Wikinews:Admin action alerts/Archive 5

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[edit] Reporter

I noticed this Hmwith (talk · contribs) page which has a template which looks very similar to that of accredited reporters, yet the user is not one. Is the appearance of this user's page a misrepresentation? It doesn't say "accredited" but just "reporter". --SVTCobra 00:37, 15 July 2009 (UTC)

Here is an example of what a real accredited user page looks like. --SVTCobra 00:40, 15 July 2009 (UTC)

I don't think it's a concern personally, since the icon doesn't have the "Wikinews Accredited Reporter" thing. –Juliancolton | ^Talk 01:08, 15 July 2009 (UTC)

I ran into this thread on my own (and I'm glad that I did), because I never would have thought that using a similar table would cause any issues. I just wanted to make information readily available and easy to find, following a format that people recognize and can read quickly. I was never trying to appear to be someone that I am not. I never wanted to cause confusion. To avoid problems, I removed the entire table from my userpage. Cheers, hmwithτ 16:42, 15 July 2009 (UTC)

That's understandable - it's a fairly simple template to copy and modify. We could probably do with something that is distinct enough but for regular users. Have a look around other talk pages and see if you can find something else to "steal" ;-) --Brian McNeil / ^talk 16:57, 15 July 2009 (UTC)

[edit] YouTube link

The page at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gxgdzOdaNtM links to a missing story here. --68.50.153.95 (talk) 03:15, 15 July 2009 (UTC)

Thanks for reporting this! The link on YouTube is not working properly, I think because of the comma. However, I created a redirect, so the wrong link should work as well. See Dance party broken up by police in Utah. If you happen to come across other not-working links, please let us know! Cheers, Van der Hoorn (talk) 12:35, 15 July 2009 (UTC)

[edit] WN:DR#Category:Association football

This DR was closed, but the appropriate category moves where not made. I tried to see if I could do it with AWB, but it is Windows-based and I am not running Windows any longer. Therefore, I appeal for someone to replace all instances of Category:Association football with Category:Football (soccer) with AWB or some other tool. We need to clean this up, ASAP. Cheers, --SVTCobra 01:16, 17 July 2009 (UTC)

Could a bot do this? Cirt (talk) 02:11, 17 July 2009 (UTC)

I did a lot of them manually and did a general cleanup of the articles at the same time. Someone should contact the author of the SportsBot, as the generated templates, such as Template:CCC, are generated with the wrong category. Cheers, Van der Hoorn (talk) 20:59, 17 July 2009 (UTC)

AWB (or Wikipedia:AutoWikiBrowser) is semi-automatic and should do the job fine, if one has Windows. As far as SportsBot is concerned, User:Zachary is on vacation, reportedly. --SVTCobra 22:45, 17 July 2009 (UTC)

Van der Hoorn, it is very ambitious of you to continue doing these manually. Cheers, --SVTCobra 23:34, 17 July 2009 (UTC)

Zach should be back by now and recovering from jetlag. --Brian McNeil / ^talk 09:15, 22 July 2009 (UTC)

• Done There were rather a lot of articles in there. Incidentally, one of the recent AWB updates breaks the preferences. I put in the updates and it 'forgot' it was supposed to be pointed at en.wikinews. --Brian McNeil / ^talk 13:43, 22 July 2009 (UTC)

[edit] Vandal user

Would an administrator please block the following account and his IP address, and delete all the nonsense pages he has created?

• Bobfhuck (talk • contribs (logs) • block (block log)
• 211.30.21.249 (talk • contribs (logs) • block (block log)

Thank you, --William Saturn (talk) 05:00, 22 July 2009 (UTC)

I blocked the accounts and I think i got all the pages. Let me know if i didn't. Thanks for undoing some of his vandalism. --PatrickFlaherty (talk) 05:02, 22 July 2009 (UTC)

I extended the block on the IP to 24 hours. Deleted talk page of Bobfhuck for obscenities and because likely to annoy as {{unblock}} was removed. Checkuser reveals a couple of possible socks, I'm watching them. --Brian McNeil / ^talk 09:14, 22 July 2009 (UTC)

[edit] WN:ARBCOM

As recently pointed out on IRC, the Arbitration Committee's terms are expiring on July 31, 2009. We have 5 current members and one vacancy. As I see it, we have three main options:

1. We abolish ArbCom by letting the terms expire. The ArbCom has not had anything to do in recent memory.
2. We do a snap election to reconfirm the current members and extend their terms, and run an election to fill the vacancy.
3. We hold full elections per current policy, which is that all the seats are up for grabs.

