Wikipedia:Mercat Cross/Archive/3

New user group for editing sitewide CSS / JS

(Please help translate to your language)

Hi all!

To improve the security of our readers and editors, permission handling for CSS/JS pages has changed. (These are pages like MediaWiki:Common.css and MediaWiki:Vector.js which contain code that is executed in the browsers of users of the site.) A new user group, interface-admin, has been created. Starting four weeks from now, only members of this group will be able edit CSS/JS pages that they do not own (that is, any page ending with .css or .js that is either in the MediaWiki: namespace or is another user's user subpage).

You can learn more about the motivation behind the change here.

Please add users who need to edit CSS/JS to the new group (this can be done the same way new administrators are added, by stewards or local bureaucrats). This is a dangerous permission; a malicious user or a hacker taking over the account of a careless interface-admin can abuse it in far worse ways than admin permissions could be abused. Please only assign it to users who need it, who are trusted by the community, and who follow common basic password and computer security practices (use strong passwords, do not reuse passwords, use two-factor authentication if possible, do not install software of questionable origin on your machine, use antivirus software if that's a standard thing in your environment).

Thanks!
Tgr (talk) 17:45, 30 Julie 2018 (UTC) (via global message delivery)

Enabling a helpful feature for Template editors

Hello.

The team working on TemplateStyles at the Wikimedia Foundation would like to enable TemplateStyles on this wiki.

TemplateStyles is a feature to allow non-administrators to write and manage CSS styles for templates. It allows contributors who edit templates to separate content and presentation. A good web practice that makes it easier to manage the layout of templates. If you don't edit templates, this will not have any impact on your contributions.

TemplateStyles is useful for a few reasons.

• It makes it possible for templates to work better on mobile.
• It cuts out confusion on where to apply CSS rules.
• Editing CSS is currently limited to administrators, which is a major barrier to participation.
• All stylesheets must be loaded on all pages (whether they actually use the page or not), which wastes bandwidth and makes debugging style rules more difficult.

You can learn more about TemplateStyles on MediaWiki.org. Technical documentation is also available.

This is an optional feature and no one must use it, but template contributors are encouraged to do so! Please discuss and let us know if there are any concerns. If there are no concerns we will proceed to deploy the feature on the 9th of August.

Thank you.

CKoerner (WMF) (talk) 21:28, 6 August 2018 (UTC)

Bot flag request for MABot

Hello/'Allo. I would like to offer my bot services to this wiki. Details below:

• Bot: MABot (multiple flags on multiple projects).
• Owner: MarcoAurelio (Meta-Wiki page; other projects).
• Basic tasks that I regularly perform:
  • Archiving pages based on archivebot.py.
  • Fixing and tagging for deletion, where appropriate double and broken redirects.
• Optional tasks that I can perform on request as well:
  • Clean the project sandbox page(s) regularly.
  • General template and/or category maintenance.
  • Maintenance of category redirects (currently Meta and Spanish Wikipedia).
• Operational mode: automatic via Toolforge for the safests scripts, supervised for all other tasks.

Thank you for your consideration. Please let me know if you have any questions or concerns. Best regards. --MarcoAurelio (tauk) 20:46, 7 August 2018 (UTC)

Approved. --AmaryllisGardener ^talk 05:55, 8 August 2018 (UTC)

Thank you AmaryllisGardener! Can you please, however, remove the permission from the bot? I'll request a proper bot flag from the stewards at m:SRB. Best regards, MarcoAurelio (tauk) 11:52, 8 August 2018 (UTC)

Sure! You're welcome! --AmaryllisGardener ^talk 20:53, 8 August 2018 (UTC)

IMPORTANT: Admin activity review

Hello. A new policy regarding the removal of "advanced rights" (administrator, bureaucrat, etc) was adopted by global community consensus in 2013. According to this policy, the stewards are reviewing administrators' activity on smaller wikis. To the best of our knowledge, your wiki does not have a formal process for removing "advanced rights" from inactive accounts. This means that the stewards will take care of this according to the admin activity review.

We have determined that the following users meet the inactivity criteria (no edits and no log actions for more than 2 years):

1. Diego Grez-Cañete (administrator)

These users will receive a notification soon, asking them to start a community discussion if they want to retain some or all of their rights. If the users do not respond, then their advanced rights will be removed by the stewards.

However, if you as a community would like to create your own activity review process superseding the global one, want to make another decision about these inactive rights holders, or already have a policy that we missed, then please notify the stewards on Meta-Wiki so that we know not to proceed with the rights review on your wiki. Thanks, Rschen7754 06:07, 10 August 2018 (UTC)

Hi, if there is no objection from the community, I would like to have the administrator rights I have on my former account (Diego) over this one, which I use. Although I don't think I will be as active as I used to be, I can help with usual patrolling. I'm fine with whatever the community decides! Kind regards --Küñall (tauk) 06:11, 10 August 2018 (UTC)

Since there has been no opposition in over two weeks, I have requested on the stewards' noticeboard to have my rights transferred. --Küñall (tauk) 03:27, 26 August 2018 (UTC)

Broken redirects

'Allo. With regards to my approved bot request above, I'd like to note that there are several broken redirects on the project. What do you want to do with them? Can I fix/tag those for deletion or do you want to keep them for some purposes? Given that there are more than 50+ pages involved and I don't want to revert later, I'm asking first just in case you'd like to do something different. I'll run the bot to see if some can be redirected to existing pages, bot for all others that need deletion I'll abstain from tagging them for now until the resolution of this thread. Best regards. MarcoAurelio (tauk) 10:37, 13 August 2018 (UTC)

Hi there :-) Have you had the chance to review this? Best regards, MarcoAurelio (tauk) 20:16, 4 September 2018 (UTC)

Hi MarcoAurelio, it would be really helpful to have them tagged for deletion. Thanks! --Küñall (tauk) 03:44, 5 September 2018 (UTC)

Hi there again. If there are no objections I can have my bot do it. I'll wait a bit more before doing so to be on the safe side. Thanks, MarcoAurelio (tauk) 21:53, 19 September 2018 (UTC)

Missing namespace translations in Scots

Hello. As I am noting on Phabricator; this wiki lacks namespace translations; so you're using the English-default ones. Namespace names, magic words and special page names can be translated. Previously that could be done via translatewiki.net, but due to the software that allowed such operations being broken, we developers have to do all of this by hand now. If you're interested to get the interface more translated I invite you to take a look at the Phabricator task I linked above and help translate some words. Once at least the basic namespaces are translated, we can start slowly implement them. Thanks for your help. Best regards, --MarcoAurelio (tauk) 10:43, 13 August 2018 (UTC)

Here are the current proposed namespace translations:

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/mediawiki/core/+/452582/3/languages/messages/MessagesSco.php

Most notably:

• All "Talk" namespaces are translated as "Collogue".
• "User" is translated as "Uiser"

Does this make sense? --Amir E. Aharoni (tauk) 05:14, 3 September 2018 (UTC)

Tagging some active users: Friendshipfan, User:Vampibyte. --Amir E. Aharoni (tauk) 05:23, 3 September 2018 (UTC)

I think it's fine! But maybe user:AmaryllisGardener could know more --Küñall (tauk) 02:44, 4 September 2018 (UTC)

Thanks for the ping! Talk is often translated as "Collogue", however I'm not 100% sure, because the OSD uses "talk" mostly, and lists "collogue" as being something more private or confidential. "User" should definitely be "Uiser", and "Wikipedia" should be "Wikipaedia". Otherwise I can't think of any namespaces that need to be changed. --AmaryllisGardener ^talk 03:08, 4 September 2018 (UTC)

Thanks for the replies, User:Küñall and User:AmaryllisGardener!

I see that in translatewiki, "talk" is usually translated as "tauk", and very rarely as "collogue". Here, locally in the Scots Wikipedia, some of the messages that mention talk pages are modified to say "collogue".

It's totally up to you to decide, but I strongly suggest deciding on a consistent terminology, removing as many of the local modifications as possible, and using translations from translatewiki.net unless you really need local modifications.

I should mention that the original English strings don't use "talk" exclusively, and sometimes they say "discussion" instead. So if you think that sometimes "tauk" (or "talk") is appropriate and sometimes "collogue" is appropriate, it's OK. You will have to choose only one word for the namespace name, however. --Amir E. Aharoni (tauk) 07:40, 4 September 2018 (UTC)

Here is an easy way to find locally modified messages:

• Click https://sco.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special%3AAllMessages&prefix=&filter=modified&lang=sco&limit=5000&uselang=en . In each pair of rows, the top yellow row shows the message as it is translated at translatewiki.net, and the bottom green row shows the local modification on the Scots Wikipedia.
• Search for "Collogue" using Ctrl-F (Windows, Linux) or Command-F (Mac). (You can also search for anything else.)
• If the top yellow row has a good translation: open the message by clicking the message key in the left-hand column. These are links such as "1movedto2", "1movedto2_redir", "Confirmrecreate", etc., and delete this page. (This has to be done by an administrator.)
• Do the same if the messages in the yellow and the green row are identical.
• If the bottom green row has a good translation, and it's good that it's locally modified on the Scots Wikipedia, just leave it alone. An example of a good local modification is using "article" instead of "content page", linking to local policy pages, etc.
• If the bottom green row has a good translation, and it can be useful for all wikis in the Scots language, go to translatewiki.net, find the message, and correct the translation there. After two or three days the translation will be auto-updated in the Scots Wikipedia. After that, delete the message.

That's it. Hope it helps! --Amir E. Aharoni (tauk) 07:50, 4 September 2018 (UTC)

Editing of sitewide CSS/JS is only possible for interface administrators from now

(Please help translate to your language)

Hi all,

as announced previously, permission handling for CSS/JS pages has changed: only members of the interface-admin (Interface administrators) group, and a few highly privileged global groups such as stewards, can edit CSS/JS pages that they do not own (that is, any page ending with .css or .js that is either in the MediaWiki: namespace or is another user's user subpage). This is done to improve the security of readers and editors of Wikimedia projects. More information is available at Creation of separate user group for editing sitewide CSS/JS. If you encounter any unexpected problems, please contact me or file a bug.

Thanks!
Tgr (talk) 12:40, 27 August 2018 (UTC) (via global message delivery)

Read-only mode for up to an hour on 12 September and 10 October

Read this message in another language • Please help translate to your language

The Wikimedia Foundation will be testing its secondary data centre. This will make sure that Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia wikis can stay online even after a disaster. To make sure everything is working, the Wikimedia Technology department needs to do a planned test. This test will show if they can reliably switch from one data centre to the other. It requires many teams to prepare for the test and to be available to fix any unexpected problems.

They will switch all traffic to the secondary data center on Wednesday, 12 September 2018. On Wednesday, 10 October 2018, they will switch back to the primary data center.

Unfortunately, because of some limitations in MediaWiki, all editing must stop when we switch. We apologize for this disruption, and we are working to minimize it in the future.

You will be able to read, but not edit, all wikis for a short period of time.

• You will not be able to edit for up to an hour on Wednesday, 12 September and Wednesday, 10 October. The test will start at 14:00 UTC (15:00 BST, 16:00 CEST, 10:00 EDT, 07:00 PDT, 23:00 JST, and in New Zealand at 02:00 NZST on Thursday 13 September and Thursday 11 October).
• If you try to edit or save during these times, you will see an error message. We hope that no edits will be lost during these minutes, but we can't guarantee it. If you see the error message, then please wait until everything is back to normal. Then you should be able to save your edit. But, we recommend that you make a copy of your changes first, just in case.

Other effects:

• Background jobs will be slower and some may be dropped. Red links might not be updated as quickly as normal. If you create an article that is already linked somewhere else, the link will stay red longer than usual. Some long-running scripts will have to be stopped.
• There will be code freezes for the weeks of 10 September 2018 and 8 October 2018. Non-essential code deployments will not happen.

This project may be postponed if necessary. You can read the schedule at wikitech.wikimedia.org. Any changes will be announced in the schedule. There will be more notifications about this. Please share this information with your community. /User:Johan(WMF) (talk)

13:33, 6 September 2018 (UTC)

Editing News #2—2018

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Did you know?

Did you know that you can use the visual editor on a mobile device?

Tap on the pencil icon to start editing. The page will probably open in the wikitext editor.

You will see another pencil icon in the toolbar. Tap on that pencil icon to the switch between visual editing and wikitext editing.

Remember to publish your changes when you're done.

You can read and help translate the user guide, which has more information about how to use the visual editor.

Since the last newsletter, the Editing Team has wrapped up most of their work on the 2017 wikitext editor and the visual diff tool. The team has begun investigating the needs of editors who use mobile devices. Their work board is available in Phabricator. Their current priorities are fixing bugs and improving mobile editing.

Recent changes

• The Editing team has published an initial report about mobile editing.
• The Editing team has begun a design study of visual editing on the mobile website. New editors have trouble doing basic tasks on a smartphone, such as adding links to Wikipedia articles. You can read the report.
• The Reading team is working on a separate mobile-based contributions project.
• The 2006 wikitext editor is no longer supported. If you used that toolbar, then you will no longer see any toolbar. You may choose another editing tool in your editing preferences, local gadgets, or beta features.
• The Editing team described the history and status of VisualEditor in this recorded public presentation (starting at 29 minutes, 30 seconds).
• The Language team released a new version of Content Translation (CX2) last month, on International Translation Day. It integrates the visual editor to support templates, tables, and images. It also produces better wikitext when the translated article is published. [1]

Let's work together

• The Editing team wants to improve visual editing on the mobile website. Please read their ideas and tell the team what you think would help editors who use the mobile site.
• The Community Wishlist Survey begins next week.
• If you aren't reading this in your preferred language, then please help us with translations! Subscribe to the Translators mailing list or contact us directly. We will notify you when the next issue is ready for translation. Thank ye!

—Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk)

14:17, 2 November 2018 (UTC)

Change coming to how certain templates will appear on the mobile web

Change coming to how certain templates will appear on the mobile web

Please help translate to your language

Example of improvements

Hello,

In a few weeks the Readers web team will be changing how some templates look on the mobile web site. We will make these templates more noticeable when viewing the article. We ask for your help in updating any templates that don't look correct.

What kind of templates? Specifically templates that notify readers and contributors about issues with the content of an article – the text and information in the article. Examples like Template:Unreferenced or Template:More citations needed. Right now these notifications are hidden behind a link under the title of an article. We will format templates like these (mostly those that use Template:Ambox or message box templates in general) to show a short summary under the page title. You can tap on the "Learn more" link to get more information.

For template editors we have some recommendations on how to make templates that are mobile-friendly and also further documentation on our work so far.

If you have questions about formatting templates for mobile, please leave a note on the project talk page or file a task in Phabricator and we will help you.

Thank ye!

CKoerner (WMF) (talk) 19:35, 13 November 2018 (UTC)

Community Wishlist Survey vote

The Community Wishlist Survey. Please help translate to your language.

Hey everyone,

The Community Wishlist Survey is the process when the Wikimedia communities decide what the Wikimedia Foundation Community Tech should work on over the next year.

The Community Tech team is focused on tools for experienced Wikimedia editors. The communities have now posted a long list of technical proposals. You can vote on the proposals from now until 30 November. You can read more on the wishlist survey page.

/User:Johan (WMF)

18:13, 22 November 2018 (UTC)

Advanced Search

Advanced Search will become a default feature on your wiki on November 28. This new interface allows you to perform specialized searches on the search page, even if you don’t know any search syntax. Advanced Search originates from the German Community’s Technical Wishes project. It's already a default feature on German, Arabic, Farsi and Hungarian Wikipedia. Besides, more than 40.000 users across all wikis have tested the beta version. Feedback is welcome on the central feedback page.

Johanna Strodt (WMDE) (talk) 11:03, 26 November 2018 (UTC)

New Wikimedia password policy and requirements

Please help translate to your language

The Wikimedia Foundation security team is implementing a new password policy and requirements. You can learn more about the project on MediaWiki.org.

These new requirements will apply to new accounts and privileged accounts. New accounts will be required to create a password with a minimum length of 8 characters. Privileged accounts will be prompted to update their password to one that is at least 10 characters in length.

These changes are planned to be in effect on December 13th. If you think your work or tools will be affected by this change, please let us know on the talk page.

Thank ye!

CKoerner (WMF) (talk) 20:03, 6 Dizember 2018 (UTC)

Invitation from Wiki Loves Love 2019

Please help translate to your language

Love is an important subject for humanity and it is expressed in different cultures and regions in different ways across the world through different gestures, ceremonies, festivals and to document expression of this rich and beautiful emotion, we need your help so we can share and spread the depth of cultures that each region has, the best of how people of that region, celebrate love.

Wiki Loves Love (WLL) is an international photography competition of Wikimedia Commons with the subject love testimonials happening in the month of February.

The primary goal of the competition is to document love testimonials through human cultural diversity such as monuments, ceremonies, snapshot of tender gesture, and miscellaneous objects used as symbol of love; to illustrate articles in the worldwide free encyclopedia Wikipedia, and other Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) projects.

The theme of 2019 iteration is Celebrations, Festivals, Ceremonies and rituals of love.

Sign up your affiliate or individually at Participants page.

To know more about the contest, check out our Commons Page and FAQs

There are several prizes to grab. Hope to see you spreading love this February with Wiki Loves Love!

Kind regards,

Wiki Loves Love Team

Imagine... the sum of all love!

--MediaWiki message delivery (tauk) 10:13, 27 Dizember 2018 (UTC)

FileExporter beta feature

Coming soon: the beta feature FileExporter

A new beta feature will soon be released on all wikis: The FileExporter. It allows exports of files from a local wiki to Wikimedia Commons, including their file history and page history. Which files can be exported is defined by each wiki's community: Please check your wiki's configuration file if you want to use this feature.

The FileExporter has already been a beta feature on mediawiki.org, meta.wikimedia, deWP, faWP, arWP, koWP and on wikisource.org. After some functionality was added, it's now becoming a beta feature on all wikis. Deployment is planned for January 16. More information can be found on the project page.

As always, feedback is highly appreciated. If you want to test the FileExporter, please activate it in your user preferences. The best place for feedback is the central talk page. Thank you from Wikimedia Deutschland's Technical Wishes project.

Johanna Strodt (WMDE) 09:41, 14 Januar 2019 (UTC)

No editing for 30 minutes on 17 January

You will not be able to edit the wikis for up to 30 minutes on 17 January 07:00 UTC. This is because of a database problem that has to be fixed immediately. You can still read the wikis. Some wikis are not affected. They don't get this message. You can see which wikis are not affected on this page. Most wikis are affected. The time you can not edit might be shorter than 30 minutes. /Johan (WMF)

18:54, 16 Januar 2019 (UTC)

Talk to us about talking

The Wikimedia Foundation is planning a global consultation about communication. The goal is to bring Wikimedians and wiki-minded people together to improve tools for communication.

We want all contributors to be able to talk to each other on the wikis, whatever their experience, their skills or their devices.

We are looking for input from as many different parts of the Wikimedia community as possible. It will come from multiple projects, in multiple languages, and with multiple perspectives.

We are currently planning the consultation. We need your help.

We need volunteers to help talk to their communities or user groups.

