User talk:Jdforrester (WMF)

Welcome

Dear Jdforrester (WMF), Welcome to MediaWiki.org!

Yes, welcome! This site is dedicated to documenting the MediaWiki software, the software behind many wikis, including that of Wikipedia and the Wikimedia Foundation projects.
Please, take a look at the following pages. They might prove useful to you as a newcomer here:

• Project:About
• How does MediaWiki work?
• Help:Editing pages
• Help:Navigation
• Manual:FAQ

If you have any questions, please ask me on my talk page. Once again, welcome, and I hope you quickly feel comfortable here, and find this site useful documentation of the MediaWiki software.

Thanks, and regards, Aude (talk) 15:52, 23 May 2012 (UTC)

You need no welcome, but welcome! ;) Aude (talk) 15:52, 23 May 2012 (UTC)

Thanks. ;-)

Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 17:42, 23 May 2012 (UTC)

Sorry

I thought that page was for a simple description. Sorry for being wrong.Jasper Deng (talk) 22:09, 21 June 2012 (UTC)

No worries. :-)

Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 22:10, 21 June 2012 (UTC)

Monthly statuses in Template:Wikimedia project status line/blue link

Hey James. I noticed you edited that template to add a link to add a monthly status update. The gadget makes this very easy with the "include in the monthly report" checkbox when you add a new status update. I wonder, is the gadget not working for you? If so, we should probably fix the gadget rather than adding an extra link to all the activity pages that transclude the template. Also, the link you added seems to do nothing for people with the gadget enabled, so it might be confusing. guillom 16:35, 24 July 2012 (UTC)

Oh, I'm sorry, there's a gadget? It might help if someone had told me. :-) Will look now. Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 16:40, 24 July 2012 (UTC)

OK, having now found the gadget it does indeed cause the template to break (it's over-riding both functionality but only replacing one of them with the pop-up); however, for non-gadget users (who we have to assume are the majority of users of the site, if you're not going to enable it by default for all users) this is confusing. How about I set the gadget as default and revert my template changes? Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 16:43, 24 July 2012 (UTC)

The gadget is linked from the top of Wikimedia engineering report/2012/July, but apparently not prominently enough :) I don't see an issue with enabling the gadget as default. guillom 16:48, 24 July 2012 (UTC)

... and now done. :-) Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 17:05, 24 July 2012 (UTC)

Query on VisualEditor module

Hello, is the "VisualEditor Module" project still in its construction phase?I would liketo undertake this with your guidance --Rahul21 (talk) 04:40, 10 March 2013 (UTC)

Yes, the VisualEditor is still undergoing significant development and I wouldn't recommend deploying it to a production wiki unless you are prepared to potentially break things for your users. There is more information about how to experiment with it at Extension:VisualEditor. Hope this is helpful! Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 04:39, 11 March 2013 (UTC)

A barnstar for you!

	The Brilliant Idea Barnstar
	Yet more barnstars all around to those on the Echo team. Genius. TortoiseWrath (talk) 04:16, 4 May 2013 (UTC)

Thank you, TortoiseWrath, though my involvement in Echo was very slight! Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 15:17, 4 May 2013 (UTC)

GSoC / OPW IRC AllHands this week

Hi, you are invited to the GSoC / OPW IRC AllHands meeting on Wednesday, June 26, 2013 at 15:00 UTC (8:30pm IST, 8am PDT) at #wikimedia-office. We have done our best finding a time that works decently in as many timezones as possibles. Please confirm at qgilwikimedia.org so I can add you to the calendar invitation and I have your preferred email for other occasions. If you can't make it's fine, but let me know as well. We have left a notice to all students, but your help is welcome making sure yours is aware about it. Thank you!--Qgil (talk) 20:35, 24 June 2013 (UTC)

Style guide

About this: Where's your style guide? International English Usage does not list that as an acceptable use of hyphens. The European Commission's English Style Guide (which does "EU English") specifically rejects it at 2.52, "In adverb-adjective modifiers, there is no hyphen when the adverb ends in -ly:" It is of course wrong in American, Australian, British, Canadian, Indian, and Irish English, so it seems unlikely to me that any "international English" standard would set itself directly against all of the major varieties of English. WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:15, 14 July 2013 (UTC)

Browser support

Hi James, thanks a lot for updating the browser matrix. Nemo_bis asked me whether FF ESR 17 would work with VE. I don't think I can test this for him, but even so there's a comment by Liangent that makes me think it wouldn't, so I thought I'd ask. Thanks. --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 10:33, 4 December 2013 (UTC)

Thank you very much for clarifying further. The instructions should now be clear enough even for our partners' technicians. --Nemo 18:51, 4 December 2013 (UTC)

@Elitre (WMF) and Nemo bis: You're welcome; sorry it was unclear before. Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 18:57, 4 December 2013 (UTC)

LQT new thread went to section header

• [1]

Why does this happen, and what can I do to avoid it? Deryck C.^Meta 16:25, 4 December 2013 (UTC)

It's caused by bug 41276 - LQT never implemented the catch on the API. :-( Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 18:00, 4 December 2013 (UTC)

But I clicked "Start a new discussion"! (The only difference I could think of is that I hit enter in the title textbox, rather than mouse-clicking the "save" button. Was that what was causing the problem? Deryck C.^Meta 13:55, 8 December 2013 (UTC)

@Deryck Chan: Oh. :-( In that case, probably a (different) odd bug with LQT? Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 20:18, 9 December 2013 (UTC)

Tried lots of stuff on the LQT test page. Can't replicate the bug. I have a feeling that it has something to do with middle-button-clicking the "start a new thread" button, which does cause weird behaviour, but I couldn't make the textbox post to the header rather than the thread list. Oh well :) Deryck C.^Meta 22:43, 9 December 2013 (UTC)

@Deryck Chan: Thanks for trying to reproduce, at least! Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 23:31, 9 December 2013 (UTC)

Also, if this was you (I couldn't tell because there's a known bug though the log suggests it was you), thank you for being the first person ever to thank me using the "thank them for this edit" button!

