Wikinews:Water cooler/miscellaneous/archives/2019/August

State of the project...

I made a good faith effort to contribute here, about a decade ago.

In Wikinews:Water cooler/policy/Archive/18#Compliance with Wikinews:Etiquette and the following section, I left my warning that I thought wikinews was a troubled project.

So, what is the state of the project? Was an attempt ever made to be more welcoming? Have contributions dried up?

What happened with Bureaucrat Brian McNeil? He seems to have retired. He warned me I would be banned if I kept asking questions. I thought my questions had been civil, pertinent, and appropriate. So, it was his bullying that drove me from this project.

My sympathy to him and his family, if he stopped contributing here due to ill-health. But, can I ask if the incivility I experienced was later more widely recognized? Did he end up losing some of his status bits? Geo Swan (talk) 20:14, 4 August 2019 (UTC)

We welcome folks who come here with positive attitudes, which in my experience is most of them; those who come here with disruptive intent, we invite to leave expeditiously, and often they claim en.wn is a hostile place though, of course, they brought with them the hostility they found here. Brianmc often dealt with the disruptive elements in order to let the rest of us get on with news production. --Pi zero (talk) 21:15, 4 August 2019 (UTC)

• Pi zero, did you mean to imply you think I was an individual who came to wikinews with disruptive intent? Did you mean to imply you think that I found hostility here because I brought hostility with me? I re-read the five attempts I made that were, eventually published. a, b, c, d, e. I dispute I brought hostility here. I am confident that a review of the talk pages of the drafts that were deleted because they weren't published would also show I exercised patience and respect in my questions.

  My recollection is that those drafts were marked "stale" when my good faith efforts to get explanations of the tags established contributors places did not receive meaningful or helpful replies.

  Now, if in the last decade you guys have figured out how to be more helpful, that would be great. If you haven't, don't shoot the messenger. Geo Swan (talk) 18:42, 5 August 2019 (UTC)

I implied nothing about you specifically. I shared a general observation. You could have reacted contemplatively. What you did instead suggests that today (regardless of wiki-archaeology) you're carrying some negative baggage with you. --Pi zero (talk) 20:04, 5 August 2019 (UTC)

Yes, attempt to be more welcoming has been made. Some effort to this end are transparent and are detailed on the water cooler, and on my user page.

This does not exclude usage of phrases like "you royally screwed the start" (ref). They are a criticism of an action and not a person. I do not find them incivil and I am not sure why someone else would. Gryllida (talk) 21:28, 4 August 2019 (UTC)

I don't see a problem with Brian's comments. He may have been too harsh at times, but I am sure he had the best of intentions. I can understand some people get a little "picky" when they get told things they don't like, I don't blame them. But in my years here I never felt unwelcome; rather, for me it was a permanent learning. I improved my English while writing news articles, something I adore, and in the meantime contributed to a free project. I think we all won something. If people don't give Wikinews a chance, hardly they could get to understand its goal. It's true, Wikinews is running at a very slow pace, and for some time now, but that is not particularly because of some long-inactive users. --Diego Grez Cañete (talk) 03:45, 5 August 2019 (UTC)

• Gryllida, Diego Grez Cañete, one problem with individuals like Brian McNeil using inflammatory language, in response to good faith requests for explanation is that it acts to poison discussions. It escalates the tension. It erodes the collegiality that WMF policy requires of participants in all wikis and related projects. As a very experienced contributor, entrusted with administrator authority, I think the rest of the broader WMF community has a reasonable expectation he should have tried his best to set a good example of collegiality for less experienced contributors.

  On User talk:Brian McNeil Mr McNeil offered a terrible explanation for his incivility that I have read many times, from various WMF project insiders. Paraphrasing "I am too busy, and too important to spend time being civil."

  Over on enwiki I wrote an essay entitled "Every question, every disagreement, is a teachable moment". We have no training courses, inadequate or nonexistent tutorials, so, IMO, it is essential for everyone to show patience when asked questions, or when encountering disagreement. Lots of people, including lots of WMF project administrators, do find it hard to show patience. IMO they should try harder.

