Here is the 7th issue of theBots Newsletter,a lot happened sincelast year's newsletter!You can subscribe/unsubscribe from future newsletters by adding/removing your name fromthis list.
BAG members are expected to be active on Wikipedia to have their finger on the pulse of the community. After two years without any bot-related activity (such as posting onbot-related pages,posting on a bot's talk page, or operating a bot), BAG members will be retired from BAG following a one-week notice. Retired members can re-apply for BAG membership as normal if they wish to rejoin the BAG.
We thank former members for their service and wish Madman a happy retirement. We note that Madman and BU Rob13 were not inactive and could resume their BAG positions if they so wished, should their retirements happens to be temporary.
Activity requirements:BAG members now have an activity requirement. The requirements are very light, one only needs to be involved in a bot-related area at some point within the last two years. For purpose of meeting these requirements, discussing a bot-related matter anywhere on Wikipedia counts, as does operating a bot (RFC).
Copyvio flag:Bot accounts may be additionally marked by abureaucratupon BAG request as being in the"copyviobot" user groupon Wikipedia. This flag allows using the API to add metadata to edits for use in the New pages feed (discussion). There is currently1bot using this functionality.
Mass creation:The restriction on mass-creation (semi-automated or automated) was extended fromarticles,toallcontent-pages.There are subtleties, butcontenthere broadly means whatever a reader could land on when browsing the mainspace in normal circumstances (e.g. Mainspace, Books, most Categories, Portals,...). There is also a warning thatWP:MEATBOTstill applies in other areas (e.g. Redirects, Wikipedia namespace, Help, maintenance categories,...) not explicitely covered byWP:MASSCREATION.
Instead of reaching a magic300as it once did last year, the backlog approaching 6,000 is still far too high. An effort is also needed to ensure that older unsuitable older pages at the back of the queue do not get automatically indexed for Google.
Coordinator
A proposal is taking placehereto confirm a nominated user as Coordinator of NPR.
This month's refresher course
Why I Hate Speedy Deleters,a 2008 essay by long since retiredBallonman,is still as valid today. Those of us who patrol large numbers of new pages can be forgiven for making the occasional mistake while others can learn from their 'beginner' errors. Worth reading.
Deletion tags
Do bear in mind that articles in the feed showing the trash can icon (you will need to have 'Nominated for deletion' enabled for this in your filters) may have been tagged by inexperienced or non NPR rights holders using Twinkle. They require your further verification.
Paid editing
Please be sure to look for the tell-tale signs of undisclosed paid editing. Contact the creatorif appropriate,and submit the issue toWP:COINif necessary. WMF policy requires paid editors to connect to their adverts.
Subject-specific notability guidelines' (SNG). Alternatives to deletion
Reviewers are requested to familiarise themselves once more with notability guidelines fororganisations and companies.
Blank-and-Redirectis a solution anchored in policy. Please consider this alternative before PRODing or CSD. Note however, that users will often revert or usurp redirects to re-create deleted articles. Do regularly patrol the redirects in the feed.
Not English
A common issue: Pages not in English or poor, unattributed machine translations should not reside in main space even if they are stubs. Please ensure you are familiar withWP:NPPNE.Check in Google for the language and content, and if they do have potential, tag as required, then move to draft. Modify the text of the template as appropriate before sending it.
Tools
Regular reviewers will appreciate the most recent enhancements to the New Pages Feed and features in the Curation tool, and there are still more to come. Due to the wealth of information now displayed by ORES, reviewers are strongly encouraged to use the system now rather than Twinkle; it will also correctly populate the logs.
Stub sorting, by SD0001: A new script is available for adding/removing stub tags. SeeUser:SD0001/StubSorter.js,It features a simple HotCat-style dynamic search field. Many of the reviewers who are using it are finding it an improvement upon other available tools.
Assessment: The script atUser:Evad37/ratermakes the addition of Wikiproject templates extremely easy. New page creators rarely do this. Reviewers are not obliged to make these edits but they only take a few seconds. They can use the Curation message system to let the creator know what they have done.
DannyS712 bot IIIis now patrolling certain categories of uncontroversial redirects. Curious? Check out itspatrol log.
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This newsletter comes a little earlier than usual because the backlog is rising again and the holidays are coming very soon.
Getting the queue to 0
There are now 805 holders of the New Page Reviewer flag! Most of you requested the user right to be able to do something about the huge backlog but it's still roughly less than 10% doing 90% of the work. Now it's time for action.
Exactly one year ago there were 'only' 3,650 unreviewed articles, now we will soon be approaching 7,000 despite the growing number of requests for the NPR user right. Ifeachreviewer soon doesonly 2 reviews a dayover five days, the backlog will be down to zero and the daily input can then be processed byeveryreviewer doingonly 1 review every 2 days- that's only a few minutes work on the bus on the way to the office or to class! Let's get this over and done with in time to relax for the holidays.
Want to join? Consider adding theNPP Pledge userbox.
Our next newsletter will announce the winners of somereally cool awards.
Coordinator
AdminBarkeep49has been officially invested asNPP/NPR coordinatorby a unanimous consensus of the community. This is a complex role and he will need all the help he can get from other experienced reviewers.
This month's refresher course
Paid editing is still causing headaches for even our most experienced reviewers:This official Wikipedia articlewill be an eye-opener to anyone who joined Wikipedia or obtained the NPR right since 2015. SeeThe Hallmarksto know exactly what to look for and take time to examine all the sources.
Tools
It is now possible to select new pages by date range. This was requested by reviewers who want to patrol from the middle of the list.