[[User:[Nobody]|[Nobody]]] thanked you for your edit on VisualEditor/Feedback.
1 day ago | View edit

Deryck C.^Meta 16:52, 11 December 2013 (UTC)

@Deryck Chan: Ha. Whoops, didn't know about that bug; yes, 'twas I. :-) Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 19:10, 11 December 2013 (UTC)

VE and WYSIWYG

I stumbled upon Extension:WYSIWYG, and it appears to me that it was working well enough on most browsers, even several years before the first VisualEditor beta, and various sites were – and some still are (including Wikia, AFAIK) – using it. While I do thank you all for the awesome work done on VE, I was just wondering why the Wikimedia Foundation has focused the development on a visual editor so lately. Were there any issues with CKEditor that prevented it from being installed or used on WMF servers? Or has the Foundation recently changed its mind on the matter, and thought it was worth starting a new project from scratch? I don't know whether this question has already been asked somewhere else, in case you can simply link a detailed answer ;-) --Ricordisamoa 09:40, 2 February 2014 (UTC)

@Ricordisamoa: Hey. Thank you for the comments. Yes, there were a number of issues with existing HTML editors (including CKEditor) which meant that we felt that our only option was to write our own. Most notably, proper rich generated content support is lacking from all HTML editors we evaluated, including CKEditor as used at Wikia (and in other extensions and CMSes) – having puzzle pieces, or "sorry, we can't edit this page with this editor" messages was considered not good enough. A principle design objective for VisualEditor is that a user could edit all our content and do anything they could do in wikitext, with exceptions only where we actively stop them from doing silly things (like adding both __INDEX__ and __NOINDEX__ to the same page). There's also significant issues with language support – in general, MediaWiki supports not just more languages than other software, but a super-set. I agree that it would have been much easier if we could have just simply extended an existing editor, but it didn't turn out to be possible from our research. Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 02:38, 15 February 2014 (UTC)

But what if a good WYSIWYG extension had been available, say, in 2009, would the WMF had adopted it? Or do you believe that the interest in visual editing is only a recent trend? --Ricordisamoa 03:16, 15 February 2014 (UTC)

@Ricordisamoa: We've been talking off-and-on about a visual editor for MediaWiki for about a decade, but we only seriously started work in 2010. Had there been a great extension that met our needs (or mostly so) then we'd probably never have thought to build our own. Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 19:14, 20 February 2014 (UTC)

Thank you very much for your time. Regards, --Ricordisamoa 19:47, 20 February 2014 (UTC)

Careful with FlaggedRevs

Please check better the diffs you review, here you approved an almost vandalic, ridiculously wrong edit by an unregistered user: [2]. It mistated dependencies and installation steps and very funnily stated that Translate is part of the Semantic Bundle; a user got very confused. Also, please don't use the "quality" setting unless you "maintain" a page or there is consensus about it, because it effectively protects the page for anyone but the highest levels in user groups. --Nemo 19:24, 23 February 2014 (UTC)

@Nemo bis: Eurgh. Why can't we switch the stupid extension off? It's actively unhelpful to demand in big bold letters at the top of every users' watchlist that they should review changes, and then not actually show the changes that are intended. Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 16:37, 24 February 2014 (UTC)

I sometimes find it useful for some changes I can let someone double check without pressure but yes, I rarely enable it myself on a page. I've never felt bored enough to question its broader usage and the review stats don't look too bad, though. --Nemo 17:14, 24 February 2014 (UTC)

@Nemo bis: The review stats don't look bad because we've an active editor base who get screamed at by the interface if they let unreviewed edits sit around. It doesn't mean it's adding value… Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 17:16, 24 February 2014 (UTC)

Sure, I'm just saying that we lack the easiest argument one can win a "let's disable the extension" battle with. --Nemo 17:22, 24 February 2014 (UTC)

Project management tools/Review/Options

Hi, and thank you for all your edits on Project management tools/Review/Options :) guillom 09:27, 25 February 2014 (UTC)

@Guillom: Happy to help. :-) Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 16:42, 25 February 2014 (UTC)

Restoring VisualEditor:Test

Hello, I see you keep restoring VisualEditor:Test. I was once asked (in it's early stages) to let my bot do this, though due to regular editing being disabled to admins (for VE pages) at the time, this was not possible. Since it now allows this, would you like me to reset that page as well?  Hazard-SJ  ±  02:28, 2 March 2014 (UTC)

@Hazard-SJ: That'd be great, yes! Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 17:37, 3 March 2014 (UTC)

 Done, my bot will reset it by substituting VisualEditor:Test/Text, so if you feel the need to change the text, just update that. Also, you should probably at least semi-protect it.  Hazard-SJ  ±  04:03, 4 March 2014 (UTC)

@Hazard-SJ: Brilliant, thank you. Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 18:08, 4 March 2014 (UTC)

Sure, no problem.  Hazard-SJ  ±  16:47, 6 March 2014 (UTC)

VisualEditor

Hi, Jdforrester. I am Gabriel Lee from Hong Kong, I would like to contribute to Visual Editor, I am experienced with using Visual Editor and I am currently admin on wy/zh and beta. Hope you would let me help. Thanks! :) --Gabrielchihonglee (talk) 05:41, 19 March 2014 (UTC)

Hi

You had reverted one of my edits. I thought it's related to the betafeatures extension, as the thoughts I've linked to are thoughts about additional functionality for the betafeatures extension. How do I best tell that to the betafeatures extension developers and testers community, if not on its talk page? Gryllida 04:23, 5 April 2014 (UTC)

How to get rid of Visual Editor on Wikipedia?