You can help by hosting a discussion at your wiki. Here's what to do:

1. First, sign up your group here.
2. Next, create a page (or a section on a Village pump, or an e-mail thread – whatever is natural for your group) to collect information from other people in your group. This is not a vote or decision-making discussion: we are just collecting feedback.
3. Then ask people what they think about communication processes. We want to hear stories and other information about how people communicate with each other on and off wiki. Please consider asking these five questions:
   1. When you want to discuss a topic with your community, what tools work for you, and what problems block you?
   2. What about talk pages works for newcomers, and what blocks them?
   3. What do others struggle with in your community about talk pages?
   4. What do you wish you could do on talk pages, but can't due to the technical limitations?
   5. What are the important aspects of a "wiki discussion"?
4. Finally, please go to Talk pages consultation 2019 on Mediawiki.org and report what you learned from your group. Please include links if the discussion is available to the public.

You can also help build the list of the many different ways people talk to each other.

Not all groups active on wikis or around wikis use the same way to discuss things: it can happen on wiki, on social networks, through external tools... Tell us how your group communicates.

You can read more about the overall process on mediawiki.org. If you have questions or ideas, you can leave feedback about the consultation process in the language you prefer.

Thank you! We're looking forward to talking with you.

Trizek (WMF) 15:01, 21 Februar 2019 (UTC)

New Wikipedia Library Accounts Available Now (March 2019)

Hello Wikimedians!

The TWL OWL says sign up today!

The Wikipedia Library is announcing signups today for free, full-access, accounts to published research as part of our Publisher Donation Program. You can sign up for new accounts and research materials on the Library Card platform:

• Kinige – Primarily Indian-language ebooks - 10 books per month
• Gale – Times Digital Archive collection added (covering 1785-2013)
• JSTOR – New applications now being taken again

Many other partnerships with accounts available are listed on our partners page, including Baylor University Press, Taylor & Francis, Cairn, Annual Reviews and Bloomsbury. You can request new partnerships on our Suggestions page.

Do better research and help expand the use of high quality references across Wikipedia projects: sign up today!
--The Wikipedia Library Team 17:40, 13 Mairch 2019 (UTC)

You can host and coordinate signups for a Wikipedia Library branch in your own language. Please contact Ocaasi (WMF).

This message was delivered via the Global Mass Message tool to The Wikipedia Library Global Delivery List.

Read-only mode for up to 30 minutes on 11 April

You will not be able to edit most Wikimedia wikis for up to 30 minutes on 11 April 05:00 UTC. This is because of a hardware problem. You can still read the wikis. You can see which wikis are affected. The time you can not edit might be shorter than 30 minutes. /Johan (WMF)

10:56, 8 Apryle 2019 (UTC)

Wikimedia Foundation Medium-Term Plan feedback request

Please help translate to your language

The Wikimedia Foundation has published a Medium-Term Plan proposal covering the next 3–5 years. We want your feedback! Please leave all comments and questions, in any language, on the talk page, by April 20. Thank ye! Quiddity (WMF) (talk) 17:35, 12 Apryle 2019 (UTC)

Wikidata Bridge: edit Wikidata’s data from Wikipedia infoboxes

Sorry for writing this message in English - feel free to help us translating it :)

Hello all,

Many language versions of Wikipedia use the content of Wikidata, the centralized knowledge base, to fill out the content of infoboxes. The data is stored in Wikidata and displayed, partially or completely, in the Wikipedia’s language, on the articles. This feature is used by many template editors, but brought several issues that were raised by communities in various places: not being able to edit the data directly from Wikipedia was one of them.

This is the reason why the Wikidata Bridge project started, with the goal of offering a way to Wikipedia editors to edit Wikidata’s data more easily. This will be achieved by an interface, connected to the infobox, that users can access directly from their local wiki.

The project is now at an early stage of development. A lot of user research has been done, and will continue to be done through the different phases of the project. The next steps of development will be achieved by the development team working at Wikimedia Deutschland, starting now until the end of 2019.

In order to make sure that we’re building a tool that is answering editors’ needs, we’re using agile methods in our development process. We don’t start with a fixed idea of the tool we want to deliver: we will build it together with the editors, based on feedback loops that we will regularly organize. The first version will not necessarily have all of the features you want, but it will keep evolving.

Here’s the planned timeline:

• From June to August, we will build the setup and technical groundwork.
• From September to November 2019, we will develop the first version of the feature and publish a test system so you can try it and give feedback.
• Later on, we will test the feature on a few projects, in collaboration with the communities.
  • We will first focus on early adopters communities who already implemented a shortcut from their infoboxes to edit Wikidata (for example Russian, Catalan, Basque Wikipedias)
  • but we also welcome also communities who volunteer to be part of the first test round.
  • Then we will reach some of the big Wikipedias (French, German, English) in order to see if the project scales and to address their potentially different needs.
  • Even later, we can consider enabling the feature on all the other projects.

In any case, no deployment or big change will be enforced on the projects without talking to the communities first, and helping the template builders to prepare for the changes they will have to do on the infoboxes’ code.

If you want to get involved, there are several ways to help:

• Read and help translating the documentation pages
• Follow the updates and participate in the first feedback loop
• Talk about it with your local community

More ideas will be added on this page along the way

If you have any questions for the development team, feel free to ask them on the main talk page. You can also ask under this message, but if you expect an answer from me, please make sure to ping me.

Thanks for your attention, Lea Lacroix (WMDE) 13:03, 24 Juin 2019 (UTC)

Redirect loops

Hello! The redirects listed at Special:DoubleRedirects cannot be fixed by my bot because they redirect over themselves. Can you please help locate the right page where those redirects should point to? Ping AmaryllisGardener, Fox & Avicennasis. Thank you! --MarcoAurelio (tauk) 11:06, 29 Juin 2019 (UTC)

Think a've fixit them aw for nou. 🦊 (tauk) 18:53, 29 Juin 2019 (UTC)

Hi Fox. Unfortunatelly they're still redirecting over themselves and my bot keeps complaining :-) MarcoAurelio (tauk) 12:08, 6 Julie 2019 (UTC)

Special:Diff/706106 fixed it, BUT now Member o the Scots Pairlament has no content. Special:Undelete/Member_o_the_Scots_Pairlament has had some previous content that you might want to restore. MarcoAurelio (tauk) 12:13, 6 Julie 2019 (UTC)

Editing News #1—July 2019

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Did you know?

Did you know that you can use the visual editor on a mobile device?

Every article has a pencil icon at the top. Tap on the pencil icon to start editing.

Edit Cards

This is what the new Edit Cards for editing links in the mobile visual editor look like. You can try the prototype here: 📲 Try Edit Cards.

Welcome back to the Editing newsletter.

Since the last newsletter, the team has released two new features for the mobile visual editor and has started developing three more. All of this work is part of the team's goal to make editing on mobile web simpler.

Before talking about the team's recent releases, we have a question for you:

Are you willing to try a new way to add and change links?

If you are interested, we would value your input! You can try this new link tool in the mobile visual editor on a separate wiki.

Follow these instructions and share your experience:

📲 Try Edit Cards.

Recent releases

The mobile visual editor is a simpler editing tool, for smartphones and tablets using the mobile site. The Editing team recently launched two new features to improve the mobile visual editor:

1. Section editing
   • The purpose is to help contributors focus on their edits.
   • The team studied this with an A/B test. This test showed that contributors who could use section editing were 1% more likely to publish the edits they started than people with only full-page editing.
2. Loading overlay
   • The purpose is to smooth the transition between reading and editing.

Section editing and the new loading overlay are now available to everyone using the mobile visual editor.

New and active projects

This is a list of our most active projects. Watch these pages to learn about project updates and to share your input on new designs, prototypes and research findings.

• Edit cards: This is a clearer way to add and edit links, citations, images, templates, etc. in articles. You can try this feature now. Go here to see how: 📲 Try Edit Cards.
• Mobile toolbar refresh: This project will learn if contributors are more successful when the editing tools are easier to recognize.
• Mobile visual editor availability: This A/B test asks: Are newer contributors more successful if they use the mobile visual editor? We are collaborating with 20 Wikipedias to answer this question.
• Usability improvements: This project will make the mobile visual editor easier to use. The goal is to let contributors stay focused on editing and to feel more confident in the editing tools.

Looking ahead

• Wikimania: Several members of the Editing Team will be attending Wikimania in August 2019. They will lead a session about mobile editing in the Community Growth space. Talk to the team about how editing can be improved.
• Talk Pages: In the coming months, the Editing Team will begin improving talk pages and communication on the wikis.

Learning more

The VisualEditor on mobile is a good place to learn more about the projects we are working on. The team wants to talk with you about anything related to editing. If you have something to say or ask, please leave a message at Talk:VisualEditor on mobile.

PPelberg (WMF) (talk) & Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk)

18:32, 23 Julie 2019 (UTC)

Update on the consultation about office actions

Hello all,

Last month, the Wikimedia Foundation's Trust & Safety team announced a future consultation about partial and/or temporary office actions. We want to let you know that the draft version of this consultation has now been posted on Meta.

This is a draft. It is not intended to be the consultation itself, which will be posted on Meta likely in early September. Please do not treat this draft as a consultation. Instead, we ask your assistance in forming the final language for the consultation.

For that end, we would like your input over the next couple of weeks about what questions the consultation should ask about partial and temporary Foundation office action bans and how it should be formatted. Please post it on the draft talk page. Our goal is to provide space for the community to discuss all the aspects of these office actions that need to be discussed, and we want to ensure with your feedback that the consultation is presented in the best way to encourage frank and constructive conversation.

Please visit the consultation draft on Meta-wiki and leave your comments on the draft’s talk page about what the consultation should look like and what questions it should ask.

Thank you for your input! -- The Trust & Safety team 08:03, 16 August 2019 (UTC)

New tools and IP masking

Hey everyone,

The Wikimedia Foundation wants to work on two things that affect how we patrol changes and handle vandalism and harassment. We want to make the tools that are used to handle bad edits better. We also want to get better privacy for unregistered users so their IP addresses are no longer shown to everyone in the world. We would not hide IP addresses until we have better tools for patrolling.

We have an idea of what tools could be working better and how a more limited access to IP addresses would change things, but we need to hear from more wikis. You can read more about the project on Meta and post comments and feedback. Now is when we need to hear from you to be able to give you better tools to handle vandalism, spam and harassment.

You can post in your language if you can't write in English.

Johan (WMF)

14:18, 21 August 2019 (UTC)

Note

Please see: Category collogue:Wikipaedia categorisation#Overhaul categories faer an RFC on Categories. –MJL ‐Tauk‐^☖ 21:17, 7 September 2019 (UTC)

The consultation on partial and temporary Foundation bans just started

Hello,

In a recent statement, the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees requested that staff hold a consultation to "re-evaluat[e] or add community input to the two new office action policy tools (temporary and partial Foundation bans)".

Accordingly, the Foundation's Trust & Safety team invites all Wikimedians to join this consultation and give their feedback from 30 September to 30 October.

How can you help?

• Suggest how partial and temporary Foundation bans should be used, if they should (eg: On all projects, or only on a subset);

• Give ideas about how partial and temporary Foundation bans should ideally implemented, if they should be; and/or

• Propose changes to the existing Office Actions policy on partial and temporary bans.

We offer our thanks in advance for your contributions, and we hope to get as much input as possible from community members during this consultation!

-- Kbrown (WMF) 17:14, 30 September 2019 (UTC)

Feedback wanted on Desktop Improvements project

Please help translate to your language

Hello. The Readers Web team at the WMF will work on some improvements to the desktop interface over the next couple of years. The goal is to increase usability without removing any functionality. We have been inspired by changes made by volunteers, but that currently only exist as local gadgets and user scripts, prototypes, and volunteer-led skins. We would like to begin the process of bringing some of these changes into the default experience on all Wikimedia projects.

We are currently in the research stage of this project and are looking for ideas for improvements, as well as feedback on our current ideas and mockups. So far, we have performed interviews with community members at Wikimania. We have gathered lists of previous volunteer and WMF work in this area. We are examining possible technical approaches for such changes.

We would like individual feedback on the following:

• Identifying focus areas for the project we have not yet discovered
• Expanding the list of existing gadgets and user scripts that are related to providing a better desktop experience. If you can think of some of these from your wiki, please let us know
• Feedback on the ideas and mockups we have collected so far

We would also like to gather a list of wikis that would be interested in being test wikis for this project - these wikis would be the first to receive the updates once we’re ready to start building.

When giving feedback, please consider the following goals of the project:

• Make it easier for readers to focus on the content
• Provide easier access to everyday actions (e.g. search, language switching, editing)
• Put things in logical and useful places
• Increase consistency in the interface with other platforms - mobile web and the apps
• Eliminate clutter
• Plan for future growth

As well as the following constraints:

• Not touching the content - no work will be done in terms of styling templates or to the structure of page contents themselves
• Not removing any functionality - things might move around, but all navigational items and other functionality currently available by default will remain
• No drastic changes to the layout - we're taking an evolutionary approach to the changes and want the site to continue feeling familiar to readers and editors

Please give all feedback (in any language) at mw:Talk:Reading/Web/Desktop Improvements

After this round of feedback, we plan on building a prototype of suggested changes based on the feedback we receive. You’ll hear from us again asking for feedback on this prototype.

Thank ye! Quiddity (WMF) (talk)

07:18, 16 October 2019 (UTC)

Beta feature "Reference Previews"

A new beta feature will soon be deployed to your wiki: Reference Previews. As you might guess from the name, this feature gives you a preview of references in the article text. That means, you can look up a reference without jumping down to the bottom of the page.

Reference Previews have already been a beta feature on German and Arabic Wikipedia since April. Now they will become available on more wikis. Deployment is planned for October 24. More information can be found on the project page.

As always, feedback is highly appreciated. If you want to test Reference Previews, please activate the beta feature in your user preferences and let us know what you think. The best place for feedback is the central talk page. We hope the feature will serve you well in your work. Thank you from Wikimedia Deutschland's Technical Wishes project.

-- Johanna Strodt (WMDE) 09:47, 23 October 2019 (UTC)

Editing News #2 – Mobile editing and talk pages

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Inside this newsletter, the Editing team talks about their work on the mobile visual editor, on the new talk pages project, and at Wikimania 2019.

Help

What talk page interactions do you remember? Is it a story about how someone helped you to learn something new? Is it a story about how someone helped you get involved in a group? Something else? Whatever your story is, we want to hear it!

Please tell us a story about how you used a talk page. Please share a link to a memorable discussion, or describe it on the talk page for this project. The team wants your examples. These examples will help everyone develop a shared understanding of what this project should support and encourage.

Talk pages project

The Talk Pages Consultation was a global consultation to define better tools for wiki communication. From February through June 2019, more than 500 volunteers on 20 wikis, across 15 languages and multiple projects, came together with members of the Foundation to create a product direction for a set of discussion tools. The Phase 2 Report of the Talk Page Consultation was published in August. It summarizes the product direction the team has started to work on, which you can read more about here: Talk Page Project project page.

The team needs and wants your help at this early stage. They are starting to develop the first idea. Please add your name to the "Getting involved" section of the project page, if you would like to hear about opportunities to participate.

Mobile visual editor

The Editing team is trying to make it simpler to edit on mobile devices. The team is changing the visual editor on mobile. If you have something to say about editing on a mobile device, please leave a message at Talk:VisualEditor on mobile.

Edit Cards

What happens when you click on a link. The new Edit Card is bigger and has more options for editing links.

• On 3 September, the Editing team released version 3 of Edit Cards. Anyone could use the new version in the mobile visual editor.
• There is an updated design on the Edit Card for adding and modifying links. There is also a new, combined workflow for editing a link's display text and target.
• Feedback: You can try the new Edit Cards by opening the mobile visual editor on a smartphone. Please post your feedback on the Edit cards talk page.

Toolbar

The editing toolbar is changing in the mobile visual editor. The old system had two different toolbars. Now, all the buttons are together. Tell the team what you think about the new toolbar.

• In September, the Editing team updated the mobile visual editor's editing toolbar. Anyone could see these changes in the mobile visual editor.
  • One toolbar: All of the editing tools are located in one toolbar. Previously, the toolbar changed when you clicked on different things.
  • New navigation: The buttons for moving forward and backward in the edit flow have changed.
  • Seamless switching: an improved workflow for switching between the visual and wikitext modes.
• Feedback: You can try the refreshed toolbar by opening the mobile VisualEditor on a smartphone. Please post your feedback on the Toolbar feedback talk page.

Wikimania

The Editing Team attended Wikimania 2019 in Sweden. They led a session on the mobile visual editor and a session on the new talk pages project. They tested two new features in the mobile visual editor with contributors. You can read more about what the team did and learned in the team's report on Wikimania 2019.

Looking ahead

• Talk Pages Project: The team is thinking about the first set of proposed changes. The team will be working with a few communities to pilot those changes. The best way to stay informed is by adding your username to the list on the project page: Getting involved.
• Testing the mobile visual editor as the default: The Editing team plans to post results before the end of the calendar year. The best way to stay informed is by adding the project page to your watchlist: VisualEditor as mobile default project page.
• Measuring the impact of Edit Cards: This study asks whether the project helped editors add links and citations. The Editing team hopes to share results in November. The best way to stay informed is by adding the project page to your watchlist: Edit Cards project page.

– PPelberg (WMF) (talk) & Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk)

11:12, 29 October 2019 (UTC)

Wikipedia Asian Month 2019

Please help translate to your language

Wikipedia Asian Month is back! We wish you all the best of luck for the contest. The basic guidelines of the contest can be found on your local page of Wikipedia Asian Month. For more information, refer to our Meta page for organizers.

Looking forward to meet the next ambassadors for Wikipedia Asian Month 2019!

For additional support for organizing offline event, contact our international team on wiki or on email. We would appreciate the translation of this message in the local language by volunteer translators. Thank you!

Wikipedia Asian Month International Team.

MediaWiki message delivery (tauk) 16:57, 31 October 2019 (UTC)

Partial blocks

CLOSIT:

Consensus i favour. Nae closit faer recordin. –MJL ‐Tauk‐^☖ 21:57, 29 November 2019 (UTC)

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

---

Tracked in Phabricator (?)
Task T239493
Open

A lot of other Wikipedias have already implemented partial blocks. Harassment has not been a major issue on sco.wiki (thank gosh), but I would like to see us have this tool in our toolbelt if so needed. If there is no objections, I will author a task on Phabricator to get it done.

@AmaryllisGardener, Cuatro Remos, DannyS712, Fixer88, Sije, and Chongkian: Would you support this proposal? –MJL ‐Tauk‐^☖ 18:13, 17 November 2019 (UTC)

Agreed, I support having them implemented. --Cuatro Remos (tauk) 18:14, 17 November 2019 (UTC)

Sounds good to me. --AmaryllisGardener ^talk 19:02, 17 November 2019 (UTC)

Support. --Sije (tauk) 19:57, 17 November 2019 (UTC)

Depending on the severity of the harassment though, but I do support this. Chongkian (tauk) 00:28, 18 November 2019 (UTC)

---

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Extension of Wikipedia Asian Month contest

In consideration of a week-long internet block in Iran, Wikipedia Asian Month 2019 contest has been extended for a week past November. The articles submitted till 7th December 2019, 23:59 UTC will be accepted by the fountain tools of the participating wikis.

Please help us translate and spread this message in your local language.

Wikipedia Asian Month International Team

--MediaWiki message delivery (tauk) 14:16, 27 November 2019 (UTC)

@AmaryllisGardener, Cuatro Remos, DannyS712, Fixer88, Sije, Chongkian, and MJL:

Partial blocks model policy

Hello all,

(Apology for writing in English) I'm writing to let you know that now there is a Partial block model policy on Meta. If this wiki does not have a policy to cover partial blocks then the model policy could be adapted for this wiki. Or if you have already written a customized policy for this wiki, you can share it on the Meta page for possible use by other wikis. There is also a page where you can share examples of the way that you are using partial block on this wiki.

