up their behavior in previous discussion 7..middayexpress invites runehelmet to discussions which is also clearly seen on the talk page..they back each other to push consensus seen here [8] & [9]..also the only time Runehelmet seems to accept consensus in a dispute is if middayexpress enters the discussion as seen here [10] & [11]" Baboon43 (talk) 09:35, 26 November 2012 (UTC). Furthermore, it seems that user AcidSnow is a "meatpuppet" of Middayexpress, because he always defends her POVs in all the Somalia discussions and "fights".

User:Bricology found that Middaexpress was "hiding it in a long, dense and relatively undifferentiated timeline" the issue of poaching as a source of funds for the Somalian terrorist group Al-Shabaab. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Al-Shabaab_(militant_group)#Moving_on...). He even wrote: "Middayexpress, you either presume that you have the power to unilaterally change other editors' work or you misunderstand the relevant issue, or both".

This tentative to "help" the image of Al-Shabaab in Wikipedia (similar to the one denounced by user Nick-D ) raises doubts, and creates the possibility that Middayexpress has a supposed involvement in Muslim terrorism support. Indeed she has an astonishing knowledge of Al-Shabaab activity in the last years: this knowledge can only be possessed by an insider (or a closely-related insider) of this terrorist organization!

Furthermore, Middayexpress has shown a "fanatical hate" (similar to the one of members of Al-Shabaab) against Christianity in Somalia, as is clearly evidenced from her cancellation of serious bibliography and data in the voice "Roman Catholicism in Somalia" (https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Roman_Catholicism_in_Somalia&oldid=320544261): she has made disappear that "The Bishop of Mogadishu, Franco Filippini, declared in 1940 that there were about 40,000 Somali Catholics due to the work of missionaries in the rural regions of Juba and Shebelle, but WWII damaged in an irreversibly way most of the catholic missions in Italian Somalia.^[1] ". She angrily (as a possible al-Shabaab member or sympathizer) denied her POV-caused disappearances (https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Roman_Catholicism_in_Somalia&oldid=320948362).

Middayexpress even attacked with continuous "malignity" user Oldsettler accusing him of sockpuppetry until she obtained the help of "wikimafia" user Vituzzu: she wanted and obtained to "decapitate without pity in Wikipedia" Oldsettler with the same kind of malignity & hate shown in Syria by ISIS terrorists. Oldsettler wrote "The malignity of this Middayexpress is unbelievable. Why against me? I have never done anything with him/her or against him/her, but -after obtaining to erase my dad's photo- now attacks me continuously repeating the same accusations again and again and again with his/her typical "byzantine phrases" full of the same things. I have read his/her 60 archives and I have found that he/she is a Somalian living in the UK (probably in the London area full of supporters of ISIS (read [46]) and that he/she has had "fightings" with many wikipedians. He/she has collected many blocks and menaces of blocks for his/her continuous edit-warrings and seems to promote muslim POVs in a way that remembers the religious fanatism: most important to me, he/she seems to "hate" colonialism and western colonialists, so probably he/she identifies me with the Italians who colonized Somalia....and this can explain his/her attacks against me."

Furthermore Vituzzu is known in the Italian wiki as one of the main bosses of the “Italian wikimafia”. Some websites denounce him, like “Wikiperle” (read in Italian : htp://wikiperle.blogspot.com/2013/05/wikipedia-mai-criticare-la-famiglia.html) and “Perle Complottiste” (read: http://complottismo.blogspot.com/search/label/Vituzzu?max-results=100 ) and so do many Italian wikiusers (read in Italian: http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Amministratori/Riconferma_annuale/Vituzzu/3 ; http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Amministratori/Riconferma_annuale/Archivio/Archivio_riconferme_tacite/2012#Vituzzu ; http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Amministratori/Riconferma_annuale/Archivio/Archivio_riconferme_tacite/2013#Vituzzu ).

Vituzzu -he is from Calabria, the home of Ndrangheta (http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2015/02/150224083921277.html)- has even been "blocked" many times in the Italian Wikipedia, even if he is an admin, and "strangely" survived without ever being banned (http://it.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?titl… ): but this could only be possible because of his powerful "mafia" relationships!).

This help from wikimafia Vituzzu could or seems to be related to the growing relationship between muslim terrorism organizations and the mafia against & inside the Christian Western industrial societies (http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:PZMgorG2ojMJ:www.europarl.europa.eu/document/activities/cont/201211/20121127ATT56707/20121127ATT56707EN.pdf+&cd=7&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us): may be it is even related -as a clear possible proof- to the Middayexpress supposed involvement in Muslim terrorism support. Also a possible link to Al-Kaeda cannot be excluded, because of the growing contacts between Somalian Al-Shabaab and ISIS (read: http://www.breitbart.com/national-security/2015/03/24/isis-reaches-out-to-somali-terror-group-al-shabaab/ ).

Indeed in London, between some members of the huge Somalian community, there it is a growing "hidden" support for Al-Shabaab; and Middaexpress seems to live there (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2964218/Somali-terror-group-Al-Shabaab-calls-Westgate-style-shopping-centre-attack-London-s-Oxford-Street-chilling-new-video.html ).

If interested in further in formation, please go to http://www.trackingterrorism.org/group/north-london-boys — Preceding unsigned comment added by 64.134.184.202 (talk) 21:36, 14 May 2015 (UTC)

Support request with team editing experiment project

Dear tech ambassadors, instead of spamming the Village Pump of each Wikipedia about my tiny project proposal for researching team editing (see here: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IdeaLab/Research_team_editing), I have decided to leave to your own discretion if the matter is relevant enough to inform a wider audience already. I would appreciate if you could appraise if the Wikipedia community you are more familiar with could have interest in testing group editing "on their own grounds" and with their own guidance. In a nutshell: it consists in editing pages as a group instead of as an individual. This social experiment might involve redefining some aspects of the workflow we are all used to, with the hope of creating a more friendly and collaborative environment since editing under a group umbrella creates less social exposure than traditional "individual editing". I send you this message also as a proof that the Inspire Campaign is already gearing up. As said I would appreciate of *you* just a comment on the talk page/endorsement of my project noting your general perception about the idea. Nothing else. Your contribution helps to shape the future! (which I hope it will be very bright, with colors, and Wikipedia everywhere) Regards from User:Micru on meta.

The Signpost: 13 May 2015

Wikidata weekly summary #158

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

• Discussions
  • Successful request for adminship: Mbch331
  • Closed request for comments: Opting out of Global sysops 2
• Events/Blogs/Press
  • Using Wikidata to Improve the Medical Content on Wikipedia
  • Past: Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing) spoke about authority control in Wikidata (and sister projects) at the World Digital Library's Arab Peninsula Regional Group Symposium, organised in conjunction with the Qatar National Library, in Doha on 13 May. His slides, with an Arabic translation, will be online soon.
  • Past: Wikidata editing workshop at the Wikimedia Conference in Berlin
  • Past: Wikidata workshop for archivists of Catalan City of Justice
  • Upcoming: MediaWiki hackathon in Lyon
• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • Elections for the board of the Wikimedia Foundation are ongoing. Wikidata should be well represented among the voters. Go and vote!
  • Wikidata won another award by Land der Ideen! \o/ Thank you everyone who is making Wikidata awesome!
  • Dutch Wikipedia and French Wikisource now have the arbitrary access feature. Persian Wikipedia, English Wikivoyage and Hebrew Wikipedia are following today. Italian Wikipedia and all remaining Wikisource projects are following on June 1st.
  • New manual for adding inventory numbers to paintings on Wikidata
  • English Wikipedia is running a bot to add authority control templates to many articles that are filled completely from Wikidata. Italian Wikipedia is doing so as well.
  • Wikidata won an Open Data award last year. Nominations for this year are open now. Who should win this year?
• Did you know?
  • Newest properties: Dictionary of Medieval Names from European Sources entry, vice-county
• Development
  • Prepared for deployment of arbitrary access on more wikis
  • Graph extension will be enabled on Wikidata later today
  • Improvements to calendar handling
  • More work on RDF export for query service
  • Continued work on usage tracking and arbitrary access for multilingual wikis
  • Addshore investigated and started fixing abuse filter issues
• Monthly Tasks
  • Hack on one of these.
  • Help fix these items which have been flagged using Wikidata - The Game.
  • Help develop the next summary here!
  • Contribute to a Showcase item
  • Help translate or proofread pages in your own language!
  • Add labels, in your own language, for the new properties listed above.

