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JACKINTHEBOX • TALK is wishing you a MerryChristmas! This greeting (and season) promotes WikiLove and hopefully this note has made your day a little better. Spread the WikiLove by wishing another user a Merry Christmas, whether it be someone you have had disagreements with in the past, a good friend, or just some random person. Happy New Year!
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Don't take this too seriously. Someone just wants to let you know that you did something silly.
You have been trouted for: muddling locations with a shared name.
Your error was understandable, given that there are three places named Lukyanivka in Kyiv Oblast alone, and only one has an English Wikipedia article. There are two ways to avoid making this kind of mistake when editing Module:Russo-Ukrainian War detailed map:
See whether a Ukrainian version of the disambiguation page is available. If there isn't one linked at the side, machine-translate the name of the settlement and search for its disambiguation page on Ukrainian Wikipedia. By doing this, you would have found uk:Лук'янівка, which lists three locations in Kyiv Oblast.
More simply, you could have spotted a discrepancy in the location: the coordinates for Lukyanivka (neighborhood) are inside Kyiv, while the source said the village in question was tens of kilometers east of Brovary.
Regardless, thank you for your contributions. —AlphaMikeOmega (talk)18:26, 31 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]__DTELLIPSISBUTTON__{"threadItem":{"timestamp":"2022-03-31T18:26:00.000Z","author":"AlphaMikeOmega","type":"comment","level":1,"id":"c-AlphaMikeOmega-2022-03-31T18:26:00.000Z-Trouted","replies":["c-Firestar464-2022-04-01T02:29:00.000Z-AlphaMikeOmega-2022-03-31T18:26:00.000Z"]}}-->
slaaaaaap...thanks for the advice Firestar464 (talk) 02:29, 1 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]__DTELLIPSISBUTTON__{"threadItem":{"timestamp":"2022-04-01T02:29:00.000Z","author":"Firestar464","type":"comment","level":2,"id":"c-Firestar464-2022-04-01T02:29:00.000Z-AlphaMikeOmega-2022-03-31T18:26:00.000Z","replies":["c-AlphaMikeOmega-2022-04-28T16:56:00.000Z-Firestar464-2022-04-01T02:29:00.000Z"]}}-->
Hi again! I see you had some trouble with some of the locations in the ISW's most recent update. Personally, the way I try to avoid errors is to
Search on Google Maps for locations of the same name near the area being discussed;
By comparing the locations of search results against the location of the front lines on Template:Russo-Ukrainian War detailed map, it may be possible to determine which settlement is being talked about. Still, at this stage, it is best not to assume.
Copy Google's Ukrainian transliteration of the settlement's name from the bar on the left;
This should appear if you click on a settlement with the right name.
If the page is for a settlement, see if there is a disambiguation link at the top. (In-browser machine translation is useful here. Unfortunately, I do not believe Preferences>Gadgets>Appearance>Display links to disambiguation pages in orange is available on Ukrainian Wikipedia, but if a link is clicked, it should be clear whether its destination is a disambiguation page from the format.) If there is no link, you can be confident you have the right settlement; if there is a link, click it.
Filter out most settlements by looking only at those in the oblasts you are interested in;
Disambiguation pages generally group articles by their oblast.
Again, machine translation is useful here; alternatively, you can learn to recognise the Ukrainian Cyrillic for "Donetsk", "Luhansk", "Kherson" etc.
Out of the settlements which remain, use the maps/coordinates on their respective pages to judge whether they are in the correct location.