Please contact me if you have questions or comments about partial block. Regards, SPoore (WMF) (tauk) 21:49, 6 Dizember 2019 (UTC)

@SPoore (WMF): We sadly don't have a lot policies written down. Therefore, I just made Wikipedia:Partial block link to m:Partial block model policy. :) –MJL ‐Tauk‐^☖ 13:19, 12 Dizember 2019 (UTC)

Wiki Loves Folklore

Hello Folks,

Wiki Loves Love is back again in 2020 iteration as Wiki Loves Folklore from 1 February, 2020 - 29 February, 2020. Join us to celebrate the local cultural heritage of your region with the theme of folklore in the international photography contest at Wikimedia Commons. Images, videos and audios representing different forms of folk cultures and new forms of heritage that haven’t otherwise been documented so far are welcome submissions in Wiki Loves Folklore. Learn more about the contest at Meta-Wiki and Commons.

Kind regards,
Wiki Loves Folklore International Team
— Tulsi Bhagat (contribs | talk)
sent using MediaWiki message delivery (tauk) 06:15, 18 Januar 2020 (UTC)

Movement Learning and Leadership Development Project

Hello

The Wikimedia Foundation’s Community Development team is seeking to learn more about the way volunteers learn and develop into the many different roles that exist in the movement. Our goal is to build a movement informed framework that provides shared clarity and outlines accessible pathways on how to grow and develop skills within the movement. To this end, we are looking to speak with you, our community to learn about your journey as a Wikimedia volunteer. Whether you joined yesterday or have been here from the very start, we want to hear about the many ways volunteers join and contribute to our movement.

To learn more about the project, please visit the Meta page. If you are interested in participating in the project, please complete this simple Google form. Although we may not be able to speak to everyone who expresses interest, we encourage you to complete this short form if you are interested in participating!

-- LMiranda (WMF) (talk) 19:01, 22 Januar 2020 (UTC)

New logo for sco.wikipedia.com

Frae Wikipedia, the free beuk o knawledge

After seeing this "Frae Wikipedia, the free beuk o knawledge" on every page, I wondered why this wasn't reflected in our logo. I've updated the source SVG to have the subtitle and if we get consensus we can go to Phabricator to get the logo on all pages changed.

If there are any changes/objections, I would be glad to hear them out and make the requisite changes.

Sorry for my lack of Scots, the Aberdonian private schools don't foster a doric friendly environment. --Carlinmack (tauk) 03:15, 30 Januar 2020 (UTC)

Please fix spellin: "Wikipædia" (or "Wikipaedia"). --Sije (tauk) 19:25, 31 Januar 2020 (UTC)

enwiki now uses Wikipedia, is there a reason for using "æ" or "ae" in Scots? I'm happy to change it, I'm just interested if there's a reason for it --Carlinmack (tauk) 14:20, 1 Februar 2020 (UTC)

It seems to be more correct in Scots although I'm no expert. It's how the word is spelled in the current logo. Pinging User:MJL and User:Fixer88. What do you say? Sije (tauk) 21:39, 2 Februar 2020 (UTC)

@Sije and Carlinmack: I love the design of the new logo!
As for why it should have an "æ" or "ae", I'd believe it is because the "æ" is the closest to the root Encyclopædia. Scots leaves a lot in what English lost.
That being said, it does feel odd to be saying that all in a namespace called Wikipedia. :/ –MJL ‐Tauk‐^☖ 22:21, 2 Februar 2020 (UTC)

Maybe the namespace could also be changed. (I'm not familiar with the technicalities). Sije (tauk) 22:30, 2 Februar 2020 (UTC)

From my understanding of Scots, the way in which words are spelled is a reflection of their pronunciation. For example, s[oo]th and [oo]tbrak have the same vowel so are spelled with the same letter pair "oo". What pronunciation does "enclopædia" have in Scots? what does the "æ" sound like? I imagine that most would say something similar to "encyclopeedeea". I think that would be more true to Scots rather than a classical spelling Carlinmack (tauk) 15:44, 20 Februar 2020 (UTC)

(en) This has been raised on Spellin Fettle page, and is probably the most fundamental spelling issue found so far. I would be uncomfortable with a change being made by the Wiki community alone (e.g. "encyclopeedeea" or "Wikipedie"), as that's how this mess happened in the first place. It needs professional academic input to advise on how it should be spelled, and the reasoning for it set out. I would suggest contacting Dr Michael Dempster of the Scots Language Centre (and also on the Scots wiki editors FB group) for an opinion. But great that this is being picked up on, and 'Free Beuk o Knawledge' reads well to me as a native-Scot. Soothrhins (tauk) 07:04, 28 August 2020 (UTC)

Additional interface for edit conflicts on talk pages

Sorry, for writing this text in English. If you could help to translate it, it would be appreciated.

You might know the new interface for edit conflicts (currently a beta feature). Now, Wikimedia Germany is designing an additional interface to solve edit conflicts on talk pages. This interface is shown to you when you write on a discussion page and another person writes a discussion post in the same line and saves it before you do. With this additional editing conflict interface you can adjust the order of the comments and edit your comment. We are inviting everyone to have a look at the planned feature. Let us know what you think on our central feedback page! -- For the Technical Wishes Team: Max Klemm (WMDE) 14:15, 26 Februar 2020 (UTC)

Please block Special:Contributions/31.4.177.6 and Special:Contributions/47.60.43.124

Sorry if this is not in the right place - I couldn't find the proper place, and had difficulties finding this one :) as mass murderer - thanks ! --Hsarrazin (tauk) 09:29, 29 Februar 2020 (UTC)

PS : Also, John Cena seems rather strange (probably hacked) to me, but I'm in no position to really evaluate it.

PPS : Please, who's admin here ? IPs seem to have had fun these last hours ? --Hsarrazin (tauk) 09:49, 29 Februar 2020 (UTC)

I've warned them, since the edits seem to have stopped and blocks are only to prevent damage. If they continue, I'll block them. Avicennasis (tauk) 11:54, 29 Februar 2020 (UTC)

thanks Avicennasis,

I undid dozens of those edits - similar pattern : famous people, date of death the day of the edit or about it, or change date of birth to be very recent...

as for John Cena, could you please check the article ? - I don't understand scottish, but the long text of song, under the presentation seems bizarre... :( - I only found the problem with death dates because I update wikidata with https://tools.wmflabs.org/pltools/recentdeaths/ :) — Precedin unsigned comment addit bi Hsarrazin (talk) 15:27, 3 Mairch 2020‎ (UTC)

Editing news 2020 #1 – Discussion tools

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This early version of the Reply tool automatically signs and indents comments.

The Editing team has been working on the talk pages project. The goal of the talk pages project is to help contributors communicate on wiki more easily. This project is the result of the Talk pages consultation 2019.

In a future update, the team plans to test a tool for easily linking to another user's name, a rich-text editing option, and other tools.

The team is building a new tool for replying to comments now. This early version can sign and indent comments automatically. Please test the new Reply tool.

• On 31 March 2020, the new Replie tool was offered as a Beta Feature editors at four Wikipedias: Arabic, Dutch, French, and Hungarian. If your community also wants early access to the new tool, contact User:Whatamidoing (WMF).
• The team is planning some upcoming changes. Please review the proposed design and share your thoughts on the talk page. The team will test features such as:
  • an easy way to mention another editor ("pinging"),
  • a rich-text visual editing option, and
  • other features identified through user testing or recommended by editors.

To hear more about Editing Team updates, please add your name to the "Get involved" section of the project page. You can also watch these pages: the main project page, Updates, Replying, and User testing.

– PPelberg (WMF) (talk) & Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk)

19:25, 8 Apryle 2020 (UTC)

Please (semi)-protect Template:MainPage/styles.css

(apologies for English) I've rewritten the Main Page to use TemplateStyles, which will make it work better on small screens and easier to edit in the future. However the new page uses Template:MainPage/styles.css which is not yet protected. Much of the rest of the Main Page is only semi-protected, so that should be enough here too. (I would have posted at Wikipedia:Requests for page protection, but that page doesn't appear to be used). The wub (tauk) 17:16, 6 Mey 2020 (UTC)

Editing news 2020 #2

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The new features include a toolbar. What do you think should be in the toolbar?

This issue of the Editing newsletter includes information the Talk pages project, an effort to help contributors communicate on wiki more easily.

• Reply tool: This is available as a Beta Feature at the four partner wikis (Arabic, Dutch, French, and Hungarian Wikipedias). The Beta Feature is called "Discussion tools". The Beta Feature will get new features soon. The new features include writing comments in a new visual editing mode and pinging other users by typing @. You can test the new features on the Beta Cluster now. Some other wikis will have a chance to try the Beta Feature in the coming months.
• New requirements for user signatures: Soon, users will not be able to save invalid custom signatures in Special:Preferences. This will reduce signature spoofing, prevent page corruption, and make new talk page tools more reliable. Most editors will not be affected.
• New discussion tool: The Editing team is beginning work on a simpler process for starting new discussions. You can see the initial design on the project page.
• Research on the use of talk pages: The Editing team worked with the Wikimedia research team to study how talk pages help editors improve articles. We learned that new editors who use talk pages make more edits to the main namespace than new editors who don't use talk pages.

– Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk)

20:33, 17 Juin 2020 (UTC)

Annual contest Wikipedia Pages Wanting Photos

Wikipedia Pages Wanting Photos (WPWP)

This is to invite you to join the Wikipedia Pages Wanting Photos (WPWP) campaign to help improve Wikipedia articles with photos and win prizes. The campaign starts today 1st July 2020 and closes 31st August 2020.

The campaign primarily aims at using images from Wikimedia Commons on Wikipedia articles that are lacking images. Participants will choose among Wikipedia pages without photo images, then add a suitable file from among the many thousands of photos in the Wikimedia Commons, especially those uploaded from thematic contests (Wiki Loves Africa, Wiki Loves Earth, Wiki Loves Folklore, etc.) over the years.

Please visit the campaign page to learn more about the WPWP Campaign.

With kind regards,

Thank you,

Deborah Schwartz Jacobs, Communities Liaison, On behalf of the Wikipedia Pages Wanting Photos Organizing Team - 08:24, 1 Julie 2020 (UTC)

feel free to translate this message to your local language when this helps your community

Feedback on movement names

Hello. Apologies if you are not reading this message in your native language. Please help translate to your language if necessary. Thank ye!

There are a lot of conversations happening about the future of our movement names. We hope that you are part of these discussions and that your community is represented.

Since 16 June, the Foundation Brand Team has been running a survey in 7 languages about 3 naming options. There are also community members sharing concerns about renaming in a Community Open Letter.

Our goal in this call for feedback is to hear from across the community, so we encourage you to participate in the survey, the open letter, or both. The survey will go through 7 July in all timezones. Input from the survey and discussions will be analyzed and published on Meta-Wiki.

Thanks for thinking about the future of the movement, --The Brand Project team, 19:42, 2 Julie 2020 (UTC)

Note: The survey is conducted via a third-party service, which may subject it to additional terms. For more information on privacy and data-handling, see the survey privacy statement.

Bot flag request for NadzikBOT

Hi! 'Allo! I recently discovered your wiki through Small Wiki Monitoring Team. I would like to request bot flag for NadzikBOT (collogue · contreebs).

• Bot: NadzikBOT (flags on pl.wiki, af.wiki).
• Owner: Nadzik (Meta-Wiki page; other projects).
• Basic tasks that I plan to perform:
  • Check Wikipedia
  • SWMT
  • Fixing double and broken redirects.
• Tools that I will use:
  • Auto Wiki Browser
  • Java Script Wiki Browser
  • WPCleaner
• Operational mode: semi-automatic via the above-mentioned tools, supervised by me.
• Approval: if there won't be opposition, I will:
  • Ask the Stewards to assign the bot flag to NadzikBOT (as there are no local Bureaucrat),
  • Perform the above-mentioned tasks. I will consult adding new tasks to the bot account.

Thank you for your time. Please let me know if you would like to ask me any questions. Please use {{ping}}, as this is not my main project and I can miss your answer. Cheers! Nadzik (tauk) 10:51, 7 Julie 2020 (UTC)

Tagging AmaryllisGardener (collogue · contreebs), as we discussed it earlier already. Cheers! Nadzik (tauk) 10:51, 7 Julie 2020 (UTC)

I'll also tag @Avicennasis:, @Fox: and @MJL: as they are other admins on this project. Cheers! Nadzik (tauk) 16:36, 10 Julie 2020 (UTC)

Editing news 2020 #3

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More than 50 million edits have been made using the visual editor on desktop.

Seven years ago this month, the Editing team offered the visual editor to most Wikipedia editors. Since then, editors have achieved many milestones:

• More than 50 million edits have been made using the visual editor on desktop.
• More than 2 million new articles have been created in the visual editor. More than 600,000 of these new articles were created during 2019.
• The visual editor is increasingly popular. The proportion of all edits made using the visual editor has increased every year since its introduction.
• In 2019, 35% of the edits by newcomers (logged-in editors with ≤99 edits) used the visual editor. This percentage has increased every year.
• Almost 5 million edits on the mobile site have been made with the visual editor. Most of these edits have been made since the Editing team started improving the mobile visual editor in 2018.
• On 17 November 2019, the first edit from outer space was made in the mobile visual editor. 🚀 👩‍🚀
• Editors have made more than 7 million edits in the 2017 wikitext editor, including starting 600,000 new articles in it. The 2017 wikitext editor is VisualEditor's built-in wikitext mode. You can enable it in your preferences.

Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk)

12:55, 9 Julie 2020 (UTC)

Announcing a new wiki project! Welcome, Abstract Wikipedia

Hi all,

It is my honor to introduce Abstract Wikipedia, a new project that has been unanimously approved by the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees. Abstract Wikipedia proposes a new way to generate baseline encyclopedic content in a multilingual fashion, allowing more contributors and more readers to share more knowledge in more languages. It is an approach that aims to make cross-lingual cooperation easier on our projects, increase the sustainability of our movement through expanding access to participation, improve the user experience for readers of all languages, and innovate in free knowledge by connecting some of the strengths of our movement to create something new.

This is our first new project in over seven years. Abstract Wikipedia was submitted as a project proposal by Denny Vrandečić in May 2020 after years of preparation and research, leading to a detailed plan and lively discussions in the Wikimedia communities. We know that the energy and the creativity of the community often runs up against language barriers, and information that is available in one language may not make it to other language Wikipedias. Abstract Wikipedia intends to look and feel like a Wikipedia, but build on the powerful, language-independent conceptual models of Wikidata, with the goal of letting volunteers create and maintain Wikipedia articles across our polyglot Wikimedia world.

The project will allow volunteers to assemble the fundamentals of an article using words and entities from Wikidata. Because Wikidata uses conceptual models that are meant to be universal across languages, it should be possible to use and extend these building blocks of knowledge to create models for articles that also have universal value. Using code, volunteers will be able to translate these abstract “articles” into their own languages. If successful, this could eventually allow everyone to read about any topic in Wikidata in their own language.

As you can imagine, this work will require a lot of software development, and a lot of cooperation among Wikimedians. In order to make this effort possible, Denny will join the Foundation as a staff member in July and lead this initiative. You may know Denny as the creator of Wikidata, a long-time community member, a former staff member at Wikimedia Deutschland, and a former Trustee at the Wikimedia Foundation . We are very excited that Denny will bring his skills and expertise to work on this project alongside the Foundation’s product, technology, and community liaison teams.

It is important to acknowledge that this is an experimental project, and that every Wikipedia community has different needs. This project may offer some communities great advantages. Other communities may engage less. Every language Wikipedia community will be free to choose and moderate whether or how they would use content from this project.

We are excited that this new wiki-project has the possibility to advance knowledge equity through increased access to knowledge. It also invites us to consider and engage with critical questions about how and by whom knowledge is constructed. We look forward to working in cooperation with the communities to think through these important questions.

There is much to do as we begin designing a plan for Abstract Wikipedia in close collaboration with our communities. I encourage you to get involved by going to the project page and joining the new mailing list . We recognize that Abstract Wikipedia is ambitious, but we also recognize its potential. We invite you all to join us on a new, unexplored path.

Yours,

Katherine Maher (Executive Director, Wikimedia Foundation)

Sent by m:User:Elitre (WMF) 20:10, 9 Julie 2020 (UTC) - m:Special:MyLanguage/Abstract Wikipedia/July 2020 announcement

The Universal Code of Conduct (UCoC): we want to hear from you.

Hello. Apologies that you may not be reading this message in your native language: translations of the following message may be available on Meta. Please help translate to your language. Thank ye!

At times, our contributor communities and projects have suffered from a lack of guidelines that can help us create an environment where free knowledge can be shared safely without fear. There has been talk about the need for a global set of conduct rules in different communities over time.

Recently, the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees announced a Community Culture Statement, asking for new standards to address harassment and promote inclusivity across projects.

The universal code of conduct will be a binding minimum set of standards across all Wikimedia projects, and will apply to all of us, staff and volunteers alike, all around the globe. It is of great importance that we all participate in expressing our opinions and thoughts about UCoC and its values. We should think about what we want it to cover or include and what it shouldn’t include, and how it may create difficulties or help our groups.

This is the time to talk about it. Before starting drafting the code of conduct, we would like to hear from you and to solicit the opinions and feedback of your colleagues. In order for your voice to be heard, we encourage and invite you to read more about the universal code of conduct (UCoC) and then write down your opinions or feedback on the discussion page.

To reduce language barriers during the process, you are welcome to translate the universal code of conduct main page from English into your respective local language. You and your community may choose to provide your opinions/feedback using your local languages.

Thanks in advance for your attention and contributions, The Trust and Safety team at Wikimedia Foundation 16:42, 22 Julie 2020 (UTC)

Technical Wishes: FileExporter and FileImporter become default features on all Wikis

The FileExporter and FileImporter will become a default features on all wikis until August 7, 2020. They are planned to help you to move files from your local wiki to Wikimedia Commons easier while keeping all original file information (Description, Source, Date, Author, View History) intact. Additionally, the move is documented in the files view history. How does it work?

Step 1: If you are an auto-confirmed user, you will see a link "Move file to Wikimedia Commons" on the local file page.

Step 2: When you click on this link, the FileImporter checks if the file can in fact be moved to Wikimedia Commons. These checks are performed based on the wiki's configuration file which is created and maintained by each local wiki community.

Step 3: If the file is compatible with Wikimedia Commons, you will be taken to an import page, at which you can update or add information regarding the file, such as the description. You can also add the 'Now Commons' template to the file on the local wiki by clicking the corresponding check box in the import form. Admins can delete the file from the local wiki by enabling the corresponding checkbox. By clicking on the 'Import' button at the end of the page, the file is imported to Wikimedia Commons.

If you want to know more about the FileImporter extension or the Technical Wishes Project, follow the links. --For the Technical Wishes Team:

Max Klemm (WMDE) 09:14, 6 August 2020 (UTC)

Criticism of language quality on Reddit

I haven't been involved in this project and I don't speak Scots. I think it would be relevant to inform you about this post on Reddit's r/Scotland:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Scotland/comments/ig9jia/ive_discovered_that_almost_every_single_article/

I can't judge whether the criticism is correct or not, but it seems like a lot of people are very worked up about it. The criticism is aimed specifically at AmaryllisGardener and there doesn't seem to be much understanding of the collaborative nature of a Wikipedia Project, even a small one with only a handful of active administrators.