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) 14:12, 18 May 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-21

16:19, 18 May 2015 (UTC)

The Signpost: 20 May 2015

Tech News: 2015-22

16:12, 25 May 2015 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #159

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

• Events/Blogs/Press

• • State of the Map US (OpenStreetMap's conference) in New York on 6-8 June
  • Wikimedia Hackathon 2015 in Lyon from 23-25 May. Some of the activities and outcomes:
    • Wikidata descriptions can be soon be edited in the Wikipedia iOS app.
    • A early preview of the official SPARQL endpoint for Wikidata has been created to query Wikidata. Remember that it is not stable and still beta. A short introduction to SPARQL can be found in Lucie's slides.
    • If you are not familiar with SPARQL yet, a tool has been created by Tpt and Bene* to generate SPARQL queries from natural language questions.
    • To do SPARQL queries from the command line, a command line tool was crafted by Marius.
    • The special page to query for badges is within reach.
    • A feedback session on the architecture of Wikibase was held.
    • We got a cool presentation by Maxime about inventaire.io.
    • We figured out the next steps to make Wikidata more mobile friendly.
    • Pilot on the Hungarian Wikipedia to show diagrams based on Wikidata in their articles on Spanish villages
• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • New command line tool for mapping SKOS to Wikidata (video)
  • The Wikidata Visualization Challenge is ending soon. Please submit your entries. The Wikidata Menu Challenge is also ending soon.
  • The number of videos about Wikidata is growing and there is now a category on Wikimedia Commons for these.
• Did you know?
  • Newest properties: lowest note, highest note, source website, Fauna Europaea ID, Danish urban area code, OpenPlaques plaque identifier, signatory, BNC identifier, different from
  • Newest WikiProjects: WikiProject Elections
• Development
  • Got early preview of the primary SPARQL endpoint for Wikidata live
  • The Graph extension is now live on Wikidata
  • Arbitrary access is rolled out on fawiki, hewiki and enwikivoyage now
  • Busy with the hackathon (see above)
• Monthly Tasks
  • Hack on one of these.
  • Help fix these items which have been flagged using Wikidata - The Game.
  • Help develop the next summary here!
  • Contribute to a Showcase item
  • Help translate or proofread pages in your own language!
  • Add labels, in your own language, for the new properties listed above.

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) 21:28, 25 May 2015 (UTC)

Norma (constellation)

You did a good job on Musca, so am selfishly asking if you could take alook at the GAN of Norma (constellation)...cheers, Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 21:47, 21 May 2015 (UTC)

Sure, no problem, I'll give it a look tomorrow. Courcelles (talk) 21:53, 21 May 2015 (UTC)

Sorry, I was unexpectedly absent for a few days. Courcelles (talk) 19:06, 25 May 2015 (UTC)

No dramas - just grateful for a review :) Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 02:39, 26 May 2015 (UTC)

Email

Dear Courcelles; I didn't receive an email from ArbCom. What address did they send it to? Antonio calalacacalalaca loco Martin (haw haw) 4:32, May 27, 2015 (UTC)

• @AntonioMartin:, I sent it through the Wikipedia e-mail system, so to whatever address is in your profile. Courcelles (talk) 03:40, 27 May 2015 (UTC)

Hi again. I found it now. It was just not under the Wikipedia header so that's why I did not find it. I can explain what happened. The house I rent is a house where many people live at, or stay (in fact tonight we have 6 people sleeping here plus the dogs) so many, many people have internet access through this computer, in fact, my dad, he does his edits from the same computer as me. My niece Isabel also has a Wikipedia membership that she created from here, but she doesn't come very often anymore so I know that was not her. So as far as "Pato Frances" now that one I don't know who made that but I suspect probably my sister or brother , or my mom, or one of my multiple nieces and nephews....the only ones I do not suspect of are my dad, my niece that has a user page, myself and my dog. All I can do is try to find out who did that because, even if he/she meant no harm to me or dad as far as Wikipedia is concerned, it still affects us. Sooo.....I guess I have not much else to say, and I do have to go get something from my room right now so the only thing left to say is, Thanks and God bless you! Antonio Cucaracha Venenosa Martin (haw haw!) 10:59, May 27, 2015 (UTC)

Smile

bzzt: "If after six months Gerda Arendt has not blocked under this motion" is probably not what you mean ;) - btw I have not been blocked (or even been warned), nor edit-warred, ever, - why should I now ;) --Gerda Arendt (talk) 09:52, 29 May 2015 (UTC)

It's fixed now. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 11:56, 29 May 2015 (UTC)

Oops. I read that maybe half a dozen times, changing a word here or there, and completely managed to miss something glaring. Courcelles (talk) 15:59, 29 May 2015 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #160

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

• Events/Blogs/Press
  • upcoming: State of the Map US
  • Visualizing history with automated event maps
• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • Final hours to make your vote count in the WMF board election
  • Now we have Q20000000 and P1900
  • Wikidata stats have been updated
  • Over 100 timeline of famous painters by Histropedia
  • WD-FIST can now take a manual item list and limit its search to JPEGs
  • Traveling this summer? Find items needing pictures around you with WikiShootMe
• Did you know?
  • Newest properties: altered regulation leads to, posttranslational modification association with, gene substitution association with, gene inversion association with, gene insertion association with, gene duplication association with, deletion association with, increased expression in, decreased expression in, side effect, Commonwealth War Graves Commission person identifier, Australian Dictionary of Biography identifier, office held by head of state, FundRef registry name, Volcanic explosivity index, Spotify artist ID, BALaT person/organisation id, EAGLE id, Librivox author ID
• Development
  • Recovering from hackathon
  • Prepared rollout of usage tracking and arbitrary access to more wikis
  • Testing of the query service
  • Fixed styling issues with entity selector
  • Worked more on Capiunto to make it easier to create good infoboxes
  • Worked on making broken values editable to fix them (this for example happens when a property is deleted but some values are left over)
  • Made entity id an optional parameter in mw.wikibase.label and mw.wikibase.description lua methods. (default to use connected item)
• Monthly Tasks
  • Hack on one of these.
  • Help fix these items which have been flagged using Wikidata - The Game.
  • Help develop the next summary here!
  • Contribute to a Showcase item
  • Help translate or proofread pages in your own language!
  • Add labels, in your own language, for the new properties listed above.

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) 13:21, 30 May 2015 (UTC)

The Wikipedia Library needs you!

