Re: [Wikimedia-l] Partial blocks update

[James Forrester]

On Thu, 19 Sep 2019 at 17:16, Steven Walling 
wrote:

> How do we see which wikis have partial blocks deployed already / are
> planning to have it deployed?


On a technical level, this is defined as wgEnablePartialBlocks in config,
which is currently:


   - Meta;
   - MediaWiki.org;
   - test wikis;
   - all Wikisources (except Old Wikisource), all Wikivoyages, and all
   Wiktionaries; and
   - most of the big Wikipedias: Arabic, Bengali, German, Farsi, Finnish,
   French, Hebrew, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Polish, Russian, Serbian,
   Telugu and Chinese.

Changes can be tracked in https://noc.wikimedia.org/conf/index.php (but the
files are large and not very friendly).


> And is there any way administrators can request deployment?
>

I'll leave that to the brilliant Anti-Harassment Tools team.

J.
-- 
*James D. Forrester* (he/him  or they/themself
)
Wikimedia Foundation 
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Copyright workflows - research (Was: Re: Foundation management of volunteers)

[James Forrester]

On Mon, 17 Jun 2019 at 06:28, Yann Forget  wrote:

> It has been suggested many times to ask Google for an access to their API
> for searching images,
> so that we could have a bot tagging copyright violations (no free access
> for automated search).
> That would the single best improvement in Wikimedia Commons workflow for
> years.
> And it would benefit all Wikipedia projects, big or small.
>

Yann,

As you should remember, we asked Google for API access to their reverse
image search system, years ago (maybe 2013?). They said that there isn't
such an API any more (they killed it off in ~2012, I think), and that they
wouldn't make a custom one for us. The only commercial alternative we found
at the time would have cost us approximately US$3m a month at upload
frequency for Commons then, and when contacted said they wouldn't do any
discounts for Wikimedia. Obviously, this is far too much for the
Foundation's budget (it would be even more now), and an inappropriate way
to spend donor funds. Providing the service in-house would involve building
a search index of the entire Internet's (generally non-free) images and
media, which would cost a fortune and is totally incompatible with the
mission of the movement. This was relayed out to Commons volunteers at the
time, I'm pretty sure.

Obviously Google might have changed their mind, though it seems unlikely. I
imagine that Google engineers and product owners don't follow this list, so
it's unlikely that they will re-create the API without being asked directly.

J.
-- 
*James D. Forrester* (he/him  or they/themself
)
Wikimedia Foundation 
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Help need

[James Forrester]

On Fri, 10 Aug 2018 at 11:31 WМ RepublikaSrpska 
wrote:

> In Republic of Srpska there is a photo-competition Trace of Soul 2018
>  (WLE+WLM)
> in
> progress. Yesterday and today we receive a few e-mails from competitors -
> they complained that they have a problem with photo upload. We have tested,
> and in third step, after release rights a page got "freezed". Does anyone
> know what is the problem? We really need help. Thanks!
>

I'm sorry that you and those competitors ran into this issue. I've just
pushed out a fix for this as an emergency patch, which seems from my
testing to make everything work. Thanks for highlighting the bug (recorded
on Phabricator  for the
curious), and our apologies again.

James
-- 

James D. Forrester
Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.
jforrester at wikimedia.org
 |
@jdforrester

http://pronoun.is/he or
http://pronoun.is/they/.../themself
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Automatic citation lookup now supports ISBNs, thanks to OCLC

[James Forrester]

On Thu, 11 May 2017 at 14:32 James Heilman  wrote:

> Excellent to see.


Absolutely.


> This complements nicely the RefToolbar on EN WP.
>
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:RefToolbar
>
> Will this lead to improvements in that tool? RefToolbar has trouble pulling
> the year of publication based on the ISBN.
>

Possibly, but not from the Wikimedia Foundation.

Gadgets are, by design, community-written and community-supported. The
English Wikipedia community has a large number of technical experts who
might help out in improving, or replacing, that gadget for the 2010-era
wikitext editor. Most other wikis have no internal technical support; it's
important that we ensure that we give help to those communities.

J.
-- 

James D. Forrester
Lead Product Manager, Editing
Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.


jforrester at wikimedia.org
 |
@jdforrester
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[Wikimedia-l] Automatic citation lookup now supports ISBNs, thanks to OCLC

[James Forrester]

Hey all,

I'm delighted to announce here that you can now use ISBNs to add
automatically-generated citations to Wikipedia. This is thanks to a
partnership with OCLC, a global non-profit library cooperative, whose
WorldCat database of books is the largest in the world.

One of the editing features for which we've had the most praise is the tool
to generate citations. This tool, started back in 2014, allows you to type
in a URL, DOI, or PMCID and have it suggest a filled-in citation. Making it
quicker and easier for new and existing editors alike to do the right thing
is a key part of our work.

However, Wikimedians love our books, and the most-requested feature was to
add to this the most common identifier for books, ISBNs. I know that a few
wikis built their own custom gadgets to do this, but I felt that we should
provide a proper, reliable tool that works on mobile as well as desktop
platforms, for all users and in all languages.

Over the past while, we agreed a partnership with OCLC to provide this data
for editors to use, to make referencing stronger and clearer for our
readers around the world. Identifiers for books will help them find further
information on topics that catch their interest, using our long-standing
BookSources tool and OCLC's WorldCat database.

This is now live on all wikis which have Citoid set up. If your wiki
doesn't have it, we'd love to help your community out – ask on the talk page
.
You can read more in the blog post
, and of
course I'd love for you to try it out on a wiki that's configured with it
near you.

My very big thanks to OCLC, in particularly Merrilee Proffitt, and to my
colleagues at the Wikimedia Foundation, particularly Marielle Volz, Marko
Obrovac, and Jake Orlowitz, for making this possible.

Yours,
-- 

James D. Forrester
Lead Product Manager, Editing
Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.
jforrester at wikimedia.org
 |
@jdforrester
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Ray Saintonge has died

[James Forrester]

I will miss Ray.

I will miss his cheeriness, his optimism, his kind-heartedness.

I will miss his steadfastness, a rock at every Wikimania until he could no
longer come, his passion for learning, his dedication to understanding.

Farewell, Ray.

J.
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[Wikimedia-l] Please take part in the Flow satisfaction survey

[James Forrester]

All,

*TL;DR*: Communities using Flow are invited to fill out a survey about what
they want to see from Flow,[Y]. It is administered by a third-party
service. It will not require an e-mail or your username. See our privacy
statement.[Z]

We in the Collaboration Team have currently paused major development of
Flow. We continue to maintain it, fixing urgent bugs and adding minor
features, but we're not planning to put large-scale efforts into improving
it further in the current fiscal year (until June 2017). Flow is currently
enabled on ten wikis as a beta feature, which allows intrepid users to
convert their user talk page to Flow.[X] Some other communities are trying
it in various ways. We plan to support these communities in the future, and
we need their input to build a strategy.

This survey is so that you can help us make decisions about the way forward
in this area by sharing your thoughts about Flow — what works, what
doesn't, and what should be improved? We remain interested in the
structured discussions that the Flow project provides, and have a list of
five big areas we think are most needed (based on community requests and
user feedback) to make it more useful: searching, categorising, moving,
watching activity, and dealing with history.

This survey will help us to prioritise future development of Flow. However,
there are lots of other things on which we could instead work, and we hope
that through this survey we will identify the key areas for everyone so
that it is as useful as possible for those that wish to use it.

There are some areas in which Flow is currently weak for some use cases,
and we don't advocate its active use by wikis which lack the expertise on
how to use it. Because of this, we're not actively looking for further
wikis to get the beta feature at this time, but if your wiki wants it, you
can request it on this page.[X]

Please fill out the survey,[Y] which is administered by a third-party
service. It will not require an e-mail or your username. See our privacy
statement.[Z]

Thank you!

[X] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Flow/Request_Flow_on_a_page/Beta_feature

[Y] https://wikimedia.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_cHm4YCZ4AaoAOr3
[Z]
https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Survey_Privacy_Statement_for_Spring_2016_Flow_Survey


-- 

James D. Forrester
Lead Product Manager, Editing
Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.
jforrester at wikimedia.org
 |
@jdforrester
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Status update about editing software, June 2016

[James Forrester]

On 23 June 2016 at 17:01, Pine W  wrote:

> 1. Is Flow feature development still frozen? If and when would Flow feature
> development resume?
>

​Yes, principal development is frozen. Like with all production software,
urgent bugs and maintenance are still worked on, and we might add some
minor features.​

We've not re-prioritised the Collaboration team's work on Flow, and we
won't do so very soon; the team this coming year are working on improving
the edit review process
 and the
notifications system. However, after that work is done there are some
often-requested areas for improvement in Flow which the team plan to
improve. For example, I know that the fixed threading of discussions is
irritating to some, and the lack of search is a serious issue. I know that
the use of Flow for individuals' talk pages as a Beta Feature on several
wikis has been quite popular, and given us a lot of feedback on how we can
do better. I look forward to discussing those priorities with everyone
nearer the time.


2. Will VE be enabled on talk pages?
>

​No. This comes up quite often. VE is designed to edit content. Talk pages
aren't content. Many of the tools and design patterns that make VE nice to
use to edit content make it poor to use for discussions. ​To make it usable
for discussions, we would have to remove or break many of those patterns in
VE. We have spent a lot of time researching with users what works best
there. I do not think we will make writing reference materials easier,
simpler and faster by compromising on that.


3. Is work planned to improve the Wikitext editor, or will that happen only
> in the context of integrating it into VE?
>

​Not really.​ ​The work on improving wikitext editing is mostly around the
wikitext mode inside the visual editor. The department is also working more
widely on improvements to wikitext itself (like supporting the
TemplateStyles work, providing balanced templates, and replacing Tidy with
a modern parser), but they won't have a big impact on the existing
WikiEditor software.


​Thanks for your questions. Happy to answer more. :-)​

​J.​
-- 
James D. Forrester
Lead Product Manager, Editing
Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.

jforres...@wikimedia.org | @jdforrester
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[Wikimedia-l] Status update about editing software, June 2016

[James Forrester]

All,


TL;DR: The Editing Department is working to make the content editing
software better. The big work areas are improving the visual editor and
editing wikitext. We will bring in a wikitext mode inside the visual editor
for simpler, faster switching. We will experiment with prompts to give
users ideas for what they might want to make as they edit. We will do other
things as well. Your feedback is welcome.