It is now also possible for accredited reviewers to put any article back into the New Pages Feed for re-review. The link is under 'Tools' in the side bar.
Reviewer Feedback
Would you like feedback on your reviews? Are you an experienced reviewer who can give feedback to other reviewers? If so there are two new feedback pilot programs.New Reviewer mentorshipwill match newer reviewers with an experienced reviewer with a new reviewer. The other program will be an occasionalpeer review cohortfor moderate or experienced reviewers to give feedback to each other. The first cohort will launchNovember 13.
Second set of eyes
Not only areNew Page Reviewersthe guardians of quality of new articles, they are also in a position to ensure that pages are being correctly tagged for deletion and maintenance and that new authors are not being bitten. This is an important feature of your work, especially while some routine tagging for deletion can still be carried out by non NPR holders and inexperienced users. Read about it at theMonitoring the systemsection in the tutorial. If you come across such editors doinggoodwork, don't hesitate to encourage them to apply for NPR.
Do be sure to haveour talk pageon your watchlist. There are often items that require reviewers' special attention, such as to watch out for pages by known socks or disruptive editors, technical issues and new developments, and of course to provide advice for other reviewers.
Arbitration Committee
The annual ArbCom election will be coming up soon. All eligible users will be invited to vote. While not directly concerned with NPR, Arbcom cases often lead back to notability and deletion issues and/or actions by holders of advanced user rights.
Community Wish list
There is to be nowish listfor WMF encyclopedias this year. We thank Community Tech for their hard work addressing our long list of requirements which somewhat overwhelmed them last year, and we look forward to a successful completion.
To opt-out of future mailings, you can remove yourselfhere
This year's Reviewer of the Year isRosguill.Having gotten the reviewer PERM in August 2018, they have been a regular reviewer of articles and redirects, been an active participant in the NPP community, and has been the driving force for the emerging NPP Source Guide that will help reviewers better evaluate sourcing and notability in many countries for which it has historically been difficult.
Special commendation again goes toOnel5969who ends the year as one of our most prolific reviewers for the second consecutive year. Thanks also toBoleynandJTtheOGwho have been in the top 5 for the last two years as well.
Several newer editors have done a lot of work withCAPTAIN MEDUSAandDannyS712(who has also written bots which have patrolled thousands of redirects) being new reviewers since this time last year.
Thanks to them and to everyone reading this who has participated in New Page Patrol this year.
(The top 100 reviewers of the year can be foundhere)
Redirect autopatrol
A recentRequest for Commenton creating a new redirect autopatrol pseduo-permission wasclosed early.New Page Reviewers are now able tonominate editorswho have an established track record creating uncontroversial redirects. At the individual discretion of any administrator or after 24 hours and a consensus of at least 3 New Page Reviewers an editor may be added to alist of userswhose redirects will be patrolled automatically byDannyS712 bot III.
Source Guide Discussion
Set to launch early in the new year is our firstNew Page Patrol Source Guidediscussion. These discussions are designed to solicit input on sources in places and topic areas that might otherwise be harder for reviewers to evaluate. The hope is that this will allow us to improve the accuracy of our patrols for articles using these sources (and/or give us places to perform aWP:BEFOREprior to nominating for deletion). Please watch theNew Page Patrol talk pagefor more information.
This month's refresher course
While New Page Reviewers are an experienced set of editors, we all benefit from an occasional review. This month consider refreshing yourself onWikipedia:Notability (geographic features).Also consider how we can take the time for quality in this area. For instance, sources to verify human settlements, which are presumed notable, can often be found in seconds. This lets us avoid the (ugly) 'Needs more refs' tag.
Hi@TK421bsod:Thanks for the note. I've made a simple update to the image, using the same test-account as previously used. I think that might suffice for now?
If you wanted to put more time into doing it more thoroughly (the timestamps are arguably the only thing that needs improving), the process would be: create a test-account (and mark it as connected to your main-account), trigger some simple notifications for that account (as done in the current screenshots, without touching mainspace), and then upload that new image on top of the old one (it could be argued that a new file ought to be started - that would entail digging through all the global-file-usage of the existing file to see which ones need to be replaced - but I think this method of updating the single file is better). Hope that helps.Quiddity (WMF)(talk)18:35, 4 February 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Twinklehas a new update (more). It now supports partial blocks and includes the select2 library as a dependency. Select2 is available atMediaWiki:Gadget-select2.min.jsfor other gadgets and scripts to use.
Miscellaneous
Until now, this newsletter has been written primarily by me (DannyS712).
If others would like to contribute, help is always appreciated;
The firstNPP source guidediscussion is now underway. It covers a wide range of sources in Ghana with the goal of providing more guidance to reviewers about sources they might see when reviewing pages. Hopefully, new page reviewers will join others interested in reliable sources and those with expertise in these sources to make the discussion a success.
Redirects
New to NPP? Looking to try something a little different? Consider patrolling some redirects. Redirects are relatively easy to review, can be found easily through theNew Pages Feed.You can find more information about how to patrol redirects atWP:RPATROL.
Discussions and Resources
There is anongoing discussionaround changing notifications for new editors who attempt to write articles.
Aresource pagewith links pertinent for reviewers was created this month.
Aproposalto increase the scope of G5 was withdrawn.
Refresher
Geographic regions, areas and placesgenerally do not needgeneral notability guidelinetype sourcing. When evaluating whether an article meets this notability guideline please also consider whether it might actually be a form ofWP:SPAMfor a development project (e.g. PR for a large luxury residential development) and not actually covered by the guideline.