Incidentally, another thing to note is that in HTML, <ref name="foo"/> is shorthand for <ref name="foo"></ref>, so you can save yourself some typing there. Once again, thanks for your help! —AlphaMikeOmega (talk)16:56, 28 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]__DTELLIPSISBUTTON__{"threadItem":{"timestamp":"2022-04-28T16:56:00.000Z","author":"AlphaMikeOmega","type":"comment","level":3,"id":"c-AlphaMikeOmega-2022-04-28T16:56:00.000Z-Firestar464-2022-04-01T02:29:00.000Z","replies":[]}}-->
__DTSUBSCRIBEBUTTONDESKTOP__{"headingLevel":2,"name":"h-AlphaMikeOmega-2022-06-10T23:33:00.000Z","type":"heading","level":0,"id":"h-Control_of_Cities:_Blahodatne-2022-06-10T23:33:00.000Z","replies":["c-AlphaMikeOmega-2022-06-10T23:33:00.000Z-Control_of_Cities:_Blahodatne"],"text":"Control of Cities: Blahodatne","linkableTitle":"Control of Cities: Blahodatne"}-->
__DTSUBSCRIBEBUTTONMOBILE__{"headingLevel":2,"name":"h-AlphaMikeOmega-2022-06-10T23:33:00.000Z","type":"heading","level":0,"id":"h-Control_of_Cities:_Blahodatne-2022-06-10T23:33:00.000Z","replies":["c-AlphaMikeOmega-2022-06-10T23:33:00.000Z-Control_of_Cities:_Blahodatne"],"text":"Control of Cities: Blahodatne","linkableTitle":"Control of Cities: Blahodatne"}-->
I'd just like to bring up your recent edits regarding Blahodatne, and why I largely reverted them, without being constrained to an edit summary. Here's how I believe the claim got to the ISW's map:
7 June: Twitter user Ukraine War Map posts this, which says that Blahodatne was reported retaken, but does not cite a source;
8 June: This is picked up and relayed by Ukrainian military journalist Roman Bochkala here. He does not cite a source, but uses the same map image;
8 June: The ISW does not mention Blahodatne in its text, but to draw its map (which can only ever be approximate due to the fog of war), the ISW cites Bochkala's Telegram post (see here).
So overall, it doesn't appear well-sourced (unless perhaps we can find Twitter user Ukraine War Map's source). It's probably because of cases like this that the contributors who worked on the Syrian Civil War maps decided not to copy others' maps – a policy carried over to equivalent pages on the Russo-Ukrainian War. That said, the ISW's maps are still useful: it's just probably best to chase down the maps' claims to see if you can find the original source. —AlphaMikeOmega (talk)23:33, 10 June 2022 (UTC)[reply]__DTELLIPSISBUTTON__{"threadItem":{"timestamp":"2022-06-10T23:33:00.000Z","author":"AlphaMikeOmega","type":"comment","level":1,"id":"c-AlphaMikeOmega-2022-06-10T23:33:00.000Z-Control_of_Cities:_Blahodatne","replies":[]}}-->
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Updates for editors
Readers of 42 more wikis can now use Dark Mode. If the option is not yet available for logged-out users of your wiki, this is likely because many templates do not yet display well in Dark Mode. Please use the night-mode-checker tool if you are interested in helping to reduce the number of issues. The recommendations page provides guidance on this. Dark Mode is enabled on additional wikis once per month.
Editors using the 2010 wikitext editor as their default can access features from the 2017 wikitext editor by adding ?veaction=editsource to the URL. If you would like to enable the 2017 wikitext editor as your default, it can be set in your preferences. [1]
For logged-out readers using the Vector 2022 skin, the "donate" link has been moved from a collapsible menu next to the content area into a more prominent top menu, next to "Create an account". This restores the link to the level of prominence it had in the Vector 2010 skin. Learn more about the changes related to donor experiences. [2]
The CampaignEvents extension provides tools for organizers to more easily manage events, communicate with participants, and promote their events on the wikis. The extension has been enabled on Arabic Wikipedia, Igbo Wikipedia, Swahili Wikipedia, and Meta-Wiki. Chinese Wikipedia has decided to enable the extension, and discussions on the extension are in progress on Spanish Wikipedia and on Wikidata. To learn how to enable the extension on your wiki, you can visit the CampaignEvents page on Meta-Wiki.
Developers with an account on Wikitech-wiki should check if any action is required for their accounts. The wiki is being changed to use the single-user-login (SUL) system, and other configuration changes. This change will help reduce the overall complexity for the weekly software updates across all our wikis.