I thought it would be helpful to send an update about editing software.
It's been over a year since my last, and things change (and it's easy to
lose track). We set out some higher-level objectives for Editing in the
Wikimedia Foundation's annual plan for the coming financial year.[0] This
gives a little more detail on that, with particular emphasis on the team
working on content editing tools directly. There's also a brief, more
feature-focussed roadmap available on MediaWiki.org if you are
interested.[1]

Status

In Editing, we're continuing to work on our commission from the 2010
community strategy[2] to create a rich visual editor which makes it
possible to edit all our content, and participate in our workflows, without
knowing or having to learn wikitext. This is a work in progress; as with
all our improvements to the software, we will never be "done", and
hopefully you notice improvements over time. Each week, new features,
improvements, and bug fixes are released, often led, altered or supported
by our volunteer developers and community pioneers; my thanks to you all.

We are now roughly five years into this visual editor work, and have made
good progress on a credible content editor for many users' workflows,
helping editors spend more time on what they're editing instead of how.
First and foremost, not having to think about the vagaries of wikitext and
instead focus on the content of their writing is something that many new
and experienced volunteers alike have mentioned they appreciate. The
automatic citations tool makes adding new references to websites or DOIs
much more quickly and thoroughly, improving the quality of the content. The
visual media searching tool makes it simple to find and add more of the
great images and other media on Commons and add to a page. Visual table
editing helps make changes to tables, like moving columns or parts of
tables around, much more easily than in wikitext, saving time of our
volunteers to focus on their work making the wikis better.

The visual editor supports many (but not yet all) of our content languages,
and thanks to community support and engagement the editor is available by
default on over 235 Wikipedias (and for opt-in use on the remaining 55),
including almost all of our largest Wikipedias. It is on by default for
logged-out users and new accounts on 233 of these, and on for new accounts
(but not yet for logged-out users) on two, English and Spanish. As of this
week, this now includes representatives from each of the "CJK" language
group, with four different Chinese script languages (Classical, Cantonese
and Wu, as well as Min Nan), Korean and Japanese. We're currently working
our way through each of the remaining communities asking them if it's OK to
switch; the next groups will be the thirteen Arabic script Wikipedias and
the twenty-three Indic Wikipedias. You can see specific details at the
rollout grid if you're interested.[3]

We have recently been working with the non-Wikipedia sister projects. As
you might imagine, each project has different needs, workflows and
concerns, and it's important to us that we ensure the tools we provide are
tweaked as appropriate to support, not undermine, those requirements to the
extent justifiable by demand. Per community request, the visual editor is
already available to all users on several different sister projects, but we
think there is more to do for some before we encourage this more widely.
Recently, we have been working with the communities on the Wikivoyages,
which are quite similar to the Wikipedias in needs from the visual editor;
our thanks to the patience and assistance from the Wikivoyagers. We're also
working with User:tpt and other volunteers who create and maintain the
software used by Wikisources to adapt the visual editor to work with those
features; our thanks to them, and to Wikisourcerers more widely.

Core and maintenance work

Despite this progress, there are still several areas in which the core
functionality of the editing software needs extensions, improvements and
fixes. In many places within the visual editor software we have to work
around browsers' bugs, missing features and idiosyncrasies, and nowhere is
that more problematic than the critical areas of typing, cursoring, and
related language support. There continue to be irritating, occasionally
serious bugs related to these, for which we continue to partner with
browser vendors and experts around the Web to try to develop workarounds
and improvements.

Another important area related to language support is coming up with 

Re: [Wikimedia-l] Fwd: [WikimediaMobile] "Among mobile sites, Wikipedia reigns in terms of popularity"

[James Forrester]

On 11 May 2016 at 14:20, Michael Peel  wrote:

> I'm hoping that having a responsive skin for the webpages isn't too far
> off, though?
>

Reading can answer that better than I; however, making the skin itself ​is
only part of the issue – you also would want to scrap m.wikimedia.org
*etc. *​Right now, the mobile sites have to make massive changes to the
content to make it fit on​ a mobile screen (and even then can't fix some
things, like tables). Giving mobile users a responsive skin whilst the
contents weren't appropriate wouldn't make anyone happy. Until the contents
of at least most the millions of pages of Wikimedia wikis' projects are
mobile-safe, we can't reasonably get rid of the mobile "site".

J.
-- 
James D. Forrester
Lead Product Manager, Editing
Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.

jforres...@wikimedia.org | @jdforrester
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Fwd: [WikimediaMobile] "Among mobile sites, Wikipedia reigns in terms of popularity"

[James Forrester]

On 11 May 2016 at 12:50, Michael Peel  wrote:

> Isn't it time to start moving to responsive mediawiki templates (
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Responsive_web_design), rather than having
> a separate mobile interface/URL?


> For a practical example, see the BBC News website (
> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news), which is the same website on all devices, it
> just rescales the content/navigation/layout to suit the device. (Try
> resizing your web browser on your computer to the size of a mobile web
> browser to see what I mean.)
>

​Hey Mike,

I think you're confusing two things – a single skin with responsive design
for all users on all devices, which is a long-term ambition, but for the
Reading department to talk about :-) – and responsive templates for
content, which we're working on in terms of scoped styling for templates
through TemplateStyles (
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:TemplateStyles, though by "we" I
mostly mean Coren as a volunteer developer). This second one is going
through security review right now, but once that's complete we'll enable it
for testing and gradual roll-out.

Scoped styling of templates will let template authors make their templates
work on any sized device, which will massively improve the terrible
experience from templates like infoboxes, navboxes, amboxes, and especially
one-off templates like those used by the Signpost. However, it'll need a
concerted effort from all of us to re-write and improve all the thousands
of templates across our hundreds of wikis to make this a reality. It
requires judgement, æsthetics and expertise, and so isn't something that
can be done automatically by software. It's a big effort, but it's going to
be worth it. :-)

J.
-- 
James D. Forrester
Lead Product Manager, Editing
Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.

jforres...@wikimedia.org | @jdforrester
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] One Last Ride

[James Forrester]

On 23 February 2016 at 15:35, Oliver Keyes  wrote:

> I am leaving the Wikimedia Foundation to take up a job as a Senior
> Data Scientist at an information security company. My last day will be
> on 18 March.


​Oliver,

It's been a while
 since
we first met in person. I even followed you across the world to work in San
Francisco! Don't think you can get away from our friendship that easily! ;-)

Take care, and go in peace and with my respect. My very best wishes.

Yours,
-- 
James D. Forrester
Lead Product Manager, Editing
Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.

jforres...@wikimedia.org | @jdforrester
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Fwd: [Wmfall] CTO Search | Status

[James Forrester]

On 17 February 2016 at 00:03, aude  wrote:

> On Thu, Feb 11, 2016 at 3:45 PM, Lila Tretikov  wrote:
> >- In collaboration with the ED and the Technology group, own and
> advance
> >the overall architectural roadmap, setting the vision and long-term
> >strategy for technology at the Foundation.
> >
>
> Lila and Amy,
>
> Curious what you mean by "Technology group" in regards to "overall
> architectural roadmap" and strategy?  Perhaps this could be made more
> clear?
>

​The Technology Group is the part of ​WMF that will report to the CTO. See
https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Staff_and_contractors#Technology in
comparison to
https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Staff_and_contractors#Product, the
group headed by Wes, in which I sit. It comprises eight departments and
teams, of which Architecture is one.


​J.
-- 
James D. Forrester
Lead Product Manager, Editing
Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.

jforres...@wikimedia.org | @jdforrester
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] [Wikimania-l] Outcomes from the Consultation on Wikimedia movement conferences/Wikimania

[James Forrester]

On Mon, 8 Feb 2016 at 14:54 Ellie Young  wrote:

> The Community Resources team at the WMF recently held a consultation
> 
> on articulating the value of Wikimedia movement conferences overall, the
> unique value of Wikimania, and what new form Wikimania could take to better
> serve the movement going forward.   We have completed analysis of these
> results and have prepared this report:
>
>
> https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IdeaLab/Towards_a_New_Wikimania/Outcomes
>
> I will be working with the community, organizers, committees, and WMF in
> 2017 to begin set up and planning for an experimental model for Wikimedia
> movement conferences, including Wikimania, starting in 2018.
>
> Feedback and comments are welcome at the discussion page
> 
> Thanks to all who participated!
>

On behalf of the Wikimania Committee, I would like to thank everyone who
took part and the Community Resources team for organising this discussion.

The Committee will consider these recommendations and will then come back
with some changes to our processes.

Yours,
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[Wikimedia-l] Wikimania 2017 to be held in Montréal in Canada

[James Forrester]

All,

I am delighted to announce on behalf of the Wikimania Committee that
Wikimania, the annual Wikimedia community conference, will be held in
Montréal, Canada in 8–13 August 2017.

2017 will be the 375th anniversary of the founding of Montréal as a city,
which will make it a great time for a cultural event to take place. Despite
being our twelfth Wikimania, Montréal will be our first in a Francophone
location, and the Montréal team is working with French-speaking community
members worldwide to make Montréal a success. WikiFranca and Wikimedia
Canada will be supporting the local team led by Marc-André Pelletier
(User:Coren). A press release/announcement from them will be forthcoming.
You can contact the team via e-mail at team{at}wikimania.ca.

For 2017, we decided to investigate and vet a revised earlier proposal for
Montréal to host while the selection process itself is being reviewed.
Selecting and confirming the venue with more lead time ensures cost savings
in hotel prices and contract terms; affords us favourable dates and rates;
and allows participation and overlap with current and future teams.

Please join us in congratulating the team, and working to support them in
holding an excellent conference.

Yours,

James D. Forrester
Chair, Wikimania Committee
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[Wikimedia-l] Fwd: Coming up with a new process for Wikimania selection

[James Forrester]

Forwarding for info; please keep the e-mail conversation on one like,
wikimania-l. Thank you.

-- Forwarded message -
From: James Forrester <jdforres...@gmail.com>
Date: Sun, 4 Oct 2015 at 11:10
Subject: Coming up with a new process for Wikimania selection
To: Wikimania general list (open subscription) <
wikimani...@lists.wikimedia.org>


All,

TL;DR: The Wikimania Committee and the WMF Community Engagement department
will be working on coming up with a new process for venues for future
Wikimanias, which we will be seeking input from the community in the next
few months

--

At the Committee’s meeting in Mexico City in August, we agreed to alter the
way that Wikimania locations are decided.

The existing bidding process has developed over time. It has become
unwieldy and hard work for the community and staff. It demands that people
pour a huge amount of effort into building local teams, contracts and
institutional relationships only for rejected bids' work to be left unused.
A lot of pressure is put on volunteers to try to work on logistics rather
than dream about what would make a great programme for our communities.
Each year, the jury has to decide on a venue based on what is presented by
each group divisively, rather than what we as a community could come
together and build.

