Fort Towson

News and updates for administrators from the past month (August 2022).

Guideline and policy news

• A discussion is open to define a process by which Vector 2022 can be made the default for all users.
• An RfC is open to gain consensus on whether Fox News is reliable for science and politics.

Technical news

• The impact report on the effects of disabling IP editing on the Persian (Farsi) Wikipedia has been released.
• The WMF is looking into making a Private Incident Reporting System (PIRS) system to improve the reporting of harmful incidents through easier and safer reporting. You can leave comments on the talk page by answering the questions provided. Users who have faced harmful situations are also invited to join a PIRS interview to share the experience. To sign up please email Madalina Ana.

Arbitration

• An arbitration case regarding Conduct in deletion-related editing has been closed. The Arbitration Committee passed a remedy as part of the final decision to create a request for comment (RfC) on how to handle mass nominations at Articles for Deletion (AfD).
• The arbitration case request Jonathunder has been automatically closed after a 6 month suspension of the case.

Miscellaneous

• The new pages patrol (NPP) team has prepared an appeal to the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) for assistance with addressing Page Curation bugs and requested features. You are encouraged to read the open letter before it is sent, and if you support it, consider signing it. It is not a discussion, just a signature will suffice.
• Voting for candidates for the Wikimedia Board of Trustees is open until 6 September.

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At Wikipedia:Requests for comment/Biographies, I edited the description of an RfC as Legobot picked up an introductory note as the RfC description rather than the RfC statement itself. [1] Legobot then reverted that edit, going back to the introductory note. [2] Except for specialized cases like anti-vandalism bots, I do not believe that bots should be reverting edits made by actual human editors. It's been fixed now by moving the introductory note lower, but this still probably should be looked at.

(On an unrelated topic, thanks for running for the Board. I thought your statements were very well on point indeed, and hope to see you get a seat.) Seraphimblade ^{Talk to me} 19:05, 30 August 2022 (UTC)

Thanks for your support in the election, I appreciate it :)

As for Legobot, it's not so much reverting your edit, as much as it is being dumb and just ensuring the page matches the text on the RfC itself, so if someone updates the RfC, it gets reflected on that page. This is documented in the page's edit notice so humans don't try to update the page themselves (but I think they still don't display on all platforms?). Legoktm (talk) 01:49, 1 September 2022 (UTC)

@Seraphimblade: forgot to ping. Legoktm (talk) 01:50, 1 September 2022 (UTC)

@Seraphimblade: I did explain in this edit: Legobot is rigid in that, it cannot be overridden except by altering the text of the RfC itself, which is why at your request I made this edit some hours before you posted here. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 12:22, 3 September 2022 (UTC)

23:19, 5 September 2022 (UTC)

Hi.

First, kudos to you and the other candidates for stepping up to represent the community this way.

With the size of the community, I have no doubt you'll have lots of people having lots of opinions. But as I believe in transparency, and in positive reinforcement, I just wanted to share my thought process with you.

For me, I don't hate the WMF at all. I think they serve several important purposes. But I've been concerned about the pushes of late to add features which aren't "nuts and bolts" useful. Making things easier for our editors and readers is great. Adding features to cater to trying to pull in disinterested editors, or trying to make wikipedia interfaces look like familiar social media interfaces - no, please no. And I've really not liked how wmf-related discussions have become more and more closed to the anonymous editing community. For example, while I don't necessarily oppose the idea of a UCoC - the processes involved in its creation and implementation have been very concerning.

So anyway, I went through all the material, watched the videos, read the notes and all the rest. The compass tool was interesting as well.

I narrowed to three, then to two. A few decisions were easy, most were tough. And in the end, I ranked you first.

Your positions on the tech side of things were strong in your favour.

I also felt that, though everyone seemed to be reading their responses from a written page (a good idea to be sure), listening to you read them, you seemed to me to clearly believe everything you said, these weren't just an attempt to try to say the "right things", or to appeal to a demographic.

I like your idea of a bottom up approach, though I do think there are times when someone needs to step in to cut the gordian knot, or in some instances, to help guide.