In depth
The server switch was completed successfully last week with a read-only time of only 2 minutes 46 seconds. This periodic process makes sure that engineers can switch data centers and keep all of the wikis available for readers, even if there are major technical issues. It also gives engineers a chance to do maintenance and upgrades on systems that normally run 24 hours a day, and often helps to reveal weaknesses in the infrastructure. The process involves dozens of software services and hundreds of hardware servers, and requires multiple teams working together. Work over the past few years has reduced the time from 17 minutes down to 2–3 minutes. [3]
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
Communities can now request installation of Automoderator on their wiki. Automoderator is an automated anti-vandalism tool that reverts bad edits based on scores from the new "Revert Risk" machine learning model. You can read details about the necessary steps for installation and configuration. [4]
Updates for editors
Translators in wikis where the mobile experience of Content Translation is available, can now customize their articles suggestion list from 41 filtering options when using the tool. This topic-based article suggestion feature makes it easy for translators to self-discover relevant articles based on their area of interest and translate them. You can try it with your mobile device. [5]
It is now possible for <syntaxhighlight> code blocks to offer readers a "Copy" button if the copy=1 attribute is set on the tag. Thanks to SD0001 for these improvements. [6]
Customized copyright footer messages on all wikis will be updated. The new versions will use wikitext markup instead of requiring editing raw HTML. [7]
Later this month, temporary accounts will be rolled out on several pilot wikis. The final list of the wikis will be published in the second half of the month. If you maintain any tools, bots, or gadgets on these 11 wikis, and your software is using data about IP addresses or is available for logged-out users, please check if it needs to be updated to work with temporary accounts. Guidance on how to update the code is available.
Rate limiting has been enabled for the code review tools Gerrit and GitLab to address ongoing issues caused by malicious traffic and scraping. Clients that open too many concurrent connections will be restricted for a few minutes. This rate limiting is managed through nftables firewall rules. For more details, see Wikitech's pages on Firewall, GitLab limits and Gerrit operations.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Updates for editors
The Structured Discussion extension (also known as Flow) is starting to be removed. This extension is unmaintained and causes issues. It will be replaced by DiscussionTools, which is used on any regular talk page. A first set of wikis are being contacted. These wikis are invited to stop using Flow, and to move all Flow boards to sub-pages, as archives. At these wikis, a script will move all Flow pages that aren't a sub-page to a sub-page automatically, starting on 22 October 2024. On 28 October 2024, all Flow boards at these wikis will be set in read-only mode. [13][14]
WMF's Search Platform team is working on making it easier for readers to perform text searches in their language. A change last week on over 30 languages makes it easier to find words with accents and other diacritics. This applies to both full-text search and to types of advanced search such as the hastemplate and incategory keywords. More technical details (including a few other minor search upgrades) are available. [15]
View all 20 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, EditCheck was installed at Russian Wikipedia, and fixes were made for some missing user interface styles.
Updates for technical contributors
Editors who use the Toolforge tool Earwig's Copyright Violation Detector will now be required to log in with their Wikimedia account before running checks using the "search engine" option. This change is needed to help prevent external bots from misusing the system. Thanks to Chlod for these improvements. [16]
Some HTML elements in the interface are now wrapped with a <bdi> element, to make our HTML output more aligned with Web standards. More changes like this will be coming in future weeks. This change might break some tools that rely on the previous HTML structure of the interface. Note that relying on the HTML structure of the interface is not recommended and might break at any time. [18]
In depth
The latest monthly MediaWiki Product Insights newsletter is available. This edition includes: updates on Wikimedia's authentication system, research to simplify feature development in the MediaWiki platform, updates on Parser Unification and MathML rollout, and more.
The latest quarterly Technical Community Newsletter is now available. This edition include: research about improving topic suggestions related to countries, improvements to PHPUnit tests, and more.
MediaWiki message delivery21:17, 14 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]__DTELLIPSISBUTTON__{"threadItem":{"timestamp":"20241014211700","author":"MediaWiki message delivery","type":"comment","level":1,"id":"c-MediaWiki_message_delivery-20241014211700-Tech_News:_2024-42","replies":[]}}-->
__DTSUBSCRIBEBUTTONDESKTOP__{"headingLevel":2,"name":"h-MediaWiki_message_delivery-20241019111300","type":"heading","level":0,"id":"h-The_Signpost:_19_October_2024-20241019111300","replies":["c-MediaWiki_message_delivery-20241019111300-The_Signpost:_19_October_2024"],"text":"The Signpost: 19 October 2024","linkableTitle":"The Signpost: 19 October 2024"}-->
__DTSUBSCRIBEBUTTONMOBILE__{"headingLevel":2,"name":"h-MediaWiki_message_delivery-20241019111300","type":"heading","level":0,"id":"h-The_Signpost:_19_October_2024-20241019111300","replies":["c-MediaWiki_message_delivery-20241019111300-The_Signpost:_19_October_2024"],"text":"The Signpost: 19 October 2024","linkableTitle":"The Signpost: 19 October 2024"}-->
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 Mobile Apps team has released an update to the iOS app's navigation, and it is now available in the latest App store version. The team added a new Profile menu that allows for easy access to editor features like Notifications and Watchlist from the Article view, and brings the "Donate" button into a more accessible place for users who are reading an article. This is the first phase of a larger planned navigation refresh to help the iOS app transition from a primarily reader-focused app, to an app that fully supports reading and editing. The Wikimedia Foundation has added more editing features and support for on-wiki communication based on volunteer requests in recent years.