The process is too short-term, setting out venue much less than two years
ahead (often only just more than twelve months in advance). This greatly
increases expenses when other similar conferences plan locations out many
years ahead. This makes it impossible for us to be strategic about
location, prevents us from arranging co-location with like-minded
conferences, and it means that some areas of the world are ignored when
they could provide great Wikimanias.

Consequently, from now on the Committee will pick an area for Wikimania
four to five years in advance, from the following (provisional) list.   The
years in which we have already held Wikimanias in these areas are shown in
parentheses

* Western, Northern, and Southern Europe (2005, 2014)

* Canada and United States (2006, 2012)

* Asia-Pacific (2007, 2013)

* Middle East and North Africa (2008, 2011)

* Latin America (2009, 2015)

* Eastern Europe, Russia, and Central Asia (2010)

* South Asia (none yet)

* Sub-Saharan Africa (none yet)

* Oceania (none yet)

The Committee intends to deliberately rotate between these areas to make
sure we allow as many community members to attend as cheaply as possible.

The large majority of our community members are based in either North
America or Europe; organising Wikimanias in these areas allows the majority
of our community members to attend cheaply, so that money spent on
scholarships can go further, and be more focussed in supporting our
community members wherever they are based.

Locating Wikimania in other continents does not assure that participants
from these areas  can attend more cheaply. Nevertheless, to support the
movement worldwide, we do want to ensure that, every third year, Wikimania
will take place neither in Europe nor North America.

We  propose that a sequence of "Western, Northern, and Southern Europe",
"Canada and United States", and one of the others every three years, picked
out several years into the future. Beyond the first two areas, we may not
visit some as often as others. (I have not listed Antarctica as an area to
which we will rotate, which may well be a disappointment to members of the
British Antarctic Survey and others in that location.)

More widely, we would like to encourage Wikimedia conferences as open,
engaging and fun community meetups, alongside the annual Wikimania
conference. I know that several chapters run country-specific conferences
each year, which is a good move. I think that there should be at least one
annual Wikimedia conference in each of these areas. This would help newer
editors know that there are people like them nearby without requiring the
existence of, or putting too great a demand on, every national chapter or
other local affiliated body. In some areas like Africa where the distances
are great, multiple regional conferences may make sense.

As part of the new system of location selection, we will no longer have a
'bidding' process. Instead, the Committee invites people interested in
leading or helping to run a Wikimania to contact us on-wiki
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Wikimania>, or via the wikimania-l
list. If you think that you know a great team, venue or concept for holding
Wikimania, in your area or anywhere else, please discuss the possibilities
with us. We will work with interested community members to narrow down the
selection to a particular venue.

Our next few locations will thus go like this:

* 2016: Western, Northern, and Southern Europe – Esino Lario in Italy

* 2017: Canada and United States – TBD

* 2018: TBD – TBD

* 2019: Western, Northern, and Southern Europe – TBD

* 2020: Canada and 

[Wikimedia-l] Fwd: [Wikitech-l] Collaboration Team Update

[James Forrester]

FYI.

-- Forwarded message --
From: Trevor Parscal 
Date: 1 October 2015 at 16:10
Subject: [Wikitech-l] Collaboration Team Update
To: Wikimedia developers ,
wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org


Hi (and sorry for cross-posting)

I’d first like to say that I’m excited about Danny’s new role and the
positive impact I know he will have on the relatively new Community Tech
team, and that he will be missed in the Editing group. This change now
leaves an open position, which we are in the process of hiring a new
Product Manager to fill. There’s an open position posted.[1]

The Collaboration team, meanwhile, will continue their work to provide Flow
as an opt-in Beta feature, allowing contributors to use Flow on their user
talk page. This feature is currently available on MediaWiki.org, and will
be enabled on other wikis upon request. Especially as more users enable
Flow, the team will continue supporting users of the product by promptly
triaging and resolving bugs.

This quarter, which began yesterday, The Collaboration team will be
focusing on the development of cross-wiki notifications and other Echo
improvements. They’re also continuing to advance efforts to research and
prototype solutions for advanced editor workflows. Further feature
development on Flow discussion tools will be based on an assessment
following the 'workflows' research work, and on editor feedback at the
wikis already using Flow.[2]

Please ask any questions you may have on-wiki at
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Talk:Flow to reduce fragmentation.

- Trevor

[1] https://boards.greenhouse.io/wikimedia/jobs/104264?t=k7xsjm
[2] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Flow/Rollout
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-- 
James D. Forrester
Lead Product Manager, Editing
Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.

jforres...@wikimedia.org | @jdforrester
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Increase in size of the core editing community

[James Forrester]

On 10 September 2015 at 07:21, WereSpielChequers <
werespielchequ...@gmail.com> wrote:

> A quick follow up to the signpost article of a couple of weeks ago
> <
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2015-08-26/In_focus
> >We
> now have the August figures
> , and August has
> continued what we might reasonably start calling the new trend. The English
> Wikipedia has more editors with 100 or more live edits in mainspace than
> for any August since 2010. Across all Wikipedias combined the figures are
> up almost as steeply with a near 10% increase on August 2014, though this
> doesn't quite get us back to 2012 levels.
>

​Interesting data, but it's just data, not a conclusion.​

Also, and a bit off-topic, "core editing community" is a pretty offensive
term to use for "editors who make more than 100 edits a month",
disregarding the continuing editors who make fewer than 100 edits as
non-core regardless of the value they add to the wikis; the normal term is
"very active editors" to avoid implicit disparagement.

​[Snip]​

editors making 5 or more saves
> ​[is]
>  down
> across Wikipedia generally when comparing August 2015 with 2014.
>

​So, actually, your title​ is faulty and misleading. Instead, you could say:

   - "English Wikipedia editor numbers continue to decline but meta-editors
   are up",
   - "Editor diversity falls as more edits are done by fewer editors", or
   even
   - "Beset by a falling number of editors, existing users of the English
   Wikipedia feel compelled to edit still more in their desperate attempts to
   fix things"?


But it's nice to have one metric be positive.
>

​I'm not sure it is.​ What is the nature and value of these edits? Two
editors endlessly reverting each other counts as "more edits" but adds no
value; one hundred editors each writing a beautiful Featured Article in a
single edit counts as less "work" than one admin reverting 101 vandalism
edits by a single spambot. What's your next step to evaluate this?


Yours,
-- 
James D. Forrester
Lead Product Manager, Editing
Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.

jforres...@wikimedia.org | @jdforrester
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Increase in size of the core editing community

[James Forrester]

On 10 September 2015 at 10:56, Pine W  wrote:

> James,
>
> Yes, there is more to the story than can be told in the data that we have.
> On the other hand, it seems to me that it's a bit harsh to respond like
> that to WSC's attempt to share good news.


​Then in my e-mail I have failed entirely, and I apologise.

My point is that we should all be very cautious in mis-reading a single
number (even sustained over a trend) as ​being "nice" when in fact we have
no reason to suspect that it is necessarily "good news". It is not "good
news" until we know that it is positive and can explain why.

Shouting from the rooftops about events as "good news" without the solid
evidence to back such a claim up risks damaging all the community efforts
working to find and fix the issues at play. If we are going to improve the
situation, we have a duty to ourselves to be honest and realistic about
what we know, and what things we find tell us. We need to hold ourselves to
the highest standards of truth, and not rush in with the first
interpretation that comes to mind.​


Perhaps you can also think of
> positive ways to interpret the data, such as that the increased speeds of
> page loads may be having a desirable positive effect on the productivity of
> highly active editors.
>

​WSC has worked hard to come up with positive reasons. :-)

I felt we needed to be more balanced, nuanced and realistic viewpoint. To
use a metaphor, possibly this datapoint is a candle of light in a storm of
darkness, but it might be the transformer exploding in sparks just as much
as it might be a the end of the storm.

However, since you asked, some positive narratives that might also or
instead be true:

   - Faster load/save times make the site feel more responsive and so
   people can do more edits in the same amount of time.
   - Increased community quality criteria lead to many very-active editors
   taking up the baton and correcting dozens of articles each.
   - Simpler, more understandable community norms and processes mean some
   feel driven to improving their areas of the.
   - Cleaner, clearer designs for tools to make mass-edits more accessible
   and appealing to more users.
   - Decreased competition increases the reader demand and so eyes in some
   environments previously lacking, pushing more people over the line from
   "active" into "very active".

However, all these narratives are merely speculation.


I believe that Aaron H. is working on ways to measure the "value" of an
> editor's contributions. When that work is done, I hope that we'll have a
> better measure for how productivity is changing over time for different
> cohorts of editors.
>

​I too look forward to knowing more about the world, and measuring value,
effort and types of edits as Aaron is trying to do would be a fantastic
improvement in understanding the picture better, yes. ​This may take some
time though, and Aaron and his team needs our support, not just heaping of
expectations on him and their work. :-)

Let's not count chickens before they've hatched.

J.
-- 
James D. Forrester
Lead Product Manager, Editing
Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.

jforres...@wikimedia.org | @jdforrester
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Media handling is difficult

[James Forrester]

On 31 July 2015 at 06:48, Juan de Vojníkov juandevojni...@gmail.com wrote:

 Hi,

 I would like to ask, if the ease of media handling (images, photographs on
 Wikimedia Commons) is a priority for Wikimedia Foundation? If not, could it
 be a priority? Recently we have seen a big step done for editors =
 VisualEditor. Contributors have no longer study wikicode to be able to
 contribute. That removes one of the technological barriers and it looks its
 a priority for WMF.

 While part of contributing to Wikipedia is still contributing by images. I
 am from Wikimedia Czech republic. We run many projects based on media
 harvest or organizing *low barrier media harvest activities* to bring new
 users to Wikipedia.


 As our newbies are not technologically skilled and not native English
 speakers, there is a big technology block to contribute to Wikipedia with
 ease:

 1) there is no app for mobile phones and tablets for image upload


​I don't think having a custom mobile app for uploading files is really the
key problem.

The quality of media capture on non-specialist mobile devices, and
especially the general pattern of use for them, is not so good that
encouraging people in general to upload them for use in Wikipedia articles
is a good idea. Yes, you *can* take good, educational, useful photos with a
mobile device, but in general people do not, and when we enabled uploads on
the mobile desktop we got a lot of very low-value photos, almost all of
which were deleted (and the users understandably didn't stay around). The
old tickets at
https://wikimedia.mingle.thoughtworks.com/projects/mobile/cards/920 and
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T53559 for example have some off-handed
comments about this being the Selfie Apocalypse.