It's extremely annoying. There doesn't seem to be a way to opt out under Preferences. Please help! Parabolooidal (talk) 21:59, 6 June 2014 (UTC)

@Parabolooidal: On which wiki? If you're on a wiki with VisualEditor as a "Beta Feature", you go to the Beta Features section; if not, to the Editing section. Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 22:43, 6 June 2014 (UTC)

Yes, I see now that other languages have a "Beta Feature" so that I don't have to understand the language to turn it off. At first I was confused when I clicked an image and suddenly ended up in the VisualEditor. Thanks, Parabolooidal (talk) 00:12, 26 August 2014 (UTC)

No problem! Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 00:24, 26 August 2014 (UTC)

Please turn on Visual Editor as default for all user on nl.wikipedia.org

Hi James. Please turn on Visual Editor as default for all user on nl.wikipedia.org. Some people will leave. Bye. Others will enter, how nice. Ad Huikeshoven (talk) 16:59, 21 June 2014 (UTC)

@Ad Huikeshoven: Thank you for the suggestion. However, I think a proper discussion on the Dutch Wikipedia would be appropriate to start with before just turning it on. Would you be willing to start that? Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 16:04, 23 June 2014 (UTC)

@Jdforrester (WMF): The discussion opened at the Dutch Village pump yesterday and continues here. Ad Huikeshoven (talk) 09:09, 9 July 2014 (UTC)

In 2013 the Dutch community had a voting about this subject and they said, based on a too long list of bugs they have to deal with, that the VE is not ready to be set on for everyone. This list of bugs is not solved yet, including some breaking problems. Based on the still existing problems and the voting based on these problems, the visual editor is not ready to be implemented. Romaine (talk) 12:06, 9 July 2014 (UTC)

@Ad Huikeshoven and Romaine: It appears that Romaine blanked the discussion after a couple of days. The edit summary says it will be moved to the parent page, but Special:Contributions for Romaine does not show it being moved anywhere. Perhaps it was an oversight or there was some sort of problem? Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 18:18, 14 July 2014 (UTC)

@@Whatamidoing (WMF): The discussion is copied and pasted to talk page of the VE feedback page. The feedback page was silent since May. Since a week there is a traffic boom. From this I filed bugzilla:67850, which is probably going to be discussed at Wikimania. "Slugs" is a concept which isn't understood at the Dutch Wikipedia, or is completely unknown. Ad Huikeshoven (talk) 17:37, 15 July 2014 (UTC)

Yes, it looks like someone reverted the blanking four hours after I posted this note. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 23:09, 15 July 2014 (UTC)

Engaging with the mathematics community

Hello. In this comment you wrote I note that the talk page is blank, so I'm confused as to how much input you've provided, if any. I doubt that you can really be confused as to the desire of the mathematics editor community to provide input, especially since it is now some weeks since you wrote I assumed denizens of WikiProject Mathematics, if no-where else, would be aware of the nature of engineering support in place for the mathematical functions in MediaWiki and had made a decision that they weren't going to help out those few volunteer developers working on it, in a discussion which had I think made it abundantly clear that there was a very clear appetite for more engagement between mathematics editors and WMF. If it was so important to you to see engagement at that particular page on MediaWiki, then you could and should have pointed the discussion to it in May when you wrote that comment at WP:WPM. To fail to do so, and then affect surprise six weeks later that nobody at WP:WPM has contributed, seems to me to cut across your remit to "make sure the VisualEditor team understands what the community wants and needs". Frankly I am disappointed in this: I would hope for something better from someone in your position.

I am asking you, personally, to please consider how you may more proactively and constructively engage with the mathematics content contributors to get our input and cooperation. We want to engage, we want to contribute and we want to be heard. For some reason it is not working at the moment, and that is damaging to the project. Please reach out to us, either directly, or using the WMF network of community advocates. Deltahedron (talk) 17:11, 21 June 2014 (UTC)

Follow-up on Extension talk:Math/Roadmap as you seem to have missed the point. Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 16:04, 23 June 2014 (UTC)

Please try to be more thoughtful in some of your replies: "well done for copy-pasting", "you seem to have missed the point", "I'm confused as to how much input you've provided, if any" are not particularly helpful and could have been better phrased. However, you did not address my request: will you please consider how you may more proactively and constructively engage with the mathematics content contributors to get our input and cooperation? A simple "yes" or "no" would suffice. Deltahedron (talk) 18:04, 23 June 2014 (UTC)

Your tone

I am finding the tone of your replies to my comments increasingly unhelpful. I have already mentioned this in the section above, in a comment which you have not yet had the courtesy to reply to. Your comment "you are clearly of the opinion that a minute's reading comprehension is beneath you" is unfounded, unhelpful and offensive. If you are not able to interact with me in a courteous and constructive way, I suggest that a colleague do so on your behalf. Perhaps your supervisor at the WMF would be able to assist. Deltahedron (talk) 06:18, 1 July 2014 (UTC)

@Deltahedron: I am sad that you feel that way. Perhaps if you said fewer wrong things that need a response it would be easier for both of us? I would start a conversation about your tone, but I feel that it would be even less productive than the other conversations in which I have tried to help you. Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 17:46, 1 July 2014 (UTC)

This continued pettiness and obstruction is not what I expect to see from a WMF staff member in your position. Please (1) do not continue to insult me in this way (2) give a plain answer to the plain questions I have asked you (3) apologise for your obstructive conduct. Deltahedron (talk) 19:55, 1 July 2014 (UTC)

