User talk:The Earwig

request to tag article talk pages within scope of Women's Basketball

Hi The Earwig,

I would like to request that talk pages for articles within the scope of WP:WBB be tagged with both

Do you need additional information and/or should I post this request somewhere else?

Thank you, Hmlarson (talk) 23:20, 5 March 2024 (UTC)

Hi Hmlarson, you'll need to define what "within the scope of WP:WBB" means in order to run the bot. — The Earwig (talk) 01:52, 6 March 2024 (UTC)

Can you do any article tagged with a subcategory of Category:Women's basketball? Hmlarson (talk) 18:58, 11 March 2024 (UTC)

@Hmlarson: OK. Subcats are sometimes tricky because of unexpected relationships (a subcategory of a subcategory a few levels deep sometimes has little relationship with the original category), but I reviewed this situation, and it looks mostly fine.

I'll have the bot generate a list of pages it would tag, and we can double-check those. It'll take me a few days.

Separately, there is a requirement that you mention on the WikiProject talk page that you want to run this tagging job, in case there are any objections.

Thanks! — The Earwig (talk) 03:43, 12 March 2024 (UTC)

Thank you. Sounds good. I've posted the notice here. Hmlarson (talk) 17:18, 12 March 2024 (UTC)

Hi The Earwig - Any chance you have you can provide an ETA on this request? Thank you! Hmlarson (talk) 20:01, 1 April 2024 (UTC)

So sorry for the wait here, I had to make some code changes to handle tagging both banners and a few personal things came up – I have some free time now and will get back to you tomorrow in a few days. — The Earwig (talk) 20:19, 6 April 2024 (UTC)

Revdel-responder

Hi, it could be a WP:THURSDAY thing but the revdel-respoder script seems to have a problem today. I keep getting a message "Sorry! revdel-responder failed to parse the page content". I'm not good enough at interpreting the console to work out what's gone wrong. Nthep (talk) 11:44, 14 March 2024 (UTC)

not sure if anything has happened during the day but, it seems to have resolved itself. Nthep (talk) 18:49, 14 March 2024 (UTC)

Thanks for letting me know, Nthep. It's possible that was some intermittent error. If you run across it again, let me know the page, or send me the text from the console (right click -> Inspect -> "Console" tab, there should be a line starting with "Error while parsing page content"). — The Earwig (talk) 03:48, 15 March 2024 (UTC)

The Signpost: 29 March 2024

• Technology report: Millions of readers still seeing broken pages as "temporary" disabling of graph extension nears its second year

• Interview: Interview on Wikimedia Foundation fundraising and finance strategy

• Special report: 19-page PDF accuses Wikipedia of bias against Israel, suggests editors be forced to reveal their real names, and demands a new feature allowing people to view the history of Wikipedia articles

• Op-Ed: Wikipedia in the age of personality-driven knowledge

• Recent research: "Newcomer Homepage" feature mostly fails to boost new editors

• News and notes: Universal Code of Conduct Coordinating Committee Charter ratified

• In the media: "For me it’s the autism": AARoad editors on the fork more traveled

• Traffic report: He rules over everything, on the land called planet Dune

• Humour: Letters from the editors

• Comix: Layout issue

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 22:41, 29 March 2024 (UTC)

Administrators' newsletter – April 2024

News and updates for administrators from the past month (March 2024).

Administrator changes

• Kbdank71
• Kosack
• NrDg
• TLSuda

Guideline and policy news

• An RfC is open to convert all current and future community discretionary sanctions to (community designated) contentious topics procedure.

Technical news

• The Toolforge Grid Engine services have been shut down after the final migration process from Grid Engine to Kubernetes. (T313405)

Arbitration

• An arbitration case has been opened to look into "the intersection of managing conflict of interest editing with the harassment (outing) policy".

Miscellaneous

• Editors are invited to sign up for The Core Contest, an initiative running from April 15 to May 31, which aims to improve vital and other core articles on Wikipedia.

---

• Discuss this newsletter
• Subscribe
• Archive

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 16:48, 1 April 2024 (UTC)

The Signpost: 25 April 2024

• In the media: Censorship and wikiwashing looming over RuWiki, edit wars over San Francisco politics and another wikirace on live TV

• News and notes: A sigh of relief for open access as Italy makes a slight U-turn on their cultural heritage reproduction law

• WikiConference report: WikiConference North America 2023 in Toronto recap

• WikiProject report: WikiProject Newspapers (Not WP:NOTNEWS)

• Recent research: New survey of over 100,000 Wikipedia users

• Traffic report: O.J., cricket and a three body problem

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 11:49, 25 April 2024 (UTC)

lowercase sigmabot III not archiving properly

For about the last three days, lowercase sigmabot III has only been archiving the Administrator's noticeboards and nothing else. Somebody mentioned that you gave it a good kick the last time it went on the fritz, so I will go ahead and notify you. Safiel (talk) 16:37, 29 April 2024 (UTC)

Thanks for the notice. I've kicked it again and added a workaround in case this issue happens again. — The Earwig (talk) 04:29, 30 April 2024 (UTC)