The hard thing is not grabbing the media file from the user's device, but
helping users understand what media is appropriate, what is expected, what
is good, and what won't get immediately deleted by the wiki's community. We
don't just want to trap people into making a one-off upload contribution –
we want to encourage people to join the community and stay, taking several
photos, not just one. :-) I've got some ideas about how we can gently coax
people into understanding this without scaring them away, but I'm sure
others have better plans.


2) newbies are lost, when they click on Upload image and they are
 transferred from Wikipedia to Wikimedia Commons

 3) Wikimedia Commons is in English - foreign language for our participants



5) Wikimedia Commons environment is still pretty techy


 6) Insert metadata, takes a long time:

 e.g.: you have an image of a cathedral in Des Moines, IW. 3 or 4 times you
 have to insert same information: a) to file name (*Des Moines,
 cathedral.jpg*), b) to file description (*en:** Cathedral in Des Moines,
 Iowa, USA*/*es:* *La catedral de XY en Des Moines, Iowa, EEUU*) and c) to
 the category (*category:Des Moines* or *Churches in Des Moines*,
 *category:Cathedrals
 in Iowa*).


​[Answering these three together.]

​
​Yup, that's why our main work in Multimedia right now is making it
possible to upload a media file from whichever wiki you're on
​, and do so whilst you're editing. We're looking to make adding the
information as simple and painless as possible, without letting people
upload files without enough information for the community to triage and
ensure are as high quality as possible.

https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T91717
​
​
​
​

​is the overall work, and https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T40030 will be
the integration into VisualEditor (we'll do it for users writing in
wikitext as well, of course)​.




 4) biggest language barrier are categories, which are in English only, we
 need to insert name of the category in our mother tongue


​That is true. The long-term hope in this area is using Wikibase (the
software behind Wikidata) to add proper structured data to Commons. This
would mean that we could replace categories named in a single language with
'tags' named in all languages, which would make it both easier to
contribute to Commons and better to find existing media already on Commons
for the majority of our readers and editors who do not speak English.

You can see some thoughts on this at:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Multichill/Commons_Wikidata_roadmap


Could we do something for those, who contributes with their media to
 Wikipedia? Could we do it in one or two years?


​Absolutely. Or, at least, I hope so. :-)

​Yours,
-- 
James D. Forrester
Lead Product Manager, Editing
Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.

jforres...@wikimedia.org | @jdforrester

On 31 July 2015 at 06:48, Juan de Vojníkov juandevojni...@gmail.com wrote:

 Hi,

 I would like to ask, if the ease of media handling (images, photographs on
 Wikimedia Commons) is a priority for Wikimedia Foundation? If not, could it
 be a priority? Recently we have seen a big step done for editors =
 VisualEditor. Contributors have no longer study wikicode to be able to
 contribute. 

Re: [Wikimedia-l] Big problem to solve: good WYSIWYG on WMF wikis

[James Forrester]

On 16 June 2015 at 02:53, Derk-Jan Hartman d.j.hartman+wmf...@gmail.com
wrote:

https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2010-December/063225.html

 I just found back this post by David Gerard from 2010 and was struck by
how
 dead-on the discussion and analysis was and how far we have actually come
 with VE 5 years later, even though we still did not pass the finish line
just
 yet.

Yes, I agree. I think there's a lot of interesting areas we can consider
for VisualEditor as a technology, and more importantly editing as an
area; thank you for raising this. :-)

 Also interesting is some of the follow up to it, which points out that the
 usability of Templates is also a real problem in itself, not easily
solvable
 with WYSIWYG, but probably just as important.

 I think VE is really close now to being usable in production, but I think
 that we are FAR from done on this front. Like was stated, templates are a
 real problem. A UI problem, and one that VE doesn't really solve. Citoid
 sort of does, but just for one small subset of templates.

Agreed. There are several layers of answer to this question, precisely as
you say based on what levels of vision we're trying to achieve. Here is
mine (TL;DR: lots to do):

Mostly this comes down to what templates (and now of course, Lua) are used
for. My mental categories are:

1. Standardised workflow notices – this needs a reference, this
article is poorly written, this list needs expanding, this file should
be expanded, please delete this page, this page is protected, this
suggested edit needs reviewing, please don't edit this discussion because
it's archived, I am warning you not to be disruptive in your editing or
you will be in trouble, this user is blocked, etc.

2. Standardised visual formatting of content – citations (templated
references), infoboxen, stub notices, succession boxes, media licensing
data, Wiktionary's etymology templates, Wikisource' and so on.

3. Standardised conversion or expansion of content – unit conversion, date
conversion, links to sister project pages on the same title, annotation
markup (e.g. setting lang=fr around some content, or marking it up with
hCard data; adding an HTML anchor to the page; etc.).

4. Standardised fetching of content – we frequently pull images from
Commons (and people don't even think of it as fetching content); beyond
that it's not yet hugely common, though some infoboxes for example pull
data from Wikidata.

5. Unstandardised sharing of identical content blocks (the original
intent for templates) – most often used as navboxes, and sadly sometimes
also used to hide complex wikitext e.g. for infoboxes or graphs from the
regular users who might break it, which speaks to how much VisualEditor
is needed.

Of course, to make things 'easier' a lot of templates do multiple versions
of these, and/or are parameterised to do almost the same thing but slightly
differently based on some of the inputs (e.g. a species infobox which adds
a 'fix me' category, sets a different background colour if the status is
'endangered', pulls three of its values from Wikidata, and converts range
from hectares to square kilometres). There's also meta-templates for other
templates like notices, but I'll ignore those for now. :-)

My broad attitude is that the need for the first four of these categories
can be replaced by real software support; the need for the fifth is not
something I foresee a better solution for than community-shared templates,
though I'm willing to be proven wrong.

I understand that everything I mentioned in group one (workflow stuff) is
potentially in scope for the work that the
​ excellent​
Collaboration team are
​considering
 as part of Flow (hence the name). No doubt it
​could
 also cover a number of areas of work of which I cannot yet conceive; this
is how templates themselves have grown from their original intent into the
sprawling, complicated and confusing morass that they are today. This
workflow stuff is
​deeply hard to get right, however, and I've seen how badly doing workflows
in systems can destroy the communities, so I imagine this will move slowly.


For many of the use cases in groups two and three (visual and
machine-readable formatting/re-formatting), I think that broad swathes of
our content uses
​of templates ​
would be
​ better
 supported through use-specific systems at three levels:

* structured – storing information in a proper, machine-readable manner,
with a single way of both storing and representing the same information for
all instances on that wiki, but differing between wikis;

* standardised – the above, with the harmonisation of the structure and use
of that content type across all Wikimedia wikis; and

* centralised – the above, with all the content stored on one central
'wiki' (or whatever) rather than local versions of the content.

For example, references are currently semi-structured on many wikis using
citation templates; storing this in structured data is a clearly useful

Re: [Wikimedia-l] edited mercilessly

[James Forrester]

On 3 December 2014 at 05:08, Amir E. Aharoni amir.ahar...@mail.huji.ac.il
wrote:

 Hi,

 I have a vague recollection that when I started editing the English
 Wikipedia ten years ago, there was a notice near the Save button, which
 said something like this: Your changes will be edited mercilessly.

 I remember similar notices in other languages as well, though even more
 vaguely.

 I don't see it now. I checked English, Hebrew and Russian.

 Does anybody know why was it removed? Did the editors communities just
 decide independently to remove it for whatever reason? If it was, I'd love
 to see links to discussions if anybody has them. Or was it a design
 decision by the Foundation?


​The messages in question are copyrightwarning
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/diffusion/MW/browse/master/languages/i18n/en.json;2e2958d6d9107fcc479183eaf2dc86247f87072e$650
and copyrightwarning2
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/diffusion/MW/browse/master/languages/i18n/en.json;2e2958d6d9107fcc479183eaf2dc86247f87072e$651
in MediaWiki core, which still use this term. However, as Nemo says,
Wikimedia cluster wikis use a different message provided by the
WikimediaMessages extension that doesn't currently include the term. I
imagine it fell foul of the work to make the language simple and easy to
understand when those were written.

J.
-- 
James D. Forrester
Product Manager, Editing
Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.

jforres...@wikimedia.org | @jdforrester
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[Wikimedia-l] Alex Roshuk / User:Alex756

[James Forrester]

I have learnt from Facebook that Alex Roshuk, old-time Wikimedian who
helped set up the Wikimedia Foundation back in the day (including
co-drafting the bylaws), has died.

I've memorialised his user page and user talk on enwiki.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alex756
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Alex756

Yours,
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] [Wikidata-l] Birthday gift: Missing Wikipedia links (was Re: Wikidata turns two!)

[James Forrester]

On Wed Oct 29 2014 at 10:56:42 Denny Vrandečić vrande...@google.com wrote:

 There’s a small tool on WMF labs that you can use to verify the links (it
 displays the articles side by side from a language pair you select, and
 then you can confirm or contradict the merge):

 https://tools.wmflabs.org/yichengtry


This is really fun, and so useful too. Thank you so much, Denny, Jiang
Bian, Si Li, and Yicheng Huang – Denny and the Googlers is a new band
name if ever there was one.
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Damon Sicore joins WMF as Vice President of Engineering

[James Forrester]

On 29 September 2014 13:38, Lila Tretikov l...@wikimedia.org wrote:

 We are excited to announce that the Wikimedia Foundation now has a Vice
 President of Engineering. Damon Sicore will be filling this vital role.
 Please join us in welcoming him to the team.


​Welcome, Damon. Looking forward to working with you.

J.
-- 
James D. Forrester
Product Manager, Editing
Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.

jforres...@wikimedia.org | @jdforrester
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Wikimedia Conference 2015

[James Forrester]

On 11 September 2014 09:27, Anh Chung anh.chung.w...@gmail.com wrote:

 Dear all,

 Wikimania has been over for a month now and it is already time to discuss
 the next Wikimedia event, the Wikimedia Conference.


Though I'm sure the event is worthy, I will repeat yet again the request
from the Wikimania Committee for people to please stop calling it the
Wikimedia Conference when it isn't about Wikimedia, just some Wikimedia
organisations, and isn't an open conference, against the ethos of Wikimedia.

Wikimedia Associations Meeting 2015 is much less misleading, and closer
to reality.

