Wikipedia:Simple talk

Simple talk
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T:TDYK's holding area

Back then when there was high activity on T:TDYK, the holding area was set up so that hooks marked as good to go ({{DYKyes}}) can be moved there, and not be counted towards an editor's hook nomination limit (since abolished). However, I think the holding area concept has outlived its usefulness, and makes the process more troublesome because it is now essentially doubling the number of DYK queues. What does the community think about this? Chenzw  Talk  17:10, 12 October 2016 (UTC)

I think that's reasonable. New arrivals here might like to know the history of the hook limit, so here goes. Once, a number of editors contributed one or two hooks when needed. Then an especially energetic editor put up many proposals in quick succession, which made it difficult for others to feel they were doing anything useful. Several regular editors stopped contributing. The hook limit was to prevent one person swamping the system but, even so, some editors have never come back to this feature. Macdonald-ross (talk) 08:39, 13 October 2016 (UTC)

Agreed, I think we could even have just one queue, given the extremely low level of activity. We should have a banner of something so that once a user has a created a new page, they see a banner advertising DYK. Jcc (talk) 21:15, 19 October 2016 (UTC)

Editing News #3—2016

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

Did you know?

Did you know that you can easily re-arrange columns and rows in the visual editor?

Select a cell in the column or row that you want to move. Click the arrow at the start of that row or column to open the dropdown menu (shown). Choose either "Move before" or "Move after" to move the column, or "Move above" or "Move below" to move the row.

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 VisualEditor Team has mainly worked on a new wikitext editor. They have also released some small features and the new map editing tool. Their workboard is available in Phabricator. You can find links to the list of work finished each week at mw:VisualEditor/Weekly triage meetings. Their current priorities are fixing bugs, releasing the 2017 wikitext editor as a beta feature, and improving language support.

Recent changes

• You can now set text as small or big.[1]
• Invisible templates have been shown as a puzzle icon. Now, the name of the invisible template is displayed next to the puzzle icon.[2] A similar feature will display the first part of hidden HTML comments.[3]
• Categories are displayed at the bottom of each page. If you click on the categories, the dialog for editing categories will open.[4]
• At many wikis, you can now add maps to pages. Go to the Insert menu and choose the "Maps" item. The Discovery department is adding more features to this area, like geoshapes. You can read more at mediawiki.org.[5]
• The "Save" button now says "Save page" when you create a page, and "Save changes" when you change an existing page.[6] In the future, the "Save page" button will say "Publish page". This will affect both the visual and wikitext editing systems. More information is available on Meta.
• Image galleries now use a visual mode for editing. You can see thumbnails of the images, add new files, remove unwanted images, rearrange the images by dragging and dropping, and add captions for each image. Use the "Options" tab to set the gallery's display mode, image sizes, and add a title for the gallery.[7]

Future changes

The visual editor will be offered to all editors at the remaining 10 "Phase 6" Wikipedias during the next month. The developers want to know whether typing in your language feels natural in the visual editor. Please post your comments and the language(s) that you tested at the feedback thread on mediawiki.org. This will affect several languages, including Thai, Burmese and Aramaic.

The team is working on a modern wikitext editor. The 2017 wikitext editor will look like the visual editor and be able to use the citoid service and other modern tools. This new editing system may become available as a Beta Feature on desktop devices in October 2016. You can read about this project in a general status update on the Wikimedia mailing list.

Let's work together

• Do you teach new editors how to use the visual editor? Did you help set up the Citoid automatic reference feature for your wiki? Have you written or imported TemplateData for your most important citation templates? Would you be willing to help new editors and small communities with the visual editor? Please sign up for the new VisualEditor Community Taskforce.

• 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, so that we can notify you when the next issue is ready. Thank you!

—Elitre (WMF)

17:49, 15 October 2016 (UTC)

Most wanted categories

There are some maintenance categories listed in Special:WantedPages. The "what links here" just has other categories and no articles. Category:Articles lacking sources from May 2011‏‎ is an example. Does anyone know how to remove these from the list?

User:Auntof6 mentioned the summary template (Template:Articles lacking sources progress for instance). Perhaps this could be the reason? Thanks for the help! --Tbennert (talk) 01:43, 31 October 2016 (UTC)

Special:WantedPages is broken and has been for nearly a decade. It does get "updated" now and then but not accurately. Its generally not a useful page to use on this wiki for a large number of reasons. The biggest being that because of our size and importing en.wiki templates the list doesn't actually reflect what is most wanted. -DJSasso (talk) 17:42, 2 November 2016 (UTC)

That being said I was going to start updating the template that is causing the problem but ran out of time right now so I will try to get to it tomorrow. -DJSasso (talk) 18:19, 2 November 2016 (UTC)

Thanks for the response. I appreciate your willingness to work on the template. Thanks! --Tbennert (talk) 04:18, 3 November 2016 (UTC)

New Wikipedia Library Accounts Available Now (November 2016)

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 from:

• Foreign Affairs - Journal of international relations and U.S. foreign policy
• OpenEdition - Journals in the social sciences and humanities
• Édition Diffusion Presse Sciences - French and English language scientific journals
• ASHA - Speech–language–hearing journals
• Tilastopaja - Athletics statistics

Expansions

• ' - Many new databases added
• Taylor & Francis - Strategic, Defence & Security Studies collection

Many other partnerships with accounts available are listed on our partners page. Sign up today!
--The Wikipedia Library Team 18:30, 1 November 2016 (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.

Password reset

I apologise that this message is in English. ⧼Centralnotice-shared-help-translate⧽

We are having a problem with attackers taking over wiki accounts with privileged user rights (for example, admins, bureaucrats, oversighters, checkusers). It appears that this may be because of weak or reused passwords.

Community members are working along with members of multiple teams at the Wikimedia Foundation to address this issue.

In the meantime, we ask that everyone takes a look at the passwords they have chosen for their wiki accounts. If you know that you've chosen a weak password, or if you've chosen a password that you are using somewhere else, please change those passwords.

Select strong passwords – eight or more characters long, and containing letters, numbers, and punctuation. Joe Sutherland (talk) / MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 23:59, 13 November 2016 (UTC)

For those who don't know where to find it, a link to change your password is in your preferences ("My settings"), on the user profile tab, in the basic settings section.

While on the subject of passwords, is there a procedure to reset a forgotten password? --Auntof6 (talk) 00:24, 14 November 2016 (UTC)

As long as you have an email on your account you can just click the forgotten password link. If you don't have an email on your account then you are out of luck unless you can convince a Steward or Dev I think. -DJSasso (talk) 18:14, 14 November 2016 (UTC)

Please accept my apologies - that first line should read "Help with translations!". Joe Sutherland (WMF) (talk) / MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 00:11, 14 November 2016 (UTC)