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Policies and guidelines for user pages on Wikipedia
Latest comment: 7 years ago5 comments3 people in discussion
Hello! I first asked this question in another forum, but am now placing it right, to see if there are more answers/input here. I would like to know if/why policies and guidelines for user pages differ on different languages on Wikipedia? My user page that looks the same in maybe 10-20 languages keeps being deleted in the Spanish Wikipedia and I can´t understand why. I have asked why on my discussion page there and on one of the editors discussion pages, that deleted it but I have received no answer or help to change what ever they think is wrong with it. I can´t see what could possibly be wrong or break any rules and in no other language have there ever been any complaints during my years here. So if anyone can help me get an explanation and straighten out what rules apply for user pages (and if/why they don´t apply for the Spanish Wikipedia for some reason) I would be thankful. I got one answer guessing that it could be because I wrote a couple of (non controversial) personal views there and that these doesn't belong on a user page, in some languages. It seems strange to me but maybe that is so. The person who answered me also said that "there are no global policy for user pages, and some projects are stricter than the others".
I find it strange that they can actually delete an entire user page just because a person writes one opinion on their own page. That seems very harsh, without a warning or anything. On the Swedish Wikipedia's user pages you can write freely about any subjects you wish, expressing/presenting your personality and views, so this is quite different. Had I written it in actual articles I would understand that the sentence would be deleted, but not the whole page. And the fact that no one seems to bother to answer me puzzles me a bit also. So it seems like the Spanish Wikipedia is very strict in this case and maybe it should be made clear whats ok and whats not? It would help if it differs this much on the different projects. I recreated my user page again, without these sentences and will see how it goes, if the problem was that or if they delete everything again without contacting me first. I don´t want to be blocked because Spanish Wikipedia differ so much in rules from other languages and I keep breaking them, not understanding them. But hopefully this will be ok. I think information on whats ok to have on your presentation/user page would be useful to have when you press to create one; before you publish think over if the text contains this that is ok, or this that is not, a little check list so one knows. The way it is when you create an article. Sorry for the long post! Frökennostalgi (talk) 20:45, 31 May 2017 (UTC)
Update: they deleted my user page again, even though I asked them to contact me instead so I could correct whatever was wrong (and after changing what we guessed was wrong). I don´t understand this. Is there anyone who can help me with this? They seem very hard to communicate with and indifferent to my tries. Frökennostalgi (talk) 07:46, 1 June 2017 (UTC)
Ok, thank you for your input billinghurst! Maybe I will, it seems impossible to solve this in any other way since no one there answers me. And all this has made my wish to contribute to the Spanish version of Wikipedia vanish actually, for the lack of civility, communication and respect that they have shown this past month. I still think some guidelines should be placed, so they can´t treat people like this just because they have some secret local idea of what is acceptable but can´t inform people of it. Frökennostalgi (talk) 19:59, 1 June 2017 (UTC)
Frökennostalgi, I would guess maybe because you have few contributions at that wiki (and none for a long time), and the quantity of personal information? They may expect local pages to be reasonably affiliated with local work. Tarawa1943 was the most recent person to delete the page. You could try pinging them from your talk page, or ask on their talk page. You might consider posting in both English and Spanish, rather than assuming they should figure out English on a Spanish wiki. Translate.google.com is very handy. Alsee (talk) 05:51, 4 June 2017 (UTC)
Translating Ibero-America is back! Come and join us :)
Latest comment: 7 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Dear all,
Please apologies in advance if this is not the place to post this message! The initiative Iberocoop is organizing again the editing contest Translating Ibero-America to promote our culture in other Wikipedia as way to build new diverse content.
We would like everyone to join us in this challenge!
Hope to seeing you there!
Exploring how the AbuseFilter can be used to combat harassment
Latest comment: 7 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Hello!
I’d like to invite you to participate in a discussion about how the AbuseFilter can potentially be used to combat harassment. The Anti-Harassment Tools team is looking into improving performance and adding functionality and we need your input to make our work successful.
Search results from sister projects enabled in all Wikipedias
Latest comment: 7 years ago8 comments2 people in discussion
Just found out that search results from sister projects are now live in all Wikipedia language sites. Nonetheless, the results at English Wikipedia are limited to just Wikibooks, Wikiquote, Wiktionary, Wikivoyage (title matches only), and Wikisource. Currently, some people aren't pleased with the enabling of cross-wiki results at English Wikipedia. BTW, what to do with the results at non-English Wikipedia sites? May we announce this on every one of them? Also, expanding cross-wiki searches to other projects is considered yet not implemented. When is the right time to consider it to every other individual project? --George Ho (talk) 23:46, 17 June 2017 (UTC); amended. 14:44, 18 June 2017 (UTC)
Example search with results even from Wikiversity Some nitpicking: what you said is not entirely correct (or relevant for all languages), for instance [1] finds a full text (non-title) match from Wikiquote and [2] finds a Wikiversity page as well as Commons media. It's just hard to find good matches for most searches on Wikinews and Wikiversity, which is why in many cases it's better to not show any result at all. (I'm not sure how exactly this desirable result was achieved.)