J.
-- 
James D. Forrester
Chair, Wikimania Committee

jdforres...@gmail.com
[[Wikipedia:User:Jdforrester|James F.]] (speaking purely in a personal
capacity)
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Wikimedia Conference 2015

[James Forrester]

On 11 September 2014 10:52, Ilario Valdelli valde...@gmail.com wrote:

 On 11.09.2014 18:42, James Forrester wrote:

 On 11 September 2014 09:27, Anh Chung anh.chung.w...@gmail.com wrote:

  Dear all,

 Wikimania has been over for a month now and it is already time to discuss
 the next Wikimedia event, the Wikimedia Conference.

  Though I'm sure the event is worthy, I will repeat yet again the request
 from the Wikimania Committee for people to please stop calling it the
 Wikimedia Conference when it isn't about Wikimedia, just some Wikimedia
 organisations, and isn't an open conference, against the ethos of
 Wikimedia.

 Wikimedia Associations Meeting 2015 is much less misleading, and closer
 to reality.


 Against the funds of WMF.

 A second conference open to the public would be a second yearly Wikimania,
 and to open it means to have a budget more or less equal to Wikimania.


Indeed, which is why we keep asking for the name to stop being a lie.

J.
-- 
James D. Forrester
jdforres...@gmail.com
[[Wikipedia:User:Jdforrester|James F.]] (speaking purely in a personal
capacity)
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] To Flow or not to Flow

[James Forrester]

On 10 September 2014 04:58, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote:

 On 10 September 2014 12:54, Andrew Gray andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk wrote:

  * inter-wiki or intra-wiki integration of multiple-venue discussions
  rather than several parallel pages and potentially parallel
  discussions (not a very frequent issue, but a messy one when needed;
  Pine notes this below)

 Yeah, that's getting into the solves a problem I have area I was
 thinking of.

 A few more of these and experienced users will be demanding Flow.


​[Talking well into the future, and free-lancing a little in Danny's area;
please do not expect this soon.]​

​One of the pain points about our treatment of content vs. discussion right
now is how to expose to casual editors of a page that discussion is
on-going about a particular aspect of an article, or that there has been a
lot of argument about an aspect of the page and that this is now 'settled'
– not that it can't be changed, but that editors may wish to consider
before blindly changing something.

These discussions can range from the very specific (what exact term /
wording should we use here?) to the very general (we should take care to
use photos of the concept from all 'sides' of the debate). Most often
they're about a small chunk of content and proposals to alter, expand or
remove it. Indeed, the need to comment on these is flagged quite often when
talking about Flow – generally in terms of we need to copy content into
the discussion and back out again, which I think is a solution rather than
the core problem we're trying to address, framed by our current way of
treating discussions.

Normally these discussions, and their total lack of visibility to all but a
handful of editors who read the talk page and all its archives before they
make each edit, aren't a problem. It's rare that a page has issues, after
all, and very often common sense gets you most of the way there, so even
without knowing about prior discussion your edits can be uncontroversial.

Sometimes we make edits against these agreed points, and someone previously
involved in the discussion notices and undoes the change (or fixes it or
whatever), and might drop a note on their talk page to that effect. This is
effective for very highly-watched pages, but adds a lot of burden to people
to monitor their watchlists' articles for changes against their hazy
memories of what has and hasn't been discussed. Certainly, editor working
on recent changes patrolling won't know the particulars of each article and
the local discussions that have been had.

Occasionally, we use HTML comments to shout at potential editors (Do NOT
change his race! on Barack Obama's article on the English Wikipedia, for
instance). These are confusing to newbies (it's a magic fragile syntax
that's uncommon), don't always 'work' (lots of people tune out whacky
syntax they don't know), and very rarely give an indication as to /why/
some user posted that instruction, when this dates from and whether it's
still current, or if it actually has consensus.

To make it easier for editors, we could provide a way to attach discussions
not just to an article (Talk:Foo is stuff about Foo) but as well to a
particular item inside Foo – a section, a paragraph, a template, a
reference, an image. When you edit, we could show somehow discussions
attached to that item.

There have been proposals to use a right-hand bar to show information
relevant to the content in view (see related Wikidata item; articles on
this subject in other languages use these images; etc.); that could be a
neat place to put relevant discussions' subjects/titles (or even the whole
discussion). Alternatively, we could put little markers in a tray/gutter
that users can click on to see more of, or put a highlighted ring around
content subject to recent discussion when editors change it. There are lots
of ways we could consider making a more powerful, more visible way to
discuss content.

Making these kind of tool available through VisualEditor would be pretty
easy (though getting the design right for all our workflows would need some
care, and as always the challenges of getting a reasonable, consistent
design for phone, tablet and desktop platforms will need some thought).
Doing it in the wikitext editor in a way that makes sense for users might
be harder. However, hard is not a good enough excuse for us not tackling
these kinds of big issues around making editing a simpler, more obvious
experience that doesn't need people to have read the talk page and all its
archives before making an edit.

Does that sound like a useful change for experience editors? :-)

​J.
-- 
James D. Forrester
Product Manager, Editing
Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.

jforres...@wikimedia.org | @jdforrester
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] To Flow or not to Flow

[James Forrester]

On 10 September 2014 10:52, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote:

 On 10 September 2014 18:48, Todd Allen toddmal...@gmail.com wrote:

  I think that would be very helpful indeed. This part of the article was
  most recently discussed under subject Stop changing the genre. Click
 here
  to review or participate in the discussion.

 This being Wikipedia, we need to think about when someone
 well-meaningly takes this new process way, way too far. And how to
 mitigate that ahead of time. But, yeah, this is what appeals to me
 about it.

 James, this sort of thing will make experienced editors clamour for VE
 ;-) You should be able to do this with the present talk pages -
 annotate VE pages with a link to the discussion.


​Eh. I'm not particularly interested in building features that only work in
VE and not wikitext, and particularly not in ones that would require
changing both the wikitext used to write talk pages for the benefit of VE
users and disrupting wikitext. We can, and we must, do better than that.

(But yes, I imagine the additional ease of VE here would be significant.)

J.
-- 
James D. Forrester
Product Manager, Editing
Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.

jforres...@wikimedia.org | @jdforrester
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] To Flow or not to Flow

[James Forrester]

On 10 September 2014 11:01, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote:

 On 10 September 2014 18:59, James Forrester jforres...@wikimedia.org
 wrote:

  Eh. I'm not particularly interested in building features that only work
 in
  VE and not wikitext, and particularly not in ones that would require
  changing both the wikitext used to write talk pages for the benefit of VE
  users and disrupting wikitext. We can, and we must, do better than that.
  (But yes, I imagine the additional ease of VE here would be significant.)

 Yeah, special markup in this case is an annoyance. I'm picturing n00bs
 using the VE (newbies I throw at the VE *love* it *so much* ... I need
 to try them on adding a reference) and going ... ah. There's
 discussion on this point.


​Indeed, one of the uses of this model of content-centred-discussion
combined with real-time collaborative editing that we're going to add to
VisualEditor eventually, could be letting newbies call out for help​
mid-edit and admins/helpers/etc. could swoop in and show them how to add a
reference; at the end of the edit, these discussions could get archived or
just thrown away, depending on what works.

But now I'm just selling products we haven't built yet, which is a bit
unfair. :-)

J.
-- 
James D. Forrester
Product Manager, Editing
Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.

jforres...@wikimedia.org | @jdforrester
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Next steps regarding WMF-community disputes about deployments

[James Forrester]

On 5 September 2014 17:25, John Mark Vandenberg jay...@gmail.com wrote:

 One of the more recent WMF products:

 https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:PageTriage

 An important note is that some of the configuration and code is
 specific to the English-language Wikipedia's workflows and as it's
 constructed now the extension is pretty much impossible to
 internationalize: developing a universal, stripped-down version is on
 our to-do list. (See bugzilla:48552.)

 [bugzilla 48552 was created May 2013, and prioritised as Lowest by
 James Forrester, and no change since.]


​As a quick note, I prioritised it on behalf of the team who owned the
product based on asking them; it's not my product, so it's not my call as
to what the priority should be…​

​J.
-- 
James D. Forrester
Product Manager, Editing
Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.

jforres...@wikimedia.org | @jdforrester
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] [Wikitech-ambassadors] Great editor for Wikipedia infoboxes/templates connected to Wikidata

[James Forrester]

On 9 August 2014 09:58, David Cuenca dacu...@gmail.com wrote:

 User:Vlsergey from ruwiki presented yesterday at the Wikidata Meetup a new
 wonderful infobox editor for Wikipedia infoboxes:

 https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Project_chat#Edit_directly_from_infocard_.2F_infobox

 And also an improved authority template which you can see in action at
 Obama

 https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%9E%D0%B1%D0%B0%D0%BC%D0%B0,_%D0%91%D0%B0%D1%80%D0%B0%D0%BA#.D0.A1.D1.81.D1.8B.D0.BB.D0.BA.D0.B8

 Plus some interfaces for editing person info, taxons, and work/edition
 source info:

 https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Project_chat/Archive/2014/07#WEF_gadgets_update

 I think these are great improvements for editing wikidata from wikipedia
 and I hope you can spread the word in your local wikis about these
 wonderful tools.


​This is really interesting, thank you!​

I wonder how much of this could be integrated into VisualEditor (possibly
as a page settings panel?), and/or into its own tab rather than as being
stuffed into the page tools box where it doesn't really belong.

I'd also be interested in thoughts from fellow Wikiwranglers
(Wikidata-ians) of the effect of making these edits really easy without
also making the feedback loop of community comment and policy expecations
clear.

​J.
-- 
James D. Forrester
Product Manager, Editing
Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.

jforres...@wikimedia.org | @jdforrester
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] [Wikitech-l] slow death of anyone can edit concept (was: let's elect people to serve on the wikimedia engineering community team! (brainstorming))

[James Forrester]

On 9 August 2014 12:23, Chad innocentkil...@gmail.com wrote:

 On Sat, Aug 9, 2014 at 11:57 AM, svetlana svetl...@fastmail.com.au
 wrote:

  On Fri, 8 Aug 2014, at 11:47, MZMcBride wrote:
   [...]
   For comparison, we now have MediaViewer, which moved through as a beta
   feature. They say MediaViewer may one day be as feature-ful as the file
   description pages we've had for a long time (editing capability, oh
 my!).
   [...]
   MZMcBride
 
  Related:
  http://unicorn.wmflabs.org/winter/index.html?page=Temperate_climate
  This re-make of the Vector skin lacks a prominent Edit button.
  I would adore talking to the relevant project people, but I /do not see
  them/ on this wonderful page:
  https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Winter
 
 
 It's right under the page title. I didn't even have to look twice to spot
 it.


