Wikinews:Water cooler/miscellaneous/archives/2015/December

SPAM

Has anyone else noticed that a very large volume of SPAM has been coming to Scoop. Anything we can do about this? --William S. Saturn (talk) 07:27, 5 December 2015 (UTC)

@William S. Saturn: Can you point me to this? —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 17:54, 7 December 2015 (UTC)

@Koavf: Scoop is the independent mailing list we maintain for Wikinews reporters to provide non-public documentation of original reporting. --Pi zero (talk) 18:37, 7 December 2015 (UTC)

@Pi zero: I'm actually an administrator of Wikinews-L and there is an insane amount of spam. I don't know if it's much more or less than before but it's constant. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 03:45, 8 December 2015 (UTC)

@Pi zero: This is a little embarrassing but is Scoop the same as Wikinews-l? It seems like Scoop is an independent thing from the WMF-sponsored mailing list. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 15:22, 8 December 2015 (UTC)

• Completely different. wikinews-l is publicly readable, scoop is not. Nor, given past interactions with the WMF, was it felt they could be trusted to provide/run a mailing distribution list that might contain confidential information which — in some circumstances — could contain material critical of the Foundation. --Brian McNeil / ^talk 15:38, 8 December 2015 (UTC)

• As with any email address that's been publicly available for a while, it ends up on lists. May be time to retire that, and set up a new one. --Brian McNeil / ^talk 10:09, 8 December 2015 (UTC)

• @Brianmc: Except that scoop-at-wikinewsie-dot-org is etched into the bones of the project, scattered all over hither and yon, including our archives, and in lots of people's minds. We have, by my subjective impression, a large segment of our community whose submission rates vary wildly on a scale of months or years, who know by heart the address for scoop. Seems like at this juncture, anyway, we're better off maintaining a stable target for contributors, even though it also maintains a stationary target for spam. --Pi zero (talk) 12:31, 8 December 2015 (UTC)

Let me see if I can crank up the anti-spam settings on the address then... --Brian McNeil / ^talk 12:59, 8 December 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-50

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent changes

• Revision scoring will help to automatically identify bad-faith and good-faith edits. The point is to make it easier to block vandals and welcome newcomers. It currently supports Wikidata and 14 Wikipedias. [1]

Problems

• Meta was not given access to information from Wikidata last week. This will happen later. [2]

Changes this week

• You will be able to use wikilinks in Flow topic titles. [3]
• IP users will have a toolbar with links to the user talk page and user contributions. Some Wikipedias already have this feature. [4]
• You will be able to edit the graph size in the visual editor. You can either specify the size in the graph dialog or drag it to be the size you want it to be. [5]
• It will be easier to write math in the visual editor if you don't know LaTeX. You can use symbol buttons instead. [6]
• You will be able to use syntax highlighting when you write math with LaTeX in the visual editor. [7]
• UploadWizard will look a bit different. [8]
• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 8 December. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 9 December. It will be on all Wikipedias from 10 December. (calendar).
• New MediaWiki versions will now be on Catalan and Hebrew Wikipedia on Wednesdays. Other Wikipedias get the new MediaWiki version on Thursdays. [9]

Meetings

• You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 8 December at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.
• You can join the next meeting with the Architecture committee. The topics this week are "Graph/Graphoid/Kartographer – data storage architecture" and "Parametric JSON builder". The meeting will be on 9 December at 22:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• A new beta feature will show users links to related articles at the bottom of an article. It will not be enabled by default. [10]

Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

17:52, 7 December 2015 (UTC)

Champions League

We currently have five (yes, five) articles on a single football competition queued up for review. These are difficult, unrewarding articles to review since sports tend to use specialist terminology and because enwn contributors traditionally lean towards harder news. At present there really isn't any point in anybody else writing anything; there's already five articles about football and I can basically guarantee some of those will go stale.

It's an unfair burden on a small project. Somebody wants to turn us into a football newsletter. In the mists of time myself and other users have felt that sports and even local news should be treated the same as any other article (including going on the main page) unless and until they became problematic. I'm curious; would the community agree that, in the present circumstances (including our small userbase), these articles have indeed become problematic? If so, what approach do we make? BRS ^{(Talk) (Contribs)} 17:18, 10 December 2015 (UTC)

• I think you know my opinion on the matter. Sport isn't news, it's the modern-day equivalent of the Coliseum Games. It's also given ridiculous coverage in the mainstream, which makes it utterly pointless for us to work on it. No sports fan is ever going to end up with Wikinews as their go-to source for coverage. Five articles? Feed 'em to the lions. --Brian McNeil / ^talk 18:27, 10 December 2015 (UTC)
• I've been discussing this with the writer, acagastya.

