User talk:Black Falcon/Archive 18

This is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page.

Archive 15

Archive 16

Archive 17

Archive 18

Archive 19

Archive 20

News and updates for administrators from the past month (January 2019).

Administrator changes

Enterprisey • JJMC89

BorgQueen

Harro5 • Jenks24 • Graft • R. Baley

Interface administrator changes

Enterprisey

Guideline and policy news

• A
  activity requirements
  for administrators.
• Administrators who are blocked have the technical ability to block the administrator who blocked their own account. A recent request for comment has amended the blocking policy to clarify that this ability should only be used in exceptional circumstances, such as account compromises, where there is a clear and immediate need.
• A request for comment closed with a consensus in favor of deprecating The Sun as a permissible reference, and creating an edit filter to warn users who attempt to cite it.

Technical news

• A
  WP:PERM
  , where historical records are kept so that prior requests can more easily be searched for.

Miscellaneous

• Voting in the 2019 Steward elections will begin on 08 February 2019, 14:00 (UTC) and end on 28 February 2019, 13:59 (UTC). The confirmation process of current stewards is being held in parallel. You can automatically check your eligibility to vote.
• A new IRC bot is available that allows you to subscribe to notifications when specific filters are tripped. This requires that your IRC handle be identified.

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Awesome

Ten years!

--Gerda Arendt (talk) 07:39, 11 February 2019 (UTC)

Thank you, though it's hard to believe it's been that long... -- Black Falcon ^(talk) 18:51, 17 February 2019 (UTC)

News and updates for administrators from the past month (February 2019).

Guideline and policy news

• The RfC on administrator activity requirements failed to reach consensus for any proposal.
• Following discussions at the Bureaucrats' noticeboard and Wikipedia talk:Administrators, an earlier change to the restoration of adminship policy was reverted. If requested, bureaucrats will not restore administrator permissions removed due to inactivity if there have been five years without a logged administrator action; this "five year rule" does not apply to permissions removed voluntarily.

Technical news

• A new tool is available to help determine if a given IP is an open proxy/VPN/webhost/compromised host.

Arbitration

• The Arbitration Committee announced
  WP:SPI
  ).
  • paid-en-wpwikipedia.org has been set up to receive private evidence related to abusive
    paid editing
    .
  • checkuser-en-wpwikipedia.org has been set up to receive private requests for CheckUser. For instance, requests for IP block exemption for anonymous proxy editing should now be sent to this address instead of the functionaries-en list.

Miscellaneous

• Following the 2019 Steward Elections, the following editors have been appointed as stewards: Base, Einsbor, Jon Kolbert, Schniggendiller, and Wim b.

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Hi Black Falcon

The discussion at Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/JJMC89 bot III seems to me to involve you taking what seems to me be a very hard line against category redirects, so went to look at our deletion log to see what sort of redirects you were deleting and why.

I was astonished by what I saw.[1]

e.g. you deleted the Category:Azerbaijan–Palestine relations, which a redirect to Category:Azerbaijan–State of Palestine relations.

The rationale which you used involved no speedy deletion criterion.

This is a very surprising deletion, because "Foo-Palestine relations" is a perfectly reasonable entry for someone unfamiliar with our current nomenclature to use to categorise a topic. It's actually the title of the head article Azerbaijan–Palestine relations.

And the same applies to each of the other 86 subcats of Category:Bilateral relations of the State of Palestine: there should in each case be a category redirect from the variant without "State of Palestine" ... but in each case you deleted the redirect.

Why are you doing this? How does deletion of an unambiguous redirect help either readers or editors?

Moving down through your deletion log, I see that you deleted the cat redirect from Category:Centuries in Judaism to Category:Judaism by century. Again, why? It's unambiguous, and it's a perfectly reasonable search guess. So why delete it?

Please can you explain? --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 18:29, 24 March 2019 (UTC)

Of course, BHG. I deleted Category:Azerbaijan–Palestine relations, which redirected to Category:Azerbaijan–State of Palestine relations, because it was not unambiguous. "Palestine" and "State of Palestine" are not equivalent terms, and we should not leave it to bots to infer that someone who specified "Palestine" in fact intended "State of Palestine".

Regarding Category:Centuries in Judaism, I honestly do not remember my thought process at the time. With hindsight, I think it may have been because I saw you deleted Category:Centuries in animation and Category:Centuries in philosophy and simply followed suit, or it may have been because "X in Y" ≠ "Y by X", but both of these are after-the-fact guess as to my reasoning... unlike the Palestine one which I clearly remember. If you think Category:Centuries in Judaism and the others at Wikipedia:Categories_for_discussion/Log/2019_January_25#Categories_by_century are useful category redirects, I would be happy to undelete them. -- Black Falcon ^(talk) 18:57, 24 March 2019 (UTC)

What other entity could be referred to "Azerbaijan–Palestine relations"? The other meanings of Palestine doesn't conduct international relations.