Peter Isotalo (tauk) 18:22, 25 August 2020 (UTC)

I've been trying to explain the wiki culture on this thread here

https://old.reddit.com/r/linguistics/comments/igbbh2/the_scots_language_wikipedia_is_edited_primarily/

but people are angry nonetheless. Without any replacement of editing power, I don't see a reason to stop the user in question, the "damage" has already been done and can be fixed by anybody who cares. Additionally, all of the guidelines on how to write good scots still exist Wikipedia:Spellin_an_grammar and there seem to be external community efforts to fix the damage

https://mobile.twitter.com/cobradile94/status/1298320405111943168

Carlinmack (tauk) 20:58, 25 August 2020 (UTC)

I've been trying to stress that this has been done in good faith and that the way to move forward is to help to improve the language, not to fume about it on external forums. This post hinted that an editathon might be in the making:

https://www.reddit.com/r/linguistics/comments/igbbh2/the_scots_language_wikipedia_is_edited_primarily/g2ubaoa?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

Maybe it's the same alluded to in the tweet.

Sorry if I'm intervening as a bit of an outsider here, but as someone who's been around the projects for a while and happened to see the Reddit post, I couldn't help trying to provide some support.

--Peter Isotalo (tauk) 21:11, 25 August 2020 (UTC)

There's this Wikimedia forum thread in case anyone's interested: m:Wikimedia_Forum#Scots_Wikipedia_is_largely_not_written_in_Scots - BirdCities (tauk) 21:25, 25 August 2020 (UTC)

Peter Isotalo, You're doing great! BTW Scots on Reddit should take a constructive approach in this affair. WhisperToMe (tauk) 18:26, 26 August 2020 (UTC)

Important: maintenance operation on September 1st

Read this message in another language • Please help translate to your language

The Wikimedia Foundation will be testing its secondary data centre. This will make sure that Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia wikis can stay online even after a disaster. To make sure everything is working, the Wikimedia Technology department needs to do a planned test. This test will show if they can reliably switch from one data centre to the other. It requires many teams to prepare for the test and to be available to fix any unexpected problems.

They will switch all traffic to the secondary data centre on Tuesday, September 1st 2020.

Unfortunately, because of some limitations in MediaWiki, all editing must stop while the switch is made. We apologize for this disruption, and we are working to minimize it in the future.

You will be able to read, but not edit, all wikis for a short period of time.

• You will not be able to edit for up to an hour on Tuesday, September 1st. The test will start at 14:00 UTC (15:00 BST, 16:00 CEST, 10:00 EDT, 19:30 IST, 07:00 PDT, 23:00 JST, and in New Zealand at 02:00 NZST on Wednesday September 2).
• If you try to edit or save during these times, you will see an error message. We hope that no edits will be lost during these minutes, but we can't guarantee it. If you see the error message, then please wait until everything is back to normal. Then you should be able to save your edit. But, we recommend that you make a copy of your changes first, just in case.

Other effects:

• Background jobs will be slower and some may be dropped. Red links might not be updated as quickly as normal. If you create an article that is already linked somewhere else, the link will stay red longer than usual. Some long-running scripts will have to be stopped.
• There will be code freezes for the week of September 1st, 2020. Non-essential code deployments will not happen.

This project may be postponed if necessary. You can read the schedule at wikitech.wikimedia.org. Any changes will be announced in the schedule. There will be more notifications about this. Please share this information with your community.

Trizek (WMF) (talk) 13:49, 26 August 2020 (UTC)

Admeenistrater request to fix a mess I've made of the Fitba article's history

Hiya, in attempting to fix what I thought would be a small thing, I've made a mess of some pages' edit histories. As per discussion on Collogue:Fitbaw, I saught to muiv Fitbaw to Fitba, which was then a redirect to the former page. The muiv failed saying that "A page o that name aareadies exists, or the name ye'v waled isna guid. Please wale anither name." My solution was to move Fitba (and associated collogue) to Uiser:James Hyett/saundbox, thinking this would make the error message go away. It didn't, so I decided to just copy and paste the content of Fitbaw into Fitba. Of course, the Collogue page was moved to Uiser collogue:James Hyett/saundbox, and the new Fitba's edit history was all under Fitbaw, with nothing like enwiki's {{Copied}} template to indicate what had happened.

So: currently the content on the page Fitba has no history before today, all that edit history is under Fitbaw, while the previously-redirect page Fitba's actual history is at Uiser:James Hyett/saundbox Additionally, Collogue:Fitba's edit history is wiped, currently located at Uiser collogue:James Hyet (explained below). I'm sorry for this bizarre cock-up, but hopefully someone with admeenistrater privileges can help sort it out.

Update as I am writing this: in order to find the text of the error message, I moved Collogue:Fitba from Uiser collogue:James Hyett/saundbox first to Uiser collogue:Fitba then to Uiser collogue:James Hyet. I'm going to step away now, and stick to rowbacking... James Hyett (tauk) 17:18, 26 August 2020 (UTC)

Gaun Forrit

Am no a seasoned Wikipedian, a ken how tae dae an eedit an if a can see somthin tae fix a usually dae. Av seen the furore aboot Scots wiki, an also the AMA MJL did. Av jist got an account, but thocht o sharing som o ma ideas fir makin forrit.Soothrhins (tauk) 07:41, 26 August 2020 (UTC)

Style guide

In his reddit/AMA, MJL said a Dictionair as an idea fir improvement. A dinnae hink that wid help much. Here’s how:

• Scots is a non-stannerised leid, an while it is still a livin livin leid, it’s primarily wan that is spoke not screived
• While it’s still alive, it disnae hae the recogneetion o ither leids, e.g. Gaelic, that can pay scholars tae issue guidance on new wurds that wer no around in the 18t century
• Folk dinnae hae skills in Scots alone, but Scots an English. So the above reality means in the maist pairt we end up borrowin English wurds tae communicate.
• If the Dicitonair o Scots Leid (led by scholars) cannae gie comprehensive Scots spellins, a struggling sco wiki ne’er will.

Whit a wid suggest is an improved style guide. So biggit on whits ootlined in the RSSCC but showin folk the rules an systems that tak place. This would need tae hae linguistic input, and shuid be based on the soond o wurds spoken, ootline the rules/rationale/etc an then ablo list agreed examples o wurds that ar then a stannar fir draftin airticles. Soothrhins (tauk) 07:41, 26 August 2020 (UTC)

@Soothrhins: I'm not male, but I agree with the remainder of what you said. –MJL ‐Tauk‐^☖ 09:25, 26 August 2020 (UTC)

@MJL: Sincerest apologies, am usually maun better at no assuming pronouns. Soothrhins (tauk) 09:40, 26 August 2020 (UTC)

Quality no Quantity

Haen had a scance aroon som o the {{fixscots}} airticles, it seems that a desire fir quantity no quality haes been pursued on sco wiki. It is whit it is thou. Makin forrit, a hink a muckle cleanup operation is needit. In ither words the Scots wiki has ootgrown the fluent/native scrievers that can maintain it. Which maks me hink that the project needs tae hae a focus wi smaller ambition than nou.

e.g. dae we really need airticles on IMI Galil ur Kay Bailey Hutchison when the Glesga page is a pure midden?

This is whar ma lack o Wiki policy experience will show, so be kind.

Whit am thinkin is that ye develop a new flag up procedure fir deleting airticles that are poor quality, an hae little connection tae Scots at present. Akin tae on EN Wikipedia when airticles ar deleted cos they dinnae meet a relevance criteria (pretty sure George Bowie bio airticle was deleted fir no bein relevant, tell that tae somwan blastin oot Clyde 1 on a Sat nite gettin mwi!).

Recognisin the unfortunate position sco wiki has foond itsell, surely we could mak a process for it? As a starter, here’s criteria to markup for deletion:

• is a stub
• has poor use o Scots leid
• has little connection tae Scots leid/livin examples o Scots use

Aye, it’ll undo wurk o som ithers, but we hae seen no anely ootrage fae Scots spikkers, but non-Scots folk sayin it meant they misunnerstood whit Scots is. So tae me, it is needit. Soothrhins (tauk) 07:41, 26 August 2020 (UTC)

First up, apologies for speaking English on a non-English language version of Wikipedia. I found this discussion through a comment made by an editor in an RFC on meta.wikimedia.org. Regarding this 'quality no quantity' point, I'd perhaps suggest requiring all new articles to go through a version of the WP:AFC process, regardless of who wrote the article, and requiring each new article to be reviewed by a native-level Scots speaker. This would, at the very least, ensure that there is a base 'good' version of the page. This would require a number of native-level reviewers - but every action involving making the Scots language Wikipedia function requires this. Domeditrix (tauk) 16:13, 26 August 2020 (UTC)

Support @Domeditrix: Sounds like a guid idea. (An no need tae apologise if yer contrebution is constructive!) Soothrhins (tauk) 20:03, 26 August 2020 (UTC)

Comment (apologies for English, not confident enough with Scots atm) Domeditrix Soothrhins This list - Wikipedia:Leet o airticles that aa Wikipedias shuid hae could be a good resource for looking at articles to prioritise. Sara Thomas (WMUK) (tauk) 11:26, 27 August 2020 (UTC)

Support for non-native

Am aw fir non-native spikkers an screivers o Scots. But we need tae recognise that it is a leid that we grew up aroon (maistly), and ne’er lairned fae textbukes (again maistly). So we need tae support non-native folk who ar somtimes mair willin tae contribute than native screivers. Especially when that isnae ony guid auto-translate tools oot thar.

When a see some {{fixscots}} examples, they can sometimes be sic a midden a widnae ken whar tae start. But if ye hink how it got there, a body took some (usually) English content an gied a bash at translatin.

So anither initiative a hink is needit is fir Collogue pages. If a template wis made whar a uiser could put in original English an thar Scots attempt side by side, that wid help native Scots in improvin the translation afore it is put on the main airticle. Soothrhins (tauk) 07:41, 26 August 2020 (UTC)

JS helper to go through every single page at ease

Tool

Enhanced version: yue:wikt:User:H78c67c/nextcurid.js

For what it's worth, I made this tool (when I wanted to clean up other similarly bad wikis but I gave up under similar circumstances when those perpetrators gained control of the wikis because of seniority and they actively block cleanup efforts 🤣). You could adapt the enhanced version or copy the following primitive version into a JS and fire it up using tampermonkey etc. Then you can start copyediting from https://sco.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?redirect=no&curid=2 or any number you like.

Extended content

// ==UserScript== // @name Next Wikipedia Page by ID // @namespace // @description Link to next Wikipedia page by page id (less intrusive than redirection). // @icon https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/90/Next_Arrow.svg/200px-Next_Arrow.svg.png // @author Roy Zuo (based on a script by Franklin Yu, greasyfork script id 38438) // @match https://*.wikipedia.org/* // @grant none // @version 0.0.1.20181209165600 // ==/UserScript== const lang = location.host.split('.')[0]; let curidnext; curidnext = parseInt(new URLSearchParams(location.search).get('curid'))+1; const anchor = document.createElement('a'); anchor.href = `https://${lang}.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?redirect=no&curid=${curidnext}`; const image = document.createElement('img'); image.src = 'https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/90/Next_Arrow.svg/200px-Next_Arrow.svg.png'; image.id = 'nextarrow-image'; anchor.appendChild(image); document.getElementById('firstHeading').prepend(anchor); const style = document.createElement('style'); style.type = 'text/css'; style.appendChild(document.createTextNode('#nextarrow-image { width: 2em; }')); document.head.appendChild(style);

My two cents

If you search main namespace pages that are both page creations and most recent edition (i.e. page never edited after creation) by the user https://sco.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?target=AmaryllisGardener&namespace=0&tagfilter=&topOnly=1&newOnly=1&start=&end=&limit=500&title=Special%3AContributions , there're currently 18000~18500 pages. I would suggest get a bot to delete them all. That'll be about 10~20% of nonsense gone. (Although a few pages are valid redirects, I think it's reasonable collateral damage.)--RZuo (tauk) 09:49, 27 August 2020 (UTC)

Deletion, etc is being discussed at length on meta. What exactly does this script do that doesn't get done with word replacement on AWB? The biggest issues are grammatical from the discussion, how does this fix those issues? Best Wishes, Lee Vilenski ^{(talk • contribs)} 09:58, 27 August 2020 (UTC)

lol. for one AWB is cumbersome to use or learn. anyone could fire this JS up in a minute and start editing with zero prior knowledge. it seems apparent no native Scots speaker is active wiki editor much less AWB users right? for two, this JS lets users visit by curid (curid doesnt change no matter what's done to the page), so technically users can coordinate and divide the wiki into different sections. fixing work has to be done by humans and this tool is just a helper. i dont suppose you mean replace nonsense with AWB-auto-generated content when you say fix right?--RZuo (tauk) 10:23, 27 August 2020 (UTC)

No, I was simply asking what the script does. Best Wishes, Lee Vilenski ^{(talk • contribs)} 18:01, 27 August 2020 (UTC)

Category: Pages translatit frae Inglis Wikipaedia

I've come across this category, and haven't seen it mentioned anywhere else in the discussion here or on Meta. Thought it might be a useful set of articles that are already tagged that bots/AWB/whatever could be used on, if there's concern over letting bots loose on the entire wiki at first. James Hyett (tauk) 18:39, 27 August 2020 (UTC)

This is the list of articles that use the {{translatit page}} template - so it would be a subset of translated articles, as doesn't do this automatically (ignoring manual translations.) Best Wishes, Lee Vilenski ^{(talk • contribs)} 20:32, 27 August 2020 (UTC)

Jimmy?

Putting an English sentence involving "a man" into the http://www.scotranslate.com/ tool returns "a jimmy" as a noun. In my 60+ years in central Scotland I've come across "Haw Jimmy, gizza fag" etc but never "He is a jimmy". The DSL has my first example ("familiar term of address to a man, usually a stranger") but not this other form. Can anyone point to different usage anywhere across the land? See a live instance of this in a new page here, though now marked for deletion.

I'll also add that scotranslate renders "woman" to "wifie" - not "woman" or "wimmin", but imposing a marital status. Again, the DSL does not agree. (And aye, the Percy Sledge song does come out as "Whin a jimmy loues a wifie".)

If scotranslate is mistranslating such common words, as well as sometimes mangling the 5th month of the year into "kin" (e.g. [2]), then does something need to be done to make clear that it is inappropriate to use for article text here? AllyD (tauk) 13:22, 27 August 2020 (UTC)

(en) Ooft! That's a tricky one to back up with other sources (e.g. the Scots Corpus) as it is also a name. Is 'jimmy' not usually used in the sense of 'you', rather than 'man'; e.g. "Haw you, gizza fag". I suppose if we were to think of what 'queens english' would say as equivalent it would be "Excuse me sir, would you give me a cigarette?" which is maybe where the conflation is coming from?

On wifie, I've only ever heard folk who use NE Scots describe any woman as a wifie, but it has been done regardless of marital status.

The fact that Sco Translate is a crowdsourced tool is maybe one the reasons it's throwing out anomalies. Soothrhins (tauk) 13:49, 27 August 2020 (UTC)

(en) I've relatives in the central belt who use 'wifie' to refer to women of any age, even teenagers. They've been doing this since they were teenagers too.--Illandancient (tauk) 14:51, 27 August 2020 (UTC)

Having looked at the scotranslate.com site closer it does say English > Scottish not English > Scots. Soothrhins (tauk) 16:23, 27 August 2020 (UTC)

It isnae a serious project, fae the footer: "Results may not accurately reflect Scotish dialect and are provided for entertainment purposes only." Monospaced (tauk) 22:01, 27 August 2020 (UTC)

Think this may date from the early 60s, at least in Leith. A friend of my faither was called Jimmy, and he got really annoyed that suddenly people were shouting "Hey Jimmy" in the street meaning "Hey you" and nothing more specific, often not aimed at him at all. Language evolves. . . dave souza (tauk) 12:34, 28 August 2020 (UTC)

(in Inglis) Request Translation for draft of Translation Needed Template (ironically)

Following a question regarding translating untranslated (rather than mistranslated) text over on Spellin Fettle's collogue, I've drafted up Uiser:James Hyett/Template:TranslatePassage, and would appreciate it if a native speaker could have a go at translating the English before the template is published. I think it'd be particularly useful to have this template published in advance of the edit-a-thon, for things like the references on 2012 Unitit States presidential election or for inner workings like Template:Documentation. James Hyett (tauk) 22:07, 27 August 2020 (UTC)

(en)I've added one to the collogue, you might want someone else to look over before committing to it. Soothrhins (tauk) 17:48, 28 August 2020 (UTC)

(in Inglis) Cheers! James Hyett (tauk) 20:23, 28 August 2020 (UTC)

(en) In order to get a nice and functional Wikipedia:Paiges wantin translatin intae Scots, I've gone ahead and created a few more templates that will work together to make tagging pages needing translation easier. I've listed them all on my User page. James Hyett (tauk) 22:57, 28 August 2020 (UTC)

Puckle Proposals

(sco) A addit a section tae the main debate on WikiMedia aboot puckle hings the wider Wiki community cuid gie us a haun wi. Ye can see them an comments here (Puckle Proposals), hopin that som folk that ken the tech can tak som o the ideas forrit fast! Soothrhins (tauk) 14:34, 27 August 2020 (UTC)

Spellin Fettle

As a put forrit on WikiMedia discussion, a hink we need a dedicatit [Wikipedia:Spellin Fettle] page tae haud the common spellin errors thegither an note actions taken. A hae asked admin MJL on thar opinion, but if ither folk spierin ablo support it a will mak it. Soothrhins (tauk) 17:30, 27 August 2020 (UTC)

(en) Admin MJL is happy with this proposal, and I think it will be a massive help to new users coming in, and future edithons to have the same issue being dealt with on one consistent page. Have asked a quick tech question of MJL, so once I have confidence from that, that I'm not going to muck it up, I'll make it an transfer similar discussions over. Soothrhins (tauk) 17:57, 27 August 2020 (UTC)

Yeah, this all seems like a good idea. Have you created a draft for these spelling changes somewhere (ignore me if I've already stated this.) Best Wishes, Lee Vilenski ^{(talk • contribs)} 18:03, 27 August 2020 (UTC)

(en) Some are being discussed below, I think its going to be a rolling process as and when things are found, hence why I'm keen for their to be a dedicated 'workspace' (as such) to keep them together. Soothrhins (tauk) 18:05, 27 August 2020 (UTC)

I suggest drafting up something in userspace User:Soothrhins/Spellin fettle and then doing a move to mainspace. Quite happy to give you a hand. Best Wishes, Lee Vilenski ^{(talk • contribs)} 18:12, 27 August 2020 (UTC)

(en) As you were writing that up, I had already made it sorry! Wikipedia:Spellin Fettle I could do with a hand moving the below discussions over to it? Soothrhins (tauk) 18:31, 27 August 2020 (UTC)

┌────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘ - sure thing. Best Wishes, Lee Vilenski ^{(talk • contribs)} 18:32, 27 August 2020 (UTC)

Previous spierins and tauk on spellins hae been removed an aw instances raised addit tae Wikipedia:Spellin Fettle

Makin new page

See meta:Requests_for_comment/Large_scale_language_inaccuracies_on_the_Scots_Wikipedia#p.4_Clarify_expected_norms_for_page_creation. Current and suggested wirds here:

Ye'v follaed an airtin til a page that disna exist yet. Tae create the page, stert typin in the box ablo (see the help page for mair info). Gin ye'r here by mistak, juist dab yer brouser's back button.