Delivered on behalf of The Wikipedia Library by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 06:16, 11 June 2015 (UTC)

Question

I don't understand your comment here, as you have just linked to his userpage on meta. Is there something I'm missing? — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 08:30, 8 June 2015 (UTC)

Oh, that makes no sense now, does it? At the time I made the comment, the page was deleted. Courcelles (talk) 14:56, 8 June 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-24

15:21, 8 June 2015 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #161

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

• Discussions
  • RfC on usage of Wikidata on German-language Wikipedia
• Events/Blogs/Press
  • Past: Pigsonthewing and aude were at State of the Map US to talk about Wikidata/OpenStreetMap cooperation and more
  • Past: Lucie and Marius gave an intro to Wikidata at Gulaschprogrammiernacht in Karlsruhe (slides)
  • Upcoming: Office hour on IRC on 19th
• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • The English-language Wikipedia has decided to deprecate Persondata in favour of Wikidata.
  • New tool by Magnus to make it easier to add references
  • The results are in for the Wikimedia Foundation's board election. One name should sound familiar to you ;-)
  • Addshore created new maps of the geocoordinates on Wikidata. More coming.
  • Sylvain made an overview of the overlap in topics that the biggest Wikipedias have.
  • Wikidata has passed German Wikipedia in number of items with images (743850 dewp articles vs. 804885 items) - now only second to English-language Wikipedia.
  • Catalan Wikipedia is moving Taxon IDs to Wikidata.
  • Zolo did a comparison of English/French/German/Chinese and Cebuano Wikipedias in terms of main types of articles. Biographies were compared by period, nationality and occupation.
  • Connectivity statistics were updated.
• Did you know?
  • Newest properties: DMS V, Clinvar Accession Number, Vaccine Ontology ID, VIOLIN ID, vaccine for, participating team, first line, URI pattern for RDF resource, Commonwealth War Graves Commission burial ground identifier, Ministry of Education of Chile school ID
  • Newest gadgets: Mark as patrolled by User:Petr Matas
• Development
  • Italian Wikipedia and all remaining Wikisource projects now have arbitrary access. The rollout will continue. The schedule for the next projects is at d:Wikidata:Arbitrary access.
  • The Content Translation tool now automatically connects translated articles to Wikidata. (Thanks Content Translation developers!) Previously translated but unconnected articles have been connected by a bot. (Thanks Amir!)
  • Code review of the extensions written by a team of students to improve the constraint reports and make it possible to automatically check our data against other databases. A first version will go live soon pending further codereview and fixes.
  • Two new methods have been added to the lua library provided by Wikibase: wikibase.resolvePropertyId and wikibase.entity:getBestStatements.
  • Further work on making unserializable values editable in the UI (This can happen for example if a property is deleted.)
  • Made the Wikidata JSON dumps available on Labs in the standard dumps location there (/public/dumps).
  • Worked on automatically creating a redirect when merging items via the API.
  • Rewrote the script that generates a map image based on geocoordinates in Wikidata. (Result see above.)
  • Released Wikibase DataModel 3.0
• Monthly Tasks
  • Hack on one of these.
  • Help fix these items which have been flagged using Wikidata - The Game.
  • Help develop the next summary here!
  • Contribute to a Showcase item
  • Help translate or proofread pages in your own language!
  • Add labels, in your own language, for the new properties listed above.

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) 15:14, 7 June 2015 (UTC)

Hello, Courcelles. Please check your email; you've got mail!
It may take a few minutes from the time the email is sent for it to show up in your inbox. You can remove this notice at any time by removing the {{You've got mail}} or {{ygm}} template.

49.50.252.68 (talk) 03:40, 8 June 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-23

15:35, 1 June 2015 (UTC)

The Signpost: 03 June 2015

My remedies

I left a sincere statement on the proposed decision talk page that I hope you'll read. I agree that I have been harsh with those I disagree with at times. I can adjust my tone so that this is no longer an issue. I almost never edit articles on subjects that I disagree with politically and have been somewhat overeager to defend those I do agree with. Over my ten plus years of work on this website a few of my articles have been on subjects that could be broadly construed as related to American Politics. Of course that would include 9/11 articles where I was at the forefront of keeping conspiracy theories at bay. I also as mentioned at the case talk page supported promotion of the Hillary Clinton article to FA even though I strongly disagree with her political platform. I cross party lines frequently in an effort to meet NPOV and while I may get it wrong at times, I'm anything but a threat to American Political articles. I have no topic bans nd haven't been blocked in 8 years. I'm dismayed that the bulk of my article work will be eliminated since so many of my articles could be conceived as having a relation to American Politics. Even my national park articles are in a way...my FA Yellowstone fires of 1988 were a highly politicized issue at that time. If the main issue based on the evidence isn't that I am a POV pusher or that I am ruining content but instead that I have a civility issue, a remedy along those lines would allow me to continue to contribute in a better way.--MONGO 05:29, 1 June 2015 (UTC)

Something (offline) happened overnight, and I'm just a little shook up today. I'll get back on all this stuff tomorrow. Courcelles (talk) 21:27, 1 June 2015 (UTC)

WP:BE

Hi. Can you give me a bit of the back story on these two blocks? If I've found a likely sockpuppet, do I open an SPI or report it to you? --Dr. Fleischman (talk) 09:31, 7 June 2015 (UTC)

I pinged you, but just to wrap things up, I went ahead and started an SPI. --Dr. Fleischman (talk) 06:45, 11 June 2015 (UTC)

Sorry, I've been a bit of a mess lately. Handled the SPI, good catch. Courcelles (talk) 20:16, 11 June 2015 (UTC)

A barnstar for you!

	The Defender of the Wiki Barnstar
	For the drafting arbitrators of the SPI block case decision. Pine✉ 19:27, 11 June 2015 (UTC)

Thanks. That was the hardest case I've drafted yet. Courcelles (talk) 20:17, 11 June 2015 (UTC)

The Signpost: 10 June 2015

Wikidata weekly summary #162

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

• Discussions
  • Should we have a Wikidata User Group?
• Events/Blogs/Press
  • Past: Thanks to everyone who participated in the Wikidata:Menu Challenge which made Wikidata shine at A Taste of Stockholm. The live results are still up at https://wikimedia-sverige.github.io/tastydata .
  • Upcoming: Donostia-San Sebastián Wikidata Editathon
  • Upcoming: Ateliers Wikidata in Paris
  • News about Wikidata FIST
  • Review of the big interwiki link migration
  • Timeline of Christopher Lee films
  • Wikidata map - 19 months on
  • A challenge was raised to calculate the degrees of separation to Kevin Bacon. Already one routine has been produced, the next step is to use live data so that we can work on reducing the number of intermediary steps.
• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • ViziData has been improved significantly
  • Wikidata Visualization Challenge winners announced: first prize to ViziData.
  • New paper: Peer-production system or collaborative ontology development effort: what is Wikidata?
  • Jura1 posted some data around property usage on items about people
  • Tpt is interning at Google now to free up more content from Freebase for us. He's adding more data to the Primary Sources Tool.
• Did you know?
  • Newest properties: street key, relief location map, location map, McCune-Reischauer romanization, conifers.org ID, Dyntaxa ID, Project Gutenberg ID, UN/LOCODE, Digital Atlas of the Roman Empire ID, DBCS ID, Animator.ru ID, MobyGames ID, stated as, PGCH ID
• Development
  • Deployed arbitrary access on all Wikivoyage and Wikiquote projects and announced the next ones. See d:Wikidata:Arbitrary access for more.
  • More fine tuning on entity usage tracking (relevant for arbitrary access)
  • Fixed bug that sometimes allowed multiple properties to have the same label in a given language (phabricator:T102148)
  • More work on automatically creating redirects when merging items
  • More code review of the Wikidata Quality extensions (improved constraint reports and checks against 3rd party databases). Starting to look good for a first deployment.
  • The sitelinks heading hierarchy changed and includes a “Site links” heading now that is only shown on mobile. This is a DOM change needed to make Wikidata work better on mobile.
  • Started working on having PHPCS coverage for the major Wikibase.git code base to find small code issues more easily
  • Prepared Wikibase.git for the DataModel 3.0 switch
  • Released Wikibase DataModel Serialization 1.4
  • Released Wikibase Internal Serialization 1.4
  • New releases of several DataValue components, including DataValues Number 0.5, DataValues JavaScript 0.7 and ValueView 0.14.5
• Monthly Tasks
  • Hack on one of these.
  • Help fix these items which have been flagged using Wikidata - The Game.
  • Help develop the next summary here!
  • Contribute to a Showcase item
  • Help translate or proofread pages in your own language!
  • Add labels, in your own language, for the new properties listed above.