This is a long-time community-demanded feature which was disabled in 2009 only for performance reasons or whatever (see phabricator:T46420). Fixing such regressions doesn't require big advertising; moreover, the feature is quite easy to discover for anyone using Special:Search. :)
We can and should distribute messages if there is some action required from locals, but I don't know of anything (the icons used to be configured with system messages, now they seem quite ok; the project are referenced by their domain name so there aren't big localisation issues). Do you know of something we should ask/suggest? --Nemo09:17, 18 June 2017 (UTC)
For an update, an opt-out option to disable the results via preferences is created at English Wikipedia per discussion there. --George Ho (talk) 20:45, 26 June 2017 (UTC)
Hey, Nemo bis. I want to spread the notification to other local wikis about the interwiki search results implementation. Here's my draft:
Hello. For notification, the search results from the following sister projects—Wikivoyage, Wikiversity, Wikinews, Wikibooks, Wikiquote, Wiktionary, Wikisource, and multimedia results from Wikimedia Commons—are now implemented and live. Simply type either (this one) or (that one), and you'll see the results. Neither Wikispecies nor Wikidata is included at the moment, but including the search results from those projects are considered. Please feel free to share your thoughts. You may propose which sister project to include or exclude. Thank you.
I already spread the message to German and Spanish Wikipedias with the help of Sänger and MarcoAurelio, to whom I thank (again). I plan to notify the communities of local Wikipedia language sites, like Italian Wikipedia, about this. At first I want to request translation at every other user talk page, but I wonder whether it would be a lot of hassle.
I would replace "(this one)" and "(that one)" with search terms for separate local wikis:
George Ho, would you mind to point to the conflict you are referring to? For non-french speaking people like me it's hard to understand what it's about. Alice Wiegand (talk) 21:06, 27 June 2017 (UTC)
Oh... no, no, no, Lyzzy. I was briefly posting a very short version of one whole statement made by Ilario. I initially thought re-summarizing it was unnecessary, but then I don't know. Something to do with "paid editing" allegations toward Wikimedia Switzerland, but... I don't know and don't get into it much. I was just here because someone else suggested posting the statement at Meta-wiki. --George Ho (talk) 22:06, 27 June 2017 (UTC)
Oh, thanks, George Ho. I come to it via the WMF board noticeboard. To be honest, it doesn't seem to be a board issue, but curious as I am, I was interested in what is is about as well as in what WMCH is expecting from the board. Alice Wiegand (talk) 22:20, 27 June 2017 (UTC)
RfC Announce: Wikimedia referrer policy
Latest comment: 7 years ago3 comments3 people in discussion
In February of 2016 the Wikimedia foundation started sending information to all of the websites we link to that allow the owner of the website (or someone who hacks the website, or law enforcement with a search warrant / subpoena) to figure out what Wikipedia page the user was reading when they clicked on the external link.
The WMF is not bound by Wikipedia RfCs, but we can use an advisory-only RfC to decide what information, if any, we want to send to websites we link to and then put in a request to the WMF. I have posted such an advisory-only RfC, which may be found here:
"The balancing COI and privacy/outing means that the only option is that people investigating COI must submit information in private to the relevant people. Currently this is the arbitration committee and/or the WMF, but other bodies could be considered if there is consensus for this."
Closing rationale: "There is consensus for the proposal with the obvious caveat, that this approach needs a lot more details and clarification.Many have clarified that other bodies shall only refer to editors who have been vetted by the community to handle sensitive and personally identifying information.There has been concerns about the use of the word only as it seems to nullify on-wiki processes based on CU and behaviorial evidence."
Milieu 4:
"We need to balance privacy provided to those editing in good faith against the requirements of addressing undisclosed paid promotional editing. To do so can be achieved with a private investigation with some release of results publicly to help with the detection of further related accounts. These details may include the name of the Wikipedia editing company with which the account is associated (such as for example the connections drawn here)"
Closing rationale: "There is consensus for the above proposal, with a condition that the proposal must be clarified to remove vaugeness, and that any information released must be limited to "employer, client, and affiliation".
More specifically, the information that is to be clarified is:
Who is doing the investigating? (this looks like it's covered by Milieu 3)
What information is to be released? The proposer has stated in the discussion below (and other editors agreed) that the information that is released is to be limited to "employer, client, and affiliation". This renders the argument of wp:outing invalid, which really was the only argument brought up on the oppose side."
While I don't really dispute that there was consensus along those lines, the fact that all the key closes were done by non-admins of meager experience is not encouraging. Due to the significance of the disagreement, I would generally hope for a decision where multiple admins reached agreement on the outcome. As something meant to resolve a dispute between the most powerful community body on Wikipedia with the most powerful organizational body on Wikipedia this is sorely lacking in official legitimacy.--The Devil's Advocate (talk) 08:11, 22 June 2017 (UTC)
I was aware of the abortive close, but even that was one non-admin (albeit one who has experience doing non-admin closures) and one admin. None of this changes what people said in the discussion, but part of the reason finding consensus in a formal discussion is traditionally the domain of admins is it requires a great deal of understanding and judgment regarding the policies as well as experience with closing contentious cases. Guess I just feel it would have been much better if the close had been done by more experienced members, especially admins. Hard to expect anything to come from the discussion when it is closed off this way. Smallbones was involved in the discussion as well so archiving without a full closure as requested is a bit improper.--The Devil's Advocate (talk) 17:31, 22 June 2017 (UTC)
Sorry if folks don't like my archiving - I did it only because we need a clear talk page for further discussions on COI. It looks to me like discussion went for a month or so and then has been left alone for over 2 months. Taking up the discussion again on the en:WP:Paid talk page looks fine to me. But it's really going to have to start at square one for several reasons. Smallbones (talk) 19:50, 22 June 2017 (UTC)
Note that these results have already been violated with users, including administrators, discussing in public the suggested nature and motive of my perceived COI editing. Guido den Broeder (talk) 03:53, 22 July 2017 (UTC)
Relisted The discussion was moved to w:en:Wikipedia:Village pump (policy)/RfC: Wikimedia referrer policy. Then I have relisted the discussion, i.e. gave the discussion additional 30 days. Therefore, more participants would be welcome to comment at the newer page there during the extended time. --George Ho (talk) 01:52, 30 June 2017 (UTC)