(new) Yer airticle's text maun be verifiable fae reliable ithir soorces. Text taken fae copyright soorces will be deleted, an dinna paste wirds fae machine-translation.(/new)

(Input box)

Bi hainin chynges, ye agree tae the Terms o Uiss, n ye onrevocablie agree tae release yer contreebution unner the CC BY-SA 3.0 License n the GFDL. Ye agree that ae hyperairtin or URL is suffeeciant attreebution unner the Creative Commons license.

Improvements welcome. AllyD (tauk) 07:47, 28 August 2020 (UTC)

Jist tae note the uise o 'hained' (an sic) in this way haes been speired on Spellin Fettle Soothrhins (tauk) 10:14, 29 August 2020 (UTC)

@AllyD and Soothrhins: I left in hained for now until that gets sorted. –MJL ‐Tauk‐^☖ 17:34, 29 August 2020 (UTC)

Infobox for Scots learners

Should we make a wee user infobox for people who are actively learning Scots to add to their profile? Not essential, but a nice thing to add for people coming to help us. Soothrhins (tauk) 01:40, 30 August 2020 (UTC)

I went ahead and made {{Uiser sco-learnin}}. Might not be the prettiest though, I'm not a graphic designer. my_hat_stinks (tauk) 13:58, 30 August 2020 (UTC)

(en) The Big Wiki Rewrite - low hanging fruit

Hey folks, ran a couple of queries on PetScan, there's some low-hanging fruit in terms of stubs:

• Articles using "fixscots" template and which are a stub
• Articles in the category "Wikipaedia cleanup!" and which are a stub

Running these queries should (if I've done it right) bring up a list of very short articles which could be easily fixed, then the tag removed... Lirazelf (tauk) 18:31, 28 August 2020 (UTC)

<3 James Salsman (tauk) 01:03, 29 August 2020 (UTC)

A lot of those stubs were created by AG, so I would suggest putting a tag after they are fixed to indicate that they are in correct scots to make sure that an automated deletion of all articles created by AG does not delete the fixed articles. Zoozaz1 (tauk) 16:34, 29 August 2020 (UTC)

Zoozaz1 This is a good point! Any ideas for a tag? Also, could you add that at the meta thread if you haven't already? Would be useful there, I think. Sara Thomas (WMUK) (tauk) 11:48, 30 August 2020 (UTC)

Thinking about it some more, we could use a tag saying that this page has been translated to Scots from x (Scotched English, Scottish English, English) that might already exist. Now there might be some articles, if the template has been created, already in the category, but we could just remove their tags if there aren't in Scots. Looking at the proposals on meta it seems like they are only deleting them if all/most of the content was created by AG, but they are also proposing auditing it, and if you applied a tag that would mean it would skip being audited and not take up more volunteer time. Zoozaz1 (tauk) 12:43, 30 August 2020 (UTC)

There's {{translatit page}} but that's already used on the talk page of a lot of poorly-translated articles. my_hat_stinks (tauk) 13:06, 30 August 2020 (UTC)

I've created a template specfically for articles translated from Scotched English here; it is pretty much a copy of the other template but with a different category. I'm not an expert on templates so I would appreciate it if someone fixed the template to make it more specific to scotched english. Zoozaz1 (tauk) 13:35, 31 August 2020 (UTC)

There are also topic-specific stub templates. This one is for Template:Stub/Scotland: Articles using the "fixscots" template that are stubs about Scotland. Lingo Bingo Dingo (tauk) 17:50, 29 August 2020 (UTC)

(en) New articles in Scottified English (?)

Dear community,

Unfortunately, the recent wave of publicity seems to attract people who still think Scots is a derivative of English. I will be careful in my judgement, but I have serious doubts about the language of this article. Can we agree that new articles in Scottified English will be deleted on sight? (And if I'm wrong about the language of this particular article: my apologies to the author.) Steinbach (tauk) 07:40, 1 September 2020 (UTC)

• Support. This is a common sense measure. James Salsman (tauk) 08:22, 1 September 2020 (UTC)
• Kind of depends. Some are being added, caught, brought up on the Discord, and people have been fixing instead. If it can't be fixed though, yes delete. I think the sco:wiki community have been good at catching many of these type of things in the past few days. Soothrhins (tauk) 08:29, 1 September 2020 (UTC)

  @James Salsman and Steinbach: Articles not in Scots are deleted on sight. I don't know what this proposal is suggesting. –MJL ‐Tauk‐^☖ 17:56, 1 September 2020 (UTC)

  I wasn't quite sure of that, so I wanted to make it sure, to have it cemented somewhere as policy. By the way: the example I cited this morning has in fact not been deleted. Steinbach (tauk) 18:06, 1 September 2020 (UTC)

(en) Help with automatic templates

Hey! Sorry for writing in English. If you want help with templates and you want to make them automatic using Wikidata, contact me and I will help! -Theklan (tauk) 22:36, 1 September 2020 (UTC)

@Theklan:(en) No need to apologise for using English! A lot of us are Wiki-rookies beyond editing articles. Can you give us an idea of the kind of things auto templates with Wikidata could do for the sco:wiki? Thanks! soothrhins (tauk) 07:31, 2 September 2020 (UTC)

@Soothrhins:(en) Of course! You can see it action at some Wikipedias. Without the need to complete anything, you can see the template fully populated at eu:Mahatma Gandhi, eu:New York, eu:Eiffel dorrea or eu:Gioconda. This makes creating articles much easier, as you don't need to worry about the templates anymore. -Theklan (tauk) 08:14, 2 September 2020 (UTC)

(en) English words which should not appear in correct Scots

Hi! I've been trying to figure out how to make a bot conforming to various proposals, and I could use help from some polyglot native Scots, please. [3] is a list of English words derived from [4] which I think should almost never occur in correct Scots (unless in quotations, etc.) I would like to ask native Scots speakers to please categorize them into certain and questionable, by posting the shorter of the two lists on my talk page, please. Thank you all in advance! James Salsman (tauk) 18:26, 30 August 2020 (UTC)

I've not checked them all, but big (DSL, Corpus) and boy (DSL, Corpus) can both be used in Scots. my_hat_stinks (tauk) 18:37, 30 August 2020 (UTC)

• Is this not what native Scots are already doing on the Fettle page? 82.132.216.168 (talk) 18:55, 30 August 2020 (UTC)

Close. James Salsman (tauk) 19:02, 30 August 2020 (UTC)

Don’t suppose that they might know better how to fix mistakes in their language? 82.132.216.168 (talk) 22:01, 30 August 2020 (UTC)

Suppose even the best at anything of the sort can use help from math? James Salsman (tauk) 23:15, 30 August 2020 (UTC)

Here's a preliminary suspect list from the word frequencies. I haven't looked at any of the category names yet. James Salsman (tauk) 20:08, 30 August 2020 (UTC)

Based on that measure, here is a list of Suspected Scotched English articles. James Salsman (tauk) 08:18, 1 September 2020 (UTC)

New: by length of article. James Salsman (tauk) 16:47, 1 September 2020 (UTC)

See Vocabulary for insichts. Jimmy~scowiki (tauk) 20:30, 1 September 2020 (UTC)

@Jimmy~scowiki: thank you! [5] is extremely helpful, too. Do you know how to find a list of Gaelic words which do not appear in proper Scots? James Salsman (tauk) 14:47, 2 September 2020 (UTC)

This Scots to Gaelic comparison spreadsheet is from illandancient on discord. James Salsman (tauk) 19:46, 2 September 2020 (UTC)

That is a difficult one. Scots dialects along the Highland line or in the South-West where Gaelic was still spoken a few hundred years ago may use Gaelic words though they often won't be immediately recognised as such by the people using them. I suppose you'll find those in Scots dictionaries. There's a bit about Gaelic influence on Scots on p.65 of An Introduction to Modern Scots.

Jimmy~scowiki (tauk) 20:01, 2 September 2020 (UTC)

I was working on combining Gàidhlig and Gaeilge, but I am suspending that effort because I can see from early counts that creating a non-content Draftspace (such as 'Scroll:') will be the most time-effective way to get 99% Scots in mainspace and on web indexes, achieving the more refined statistical outcome. James Salsman (tauk) 19:05, 3 September 2020 (UTC)

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Categories with a lot of less notable or fandomlike content

(en) The following categories about fictional works contain many pages or subcategories with pages that would be considered insufficiently notable on some editions of Wikipedia and may be more appropriate on a fandom Wikia:

• Category:Star_Wars, especially Category:Star Wars chairacters
• Category:Pokémon species
• Category:Sonic the Hedgehog chairacters

In my view it would go too far to simply delete all the pages in these categories, as some of these characters are also mascots of their franchises or companies. I'm not really sure where to draw the line, so I post the links here instead of nominating individual pages for deletion. Lingo Bingo Dingo (tauk) 14:54, 3 September 2020 (UTC)

RFC anent Quotes

Sud furrain leid quotes be pit intae Scots or lea'ed in thair original leid?

(EN) Should foreign-language quotes be translated into Scots or left in their native language? -Cobra! (tauk) 08:36, 7 September 2020 (UTC)

Where quotations are presented as direct quotations from a subject, care should be taken, including a link to a primary source or where there is none available it should be indicated whether the quotation is a translation from any other language. For example:-

Robert Scott Lauder RSA (Edinburgh 25 Juin 1803 – 21 Apryle 1869 Edinburgh) wis a Scots mid-Victorian airtist that descrived himsel as a "historical penter".

The original source of "historical penter" is the English wikipedia article text "historical painter", scholars might take years to search the Lauder estate and find he never uttered the word "penter". -- Illandancient (tauk) 10:32, 7 September 2020 (UTC)

Perhaps use of italics and no quotation marks to indicate translated quotations?

Robert Scott Lauder RSA (Edinburgh 25 Juin 1803 – 21 Apryle 1869 Edinburgh) wis a Scots mid-Victorian airtist that descrived himsel as a historical penter.

or something more explicit with wiki markup

Robert Scott Lauder RSA (Edinburgh 25 Juin 1803 – 21 Apryle 1869 Edinburgh) wis a Scots mid-Victorian airtist that descrived himsel as a "historical painter" (historical penter).

The page for Hoose o Orléans states the following

during the reign o Louis Philippe I. He ruled Fraunce unner the title "Keeg o the French"

How are we to know whether this is a typo from the translator or a direct quotation of a typo from Louis Philippe who wasn't quite fluent in Scots? --Illandancient (tauk) 09:19, 7 September 2020 (UTC)

Extended content

Furthermore, Fowkrepublic o Cheenae is a literal translation of the English official name the People's Republic of China, which was determined by professional translators either in the Chinese foreign ministry or the English one in 1949. The French official name is République populaire de Chine, again determined by either the Chinese foreign ministry or the French one. The German official name Volksrepublik China, determined by the German foreign ministry or the Chinese one. The Scots name was determined by neither the Chinese foreign ministry nor a hypothetical Scottish foreign ministry, nor the UK foreign ministry, it was translated by a North American teenager, who doesn't speak Scots. Some Scottish authors have expressed interest in using the term "Fowkrepublic o Cheenae", but that is their prerogative, crafting original art. As a wikipedians I don't think such matters should be unilaterally decided. Its a country a with a thousand times more people than there are Scots speakers, if they look up what Scots call their country, for when they pop over on their summer holidays, they will be using a term that neither the Scots nor the Chinese have come up with, because there is no indication whether it was a badly translated term or an official term. --Illandancient (tauk) 09:19, 7 September 2020 (UTC) It is true that Fowkrepublic or Fowk's Republic would both be neologisms, but this is a feature of (probably) all languages. Cornish, Welsh, Nahuatl also don't have a memo from foreign ministries to determine the name of the country. Some other minority language wikis link to an etymology in a footnote if the name given is an neologism for that language. Example: https://ia.wikipedia.org/wiki/China#cite_note-1. If the situation were reversed, and Scotland changed it's name (post-independence or whatever), every other language, with official government support or not, would have to come up with a name for it, even though noone had ever called it that before. Entohist (tauk) 10:32, 7 September 2020 (UTC) @Entohist and Illandancient: This RFC was called about putting things in quotes which aren't in original Scots. Let's just focus on that than translating titles. That is currently being discussed here. –MJL ‐Tauk‐☖ 19:45, 7 September 2020 (UTC)

• fwiw, RSL likely didn't actually call *himself* a "historical painter". It was what was entered on his death certificate, and seems to be the source of the "quote". Entohist (tauk)

As far as I could tell the Fowkrepublic o Cheenae article was created on 3 May 2006‎, before the American Teenager started editing. I suspect the American Teenager is taking the flak for the fact that Scots is not an Ausbau language. The Scots language enthusiasts/revivalist who started the Scots Wikipedia will have been indulging in ad hoc Ausbau as the project progressed. As Scots effectively functions as varieties of colloquial English spoken in Scotland it is heteronomous with respect to Standard English so ultimately formal register terminology would be that of Standard English, perhaps spellt to indicate how it is said in a Scots accent.

Nogger (tauk) 21:02, 7 September 2020 (UTC)

(en) Possibly embarrassing translation of "Mount" as "Munt"

A discussion has gone over at the Mount Everest (formerly Munt Everest) talkpage over the use of (what seems to be) the pseudo-Scots word munt for mount. A quick search of the word on this site gives a range of other articles (Munt Olympus, Munt Lebanon Govrenorate, Munt Floridae, Munt Simeon Destrict and Munt Erebus to list a few) which seem to use this (mis?)translation from English. The Dictionary of the Scots Language does list this as a translation for the noun "mount", but not in the sense of "Mount X" as they seem to be used here. Plus, as early as 2014 there were concerns raised on the Everest page about its possible derogatory meaning. FWIW, scots-online.org does list "munt" as Scots for "mount", and "muntain" for "mountain".

Full disclosure: I created an article on this site on the Sermon on the Mount (which I originally called Sermon on the Munt in keeping with community standards, presuming them to be correct). I do not speak Scots so I do not know if this is an accurate translation, but as native Scots speakers have raised this as an issue and that the Everest page has been moved, there should be consistency at least on this Wikipaedia. --Bangalamania (tauk) 02:35, 9 September 2020 (UTC)

@Bangalamania: All articles have now been moved. (in Inglis) –MJL ‐Tauk‐^☖ 05:25, 9 September 2020 (UTC)

In William Laughton Lorimer's much praised Scots Translation of the New Testament Revelations 14 has: "Syne I luikit, an thair afore my een wis the Lamb staundin on Munt Zion ..."

Of course Lorimer translated the New Testament into Broad Scots. What's being attempted here appears to be to produce a Wikipedia in what's left of that after a hundred or more years of dialect levelling towards standard English. That vernacular mix of surviving Scots forms, non-standard and standard English in not an autonomous ausbau language by any stretch of the imagination. Its local vernacular heteronomous with respect to standard English.

Nogger (tauk) 20:37, 9 September 2020 (UTC)

(en) Pheesicist, Pheesics, and Filosopher.

Re this comment on Reddit regarding the "ee" spellings in Scots Wikipaedia. These particular pages have been subject to much derision. Neither of them seem to exist in any reliable Scots Dictionaries online. "Philosophour" and "Phisik" exist in Auld Scots but seem to have been replaced by their English equivalents in modern Scots. (If I am wrong, I am happy to be corrected) --Bangalamania (tauk) 14:31, 9 September 2020 (UTC)

Also applies to Physeecian, Pheesical chemistry, Pheesical quantity, Pheesical geografie, Pheesical strenth, Pheesical constant. I have moved some pages and categories that use these nonstandard "ee" spellings. --Bangalamania (tauk) 14:37, 9 September 2020 (UTC)

Agreed. "Pheesicist" in particular is on the spellin fettle's todo list, but I don't think there's any objections so feel free to fix it where you see it. my_hat_stinks (tauk) 14:39, 9 September 2020 (UTC)

The "ee" spellings probably represent what's described in the Dictionary of the Scots Language: "§ 45. Romance [i] — advice, fine, cry, sybo (an onion). When the Romance word came into Scots after this change was completed the ee [i] remains as in item, licence, oblige, liberal." [6] Also 1. as [i]: (1) in the stressed vowel of Romance words as civil, city, image, item, licence, minute, oblige, position, etc. (see Weekly Mag. (18 July 1771) 69 and P.L.D. § 45 and p. xliii), and in the ending -ise, as criticeese, idoleeze, etc., now obsol." [7] Which is no surprise after a hundred years or so of dialect levelling.

Nogger (tauk) 20:52, 9 September 2020 (UTC)

Agreed. Here's a complete list of the "phee" an "filo" words and occurrences on Scots wiki (2020-09-01): pheesics (456), pheesical (337), pheesicist (331), pheesiology (62), pheesician (40), pheesically (31), pheesiologist (22), astropheesicist (20), pheesicists (18), astropheesics (11), metapheesics (11), metapheesical (8), biopheesics (6), pheesicians (4), pheesiologically (4), ampheebious (3), geopheesicist (3), biopheesicist (3) and filologist (8), filosofer (233), filosofer's (4), filosofers (26), filosofical (55), filosofie (195), filosopher (27), filosophers (3), filosophical (3). There's not that many, and a handful have already been eliminated, leaving only re-direct pages. Can an admin advise on how to deal with page titles and categories?--Illandancient (tauk) 08:28, 10 September 2020 (UTC)

Invitation to participate in the conversation

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(Inglis) Norlin Airlan and Ulstèr-Scotch

(Inglis) Two things:

1. Can someone please change all references from Norn Iron in the Norlin Airlan (Northern Ireland) article to Norlin Airlan, as that's clearly what is meant here.
2. With regards to articles on this wiki pertaining to the areas on the island of Ireland where Ulstèr-Scotch is the dominant dialect, what is the language policy? For now, I would suggest the main article name at the very least should be in Ulster-Scots, with Lowland Scots in brackets of the article ambiguity is needed. e.g. "Norlin Airlan (Ulstèr-Scotch; kent in Lallans Scots as Northren Ireland) is ane o fower kintras o the Unitit Kinrick." or "The Männystrie o Fowkgates, Airts an Aisedom (Ulstèr-Scotch; kent in Lallans Scots as the Depairtment o Cultur Airts an Leisur) is a depairtment o the Norlin Airlan Executive..."

I am laith to suggest a policy like English Wikipedia's policy on national varieties of English; I think it would be good if the rest of the article was in Scots of whatever dialect, so long as it's consistent. But the name of the article and first mention at least should be in Ulster-Scots, I think. What does the community think? --Bangalamania (tauk) 00:46, 12 September 2020 (UTC)

• I've replaced Norn Iron with Norlin Airlan within that article. I brought up the idea of having a similar policy for dialects with some contributors previously and the consensus was that it's a good principle but not a great concern for most articles right now. Where there might be a conflict or there's a particularly local subject I think it's the right policy to prefer the local byleid. I would note dialectal differences for widely used terms like 'Norlin Airlan' / 'Northren Ireland' or if the words are widely different regionally but not necessarily when there is an official Scots name. For example, I think NI Executive articles could just use Ulster Scots with the official English and Irish names noted in parenthesis (as the English and Irish wikis do). Monospaced (tauk) 08:01, 12 September 2020 (UTC)

@Bangalamania and Monospaced: I think that tagging pages with a template like {{byleid|Ulster Scots}} would be an excellent place to start before we move forward. –MJL ‐Tauk‐^☖ 08:20, 12 September 2020 (UTC)

@Bangalamania and Monospaced: On page 1 of his 1997 Ulster–Scots A Grammar of the Traditional Written and Spoken Language Philip Robinson maintains that "Ulster–Scots or 'Ullans' is a close relative of the language called Scots" further adding "In simple terms, the relationship between Ulster–Scots and Lallans could be compared to the relative positions of Irish and Scottish Gaelic." If that premise is accepted then Ulster-Scots should not be used in the Scots Wikipedia. Its a different language that should have its own Ulster-Scots Wikipedia. If that premise is rejected, then perhaps the bizarre spelling conventions in the Spelling Guide that go with it should also be rejected. An evidence based critique of that can be found here. Nogger (tauk) 18:38, 12 September 2020 (UTC)

Suggestion: Have Lowland Scottish universities take a look at the grammar and spelling and suggest edits

Hello,

I would suggest publicly asking professors and/or their PhD candidates from Scottish universities to take a look at the articles and make changes.