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) 12:08, 14 June 2015 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #162

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

• Discussions
  • Should we have a Wikidata User Group?
• Events/Blogs/Press
  • Past: Thanks to everyone who participated in the Wikidata:Menu Challenge which made Wikidata shine at A Taste of Stockholm. The live results are still up at https://wikimedia-sverige.github.io/tastydata .
  • Upcoming: Donostia-San Sebastián Wikidata Editathon
  • Upcoming: Ateliers Wikidata in Paris
  • News about Wikidata FIST
  • Review of the big interwiki link migration
  • Timeline of Christopher Lee films
  • Wikidata map - 19 months on
  • A challenge was raised to calculate the degrees of separation to Kevin Bacon. Already one routine has been produced, the next step is to use live data so that we can work on reducing the number of intermediary steps.
• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • ViziData has been improved significantly
  • Wikidata Visualization Challenge winners announced: first prize to ViziData.
  • New paper: Peer-production system or collaborative ontology development effort: what is Wikidata?
  • Jura1 posted some data around property usage on items about people
  • Tpt is interning at Google now to free up more content from Freebase for us. He's adding more data to the Primary Sources Tool.
• Did you know?
  • Newest properties: street key, relief location map, location map, McCune-Reischauer romanization, conifers.org ID, Dyntaxa ID, Project Gutenberg ID, UN/LOCODE, Digital Atlas of the Roman Empire ID, DBCS ID, Animator.ru ID, MobyGames ID, stated as, PGCH ID
• Development
  • Deployed arbitrary access on all Wikivoyage and Wikiquote projects and announced the next ones. See d:Wikidata:Arbitrary access for more.
  • More fine tuning on entity usage tracking (relevant for arbitrary access)
  • Fixed bug that sometimes allowed multiple properties to have the same label in a given language (phabricator:T102148)
  • More work on automatically creating redirects when merging items
  • More code review of the Wikidata Quality extensions (improved constraint reports and checks against 3rd party databases). Starting to look good for a first deployment.
  • The sitelinks heading hierarchy changed and includes a “Site links” heading now that is only shown on mobile. This is a DOM change needed to make Wikidata work better on mobile.
  • Started working on having PHPCS coverage for the major Wikibase.git code base to find small code issues more easily
  • Prepared Wikibase.git for the DataModel 3.0 switch
  • Released Wikibase DataModel Serialization 1.4
  • Released Wikibase Internal Serialization 1.4
  • New releases of several DataValue components, including DataValues Number 0.5, DataValues JavaScript 0.7 and ValueView 0.14.5
• Monthly Tasks
  • Hack on one of these.
  • Help fix these items which have been flagged using Wikidata - The Game.
  • Help develop the next summary here!
  • Contribute to a Showcase item
  • Help translate or proofread pages in your own language!
  • Add labels, in your own language, for the new properties listed above.

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) 12:08, 14 June 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-25

15:04, 15 June 2015 (UTC)

Bárður Hansen

Hi. You deleted the article Bárður Hansen in 2010. He has now played for the Faroe Islands national football team. Could you please undelete the article, if possible? Kind regards --EileenSanda (talk) 07:05, 15 June 2015 (UTC)

Done. Courcelles (talk) 18:45, 19 June 2015 (UTC)

The Signpost: 17 June 2015

Wikidata weekly summary #163

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

• Discussions
  • German language Wikipedia closed its RfC on usage of Wikidata data. As a result Wikidata data can be used on the project as long as it happens through a template and it has a non-Wikimedia reference.
• Events/Blogs/Press
  • Past: Office hour on IRC. We talked about cool things that happened around Wikidata over the past 3 months got an update on upcoming developments and Freebase and more. You can read the log.
• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • en:South Pole Telescope is a nice example of an infobox completely filled from Wikidata.
  • Q20150617 was created on 2015-06-17
  • More data from Freebase have been added the Primary Sources Tool. There is also a page to help the mapping of Freebase properties.
  • Nice new manual for MixnMatch
  • The new nature.com/ontologies links to external ontologies and datasets; among them Wikidata.
  • National Gallery of Art and the J. Paul Getty Museum now have entries for all their paintings on Wikidata thanks to wiki project Sum of all Paintings
• Did you know?
  • Newest properties: takeoff and landing capability, Discogs label ID, Discogs master ID, Discogs artist ID, Encyclopaedia Metallum band id, investor, second surname in Spanish name, CulturaItalia ID, BerlPap identifier, Mapillary id, National Library of Ireland authority
  • Newest WikiProjects: Cross Items Interwikis
• Development
  • Made a small API breaking change to wbeditentity and wbgetclaims modules. Details can be seen in the commit message of https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/217885/
  • Worked more on unit support
  • Fixed an issue where you'd sometimes select the wrong value when entering a statement unintentionally (phabricator:T98471)
  • Switched the whole code base to make use of DataModel 3.0
  • The concept of “claims” no longer exists in Wikibase, as all places in the software work with statements. We are making this more and more explicit in the code.
  • The autoloading mechanism of the extension changed, see phabricator:T100813
  • More work on getting the Wikibase Quality extensions ready for deployment. They'll improve constraint checking and provide checks against 3rd party databases.
  • Special:UnconnectedPages had to be reworked (thanks Amir!) because of huge performance issues. Because of this it loses some functionality (being able to specify where the list starts and limiting the list to pages that have local interwiki links). We're working on bringing functionality back without the performance penalty.
  • Bene* created a SPARQL abstraction layer for PHP called Asparagus: https://github.com/Benestar/asparagus
  • Enabled arbitrary access on arwiki, cawiki, eswiki, huwiki, kowiki, rowiki, ukwiki, viwiki, and usage tracking on dewiki, ruwiki, cswiki and all s3 wikis. (ruwiki and cswiki get arbitrary access on June 23)
  • Finishing work on improved handling “invalid” values and statements with deleted properties.
  • Small breaking DOM change: Wikibase no longer adds its own h1 tag but uses MediaWiki's default .firstHeading element. (phabricator:T93534)
• Monthly Tasks
  • Hack on one of these.
  • Help fix these items which have been flagged using Wikidata - The Game.
  • Help develop the next summary here!
  • Contribute to a Showcase item
  • Help translate or proofread pages in your own language!
  • Add labels, in your own language, for the new properties listed above.

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) 11:34, 21 June 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-26

15:23, 22 June 2015 (UTC)

The Signpost: 24 June 2015

July 8: WikiWednesday Salon and Skill-Share NYC

Wednesday July 8, 7pm: WikiWednesday Salon and Skill-Share NYC

You are invited to join the Wikimedia NYC community for our evening "WikiWednesday" salon and knowledge-sharing workshop by 14th Street / Union Square in Manhattan. This month will also feature on a review of past and upcoming editathons, including Black Lunch Table Editathon @ MoMA on July 13. We also hope for the participation of our friends from the Free Culture movement and from educational and cultural institutions interested in developing free knowledge projects. We will also follow up on plans for recent and upcoming editathons, and other outreach activities. After the main meeting, pizza and refreshments and video games in the gallery! Wednesday July 8 WikiWednesday Salon and Skill-Share NYC (RSVP on-wiki or at meetup.com). 7:00pm - 9:00 pm at Babycastles, 137 West 14th Street Featuring a keynote talk this month to be determined! We especially encourage folks to add your 5-minute lightning talks to our roster, and otherwise join in the "open space" experience! Newcomers are very welcome! Bring your friends and colleagues! --Pharos (talk) 05:45, 28 June 2015 (UTC)

(You can subscribe/unsubscribe from future notifications for NYC-area events by adding or removing your name from this list.)