Copyvio Detector not working well

Hello Ben, hope you are well. I just thought I'd let you know that the Copyvio Detector is not functioning all that well thae last couple of days, timing out on just about every comparison. ("The URL https://www.dvfu.ru/en/about/ timed out before any data could be retrieved", for example.) Even times out on simple, short webpages of the type that it's usually able to access easily. Any assistance appreciated. Thanks, — Diannaa (talk) 13:34, 1 May 2024 (UTC)

Hi Diannaa. We (Chlod and I) did just block a misbehaving bot last night, so that would account for some extra load, but it doesn't totally explain the issue. That one URL is working for me at the moment, only taking a couple seconds. I will investigate further. — The Earwig (talk) 15:27, 1 May 2024 (UTC)

Administrators' newsletter – May 2024

News and updates for administrators from the past month (April 2024).

Administrator changes

Nyttend

• JohnOwens
• Killiondude
• MelanieN
• Nihonjoe

Bureaucrat changes

Nihonjoe

CheckUser changes

Joe Roe

Oversight changes

GeneralNotability

Guideline and policy news

• Phase I of the 2024 requests for adminship review has concluded. Several proposals have passed outright and will proceed to implementation, including creating a discussion-only period (3b) and administrator elections (13) on a trial basis. Other successful proposals, such as creating a reminder of civility norms (2), will undergo further refinement in Phase II. Proposals passed on a trial basis will be discussed in Phase II, after their trials conclude. Further details on specific proposals can be found in the full report.

Technical news

• Partial action blocks are now in effect on the English Wikipedia. This means that administrators have the ability to restrict users from certain actions, including uploading files, moving pages and files, creating new pages, and sending thanks. T280531

Arbitration

• The arbitration case Conflict of interest management has been closed.

Miscellaneous

• This may be a good time to reach out to potential nominees to ask if they would consider an RfA.
• A New Pages Patrol backlog drive is happening in May 2024 to reduce the number of unreviewed articles in the new pages feed. Currently, there is a backlog of over 15,000 articles awaiting review. Sign up here to participate!
• Voting for the Universal Code of Conduct Coordinating Committee (U4C) election is open until 9 May 2024. Read the voting page on Meta-Wiki and cast your vote here!

---

• Discuss this newsletter
• Subscribe
• Archive

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 17:25, 2 May 2024 (UTC)

WikiProject Banner Tagging

Hi, @The Earwig! You seem to be the most active operator for one of the Category:WikiProject tagging bots so I hope this isn't a bother. I'm overseeing the newly created WP:WikiProject AfroCreatives now and would like to disseminate {{WikiProject AfroCreatives}} through our targeted articles in the AfroCreatives categories with all subcategories included. We are willing to make use of auto assessment and to inherit it from existing WP banners too. The template already accommodates this. I would very much appreciate your help. Assem Khidhr (talk) 06:12, 5 May 2024 (UTC)

Copyvio Detector and Google

Hi,

(Sorry if this is the wrong forum for asking, but if so, perhaps you could point me in the right direction?)

I use the Copyvio Detector (great tool, BTW!) in checking new AfC drafts, at least a dozen times most days. I sometimes get an error message saying that the detector has exceeded its maximum allowed Google searches. This issue has always been there, occasionally, but in the last week or two it has occurred daily. When I start reviewing, around 6am or so UK time, the first few reviews always hit this problem. Then, maybe 8am (?) the daily quota probably gets reset, or something else happens, because from then onwards everything is fine until the next morning.

So I was thinking, I don't suppose there's much we can do to increase the quota (?), but would it be possible to add another search engine as a fallback option? Either so that when the user gets that error message, they could manually tick a box to use Bing (say) instead; or maybe the Detector could automatically switch to using the alternative if Google has failed.

I realise this may not be possible, either for technical or policy reasons, but thought I'd ask at least. Cheers, -- DoubleGrazing (talk) 09:35, 8 May 2024 (UTC)

Hi DoubleGrazing, using Bing or some other engine as a fallback is definitely something we’ve discussed—I hadn’t realized the issue had gotten this bad recently. The main issue here is these services usually cost money, and while the WMF pays for our Google access right now, I don’t know if I will be able to ask for access to additional search engines. First, I can take a deeper look into whether anyone is overusing their share of the tool’s resources; we might need to block/limit them. (Our plan with Google allows about 1500 articles to be checked per day.) — The Earwig _alt (talk) 16:11, 8 May 2024 (UTC)

Okay, thanks for shedding some more light on this; needless to say, I knew nothing about how these things work.

I guess we at AfC are taking up quite a chunk of that quota, given that we see what are by definition new drafts usually by new users. I for one run the check probably at least on ⅓ of the drafts I review (and if you think that makes me an overuser, feel absolutely free to point this out, of course!). Even at NPP we deal with relatively more experienced users, so there's that much less of a need to check for CV.

It may be that I see the problem worse than some others, mind, because of my weird early-morning AfC habit, combined with the time zone I'm in. -- DoubleGrazing (talk) 17:05, 8 May 2024 (UTC)