Follow-up

In this edit, you explain that you have been consistently and deliberately offensive to me, and to refuse to give information to the community at large, because you felt that a question I asked was insufficiently respectful. This is not acceptable behaviour from a member of WMF staff. I call on you to consider whether your actions were appropriate and to apologise to me and to the rest of the community which you have slighted. Alternatively, perhaps you would care to post or email me with the name of your supervisor at the WMF. Deltahedron (talk) 17:18, 11 August 2014 (UTC)

I note that you have nor responded even though I can see that you have had the opportunity to do so. You may wish to read this. Deltahedron (talk) 21:07, 13 August 2014 (UTC)

Usurpation Request (SUL)

Hello Jdforrester, I wanted to bring you attention to my request here which is pending since 7 June. I had sent a talk page message to User:Jasper Deng for this issue but hasn't attended to it, which is why I am requesting you to see into it. I humbly understand this is not very urgent. Thank you. D abhi (talk) 14:47, 21 June 2014 (UTC)

Hey! Unfortunately I'm not involved in that side of the wiki administration much, but I'll look at checking about doing it myself or finding someone like Jasper to do it instead. Sorry if it takes a while. Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 19:29, 1 July 2014 (UTC)

—Thanks for replying. I'll wait till then. D abhi (talk) 15:08, 3 July 2014 (UTC)

As a note, Hoo has now done this. Yay. Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 16:53, 7 July 2014 (UTC)

Re:Translating Extension:VisualEditor

So, is it possible to translate it in the old style? - Fabsouza1 (talk) 15:29, 28 July 2014 (UTC)

@Fabsouza1: Sadly, no. Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 16:11, 28 July 2014 (UTC)

@Jdforrester (WMF): Ok... - Fabsouza1 (talk) 03:43, 29 July 2014 (UTC)

Heading vs sub-heading

What's the difference between "heading" and "sub-heading" in the VE interface, e.g.

• MediaWiki:visualeditor-formatdropdown-format-heading2, vs
• MediaWiki:visualeditor-formatdropdown-format-mw-heading2?

Deryck C.^Meta 19:21, 7 August 2014 (UTC)

The second is currently used in the Paragraph menu to create ==Headings==. I don't know where the other one is (was?) used. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 03:40, 8 August 2014 (UTC)

@Deryck Chan and Whatamidoing (WMF): The first is used in stand-alone, not in MediaWiki; the second is used in MediaWiki, as Whatamidoing said. Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 09:27, 8 August 2014 (UTC)

VisualEditor with Parsoid on Windows

Hi, in principle I would agree with you that we do not need to have all the details here, but ...

It cost me the better part of a working day tracing down these things (and nobody cared to write them down in an quickly digestable form), because I needed to get VisualEditor running on Windows - WHICH IT STILL DOES NOT - and it would really really really be good to have pointer here giving a very rough overview of what you need. For example downloading (several hundred freaking Megabytes), installing and getting VC++ 2010 to run took me more than an hour, and it would be really good to have a very short info on that.

Besides, VisualEditor is still not running on my Windows system, and I have no clue if I am an the only poor soul with this problem, or if this is a general problem. Having the pointer: "VisualEditor on Windows? Here be dragons!" Would be really really good.

Having wasting so much time on this, I hate the whole thing wholeheartly by now... Tony Mach (talk) 08:37, 21 August 2014 (UTC)

@Tony Mach: Hello, sorry you've been having so many issues. I'm afraid I don't have a Windows box to hand and so I've never personally tried to get even MediaWiki running on a Windows box, much less VisualEditor and Parsoid. That said, I've heard reports from people before that they got VE and Parsoid working properly on Windows, even on IIS. I don't know off-hand who could give you some advice on getting it working, however. Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 19:22, 21 August 2014 (UTC)

An important message about renaming users

Dear Jdforrester (WMF),

I am cross-posting this message to many places to make sure everyone who is a Wikimedia Foundation project bureaucrat receives a copy. If you are a bureaucrat on more than one wiki, you will receive this message on each wiki where you are a bureaucrat.

As you may have seen, work to perform the Wikimedia cluster-wide single-user login finalisation (SUL finalisation) is taking place. This may potentially effect your work as a local bureaucrat, so please read this message carefully.

Why is this happening? As currently stated at the global rename policy, a global account is a name linked to a single user across all Wikimedia wikis, with local accounts unified into a global collection. Previously, the only way to rename a unified user was to individually rename every local account. This was an extremely difficult and time-consuming task, both for stewards and for the users who had to initiate discussions with local bureaucrats (who perform local renames to date) on every wiki with available bureaucrats. The process took a very long time, since it's difficult to coordinate crosswiki renames among the projects and bureaucrats involved in individual projects.

The SUL finalisation will be taking place in stages, and one of the first stages will be to turn off Special:RenameUser locally. This needs to be done as soon as possible, on advice and input from Stewards and engineers for the project, so that no more accounts that are unified globally are broken by a local rename to usurp the global account name. Once this is done, the process of global name unification can begin. The date that has been chosen to turn off local renaming and shift over to entirely global renaming is 15 September 2014, or three weeks time from now. In place of local renames is a new tool, hosted on Meta, that allows for global renames on all wikis where the name is not registered will be deployed.

Your help is greatly needed during this process and going forward in the future if, as a bureaucrat, renaming users is something that you do or have an interest in participating in. The Wikimedia Stewards have set up, and are in charge of, a new community usergroup on Meta in order to share knowledge and work together on renaming accounts globally, called Global renamers. Stewards are in the process of creating documentation to help global renamers to get used to and learn more about global accounts and tools and Meta in general as well as the application format. As transparency is a valuable thing in our movement, the Stewards would like to have at least a brief public application period. If you are an experienced renamer as a local bureaucrat, the process of becoming a part of this group could take as little as 24 hours to complete. You, as a bureaucrat, should be able to apply for the global renamer right on Meta by the requests for global permissions page on 1 September, a week from now.