Wikidata weekly summary #164

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

• Events/Blogs/Press
  • Past: Ateliers Wikidata
  • Upcoming: Wikimania. There will be several talks and workshops related to Wikidata. Say hi at the "Ask Us Anything" session for Wikidata if you're there.
  • Reductionism
• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • Which geographic areas do different Wikipedias cover? How does it compare to Wikidata? Markus has a beautiful answer
  • Wikiproject Molecular Biology and AskPlatypus are shortlisted for the OpenData Award \o/ This is the award Wikidata won last year.
  • Paper on vandalism on Wikidata. Lydia is in touch with them to figure out how to best use the insights for us.
  • Reasonator got some updates: it is now using external ID formatter URLs, has monolingual string support and better social network links
• Did you know?
  • Newest properties: number of children, MovieMeter movie identifier, MovieMeter director ID, Foursquare venue ID, BoxRec ID, Biblioteca Nacional de Chile catalogue number, sortkey, properties for this type, patron, Comité des travaux historiques et scientifiques, Google Scholar ID, Dutch Senate person ID, Trismegistos ID, Wikisource index page
  • Newest External tools: Wikidata Compare
  • Showcase items: none. Yours next week?
• Development
  • Jonas joined the team and Adam is back \o/
  • Deployed arbitrary access to ruwiki and cswiki
  • Machine readable versions (in various formats) of Wikibase entities will be advertised in their page heads as alternate link. (phabricator:T96298)
  • Fixed property label on item pages not scrolling anymore (phabricator:T94588)
  • More work on getting the Wikibase Quality extensions ready for release. The part doing constraint violation checks should go to test.wikidata.org next week. The part doing checks against 3rd party databases will still take a bit longer but is also shaping up nicely.
  • Made it possible to create items even when another user is mass-creating items (phabricator:T103796)
  • Bene* worked more on making Wikidata work nicely on mobile
  • Fixed weird issue with cursor jumping around in sitelink input field (phabricator:T103489)
  • Fixed an issue where it was not possible to edit a statement after you removed its only reference (phabricator:T103603)
  • Lydia will be traveling for much of July. Expect her to be a bit less responsive during that time.
• Monthly Tasks
  • Hack on one of these.
  • Help develop the next summary here!
  • Contribute to a Showcase item

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) 18:15, 28 June 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-27

15:56, 29 June 2015 (UTC)

userification

When you closed Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Jihad Kandahar you wrote: "Userification happily done on request." The intelligence analysts allegations about the organization are addressed in An Intimate War: An Oral History of the Helmand Conflict, 1978-2012, so I request that userification.

The book discusses Mohammed Nasim (Guantanamo captive 849), Mohammed Hashim, Rahmatullah Sangaryar, Bismullah (Guantanamo detainee 968). You deleted these articles when you closed Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Mohammed Nasim (Guantanamo captive 849). I request userification of these articles as well. Geo Swan (talk) 19:39, 2 July 2015 (UTC)

I fully give permission for another admin to do this, but I'm away from home until Sunday, and this is just more than I can manage from a phone or my tablet. Courcelles (talk) 20:07, 2 July 2015 (UTC)

Recusal

Hi Courcelles. I'm a little confused by your statement here. You say your "fingerprints were over it", but I'm trying to work out what it is? Do you mean the injunction? If so, I'm concerned that you were involved in the injunction, then just as it passes, you recuse. Sorry to labour the point, but there's something in that timeline that really doesn't feel right. Worm^TT(talk) 10:40, 3 July 2015 (UTC)

Wasn't the injunction I meant, I meant the history of the matter, specifically my comments on Adjwilly (can't remember the exact spelling of the username, or look it up on a phone) talk page. Even though he wasn't a named party, I was convinced to just get out of the way. Courcelles (talk) 20:22, 3 July 2015 (UTC)

The Signpost: 01 July 2015

SetupBuilder

I see that you have deleted a previous page about SetupBuilder. I would like to create a new one. SetupBuilder is listed under List_of_installation_software and is a major competitor to Wise and InstallShield, both of which have Wiki entries.

I am a user of the product, not associated with it in any other way. But I would like the product I use to have a page as do the others. The company's client roster includes one-third of the Fortune Global 500 so it is worthy of mention in my view.

Thank you for your consideration

http://setupbuilder.com/

Dsbglobal (talk) 08:47, 4 July 2015 (UTC)dsbglobal

Wikidata weekly summary #165

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

• Discussions
  • Discussion about Atheism and the religion property.
  • Discussion about the Verifiability of data as a policy.
• Events/Blogs/Press
  • Upcoming: Wikimania. There will be several talks and workshops related to Wikidata. Say hi at the "Ask Us Anything" session for Wikidata if you're there.
• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • A new database report lists people categorized as dead in Wikipedia, but lacking Property:P570 (date of death). It's updated several times during the day. There are about 20 to 30 new entries each day. There is currently some backlog from the Arabic, Marathi, and Thai Wikipedias. Items updated first in Wikidata wont appear in the report. They are listed directly in Wikidata's recent deaths report.
• Did you know?
  • Newest properties: RSL editions, Open Hub ID, number of children, MovieMeter movie identifier, MovieMeter director ID
• Development
  • Adam wrote a blog post on the improvement of the data after one year and GeneaWiki
  • After the next deployment, Special:ItemDisambiguation will match aliases and be case insensitive.
  • Improved details of matches in the entity suggester (wbsearchentities api module)
  • Deployed the WikibaseQuality and WikibaseQualityConstraints extensions to test.wikidata.org
  • Fixed the layout of long qualifier names
  • JSON dumps are now automatically copied to labs
• Monthly Tasks
  • Hack on one of these.
  • Help develop the next summary here!
  • Contribute to a Showcase item

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · John F. Lewis 21:16, 4 July 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-28

15:13, 6 July 2015 (UTC)

The Wikipedia Library needs you!

We hope The Wikipedia Library has been a useful resource for your work. TWL is expanding rapidly and we need your help!

With only a couple hours per week, you can make a big difference for sharing knowledge. Please sign up and help us in one of these ways:

• Account coordinators: help distribute free research access
• Partner coordinators: seek new donations from partners
• Communications coordinators: share updates in blogs, social media, newsletters and notices
• Technical coordinators: advise on building tools to support the library's work
• Outreach coordinators: connect to university libraries, archives, and other GLAMs
• Research coordinators: run reference services

Send on behalf of The Wikipedia Library using MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 04:31, 7 July 2015 (UTC)

You're invited to the Ally Skills Workshop at Wikimania!

You were suggested as someone who might be interested in the Ally Skills Training Workshop at Wikimania! The workshop is designed to train Wikipedia admins to be more aware of sexism and is funded by an Inspire grant. The workshop will focus on teaching specific skills and techniques directly relevant to Wikipedia admins and editors, and in particular will teach people about the psychology of trolls. The workshop will be on Thursday July 16 from 2pm to 5pm in Don Diego 3.

If you are attending Wikimania, you are invited to apply to the Ally Skills Workshop! Space is limited and we may not be able to accept all applications, so apply now. More information, including a link to the application form, is here:

Ally Skills Workshop description and application form

People of all genders are welcome to attend. Unfortunately, travel scholarships for Wikimania are already closed and we don't know of any other sources of travel funding. If you know anyone else attending Wikimania who might be interested in attending this workshop, please encourage them to apply!

Thank you for your time,

Valerie Aurora (Instructor and Interim Executive Director of the Ada Initiative)

Valerietai (talk) 22:26, 10 July 2015 (UTC)

Too bad I won't be anywhere near MEX this summer... Courcelles (talk) 00:14, 11 July 2015 (UTC)

The Signpost: 08 July 2015

Wikidata weekly summary #166

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

• Events/Blogs/Press
  • Slides on Primary Sources Tool and Wikidata introduction (in Spanish) for the Donostia-San Sebastián Wikidata Editathon
  • Presentation about Wikidata at the Axel Springer Hack Day 2015
• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • Wikiresearch looked into the coverage of the moon by geotags in Wikidata
  • Wikiresearch published a visualization of the relationship between nationality and occupation based on Wikidata's data
  • Which zoo has polar bears? Wikidata attempts to answer the question here. Work in progress.
• Did you know?
  • Newest properties: MCN code, Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, Anime News Network anime ID, Anime News Network manga ID, Anime News Network company ID, Anime News Network person ID, FSK film rating, PolSys ID, Righteous Among The Nations ID, USDA NDB number, lesarchivesduspectacle ID, INEGI locality identifier
• Development
  • The Wikidata Quality extension (constraint reports per item) was deployed. You can now use d:Special:ConstraintReport to see the result for different items. This is for example the constraint report for the item cat (Q142).
  • 8 million additional statements from Freebase were made available through the Primary sources tool
  • Moving towards having a single edit button to edit references along with the value they belong to.
  • Bene continued working on phasing out the deprecated Entity superclass and making more entity types possible.
  • More work on phasing out a deprecated serializer implementation we still use in certain places.
  • Further work on the new RDF export.
  • PHPCS is now used on each change in Wikibase to ensure the code fulfils certain code quality standards.
• Monthly Tasks
  • Hack on one of these.
  • Help develop the next summary here!
  • Contribute to a Showcase item

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · John F. Lewis 11:03, 12 July 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-29

15:06, 13 July 2015 (UTC)

Old maintenance question...