Six Month Queue Data: Today – 7095 Low – 4991 High – 7095
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Automatically detecting Good Article, Featured Article, and Featured List status, and limiting ORES predictions to B-class
An updated version ofTwinklewas released. Features relating to the recently-enabled partial blocks include automatic lookup of pages and expanded options for block templates. See a full list of changeshere
For users ofEnterprisey's easy-brfascript, the bug with transcluding new BRFAs has been resolved
For any scripts that previously made use of theeditAPI to change a page's content model, a new API module is available: useaction=changecontentmodelto specify the new content model of an existing page. Documentation is available:mw:API:ChangeContentModel.
The dispute resolution noticeboard wizard is no longer a gadget, but rather is loaded using withJSandwithCSS.See the discussion atMediaWiki talk:Gadget-DRN-wizard.js
Pending requests
A script to help file movers process requests, including
Enterprisey's reply-linkhas been updated to fail less, especially around template transclusions.
Twinklereleased new features, including a new option to disable individual modules, support for stub template nomination at CfD, and integration with the PageTriage extension used to patrol new pages.(See full list of changes)
Open tasks
Themediawiki.notifyresource loader module was deprecated and is no longer needed; its functionality is now available by default. Seemw:ResourceLoader/Migration guide (users)for more. Any dependency on it should be removed.
Twinkle'sMorebits libraryadded a newMorebits.dateclass to replace the moment library. It can handle custom formatting and natural language for dates, as well as section header regexes. If you were usinggetUTCMonthNameorgetUTCMonthNameAbbrevwithDateobjects, those have been deprecated and shouldbe updated.
NPP Sortingcan be a great way to find pages needing new page patrolling that match your strengths and interests. Using ORES, it divides articles into topics such as Literature or Chemistry and on Geography. Take a look and see if you can find time to patrol a couple pages a day. With over 10,000 pages in the queue, the highest it's been sinceACPERM,your help could really make a difference.
Google Adds New Languages to Google Translate
In late February, Google added 5 new languages to Google Translate: Kinyarwanda, Odia (Oriya), Tatar, Turkmen and Uyghur. This expands our ability to find and evaluate sources in those languages.
Discussions and Resources
Adiscussionon handling new article creation by paid editors is ongoing at the Village Pump.
Also at the Village Pump is adiscussionabout limiting participation at Articles for Deletion discussion.
Enterprisey's parsoid-round-tripusesParsoidto convert wikitext to HTML and back, and then shows the result and the difference between the original wikitext and the post-conversion wikitext.
Frietjes's infoboxgapassists in renumbering infobox labels/data/classes, so that a new line can be inserted in the middle of the infobox.
Twinklehas made a number of improvements, including using a change tag to identify actions made with it and automatically filing edit requests for protected XfD nominations.
GeneralNotability's spihelperupdated to 2.2.10, fixing a number of small bugs, automatically tagging globally locked socks as such in the sockpuppet template, and restoring open cases following an SPI history merge.
Enterprisey's script-installergadget has been updated with more internationalization of messages, as well as addition of a user preference,window.scriptInstallerInstallTargetto allow controlling where new scripts are to be installed.
It has been a productive year for New Page Patrol as we've roughly cut the size of the New Page Patrol queue in half this year. We have been fortunate to have a lot of great work done byRosguillwho was the reviewer of the most pages and redirects this past year. Thanks and credit go toJTtheOGandOnel5969who join Rosguill in repeating in the top 10 from last year. Thanks toJohn B123,Hughesdarren,andMccaprawho all got the NPR permission this year and joined the top 10. Also new to the top ten is DannyS712 bot III, programmed byDannyS712which has helped to dramatically reduce the number of redirects that have needed human patrolling by patrolling certain types of redirects (e.g. for differences in accents) and by also patrolling editors who are on on theredirect whitelist.
John B123has been named reviewer of the year for 2020. John has held the permission for just over 6 months and in that time has helped cut into the queue by reviewing more than 18,000 articles. His talk page shows his efforts to communicate with users, upholding NPP's goal of nurturing new users and quality over quantity.
NPP Technical Achievement Award
As a special recognition and thank youDannyS712has been awarded the first NPP Technical Achievement Award. His work programming the bot has helped us patrol redirects tremendously - more than 60,000 redirects this past year. This has been a large contribution to New Page Patrol and definitely is worthy of recognition.
Six Month Queue Data: Today – 2262 Low – 2232 High – 10271
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Enterprisey's copy-section-linkadds popups to section headers which has an appropriate wikilink and external link to the section.
DannyS712's FindBlacklistEntrycan be used to figure out which line(s) in either the local or global spamblacklist prevent a particular url from being added.
TheWatchlist Expiryfeature worked on by the Community Tech team has been enabled on Wikipedia. For scripts that include watching or unwatching pages, developers may want to update their code to take advantage of the new functionality. See the documentationon mediawiki.org.
User:Ahecht/Scripts/pageswap- version 1.4 fixes reading destination from form field if destination is not in article namespace, and fixes self redirects.
Wikipedia:XFDcloser- version 4 brings a new user interface for dialogs, some preferences for customising XFDcloser, major behind-the-scenes coding changes, and resolves various issues raised on the talkpage. Also, since version 3.16.6 non-admin soft delete closure have been allowed at TfD.
Open tasks
As a reminder, the legacy javascript globals (like accessingwgPageNamewithout first assigning it a value or usingmw.config.get('wgPageName')instead) are deprecated. If your user scripts make use of the globals, please update them to usemw.configinstead. Someglobal interface editorsor localinterface administratorsmay edit your user script to make these changes if you don't. Seephab:T72470for more.