In the meantime please update your local page where users request renames to reflect this move to global renaming, and if there is a rename request and the user has edited more than one wiki with the name, please send them to the request page for a global rename.

Stewards greatly appreciate the trust local communities have in you and want to make this transition as easy as possible so that the two groups can start working together to ensure everyone has a unique login identity across Wikimedia projects. Completing this project will allow for long-desired universal tools like a global watchlist, global notifications and many, many more features to make work easier.

If you have any questions, comments or concerns about the SUL finalisation, read over the Help:Unified login page on Meta and leave a note on the talk page there, or on the talk page for global renamers. You can also contact me on my talk page on meta if you would like. I'm working as a bridge between Wikimedia Foundation Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Stewards, and you to assure that SUL finalisation goes as smoothly as possible; this is a community-driven process and I encourage you to work with the Stewards for our communities.

Thank you for your time. -- Keegan (WMF) talk 18:24, 25 August 2014 (UTC)

--This message was sent using MassMessage. Was there an error? Report it!

Eek

James, I just took a hyphen out of the July eng report (not important), and I'm not sure whether that damaged everything. Tony (talk) 04:58, 27 August 2014 (UTC)

@Tony1: Hey, sorry, didn't see this until now. The wonderful Guillaume (WMF) fixed it, I saw. Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 23:33, 31 August 2014 (UTC)

OAuth App

Hi, I wrote an OAuth Application (RC Helper 1.0 - demo) but after 10 days the app status is "proposed". can you check and approve it ? Thanks --Arash.pt (talk) 23:06, 13 September 2014 (UTC)

@Arash.pt: Hey, for OAuth application questions your best bet is CSteipp (WMF) who should be able to help you. Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 23:20, 17 September 2014 (UTC)

Growth team newsletter #25

Welcome to the twenty-fifth newsletter from the Growth team! Help with translations

Celebrations

Leveling up release

• We released Leveling up features to our pilot wikis on March 22 for an initial A/B test.
• In this test, we use post-edit dialogs (pop-ups shown after publishing an edit) and notifications to encourage new editors to try new types of newcomer-friendly suggested edits.
• We are closely monitoring the short term impact of this feature as well as the longer term effect on newcomer productivity and retention. If the experiment shows positive results, we will release this feature to more wikis.

5,000+ images added via the newcomer task in February

• In February 2023, 5,035 images were added via the newcomer “add an image” feature (on all wikis where available); 155 were reverted.
• Since the feature “add an image” was launched: 36,803 images have been added; 2,957 images were reverted.

Recent changes

• Add a link
  • Community Ambassadors completed an initial evaluation that confirmed that prioritizing underlinked articles resulted in better article suggestions. We then evaluated the change on Growth pilot wikis, and results suggest that more newcomers are successfully completing the task and experiencing fewer reverts. We have now deployed the new prioritization model to all wikis with "add a link" enabled. [3][4]
  • We continue the deployment of "add a link" to more wikis. These changes are regularly announced in Tech News. To know if newcomers at your wiki have access to this feature, please visit your Homepage.
• The Impact module was deployed on our pilot wikis, where we conducted an A/B test. We published initial findings, and a data scientist is now completing experiment analysis. [5]
• Donor Thank you page experiment – Donors land on a “thank you” page after donation, and that landing page now includes a call to action to try editing: Example Thank you page in French. This promising feature is tested at several Wikipedias (French Wikipedia, Italian Wikipedia, Japanese Wikipedia, Dutch Wikipedia, Swedish Wikipedia).
• Growth features are now the default experience on both test.wikipedia.org and test2.wikipedia.org. You can test our features there.

Upcoming work

• Add an image – We plan to offer section-level image suggestions as a structured task for newcomers.
  • We are starting design work. [6]
  • Growth team Ambassadors helped with an initial evaluation of these section-level image suggestions. [7]
  • We will start a community consultation in which we share initial ideas and designs soon. [8]
• IP Editing: Privacy Enhancement and Abuse Mitigation – We will support this project for all Growth Team maintained products and extensions that may be affected by IP Masking. [9]

Growth team's newsletter prepared by the Growth team and posted by bot • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

13:10, 1 April 2023 (UTC)

Growth team newsletter #26

Welcome to the twenty-sixth newsletter from the Growth team! Help with translations

One million Suggested Edits

We passed the 1 million Suggested edits milestone in late April!

• The Suggested edits feature (AKA Newcomer tasks) increase newcomer activation by ~12%, which flows on through to increased retention. (source)
• Suggested edits increase the number of edits newcomers complete in their first two weeks and have a relatively low revert rate. (source)
• Suggested edits are available on all Wikipedia language editions.
• Newer Suggested edits, like Add a link and Add an image, aren’t yet deployed to all wikis, but these structured tasks further increase the probability that newcomers will make their first edit. (source)

Positive reinforcement

Positive reinforcement aims to encourage newcomers who have visited our homepage and tried Growth features to keep editing.

• The new Impact module was released to Growth pilot wikis in December 2022, and we are now scaling the feature to another ten wikis. [10]
• The Leveling up features are deployed at our pilot wikis.
• The Personalized praise features were deployed at our pilot wikis on May 24. Mentors at pilot wikis will start to receive notifications weekly when they have “praise-worthy” mentees. Mentors can configure their notification preferences or disable these notifications.

Add an image

• We are creating a new section-level variation of the “add an image” task. We have tested the accuracy of suggestions, and the development of this new task is well-underway. [11]

Other updates

• We are progressively releasing Add a link to more wikis. [12]
• After adding Thanks to Recent Changes, Watchlist and Special:Contributions, we investigated Thanks usage on the wikis. There is no evidence that thanks increased after the feature was added on more pages.
• We helped with code review for the 2023 Community Wish to add Notifications for user page edits. [13]
• We have been attending several community events, that we documented in our Growth’s Community events report.

