User talk:Chess
 | Chess uses the Wikibreak Switch template, and plans to update this notice if a wikibreak is taken. |
|
Index 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 |
|
This page has archives. Sections older than 10 days may be automatically archived by Lowercase sigmabot III when more than 4 sections are present. |
 | This user is aware of the designation of the following topics as contentious topics:
|
Hello Chess,
Backlog
Redirect drive: In response to an unusually high redirect backlog, we held a redirect backlog drive in May. The drive completed with 23851 reviews done in total, bringing the redirect backlog to 0 (momentarily). Congratulations to Hey man im josh who led with a staggering 4316 points, followed by Meena and Greyzxq with 2868 and 2546 points respectively. See this page for more details. The redirect queue is steadily rising again and is steadily approaching 4,000. Please continue to help out, even if it's only for a few or even one review a day.
Redirect autopatrol: All administrators without autopatrol have now been added to the redirect autopatrol list. If you see any users who consistently create significant amounts of good quality redirects, consider requesting redirect autopatrol for them here.
WMF work on PageTriage: The WMF Moderator Tools team, consisting of Sam, Jason and Susana, and also some patches from Jon, has been hard at work updating PageTriage. They are focusing their efforts on modernising the extension's code rather than on bug fixes or new features, though some user-facing work will be prioritised. This will help make sure that this extension is not deprecated, and is easier to work on in the future. In the next month or so, we will have an opt-in beta test where new page patrollers can help test the rewrite of Special:NewPagesFeed, to help find bugs. We will post more details at WT:NPPR when we are ready for beta testers.
Articles for Creation (AFC): All new page reviewers are now automatically approved for Articles for Creation draft reviewing (you do not need to apply at WT:AFCP like was required previously). To install the AFC helper script, visit Special:Preferences, visit the Gadgets tab, tick "Yet Another AFC Helper Script", then click "Save". To find drafts to review, visit Special:NewPagesFeed, and at the top left, tick "Articles for Creation". To review a draft, visit a submitted draft, click on the "More" menu, then click "Review (AFCH)". You can also comment on and submit drafts that are unsubmitted using the script.
You can review the AFC workflow at WP:AFCR. It is up to you if you also want to mark your AFC accepts as NPP reviewed (this is allowed but optional, depends if you would like a second set of eyes on your accept). Don't forget that draftspace is optional, so moves of drafts to mainspace (even if they are not ready) should not be reverted, except possibly if there is conflict of interest.
Pro tip: Did you know that visual artists such as painters have their own SNG? The most common part of this "creative professionals" criteria that applies to artists is WP:ARTIST 4b (solo exhibition, not group exhibition, at a major museum) or 4d (being represented within the permanent collections of two museums).
Reminders
- Newsletter feedback - please take this short poll about the newsletter.
- There is live chat with patrollers on the New Page Patrol Discord and #wikimedia-npp connect on IRC.
- Please add the project discussion page to your watchlist.
- To opt out of future mailings, please remove yourself here.
The fourth round of the competition has finished, with anyone scoring less than 673 points being eliminated. It was a high scoring round with all but one of the contestants who progressed to the final having achieved an FA during the round. The highest scorers were
Epicgenius, with 2173 points topping the scores, gained mainly from a featured article, 38 good articles and 9 DYKs. He was followed by
Sammi Brie, with 1575 points, gained mainly from a featured article, 28 good articles and 50 good article reviews. Close behind was
Thebiguglyalien, with 1535 points mainly gained from a featured article, 15 good articles, 26 good article reviews and lots of bonus points.
Between them during round 4, contestants achieved 12 featured articles, 3 featured lists, 3 featured pictures, 126 good articles, 46 DYK entries, 14 ITN entries, 67 featured article candidate reviews and 147 good article reviews. Congratulations to our eight finalists and all who participated! It was a generally high-scoring and productive round and I think we can expect a highly competitive finish to the competition.
Remember that any content promoted after the end of round 4 but before the start of round 5 can be claimed in round 5. Remember too that you must claim your points within 10 days of "earning" them and within 24 hours of the end of the final. If you are concerned that your nomination will not receive the necessary reviews, please list it on Wikipedia:WikiCup/Reviews. It would be helpful if this list could be cleared of any items no longer relevant. If you want to help out with the WikiCup, please do your bit to keep down the review backlogs! Questions are welcome on Wikipedia talk:WikiCup, and the judges are reachable on their talk pages or by email. If you wish to start or stop receiving this newsletter, please feel free to add or remove your name from Wikipedia:WikiCup/Newsletter/Send.
I will be standing down as a judge after the end of the contest. I think the Cup encourages productive editors to improve their contributions to Wikipedia and I hope that someone else will step up to take over the running of the Cup. Sturmvogel 66 (talk), and Cwmhiraeth (talk)
Guild of Copy Editors 2023 Annual Report
 Our 2023 Annual Report is now ready for review.
Highlights:
– Your Guild coordinators:
Dhtwiki, Miniapolis and Wracking.