Computerjoe has also started a discussion at the water cooler. We ought to get a general consensus before the terms expire. Cheers, --SVTCobra 23:20, 24 July 2009 (UTC)

• Elections have now been set up at Wikinews:Arbitration Committee/2009 elections. Nominations are being accepted. Voting begins August 10 and ends August 17 (UTC). --SVTCobra 00:53, 5 August 2009 (UTC)

[edit] user abuse of sighting privilege

Please see here. User added publish template and self-reviewed an article citing original reporting with no original reporting notes, and no independent peer review. --Brian McNeil / ^talk 10:16, 16 August 2009 (UTC)

Done. See [1]. Cirt (talk) 15:28, 16 August 2009 (UTC)

[edit] Unprotect?

I'm normally more of a Wikipedia editor, so I'm probably missing something obvious here (although, as much as I watch the news I should be a wikinews "reporter", but that's a different subject...). I wanted to request unprotection for Comedian Stephen Colbert wins NASA space station name contest, is all, because I notices a couple of minor grammatical errors. I don't see why it's been protected in the first place, but I don't have much editorial experience on this project so I'm not really overly concerned about that issue. If anyone can provide some direction here, I would appreciate it. Thanks!Ohms law (talk) 03:22, 23 August 2009 (UTC)

We normally archive/protect articles after 7 days. You can suggest changes to the article by using {{editprotected}} and listing the changes on the talk page. --PatrickFlaherty (talk) 04:54, 23 August 2009 (UTC)

Ah, I see... thank you. Ohms law (talk) 11:01, 23 August 2009 (UTC)

[edit] abuse filter mismatch for Page blanking

I'm trying to remove the "visit my blog!" section on User:Deathgleaner's user page, but I keep receiving this page blanking filter. Deathgleaner has been spamming this blog link (which includes attacks on Wikipedia administrators) across at least a dozen different Wikimedia projects. It's being removed across wikis for soapboxing, especially because he is adding this to projects where he has never edited before (or barely edited, as in the case here). Any assistance would be appreciated. I'm a sysop at En. and Simple Wikipedias, so it's not my intention to vandalize or anything, just curtail this cross-wiki soapboxing. Thanks, Either way (talk) 12:22, 1 September 2009 (UTC)

Done –Juliancolton | ^Talk 12:30, 1 September 2009 (UTC)

Thanks! I was about to leave you a note on your talk page actually since I saw you were around here. Do you think you can also take a look at MediaWiki talk:Abusefilter-warning and fix the template? Much appreciated! Either way (talk) 12:32, 1 September 2009 (UTC)

• Done. You might have avoided the abuse filter if you'd reverted to the older version with just {{ticker}} on it. --Brian McNeil / ^talk 13:24, 1 September 2009 (UTC)

• I did actually. That's what was weird about it. It wasn't technically a full blanking. I was leaving the ticker template each time. Either way (talk) 13:34, 1 September 2009 (UTC)

[edit] Templates and template documentation

Having had cause to look at a few templates earlier, I had to recreate a documentation template to fix {{source}} and {{develop}}.

All templates should be documented with the {{documentation}} template, if a template already has documentation and categories/interwiki embedded in it, these should be moved to the sub-page the template will create - unless they are categories that should be included in articles where the template is used.