Miscellaneous
For people interested in creating user scripts or gadgets usingTypeScript,a types-mediawiki package (GitHub,NPM) is now available that provides type definitions for the MediaWiki JS interface and the API.
AGitHub organizationhas been created for hostingcodebases of gadgets.Users who maintain gadgets using GitHub may choose to move their repos to this organization, to ensure continued maintenance by others even if the original maintainer becomes inactive.
As always, if anyone else would like to contribute, including nominating a featured script, help is appreciated. Stay safe, and happy new year! --DannyS712(talk)01:17, 3 February 2021 (UTC)[reply]
User:Ahecht/Scripts/pageswap- version 1.4 fixes reading destination from form field if destination is not in article namespace, and fixes self redirects.
Wikipedia:XFDcloser- version 4 brings a new user interface for dialogs, some preferences for customising XFDcloser, major behind-the-scenes coding changes, and resolves various issues raised on the talkpage. Also, since version 3.16.6 non-admin soft delete closure have been allowed at TfD.
Open tasks
As a reminder, the legacy javascript globals (like accessingwgPageNamewithout first assigning it a value or usingmw.config.get('wgPageName')instead) are deprecated. If your user scripts make use of the globals, please update them to usemw.configinstead. Someglobal interface editorsor localinterface administratorsmay edit your user script to make these changes if you don't. Seephab:T72470for more.
Miscellaneous
For people interested in creating user scripts or gadgets usingTypeScript,a types-mediawiki package (GitHub,NPM) is now available that provides type definitions for the MediaWiki JS interface and the API.
AGitHub organizationhas been created for hostingcodebases of gadgets.Users who maintain gadgets using GitHub may choose to move their repos to this organization, to ensure continued maintenance by others even if the original maintainer becomes inactive.
As always, if anyone else would like to contribute, including nominating a featured script, help is appreciated. Stay safe, and happy new year! --DannyS712(talk)01:17, 3 February 2021 (UTC)[reply]
FoldArchivescollapses archived talk page threads in order to reduce screen space
GoToTitleconverts the page title into an input field for navigating to other pages
UserHighlighteradds highlighting to links to the userpages, talk pages, and contributions of administrators and other user groups as well as tooltips to indicate which groups a user is in
filterDiff:Adds a "Show changes" button to the filter editor.
filterNotes:Parses filter notes as wikitext (so links are clickable), and signs and dates new comments for you.
filterTest:Adds a "Test changes" button. OpensSpecial:AbuseFilter/testwith what'scurrentlyin the edit form, not with what's saved in the database, so you don't have to copy-paste your changes.
Twinklehas a number of improvements, including that most watchlist defaults now make use of the newtemporary watchlistfeature. Other changes include rollbacks treating consecutive IPv6 editors in the same /64 range as the same user, adding a preview for shared IP tagging, a preference for watching users after CSD notification, and for sysops, the ability toblock the /64and link to aWP:RfPPrequest, and new copyright blocks default to indefinite.
Wikipedia:Shortdesc helpernow v3.4.17, changes include minor fixes and preventing edits that don't change the description.
Joeytje50's JWBnow version 4.1.0, includes the ability to generate page lists from the search tool, major updates to the handling of regular expressions, the storing of user settings, the addition of upload protection, and an option to skip pages that belong to a specific category, among other changes. SeeUser:Joeytje50/JWB/Changelogfor a full list of recent changes.
Wikipedia:User scripts/Listhas been revamped to make it easier to find scripts suited for your needs. If you know of a cool script that is missing on the list, or a script on the list that is no longer working, please edit the list or let us know onthe talk page.
My apologies for this long-overdue issue, and if I missed any scripts. Hopefully going forward we can go back to monthly releases - any help would be appreciated. Thanks, --DannyS712(talk)13:04, 2 June 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Please jointhis discussion- there is increase in the abuse of Wikipedia and its processes by POV pushers, Paid Editors, and by holders of various user rights includingAutopatrolled.Even our review systems themselves atAfCandNPRhave been infiltrated. The good news is that detection is improving, but the downside is that it creates the need for a huge clean up - which of course adds to backlogs.
Copyright violationsare also a serious issue. Most non-regular contributors do not understand why, and most of our Reviewers are not experts on copyright law - and can't be expected to be, but there is excellent, easy-to-follow advice on COPYVIO detectionhere.
At the time of the last newsletter (#25, December 2020) the backlog was only just over 2,000 articles. New Page Review is an official system. It's the only firewall against the inclusion of new, improper pages.
There are currently706New Page Reviewers plus a further 1,080 admins, but as much as nearly 90% of the patrolling is still being done by around only the 20 or so most regular patrollers.
If you are no longer very active on Wikipedia or you no longer wish to be part of the New Page Reviewer user group, please consider asking any admin to remove you from the list. This will enable NPP to have a better overview of its performance and what improvements need to be made to the process or its software.
Various awards are due to be allocated by the end of the year and barnstars are overdue. If you would like to manage this, please let us know. Indeed, if you are interested in coordinating NPR, it does not involve much time and the tasks are describedhere.
To opt-out of future mailings, please remove yourselfhere.Sent to 827 users. 04:32, 16 September 2021 (UTC)
Graphs are unavailable due to technical issues. There is more info onPhabricatorand onMediaWiki.org.
BRFA activity by month
Welcome to the eighth issue of the English Wikipedia'sBots Newsletter,your source for all thingsbot.Maintainers disappeared to parts unknown... bots awakening from the slumber of æons... hundreds of thousands of short descriptions... these stories,and more,are brought to you by Wikipedia's most distinguished newsletter about bots.