And as I kept reading your responses, I kept wishing you said more about the openness of the internet and protection of privacy and protection from oppression, etc. (basically the things which seemed very clear in User:Fjmustak's statements.) And then I come here and see your "free culture" userbox, and laughed, thinking "where was that in your statements"? lol

Anyway, I've rambled on enough. I just thought I would share some of my thoughts. (I considered a lot more things from the statements than just what I've shared here, but this is long enough as it is : )

I wish you well, and thanks again : ) - jc37 21:11, 5 September 2022 (UTC)

@Jc37: I really appreciate your support and feedback! Looking back, aside from one question, I think I didn't end up talking about the open internet and privacy because I think the WMF already does those things pretty well and voters didn't seem to ask about those issues. And personally, I consider all of those to be fundamentally core to my identity that it's easy to forget that I need to express that to people who don't know me that well. :-) Legoktm (talk) 17:58, 7 September 2022 (UTC)

Hi Legoktm! Sorry to continue to be a broken record, but it's really disheartening to see that the community consensus to trial semi-protection at TFA has apparently still not been honored, more than a year after Jc37 closed the discussion. You offered to BRFA it, so the ball remains in your court. Any updates since March? {{u|Sdkb}} ^talk 05:09, 7 September 2022 (UTC)

@Sdkb: In April I moved across the country and then in May I got persuaded to run for the Board, so this basically my first gap of free wiki-time since then. Anyways, let's give it a shot. Legoktm (talk) 02:02, 8 September 2022 (UTC)

01:48, 13 September 2022 (UTC)

MediaWiki message delivery 22:14, 19 September 2022 (UTC)

Am I correct that you used your meta:System administrators abilities to make this minor text tweak to a user script here at enWiki? ~ Amory (u • t • c) 20:12, 22 September 2022 (UTC)

Yes. Do you have any concerns with that change? Legoktm (talk) 01:30, 23 September 2022 (UTC)

No issue with the content of the change, but given that it's a label change to a user script and not an important technical change, I was surprised to see the use of that group to overcome local restrictions for something so technically minor. ~ Amory (u • t • c) 12:13, 23 September 2022 (UTC)

Hi Kunal. I am surprised and dismayed that you did not get a seat on the board. Maybe Mike Peel will be able to bridge the gap as you shared many intentions. Please do try again next year, and thank you for all the support you already lend to the volunteer community, especially NPP. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 01:35, 22 September 2022 (UTC)

Hi Legoktm. I was shocked too, you seemed like a very strong candidate. I echo everything Kudpung says above. Would love to see you run again in the future. Thank you for your efforts. –Novem Linguae (talk) 08:46, 22 September 2022 (UTC)

Alas, it's been a disappointing day :-( Thank you, and everyone else, for all the support, it really meant a lot to me. I hope we're able to get some ideas and changes accomplished regardless of the result. Legoktm (talk) 08:56, 22 September 2022 (UTC)

You were my top candidate. I hope you'll consider running again next year. czar 23:57, 24 September 2022 (UTC)

The photos of Elizabeth II from September 19's TFA still seem to be protected on Commons (commons:Commons:Auto-protected files/wikipedia/en), despite not being on the MP or in MP staging areas. Do you know why this is? — Goszei (talk) 22:02, 25 September 2022 (UTC)

I forgot to remove the live hack I had added in for it, thanks for noticing :) Should be removed in the bot's next update. Legoktm (talk) 22:09, 25 September 2022 (UTC)

MediaWiki message delivery 00:28, 27 September 2022 (UTC)

	The Technical Barnstar
	Thanks for making a new RFA voting history tool! {{u|Sdkb}} talk 18:22, 27 September 2022 (UTC)

You're welcome :-) Legoktm (talk) 06:34, 28 September 2022 (UTC)

You really want them here? Well, ok. I've only looked at my own results.

Two false positives:

• It misidentifies me as supporting in Wikipedia:Requests for adminship/Sro23, showing Neovu79's !vote as the snippet; they linked to my userpage in the middle of their comment. My only two edits to that RFA were to reformat another user's question and to pose one of my own.
• Similarly, Becky Sayles's neutral in Wikipedia:Requests for adminship/Primefac 2 is misattributed to me; again, they linked pinged me in their comment, and my only edit to that RFA was to reply to that comment.