This is listed here at AAA because many - if not most - templates should be semi-protected. In addition, they should be sighted. Most templates predate FlaggedRevisions and are not currently sighted. --Brian McNeil / ^talk 13:31, 1 September 2009 (UTC)

Just so I'm clear: you want the template itself full-protected and the documentation semi-protected? Gopher65_talk 20:05, 1 September 2009 (UTC)

I'll note that {{documentation}} appears to have been copied straight from Wikipedia. Since the anal-retentive Wikinewsies in 2005 decided that our license shouldn't be compatible with Wikipedia, this template cannot be used and must be deleted... unless of course you want to change our license to by-sa. Gopher65_talk 20:05, 1 September 2009 (UTC)

This is listed here because many of the templates are protected - whether we should protect more is up for debate. I did semi-protect the /doc pages I did because they're on very high-vis templates and it was a precaution. --Brian McNeil / ^talk 20:09, 1 September 2009 (UTC)

Well, if we're not going to full-protect all templates, then I'd say that we need to decide what general types of templates we're going to full protect. Infoboxes, language templates, source templates, commentary templates, etc need to be full protected because they are included in every (or nearly every) article in un-substituted form. Vandalism of any one of those templates would result in a large disruption to Wikinews. Lesser templates like talk page templates could probably be only semi-protected without any significant danger. (though I'd protect {{Welcome}} and {{Howdy}} just to be on the safe side). I'd also think that all doc pages, if that feature gets used, should be semi-protected. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Gopher65 (talk • contribs)

The Template: namespace is covered by FlaggedRevisions. On that basis I would tend more towards favouring semi-protect for a lot of templates. --Brian McNeil / ^talk 08:56, 2 September 2009 (UTC)

[edit] Death threats on comments page

Not sure whether to take this threat seriously? Open to thoughts. Tempodivalse [talk] 23:00, 2 September 2009 (UTC)

Joe deleted this, but we should probably decide whether we should delete threats on sight, regardless of whether they are credible or not. --SVTCobra 23:09, 2 September 2009 (UTC)

What I find a bit concerning about this particular instance is that the IP is from the immediate vicinity where the persons the threats were made against live (see the WHOIS results). Tempodivalse [talk] 23:39, 2 September 2009 (UTC)

What exactly do you mean by 'take seriously'? --78.146.215.12 (talk) 23:59, 2 September 2009 (UTC)

What I meant was whether this threat seemed credible enough for us to consider notifying local authorities to the situation. Tempodivalse [talk] 02:57, 3 September 2009 (UTC)

That's not out job. You could tell the authorities, but they would most likely not do anything about this. Then you'd have to spend an hour explaining to them who you are and why you're involved. If you want to, feel free, but I think it is a waste of time. There are only 2 things we can do. #1 - Block the IP (Which I did, which I wonder why it wasn't already) and #2 - Possible request the edit be oversighted. --ShakataGaNai ^{^_^} 03:33, 3 September 2009 (UTC)

• death threats should be deleted on sight, but I'd say not oversighted. If they are oversighted then local admins cannot see if there is any pattern to threats or indications of someone obsessing about this. Where someone is persistently threatened I would strongly advise another discussion on the topic of contacting local law enforcement. A caveat to that is that data available under the WMF privacy policy should not be disclosed without a valid supoena - but this is pretty much only going to apply to checkusers. --Brian McNeil / ^talk 11:30, 5 September 2009 (UTC)

For the record, because Wikinews is hosted in Florida death threats here are all crimes, regardless of their veracity. US federal law makes this something that (the FBI?) supposedly investigate. Wether they actually bother is another matter, of course. Blood Red Sandman ^{(Talk) (Contribs)} 11:35, 5 September 2009 (UTC)

Oh, there's such a temptation there to abuse that. Start a website http://www.howillkillosama.com and make it forward every post someone puts on it to the FBI. :P --Brian McNeil / ^talk 17:11, 6 September 2009 (UTC)

[edit] Announcement

I'd just like to draw attention to the announcement on my userpage. I think people should be made aware of it. Blood Red Sandman ^{(Talk) (Contribs)} 21:13, 11 September 2009 (UTC)

Hope everything works out for you IRL. Let me know if there's anything I can help with. –Juliancolton | ^Talk 04:57, 12 September 2009 (UTC)

Good luck.    Tris   07:14, 12 September 2009 (UTC)

Same here. I hope things get better for you soon. Tempodivalse [talk] 12:45, 12 September 2009 (UTC)