Thanks, WhisperToMe (tauk) 18:21, 25 August 2020 (UTC)

The OU Scots Language and Culture course [8] by experts in the field states that Scots is a non-standard language.[9] That would indicate that any spelling or turn of phrase that can be understood by a Scots-speaker literate in English is as good as any other. Resources for schools inform that "you can spell Scots any way you want" (within reason of course). [10] I suspect that it was assumed that transactional or discursive writing for an encyclopedia is something that Scots would never be used for. An encyclopedia in the standard language to which the non-standard language is heteronomous can be found here.

The Spellin an grammar page suggests following the Report an Recommends o the Scots Spellin Comatee from 20 or so years ago. Why not follow that? Is there a better alternative? If so which?

Nogger (tauk) 18:21, 2 September 2020 (UTC)

(en) I can see where WhisperToMe is coming from, but there are 57k articles, and only handfuls of suitably qualified academics, who will have been pummelled by COVID planning for distant/blended learning. If the academics came to us asking to help, that would be a different matter. As Nogger outlines, there are plenty of resources and references that Scots speakers can use to bring up standards. soothrhins (tauk) 18:49, 2 September 2020 (UTC)

That's true. I was thinking that the academics who are qualified would ask their PhD students or the like to do some of the patrolling/work WhisperToMe (tauk) 13:47, 14 September 2020 (UTC)

(en) Recommending MediaWiki Draft namespace called Scroll

As per [11] and [12] I recommend that a Scots speaker propose a mw:Draft namespace called, for example, "Preliminary" Scroll and/or Jottin, and with at least five years of persistence. One use of such a draftspace which I support is to move everything that hasn't been edited in the past week into draftspace, and then worry about tags, templates, deletion, and bots from there. I don't think there is a faster way to get to 99% Scots in mainspace. Rescuing good Scots from drafts should be more interesting than removing bad Scots from mainspace. James Salsman (tauk) 19:13, 3 September 2020 (UTC)

Update: Native speakers have suggested "Jottin" and "Scroll", I have changed the proposal to reflect that. James Salsman (tauk) 23:03, 4 September 2020 (UTC)

Please see [13]. This is a tried and true solution which would cause the damage to be removed from search engine results, as the deletionists demand, but still allow as much time as needed to decide on further steps, such as any combination of deletion, templating, or categorization. It would be easy to have two draft namespaces, one of which, e.g. Jottin:, results in automatic deletion after a number of months, while the other, e.g. Scroll:, results in deletion after some number of years.

However, this will not happen and so the damage will persist until an appropriate resolution is supported by Scots speakers here. That is not my policy, if is the Mediawiki Foundation's. James Salsman (tauk) 18:18, 9 September 2020 (UTC)

The Broad Scots form of English scroll would appear to be scrow(e) with additional senses. Apparently something to do with L-vocalization. Nogger (tauk) 10:24, 12 September 2020 (UTC)

This section reads like a major proposal as is being discussed by the Wikimedia RfC, and as such should happen there? soothrhins (tauk) 10:30, 12 September 2020 (UTC)

(en) Further to my previous comment (which still stands), I have thought more about this. I'm very concerned that the consequences of such an action are not stated, to explain how it would affect editors trying to cleanup and improve this Wiki.

Irrespective of the outcome of the Wikimedia RfC, new editors have came forward (myself included) to make a start on putting this Wiki right, and on a stronger footing for the future. I would describe our current collective actions as sifting through the current mainspace and correcting, marking (for future correction) or deleting below par content.

I presume that this proposal does the opposite; assumes everything is substandard, and asks editors to sift through content to draw out good articles to return to the mainspace. I could be wrong, but that feels like a larger and more laborious task than our current way of working, it would also require more technical skill which may be a barrier to getting new editors involved.

This might not be the case, but as I referred to before, the consequences of this proposal are not explained. I'm therefore concerned that such a drastic action may do more harm than good. soothrhins (tauk) 09:56, 15 September 2020 (UTC)

[en] Bot RFA

Please see Wikipedia:Requests for adminship/Cliverbot. –MJL ‐Tauk‐^☖ 17:51, 15 September 2020 (UTC)

Establishin 'notability' policy

See proponed here: Wikipedia:Notability
Request for comments and votes for what to call it here: Wikipedia collogue:Notability
Aefauldlie - soothrhins (tauk) 10:11, 20 September 2020 (UTC)

Label article dialect and language quality

Hello there, inspired by other small wikis, I would like to make the following suggestions:

1. Add a label to each page to show in which variant/dialect it is written. This is used on many wikis in non-standardized langauges and prepares the reader/editor. Maybe this could be especially valuable for the Scots Wikipedia, since I hear stories where people wouldn't contribute since they think their Scots is bad just because their Scots is different from that used in a certain page.
2. Mark the "quality" of the Scots used in an article. This--of course--won't help with AG's contributions, but maybe with people who only just start writing Scots. Plus, I would help others find articles that need help language-wise. Such a system is used in the Latin wikipedia.

Just my two cents. --84.182.148.193 (talk) 14:45, 24 September 2020 (UTC) --Andreas (tauk) 18:43, 24 September 2020 (UTC)

I like it! –MJL ‐Tauk‐^☖ 14:54, 24 September 2020 (UTC)

On (1.), aye, but as maist articles ar screived in a kind o general Scots, it wid be maist uiseful if a editor scrieves a page in total Ullans (for example).

On (2.), nice idea, but dinnae ken how ye wid grade quality o a non-standart leid wi oot causin quarrels. Mibbe sumhin ti leuk at lang intae the futur efter the muckle cleanup. soothrhins (tauk) 21:18, 24 September 2020 (UTC)

Point taken, and I kinda agree with your comment on 2.

A didna ken that there was something like a general Scots. I just though it might make sense when I stumbled upon a talk page where person (Glaswegian, iirc) mentioned they didna ken "ken". Also, there are several ways to design such a system: You could just go with the major dialect groups (insular, northern, central, southern, Ullans and Doric). That is if they aren't purely an academic thing and people know about them. Or you could use a "braid", "general" and "urban" system. In both cases you could allow for a variable where the authors could add their town or county. Apart from Ullans, something like Caithness Scots might also be worth labeling. Anywho, it's just something that came to mind from reading comments here and elsewhere. --Andreas (tauk) 22:20, 24 September 2020 (UTC) Btw, is there an article in Ullans?

A hae seen yin scrieved in Ullans an non-Ullans on the same page (an labelled). Can a mind whit it was? No! A hink thare's miles in settin sumhin up lik {{byleid|freetext ti pit the byleid in here}} (a bit lik Template:aboot), whaur free text gies room for nuance. soothrhins (tauk) 22:39, 24 September 2020 (UTC)

If Wikipedia is supposed to be an online encyclopedia that anybody can edit is it then expected that edits to a page with a "which variant/dialect it is written" label are done in the labelled variant/dialect? The edits might be being made by somebody unfamiliar with the labelled variant/dialect or who chooses to spell it differently than has already been done. A veritable can of worms attempting a project typical of an Ausbau language with language varieties that effectively function as local varieties of colloquial English spoken in Scotland that are ultimately heteronomous with respect to Standard English. Nevertheless, it seems that when this Wiki was started attemps were made to address that issue. Nogger (tauk)

(Looks like @Nogger: added their answer to #1 after I already replied to their answer ad #2, so I'll reply to this one separately.)

Like I said in my reply to yours below, I know where you're coming from since I contributed to the Bavarian Wikipedia in the past. The situation of Bavarian is virtually the same as that of Scots in that is not standardised, not taught in schools etc. (It's not even recognised as a regional language by Bavaria or Austria, so congrats on that part, I guess). I'm merely sharing experiences made in other similar projects. With that out of the way, I could certainly give you the details of the language policy over there, but I think every community should figure out its own way to handle language use. If you want the details anyway, just let me know. On a separate note, I would love to know what makes Scots an ausbau language rather than an abstand one. If you find the time, please leave me a note on my collogue page. Thanks! --Andreas (tauk) 00:50, 25 September 2020 (UTC)

It would certainly be a challenge to Mark the "quality" of the Scots used in an article where, according to experts in the field such as those who created the The OU Scots Language and Culture course [14], Scots is a non-standard language.[15] That would indicate that any spelling or turn of phrase that can be understood by a Scots-speaker literate in English is as good as any other. Consequently resources for schools inform that "you can spell Scots any way you want" (within reason of course). [16] I suspect that it was assumed that transactional or discursive writing for an encyclopedia is something that Scots would never be used for. On the other hand, the Wikipedia article Modern Scots mentions "spellings ... based on ... prestigious literary conventions". Nogger (tauk) 22:23, 24 September 2020 (UTC)

While I like the idea of spellings ... based on ... prestigious literary conventions, I totally understand where you're coming from. I used to write for the Bavarian (my mouther tongue) and Neapolitan (my then SO's mother tongue) Wikipedias. I know that regional languages like these and Scots--which are close to their region's "prestige variety" and often considered dialects thereof--are not standardised nor taught in schools. I know that your head easily switches to the "prestige variety" as soon as you pick up a pen or put your hands down on a keyboard. That's what the "quality check" should focus on: how English is the Scots on a page--especially grammar-wise? This reminds me of another method we use on the Bavarian and Alemannic Wikipedias: a Help: page (entitled How to write good Bavarian/Alemannic) which explains the major grammatical differences between these varieties and Standard German, simple things you might get wrong when you aren't used to wrting them. Such a page could also be linked to in the welcome wagon/messages.

I don't know, just trying to help. Let me know what you think. --Andreas (tauk) 23:01, 24 September 2020 (UTC)

There's 50,000 pages, and not enough native mother-tongue contemporary Scots speaking editors on wikipedia. If there was a large pool of enthusiastic domestic native speakers involved then this wouldn't be a problem, but as it is the non-natives who rarely hear spoken Scots vastly outnumber them. I'm not a native speaker myself, but I'm sceptical of the merits of using 18t Century sources, the Online Scots Dictionary and even the Scots Spelling Committee, because a modern contemporary Scots speaker, Jimmy on the Clackmannan omnibus, can turn round and say that it looks like nonsense, nae one talks like that.
As a counterpoint, professional Scots authors and book publishers are staking their likelihoods and careers on getting spellings and grammar right, and not spouting nonsense. There's only a couple them, and only two or three Scots leid books published a year. --Illandancient (tauk) 08:25, 25 September 2020 (UTC)

It is certainly likely that Jimmy on the Clackmannan omnibus won't be speaking the Broad Scots that Survived into the middle of the 20th century or be familiar with the vibrant literary tradition that accompanied it before rapid dialect levelling occured. It was that Broad Scots which is described in the introduction to the 1985 Concise Scots Dictionary as having "linguistic distinctiveness" and a "remarkable literature" among other features which are "attributes of a language rather than a dialect." Since the onset of widespread dialect levelling after WWII most folk speak various intermediate mixtures of residual Broad Scots and Standard English/colloquial influences from throughout the English speaking world which is described as "the country's everyday vernacular, but now no more than that" in the introduction to the Concise Scots Dictionary mentioned above. That intermediate mixture was perhaps not regarded as Scots at all when C. Macafee concluded in the 'Edinburgh Companion to Scots' (p.51) that by the end of the twentieth century Scots was at an advanced stage of language death over much of Lowland Scotland.

The same "nae one talks like that" perhaps also applies in the world inhabited by John on the Millwall omnibus. When perusing the English Wikipedia John sees English written in high register aureate transactional prose rather than a representation of his habitual colloquial English. Years of schooling in Standard English transactional writing make John on the Millwall omnibus aware of that and enables others to produce it. Should the Scots Wikipedia be drawing on the Broad Scots literary tradition in order to educate Jimmy on the Clackmannan omnibus and help him reclaim his linguistic heritage or should the Scots Wikipedia be written in a colloquial first-person narrative drawing on that vernacular mix of residual Broad Scots and Standard and Non-standard English along with other colloquial influences from throughout the English speaking world?

The fact that most books currently published in Scots (rather than having Scots in dialogue and the narrative in English) are creative writing for children would indicate that many view Scots (of any kind) as an unsuitable medium for non-fiction transactional prose. Which is probably why Jimmy on the Clackmannan omnibus, and many like him, consult the English Wikipedia rather than the Scots one. Nogger (tauk) 20:53, 25 September 2020 (UTC)

Server time is off by an hour?

The times logged when making changes seem to be an hour behind. It's 2:18 BST as of saving this. --Andreas (tauk) 01:19, 25 September 2020 (UTC)

Prolly loggin in GMT, that Scotland uises hauf the year. Nae shuir if it's possible tae change this CiphriusKane (tauk) 01:21, 25 September 2020 (UTC)

The server time is UTC+0000, but you can change your time zone in your settings. Bear in mind this will only change the time displayed to you, it will not affect where the time is displayed as part of the page contents. If you see a time stamp in someone's signature on a talk page, for example, you'll still have to account for the difference yourself. Signatures will usually be tagged "UTC" so you know you might need to account for differences, like so: my_hat_stinks (tauk) 14:24, 26 September 2020 (UTC)

RfC on date airticles

A hae foond twa muckle problems wi the date airticles, e.g. 1 Januar:

1. fair feck o Scotched English
2. no or bare referencin on leets (wi a tot o thoosands o events/births/daiths)

If it wis jist 1, that wid be no different tae {{fixscots}}. But ti ma pense, baith maks a kittle (see 5).

A propone ettlin throu ilka date airticle an:

• rid ony events/births/daiths wi no reference
• apairt fae ony that airt tae the date, e.g. the non date relatit pages
• pit thon remainin ower intae Scots
• eikin references
• fendin the airticle, so anely autoconfirmed users can edit (mony Scotched/no reference contribs ar fae IP editors the nou)

Thochts? soothrhins (tauk) 21:22, 16 September 2020 (UTC)

Aye, A'm happy wi aw this. Better aan jest leavin em open fur edit fermin CiphriusKane (tauk) 05:56, 28 September 2020 (UTC)

Growth team experiments on your wiki?

Hello!

I'm Trizek (WMF). I work as a community relations specialist for the Wikimedia Foundation, and in particular with the Growth team.

I'm contacting you after the recent revelations about your wiki. My goal is to offer some help.

The Growth team's goal is to create tools that would help newcomers, and you apparently have more newcomers these days. The objective is to increase the retention of new editors.

This is the newcomer homepage (displayed using Czech language)

We have created several tools to help them, and also to help community members who help them:

• Newcomer tasks: a feed of task suggestions that help newcomers learn to edit. Newcomers make productive edits through this feed. Also, they are more likely to stay on Wikipedia after making edits using this feature!
• Newcomer homepage: a special page that hosts the "newcomer tasks" and is a good place for a newcomer to get started. They get the contact with an experienced mentor who can help them.
• Help panel: a platform to provide resources to newcomers while they are editing. If they do suggested tasks, they are step-by-step guided.

These tools are already available on some wikis, you can also try them on https://test.wikipedia.org.

We can deploy these tools on Scots Wikipedia. What do you think? I'm looking for people who could help working on translations and also to check on the configuration. What you have to do is explained on this page. It is mostly about translations, identifying useful templates and have a list of mentors ready to help. I can also assist you anytime with it.

I'm looking forward your reply, hoping for a great collaboration. Let me know if you have any question about this project! Of course, please move or share this message if needed.

Thank you, Trizek (WMF) (tauk) 13:06, 8 September 2020 (UTC)

@Trizek (WMF): if you had to choose between two new non-content namespaces, "Scroll:" and "Jottin:" as opposed to both or none, which do you think would be the most useful for increasing the proportion of Scots in the Scots Wikipedia? James Salsman (tauk) 00:28, 10 September 2020 (UTC)

(in Inglis) @Trizek (WMF): I've been interested in this since you posted it, and have mentioned it here and there on and off wiki. I think generally there is interest in some of what the Growth team has to offer, if the comments on our current RfC about whether to disallow IP editors from creating articles. I'm not at all qualified to be speaking on behalf of the community, and can't offer to translate, but wanted to bring this up so some more people had a look at it. James Hyett (tauk) 20:53, 28 September 2020 (UTC)

[en] Thank you for the highlight @James Hyett. Growth team tools may be a really good opportunity to help new users to make their first steps and stay on Scots Wikipedia. Let me know if the community wishes to adopt them. Maybe an RfC would help? Trizek (WMF) (tauk) 12:40, 29 September 2020 (UTC)

The message at the tap o the page

The message at the tap o the page says:

"(in Scots) Followin recent revelations, Scots Wikipedia is presently reviewin its airticles for muckle leid inaccuracies. (FAQ)"

Wad it no be mair Scots tae say:

"(in Scots) Follaein racent clearances, the Scots Wikipedia is praisently reviewin its airticles for muckle leid inaccuracies. (FAQ)"

?

Munci (tauk) 16:02, 29 September 2020 (UTC)

Wiki of functions naming contest

Please help translate to your language

Hello. Please help pick a name for the new Wikimedia wiki project. This project will be a wiki where the community can work together on a library of functions. The community can create new functions, read about them, discuss them, and share them. Some of these functions will be used to help create language-independent Wikipedia articles that can be displayed in any language, as part of the Abstract Wikipedia project. But functions will also be usable in many other situations.

There will be two rounds of voting, each followed by legal review of candidates, with voting beginning on 29 September and 27 October. Our goal is to have a final project name selected on 8 December. If you would like to participate, then please learn more and vote now at meta-wiki. Thank ye! --Quiddity (WMF)

21:22, 29 September 2020 (UTC)

RfC on delisting guid/featurt airticles

At the current time, there's a couple of standards for quality on the wiki, primarily guid articles and featurt airticles. Given Leidgate and the abysmal quality of some of these articles (see Betula pubescens, which was a "guid airticle" until recently), I'm proposing all featurt airticles prior to October 2020 (i.e. all bar Findhorn) and all guid airticles be delisted and that we set up some process for assigning these tags. As an additional note, some articles listed as "guid airticles" had the tags added by the article creators due to the English wiki having that status (see: Timbaland) CiphriusKane (tauk) 10:09, 1 October 2020 (UTC)

Seems lik the richt thing tae dae, mibbie we should delete Template:Good article an aw, an anely use Template:Guid airticle tae discourage it's use whan lifit ower as pairt o en-wiki owersettins. Monospaced (tauk) 15:41, 1 October 2020 (UTC)

(in Inglis) Moving pages (can't do it myself)

(in Inglis) Erse Republican Airmy -> Irish Republican Army. Definitely a neologism coined on this wiki which can't be found in any Scots or Ulster Scots sources. Probably best to stick with the English as the official title of the page with Erse Republican Airmy in brackets. (n.b. this doesn't refer to the PIRA, which I previously moved to PIRA (Provos); if folk want to move this page then I understand).