​It sounds like svetlana is encountering the same bug I am (which I've not
yet had time to investigate), which certainly is making the actions rather
less understandable (and for the extended actions menu, usable):

https://imgur.com/a/JFN9y​

​Once the rush of Wikimania​ is over we can get this fixed, I'm sure. ;-)

​J.​
-- 
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Product Manager, Editing
Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.

jforres...@wikimedia.org | @jdforrester
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Howdy from Wil

[James Forrester]

On 5 May 2014 11:30, Wil Sinclair w...@wllm.com wrote:

 I'm Wil Sinclair, Lila Tretikov's significant other.

 I've always wanted a good excuse to get involved in the Wikipedia
 project and the Wikipedia community. Lila's appointment would be about
 as good as it gets. :)


​Welcome! :-)​

​J.
-- 
James D. Forrester
Product Manager, VisualEditor
Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.

jforres...@wikimedia.org | @jdforrester
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[Wikimedia-l] 1 week reminder: Wikimania 2014 – Call for Submissions

[James Forrester]

On 2 January 2014 04:24, James Forrester jdforres...@gmail.com wrote:

 Everyone,

 I would like to invite submissions[0] proposing presentations, panels,
 tutorials and workshops for Wikimania 2014 in London this coming August.

 Note that the deadline is the end of March; we hope to have final
 decisions about the programme by the end of April.



[0] – https://wikimania2014.wikimedia.org/wiki/Submissions


All,

A reminder that this deadline is just over *one week away* – by the end of
31 March.

Note that a complete submission is required, including an abstract of 300
words or more that explains to the Programme Committee why you think your
proposal should be accepted over others.

(For the curious, we will accept submissions up to 23:59 UTC−12:00 on 31
March 2014, which is 11:59 UTC on 1 April 2014, but not later.)

Yours,
-- 
James D. Forrester
Chair, Programme Committee
Wikimania 2014

jdforres...@gmail.com
[[Wikipedia:User:Jdforrester|James F.]] (speaking purely in a personal
capacity)
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] This weird trick will make readers of mass messages on village pumps happier

[James Forrester]

On 17 January 2014 08:24, Amir E. Aharoni amir.ahar...@mail.huji.ac.ilwrote:

 Put it inside the following HTML tag:
 div lang=en dir=ltr class=mw-content-ltr
 Your important notification.
 /div


​[Snip]​



 Of course, it's not great to have to remember to write it every time, so if
 there is a way to automate in MassMessage or EdwardsBot or whatever is used
 to send these messages, it would be great.


Filed as https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=60176.

​J.
-- 
James D. Forrester
Product Manager, VisualEditor
Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.

jforres...@wikimedia.org | @jdforrester
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Thanking anonymous users

[James Forrester]

On 13 January 2014 05:18, Marc A. Pelletier m...@uberbox.org wrote:

 On 01/13/2014 12:19 AM, Tim Starling wrote:
  Not as fast as revisions, and we seem to cope with those.

 Fair enough.

 So you'd implicitly create the user, track it by cookie?  With some well
 designed UX this'd work well and hide IPs entirely (and allow users that
 do create an account to retroactively rename their contribs).

 Wouldn't that affect caching though?


​We've talked about using the cached Parsoid HTML for read requests (with
user-specific CSS styling applied at request time) rather ​than uncached MW
HTML renders for a while. This'd be a good impetus to actually doing that.
:-)

J.
-- 
James D. Forrester
Product Manager, VisualEditor
Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.

jforres...@wikimedia.org | @jdforrester
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Introducing Beta Features

[James Forrester]

On 4 November 2013 18:22, Samuel Klein meta...@gmail.com wrote:

 Beautiful.  Thank you, Fabrice and all.  I'm particularly enjoying the
 formula editing.
 Combined with, say, a link to deTeXify, this can be really powerful even
 for newbies.
   http://detexify.kirelabs.org/classify.html


​Thank you, SJ; this was worked on by one of the VisualEditor GSoC students
this (North-hemisphere) Summer​, Jiabao, and it's great that we're getting
it into wider visibility.

Longer-term, we're planning a true visual editor for formulae, where you'd
be able to drag-and-drop formula elements like the integrand or a divider
into the formula, rather than write it in LaTeX.

J.
-- 
James D. Forrester
Product Manager, VisualEditor
Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.

jforres...@wikimedia.org | @jdforrester
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[Wikimedia-l] Fwd: Wikimania 2015 - Call for Jury volunteers

[James Forrester]

Forwarding for info.

-- Forwarded message --
From: James Forrester jdforres...@gmail.com
Date: 1 November 2013 18:43
Subject: Wikimania 2015 - Call for Jury volunteers
To: Wikimania general list (open subscription) 
wikimani...@lists.wikimedia.org


Dear all,

Soon we will be kicking off the selection process for deciding where we
will hold Wikimania 2015[0].

The Requests for Proposals (RfP) is being written right now[1], and will be
coming out soon, but in this e-mail we would like to invite volunteers to
serve on the selection jury[2]. The jury will select the winning bid based
on published criteria, reviewing the bids from January onwards until the
final selection is made in April 2014.

This is roughly 30-40 hours' work, and is key to us making Wikimania a
strong, healthy community conference that we all can enjoy. The Wikimania
Committee will select a jury that is a balanced representation of the
community, from a diverse range of backgrounds, sexes, languages, cultures
and regions of the world.

The main criteria are as follows:

* You want to help make Wikimania as great a celebration of the community
as we can make it;
* You can represent some of the Wikimedia community's varied projects and
activities;
* You have some experience of community events, meetings, conferences, or
want to learn;
* You have some free time during the selection period, especially late
March and early April; and
* You are not closely involved in any bid (it's a conflict of interest).

If you would like to serve on the jury, please e-mail Florence Devouard
(off-list) [[Wikipedia:User:Anthere]] at fdevouard @ wikimedia.org by 12
November. We will announce the jury in two weeks' time.

Please help us by translating this message and passing it on to your wiki's
community for those that don't read these mailing lists.

Thank you, and good luck to all Bids.

[0] - https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimania_2015
[1] - https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimania_2015_bids
[2] - https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimania_jury

On behalf of the Wikimania Committee.

Yours,
-- 
James D. Forrester
jdforres...@gmail.com
[[Wikipedia:User:Jdforrester|James F.]] (speaking purely in a personal
capacity)



-- 
James D. Forrester
jdforres...@gmail.com
[[Wikipedia:User:Jdforrester|James F.]] (speaking purely in a personal
capacity)
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] How to force to enable Visual Editor

[James Forrester]

On 15 October 2013 00:58, Charles Andres charles.andres.w...@gmail.comwrote:

 Dear all,

 In our new education program with youngs in scholar difficulties, we have
 the problem that only half of the new accounts have the visual editor
 activated, it's quite annoying to have two teach two way of editing.


​Charles,

​Is this because of the browser they are using, the wiki they are trying to
edit on, or specific to their account? Which wiki are you talking about
this happening on?

There was a configuration that we used in June for just over a week to A/B
test VisualEditor, but that code is no longer around, so this should not be
happening.

However, users of Internet Explorer and some marginal or old browsers
cannot use VisualEditor yet as we have not been able to get it to work
there, which may explain the issue?

Yours,
-- 
James D. Forrester
Product Manager, VisualEditor
Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.

jforres...@wikimedia.org | @jdforrester
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] On the gentrification of Wikipedia, by Superbass (was: Visual Editor)

[James Forrester]

On 30 July 2013 04:36, Martijn Hoekstra martijnhoeks...@gmail.com wrote:

 On Tue, Jul 30, 2013 at 1:01 PM, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote:

  On 30 July 2013 09:06, Martijn Hoekstra martijnhoeks...@gmail.com
 wrote:
 
   6. Announce a date from where on saving a page with a transcluded
 legacy
   template will be blocked. Expect public outcry.
   An important consideration that all developers must keep in mind is
 that
   though the current syntax is quite horrible, it also serves a purpose,
  and
   though its existence in itself is quite horrible, the fact that it is
   widely used is completely reasonable.
 
 
  The question then will be how to keep parsing old versions reasonably.
  I suppose we could keep an old wikitext parser around. *shudder*
 
  (Or just punt the question into the long grass. Do old page versions
  pull in contemporary versions of the page's templates or use the
  current versions? If the latter, then heh, too bad.)
 

 This *sounds* horrible, but is exactly what happens now. If a template
 changes, old revisions break. I suppose that if MediaWiki would go for a
 change in template semantics, an option besides letting them break, is to
 substitute all 'legacy' templates into their parents last revision before
 the changeover. How many revisions back one would want to do this and in
 what timeframe sounds like a discussion point, but I don't see this as a
 far more broken process than template changes cause right now.


​That's what we did last time we switched how templates work (the MW 1.2 -
1.3 transition)​
​. Template syntax conversion bot​ (or whatever) spidered across the
corpus and created a new top revision as needed, IIRC.

​J.
-- 
James D. Forrester
Product Manager, VisualEditor
Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.

jforres...@wikimedia.org | @jdforrester
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] On the gentrification of Wikipedia, by Superbass (was: Visual Editor)

[James Forrester]

On 30 July 2013 08:02, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote:

 On 30 July 2013 15:44, Ziko van Dijk vand...@wmnederland.nl wrote:

  It's interesting how an essentially social question (being welcoming to
 new
  people by a Visual editor) turns quickly into a debate on software.

 .nl has yet to experience the software in question, and the social
 issues surrounding it ...


VisualEditor has been enabled as an alpha on nlwiki for ​testing since May,
same as another 15 wikis, actually. But yes, there's a substantive
difference between the usage of the software in a small number of
knowingly-testing edits by experienced users (who normally want to do
relatively-edge cases) and actual real-world usage in exploring the social,
design and technical issues.

​J.
-- 
James D. Forrester
Product Manager, VisualEditor
Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.

jforres...@wikimedia.org | @jdforrester
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] On the gentrification of Wikipedia, by Superbass

[James Forrester]

On 30 July 2013 13:58, Mark delir...@hackish.org wrote:

 On 7/30/13 6:40 PM, Brad Jorsch (Anomie) wrote:

 Templates such as {{hat}} and {{hab}} don't exist so much because of
 weaknesses in wikimarkup as because passing the content as a parameter
 would rapidly exceed the Template argument size limit, and possibly
 other parser limits. Any solution to this problem would have to take
 that into account, unless the vaguely mentioned new parser doesn't
 have such limits.