What's next for Growth?

• We shared an overview of Growth annual planning ideas, and have started community discussion about these potential projects. We would love to hear your feedback on these ideas!

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15:14, 29 May 2023 (UTC)

Ad:MediaWiki 1.41/Roadmap

Ad:MediaWiki 1.41/Roadmap

Hi. Why do you think sections make this unusable? My view is quite opposite. With sections, you can easily jump to the currently deployed version (just use ToC and scroll up). So sections makes this more usable for me (UI/UX).

Also note that the article is now far behind. If you stand by your view of removing sections, then at least please update to the current state.

Kind regards, Nux (talk) 19:41, 30 May 2023 (UTC)

Making it so the page can't be edited sensibly with VE just for an anchor point is a very aggressive action.

Updating the page is part of the job of the train conductor. I'll make sure they continue to do so. Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 20:09, 30 May 2023 (UTC)

Aggressive? Weird choice of word. I edit in VE a lot, but that template is very bad for VE in any case. I would not edit it in VE and none of the previous edits were in VE. And I think viewing is more important then editing ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Nux (talk) 20:31, 30 May 2023 (UTC)

Growth team newsletter #27

Welcome to the twenty-seventh newsletter from the Growth team! Help with translations

Annual plan for Growth

We shared our annual plan, for the period July 2023 - June 2024.

Our first project of the year will be Community configuration 2.0, which helps editors with extended rights transparently and easily configure important on-wiki functionality.

After we finish work on Community configuration 2.0, we will hope to fit in one of the following projects:

• Article creation: This project aims to provide new editors with better guidance and guardrails in the article creation process, with the intention of lightening the load of new page reviewers.
• Non-editing participation: This project aims to create low-risk ways for readers to participate in Wikipedia with the intention of funneling more readers into contributing to the Wikimedia movement.

Please let us know what you think about these projects on the related talk page, or Growth's annual plan talk page.

Suggested edits

The new "Add an image" section-level task

We released a new Section-level “add an image” structured task to Growth pilot wikis (Arabic, Bengali, Czech, and Spanish). This task was part of the Structured Data Across Wikipedia project. We are monitoring the edits made, and we look for community feedback as well.

Suggested Edits are now receiving topic predictions via the new Language-Agnostic Topic Classification. This change affects non-English Wikipedia wikis. It will ensure newcomers receive a greater diversity of task recommendations. Before, as this feature was a test, English Wikipedia was used to select topics. The change is gradual as lists of topics are refreshed when they become empty. The Research team will evaluate the impact in a few months. [14]

Starting on August 1, a new set of Wikipedias will get "Add a link": Georgian Wikipedia, Kara-Kalpak Wikipedia, Kabyle Wikipedia, Kabardian Wikipedia, Kabiyè Wikipedia, Kikuyu Wikipedia, Kazakh Wikipedia, Khmer Wikipedia, Kannada Wikipedia, Kashmiri Wikipedia, Colognian Wikipedia, Kurdish Wikipedia, Cornish Wikipedia, Cornish Wikipedia.

Mentorship

The Growth team provides dedicated features to establish a mentorship program for newcomers. Every newcomer gets a volunteer mentor who provides encouragement and answers questions. Communities can set up or join this mentorship system by visiting Special:ManageMentors. This mentorship system is configurable by the community at Special:EditGrowthConfig.

More communities have implemented mentorship. A Wikimedia Foundation data scientist will be looking at the impact of Mentorship. We will look at the impact on Spanish and English Wikipedia. [15]

The Growth team will also host a Mentoring new editors on Wikipedia session at Wikimania 2023 in Singapore. Workshop attendees will help brainstorm improvements to Growth’s mentorship features.

Positive reinforcement

We will share more complete experiment analysis for all the three parts of the Positive reinforcement project soon. At the moment, the new Impact module, Leveling up, and Personalized praise are still being A/B tested on the Growth team's pilot wikis.

In the meantime, initial leading indicators for the Personalized praise project have been published. Although this is still a relatively small sample, results seem healthy. They show that Mentors are indeed receiving notifications and clicking through to view their praise-worthy mentees.

Growth contributes to IP Editing migration

The Growth team is currently focusing on IP Editing: Privacy Enhancement and Abuse Mitigation. It is a project that touches many different Wikimedia Foundation teams. The Growth team will focus on temporary accounts through two main points:

• the user experience of a logged-out user, that switches to a temporary account,
• change Growth-owned extensions and features, so that they work as expected with temporary accounts. [16]

Community Configuration 2.0

We are still in the early planning stage of the Community Configuration 2.0 project:

• We are gathering internal Wikimedia Foundation teams' needs, so as community feedback. [17]
• We have started to investigate design improvements. [18]
• We are also reviewing similar tools that are part of other products. [19]

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12:42, 1 August 2023 (UTC)

Growth team newsletter #28

Welcome to the twenty-eighth newsletter from the Growth team! Help with translations

Community Configuration, concept A: Accordion style

Community Configuration, concept B: Dashboard style

Community configuration 2.0

• Community Configuration 2.0 is a feature that will enable Wikimedia communities to easily customize and configure features to meet their unique needs. This approach provides non-technical moderators with more independence and control over enabling/disabling and customizing features for their communities.
• Technical approach and associated tasks are detailed in this Epic task on Phabricator.
• Initial designs are drafted for two different approaches (see images). We will soon demo interactive prototypes to interested admins, stewards, and experienced editors (T346109). Please let us know if you have feedback on the design approach, or want to participate in prototype testing.