You might have a point if the head articles were named differently, but when they use the undisambiguated title, it's bizarre to claim that the category redirect is intolerably ambiguous. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 20:03, 24 March 2019 (UTC)

Perhaps you have already noticed that administrators' involvement in CfD closures is close to zero in the last few weeks. Would you be willing to close a number of discussions, especially the older ones? Marcocapelle (talk) 13:21, 10 February 2019 (UTC)

Boy,

that's a long list... I'll take a crack at closing some of the oldest ones today. -- Black Falcon ^(talk

) 16:36, 10 February 2019 (UTC)

Would you like doing some more closures? Marcocapelle (talk) 21:56, 12 February 2019 (UTC)

Certainly, it's just been a rather busy week for me. I'll devote some time this weekend to thinning the backlog. -- Black Falcon ^(talk) 04:27, 15 February 2019 (UTC)

There's still a backlog, including 4 discussions still open from January. So if you find a few minutes to close a few more, that'd be great! --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 22:49, 31 March 2019 (UTC)

News and updates for administrators from the past month (March 2019).

Technical news

• In Special:Preferences under "Appearance" → "Advanced options", there is now an option to show a confirmation prompt when clicking on a rollback link.
• The Wikimedia Foundation's Community health initiative plans to design and build a new user reporting system to make it easier for people experiencing harassment and other forms of abuse to provide accurate information to the appropriate channel for action to be taken. Please see meta:Community health initiative/User reporting system consultation 2019 to provide your input on this idea.

Arbitration

• The Arbitration Committee
  ARBPIA 1RR editnotice
  }} edit notice.

Miscellaneous

• Two more administrator accounts were compromised. Evidence has shown that these attacks, like previous incidents, were due to reusing a password that was used on another website that suffered a data breach. If you have ever used your current password on any other website, you should change it immediately. All admins are strongly encouraged to enable
  two-factor authentication, please consider doing so. Please always practice appropriate account security by ensuring your password is secure
  and unique to Wikimedia.
• As a reminder, according to
  proposed deletion
  (PROD) prior to determining whether it should be relisted.

---

Did you get my mail? ◄ Sebastian 11:56, 26 April 2019 (UTC)

This message was sent to all administrators following a recent motion. Thank you for your attention. For the Arbitration Committee, Cameron11598 02:28, 4 May 2019 (UTC)

ArbCom would like to apologise and correct our previous mass message in light of the response from the community.

Since November 2018, six administrator accounts have been compromised and temporarily desysopped. In an effort to help improve account security, our intention was to remind administrators of existing policies on account security — that they are

remains an optional means of adding extra security to your account. The choice not to enable 2FA will not be considered when deciding to restore sysop privileges to administrator accounts that were compromised.

We are sorry for the wording of our previous message, which did not accurately convey this, and deeply regret the tone in which it was delivered.

For the Arbitration Committee, -Cameron11598 21:03, 4 May 2019 (UTC)

News and updates for administrators from the past month (April 2019).

Guideline and policy news

• A request for comment concluded that creating pages in the portal namespace should be restricted to autoconfirmed users.
• Following a
  WP:GNG
  .

Technical news

• XTools Admin Stats, a tool to list admins by administrative actions, has been revamped to support more types of log entries such as AbuseFilter changes. Two additional tools have been integrated into it as well: Steward Stats and Patroller Stats.

Arbitration

• In response to the continuing compromise of administrator accounts, the Arbitration Committee
  procedures for return of permissions (diff
  ). In such cases, the committee will review all available information to determine whether the administrator followed "appropriate personal security practices" before restoring permissions; administrators found failing to have adequately done so will not be resysopped automatically. All current administrators have been notified of this change.
• Following a
  arbitration policy has been amended (diff
  ). Specifically, the two-thirds majority required to remove or suspend an arbitrator now excludes (1) the arbitrator facing suspension or removal, and (2) any inactive arbitrator who does not respond within 30 days to attempts to solicit their feedback on the resolution through all known methods of communication.

Miscellaneous

• A request for comment is currently open to amend the community sanctions procedure to exclude non XfD or CSD deletions.
• A proposal to remove pre-2009 indefinite IP blocks is currently open for discussion.

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News and updates for administrators from the past month (May 2019).