 There's also the fact that a {{hat}}/{{hab}} pair can be clearer than
 {{hidden|text= with }} 2000 lines further down in the text. Although I
 suppose the comeback to that is that people using VE don't see such
 things.


 From an editing perspective, it seems what's wanted here is a way to mark
 regions of text, and then to specify what processing is done on this
 region. As you note, {{foo|giant parameter consisting of the whole region}}
 is one way to do that, but currently doesn't work technically, and looks a
 bit weird syntactically. Perhaps some kind of region-definition could be a
 first-class supported feature?


​That'd be great, yes (and really easy to do using Parsoid's DOM) - we
could do annotations, comments, content collapsing, etc. - but I can't see
how it would work with wikitext in a way that would leave it
sanely-editable for users. I'm not sure we want to start building features
that only for work VisualEditor users at this point.

​J.
-- 
James D. Forrester
Product Manager, VisualEditor
Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.

jforres...@wikimedia.org | @jdforrester
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Feedback for the Wikimedia Foundation

[James Forrester]

On 23 July 2013 00:01, Erik Moeller e...@wikimedia.org wrote:

 As I've noted in my response to wikitech-l just now, there's also the
 issue of what opt-out should mean as VE becomes increasingly more
 pervasive in the user experience.

 But as I've noted in [1], I do not think a compromise on the
 preference question is necessarily out of reach. I've asked James and
 team to deliberate on some of the possibilities here, and offered the
 same suggestion I noted in [1].


​[As just posted to wikitech-l]​

Because I understand the level of concern that this matter is causing, I am
changing my mind on this. For the duration of VisualEditor's beta period,
there will be an opt-out user preference. This will be deployed tomorrow
morning, San Francisco time. Once VisualEditor is out of 'beta', this
preference will be removed.

As others have explained better than I, we think that users will be
ill-served by this opt-out, and I hope that as few users as possible will
choose this way to degrade their experience and deprive the community of
their input. Instead of endlessly arguing the point about this, I'd rather
my team and I spending our time working to make our sites better.

​Yours,
-- 
James D. Forrester
Product Manager, VisualEditor
Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.

jforres...@wikimedia.org | @jdforrester
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Single User Login finalisation: some accounts will be renamed

[James Forrester]

All,

As an update, I'm afraid to announce that we will have to delay the process
for some time.

As my previous e-mail states, we had intended to start the final renaming
process in the week commencing 27 May. However, given the scale of the
task, it now is clear that this would interfere with the community
elections for the Wikimedia Foundation's Board, FDC and FDC Ombudsperson,
which start on 1 June.

Voters' accounts would get renamed (and then possibly renamed further at
their request), which would mean that the eligible-voter list would be
out-of-date and need a huge amount of manual work by the Election
Committee. As I'm sure you're all aware, the existing duties of the
Committee are already taxing; adding this to their workload at the last
minute would be highly unfair to them, and to the community who will wish
to vote.

Although the finalisation of the Single User Login system is
important, I cannot
let it disrupt the community's voting. Because of this, I have decided to
delay the renaming and the finalisation of SUL. This will not have an
impact on existing features, though it will mean that non-global users may
be unable to use new tools developed between now and finalisations.

Unfortunately, by the time the election is over, I will be focussed
entirely on the wider roll-out of VisualEditor, which will continue for
some time. I therefore intend to re-start the process in August, following
Wikimania. I will let people know the updated schedule closer to the time.

Sorry for the disruption to everyone's plans. If you have any questions,
please do ask.

​J.
-- 
James D. Forrester
Product Manager, VisualEditor
Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.

jforres...@wikimedia.org | @jdforrester
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Single User Login finalisation: some accounts will be renamed

[James Forrester]

On 12 May 2013 10:40, Federico Leva (Nemo) nemow...@gmail.com wrote:

 James Forrester, 12/05/2013 19:20:

  Sorry for the disruption to everyone's plans. If you have any questions,
 please do ask.


 Will you still make the lists and send out the notifications so that
 people can start planning?


Yes.

J.
-- 
James D. Forrester
jdforres...@gmail.com
[[Wikipedia:User:Jdforrester|James F.]] (speaking purely in a personal
capacity)
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] movement blog, not WMF blog, was: Go away, community (from WMF wiki at least)

[James Forrester]

On 11 May 2013 13:03, Yaroslav M. Blanter pute...@mccme.ru wrote:

 At this point I am lost. Comcom is made of the representative of chapters,
 right? (I just happen to know this because the representatives of the
 Russian chapter there have hmm... complicated relations with the
 communities of Russian language projects). Is the blog then the business of
 WMF and chapters?


No. ​ComCom is made up of community people who take on communications
roles. Some of us are normal volunteers who answer telephones and e-mails
from journalists (this is why I joined in 2005); some are board members or
staff of the WMF or other affiliate bodies​.

J.
-- 
James D. Forrester
jdforres...@gmail.com
[[Wikipedia:User:Jdforrester|James F.]] (speaking purely in a personal
capacity)
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] OSM iD Editor: how a nice editing interface could engage users

[James Forrester]

On 8 May 2013 08:38, Tom Morris t...@tommorris.org wrote:

 Yesterday, OpenStreetMap launched iD, an in-browser editor so that you can
 edit the map.

 You no longer need to download JOSM, the desktop application, or use
 Potlatch, a Flash-based application.

 When you start using iD, it gives you an introductory guide on how to
 edit. The app is designed to let newbies start editing very quickly and
 easily, without having to go and read documentation or a load of other
 cruft.

 It's an amazing bit of open source work and has the potential for making
 it dramatically easier for new users to jump in and make their first edit,
 and then get utterly addicted.

 There's a site about it here:
 http://ideditor.com/

 Blog post about it from the official OSM blog:

 http://blog.openstreetmap.org/2013/05/07/openstreetmap-launches-all-new-easy-map-editor-and-announces-funding-appeal/

 My off-the-cuff reactions:
 http://tommorris.org/posts/8264 ;)


​Yes, the iD editor is fantastic and OSM (with the Knight Foundation's
help) should be proud of themselves.​


 Now the Foundation just need to do the same for Wikipedia and the other
 Wikimedia projects with VisualEditor, right...?


​Well, we'll do our best. (Note, BTW, that it's not just WMF that's
involved in the development of VisualEditor and we're delighted to take on
volunteers! Don't give WMF all the credit.)

I don't think we'll have the time to make a whizzy introduction like iD
has before the beta launches, but we're keen to do something similar in the
short-term after that, probably working with the E3 team to extend the
Guided Tours tool.

​J.
-- 
James D. Forrester
Product Manager, VisualEditor
Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.

jforres...@wikimedia.org | @jdforrester
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[Wikimedia-l] Selection of winning bid for Wikimania 2014: London

[James Forrester]

Dear Wikimedians,

On behalf of the Wikimania 2014 selection Jury, after review and
evaluation of the two final bids, we have awarded the conference to
London. Congratulations to the London team, and to the Arusha team who
also put forward a solid effort.

We were concerned this year to see that both bidding teams put forward
proposals which were costly and complicated, in contrast to the
Wikimania tradition. The Jury briefly considered re-opening the bid
for other teams, and asked both bids to present a simpler core budget
and lower-cost options for attendees.

The London team took our comments to heart and decreased their core
budget to 20% of their initial proposal, and have committed to finding
ways to reduce the cost for community attendees.

We encourage future bidding teams to not give up their dreams, to keep
aiming for the stars, but at the same time, to not forget the spirit
of Wikimedia: a volunteer movement that makes creative use of limited
resources. We look forward to the proposed Wikimania Committee setting
out clearer guidelines on these principles.

The process to bid for hosting Wikimania requires a substantial time
investment, and we thank both candidate teams for their submissions
and hard work.

Yours,

James Forrester
Moderator, Wikimania 2014 Jury
For the Wikimania 2014 Jury
--
James D. Forrester
jdforres...@gmail.com
[[Wikipedia:User:Jdforrester|James F.]] (speaking purely in a personal capacity)

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Single User Login finalisation: some accounts will be renamed

[James Forrester]

On 30 April 2013 01:01, Marco Chiesa chiesa.ma...@gmail.com wrote:
 On Tue, Apr 30, 2013 at 4:29 AM, James Forrester
 jforres...@wikimedia.orgwrote:

 Unfortunately, some accounts are currently not unique across all our
 wikis, but instead clash with other users who have the same account
 name. To make sure that all of these users can use Wikimedia's wikis
 in future, we will be renaming a number of accounts to have ~” and
 the name of their wiki added to the end of their accounts' name. This
 change will take place on or around 27 May. For example, a user called
 “Example” on the Swedish Wiktionary who will be renamed would become
 “Example~svwiktionary”.

 Why did you choose to insert the character  ~? Many keyboards do not have
 such a key.

We picked a character which had very few clashes with the existing set
of account names, but was allowed in account names and distinctive.
Active accounts will be welcome to rename in the 'normal' process if
they do not want to remain at the name to which the script will move
them.

J.
--
James D. Forrester
Product Manager, VisualEditor
Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.

jforres...@wikimedia.org | @jdforrester

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Single User Login finalisation: some accounts will be renamed

[James Forrester]

On 30 April 2013 02:56, Dan Rosenthal swatjes...@gmail.com wrote:
 Global renames will be done by Stewards then, yes?

Yes.

J.
--
James D. Forrester
Product Manager, VisualEditor
Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.

jforres...@wikimedia.org | @jdforrester

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[Wikimedia-l] Single User Login finalisation: some accounts will be renamed

[James Forrester]

All,

The developer team at Wikimedia is making some changes to how accounts
work, as part of our on-going efforts to provide new and better tools
for our users (like cross-wiki notifications). These changes will mean
users have the same account name everywhere, will let us give you new
features that will help you edit  discuss better, and will allow more
flexible user permissions for tools. One of the pre-conditions for
this is that user accounts will now have to be unique across all 900
Wikimedia wikis.[0]

Unfortunately, some accounts are currently not unique across all our
wikis, but instead clash with other users who have the same account
name. To make sure that all of these users can use Wikimedia's wikis
in future, we will be renaming a number of accounts to have ~” and
the name of their wiki added to the end of their accounts' name. This
change will take place on or around 27 May. For example, a user called
“Example” on the Swedish Wiktionary who will be renamed would become
“Example~svwiktionary”.

All accounts will still work as before, and will continue to be
credited for all their edits made so far. However, users with renamed
accounts (whom we will be contacting individually) will have to use
the new account name when they log in.