Laird's Prayer -> Lord's Prayer. While "Laird" has been used in some older Scots translates (e.g. William Laughton Lorimer), "Lord" is the term used by the Kirk in their Prayer in Scots section. This was actually mentioned in the Leidgate discussion on Wikimedia. --Bangalamania (tauk) 20:56, 2 October 2020 (UTC)

@Bangalamania: on it. soothrhins (tauk) 21:36, 2 October 2020 (UTC)

Call for feedback about Wikimedia Foundation Bylaws changes and Board candidate rubric

Hello. Apologies if you are not reading this message in your native language. Please help translate to your language.

Today the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees starts two calls for feedback. One is about changes to the Bylaws mainly to increase the Board size from 10 to 16 members. The other one is about a trustee candidate rubric to introduce new, more effective ways to evaluate new Board candidates. The Board welcomes your comments through 26 October. For more details, check the full announcement.

Thank ye! Qgil-WMF (talk) 17:17, 7 October 2020 (UTC)

Scots & Wikisource

(in Inglis) Bit o chat over on the Facebook group about Scots language texts on Wikisource; there's a Texts in Scots category, and a Scots Portal as a starting point. Thought folks here might be interested. Transcription is a relatively easy entry point into editing on wikki, and doesn't require a high level of Scots language proficiency, so perhaps a good entry/learning point for folks with a lower Scots proficiency / who want to learn more. Happy to point folks in the direction of training materials / answer questions if I can. Scotland's had a good showing on Wikisource recently, what with the National Library of Scotland's lockdown project on the Scottish Chapbook collection. Relevant articles on sco.wiki can be enriched with links to source texts on wikisource, too... Sara Thomas (WMUK) (tauk) 12:04, 16 October 2020 (UTC)

Politics news on 'e Newsins?

A'm wunnerin gin news tae dae wi politics wad be alloud on the Newsins bit? A wis hinkin thit the Welsh border closin wad be newswirthy here, bit wisna shuir anent the policy on politics news an wis telt tae come here an ask yese?

(in Inglis) So I'm wondering if news relating to politics would be allowed on the Newsins? I figured that maybe the Welsh border closing would be newsworthy here, and I was told to come here to ask what the policy/stance is on political news? -Cobra! (tauk) 23:00, 15 October 2020 (UTC)

Uiser:Cobra 3000, as I see nobody answered you (yet), I think you can go ahead and report on any political news you think might be relevant. I don't see why not. And if anyone objects, then they will hopefully let us know. But in the meantime, I think you can go ahead. Thanks for your hard work, Sije (tauk) 18:59, 18 October 2020 (UTC)

(in Inglis) Alrighty then! -Cobra! (tauk) 19:36, 18 October 2020 (UTC)

Important: maintenance operation on October 27

Read this message in another language • Please help translate to your language

The Wikimedia Foundation tests the switch between its first and secondary data centers. This will make sure that Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia wikis can stay online even after a disaster. To make sure everything is working, the Wikimedia Technology department needs to do a planned test. This test will show if they can reliably switch from one data centre to the other. It requires many teams to prepare for the test and to be available to fix any unexpected problems.

They will switch all traffic back to the primary data center on Tuesday, October 27 2020.

Unfortunately, because of some limitations in MediaWiki, all editing must stop while the switch is made. We apologize for this disruption, and we are working to minimize it in the future.

You will be able to read, but not edit, all wikis for a short period of time.

• You will not be able to edit for up to an hour on Tuesday, October 27. The test will start at 14:00 UTC (14:00 WET, 15:00 CET, 10:00 EDT, 19:30 IST, 07:00 PDT, 23:00 JST, and in New Zealand at 03:00 NZDT on Wednesday October 28).
• If you try to edit or save during these times, you will see an error message. We hope that no edits will be lost during these minutes, but we can't guarantee it. If you see the error message, then please wait until everything is back to normal. Then you should be able to save your edit. But, we recommend that you make a copy of your changes first, just in case.

Other effects:

• Background jobs will be slower and some may be dropped. Red links might not be updated as quickly as normal. If you create an article that is already linked somewhere else, the link will stay red longer than usual. Some long-running scripts will have to be stopped.
• There will be code freezes for the week of October 26, 2020. Non-essential code deployments will not happen.

This project may be postponed if necessary. You can read the schedule at wikitech.wikimedia.org. Any changes will be announced in the schedule. There will be more notifications about this. A banner will be displayed on all wikis 30 minutes before this operation happens. Please share this information with your community.

-- Trizek (WMF) (talk) 17:11, 21 October 2020 (UTC)

RfC on "guid airticle" usage

Point 1: Given the lack of decent articles on the wiki, I'd like to propose that we assign "guid airticle" status to potential featured articles. When we reach a point where we've got enough good articles to be a bit more picky, we can have a discussion about redefining "guid airticles".
Point 2: I'm proposing we award "guid airticle" status to The GFT, The Reid Road and George Square. These three should hopefully tide us over until we get some more quality articles CiphriusKane (tauk) 10:46, 1 October 2020 (UTC)

ad Point 1: +1. And I'd suggest to use one-tier system, at least until that redifining you propose happens. Maybe give a more Scots name (Braw airticles)? --Andreas (tauk) 15:56, 1 October 2020 (UTC)

ad Point 2: I nominate River Dee, Aiberdeenshire, Findhorn and Ben Lomond. --Andreas (tauk) 16:49, 1 October 2020 (UTC)

RE Point 1: Clarified in the Discord server, repeating here. The proposal is we assign "guid airticle" status to articles which can be featurt airticles and allowing admins to pick the next featurt airticle from the guid airticle pool. This would mean that GAs are our best and FAs are GA articles we've promoted (as opposed to the enwiki system where GAs are decent articles and FAs are the best), so the proposed "one-tier system" would be counterintuitive

RE Point 2: I'll clarify in the other RfC that Findhorn will be exempt from the FA cleansing and should automatically be awarded GA status as per Point 1. I'm happy with Ben Lomond but will refrain from commenting on River Dee, Aiberdeenshire given I wrote most of it CiphriusKane (tauk) 02:42, 2 October 2020 (UTC)

Actually, I'm opposing River Dee, Aiberdeenshire, cause I ken the language can be improved (ideally in Doric) and should be CiphriusKane (tauk) 22:29, 26 October 2020 (UTC)

AbuseFilter notice: rmspecials() will no longer remove whitespace when used in filters

Hello,

Apologies if you are not reading this message in your native language. Please help translate to your language.

We are making a change to the AbuseFilter extension, which may impact the behavior of some existing filters. The rmspecials() function currently removes spaces in addition to special characters. We will change it such that it will only remove special characters. The existing rmwhitespace() can be used to remove spaces whenever applicable.

As reported on https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/P12854 we believe at least one filter on your wiki has been identified to use the rmspecials() function. Please consider updating these filters by wrapping rmspecials() inside rmwhitespace() like this: rmwhitespace(rmspecials(....))

We need you to update the relevant filters within 2 weeks of this notice. If one of the community members with proper access is volunteering to take this on, we ask them to please respond below and notify User:Huji in their response or in the edit summary. If we don't hear back from you within 2 weeks, Huji will edit the relevant filters on your wiki per the global abuse filter maintainer policy, to ensure the filters won't break once the change is implemented. Thank you for your consideration!

Best regards,

--User:Huji (Collogue) 23:48, 26 October 2020 (UTC), sent via MediaWiki message delivery

Wiki of functions naming contest - Round 2

Hello. Reminder: Please help to choose the name for the new Wikimedia wiki project - the library of functions. The finalist vote starts today. The finalists for the name are: Wikicode, Wikicodex, Wikifunctions, Wikifusion, Wikilambda, Wikimedia Functions. If you would like to participate, then please learn more and vote now at Meta-wiki. Thank ye! --Quiddity (WMF)

22:10, 5 November 2020 (UTC)

(in Inglis) What does your wiki need in the next 10 years? 2030 Celtic Knot discussion

Hey folks. We'd really like sco.wiki input on this conversation!

Join Wikimedia UK in November for a Celtic Knot-focused community discussion on the next ten years of our movement.

We'll run a 2 hr online meeting for editors and community organisers working on Celtic Knot languages within the UK (e.g. Welsh, Scots, Cornish, Scottish Gaelic, Irish) to discuss priorities and wishes we have about the future of these communities. Is improving user experience a priority? How about better safety and inclusion? Or developing community leaders within your wiki? Let's discuss what's most important for your community to thrive.

You don't need to be a top contributor - experiences of challenges within your wiki, or a desire to help your community, is enough! Hope to see you there. Register by filling in this form and we'll follow up with joining info a few days in advance. Thanks! Sara Thomas (WMUK) (tauk) 13:48, 6 November 2020 (UTC)

Cleanup on Wikidata

(in Inglis) Now that we're into the mass-deletion stage, I've been working on cleaning up Wikidata labels (~item titles) in Scots, which was one of the concerns raised during the meta RFC. Because Wikidata items automatically take their titles from the Scots Wikipedia pages, there's a risk that bad article titles from here (scotched English, strange spellings, etc) will persist on Wikidata, make their way into translation projects, etc.

I've so far cleaned up and checked the Scots labels for about 4000 of the items deleted by MJL in Wikipedia:Votes for deletion/Proposal 2, batches A & B - these are the easy ones, eg people's names. About 500 are places in Scotland and I'll sort them out manually using the Gazetteer to make sure they're correct. There are about ~6500 left. My feeling is that since we're deleting all the articles as potentially bad Scots, we should probably remove the Scots labels as well. I suggested this in the meta discussion and didn't have any objections, but wanted to flag it up here as well in case of concerns. If not I'll go ahead and remove the rest of the labels in the next few days. Andrew Gray (tauk) 19:29, 3 October 2020 (UTC)

(en) I've been doing this (manually) as best I can when deleting/moving pages. Either correcting or if there is any doubt removing it. I don't know enough about how all of Wikidata works, but I see no problem with your suggestion to clean it up. soothrhins (tauk) 20:56, 3 October 2020 (UTC)

(in Inglis) Happy to point folks in the direction of some wikidata training materials, if that would help? Or could run an intro-to-Wikidata session on Zoom, if folks were interested? I'm also advised that translating key properties (there's about 3000 key ones) is quite helpful for a language. Sara Thomas (WMUK) (tauk) 11:41, 16 October 2020 (UTC)

• Update a month later: every item deleted since 6th October has had the label blanked (and most of the ones deleted since 1 October as well). I'll re-run this script periodically to catch the next wave of mass deletions. Next up - resynchronising names to take account of page moves. Andrew Gray (tauk) 14:47, 13 November 2020 (UTC)

Community Wishlist Survey 2021

The 2021 Community Wishlist Survey is now open! This survey is the process where communities decide what the Community Tech team should work on over the next year. We encourage everyone to submit proposals until the deadline on 30 November, or comment on other proposals to help make them better. The communities will vote on the proposals between 8 Dizember and 21 Dizember.

The Community Tech team is focused on tools for experienced Wikimedia editors. You can write proposals in any language, and we will translate them for you. Thank you, and we look forward to seeing your proposals!

SGrabarczuk (WMF) 05:52, 20 November 2020 (UTC)

Global bot policy proposal: invitation to a Meta discussion

Hello!

I apologize for sending a message in English. Please help translate to your language. According to the list, your wiki project currently is opted in to the global bot policy. Under this policy, bots that fix double redirects or maintain interwiki links are allowed to operate under a global bot flag that is assigned directly by the stewards.

As the Wikimedia projects developed, the need for the current global bot policy decreased, and in the past years, no bots were appointed via that policy. That is mainly given Wikidata were estabilished in 2013, and it is no longer necessary to have dozens of bots that maintain interwiki links.

A proposal was made at Meta-Wiki, which proposes that the stewards will be authorized to determine whether an uncontroversial task may be assigned a global bot flag. The stewards already assign permissions that are more impactful on many wikis, namely, global sysops and global renamers, and I do not think that trust should be an issue. The stewards will assign the permission only to time-proven bots that are already approved at a number of projects, like ListeriaBot.

By this message, I would like to invite you to comment in the global RFC, to voice your opinion about this matter.

Thank you for your time.

Best regards,
Martin Urbanec (Collogue) 11:49, 24 November 2020 (UTC)

Request for bot approval: InternetArchiveBot

(Inglis) Hello everyone. Recently I have configured InternetArchiveBot so that it can run on Scots Wikipedia, and I would like to request approval to run it here. It is approved to run on over 40 Wikimedia wikis to replace dead links on articles to archives in the Wayback Machine. The bot would run continuously and make approximately 60 edits per minute. Admins can also adjust the settings and translate bot messages on this configuration page. Please let me know if you have any questions. Thank you, Harej (tauk) 23:47, 24 November 2020 (UTC)

Wikidata descriptions changes to be included more often in Recent Changes and Watchlist

Sorry for sending this message in English. Translations are available on this page. Feel free to translate it in more languages!

As you may know, you can include changes coming from Wikidata in your Watchlist and Recent Changes (in your preferences). Until now, this feature didn’t always include changes made on Wikidata descriptions due to the way Wikidata tracks the data used in a given article.

Starting on December 3rd, the Watchlist and Recent Changes will include changes on the descriptions of Wikidata Items that are used in the pages that you watch. This will only include descriptions in the language of your wiki to make sure that you’re only seeing changes that are relevant to your wiki.

This improvement was requested by many users from different projects. We hope that it can help you monitor the changes on Wikidata descriptions that affect your wiki and participate in the effort of improving the data quality on Wikidata for all Wikimedia wikis and beyond.

Note: if you didn’t use the Wikidata watchlist integration feature for a long time, feel free to give it another chance! The feature has been improved since the beginning and the content it displays is more precise and useful than at the beginning of the feature in 2015.

If you encounter any issue or want to provide feedback, feel free to use this Phabricator ticket. Thanks!

Lea Lacroix (WMDE) 14:39, 30 November 2020 (UTC)

(in Inglis) Scots Language Centre survey - language support for Wiki editors

Afternoon all, the Scots Language Centre have put up a survey, they're looking to gain info on what language support folks here might appreciate in terms of helping to contribute to the Wiki. Would appreciate your feedback! survey can be found here. Sara Thomas (WMUK) (tauk) 13:47, 2 Dizember 2020 (UTC)

2020 Coolest Tool Award Ceremony on December 11th

Hello all,

The ceremony of the 2020 Wikimedia Coolest Tool Award will take place virtually on Friday, December 11th, at 17:00 GMT. This award is highlighting tools that have been nominated by contributors to the Wikimedia projects, and the ceremony will be a nice moment to show appreciation to the tools developers and maybe discover new tools!

You will find more information here about the livestream and the discussions channels. Thanks for your attention, Lea Lacroix (WMDE) 10:55, 7 Dizember 2020 (UTC)

(in Inglis) December editathon - with language support from the Scots Language Centre

Hey folks, really happy to say that the next Scots wiki editathon (12th & 13th December) will be supported by the Scots Language Centre. There'll be folks along on Zoom on Saturday 12th, 12-3, to offer language support and advice. You can book a place on Eventbrite here, and the on-wiki event page is here. We'll be looking at Winter holidays, and the Define space. Hope to see you there! Sara Thomas (WMUK) (tauk) 11:32, 9 Dizember 2020 (UTC)

(in Inglis) Sunday 13th December - extra zoom session with the Scots Language Centre!

We've added another session for the editathon this weekend, with the folks from the SLC. Join us on Zoom for editing 12-3 on Sunday now too; we can help with wiki and language queries :) Book your place on Eventbrite here. Sara Thomas (WMUK) (tauk) 13:30, 11 Dizember 2020 (UTC)

Community Wishlist Survey 2021

We invite all registered users to vote on the 2021 Community Wishlist Survey. You can vote from now until 21 December for as many different wishes as you want.

In the Survey, wishes for new and improved tools for experienced editors are collected. After the voting, we will do our best to grant your wishes. We will start with the most popular ones.

We, the Community Tech, are one of the Wikimedia Foundation teams. We create and improve editing and wiki moderation tools. What we work on is decided based on results of the Community Wishlist Survey. Once a year, you can submit wishes. After two weeks, you can vote on the ones that you're most interested in. Next, we choose wishes from the survey to work on. Some of the wishes may be granted by volunteer developers or other teams.

We are waiting for your votes. Thank you!

SGrabarczuk (WMF)

15:03, 11 Dizember 2020 (UTC)

Image policies

The noo, we've nae haed ony formal image policy fae fit a kin tell an hae jist been uisin enwiki's image policies, sic as fair uiss an non-free content. Ar we happy tae keep up wi iss practice pendin a formal policy draftin? These images hae been uised on the groonds ae Wikipaedia's servers bein in the US, an a'm happy tae keep up wi iss but hink we shid discuss fit tae dae wi warks oreeginatin in the UK still athin copyricht, sic as pentins CiphriusKane (tauk) 19:15, 23 December 2020 (UTC)

(in Inglis) Wikilearn courses in Identifying & Addressing Harassment, & Partnership Building

Morning all - these courses may be of interest to folks here, being run by the Community Development Team at the Foundation. The first is aimed at admins & those with advanced user rights, and the second at those interested in building programmatic & organisational partnerships. Deadline for applications is Jan 14th. More details on the meta page here. Sara Thomas (WMUK) (tauk) 10:12, 7 Januar 2021 (UTC)

Leet o unused files / (en) List of unused files

(in Inglis) Is anyone able to make a list report of unused non-free files (like this)? It would make it a quicker process for admins to delete them. soothrhins (tauk) 14:24, 17 Januar 2021 (UTC)

Moving Wikimania 2021 to a Virtual Event

Hello. Apologies if you are not reading this message in your native language. Please help translate to your language. Thank ye!

Wikimania will be a virtual event this year, and hosted by a wide group of community members. Whenever the next in-person large gathering is possible again, the ESEAP Core Organizing Team will be in charge of it. Stay tuned for more information about how you can get involved in the planning process and other aspects of the event. Please read the longer version of this announcement on wikimedia-l.

ESEAP Core Organizing Team, Wikimania Steering Committee, Wikimedia Foundation Events Team, 15:16, 27 Januar 2021 (UTC)

Project Grant Open Call

This is the announcement for the Project Grants program open call that started on January 11, with the submission deadline of February 10, 2021.
This first open call will be focussed on Community Organizing proposals. A second open call focused on research and software proposals is scheduled from February 15 with a submission deadline of March 16, 2021.

For the Round 1 open call, we invite you to propose grant applications that fall under community development and organizing (offline and online) categories. Project Grant funds are available to support individuals, groups, and organizations to implement new experiments and proven ideas, from organizing a better process on your wiki, coordinating a campaign or editathon series to providing other support for community building. We offer the following resources to help you plan your project and complete a grant proposal:

• Weekly proposals clinics via Zoom during the Open Call. Join us for #Upcoming_Proposal_Clinics|real-time discussions with Program Officers and select thematic experts and get live feedback about your Project Grants proposal. We’ll answer questions and help you make your proposal better. We also offer these support pages to help you build your proposal:
• Video tutorials for writing a strong application
  
• General planning page for Project Grants
  
• Program guidelines and criteria
  

Program officers are also available to offer individualized proposal support upon request. Contact us if you would like feedback or more information.

We are excited to see your grant ideas that will support our community and make an impact on the future of Wikimedia projects. Put your idea into motion, and submit your proposal by February 10, 2021!