IP Masking

• The Growth team has been working on several updates to ensure Growth maintained features will be compatible with future IP Masking changes. This work has included code changes to: Recent Changes (T343322), Echo notifications (T333531), the Thanks extension (T345679) and Mentorship (T341390).
• Before December, the Growth team will initiate community discussions with the goal of migrating communities from Flow to DiscussionTools. This move aims to minimize the necessity for additional engineering work to make Flow compatible with IP Masking. (T346108)

Mentorship

• We assembled some resources for mentors at Mediawiki wiki. This resource page is translatable and will be linked from the mentor dashboard.
• We are working to resolve a bug related to mentors properly returning after being marked as "Away". (T347024)
• Half of newcomers at English Wikipedia get a mentor assigned to them. To ensure every newcomer receives mentorship, we need additional volunteer mentors at English Wikipedia to achieve a 100% coverage rate. We also encourage experienced users from other wikis to help newcomers at their own community.

Scaling Growth features

• We continue the deployment of the structured task "add a link" to all Wikipedias. We plan to scale the task to all Wikipedias that have link suggestions available by the end of 2023.
• We plan to scale the new Impact Module to all Wikipedias soon, but first we are investigating a bug with the job that refreshes the Impact Module data. (T344428)
• At some wikis, newcomers have access to the "add an image" structured task. This task suggests images that may be relevant to add to unillustrated articles. Newcomers at these wikis can now add images to unillustrated articles sections. (T345940) The wikis that have this task are listed under "Images recommendations" at the Growth team deployment table.

Other news

• We disabled the “add an image” task temporarily (T345188) because there was a failure in the image suggestions pipeline (T345141). This is now fixed.
• You can read a report about the Growth team’s representation at Wikimania in Singapore here. Growth team members presented two sessions at Wikimania Singapore.
• After a 2.5 years-long collaboration with Bangala Wikipedia, we have decided to start a collaboration with another wiki. Swahili Wikipedia is now a pilot wiki for Growth experiments.

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Trizek_(WMF) Discussion 23:16, 16 October 2023 (UTC)

Growth team newsletter #29

Welcome to the twenty-ninth newsletter from the Growth team! Help with translations

Community Conversations

The Growth team will host its first community conversation Monday, 4 December (19:00 - 20:30 UTC). The topic for this meeting will be Mentorship.

This first meeting language will be English, but we plan to host conversations in other languages, and about other topics. Please visit the conversation page on-wiki for the details on how to join. You can also watch the page, or suggest ideas for upcoming conversations there.

Impact Module

At the beginning of November 2023, the Growth team deployed the New Impact Module to all Wikipedias. We recently released a follow up improvement to how edit data was displayed based on editor feedback. [20]

Add a Link

We released “add a link” to 35 more Wikipedias. [21] [22]

We have a few Wikipedias remaining:

• German and English Wikipedia will be contacted at the beginning of January 2024.
• There are a few small wikis that will not receive the task until they have enough articles for the algorithm to work properly.

Community Configuration

• We shared Community Configuration 2.0 plans with technical stakeholders. [23] 🖂
• Initial Community Configuration design ideas have been shared and discussed with community members.
• A basic Community Configuration 2.0 demo is released on ToolForge.
• Developers can find some initial proof of concept code shared on gitlab.

Mentorship

When a mentor marked themselves as "Away", they were not getting their name assigned to new accounts when they returned. This has been fixed. [24]

We improved the message received by newcomers when their mentor quits, to reduce confusion. [25]

We worked on ensuring that all mentees are assigned to an active mentor. This required reassigning mentees with no mentors to a new mentor. We paused this as the clean-up script confused some editors. We will resume it when the identified blockers are resolved. [26]

It is now possible to create an Abuse Filter to prevent one user from signing up as a mentor. [27]

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18:04, 1 December 2023 (UTC)

Compatibility of MW 1.39 with PHP 7.4

Hi James,

Since your edit on Template:Compatibility PHP on 21 March 2024, MediaWiki 1.39 is said to be no more compatible with PHP 7.4. I guess it’s a mistake, but I prefer to ask. I see the parameters like "4 end =" seens not to correspond to the "5 start =" on the same line.

(Apart this, it’s great MW 1.42 becomes compatible with PHP 8.2 d:-) ~ Seb35 [^_^] 15:05, 25 March 2024 (UTC)

@Seb35: Oops! Yes, fixed. Hopefully we'll get PHP 8.3 support in too. Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 15:57, 25 March 2024 (UTC)

Growth News, April 2024

The Growth team will now send quarterly reports to keep you in the loop. Growth team weekly updates are available on wiki (in English) if you want to know more about our day-to-day work.

If you want to receive more general updates about technical activity happening across the Wikimedia movement (including Growth work), we encourage you to subscribe to Tech News.

Community Configuration

Growth features are currently configurable at Special:EditGrowthConfig. This quarter we are working on making Community Configuration accessible for other MediaWiki developers while also moving Growth feature configuration to the new CommunityConfiguration extension.

An early version of Community Configuration can be tested at Spanish Beta Wikipedia. We plan to release the new Community Configuration extension to pilot wikis (Arabic and Spanish Wikipedia) in early May, 2024. The first non-Growth team feature to utilize Community Configuration will be Automoderator.

In parallel with the development, the Growth team will propose Community Configuration usage guidelines, Community Configuration design guidelines, and provide technical documentation.

Experiment Results

Add a Image experiment analysis results

The Growth team conducted an experiment to assess the impact of the “Add an Image” structured task on the Newcomer Homepage's "Suggested Edits" module. This analysis finds that the Add an Image structured task leads to an increase in newcomer participation on the mobile web platform, particularly by making constructive (non-reverted) article edits:

• The likelihood that mobile web newcomers make their first article edit (+17.0% over baseline)
• The likelihood that they are retained as newcomers (+24.3% over baseline)
• The number of edits they make during their first two weeks on the wiki (+21.8% over baseline)
• A lower probability of the newcomers' edits will be reverted (-3.3% over baseline).