To discontinue receiving GOCE newsletters, please remove your name from our mailing list.
|
Hi Chess, out of personal curiosity, would you mind sharing whether and how long you were already ready to submit Special:Diff/1294642790? ~ ToBeFree (talk) 00:24, 9 June 2025 (UTC)
- @ToBeFree: I wrote a draft yesterday and decided to finish it later. I forgot to actually finish it until today, when I was reminded in another thread at WP:AN a little before 23:00 that the case existed.[1] At that point I realized "oh shit I forgot to actually submit my evidence". To answer your question, I wasn't really ready to submit it. I couldn't finish the last paragraph.
- The main difference between the draft and my final comment is I linked this[2] comment on my talk page by another editor. I took that out and replaced it with a vague reference to the type of editor I'd like to see more, because I didn't want to submit diffs about someone who isn't a party and who should be contributing more.
- If I had more time, I would elaborate on knowledgeable editors not writing articles on caste because avoiding certain topics prevents caste-pushing (you can find many examples at the Kshatriya RfC). That creates the problematic scenario where Wikipedia's history of Kshatriya effectively ends in 700 CE. That isn't fixable by carpetbombing the area with bans, because we can't force people to edit or make proposals. Chess (talk) (please mention me on reply) 01:17, 9 June 2025 (UTC)
All good. Thanks for the clarification. I asked because the extension phase had been extended in response to last-minute submissions.- The volunteer aspect in the caste topic area is interesting. I have to admit I don't know much about castes beyond the school-taught simplified basics of the Indian caste system's pyramid. Applying page protection where new users engage in a strange form of promotional editing is simple independently of the topic, but it doesn't solve all problems. Thanks for sharing this. ~ ToBeFree (talk) 02:52, 9 June 2025 (UTC)
- I'm afraid that you are misunderstanding a heap of things, Chess. That was why your RfC closure attracted a fair few queries, including from people who do understand. For starters, you say in your ArbCom evidence that "varna is a subjective term with conflicting definitions", which is incorrect, and in any event we have Varna (Hinduism) for that.
- The article subject to the RfC closure was Kshatriya, which is just one of the classifications within the varna system. And, yes, it is a POV magnet because, as in the RfC example, folk just want to push the claim of their own caste etc. It is difficult to understate the desire of Indian Hindus, and especially the more right-wing amongst them politically, to be associated with ancient warriors and kings, and to have inherited a martial nature which they believe they exude themselves.
- The Kshatriya article should be short because there isn't a lot to say about it as a class of people: it was defined in legend a couple of millenia or more ago and hasn't really changed, certainly not until the British Raj era & they misunderstood the entire Varna system. The Varna article should be much lengthier because it is the interactions between the four classes (+ "untouchables" in their various synonyms) which explain both much of India's social history and its present.
- You should not have been surprised that a further proposal didn't come from your RfC close. The original proposal was a specific caste POV-push and the contributor was never going to be interested in any wider aspect anyway, even if one might exist. If you can't see that it was a POV-push then probably working on caste articles isn't a good use of your time, sorry.
- Knowledgeable people, by the way, are well aware that getting entangled with the numerous socks, glorifiers, ill-read etc is a quick way to burn-out or a sanction. And their knowledge will still usually be wiped out within a couple of months unless they personally monitor it, which has implications for ownership etc. They aren't helped by so few admins having both sufficient knowledge and "balls" to patrol all of this. I've lost count of the number of death threats I have had through working on India stuff, and in one case causing me to have to relocate because the police deemed it to be credible (the WMF got involved at one point but I can't say more). So I'm not impressed by any admin or experienced contributor who bemoans that "knowledgeable" people aren't doing stuff - such people should be lauded for what they do, not criticised etc for what they don't do. - Sitush (talk) 15:00, 9 June 2025 (UTC)
- @Sitush: I'm not an admin, and you're far more of an expert than I am on this. You're also more experienced than I am on Wikipedia. I'm basing my knowledge on what was presented and unrefuted in that particular discussion, e.g. You described Kshatriya as being "entirely subjective".[3]
- My broader point is that, as a reader, I have no way of knowing that "who is a Kshatriya a 2025?" is an incredibly contentious issue. I believe this is a major content gap.
- I'm lauding you for what you are doing. That being said, I don't want this to be the same as WP:ARBPIA5 where ArbCom carpetbombed a topic area without a corresponding effort to encourage collaborative editing. There's a cyclical nature to WP:CTOPS where ArbCom creates power vacuums by mass-banning disruptive editors, experienced editors "write off" the area, and the only people willing to edit are disruptive/unaligned with our principles. That is the cycle I want to break, because it leads to incomplete coverage.
- Right now I'm writing WP:TITLEWARRIOR and Draft:Manual of Style/Israel- and Palestine-related articles to make it easier to prevent POV-pushing at requested moves. This is mainly in WP:ARBPIA but someone at the administrators noticeboard said it could be useful for WP:ARBIPA as well. I would appreciate if you wrote an essay on caste pushing (maybe WP:CASTEPUSH).