Please feel free to get in touch with questions about getting started with your grant application, or about serving on the Project Grants Committee. Contact us at projectgrantsTemplate:Atwikimedia.org. Please help us translate this message to your local language. MediaWiki message delivery (tauk) 08:01, 28 Januar 2021 (UTC)

New Wikipedia Library Collections Available Now (February 2021)

Hello Wikimedians!

The TWL owl says sign up today!

The Wikipedia Library is announcing new free, full-access, accounts to reliable sources as part of our research access program. You can sign up to access research materials on the Library Card platform:

• Taxmann – Taxation and law database
• PNAS – Official journal of the National Academy of Sciences
• EBSCO – New Arabic and Spanish language databases added

We have a wide array of other collections available, and a significant number now no longer require individual applications to access! Read more in our blog post.

Do better research and help expand the use of high quality references across Wikipedia projects!

This message was delivered via the Global Mass Message tool to The Wikipedia Library Global Delivery List.

--12:57, 1 Februar 2021 (UTC)

Wiki Loves Folklore 2021 is back!

Please help translate to your language

You are humbly invited to participate in the Wiki Loves Folklore 2021 an international photography contest organized on Wikimedia Commons to document folklore and intangible cultural heritage from different regions, including, folk creative activities and many more. It is held every year from the 1st till the 28th of February.

You can help in enriching the folklore documentation on Commons from your region by taking photos, audios, videos, and submitting them in this commons contest.

Please support us in translating the project page and a banner message to help us spread the word in your native language.

Kind regards,

Wiki loves Folklore International Team

MediaWiki message delivery (tauk) 13:25, 6 Februar 2021 (UTC)

Feminism & Folklore 1 February - 31 March

Please help translate to your language

Greetings!

You are invited to participate in Feminism and Folklore writing contest. This year Feminism and Folklore will focus on feminism, women's biographies and gender-focused topics for the project in league with Wiki Loves Folklore gender gap focus with folk culture theme on Wikipedia. folk activities, folk games, folk cuisine, folk wear, fairy tales, folk plays, folk arts, folk religion, mythology, etc.

You can help us in enriching the folklore documentation on Wikipedia from your region by creating or improving articles centered on folklore around the world, including, but not limited to folk festivals, folk dances, folk music, women and queer personalities in folklore, folk culture (folk artists, folk dancers, folk singers, folk musicians, folk game athletes, women in mythology, women warriors in folklore, witches and witch-hunting, fairy tales and more. You can contribute to new articles or translate from the list of suggested articles here.

You can also support us in translating the project page and help us spread the word in your native language.

Learn more about the contest and prizes from our project page. Thank you.

Feminism and Folklore team,

Joy Agyepong (talk) 02:40, 16 Februar 2021 (UTC)

Proposal: Set two-letter project shortcuts as alias to project namespace globally

Please help translate to your language

Hello everyone,

I apologize for posting in English. I would like to inform everyone that I created a new global request for comment (GRFC) at Meta Wiki, which may affect your project: m:Requests for comment/Set short project namespace aliases by default globally.

In this GRFC, I propose that two-project shortcuts for project names will become a default alias for the project namespace. For instance, on all Wikipedias, WP will be an alias to the Wikipedia: namespace (and similar for other projects). Full list is available in the GRFC.

This is already the case for Wikivoyages, and many individual projects asked for this alias to be implemented. I believe this makes it easier to access the materials in the project namespace, as well as creating shortcuts like WP:NPOV, as well as helps new projects to use this feature, without having to figure out how to request site configuration changes first.

As far as I can see, Wikipedia currently does not have such an alias set. This means that such an alias will be set for you, if the GRFC is accepted by the global community.

I would like to ask all community members to participate in the request for comment at Meta-Wiki, see m:Requests for comment/Set short project namespace aliases by default globally.

Please feel free to ask me if you have any questions about this proposal.

Best regards,
--Martin Urbanec (talk) 14:12, 18 Februar 2021 (UTC)

Wikifunctions logo contest

Hello. Please help tae choose a design concept for the logo o the new Wikifunctions wiki. Votin starts the day an will be open for 2 weeks. If ye wad lik tae participate, than please learn mair an vote now at Meta-Wiki. Thank ye! --Quiddity (WMF)

01:47, 2 Mairch 2021 (UTC)

Universal Code of Conduct – 2021 consultations

Universal Code of Conduct Phase 2

Please help translate to your language

The Universal Code of Conduct (UCoC) provides a universal baseline of acceptable behavior for the entire Wikimedia movement and all its projects. The project is currently in Phase 2, outlining clear enforcement pathways. You can read more about the whole project on its project page.

Drafting Committee: Call for applications

The Wikimedia Foundation is recruiting volunteers to join a committee to draft how to make the code enforceable. Volunteers on the committee will commit between 2 and 6 hours per week from late April through July and again in October and November. It is important that the committee be diverse and inclusive, and have a range of experiences, including both experienced users and newcomers, and those who have received or responded to, as well as those who have been falsely accused of harassment.

To apply and learn more about the process, see Universal Code of Conduct/Drafting committee.

2021 community consultations: Notice and call for volunteers / translators

From 5 April – 5 May 2021 there will be conversations on many Wikimedia projects about how to enforce the UCoC. We are looking for volunteers to translate key material, as well as to help host consultations on their own languages or projects using suggested key questions. If you are interested in volunteering for either of these roles, please contact us in whatever language you are most comfortable.

To learn more about this work and other conversations taking place, see Universal Code of Conduct/2021 consultations.

-- Xeno (WMF) (talk) 22:06, 5 Apryle 2021 (UTC)

Global bot policy changes

Hello!

I apologize for sending a message in English. Please help translate to your language. According to the list, your wiki project is currently opted in to the global bot policy. As such, I want to let you know about some changes that were made after the global RfC was closed.

• Global bots are now subject to a 2 week discussion, and it'll be publicized via a MassMessage list, available at Bot policy/New global bot discussion on Meta. Please subscribe yourself or your wiki if you are interested in new global bots proposals.
• For a bot to be considered for approval, it must demonstrate it is welcomed in multiple projects, and a good way to do that is to have the bot flag on at least 5 wikis for a single task.
• The bot operator should make sure to adhere to the wiki's preference as related to the use of the bot flag (i.e., if a wiki doesn't want a bot to use the flag as it edits, that should be followed).

Thank you for your time.

Best regards,
—Thanks for the fish! ^{talk•contribs} 18:48, 6 Apryle 2021 (UTC)

Line numbering coming soon to all wikis

Example

From April 15, you can enable line numbering in some wikitext editors - for now in the template namespace, coming to more namespaces soon. This will make it easier to detect line breaks and to refer to a particular line in discussions. These numbers will be shown if you enable the syntax highlighting feature (CodeMirror extension), which is supported in the 2010 and 2017 wikitext editors.

More information can be found on this project page. Everyone is invited to test the feature, and to give feedback on this talk page.

-- Johanna Strodt (WMDE) 15:09, 12 Apryle 2021 (UTC)

Suggested Values

From April 29, it will be possible to suggest values for parameters in templates. Suggested values can be added to TemplateData and will then be shown as a drop-down list in VisualEditor. This allows template users to quickly select an appropriate value. This way, it prevents potential errors and reduces the effort needed to fill the template with values. It will still be possible to fill in values other than the suggested ones.

More information, including the supported parameter types and how to create suggested values: [1] [2]. Everyone is invited to test the feature, and to give feedback on this talk page.

Timur Vorkul (WMDE) 14:08, 22 Apryle 2021 (UTC)

(in Inglis) Wiki for Human Rights Challenge

Hey folks, just to let you know about the Wiki For Human Rights challenge that's happening at the moment. "Write about human rights, environmental health and diverse communities impacted by these issues around the world!" The writing challenge has prizes available ($$ for goods from the Wikimedia store) there's a focus on getting articles translated into different languages, should any of you be interested in this area: link here Sara Thomas (WMUK) (tauk) 13:53, 4 Mey 2021 (UTC)

Who are the Election Volunteers in your community?

Do you want to be an Election Volunteer?

Would you like to get more people taking part in the Wikimedia Foundation’s Board of Trustees election?

The Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees announced the plan for the 2021 Board elections. That plan includes outreach and communication support for the Board elections. The Board election facilitators will:

• Inform communities of the trustee selection process
• Invite communities to engage in voting
• Encourage people representing emerging Wikimedia communities to run as candidates

Voter turnout in prior elections was about 10% globally. It was better in communities with volunteer election support. Some of those communities reached over 20% voter turnout. We know we can get more voters to help assess and promote the best candidates, but to do that, we need your help.

We are looking for volunteers to serve as Election Volunteers. Election Volunteers should have a good understanding of their communities. The facilitation team sees Election Volunteers as doing the following:

• Promote the election in their communities’ channels
• Organize discussions about the election in their communities
• Translate messages for their communities

Who are the Election Volunteers to connect your community with this movement effort? Is it you? Or someone you know? Check out more details about Election Volunteers and add your name next to the community you will support in this table or get in contact with a facilitator. We aim to have at least one Election Volunteer for Wiki Projects in the top 30 for eligible voters. Even better if there are two or more sharing the work.

Best, JKoerner (WMF) (tauk) 20:04, 21 Mey 2021 (UTC)

(in Inglis) Next Editathon

Hey folks, heads up that the next Editathon will take place this weekend (5 & 6 June), we're looking at Scots in STEM as a starting point. More info on the event page here. Hope to see some of you at the Zoom sessions! Lirazelf (tauk) 16:04, 2 Juin 2021 (UTC)

Universal Code of Conduct News – Issue 1

Universal Code of Conduct News
Issue 1, June 2021Read the full newsletter

---

Welcome to the first issue of Universal Code of Conduct News! This newsletter will help Wikimedians stay involved with the development of the new code, and will distribute relevant news, research, and upcoming events related to the UCoC.

Please note, this is the first issue of UCoC Newsletter which is delivered to all subscribers and projects as an announcement of the initiative. If you want the future issues delivered to your talk page, village pumps, or any specific pages you find appropriate, you need to subscribe here.

You can help us by translating the newsletter issues in your languages to spread the news and create awareness of the new conduct to keep our beloved community safe for all of us. Please add your name here if you want to be informed of the draft issue to translate beforehand. Your participation is valued and appreciated.

• Affiliate consultations – Wikimedia affiliates of all sizes and types were invited to participate in the UCoC affiliate consultation throughout March and April 2021. (continue reading)
• 2021 key consultations – The Wikimedia Foundation held enforcement key questions consultations in April and May 2021 to request input about UCoC enforcement from the broader Wikimedia community. (continue reading)
• Roundtable discussions – The UCoC facilitation team hosted two 90-minute-long public roundtable discussions in May 2021 to discuss UCoC key enforcement questions. More conversations are scheduled. (continue reading)
• Phase 2 drafting committee – The drafting committee for the phase 2 of the UCoC started their work on 12 May 2021. Read more about their work. (continue reading)
• Diff blogs – The UCoC facilitators wrote several blog posts based on interesting findings and insights from each community during local project consultation that took place in the 1st quarter of 2021. (continue reading)

--MediaWiki message delivery (tauk) 23:06, 11 Juin 2021 (UTC)

Wikimania 2021: Individual Program Submissions

Dear all,

Wikimania 2021 will be hosted virtually for the first time in the event's 15-year history. Since there is no in-person host, the event is being organized by a diverse group of Wikimedia volunteers that form the Core Organizing Team (COT) for Wikimania 2021.

Event Program - Individuals or a group of individuals can submit their session proposals to be a part of the program. There will be translation support for sessions provided in a number of languages. See more information here.

Below are some links to guide you through;

• Program Submissions
• Session Submission Guidelines
• FAQ

Please note that the deadline for submission is 18th June 2021.

Announcements- To keep up to date with the developments around Wikimania, the COT sends out weekly updates. You can view them in the Announcement section here.

Office Hour - If you are left with questions, the COT will be hosting some office hours (in multiple languages), in multiple time-zones, to answer any programming questions that you might have. Details can be found here.

Best regards,

MediaWiki message delivery (tauk) 04:18, 16 Juin 2021 (UTC)

On behalf of Wikimania 2021 Core Organizing Team

Improving the translation support for Scots Wikipedia

Hello!

Apologies as this message is not in your native language, Please help translate to your language.

Content translation has been successful in supporting the translation process on many Wikipedia communities, and we want to help additional wikis with potential to grow using translation as part of a new initiative.

Content translation facilitates the creation of Wikipedia articles by translating content from other languages. It has been used already to create more than half a million articles. In addition, the tool provides mechanisms to encourage the creation of good quality content, preventing the publication of lightly edited machine translations. In general, our analysis shows that the translations produced are less likely to be deleted than the articles started from scratch.
Scots Wikipedia editors have used Content translation to create more than five hundred and fifty articles. We think that there is potential to use translation to create more articles, expand existing ones, and attract new editors that learn how to make productive edits. Translation can help the community to reduce the language gap with other languages and grow the number of editors in a sustainable way. In order to achieve this goal, we want to collaborate with you to make Content translation more visible in the Scots Wikipedia and support new ways to translate.

As a first step, during the next weeks we plan to enable Content translation by default on Scots Wikipedia. That will make it easy for users to discover the tool through several entry points. However, users not interested in translation will still be able to disable it from their preferences.

Please feel free to share any comment in this conversation thread.

Thanks!

UOzurumba (WMF) (tauk) 13:51, 15 Juin 2021 (UTC) On behalf of the WMF Language team.

Content Translation Deployed in Scots Wikipedia

Hello everyone.

We have enabled Content translation by default on Scots Wikipedia this week. Now it is easy for users to discover the tool through several entry points. However, users not interested in translation can disable it from their preferences. We expect this will help translators to create more content of good quality in Scots. We’ll be monitoring the statistics for Scots as well as the list of articles created with the tool.

Content translation provides quality control mechanisms to prevent the abuse of machine translation, and the limits can be adjusted based on the needs of each community. Please, feel free to share your impressions about the content created and how the tool works for the community. This feedback is essential to improve the tool to support your needs better.

Thanks!

UOzurumba (WMF) (tauk) 13:50, 29 Juin 2021 (UTC) On behalf of the WMF Language team.

An invitation to discuss three questions regarding the Movement Charter drafting committee

Discuss questions about the Movement Charter drafting committee

Hi there! This is an invitation to discuss three questions that need answers to create the Movement Charter drafting committee:

• What composition should the committee have in terms of movement roles, gender, regions, affiliations and other diversity factors?
• What is the best process to select the committee members to form a competent and diverse team?
• How much dedication is it reasonable to expect from committee members, in terms of hours per week and months of work? Should the initial members commit for the whole duration of the project or should renewals be expected?

The objective is to collect questions, opinions, ideas, points of agreement and disagreement. A first report of this conversation will be published by the end of Friday, June 25 to inform the Global Conversations on the 26-27 of June.

Find more about the questions and conversations in other languages.

I am glad to join meetings or community conversations to pose the questions and receive feedback. Please reach out if you would like me to attend any meeting or community conversation.

Best, JKoerner (WMF) (tauk) 22:37, 16 Juin 2021 (UTC)

(in Inglis) Global templates discussion

Hey folks, just to let you know that there's a discussion happening over at MetaWiki about a proposal which it's hoped will make templates easier for smaller wikis. Your input would be appreciated! Read on Meta here. Sara Thomas (WMUK) (tauk) 11:44, 24 Juin 2021 (UTC)

Editing news 2021 #2

Read this in another language • Subscription list for this multilingual newsletter

When newcomers had the Reply tool and tried to post on a talk page, they were more successful at posting a comment. (Source)

Earlier this year, the Editing team ran a large study of the Reply Tool. The main goal was to find out whether the Reply Tool helped newer editors communicate on wiki. The second goal was to see whether the comments that newer editors made using the tool needed to be reverted more frequently than comments newer editors made with the existing wikitext page editor.

The key results were:

• Newer editors who had automatic ("default on") access to the Reply tool were more likely to post a comment on a talk page.
• The comments that newer editors made with the Reply Tool were also less likely to be reverted than the comments that newer editors made with page editing.

These results give the Editing team confidence that the tool is helpful.

Looking ahead

The team is planning to make the Reply tool available to everyone as an opt-out preference in the coming months. This has already happened at the Arabic, Czech, and Hungarian Wikipedias.

The next step is to resolve a technical challenge. Then, they will deploy the Reply tool first to the Wikipedias that participated in the study. After that, they will deploy it, in stages, to the other Wikipedias and all WMF-hosted wikis.

You can turn on "Discussion tools" in Beta Features now. After you get the Reply tool, you can change your preferences at any time in Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-editing-discussion.

–Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk)

14:14, 24 Juin 2021 (UTC)

Server switch

Read this message in another language • Please help translate to your language

The Wikimedia Foundation tests the switch between its first and secondary data centers. This will make sure that Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia wikis can stay online even after a disaster. To make sure everything is working, the Wikimedia Technology department needs to do a planned test. This test will show if they can reliably switch from one data centre to the other. It requires many teams to prepare for the test and to be available to fix any unexpected problems.

Unfortunately, because of some limitations in MediaWiki, all editing must stop while the switch is made. We apologize for this disruption, and we are working to minimize it in the future.

You will be able to read, but not edit, all wikis for a short period of time.

• You will not be able to edit for up to an hour on Tuesday, 29 June 2021. The test will start at 14:00 UTC (07:00 PDT, 10:00 EDT, 15:00 WEST/BST, 16:00 CEST, 19:30 IST, 23:00 JST, and in New Zealand at 02:00 NZST on Wednesday 30 June).
• If you try to edit or save during these times, you will see an error message. We hope that no edits will be lost during these minutes, but we can't guarantee it. If you see the error message, then please wait until everything is back to normal. Then you should be able to save your edit. But, we recommend that you make a copy of your changes first, just in case.

Other effects:

• Background jobs will be slower and some may be dropped. Red links might not be updated as quickly as normal. If you create an article that is already linked somewhere else, the link will stay red longer than usual. Some long-running scripts will have to be stopped.
• There will be code freezes for the week of June 28. Non-essential code deployments will not happen.

This project may be postponed if necessary. You can read the schedule at wikitech.wikimedia.org. Any changes will be announced in the schedule. There will be more notifications about this. A banner will be displayed on all wikis 30 minutes before this operation happens. Please share this information with your community.

SGrabarczuk (WMF) 01:19, 27 Juin 2021 (UTC)

New Wikipedia Library collections and design update (August 2021)

Hello Wikimedians!

The TWL OWL says log in today!

The Wikipedia Library is pleased to announce the addition of new collections, alongside a new interface design. New collections include:

• Cabells – Scholarly and predatory journal database
• Taaghche - Persian language e-books
• Merkur, Musik & Ästhetik, and Psychologie, Psychotherapie, Psychoanalyse - German language magazines and journals published by Klett-Cotta
• Art Archiv, Capital, Geo, Geo Epoche, and Stern - German language newspapers and magazines published by Gruner + Jahr

Additionally, De Gruyter and Nomos have been centralised from their previous on-wiki signup location on the German Wikipedia. Many other collections are freely available by simply logging in to The Wikipedia Library with your Wikimedia login!

We are also excited to announce that the first version of a new design for My Library was deployed this week. We will be iterating on this design with more features over the coming weeks. Read more on the project page on Meta.

Lastly, an Echo notification will begin rolling out soon to notify eligible editors about the library (T132084). If you can translate the notification please do so at TranslateWiki!

--The Wikipedia Library Team 13:23, 11 August 2021 (UTC)

This message was delivered via the Global Mass Message tool to The Wikipedia Library Global Delivery List.