I nominated Batavia, NY μSA for deletion, and found this diff , where you closed via AWB. It looks like this might have been a prevalent problem given your comment, but I can't locate the discussion. Is there some reason this was kept? MSJapan (talk) 04:03, 13 July 2015 (UTC)

@MSJapan: See the old MFD at Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion/Log/2010 September 27. Courcelles (talk) 02:32, 14 July 2015 (UTC)

Thanks! MSJapan (talk) 23:55, 14 July 2015 (UTC)

Books and Bytes - Issue 12

The Interior 15:23, 16 July 2015 (UTC)

The Signpost: 15 July 2015

Wikidata weekly summary #167

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

• Discussions
  • Open request for adminship: Nikki
• Events/Blogs/Press
  • Right now: Wikimania
• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • Magnus made some new tools:
    • list of scientists on Wikidata born after 1950 with no image, grouped by employer. Check your university!
    • list of scientists on Wikidata born after 1950 with no ORCID iD, grouped by employer. Ditto!
    • an InfoBitt replacement
    • a tool you can use to match up Wikipedia articles without an item to either an existing item or a create a new one if none exists
    • plus Mix'N'Match got new datasets you can help match up with Wikidata
  • P2000 was created.
  • Some presentations at Wikimania related to Wikidata have detailed slides online:
    • WikiProject Sum of All Paintings
    • Templates are dead! Long live templates!, technical presentation on the function and future of template syntax
    • Future of structured documents: VisualEditor, Citations and Wikidata, oh my!
• Did you know?
  • Newest properties: CPDL ID, UNESCO language status, UCI code, Facebook Places ID, parliament.uk bio link, medical specialty, AllMusic composition ID, TeX string, Plazi ID, LPSN URL, species kept, Encyclopaedia Metallum artist ID, Delarge ID
  • New task forces: Linguistics
• Development
  • Attending Wikimania 2015 in Mexico City right now, meeting awesome people that already use or want to know everything about Wikidata.
  • After the next deployment, redirects will be automatically created when merging items.
  • Special:UnconnectedPages can now be queried via the query API, thanks to Ladsgroup.
  • Migrating away from an older serializer to the DataModel Serialization component.
  • Worked on a new time parser that can parse formats like M/D/Y, Y M D and so on.
  • Fixed a bug where a value could not be edited when save failed.
  • Made the snak type, badge and rank selectors position themselves after resizing the browser window and introduced a possibility to collapse the sitelinks sections.
  • Worked on a change in editing to be able to edit a statement and it’s references in one step.
• Monthly Tasks
  • Hack on one of these.
  • Help develop the next summary here!
  • Contribute to a Showcase item

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · John F. Lewis 15:48, 19 July 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-30

03:05, 21 July 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-31

15:05, 27 July 2015 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #168

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

• Discussions
  • Successful request for adminship: Nikki
  • Open request for oversightership: Sjoerddebruin
  • Closed request for comments: Administrative divisions and populated places, Given names and surnames
• Events/Blogs/Press
  • Wikidata, coming soon to a menu near you!
  • Past: Wikimania
• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • Upload of 4.2M new statements from Freebase in the Primary Sources tool.
• Did you know?
  • Newest properties: NALT id, Instagram username, Twitter username, Revised Romanisation, CPDL ID, UNESCO language status, UCI code, Facebook Places ID
• Development
  • Continued migrating away from an older serializer to the DataModel Serialization component.
  • Released Wikibase DataModel Serialization 1.7.0
  • Depreacting the parameter ungroupedlist in the api modules GetClaims and GetEntities
  • Tweaking the sitelink input
  • Changing the display of item selector results
• Monthly Tasks
  • Hack on one of these.
  • Help develop the next summary here!
  • Contribute to a Showcase item
  • Help translate or proofread pages in your own language!
  • Add labels, in your own language(s), for the new properties listed above.

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · John F. Lewis 23:50, 26 July 2015 (UTC)

The Signpost: 22 July 2015

Sunday August 2: WikNYC Picnic

Sunday August 2, 1-7pm: WikNYC Picnic

You are invited to join us the "picnic anyone can edit" in Brooklyn's Prospect Park, as part of the Great American Wiknic celebrations being held across the USA. Remember it's a wiki-picnic, which means potluck. Sunday August 2 WikNYC Picnic (RSVP) (also on meetup.com) 1pm–7pm - come by any time! @ Bartel-Pritchard Square entrance (Prospect Park West and 15th St), immediately on the lawn to your left as you walk through the lovely lotus columns. Subway: ​ to 15th Street – Prospect Park (IND Culver Line) We hope to see you there! --Pharos (talk) 03:31, 24 July 2015 (UTC) (Bonus event: WikiWednesday Salon @ Babycastles - Wednedsay, August 19)

(You can subscribe/unsubscribe from future notifications for NYC-area events by adding or removing your name from this list.)

The Signpost: 29 July 2015

Wikidata weekly summary #169

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

• Discussions
  • Open requests for Oversight: Sjoerddebruin
  • Enable Flow on Wikidata?
• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • Early version of a reconcile API for Wikidata by Magnus
  • PagePile: a new tool by Magnus
  • Mix-n-Match got a number of new catalogs and now shows a thin red line in front of a catalog that does not yet have a property on Wikidata
  • 1.700 biographical items without gender, but with image. Go go go!
  • Interested in art movements? Check out this
• Did you know?
  • Newest properties: MoMA artwork id, Facebook ID, cuisine, Cooper-Hewitt Person ID, Exif make, Exif model, IPNI publication ID, ZooBank publication ID, ZooBank author ID, Catalogus Professorum Halensis, NALT id
  • Showcase items: László Krasznahorkai (Q512062)
• Development
  • Minor fixes to property edit mode
  • Some fixes for the cucumber test errors
  • Released Wikibase DataModel 4.0
  • Released Wikibase DataModel Services 1.0
  • Continued work to migrate away from old serializers in Wikibase Lib to those in WikibaseDataModelSerialization.
  • Working on scripts for importing entities from another Wikibase instance (e.g. Wikidata), so that development instances can have some sample data.
  • Fixed the counting of references
  • Changed style of the Entitytermsview inputs
  • Entity Selector displays alias in brackets behind label
• Monthly Tasks
  • Hack on one of these.
  • Help develop the next summary here!
  • Contribute to a Showcase item
  • Help translate or proofread pages in your own language!
  • Add labels, in your own language(s), for the new properties listed above.