Administrator changes

Andonic • Consumed Crustacean • Enigmaman • Euryalus • EWS23 • HereToHelp • Nv8200pa • Peripitus • StringTheory11 • Vejvančický

CheckUser changes

Ivanvector

Guideline and policy news

• An
  WP:OUTING
  should include information on just the English Wikipedia or any Wikimedia project.
• An RfC on WT:RfA concluded that Requests for adminship and bureaucratship are discussions seeking to build consensus.
• An RfC proposal to make the templates for discussion (TfD) process more like the requested moves (RM) process, i.e. "as a clearinghouse of template discussions", was closed as successful.

Technical news

• The CSD feature of
  Twinkle now allows admins to notify page creators of deletion if the page had not been tagged. The default behavior matches that of tagging notifications, and replaces the ability to open the user talk page upon deletion. You can customize which criteria receive notifications in your Twinkle preferences
  : look for Notify page creator when deleting under these criteria.
• Twinkle's d-batch (batch delete) feature now supports deleting subpages (and related redirects and talk pages) of each page. The pages will be listed first but use with caution! The und-batch (batch undelete) option can now also restore talk pages.

Miscellaneous

• The previously discussed unblocking of IP addresses indefinitely-blocked before 2009 was approved and has taken place.
• The 2019 talk pages consultation produced a report for Phase 1 and has entered Phase 2.

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News and updates for administrators from the past month (June 2019).

Administrator changes

28bytes • Ad Orientem • Ansh666 • Beeblebrox • Boing! said Zebedee • BU Rob13 • Dennis Brown • Deor • DoRD • Floquenbeam¹ • Flyguy649 • Fram² • Gadfium • GB fan • Jonathunder • Kusma • Lectonar • Moink • MSGJ • Nick • Od Mishehu • Rama • Spartaz • Syrthiss • TheDJ • WJBscribe

¹Floquenbeam's access was removed, then restored, then removed again.

²Fram's access was removed, then restored, then removed again.

Guideline and policy news

• A request for comment seeking to alleviate pressures on the request an account (ACC) process proposes either raising the account creation limit for extended confirmed editors or granting the account creator permission on request to new ACC tool users.

• In a related matter, the account throttle has been restored to six creations per day as the mitigation activity completed.

• The scope of
  CSD criterion G8 has been tightened
  such that the only redirects that it now applies to are those which target non-existent pages.
• The scope of
  CSD criterion G14 has been expanded slightly
  to include orphan "Foo (disambiguation)" redirects that target pages that are not disambiguation pages or pages that perform a disambiguation-like function (such as set index articles or lists).
• A request for comment seeks to determine whether Wikipedia:Office actions should be a policy page or an information page.

Technical news

• The Wikimedia Foundation's Community health initiative plans to design and build a new user reporting system to make it easier for people experiencing harassment and other forms of abuse to provide accurate information to the appropriate channel for action to be taken. Community feedback is invited.

Miscellaneous

• In February 2019, the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF)
  significant community discussion, a request for arbitration (permalink), and, either directly or indirectly, the resignations of numerous administrators and functionaries. The WMF Board of Trustees is aware of the situation, and discussions continue on a statement and a way forward. The Arbitration Committee has sent an open letter to the WMF Board
  .

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News and updates for administrators from the past month (July 2019).

Guideline and policy news

• Following a request for comment, the page Wikipedia:Office actions has been changed from a policy page to an information page.
• A
  administrator inactivity policy
  .

Arbitration

• Editors
  alert
  them.

Miscellaneous

• Following a research project on masking IP addresses, the Foundation is starting a new project to improve the privacy of IP editors. The result of this project may significantly change administrative and counter-vandalism workflows. The project is in the very early stages of discussions and there is no concrete plan yet. Admins and the broader community are encouraged to leave feedback on the talk page.
• The
  removal for inactivity
  at a later stage and enables a review of their work before according the right on a permanent basis.

---

A tag has been placed on

, or a project category that by its nature may become empty on occasion.

If you think this page should not be deleted for this reason, you may contest the nomination by visiting the page and clicking the button labelled "Contest this speedy deletion". This will give you the opportunity to explain why you believe the page should not be deleted. However, be aware that once a page is tagged for speedy deletion, it may be deleted without delay. Please do not remove the speedy deletion tag from the page yourself, but do not hesitate to add information in line with Wikipedia's policies and guidelines. Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 02:43, 4 August 2019 (UTC)

@Liz: Thank you for notifying me. The category became empty after this edit removed its sole member. I will not contest the deletion for now but have requested clarification at Category talk:Croatia football club navigational boxes. -- Black Falcon ^(talk) 04:42, 5 August 2019 (UTC)

News and updates for administrators from the past month (August 2019).

