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Administrators' newsletter – March 2017

News and updates for administrators from the past month (February 2017).

Administrator changes

Amortias • Deckiller • BU Rob13
Ronnotel • Islander • Chamal N • Isomorphic • Keeper76 • Lord Voldemort • Shereth • Bdesham • Pjacobi

Guideline and policy news

Technical news

  • A recent query shows that only 16% of administrators on the English Wikipedia have enabled two-factor authentication. If you haven't already enabled it please consider doing so.
  • Cookie blocks should be deployed to the English Wikipedia soon. This will extend the current autoblock system by setting a cookie for each block, which will then autoblock the user after they switch accounts under a new IP.
  • A bot will now automatically place a protection template on protected pages when admins forget to do so.
Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 05:14, 1 March 2017 (UTC)

Today's portal DYK

Hi, re this DYK: there's a serious factual error here. Of the ELR's line between Manchester Victoria and Rawtenstall (opened 1846), the only section that was ever electrified was the relatively short portion of about 2+1⁄2 miles between Radcliffe North Junction and Tottington Junction - of the rest of the electrified route, the section between Victoria and Radcliffe North Junction was opened by the LYR in 1879, and that between Tottington Junction and Holcombe Brook was opened by the Bury & Tottington District Railway in 1882. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 19:51, 9 March 2017 (UTC)

Whoops. The history section says "In response to competition from trams, the line was electrified in 1916 using a unique 1,200 volt side-contact third rail system, which remained in operation until the line was converted to Metrolink operation in 1991." which makes it sound like the whole line was electrified with that system, which was the basis of the DYK entry. Slambo (Speak) 16:05, 11 March 2017 (UTC)
There have been three substantially different routes between Manchester Victoria and Bury, plus minor variations. The article Bury Line is about the one which was third chronologically, which left Manchester Victoria at its eastern end, and proceeded via Whitefield and Radcliffe Central to Bury. This is the route that opened in 1879 and was electrified in 1916. The first was the 1846 line of the ELR, which left Victoria at its western end and proceeded via Salford, Clifton Junction and Radcliffe Bridge to Bury. The second one chronologically, and not relevant here, opened in 1848, left Manchester Victoria at its eastern end, and proceeded via Middleton Junction and Heywood to Bury. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 21:27, 11 March 2017 (UTC)

Question about info box parameters

What is an unsupported parameter and why comment it out? (No judgement - I just don't know much about info boxes as a rule so I'm curious about what this means..this edit [1]). ☕ Antiqueight haver 22:18, 24 March 2017 (UTC)

@Antiqueight: Most templates accept one or more parameters, these pass information in, some are displayed as textual values, others control what the template displays. Parameters need to be coded into the template to be supported, if the template has no code for that parameter, it is an unsupported parameter. Infoboxes are specialised templates, usually presenting information as two columns; the infobox on this article is {{Infobox rail line}}. If you follow that link, you will see its documentation, including two lists of supported parameters; the first of the two has a link to a full parameter list. None of those three lists mention |successor_line=, or anything resembling it: it is not supported. Occasionally, a template might support an undocumented parameter, but this is not the case here. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 23:48, 24 March 2017 (UTC)
Redrose64, thanks. From an editing perspective, why comment it out rather than delete the unsupported line? (Since I usually copy an infobox as is from another appropriate article, I'm never entirely certain of them and wasn't at all sure about the parameters here as I only ever looked that this one rail line I think). Does such a parameter make sense in a ... potential for the future kind of way? ☕ Antiqueight haver 00:04, 25 March 2017 (UTC)
Thank you, Redrose64, for popping in with a quick explanation.
I was working through updating the articles that were listed in Category:Pages using infobox rail line with unsupported parameters, which is automatically populated by the template when an unsupported parameter is used on an article. In most cases, if the parameter is present but unused, I deleted the parameter, like on this edit. But when the parameter had data, like the one you pointed out, I left it there but commented it out; the data is still there so another editor can more easily move it to a better location and so the article no longer appears in the maintenance category and doesn't show any errors in preview mode. The end user who never edits the article doesn't see any difference because unsupported parameters don't display on the article anyway.
There are two common cases where template parameters become unsupported like this: the template code gets updated to remove parameters that have been deemed unnecessary by the template editors, and a template is superseded by another template that doesn't include all of the parameters of the former. Only the editors who were involved in the template updates usually know that there was an update, so the tracking category helps find articles that need to be updated for the new template code. There are many maintenance categories under Category:WikiProject Trains articles in need of maintenance and I will often work through updating articles listed in them to fix non-controversial problems like this. Slambo (Speak) 14:23, 25 March 2017 (UTC)

Portal:Rail transport modelling?