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · John F. Lewis 19:29, 2 August 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-32

15:51, 3 August 2015 (UTC)

The Signpost: 05 August 2015

Wikidata weekly summary #170

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

• Discussions
  • Successful request for oversight rights: Sjoerddebruin
• Events/Blogs/Press
  • Wikimedia UK is organizing a Wikidata training session. You can sign up here.
• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • Talk pages on Wikidata can now be converted to use Flow. You can request migrating your talk page at d:Wikidata:Flow.
  • Mix-n-Match got a bunch of new catalogs for you to match up with Wikidata. Currently matching is happening at about 500 items per day. Pretty sweet :)
  • @happybirthdayauthors is a new Twitter account posting reading suggestions based on Wikidata data.
  • Arbitrary access is rolling out to a large number of wikis over the next two weeks.
  • Duplicity can help you match up unlinked Wikipedia articles to a Wikidata item.
• Did you know?
  • Newest properties: Erdős number, worldfootball.net ID, AllMovie artist ID, Teuchos ID, isomeric SMILES, Catalogus Professorum Academiae Groninganae id, Hansard ID
• Development
  • Made some small changes to the style of the edit warning and sitelinks so they are easier to notice and understand
  • Added error messages for Special:GoToLinkedPage and Special:ItemByTitle so you get a useful message in case no result is found
  • The Entity Selector now displays alias in brackets behind label
  • The number of entities loaded via the {{#property:…}} parser function and via Lua will be reported in the “Parser profiling data” (which can be found below a page preview or within the Html of a page)
  • Prepared for next rounds of arbitrary access rollout
  • Investigated growing lag of dispatching of changes to Wikipedia and co. We'll need to investigate further and change things so the lag between an edit on Wikidata and it being send to the Wikipedias and other projects is not too high.
  • Added the property ID to Special:ListProperties
  • Moved two extensions (Wikidata.org and WikimediaBadges) from Github to Gerrit. More will follow.
  • We'd like to drop a database table. Discussion is ongoing.
• Monthly Tasks
  • Hack on one of these.
  • Help develop the next summary here!
  • Contribute to a Showcase item
  • Help translate or proofread pages in your own language!
  • Add labels, in your own language(s), for the new properties listed above.

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) 18:20, 9 August 2015 (UTC)

August 19: WikiWednesday Salon and Skill-Share NYC

Wednesday August 19, 7pm: WikiWednesday Salon and Skill-Share NYC

You are invited to join the Wikimedia NYC community for our evening "WikiWednesday" salon and knowledge-sharing workshop by 14th Street / Union Square in Manhattan. We also hope for the participation of our friends from the Free Culture movement and from educational and cultural institutions interested in developing free knowledge projects. We will also follow up on plans for recent and upcoming editathons, and other outreach activities. After the main meeting, pizza and refreshments and video games in the gallery! Wednesday August 19 WikiWednesday Salon and Skill-Share NYC (RSVP on-wiki or at meetup.com). 7:00pm - 9:00 pm at Babycastles, 137 West 14th Street Featuring a keynote talk this month to be determined! We especially encourage folks to add your 5-minute lightning talks to our roster, and otherwise join in the "open space" experience! Newcomers are very welcome! Bring your friends and colleagues! --Pharos (talk) 15:58, 11 August 2015 (UTC)

(You can subscribe/unsubscribe from future notifications for NYC-area events by adding or removing your name from this list.)

Tech News: 2015-33

14:57, 10 August 2015 (UTC)

The Signpost: 12 August 2015

Your assistance please... redux

In this reply you told me you would be away from the wikipedia for several days. You agreed to let me ask any other administrator to userify Mohammed Nasim (Guantanamo captive 849), Mohammed Hashim, Rahmatullah Sangaryar, Bismullah (Guantanamo detainee 968).

Given that the information, new to me, came from a book, not a breaking news story, I thought I could wait for you to return from your trip. It looks like you assumed someone else took care of the userification.

Do you still prefer me to go WP:DRV? Geo Swan (talk) 19:51, 26 July 2015 (UTC)

Yeah, I thought you would have either pinged another admin or gone to WP:REFUND (DRV would be if I objected to the action, I don't). Since you haven't, let me get to work... Courcelles (talk) 23:52, 27 July 2015 (UTC)

@Geo Swan: Done. Courcelles (talk) 23:58, 27 July 2015 (UTC)

• Thanks

Could you restore the talk ages, as well? Geo Swan (talk) 06:25, 28 July 2015 (UTC)

The only thing beyond Wikiproject tagging and you saying you had changed a picture is a requested move on Talk:Bismullah (Guantanamo detainee 968). There really isn't anything useful in any of them. Courcelles (talk) 06:53, 28 July 2015 (UTC)

NeuLion

Since you protected Dialogic Inc. after the SPI was closed, would you be so kind as to take a look at WP:COIN#NeuLion? I filed it over a week ago, but no response so far. The activity on NeuLion is fairly stale now, so PP might not be worth it, but NeuLion seems to be PR/puffery stretching back to 2009, when NeuLion2009 created it. NPP must have been pretty bad then. —George8211 / T 14:37, 5 August 2015 (UTC)

• Yeah, that's stale at this point, and the last account is autoconfirmed anyhow, so page protection wouldn't actually do much. (Dialogic I cleaned out a sock drawer, which made protection more useful.) Courcelles (talk) 03:56, 10 August 2015 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #171

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

• Discussions
  • Reinforcement of data analysis before any modification of the DB
• Events/Blogs/Press
  • cooperation between free content projects
  • A case is made to concentrate our quality efforts on the differences between Wikidata and other sources
  • Ongoing: Several team members are attending the Chaos Communication Camp.
  • Upcoming: SmartDataConference
  • A Comparative Survey of DBpedia, Freebase, OpenCyc, Wikidata, and YAGO
• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • Wikidata needs your vote! It only takes a minute.
  • WikiProject Sum of all Paintings reached the milestone of 100.000 paintings. Congrats!
  • Arbitrary access is now available on another ~250 Wikipedias].
  • See d:Wikidata talk:Arbitrary access#Use cases: testing modules and templates for two general use cases for arbitrary access on Wikipedia's regression testing of Wikidata-related modules and templates and testing infoboxes with Wikidata content.
  • List of articles on English Wikipedia without a Wikidata item (also works for other projects)
  • You have a bunch of names etc. and want to find Wikidata items with those labels/aliases? Try relabel!
  • SourcererBot is adding lots of references to existing statements on several thousand items.
  • Mix-n-Match has new catalogs including the National Library of Australia.
  • Deaths at Wikipedia are a series of reports comparing items at Wikidata with death-by-year-categories of Wikipedia. For the years since 2000, only about 15% of items at Wikidata lack d:Property:P570 (date of death).
  • 93% of items about people have a gender set now.
  • Want to make both Wikidata and Inventaire better? You can help by finding those books' authors.
• Did you know?
  • Newest properties: Find A Grave cemetery ID, German cattle breed ID, Erdős number, worldfootball.net ID, AllMovie artist ID
  • Newest tools: Suggestor
• Development
  • Rolled out arbitrary access to about 250 Wikipedias including German, French and Japanese. More to come in a few days.
  • Worked more on quantities. Looks like we'll have it on a demo system for you to try a first version within the next two weeks.
  • Bene* is joining us for a month as an intern. Welcome!
  • References are now hidden while loading the page, speeding up page load time
  • First commit to the ArticlePlaceholder extension
  • Expensive parser functions now count each entity only once
  • Released a new version of the DataModelServices component and started using it
  • Started working on phasing out the wb_entity_per_page table. It will be kept around and updated for some time to allow tool owners to migrate.
  • The Wikibase code base now fullfills all of MediaWiki’s PHPCS coding standards
  • Added property IDs to Special:ListProperties
  • Did a lot of bug triage on Phabricator
• Monthly Tasks
  • Hack on one of these.
  • Help develop the next summary here!
  • Contribute to a Showcase item
  • Help translate or proofread pages in your own language!
  • Add labels, in your own language(s), for the new properties listed above.