Ourlast issuewas in August 2019, so there's quite a bit of catching up to do. Due to the vast quantity of things that have happened, the next few issues will only cover a few months at a time. This month, we'll go from September 2019 through the end of the year. I won't bore you with further introductions — instead, I'll bore you with a newsletter about bots.
Overall
Between September and December 2019, there were 33BRFAs.Of these,Y25 were approved, and 8 were unsuccessful (N23 denied,?3 withdrawn, and2 expired).
TParis goes away, UTRSBot goes kaput:Beeblebroxnotedthatthe botfor maintaining on-wiki records ofUTRSappeals stopped working a while ago.TParis,the semi-retired user who had previously run it, said they were "unlikely to return to actively editing Wikipedia", and the bot had been vanquished by trolls submitting bogus UTRS requests on behalf of real blocked users. WhileOAuthwas a potential fix, neither maintainer had time to implement it. TParis offered to access to the UTRS WMFLabs account to any admin identified with the WMF: "I miss you guys a whole lot [...] but I've also moved on with my life. Good luck, let me know how I can help". Ultimately,SQLended up in charge. Some progress was made, and the bot continued to work another couple months — but as of press time, UTRSBot has not edited since November 2019.
Curb Safe Charmer adopts reFill:TAnthonypointed outthatreFill 2's bug reports were going unanswered; creatorZhaofeng Lihad retired from Wikipedia, and a maintainer was needed. As of June 2021,Curb Safe Charmerhadtaken up the mantle,saying: "Not that I have all the skills needed but better me than nobody! 'Maintainer' might be too strong a term though. Volunteers welcome!"
Hello everyone, and welcome to the 22nd issue of the WikipediaScripts++ Newsletter.This issue will be covering new and updated user scripts from the past seven months (June through December 2021).
Got anything good? Tell us about your new, improved, old, or messed-up scripthere!
Featured script
LuckyRename,byAlexis Jazz,is this month's featured script. LuckyRename makes requesting file moves easier, and automates the many steps in file moving (including automatic replacement of existing usage). Give it a shot!
Updated scripts
SD0001:hide-reverted-editshas been updated to take into account changes in reversion tools like Twinkle and RedWarn.
ClaudineChionh:SkinSwitcher(a fork and update ofEizen'sscript) provides an options menu/toolbox/toolbar allowing users to view a given page in MediaWiki's default skins.
Wikipedia:User scripts/Rankingis a sortable table of Wikipedia's thousand-or-so most commonly used scripts; it includes their author, last modification date, installation count, and sometimes a short description.
Toolhubis a community managed catalog of software tools used in the Wikimedia movement. Technical volunteers can use Toolhub to document the tools that they create or maintain. All Wikimedians can use Toolhub to search for tools to help with their workflows and to create lists of useful tools to share with others.
draft-sortersorts AfC drafts by adding WikiProject banners to their talk pages. It supersedesUser:Enterprisey/draft-sorter,adding a few features and fixing some bugs.
BooksToSfnadds a portlet link inVisual Editor's source mode editing, in main namespace articles or in the user's Sandbox. When clicked, it converts one{{cite book}}inside a<ref>...</ref>tag block into an{{Sfn}}.
diffeditenables editing directly from viewing a diff "when, for instance, you notice a tiny mistake deep into an article, and don't want to edit the entire article and re-find that one line to fix that tiny mistake".
warnOnLargeFilewarns you if you're about to open a very large file (width/height >10,000px or file size >100 MB) from a file page.
QuickDiff(by OneTwoThreeFall at Fandom) lets you quickly view any diff link on a wiki, whether on Recent Changes, contribs pages, history pages, the diff view itself, or elsewhere. For more information, view itspage on Fandom.
talkbackcreates links after user talk page links like this: |C|TB(with the first linking to the user's contributions, and the latter giving the option of sending a{{talkback}}notice). It also adds a [copy] link next to section headers.
diff-linkshows "copy" links on history and contributions pages that copy an internal link to the diff (e.g.,Special:Diff/1026402230) to your clipboard when clicked.
auto-watchlist-expiryautomatically watchlists every page you edit for a user-definable duration (you can still pick a different time using the dropdown, though).
generate pingsgenerates the wikitext needed to ping all members of a category, up to 50 editors (the limit defined by MediaWiki).
share ExpandTemplates urlallows for easy sharing of your inputs toSpecial:ExpandTemplates.It adds a button that, when clicked, copies a shareable URL to your exact invocation of the page,like this.Other editorsdo notneed to have this script installed in order to access the URL generated.
show tag namesshows the real names of tags next to their display names in places such as page revision histories or the watchlist.
ColourContribcolor-codes the user contributions page so that pages you've edited last are sharply distinguished from pages where another editor was the last to edit the page.
All in all, some very neat scripts were written in these last few months. Hoping to see many more in the next issue --drop us a line on the talk pageif you've been writing (or seeing) anything cool and good. Filling in for DannyS712, this has beenjp×g.Take care, and merry Christmas!jp×g07:30, 24 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Graphs are unavailable due to technical issues. There is more info onPhabricatorand onMediaWiki.org.
BRFA activity by month
Welcome to the ninth issue of the English Wikipedia'sBots Newsletter,your source for all thingsbot.Vicious bot-on-bot edit warring... superseded tasks... policy proposals... these stories, and more, are brought to you by Wikipedia's most distinguished newsletter about bots.