It will now only be possible for accounts to be renamed globally; the
RenameUser tool will no longer work on a local basis - since all
accounts must be globally unique - therefore it will be withdrawn from
bureaucrats' tool sets. It will still be possible for users to ask on
Meta for their account to be renamed further, if they do not like
their new user name, once this takes place.

A copy of this note is posted to meta [1] for translation. Please
forward this to your local communities, and help get it translated.
Individuals who are affected will be notified via talk page and e-mail
notices nearer the time.

[0] - https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Unified_login
[1] - 
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Single_User_Login_finalisation_announcement

Yours,
--
James D. Forrester
Product Manager, VisualEditor
Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.

jforres...@wikimedia.org | @jdforrester

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Single User Login finalisation: some accounts will be renamed

[James Forrester]

Fae,

Though I understand the concern that users will have, the need to
rename a relatively-small number of accounts is a technical
requirement that has been built into our system since SUL was designed
c. 2005; it was switched on in early 2008. This has (sadly) been on
the back-burner for too many years now, and efforts to finalise things
have repeatedly stalled. By waiting, and not wanting to bite the
bullet, we have increased (significantly) the number of accounts
affected by this, and discussing it further will certainly not reduce
that fact. That said, the vast majority of accounts affected will not
be actively used - and if your account is already global (as you will
be informed against Global account status in your preferences), this
will not affect your account in any way.

This is, primarily, a developer action necessary to improve the site
and provide better tools for our users (like cross-wiki notifications
and watchlists, giving limited editing rights to a tool editing
through your account, and others). Of course, we are sensitive to the
emotional attachment that users will have to their account's name, and
I do not want to make light of that. We have worked hard over the past
few months to help ameliorate this with better tools for renaming
accounts (so that users who are affected can pick a new name that they
like more easily), which will ease the transition. But discussing it
further will not make it go away.

Yours,

On 29 April 2013 19:38, Fae fae...@gmail.com wrote:
 Hi James, thanks for the links.

 Keeping in mind that there will be users that unexpectedly find their
 much loved account name changed the next time they try to log in, and
 this may be central to their established online wiki identity, is
 there a community discussion that we can point to where this approach
 was consulted on?

 Thanks,
 Fae

 On 30 April 2013 03:29, James Forrester jforres...@wikimedia.org wrote:
 All,

 The developer team at Wikimedia is making some changes to how accounts
 work, as part of our on-going efforts to provide new and better tools
 for our users (like cross-wiki notifications). These changes will mean
 users have the same account name everywhere, will let us give you new
 features that will help you edit  discuss better, and will allow more
 flexible user permissions for tools. One of the pre-conditions for
 this is that user accounts will now have to be unique across all 900
 Wikimedia wikis.[0]

 Unfortunately, some accounts are currently not unique across all our
 wikis, but instead clash with other users who have the same account
 name. To make sure that all of these users can use Wikimedia's wikis
 in future, we will be renaming a number of accounts to have ~” and
 the name of their wiki added to the end of their accounts' name. This
 change will take place on or around 27 May. For example, a user called
 “Example” on the Swedish Wiktionary who will be renamed would become
 “Example~svwiktionary”.

 All accounts will still work as before, and will continue to be
 credited for all their edits made so far. However, users with renamed
 accounts (whom we will be contacting individually) will have to use
 the new account name when they log in.

 It will now only be possible for accounts to be renamed globally; the
 RenameUser tool will no longer work on a local basis - since all
 accounts must be globally unique - therefore it will be withdrawn from
 bureaucrats' tool sets. It will still be possible for users to ask on
 Meta for their account to be renamed further, if they do not like
 their new user name, once this takes place.

 A copy of this note is posted to meta [1] for translation. Please
 forward this to your local communities, and help get it translated.
 Individuals who are affected will be notified via talk page and e-mail
 notices nearer the time.

 [0] - https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Unified_login
 [1] - 
 https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Single_User_Login_finalisation_announcement

 Yours,
 --
 James D. Forrester
 Product Manager, VisualEditor
 Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.

 jforres...@wikimedia.org | @jdforrester

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 fae...@gmail.com http://j.mp/faewm
 Guide to email tags: http://j.mp/mfae
 Personal and confidential. Unless otherwise stated, do not copy, quote
 or forward this email for any reason without permission.

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-- 
James D. Forrester
Product Manager, VisualEditor
Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.

jforres...@wikimedia.org | @jdforrester

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Deploying alpha of VisualEditor to non-English Wikipedias

[James Forrester]

On 26 April 2013 10:08, Takashi OTA supertakot+foundatio...@gmail.com wrote:
 I have been working on translation of Wikimedia Blog post written by
 James, into Japanese.
 http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Blog/Drafts/Try_out_the_alpha_version_of_the_VisualEditor,_now_in_15_languages

 To grasp actual behavior of VisualEditor and reflect it translation, I
 myself enabled VisualEditor as well.
 James wrote:
 Once enabled, for each article you can edit, you will get a second
 editor tab labelled “VisualEditor” next to the “Edit” tab.
 However, it seems that the new Edit tab now works as VisualEditor
 and Edit source tab works as former Edit did.
 Is that correct? Or am I confusing?

Sorry, you are right, I wrote the blog post before we changed the
behaviour. My apologies.

Yours,
--
James D. Forrester
Product Manager, VisualEditor
Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.

jforres...@wikimedia.org | @jdforrester

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Wikimedia Gadgets

[James Forrester]

On 7 April 2013 07:52, MZMcBride z...@mzmcbride.com wrote:
 Everton Zanella Alvarenga wrote:
  I've started a page on meta for Wikimedia Gadget
 
  http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Gadgets

 I'm not sure gadgets is the word you want. It immediately made me think
 of the popular Gadgets MediaWiki extension:
 https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Gadgets.

I was also confused. :-)

 It sounds like maybe you want merchandise? Or something similar to that.
 Just a thought.

There's https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Wikimedia_merchandise
which has a lot of this discussion already.

J.
--
James D. Forrester
jdforres...@gmail.com
[[Wikipedia:User:Jdforrester|James F.]] (speaking purely in a personal capacity)

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Featuring the edit tab in Vector (by making it red)

[James Forrester]

On 11 January 2013 02:12, Federico Leva (Nemo) nemow...@gmail.com wrote:
 Andrew Gray, 11/01/2013 10:34:

 * moving their positioning (eg, to beside the header text, as is done on
 fr.wp

 This has been known to be needed for years, but it waiting for some coding.
 http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/design/2012-November/000215.html

See https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=41729 which Ori
just assigned to himself yesterday.

J.
--
James D. Forrester
Product Manager, VisualEditor
Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.

jforres...@wikimedia.org | @jdforrester

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Alpha version of the VisualEditor now available on the English Wikipedia

[James Forrester]

On 12 December 2012 02:58, Andrea Zanni zanni.andre...@gmail.com wrote:
 dont' forget sister projects

Absolutely. One of my particular concerns over the next few months is
understand how other non-Wikipedia wikis using MediaWiki (primarily
Wikimedia's, but others' too) work, and in what ways we will need to
add in flexibility to the VisualEditor so that, for example, the
editing surface definitely could be contained alongside a source
material (for Wikisource) or for structured data editing (for
Wikidata). Beyond having the flexibility, at some point we will need
to make sure these uses are actually supported - for which assistance
is gratefully received. :-)

J.
--
James D. Forrester
Product Manager, VisualEditor
Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.

jforres...@wikimedia.org | @jdforrester

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Logo for new travel guide

[James Forrester]

On 5 October 2012 14:57, Lodewijk lodew...@effeietsanders.org wrote:
 I'm also having a hard time to understand the argument No sufficient
 time... Apparently James has a sense of urgency, but I'm unsure /why/
 there is such a hurry that a few extra days/weeks is out of the question.

Indeed. After all, we ran Wikipedia with a temporary logo for nearly
three years... :-)

J.
-- 
James D. Forrester
jdforres...@gmail.com
[[Wikipedia:User:Jdforrester|James F.]] (speaking purely in a personal capacity)

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] CheckUser openness

[James Forrester]

On 15 June 2012 04:55, Nathan nawr...@gmail.com wrote:
 Supposedly, the data only survives 3 months. If data is being
 retained much longer than this for investigations that go on for months
 on the checkuser wiki, that's concerning.

We have well-known trolls and repeat vandals who have been coming back
to the various wiki communities for many years - in some cases, for
nearly a decade now. Why is it concerning to you that the people
responsible for detecting, tracking and defeating these individuals
keep track of these users and their work over time (whilst of course
always being within the Privacy and CheckUser policies)?

Yours,
-- 
James D. Forrester
jdforres...@gmail.com
[[Wikipedia:User:Jdforrester|James F.]] (speaking purely in a personal capacity)

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Pro-active user privacy (Was: Update on IPv6)

[James Forrester]

On 13 June 2012 11:09, Nathan nawr...@gmail.com wrote:
 Why is improving anonymity a goal? Our privacy policy governs the
 disclosure of non-public information, but the IP addresses of editors
 without an account have always been effectively public. Are IP editors
 clamoring for more privacy? Is masking IPv6 addresses more important than
 the uses to which IP addresses are currently put? Is masking a better way
 to solve the problem of potentially more identifiable information in IPv6
 than, say, a more prominent disclosure and disclaimer? Would masking the IP
 addresses only for logged-out users be a worthwhile change, given the ease
 of registering an account? Would they remain masked in the histories of
 project dumps? There are a lot of questions to answer here before it's
 reasonable to start suggesting changes be made, and these are only some.

Valuable questions.

There is certainly an argument that we should consider changing how we
doing things so that unregistered (mis-named anonymous) editors are,
in fact, more rather than less anonymous, whichever IP version they
use to connect. We already take actions far beyond what most Internet
sites do to protect their privacy even though it's clear the vast
majority of the Web's users neither know nor care about such choices.

There are lots of things we could do - for instance, blocking all
edits except by logged-in editors would solve this (but is profoundly
against our general operating principles), auto-generating accounts by
cookie (messy, and would need the privacy policy changed), blurring
some arbitrary part of the IP (the last one octet for IP4 and four for
IP6, perhaps), etc. - but first we should have the discussion of what
we believe we want to achieve.

Can I suggest that we try to discuss this on-wiki (as it's more
inclusive of the community)? -
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Unregistered_user or something linked
from there would be the 'obvious' place to start.

Yours,
-- 
James D. Forrester
jdforres...@wikimedia.org | jdforres...@gmail.com
[[Wikipedia:User:Jdforrester|James F.]]
(Writing in a personal capacity)

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