Hello Slambo, my name is Vince. Could you give me an Idea of what would be involved in maintaining such a "Portal" if "Rail Transport Modeling" were to be in a seperate portal? I ask because I want to be sure it is something I can do before offering an opinion. Thanks VinceVinijackson (talk) 16:57, 29 March 2017 (UTC)

Should there be a separate Portal:Rail transport modelling or should the information be integrated into Portal:Trains? If separate, who will maintain it?

Vinijackson, those are great questions, and my answer turned out a bit long...
For P:Trains, I try to make at least an edit to the DYK section every day to add a new fact and remove the oldest. I miss a day here and there but nobody's complained to me about it yet. I do get comments from some editors with corrections on DYK entries (as you can see above), so I try to go back and make those corrections when I can. Once a week, I make the selections for the Selected article and Selected picture. While I'm editing articles that have specific dates mentioned, I'll add anniversary data to the appropriate Anniversaries page. Once a month I make a selection for the lead image and I create the next empty DYK archive page. Finally, once a year, I create the new year's Selected article and Selected picture archive pages and make stubs for the new year's weeks of Selected article and Selected picture subpages. There is a ton more rail transport news than I have time to edit the News section (which is why the most current item there right now is a year old). I need to work out a better plan for keeping the news section updated, but this is Wikipedia, not Wikinews, so the news section is less urgent to be updated here. All of the other sections are fairly static in their content; it is rare that I need to update them, but there are edits here and there.
All of these tasks, except updating the news section, can be staged ahead of time, depending on how the portal is set up. The trickiest would be the DYK section if you select a new entry each day like I do for P:Trains. After almost twelve years of maintaining the portal, I still don't get enough DYK collaboration yet with other editors to model it on the strategy used for the main page DYK section. I usually spend about an hour a day to update the DYK section, about 90 minutes a week to update the Selected article and picture sections, and about an hour a month to update the lead image. Prepping the stubs at year end takes a few hours once a year. Updating the news section has been about an hour per new entry because I make sure to cite the sources with the entry and will often have to write the entry fresh rather than copy it from an existing article. This is another section where I would love some more collaboration, but haven't found the editor who will stick around long enough to help with it for a longer term than a few weeks.
I've been keeping this portal almost exclusively focused on prototype railroad subjects rather than scale model subjects, but I have used several scale model articles for the DYK section and images for the lead on April 1 in various years. So, since P:Trains has so little scale model content already, there wouldn't really be much of an overlap if a portal were created to highlight scale model articles and media.
Since I created P:Trains in 2005, the portal creation instructions have been simplified somewhat and can be used to quickly create a new portal. Although I am a lifelong model railroader (and coincidentally will be attending my local NMRA Division meeting this Sunday), I don't have time to maintain a second portal here on that subject; I have a hard enough time making one post a week to my personal model railroad and railroad history Facebook page (Facebook: The Rip Track) and have been in the middle of rebuilding its associated website (The Rip Track) for way longer than I had ever anticipated. The rail transport modelling category tree has about the same number of articles that the main rail transport category had when I started P:Trains, so there is enough content to start with, but more will need to be added to make as many updates as I make to P:Trains. There hasn't been a lot of action on the WikiProject Trains/Rail transport modelling task force page, but there are other editors who have added their names to the list, so they would be good candidates to ask for assistance.
Slambo (Speak) 03:50, 30 March 2017 (UTC)

On this day, 12 years ago...

Wishing Slambo/Archives/2017/March a very happy adminship anniversary on behalf of the Wikipedia Birthday Committee! Have a great day! Lepricavark (talk) 16:03, 30 March 2017 (UTC)

Sysop Birthday!

Wishing Slambo a very happy adminship anniversary on behalf of the Wikipedia Birthday Committee! UNSC Luke 1021 (talk) 16:07, 30 March 2017 (UTC)
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