After a long hiatus between August 2019 and December 2021, there's quite a bit of ground to cover. Due to the vastness, I decided in December to split the coverage up into a few installments that covered six months each. Some people thought this was a good idea, since covering an entire year in a single issue would make it unmanageably large. Others thought this was stupid, since they were getting talk page messages about crap from almost three years ago. Ultimately, the question of whether each issue covers six months or a year is only relevant for a couple more of them, and then the problem will be behind us forever.
Of course, you can also look on the bright side – we are making progress, and this issue will only be about crap from almosttwoyears ago. Today we will pick up where we left off in December, and go through the first half of 2020.
Overall
In the first half of 2020, there were 71BRFAs.Of these,Y59 were approved, and 12 were unsuccessful (withN28 denied,?2 withdrawn, and2 expired).
January 2020
Yeah, you're not gonna be able to get away with this anymore.
A newPywikibotrelease dropped support forPython 3.4,and it was expected that support forPython 2.7would be removed in coming updates.Toolforgeitself planned to drop Python 2 support in 2022.
In March, a longdiscussionwas started atWikipedia talk:Bot policybySkdbabout the troubling trend of bots "expiring" without explanation after their owners became inactive. This can happen for a variety of reasons --APIchanges break code, hosting providers' software updates break code, hosting accounts lapse, software changes make bots' edits unnecessary, and policy changes make bots' edits unwanted. The most promising solution seemed to beToolforgehosting (although it has some problems of its own, like the occasional necessity of refactoring code).
Adiscussionon the bot noticeboard, "Re-examination of ListeriaBot", was started byBarkeep49,who pointed out repeated operation outside the scope of its BRFA (i.e. editing pages in mainspace, and addingnon-free imagesto others). Some said it was doing good work, and others said it was operating beyond its remit. It wasblockedon April 10; the next day it was unblocked, reblocked from article space, reblocked "for specified non-editing actions", unblocked, and indeffed. The next week, severalsafeguardswere implemented in its code by Magnus; the bot was allowed to roam free once more on April 18.
Issues and enquiries are typically expected to be handled on the English Wikipedia. Pages reachable viaunified login,like a talk page atCommonsor atItalian Wikipediacould also be acceptable [...] External sites likePhabricatororGitHub(which require separate registration or do not allow for IP comments) and email (which can compromiseanonymity) can supplement on-wiki communication, but do not replace it.
May 2020
We heard you like bots, so we made a bot that reports the status of your bots, so now you can use bots while you use bots
MajavahBot 3,an impressively meta bot task, was approved this month for maintaining a list of bots running on the English Wikipedia. The page, located atUser:MajavahBot/Bot status report,is updated every 24 hours; it contains a list of all accounts with the bot flag, as well as their operator, edit count, last activity date, last edit date, last logged action date, user groups and block status.
In July 2017,Headbombmade aproposalthat a section of theWikipedia:Dashboardbe devoted to bots and technical issues. In November 2019,Luacode was written supersedingLegobot's tasks on that page, and operatorLegoktmwas asked to stop them so that the new code could be deployed. After no response to pings, apartial-blockof Legobot for the dashboard was proposed. Some months later, on June 16, Headbomb said: "A full block serves nothing. A partial block solves all current issues [...] Just fucking do it. It's been 3 years now." The next day, however, Legoktm disabled the task, and the dashboard was successfully refactored.
On June 7,RexxSblockedCitation botfordisruptive editing,saying it was "still removing links after request to stop". A couple weeks later, adiscussion on the bots noticeboardwas opened, saying "it is a widely-used and useful bot, but it has one of the longest block logs for any recently-operating bot on Wikipedia". While its last BRFA approval was in 2011, its code and functionality had changed dramatically since then, andAntiCompositeNumberrequested that BAG require a new BRFA. MaintainerAManWithNoPlanresponded that most blocks were from years ago (when it lacked a propertest suite), and problems since then had mostly been one-off errors (like aJune 2019 incidentin which aLTAhad "weaponized" the bot to harass editors).
David Tornheimopened a discussion aboutwhether bots based on closed-source code should be permitted,and proposed that they not. He cited a recent case in which a maintainer had said "I can only suppose that the code that is available on GitHub is not the actual code that was running on [the bot]". Some disagreed:Nayptasaid that "I like free software as much as the next person, and I strongly believe that bot operators should make their bot code public, but I don't think it should be that they must do so".
At the time of the last newsletter (No.26, September 2021), the backlog was 'only' just over 6,000 articles. In the past six months, the backlog has reached nearly 16,000, a staggering level not seen in several years. A very small number of users had been doing the vast majority of the reviews. Due to "burn-out", we have recently lost most of this effort. Furthermore, several reviewers have been stripped of the user right for abuse of privilege and the articles they patrolled were put back in the queue.
Several discussions on the state of the process have taken place on thetalk page,but there has been no action to make any changes. The project also lacks coordination since the "position" is vacant.
In the last 30 days, only100 reviewershave made more than 8 patrols and only 50 have averaged one review a day. There are currently805New Page Reviewers, but about a third have not had any activity in the past month. All 851 administrators have this permission, but only about a dozen significantly contribute to NPP.
This means we have an active pool of about 450 to address the backlog. We cannot rely on a few to do most of the work as that inevitably leads to burnout. A fairly experienced reviewer can usually do a review in a few minutes. If every active reviewer would patrol just one article per day, the backlog would very quickly disappear.
If you have noticed a user with agoodunderstanding of Wikipedia notability and deletion, do suggest they help the effort by placing{{subst:NPR invite}}on their talk page.