  @Blood Red Sandman: If something else is submitted, I would review it. I would certainly like to see at least one of acagastya's articles reviewed, and if nothing else comes along I'd likely try to get more of them, but it seems reasonable to me to take distribution of authorship into account as part of one's personal prioritizing of the review queue.

  @Brian McNeil: I've never taken quite as strong an anti-sports-news stance as you have but, granted, it isn't the hardest news (it isn't the softest, either; over here in the US, one can tune in every weekday morning to things like Good Morning America that make any en.wn sports article look rock solid). --Pi zero (talk) 18:41, 10 December 2015 (UTC)

• If we could figure out an order with the reporter to address them in, that would be a help. I'm keen as part of the balancing act to try and minimise discouragement to Acagastya (who's an exceptionally enthusiastic newcomer). Tonight I'm unlikely to have uninterrupted blocks of time long enough to review but tomorrow's a possibility. I'd suggest maybe only the most recently published one should make it to a lead.

Regarding sports and local news, I wrote in the car crash test to try and make the judgement call as consistent and fair as possible. There can be no doubt sports rank as more obviously newsworthy than, say, the articles exemplified there. Prioritising anything else that comes up seems reasonable; I'd hoped to write as well as review tomorrow. BRS ^{(Talk) (Contribs)} 19:41, 10 December 2015 (UTC)

• After I left enwp, I started with articles, which were either WN:STALE or not as per WN:SG. Then I took football articles, and I have written about 20 football articles. I have covered other news articles like death of Dr Abdul Kalam, Gay marriage in US, Wimbledon, articles of NASA, Nobel prize in chemistry, Sehwag's retirement, Afghan earthquake etc. It is because my primary interest is football. Plus, a source from BBC and The Guardian helps to complete the article quickly. Don't face much trouble. But saying that nobody checks enwn for this would be unfair. There has been a rise in alexa rank of wikinews from 80k to 66k. I update it on wp. I did not do it because I wanted to have the main page filled with my articles only. There was a time in June and July when 7 out of the 10 articles on main page were created by me. I just did it because group stages of UCL completed yesterday. That too, with a record breaking performance of Ronaldo, the crazy exit of Manchester United, comfortable win of Bayern Munich, hat-trick by Giroud, and a tense (actually 2) draws that made Roma qualify for the next round. That is the only reason. I hope we are not going to stop writing about sports.
  14.139.242.195 (talk) 21:37, 10 December 2015 (UTC)

My opinion is the minority one, and always has been. I've a strong preference for hard news, and just find the language/terminology around sports somewhat incomprehensible. --Brian McNeil / ^talk 14:43, 11 December 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-51

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Changes this week

• Meta will be able to use information from Wikidata. [11]
• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 15 December. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 16 December. It will be on all Wikipedias from 17 December. (calendar).

Meetings

• You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 15 December at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.
• You can join the next meeting with the Architecture committee. The topic this week is talking about the agenda for the Wikimedia Developer Summit. The meeting will be on 16 December at 22:00 (UTC). See how to join. [12]

Future changes

• A new gadget manager will come next year. The new gadget system is called Gadgets 2.0. [13]

Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

17:42, 14 December 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-52

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Tech News

• Because of the holidays, the next issue of Tech News will be sent out on 11 January 2016.
• The writers of the technical newsletter are asking for your opinion. Did you get the information you wanted this year? Did we miss important technical news in 2015? What kind of information was too late? Please tell us! You can write in your language. Thank you!

Recent changes

• CompletionSuggester is a new suggestions algorithm for Search. It is available as a Beta feature since 17 December. (more information)
• The Multimedia team is running an A/B test for the cross-wiki upload tool. They are testing four different interfaces. The test is running from 16-23 December. (more information)

Changes this week

• There is no deployment of MediaWiki scheduled until 12 January 2016 (calendar).

Meetings

• Should administrators and other users with advanced tools need stronger passwords? You can discuss about it in a Request for Comments.
• No meeting with the VisualEditor team on 22 and 29 December, and 5 January.

Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

18:29, 21 December 2015 (UTC)