- The goal is to form strong community norms against disruptive content-related behaviour. That allows closers to ignore editors who aren't here to build an encyclopedia but aren't clearly breaking any rules. It pulls more editors into being constructive. At Palestine-Israel conflict related RMs, I see most editors discussing sources instead of opinion now. Chess (talk) (please mention me on reply) 16:03, 9 June 2025 (UTC)
- Yes, I became aware belatedly that you are not an admin and I edited accordingly. I didn't get an edit conflict message but sorry about that.
- I repeat, though, that varna is not subjective - it's written in scriptures and all Hindus accept it is there, even though it is a nonsense to an atheist like me. What is subjective, as I said in the RfC, is which classification within varna a person or group claims. They can and do claim anything they want, just as castes themselves appear and disappear (which can be evidenced in census returns of the Raj era). Whether or not other unaffiliated people accept it is another matter. There is and never has been a master list for who is in which classification group and caste itself is in constant flux.
- Anyways, we will disagree, I guess. I'm certainly not going to be drafting an essay in the hope of it establishing community norms: we already have those norms in policies and guidelines - if people aren't prepared to follow those, they aren't going to accept an essay written by someone who is widely disliked among Indian contributors for, well, upsetting the vast majority of them over the years. The ArbCom sanctions regime helps a lot but my dream is of some sort of automated sock detection method (it won't happen, of course, because of VPNs, IP hopping and similar). - Sitush (talk) 17:15, 9 June 2025 (UTC)
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Weekly highlight
- The Trust and Safety Product team is finalizing work needed to roll out temporary accounts on large Wikipedias later this month. The team has worked with stewards and other users with extended rights to predict and address many use cases that may arise on larger wikis, so that community members can continue to effectively moderate and patrol temporary accounts. This will be the second of three phases of deployment – the last one will take place in September at the earliest. For more information about the recent developments on the project, see this update. If you have any comments or questions, write on the talk page, and join a CEE Catch Up this Tuesday.
Updates for editors
The watchlist expiry feature allows editors to watch pages for a limited period of time. After that period, the page is automatically removed from your watchlist. Starting this week, you can set a preference for the default period of time to watch pages. The preferences also allow you to set different default watch periods for editing existing pages, pages you create, and when using rollback. [4]
.jpg?lang=en)
- The appearance of talk pages will change at almost all Wikipedias (some have already received this design change, a few will get these changes later). You can read details about the changes on Diff. It is possible to opt out of these changes in user preferences ("Show discussion activity"). [5][6]
- Users with specific extended rights (including administrators, bureaucrats, checkusers, oversighters, and stewards) can now have IP addresses of all temporary accounts revealed automatically during time-limited periods where they need to combat high-speed account-hopping vandalism. This feature was requested by stewards. [7]
- This week, the Moderator Tools and Machine Learning teams will continue the rollout of a new filter to Recent Changes, releasing it to several more Wikipedias. This filter utilizes the Revert Risk model, which was created by the Research team, to highlight edits that are likely to be reverted and help Recent Changes patrollers identify potentially problematic contributions. The feature will be rolled out to the following Wikipedias: Afrikaans Wikipedia, Belarusian Wikipedia, Bengali Wikipedia, Welsh Wikipedia, Hawaiian Wikipedia, Icelandic Wikipedia, Kazakh Wikipedia, Simple English Wikipedia, Turkish Wikipedia. The rollout will continue in the coming weeks to include the rest of the Wikipedias in this project. [8]
View all 27 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.
Updates for technical contributors
- AbuseFilter editors active on Meta-Wiki and large Wikipedias are kindly asked to update AbuseFilter to make it compatible with temporary accounts. A link to the instructions and the private lists of filters needing verification are available on Phabricator.
- Lua modules now have access to the name of a page's associated thumbnail image, and on some wikis to the WikiProject assessment information. This is possible using two new properties on mw.title objects, named
pageImageandpageAssessments. [9][10] - Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
MediaWiki message delivery 01:14, 10 June 2025 (UTC)
Your feedback is requested at Talk:Muffin and Talk:2025 India–Pakistan conflict on "All RFCs" request for comments. Thank you for helping out!
You were randomly selected to receive this invitation from the list of Feedback Request Service subscribers. If you'd like not to receive these messages any more, you can opt out at any time by removing your name.
Message delivered to you with love by Yapperbot :) | Is this wrong? Contact my bot operator. | Sent at 13:41, 12 June 2025 (UTC)
Your feedback is requested at Talk:Air India Flight 171 on a "All RFCs" request for comment. Thank you for helping out!
You were randomly selected to receive this invitation from the list of Feedback Request Service subscribers. If you'd like not to receive these messages any more, you can opt out at any time by removing your name.
Message delivered to you with love by Yapperbot :) | Is this wrong? Contact my bot operator. | Sent at 11:30, 13 June 2025 (UTC)
Your feedback is requested at Talk:Daisy Bates (author) on a "All RFCs" request for comment. Thank you for helping out!
You were randomly selected to receive this invitation from the list of Feedback Request Service subscribers. If you'd like not to receive these messages any more, you can opt out at any time by removing your name.
Message delivered to you with love by Yapperbot :) | Is this wrong? Contact my bot operator. | Sent at 04:30, 14 June 2025 (UTC)