Administrator changes

Bradv • Chetsford • Izno

Floquenbeam • Lectonar

DESiegel • Jake Wartenberg • Rjanag • Topbanana

CheckUser changes

Callanecc • LFaraone • There'sNoTime

Oversight changes

Callanecc • Fox • HJ Mitchell • LFaraone • There'sNoTime

Technical news

• Editors using the mobile website on Wikipedia can opt-in to new advanced features via your settings page. This will give access to more interface links, special pages, and tools.
• The advanced version of the edit review pages (recent changes, watchlist, and related changes) now includes two new filters. These filters are for "All contents" and "All discussions". They will filter the view to just those namespaces.

Arbitration

• A request for comment is open to provide an opportunity to amend the structure, rules, and procedures of the 2019 English Wikipedia Arbitration Committee election and to resolve any issues not covered by existing rules.

Miscellaneous

• A global request for comment is in progress regarding whether a user group should be created that could modify edit filters across all public Wikimedia wikis.

---

Hi, I'm Barkeep49. I wanted to let you know that I saw the page you reviewed, Alexander II Magnet School (Macon, Georgia), and have marked it as unpatrolled. If you have any questions, please ask them on my talk page. Thank you.

Message delivered via the Page Curation tool, on behalf of the reviewer.

Barkeep49 (talk) 04:04, 8 September 2019 (UTC)

Hello Samkelourhhhh (talk) 09:28, 9 September 2019 (UTC)

Hello to you, too. -- Black Falcon ^(talk) 04:32, 10 September 2019 (UTC)

Black Falcon, I wanted to thank you for the time and consideration you gave my candidacy and for the effort and thought you put into your neutral vote. The role of NPP in encouraging new editors is an important one and I thank you for the feedback you've offered to me in this regard and will keep it in mind as I continue my new page efforts. Should you have further thoughts or feedback in the future, please know my door is always open. Best, Barkeep49 (talk) 22:55, 11 September 2019 (UTC)

The speedy keep was because the nominator demonstrated a lack of awareness that any other method of searching existed, which is completely at variance with

. Nominations that are made in significant error are routinely speedy kept, because consensus is a matter of relying on informed, sensible voting, not merely raw numbers of votes.

To answer your question: some people reach pages by clicking links (the section header), others reach pages by clicking URLs from other websites (<a>"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_south_guangxi">Wikipedia</a>), or by entering the page title in the browser's URL bar, and all of these methods are case-sensitive. We have many years of precedent for keeping redirects that are entirely uncapitalised if capitalisation is the only variant, and deleting this one merely because "the search will find it" would be grossly at variance with nearly 20 years of XFDs. Nyttend (talk) 02:41, 22 September 2019 (UTC)

News and updates for administrators from the past month (September 2019).

Guideline and policy news

• Following
  C2F: One eponymous article
  , which applies if the category contains only an eponymous article or media file, provided that the category has not otherwise been emptied shortly before the nomination. The default outcome is an upmerge to the parent categories.

Technical news

• As previously noted, tighter password requirements for Administrators were put in place last year. Wikipedia should now alert you if your password is less than 10 characters long and thus too short.

Arbitration

• The
  2019 CheckUser and Oversight appointment process
  has begun. The community consultation period will take place October 4th to 10th.
• The
  incident
  . It will be open until October 30th.

Miscellaneous

• The Community Tech team has been working on a system for temporarily watching pages, and welcomes feedback.

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Why can't you just merge the categories into the right categories?

) 04:12, 15 October 2019 (UTC)

@SpinnerLaserz: It is not necessary to merge to Category:World Heritage Sites, as the articles are all already in more specific country-level subcategories of Category:World Heritage Sites. -- Black Falcon ^(talk) 04:15, 15 October 2019 (UTC)

If you nominate the World Heritage Site by religion for deletion or merge, then what is this category (

talk

) 04:17, 15 October 2019 (UTC)

You're right, I missed that one. I will nominate it for deletion momentarily. -- Black Falcon ^(talk) 04:19, 15 October 2019 (UTC)

Do you think that being angry on a discussion will make it worse because I saw Place Clichy making an angry comment (which I believed it may relate to the

talk

) 16:15, 15 October 2019 (UTC)

To what comment are you referring? Maybe I just missed it, but I did not see an angry comment by Place Clichy in that discussion. He did state that he "do[es] not find much logic" in these categories, but that comment contains criticism of the categories, not anger. -- Black Falcon ^(talk) 05:48, 16 October 2019 (UTC)

Precious

Two years!

--Gerda Arendt (talk) 21:31, 26 October 2019 (UTC)

News and updates for administrators from the past month (October 2019).

