User talk:robertsky

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The Signpost: 2 March 2024

News and notes: Wikimedia enters US Supreme court hearings as "the dolphin inadvertently caught in the net"

Recent research: Images on Wikipedia "amplify gender bias"

In the media: The Scottish Parliament gets involved, a wikirace on live TV, and the Foundation's CTO goes on record

Obituary: Vami_IV

Traffic report: Supervalentinefilmbowlday

WikiCup report: High-scoring WikiCup first round comes to a close

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 11:02, 2 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2024-10

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

The Special:Book page (as well as the associated "Create a book" functionality) provided by the old Collection extension has been removed from all Wikisource wikis, as it was broken. This does not affect the ability to download normal books, which is provided by the Wikisource extension. [1]
Wikitech now uses the next-generation Parsoid wikitext parser by default to generate all pages in the Talk namespace. Report any problems on the Known Issues discussion page. You can use the ParserMigration extension to control the use of Parsoid; see the ParserMigration help documentation for more details.
Maintenance on etherpad is completed. If you encounter any issues, please indicate in this ticket.
Gadgets allow interface admins to create custom features with CSS and JavaScript. The Gadget and Gadget_definition namespaces and gadgets-definition-edit user right were reserved for an experiment in 2015, but were never used. These were visible on Special:Search and Special:ListGroupRights. The unused namespaces and user rights are now removed. No pages are moved, and no changes need to be made. [2]
A usability improvement to the "Add a citation" in Wikipedia workflow has been made, the insert button was moved to the popup header. [3]

Changes later this week

The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 5 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 6 March. It will be on all wikis from 7 March (calendar). [4][5]

Future changes

All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes on March 20. This is planned at 14:00 UTC. More information will be published in Tech News and will also be posted on individual wikis in the coming weeks. [6]
The HTML markup of headings and section edit links will be changed later this year to improve accessibility. See Heading HTML changes for details. The new markup will be the same as in the new Parsoid wikitext parser. You can test your gadget or stylesheet with the new markup if you add ?useparsoid=1 to your URL (more info) or turn on Parsoid read views in your user options (more info).

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

MediaWiki message delivery 19:45, 4 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]

ITN recognition for Eugene Wijeysingha

On 5 March 2024, In the news was updated with an item that involved the article Eugene Wijeysingha, which you nominated and updated. If you know of another recently created or updated article suitable for inclusion in ITN, please suggest it on the candidates page. PFHLai (talk) 01:00, 5 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Books & Bytes – Issue 61

The Wikipedia Library: Books & Bytes
Issue 61, January – February 2024

Bristol University Press and British Online Archives now available
1Lib1Ref results

Read the full newsletter

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery on behalf of The Wikipedia Library team --16:32, 5 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Nomination of Meaningful Broadband for deletion

A discussion is taking place as to whether the article Meaningful Broadband, to which you have significantly contributed, is suitable for inclusion in Wikipedia according to Wikipedia's policies and guidelines or if it should be deleted.

The discussion will take place at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Meaningful Broadband until a consensus is reached, and anyone, including you, is welcome to contribute to the discussion. Users may edit the article during the discussion, including to improve the article to address concerns raised in the discussion. However, do not remove the article-for-deletion notice from the top of the article.

To customise your preferences for automated AfD notifications for articles to which you've significantly contributed (or to opt-out entirely), please visit the configuration page. Delivered by SDZeroBot (talk) 01:01, 8 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]

The Closer's Barnstar

		The Closer's Barnstar
		In recognition of your thoroughness and attention to Wikipedia's policies when closing the discussion on moving the Flour massacre article. This was an extremely contentious move discussion, with dozens of impassioned editors arguing about the necessity of moving the original article and debating the proper title to be used. Adding to the difficulty of this move discussion was the high level of attention that the discussion received off of Wikipedia. All told, Robertsky's thorough explanation in closing the discussion demonstrated clear reasoning as to 1) why the discussion among editors had coalesced around a consensus to move the article, and 2) why a move to Flour massacre was warranted at the time of the move even in the absence of a clear consensus on a target title. --Delta1989 (talk) (contributions) 16:36, 8 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Move of 'Al-Rashid humanitarian aid incident' to 'Flour Massacre'

Hi Robertsky, I request that you reconsider your move of Al-Rashid humanitarian aid incident. Many of the support !votes were brief and perfunctory, and above all I am very concerned by outside canvassing---a Twitter post that achieved over 570,000 views [7], as was noted in the move discussion (albeit, counterintuitively, as a reason to end the discussion) [8]

That tweet, from a user with 24,700 followers, stated as follows: The Wikipedia page for the Flour Massacre euphemistically calls it the “Al-Rashid humanitarian aid incident”. This is straight up Holocaust denialism.

This tweet was posted at 6:25 pm March 1. It you examine the page view statistics for the talk page where the RM was underway [9], you can see that page views went from 193 on Feb. 29 to 2252 on March 1 and 3374 on March 2 and remained at high levels, coinciding with a surge of support !votes, as was noted in the closure request discussion [10]. The spike in talk page views subsided in the days subsequent to the canvassing on Twitter, most recently to 718 as of 3/7.

The replies to the tweet linked above actively discuss the article move discussion.

I believe the process was tainted by this outside canvassing and I request that you reconsider this action, and let the RM remain open for a meaningful additional period of time.

One other point that bears mentioning, which is somewhat obvious, is that you changed the title to a name that is completely non-neutral and is in breach of WP:NPOV, in particular WP:IMPARTIAL. Even if the "consensus" that you found was not tainted by canvassing, that alone would be sufficient not to use "massacre" in a Wikipedia title of an article on a current event in a contentious topic area. Coretheapple (talk) 18:50, 8 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]

@Coretheapple:

While there is the tweet, it cannot possibly explain all of the page views on the talk page. During the course of the discussion, there is also a similar page views pattern on the article itself [11]. Given that there is a RM banner on the article as well, the traffic to the talk page can also be attributed from the RM banner. If there is canvassing going on, we would expect that much of the talk page traffic come from mobile devices/app, given that 80% of Twitter users access Twitter via mobile (widely cited on the net as early as 2015. not sure what's the recent numbers). However there are many more viewers to the talk page from desktop devices, and despite an obvious spike in mobile traffic on day 1 of the tweet, the traffic from desktop is still much higher. A more definitive assessment on whether the traffic came from the RM banner can be made if we have the clickstream data for March, but that would be another 3 weeks before the data is being produced.

As the talk page is under ECP, the effects of canvassing is lessened, or hopefully non-existent, as many of those coming through the tweet who would have voted in favour of the move would have been anon or newly-registered accounts. EC editors who have joined the discussion may have visited the article, then the talk page by the virtue of the event being in the news. And those who have simply put 'Support/oppose per X' without much explanation of why so have been discounted in the assessment as consensus isn't poll voting. I evaluated at the strengths of the arguments against policies and guidelines instead.

As for the use of 'massacre', while it is seen as non-neutral in some quarters, it is recognizable and widely use in reliable sources, especially as 'Flour massacre' for now, and this is afforded in WP:NPOVNAME, a section of WP:NPOV. I did consider 'killings' or 'disaster', but there's limited evidence of either of their recognition presented and have relatively lesser support as well. – robertsky (talk) 20:48, 8 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Move review for Al-Rashid humanitarian aid incident

An editor has asked for a Move review of Al-Rashid humanitarian aid incident. Because you closed the move discussion for this page, or otherwise were interested in the page, you might want to participate in the move review. Coretheapple (talk) 21:39, 8 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]