Personalized praise experiment results

This feature was developed for Mentors as part of the Growth team's Positive Reinforcement project. When A/B testing on Spanish Wikipedia, we found no significant impact on retention, but we found a significant positive impact on newcomer productivity. However, we concluded that the results weren’t positive enough to justify the time investment from Mentors. We plan to discuss this feature with our pilot wikis, and consider further improvements before scaling this feature further. Meanwhile, communities willing to test the feature can ask to have it deployed. (T361763)

English donors encouraged to try editing

As in previous years, donors were directed to a Thank you page after donation (example). However, this year we tested a new “Try editing Wikipedia,” call to action on the Thank You page. This call to action linked to a unique account creation page. From this account creation page we were able to track Registrations and Activation (editing for the first time). During the English banner campaign, the Donor Thank you page led to 4,398 new accounts, and 441 of those accounts went on to constructively edit within 24 hours. (T352900)

Future work

Annual Plan

The Growth team and the Editing team will work on the WE1.2 Key Result in the coming fiscal year. We will start initial discussions with communities soon to help finalize our plans. (T361657)

Newcomer Homepage Community Updates module

We plan to A/B test adding a new Community Configurable module to the Newcomer Homepage that will allow communities to highlight specific events, projects, campaigns, and initiatives. We are early in the planning phase of this project that will take place first at our pilot wikis and wikis volunteering. We welcome community feedback on initial designs and plans, in any language at our project talk page.

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18:55, 23 April 2024 (UTC)

Growth News, July 2024

Community Configuration

The Growth team released Community Configuration at all Wikipedias. You can access it at Special:CommunityConfiguration.

This new special page replaces Special:EditGrowthConfig. For now, all Growth features can be configured using Community Configuration. Configuration for AutoModerator (T365046) and other features will be available in the future.

You can help with translations. The interface translation is done at Translatewiki.net. You can also help translate the documentation.

If you attend Wikimania 2024, please join us for the session about Community configuration's future!

Current work

Newcomer Homepage Community Updates module

We will add a new Community Configurable module to the Newcomer Homepage that will allow communities to highlight specific events, projects, campaigns, and initiatives. We have released a simple version available to beta wikis. We will conduct an A/B test at our pilot wikis using the new Metrics Platform. We still welcome community feedback on initial designs and plans, in any language at our project talk page.

Future work

Increase constructive activation on mobile

As part of the Growth team 2024/2025 Annual Plan, the Growth team will explore various ways to increase the percentage of newcomers who successfully start editing.

Editing a Wikipedia page requires too much context and patience. It means many trial and error for newcomers to contribute, meaning a steeper learning curve and potential discouraging reverts. To support a new generation of volunteers, we will increase the number and availability of smaller, structured, and more task-specific editing workflows (E.g. Edit Check and Structured Tasks). The Growth team will primarily focus on Structured Tasks, while working closely with the Editing team to ensure our work integrates well with Edit Check.

Stay informed

Growth team weekly updates are available on wiki (in English) if you want to know more about our day-to-day work. If you want to receive more general updates about technical activity happening across the Wikimedia movement (including Growth work), we encourage you to subscribe to Tech News.

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15:08, 30 July 2024 (UTC)

MW 1.42 PHP compatibility

After your revert of my change, I restarted this talk page discussion. It would be great if you could respond there. Yaron Koren (talk) 15:29, 17 October 2024 (UTC)

Sure, will do. Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 13:10, 28 October 2024 (UTC)

Growth News, October 2024

Current work

Newcomer Homepage Community Updates module

We will add a new module to the Newcomer Homepage that will allow communities to highlight specific events, projects, campaigns, and initiatives. We have released a simple version on beta wikis and we will soon start an A/B test on our pilot wikis. This module will only display on the Newcomer Homepage if communities decide to utilize it, so learn how to configure the Community Updates module, or share your thoughts on the project's talk page.

One design concept aimed to increase constructive activation

Constructive activation experimentation

After showcasing early design ideas at Wikimania, we conducted user testing of design prototypes. We now aim to engage communities in further discussions and plan to run a targeted experiment, presenting a structured task within the reading view to logged-in new account holders with zero edits.

Community Configuration

This Community Configuration extension was developed to help communities customize wiki features to meet their unique needs. The Growth team is now helping other Wikimedia Foundation teams make their products configurable:

• The Moderation Tools team now provides Community Configuration for Automoderator. (T365046)
• Certain Babel extension settings will be configurable soon. (T328171)

Future work

As part of the Growth team annual plan, we will continue to investigate ways to increase constructive activation on mobile, while also working with Data Products to move forward A/B testing functionality via the Metrics Platform.

Community events

• Growth team members presented Community Configuration: Shaping On-Wiki Functionality Together at Wikimania (slides). The session recording is available to watch on YouTube. This session provided an update on the Community Configuration project and introduced details about the upcoming features that communities will soon be able to configure. Representatives from the Moderator Tools, Editing, Web, and Campaigns teams shared their plans for utilizing Community Configuration in the future. Following these presentations, the WMF Growth team's Benoît Evellin and Martin Urbanec answered audience questions.
• Habib Mhenni gave a presentation of how mentorship works at WikiIndaba 2024. The recording is available.

Stay informed

Growth team weekly updates are available on wiki (in English) if you want to know more about our day-to-day work. If you want to receive more general updates about technical activity happening across the Wikimedia movement (including Growth work), we encourage you to subscribe to Tech News.

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Trizek_(WMF), 15:44, 22 October 2024 (UTC)