Guideline and policy news

• An
  resysop criteria
  should be made stricter.

• The follow-up RfC to develop that change is now open at Wikipedia:Requests for comment/2019 Resysop Criteria (2).

• A related RfC is seeking the community's sentiment for a binding desysop procedure.

Arbitration

• Eligible editors may now nominate themselves as candidates for the 2019 Arbitration Committee Elections. The self-nomination period will close November 12, with voting running from November 19 through December 2.

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2019 Arbitration Committee elections is now open until 23:59 on Monday, 2 December 2019. All eligible users are allowed to vote. Users with alternate accounts may only vote once. The topic bans, editing restrictions, and other measures needed to maintain our editing environment. The arbitration policy describes the Committee's roles and responsibilities in greater detail. If you wish to participate in the 2019 election, please review NoACEMM}} to your user talk page. MediaWiki message delivery (talk ) 00:05, 19 November 2019 (UTC)

Hello,

Google Code-In, Google-organized contest in which the Wikimedia Foundation participates, starts in a few weeks. This contest is about taking high school students into the world of opensource. I'm sending you this message because you recently edited a documentation page at the English Wikipedia.

I would like to ask you to take part in Google Code-In as a mentor. That would mean to prepare at least one task (it can be documentation related, or something else - the other categories are Code, Design, Quality Assurance and Outreach) for the participants, and help the student to complete it. Please sign up at the contest page and send us your Google account address to [email protected], so we can invite you in!

From my own experience, Google Code-In can be fun, you can make several new friends, attract new people to your wiki and make them part of your community.

If you have any questions, please let us know at [email protected].

Thank you!

--User:Martin Urbanec (talk) 21:58, 23 November 2019 (UTC)

Hi. Not sure what happened there. Got a notice from WP a short while ago that someone had requested a PW reset, so have just changed my password. I checked this page earlier today (due to the Mizzle entry), but don't think I took any action on it. Certainly didn't within the last hour. Onel5969 ^{TT me} 03:06, 30 November 2019 (UTC)

No worries, and no harm done. I assumed it was just a stray click or something along those lines. Cheers, -- Black Falcon ^(talk) 04:48, 30 November 2019 (UTC)

News and updates for administrators from the past month (November 2019).

Administrator changes

EvergreenFir • ToBeFree

Akhilleus • Athaenara • John Vandenberg • Melchoir • MichaelQSchmidt • NeilN • Youngamerican • 😂

CheckUser changes

Beeblebrox

Deskana

Interface administrator changes

Evad37

Guideline and policy news

• An
  request for adminship is not required has been reduced from three years to two. Additionally, Bureaucrats
  are permitted to use their discretion when returning administrator rights.
• Following
  edit filter mailing list
  has been opened up to users with the Edit Filter Helper right.

Technical news

• Wikimedia projects can set a default block length for users via MediaWiki:ipb-default-expiry. A new page, MediaWiki:ipb-default-expiry-ip, allows the setting of a different default block length for IP editors. Neither is currently used. (T219126)

Arbitration

• Voting in the
  2019 Arbitration Committee Elections is open to eligible editors until Monday 23:59, 2 December 2018 UTC. Please review the candidates and, if you wish to do so, submit your choices on the voting page
  .

Miscellaneous

• The global consultation on partial and temporary office actions that ended in October received a closing statement from staff concluding, among other things, that the WMF will no longer use partial or temporary Office Action bans... until and unless community consensus that they are of value or Board directive.

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News and updates for administrators from the past month (December 2019).

Guideline and policy news

• A request for comment asks whether partial blocks should be enabled on the English Wikipedia. If enabled, this functionality would allow administrators to block users from editing specific pages or namespaces, rather than the entire site.
• A proposal asks whether admins who don't use their tools for a significant period of time (e.g. five years) should have the toolset procedurally removed.
• Following a
  Wikipedia talk:New pages patrol/Redirect whitelist
  .

Arbitration

• The fourth case on Palestine-Israel articles was closed. The case consolidated all previous remedies under one heading, which should make them easier to understand, apply, and enforce. In particular, the distinction between "primary articles" and "related content" has been clarified, with the former being the entire set of articles whose topic relates to the Arab-Israeli conflict, broadly interpreted rather than reasonably construed.
• Following the 2019 Arbitration Committee elections, the following editors have been appointed to the Arbitration Committee: Beeblebrox, Bradv, Casliber, David Fuchs, DGG, KrakatoaKatie, Maxim, Newyorkbrad, SoWhy, Worm That Turned, Xeno.

Miscellaneous

• This issue marks three full years of the
  Admin newsletter
  . Thanks for reading!

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