  Newsflash, administrators, being human, sometimes make mistakes. When administrators lack the patience to offer an explanation, then the hopefully rare instances where they were wrong, and the questioner correct, go unrecognized, and uncorrected.

  Over on enwiki I wrote an essay entitled "nothing is obvious", where I describe an unfortunately common phenomenon. Lots of people try to argue that some things they believe are "too obvious" to require explanation. In my experience, it is those things people regard as too obvious to require explanation that cause the deepest problems. Sometimes not only is the truth of their claim not obvious, their notion is actually not even true.

  When something is truly obvious, it should be trivial to explain.

  When asked to explain something they regard as too obvious to require explanation a common reaction is annoyance, or even an ugly rage. This is what I think the questions I raised triggered from Mr McNeil. Geo Swan (talk) 18:33, 5 August 2019 (UTC)

I would still appreciate an opinion on the state of health of the wikinews project

Have the number of submissions submitted fallen off, over the last decade?

Have steps been taken to be more welcoming to late-comers? Geo Swan (talk) 18:45, 5 August 2019 (UTC)

The state of the project should be self-evident. There is, as far as I know, no way to track the number of submissions. We delete articles which fail to get published. I suppose the number of submissions are roughly correlated to the number of articles which do get published. However, as we have taken steps to further tighten the review process to ensure accuracy and verifiability, this correlation is probably not one-to-one.

I am aware of no formal step to be "more welcoming" to newcomers as the policy has always been to be welcoming. Has the overall experience for newcomers been good, well, perhaps you could ask them. If you want some names, let me know. Cheers, --SVTCobra 19:25, 5 August 2019 (UTC)

SVTCobra, in the interests of giving newcomers a friendly, welcoming environment, seems to me we should be protecting newcomers from that one. --Pi zero (talk) 20:20, 5 August 2019 (UTC)

In the case of on-wiki notifications via the welcome-a-bit tool, you can keep a history of legitimate submissions. (I do, in my talk page archive.) Gryllida (talk) 21:16, 5 August 2019 (UTC)

Criticism of one's actions -- when necessary -- is vital for team work. Taking things personally isn't. I am sorry if criticism directed at your actions feels for you like people are criticizing you and your intellectual as a person. This is an over generalization and getting rid of it would be fabulous.

Also, I can not do a lot about things which were said in the past. Either they already were apologized for, or someone already decided not to. I find it awfully terrible idea to dig deeper into these issues again and would prefer instead to look at what happens now and what can happen in the future. Preferably with the current content in the Newsroom as energy directed to the new articles and new their talk pages and newcomers user talk pages is highly efficient. Gryllida (talk) 21:14, 5 August 2019 (UTC)

Tech News: 2019-32

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 later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 6 August. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 7 August. It will be on all wikis from 8 August (calendar).

Problems

• A change in RelatedArticles extension accidentally enabled it for everyone, not just for mobile users. This has been fixed. [1][2]

Meetings

• You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 7 August at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• Today everyone can see IP addresses if someone edits without an account. In the future this could be more hidden. This is to protect unregistered editors so fewer can see their IP address. This would only happen after we make sure the tools for vandal fighting can still be effective. You can read more and comment.

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

13:25, 5 August 2019 (UTC)

—The preceding unsigned comment was added by Trizek (WMF) (talk • contribs)

This anonymous IP editing proposal mentioned in the last line is a major change. I've commented on it. --Gryllida (talk) 00:21, 6 August 2019 (UTC)

Geolocation is a key tool for enabling anything at all to be known about an IP; without it, IPs would be so untrustworthy they should really just be disallowed altogether. I find it hard to imagine putting in all the effort to compose a comment for the talk page, though; it's obvious the Foundation doesn't care what the community says (which, yes, is disastrous since the community has all the clue). --Pi zero (talk) 00:49, 6 August 2019 (UTC)

On collaborative data journalism

https://propublica.gitbook.io/collaborative/ and https://www.propublica.org/nerds/collaborative-data-journalism-guide —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 19:27, 14 August 2019 (UTC)