If you are no longer very active on Wikipedia or you no longer wish to be part of the New Page Reviewer user group, please consider asking any admin to remove you from the list. This will enable NPP to have a better overview of its performance and what improvements need to be made to the process and its software.
To opt-out of future mailings, please remove yourselfhere. Sent 05:18, 23 May 2022 (UTC)
Hi Quiddity (WMF)!We're so happy you wanted to play to learn, as a friendly and fun way to get into our community and mission. I think these links might be helpful to you as you get started.
New year, new scripts. Welcome to the 23rd issue of the WikipediaScripts++ Newsletter,covering around 39% of our favorite new and updated user scripts since24 December 2021.That’s right, we haven’t published in two years! Can you believe it? Did you miss us?
Got anything good? Tell us about your new, improved, old, or messed-up scripthere!
User:Alexander Davronov/HistoryHelperhas now become stable with some bugfixes and features such as automatically highlighting potentially uncivil edit summaries and automatically pinging all the users selected.
To a lesser extent, the same goes forUser:PrimeHunter/Search sort.js.I wish someone would integrate the sorts into the sort menu instead of adding 11 portlet links.
Aaron Liu:Watchlyst Greybar Unsinis a rewrite of Ais's Watchlist Notifier with modern APIs and several new features such as not displaying watchlist items marked as seen (hence the name), not bolding diffs of unseen watchlist elements which doesn’t work properly anyways, displaying the rendered edit summary, proper display of log and creation actions and more links.
Alexis Jazz:Factotumis a spiritual successor to reply-link with a host of extra features like section adding, link rewriting, regular expressions and more.
User:Aveaoz/AutoMobileRedirect:This script will automatically redirect MobileFrontend (en.m.wikipedia) to normal Wikipedia. Unlike existing scripts, this one will actually check if your browser is mobile or not through its secret agent string, so you can stay logged in on mobile! Hooray screen estate!
Deputyis a first-of-its-kind copyright cleanup toolkit. It overrides the interface forWikipedia:Contributor copyright investigationsfor easy case processing. It also includes the functionality of the following (also new) scripts:
User:Elominius/gadget/diff arrow keysallows navigation between diffs with the arrow keys. It also has a version that requires holdingCtrlwith the arrow key.
Frequently link to Wikipedia on your websites yet find generating CC-BY credits to be such a hassle? Say no more!User:Luke10.27/attributewill automatically do it for ya and copy the credit to yer clipboard.
User:MPGuy2824/MoveToDraft,a spiritual successor (i.e. fork) toEvad37'sscript, with a few bugs solved, and a host of extra features like check-boxes for choosing draftification reasons, multi-contributor notification, and appropriate warnings based on last edit time.
/CopyCodeBlock:one of the most important operations for any scripter and script-user is to copy and paste. This script adds a copy button in the top right of every code block (not to be confused with <code>) that will, well, copy it to your clipboard!
m:User:NguoiDungKhongDinhDanh/AceForLuaDebugConsole.jsadds theAceeditor (a.k.a. the editor you see when editing JS, CSS and Lua on Wikimedia wikis) to the Lua debug console. "In my opinion, whoever designed it to be a plain <textarea> needs to seriously reconsider their decision."
GANReviewToolquickly and easily closes good article nominations.
ReviewStatusdisplays whether or not a mainspace page is marked as reviewed.
SpeciesHelpertries to add the correct speciesbox, category, taxonbar, and stub template to species articles.
User:Opencooper/svgReplaceandTol's forkreplaces all rasterized SVGs with their original SVG codes for your loading pleasures. Tell us which one is better!
ArticleInfodisplays page information at the top of the page, directly below the title.
/HeaderIconstakes away the Vector 2022 user dropdown and replaces it with all of the icons within, top level, right next to the Watchlist. One less click away! There's also analternate versionthat uses text links instead of icons.
Hello everyone, and welcome to the 24th issue of the WikipediaScripts++ Newsletter,covering all our favorite new and updated user scripts since24 December 2021.Uh-huh, we're finally covering the good ones among the rest! Aren't you excited? Remember to include a link in double brackets to the script's.js page when you install the script, so that we can see who uses the script in WhatLinksHere! The ScriptInstaller gadget automatically does this.Aaron Liu(talk)01:00, 1 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Got anything good? Tell us about your new, improved, old, or messed-up scripthere!
Making user scripts load fasterbySD0001is this month's featured script, which caches userscripts every day to eliminate the overhead caused by force-downloading the newest version of scripts every time you open a Wikipedia page. Despite being released in April 2021, our best script scouters have failed to locate it due to its omission fromthe US of L.For security reasons, the script only supports loading JavaScript pages.
Ahechthas createda forkofSiBr4/TemplateSearch,which adds the "TP:" shortcut for "Template:" in the search box, and updated it to be compatible with Vector 2022.
AquilaFasciata/goToTopFastis a much faster fork of the classic goToTop script that also adds compatibility for Minerva and Vector 2022.
Without caching. Each script takes 400–500ms. A particularly large script takes 1.11 s! Internet download speed is 50 Mbps.With caching enabled. Each script takes just 1-2 ms to load.
To a lesser extent, the same goes forPrimeHunter/Search sort.I wish someone would integrate the sorts into the sort menu instead of adding 11 portlet links.
Dragoniez/SuppressEnterInFormstops you from accidentally submitting anything due to pressing enter while in the smaller box, and works on almost anything... except the InputBox element itself, used in subscription lists andthe Signpost Crossword!Oh, the humanity!