Less seriously, it's unable to parse most of my RFA edits at all. I expect that of this sort of tally-counter, since I almost always omit bolded votewords. (I like to pretend I'm persuading other participants in a debate instead of just bolding a vote for the closer to count; I've come to accept how much bots hate me for it.) On the other hand:

• Edits that look like this were a fairly frequent pattern back when we had to manually update the top-of-the-RFA votecount.
• I'm curious why it wasn't able to parse this but could parse this. Is it getting confused by how ancient RFAs used boldtext instead of subsubsection headers to divide vote sections? —Cryptic 01:43, 27 September 2022 (UTC)

Thank you for the detailed bug report :)

I fixed some of the misattribution issues, but of course it now misattributes you to a different vote on Sro23 because the person used list items in their comment...another bug for tomorrow.

The way the tool currently works is that it looks for the 3 headings (Support/Oppose/Neutral) and then considers any list items underneath the heading to be a vote, rather than looking for bolded comments (so it shouldn't count that against you). I'll take a more detailed look once the old RfAs lack-of-headings issue is fixed, since that's probably another large chunk of your votes.

And it looks that the latest revision rather than diffs, so I've noticed RfAs that are courtesy blanked end up in the unknown category as well. Legoktm (talk) 03:06, 27 September 2022 (UTC)

You just need to hard-code in the "bold headings". At least, I haven't gotten any complaints since I did that :) Enterprisey (talk!) 06:38, 28 September 2022 (UTC)

D'oh, you beat me by 12 minutes. I ought to learn to scroll down more often. Enterprisey (talk!) 06:39, 28 September 2022 (UTC)

It's now parsing almost all of my former unknowns that were actually votes; well done. The two exceptions are my opposes in Acetic Acid and Aranda56. Neither have sublists as mentioned in your update announcement at WT:RFA, though earlier votes do. It's not picking up any of the other opposes to those, either, except for Journalist's in Acetic Acid; spot checks of supports and neutrals were ok. It does still interpret Kappa's stricken oppose in Aranda56 as an oppose, and misparses their non-voting replies in the other two RFAs they edited as opposes too.

On Sro23, maybe reject lines without timestamps? That should at least stop it misattributing Mparrault's oppose to me, even if it doesn't help attribute it to them. —Cryptic 07:48, 28 September 2022 (UTC)

OK, I think I fixed all of these cases. Instead of looking for any list item, it now only looks for numbered list items. This ended up being enough to fix the Sro23 case, but I added in the signature check (specifically the presence of "(UTC)") anyways. Acetic Acid was parsed wrong because of unbalanced HTML, I think the correct solution in those cases is to actually fix the RfA pages. Legoktm (talk) 23:14, 29 September 2022 (UTC)

Something to be aware of, but not necessarily to do anything about: there used to be a handful of prolific users who insisted on using nonstandard timestamp formats. One such example. —Cryptic 23:58, 29 September 2022 (UTC)

Yeah I remember that from some other bot I wrote :( I have no intention of supporting people who did that. I'm very glad that we now have proper signature requirements... Legoktm (talk) 02:42, 30 September 2022 (UTC)

Whitespace in the "old" field isn't getting trimmed; compare "Rebecca,Ambi", " Rebecca,Ambi ", and "Rebecca, Ambi". The last seems like it'd be a common error; seen in the wild at WT:RFA#An update by SandyGeorgia as [15] (a poor example to illustrate the bug, since neither of the old usernames were actually renamed to the new one). —Cryptic 15:20, 28 September 2022 (UTC)

Oh, and commas are legal in usernames, so this fails for the two pre-rename RFAs. I expect it's not going to be a common problem, but I'd suggest using | instead. —Cryptic 17:24, 28 September 2022 (UTC)

I should've known people have commas in their usernames...ok, swapped that to use a pipe and also now normalizing old names, both good points. Working on the issues you mentioned above now. Legoktm (talk) 22:13, 29 September 2022 (UTC)