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) 11:03, 17 August 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-34

16:17, 17 August 2015 (UTC)

Confused

What do you mean when you said confirmed on Wikipedia:Sockpuppet investigations/thevideogameexpert? Gameroffun (talk) 23:19, 19 August 2015 (UTC)

• In this case, I have absolutely no doubt that all three accounts, including the one Gameroffun one, are operated by the same person. Courcelles (talk) 23:21, 19 August 2015 (UTC)

• But sir, my ip address is different. Gameroffun (talk) 23:25, 19 August 2015 (UTC)

• No, it isn't. And with that lie, this conversation is over. Indefed without waiting for the clerk to do it. Courcelles (talk) 23:27, 19 August 2015 (UTC)

The Signpost: 19 August 2015

Archived SPI

When you archived WP:Sockpuppet investigations/Rakxit RapStaR something went wrong. the {{SPIpriorcases}} template isn't properly directing to the archive page. Any idea how to fix? WikiDan61^ChatMe!_ReadMe!! 14:14, 21 August 2015 (UTC)

• Purging the page seems to have fixed it, at least for me? Courcelles (talk) 18:56, 21 August 2015 (UTC)

What is it I don't see?

Regarding my infoboxes parole to which you helped: I like cantatas to look like this (which you may have seen as TFA), therefore I tried to add an infobox in 2013 to one by Benjamin Britten, to improve the composer's works for the (then) upcoming centenary. It's on the talk, because it was reverted by Nikkimaria. We both edited the article before, which none of us started. - I suggested now to revive the infobox, - see talk, and see the article. How does what we have now help a reader (!) to understand at a glance where to put that article in time and place? - I am happy with all other discussions on the matter, btw. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 21:21, 4 August 2015 (UTC)

• You and Nikkimaria seem to be going around in circles here. Seems like a third opinion would be the best start to getting someone uninvovled to help? Courcelles (talk) 21:30, 4 August 2015 (UTC)

That's what I came for ;) - late here as I said at the other end. Did you know the curse on me mentioning granularity again? --Gerda Arendt (talk) 22:21, 4 August 2015 (UTC)

Yeah, but what this needs is other opinions from someone who hasn't written proposed decisions and motions in this topic area. ;) Courcelles (talk) 22:24, 4 August 2015 (UTC)

Do you know anybody without a bias when it comes to infoboxes? Two things I learned in the process: let go and patience. Next life I will possibly find out why infoboxes cause more conflict than images ;) --Gerda Arendt (talk) 22:32, 4 August 2015 (UTC)

I know a lot of people whose opinion about infoboxes is not known -- likely the vast majority of users have never sat down and had a think about the things. The usual places should yield a couple. Courcelles (talk) 03:53, 5 August 2015 (UTC)

I think we had a misunderstanding. (Some days I feel more than others that I am not a native speaker.) When I said eyes I meant eyes, don't think I wanted you to comment. Just look. What I see: I added to an article in good faith. Imagine: there were options to react. It could have been ignored, or thanked for, or discussed. Instead it was reverted. A sum of these reverts made the infoboxes case. But what would life be without without it ;) - Life is too short to continue that "discussion", with the one voice of objection, --Gerda Arendt (talk) 12:20, 5 August 2015 (UTC)

ps: I just returned from a remarkable concert with Bach's cantata BWV 105. That is a different story. The creator of the article saying this, also banned and unable to defend his creation: I have no problem to respect that. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 22:08, 5 August 2015 (UTC)

solved, I would say, by 4 more eyes on it, --Gerda Arendt (talk) 22:19, 9 August 2015 (UTC)

Great! I wish I could share your interest in the classical music, but sadly I am quite tone deaf. Courcelles (talk) 04:05, 10 August 2015 (UTC)

You might still be open to the political overtones in this cantata, - the composer would have been 150 today, - he received a text offer he could not refuse ;) --Gerda Arendt (talk) 08:28, 10 August 2015 (UTC)

Look and see, the piece is about awe of miraculous deeds, --Gerda Arendt (talk) 08:54, 12 August 2015 (UTC)

I had no idea someone so highly ranked in the Russian nobility; Royal patrons are common enough, but Royals who actually produce art. Fascinating. Courcelles (talk) 18:07, 13 August 2015 (UTC)

He appeared on stage in plays he wrote, pictured, --Gerda Arendt (talk) 19:07, 13 August 2015 (UTC)

Today is the day that all operas by Verdi and Wagner have an infobox, did you know? --Gerda Arendt (talk) 23:06, 13 August 2015 (UTC)

Fascinating. If the so-called "Great Infobox War" is over one way or the other, perhaps we will never see this back at Arbcom, something I rejoice in. Courcelles (talk) 17:37, 15 August 2015 (UTC)

I believe that without arbitration, we might have been there sooner, but never mind. I was late to the wars, miss victims (GFHandel most), wasn't in a single battle, was astonished about arbitration, requested to look into too many reverts of infoboxes (I named 59, numbered), deciding to restrict those who requested, possibly as the easier "solution"? Of the 59, there are still a few without (Bach and Verdi, for example), but most have been settled. On the Main page now a cantata without one, but I have no intention to take the bait, decided to find it amusing ;) --Gerda Arendt (talk) 08:40, 16 August 2015 (UTC)

On the Main page now: Carl Nielsen works which has not only an infobox but templated entries for the individual works, --Gerda Arendt (talk) 23:31, 19 August 2015 (UTC)

very nice, though I did find two things in the table that should be changed. I have no idea what the "FS" column is for. Also, the "time" column should be renamed "year" or "date", given the confusion with Time signature. Courcelles (talk) 23:39, 19 August 2015 (UTC)

"The FS catalogue was first compiled in 1965 by Dan Fog and Torben Schousboe.", infobox: "Catalogue FS 1 to 403", summarized in the lead as "other catalogue numbers". The correct label for "Time" would be "Composition period" - way too long. If you think it's unclear feel free to explain, but it is like that since the composer's 150th birthday 8 June. - I need sleep ;) --Gerda Arendt (talk) 23:50, 19 August 2015 (UTC)

Another cantata is now a GA: Geist und Seele wird verwirret, BWV 35, after a long history from 2002 with several editors. I believe that our readers would be helped best if it had a detailed infobox as other GAs on the topic but one of the former editors disagrees, please look at the talk, --Gerda Arendt (talk) 22:06, 21 August 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-35

13:02, 24 August 2015 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #172

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

• Events/Blogs/Press
  • Past: SmartData conference
  • Paper: Reifying RDF: What Works Well With Wikidata?
• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • Wikidata made it into the top 10 of the Land der Ideen competition \o/ This means we're part of the final public voting starting on 9th of September. Thanks everyone who voted and spread the word.
  • Flow is being tested on selected talk pages.
  • New tool: Get new Wikidata items (now or before a given timestamp) as HTML or PagePile
  • New tool: Find Wikidata items without an image around a location, then find free images on Flickr taken nearby.
  • EventZoom.net extended with OpenStreetMap support, increasing the options for visualizing historical events from Wikidata.
• Did you know?
  • Newest properties: Find A Grave cemetery ID, German cattle breed ID, Erdős number, worldfootball.net ID, AllMovie artist ID
• Development
  • Soon the edit summary for edits through the API will also contain the automatic edit summary that you are used to for edits done through the website. The summary given by the API user will be appended to the automatic summary. (phabricator:T97247)
  • Addressed performance issues in usage tracking updates and had to delay the latest round of rollouts because of it
  • Fixed a bug where suggestions would show up twice in item and property selectors (phabricator:T109697)
  • Improved performance of the mw.wikibase.sitelink Lua method
  • More work done on Unit Selector widget
  • Started working on the ArticlePlaceholder extension
  • Made final changes so we can redirect mobile users to the mobile version by default
  • Evaluated the remaining steps to get the extension deployed that lets you do checks against 3rd party databases. Not much left it seems and we'll tackle that in one of the next sprints. Getting the new features deployed for the constraints checks will still take a bit longer.
  • More work on making the edit summaries in the watchlist on Wikipedia and co more meaningful
• Monthly Tasks
  • Hack on one of these.
  • Help develop the next summary here!
  • Contribute to a Showcase item
  • Help translate or proofread pages in your own language!
  • Add labels, in your own language(s), for the new properties listed above.

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) 12:35, 24 August 2015 (UTC)