Updates for editors
Wikipedia readers can now download a browser extension to experiment with some early ideas on potential features that recommend articles for further reading, automatically summarize articles, and improve search functionality. For more details and to stay updated, check out the Web team's Content Discovery Experiments page and subscribe to their newsletter.
Later this month, logged-out editors of these 12 wikis will start to have temporary accounts created. The list may slightly change - some wikis may be removed but none will be added. Temporary account is a new type of user account. It enhances the logged-out editors' privacy and makes it easier for community members to communicate with them. If you maintain any tools, bots, or gadgets on these 12 wikis, and your software is using data about IP addresses or is available for logged-out users, please check if it needs to be updated to work with temporary accounts. Guidance on how to update the code is available. Read more about the deployment plan across all wikis.
It is now possible to create functions on Wikifunctions using Wikidata lexemes, through the new Wikidata lexeme type launched last week. When you go to one of these functions, the user interface provides a lexeme selector that helps you pick a lexeme from Wikidata that matches the word you type. After hitting run, your selected lexeme is retrieved from Wikidata, transformed into a Wikidata lexeme type, and passed into the selected function. Read more about this in the latest Wikifunctions newsletter.
Updates for technical contributors
Users of the Wikimedia sites can now format dates more easily in different languages with the new {{#timef:…}} parser function. For example, {{#timef:now|date|en}} will show as "28 October 2024". Previously, {{#time:…}} could be used to format dates, but this required knowledge of the order of the time and date components and their intervening punctuation. #timef (or #timefl for local time) provides access to the standard date formats that MediaWiki uses in its user interface. This may help to simplify some templates on multi-lingual wikis like Commons and Meta. [24][25]
Commons and Meta users can now efficiently retrieve the user's language using {{USERLANGUAGE}} instead of using {{int:lang}}. [26]
The Product and Tech Advisory Council (PTAC) now has its pilot members with representation across Africa, Asia, Europe, North America and South America. They will work to address the Movement Strategy's Technology Council initiative of having a co-defined and more resilient technological platform. [27]
In depth
The latest quarterly Growth newsletter is available. It includes: an upcoming Newcomer Homepage Community Updates module, new Community Configuration options, and details on new projects.
The Wikimedia Foundation is now an official partner of the CVE program, which is an international effort to catalog publicly disclosed cybersecurity vulnerabilities. This partnership will allow the Security Team to instantly publish common vulnerabilities and exposures (CVE) records that are affecting MediaWiki core, extensions, and skins, along with any other code the Foundation is a steward of.
The Community Wishlist is now testing machine translations for Wishlist content. Volunteers can now read machine-translated versions of wishes and dive into discussions even before translators arrive to translate content.
20–22 December 2024 - Indic Wikimedia Hackathon Bhubaneswar 2024 in Odisha, India. A hackathon for community members, including developers, designers and content editors, to build technical solutions that improve contributors' experiences.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Updates for editors
Later in November, the Charts extension will be deployed to the test wikis in order to help identify and fix any issue. A security review is underway to then enable deployment to pilot wikis for broader testing. You can read the October project update and see the latest documentation and examples on Beta Wikipedia.
View all 32 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, Pediapress.com, an external service that creates books from Wikipedia, can now use Wikimedia Maps to include existing pre-rendered infobox map images in their printed books on Wikipedia. [28]
Updates for technical contributors
Wikis can use the Guided Tour extension to help newcomers understand how to edit. The Guided Tours extension now works with dark mode. Guided Tour maintainers can check their tours to see that nothing looks odd. They can also set emitTransitionOnStep to true to fix an old bug. They can use the new flag allowAutomaticBack to avoid back-buttons they don't want. [29]
Administrators in the Wikimedia projects who use the Nuke Extension will notice that mass deletions done with this tool have the "Nuke" tag. This change will make reviewing and analyzing deletions performed with the tool easier. [30]