Fragile Minds

https://www.wheelercentre.com/broadcasts/podcasts/the-wheeler-centre/pen-lecture-fragile-minds. Also https://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/latenightlive/fragile-minds_-erik-jensen/11059754 —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 21:13, 16 August 2019 (UTC)

Is it lead or lede?

https://www.poynter.org/reporting-editing/2019/lead-vs-lede-roy-peter-clark-has-the-definitive-answer-at-last/ —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 17:24, 18 August 2019 (UTC)

<Oh, one of those.> :p  --Pi zero (talk) 19:09, 18 August 2019 (UTC)

Tech News: 2019-34

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

• There will be no Tech News issue next week. The next issue of Tech News will be sent out on 2 September 2019.

Problems

• Some abuse filters stopped working because of a code change. Only variables for the current action will work. Variables defined inside a branch may not work outside of that branch. You can read more to see how to fix the filters.
• Only six accounts can be created from one IP address per day. Between 12 August and August 15 this was two accounts per day. This was because of a security issue. It is now six accounts per day again. [3]

Changes later this week

• Only a limited number of accounts can be created from one IP address. An IP address can be whitelisted so that it can create as many accounts as needed. This is useful at events where many new persons learn to edit. IP addresses that are whitelisted for this reason will also not show CAPTCHAs when you create accounts. This will happen on Wednesday. [4]
• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 20 August. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 21 August. It will be on all wikis from 22 August (calendar).

Meetings

• You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 21 August at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• There is an RFC about creating a new global user group with the right to edit abuse filters. This will be used to fix broken filters and make sure all filters will still work when software changes happen. You can read more and comment.
• Special:Contributions/newbies will no longer be working. This is because of performance reasons. It showed edits by new accounts. You can see this in the recent changes feed instead. [5]

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

15:21, 19 August 2019 (UTC)

New people

Something reminded me that there may be entities who can be very interested in news writing and benefit from it more than an average individual who learns to think better after some news writing.

• Uni journalism classes are a good example, as the teacher receives free access to high quality peer review which becomes a part of the education process and can be used in their marking scheme.
• Primary and high schools can benefit from this, as they often need to study the 5Ws as a part of their standard curriculum in Literacy.
• Uni computer science people might benefit from this if they do a programming class and do a group assignment to develop a tool that aids authoring or review.

What are other entities that might be interested? I'm just checking as I would be happy to create 'landing pages' for different kind of educators or other groups, and share links to these landing pages with a few institutions in my local area. --Gryllida (talk) 00:01, 21 August 2019 (UTC)

Note: this is for brainstorming. As many as you can think of would be great to have. Gryllida (talk) 00:02, 21 August 2019 (UTC)

Most recently, my own planning for Wikinews has leaned toward two notions:

• We ought to look for ways to help children learn fact-based thinking; we're not a child-friendly environment, it goes with being uncensored and I certainly wouldn't wish to change that but it's worth some thought to what we might do in that direction.
• Whatever semi-automated assistance we build for writing articles ("article wizard(s)") should also encourage the writer in fact-based thinking.

Another general line of thought is expressed in a planning essay I drafted not too long ago on Wikibooks: Wikiness. --Pi zero (talk) 00:40, 21 August 2019 (UTC)

Regarding children, I think wikis have the advantage (compared with, say, w:Minetest or some other educational games) of transparency. Gryllida (talk) 07:31, 21 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)

Tech News: 2019-33

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

• 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. Feedback on the discussion page is appreciated. [6]
• Due to the absence of volunteer maintenance of Cologne Blue skin, the link to activate it will be hidden. The skin will still work, but editors using it are encouraged to switch to another skin. [7]

Changes later this week

• Due to Wikimania, there is no deployment this week. [8]

Meetings

• You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 13 August at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• The "Wikidata item" link will be moved from "Tools" to "In other projects" section on all Wikimedia projects, starting on August 21. Full announcement, Phabricator task.

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

18:19, 12 August 2019 (UTC)

I noticed "Wikidata item" moved from "Tools" to "In other projects" yesterday, however, today it seems to have moved back to "Tools". --SVTCobra 16:47, 25 August 2019 (UTC)