Doǵu/Adiutor(pictured)provides a nice, integrated interface to do some twinkley tasks such as copyvio detection, CSD tagging, and viewing the most recent diff.
Eejit43has quite the aesthetically pleasing scripts, all made inTypeScript.
/afcrc-helperis a replacement for the unmaintainedEnterprisey/AFCRHSand processes Redirects for Creation and Categories for Creation requests.
/ajax-undostops the "undo" button from taking you to another page while providing a text box to provide a reason for the revert.
/redirect-helper(pictured)adds a much better interface for editing and redirects, including categorization, for which valid categories are dictated by/redirect-helper.json.
/rmtr-helperhelps process technical requested moves without being able to actually move them.
Guycn2/UserInfoPopup(pictured)adds a flyout after the watchlist star on userspace pages that displays the common information you might use about a user.
Jeeputer/editCounter,under userspace, adds a portlet link to count your edits by namespace, put them in a table, and put that table in a hardcoded subpage, all in the background.
Hilst/Scripts/sectionLinksconverts all section links to use the § sign, which are known to be preferred over the ugly # by 99% of the devils I've met.
PrimeHunter/Category source.jsadds portlet links to tell you where a category for an article comes from and supports those from template transclusions.
NguoiDungKhongDinhDanh/AjaxLoadermakes paging links (e.g. older 50, 500, newest) load without refreshing and makes you realize how slow your internet actually is.
Dragoniez/MarkBLockedGlobal:Remember the "strike blocked usernames" gadget? Now you can use a red, dotted line to highlight rangeblocks and global locks!
Jonesey/common(pictured)has some styles to overhaul your Vector 2022 experience. It reduces padding everywhere, and makes the top bar animation faster.
Aaron Liu/V22is a fork that narrows the sidebars instead of upheaving them, reverts the January 2024 dropdown changes, and restores the old page-link color for links that don't go outside the current wiki.
Nardog: SmartDiffis a spiritual successor toEnterprisey/fancy-diffs.It makes the page title part of links in diffs clickable, along with template and parser function calls. Unnamed parameters can be configured per template to also be linked. All links are styled based on the normal CSS classes of rendered links.
For the paranoid:Rublov/anonymizereplaces your username at the top of the screen with the generic "User page" text. Remember, it is your duty to persuade everyone thatediting is an honor.
/AjaxBlockprovides a dialog box for easy input of reasons while blocking users.
/Selective Rollback(pictured)provides a dialog box to customizerollbackedit summaries and does them without reloading the page. Seriously, why doesn't MediaWiki already do this?
/flickrsearchadds a portlet link to search for uploadable flickr images about the subject.
/randomincategoryadds a portlet link when on Category pages to go to a random page in the current category.
Vghfr/EasyTemplatesadds a portlet link to automatically insert some of the most common inline{{fix}}templates.
Yes, we're just doing 'em as we go now. Thanks for reading through this looong issue, if you did! I'm sure this'll send a record for the longest issue ev-ah. You may need to wait even longer for the last issue, as our reserve of old-y and goodie scripts have ran out... We encourage you to try and do some of the requests or improvement tasks. See you in Summer, hopefully!
Hey there, welcome to the 25th issue of the WikipediaScripts++ Newsletter,covering all our favorite new and updated user scripts since1 March 2024.We've got a ton of wonderful editors taking back their pitchforks today. Don't worry, for they come in peace, to forcibly fix and extend existing scripts you use with sheer passion. There's so many, them forks have got what's basically their own column now!gift us with some rows before it's too lateAaron Liu(talk)04:01, 1 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Got anything good? Tell us about your new, improved, old, or messed-up scripthere!
To a lesser extent, the same goes forPrimeHunter/Search sort.I wish someone would integrate the sorts into the sort menu instead of adding 11 portlet links.
An easily configurable script to add a link to the #p-vector-user-menu-overflow portlet with a name, target, and icon. This one should be a relatively easier one. I would do it myself, but I'm too busy rotting away onCeleste (video game).
After theＲＩＩＪupdate,Aaron Liu:Watchlyst Greybar Unsinhas a dismiss button that allows you to mark an item as read in one click and cycle to the next Watchlist item.
Lordseriouspig/StatusChangerImprovedis just like Enterprisey's script, except you select your status from a dropdown instead of cycling through them with a button. The WMF operates out of car-centric infrastructure anyway. Shame!
Aaron Liuhas createdDuplinksfromEvad37/duplinks-alt;his fork adds a config variable to automatically highlight duplicate links on the loading of any page where the portlet link would've appeared.
Tired of staring at a bunch of filtering text and waiting for darn filter logs to load?Msz2001/AbuseFilter analyzercan parse abuse filters into a visual syntax tree and evaluate locally on-demand!
Polygnotus/DuplicateReferencesfinds references with the same link and displays the number of them along with a button to add the{{duplicated citations}}tag under the references section. Being lazy has never been easier!
fastest gun on the netPonor/really-quick-blockreally quick add to contribution lists three buttons awesome
Miscellaneous
Template:2030 citehas beennominated for deletion.You are invited to comment on the discussion atthe template's entry on the Templates for discussion page.Bsherr(talk)12:26, 14 February 2020 (UTC)
Twinklehas made a number of improvements, including using a change tag to identify actions made with it and automatically filing edit requests for protected XfD nominations.
Open tasks
Pending requests
Got anything good? Tell us about your new, improved, old, or messed-up scripthere!
New scripts
Featured script
Improve a script
Requested scripts
New scripts
Newly maintained scripts
Requested scripts
