User talk:DMacks

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Erich Clar page

I want to include a synthetic reaction that is known as Clar's reaction. It is of a certain class of cyclic ketones that condense with themselves when heated to 400 C in a mixture of zinc dust and zinc chloride.

I will add references and a description of what it is used for in synthesizing new polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons.

Tech News: 2024-48

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Updates for editors

A new version of the standard wikitext editor-mode syntax highlighter will be available as a beta feature later this week. This brings many new features and bug fixes, including right-to-left support, template folding, autocompletion, and an improved search panel. You can learn more on the help page.
The 2010 wikitext editor now supports common keyboard shortcuts such Ctrl+B for bold and Ctrl+I for italics. A full list of all six shortcuts is available. Thanks to SD0001 for this improvement. [1]
Starting November 28, Flow/Structured Discussions pages will be automatically archived and set to read-only at the following wikis: bswiki, elwiki, euwiki, fawiki, fiwiki, frwikiquote, frwikisource, frwikiversity, frwikivoyage, idwiki, lvwiki, plwiki, ptwiki, urwiki, viwikisource, zhwikisource. This is done as part of StructuredDiscussions deprecation work. If you need any assistance to archive your page in advance, please contact Trizek (WMF).
View all 25 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, a user creating a new AbuseFilter can now only set the filter to "protected" if it includes a protected variable.

Updates for technical contributors

The CodeEditor, which can be used in JavaScript, CSS, JSON, and Lua pages, now offers live autocompletion. Thanks to SD0001 for this improvement. The feature can be temporarily disabled on a page by pressing Ctrl+, and un-selecting "Live Autocompletion".
Tool-maintainers who use the Graphite system for tracking metrics, need to migrate to the newer Prometheus system. They can check this dashboard and the list in the Description of the task T350592 to see if their tools are listed, and they should claim metrics and dashboards connected to their tools. They can then disable or migrate all existing metrics by following the instructions in the task. The Graphite service will become read-only in April. [2]
The New PreProcessor parser performance report has been fixed to give an accurate count for the number of Wikibase entities accessed. It had previously been resetting after 400 entities. [3]

Meetings and events

A Language community meeting will take place November 29 at 16:00 UTC. There will be presentations on topics like developing language keyboards, the creation of the Mooré Wikipedia, the language support track at Wiki Indaba, and a report from the Wayuunaiki community on their experiences with the Incubator and as a new community over the last 3 years. This meeting will be in English and will also have Spanish interpretation.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

MediaWiki message delivery 22:39, 25 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Wikidata links

Hi DMacks. Just to say that there is no need to remove wikidata {{ill}} links like you did here. There is a bot which does this automatically after an en:Wikipedia article is created, which is one of the advantages of having these links. See the edit history of that list for examples of the bot working. Mike Turnbull (talk) 11:44, 29 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Yup, I usually do rely on that. In this case, its presence was annoying because it kept popping up on searches while I was working on some articles, so I didn't want to wait for the bot to get around to it. DMacks (talk) 11:46, 29 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2024-49

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Updates for editors

Two new parser functions were added this week. The {{#interwikilink}} function adds an interwiki link and the {{#interlanguagelink}} function adds an interlanguage link. These parser functions are useful on wikis where namespaces conflict with interwiki prefixes. For example, links beginning with MOS: on English Wikipedia conflict with the mos language code prefix of Mooré Wikipedia.
Starting this week, Wikimedia wikis no longer support connections using old RSA-based HTTPS certificates, specifically rsa-2048. This change is to improve security for all users. Some older, unsupported browser or smartphone devices will be unable to connect; Instead, they will display a connectivity error. See the HTTPS Browser Recommendations page for more-detailed information. All modern operating systems and browsers are always able to reach Wikimedia projects. [4]
Starting December 16, Flow/Structured Discussions pages will be automatically archived and set to read-only at the following wikis: arwiki, cawiki, frwiki, mediawikiwiki, orwiki, wawiki, wawiktionary, wikidatawiki, zhwiki. This is done as part of StructuredDiscussions deprecation work. If you need any assistance to archive your page in advance, please contact Trizek (WMF). [5]
This month the Chart extension was deployed to production and is now available on Commons and Testwiki. With the security review complete, pilot wiki deployment is expected to start in the first week of December. You can see a working version on Testwiki and read the November project update for more details.
View all 23 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, a bug with the "Download as PDF" system was fixed. [6]

Updates for technical contributors

In late February, temporary accounts will be rolled out on at least 10 large wikis. This deployment will have a significant effect on the community-maintained code. This is about Toolforge tools, bots, gadgets, and user scripts that use IP address data or that are available for logged-out users. The Trust and Safety Product team wants to identify this code, monitor it, and assist in updating it ahead of the deployment to minimize disruption to workflows. The team asks technical editors and volunteer developers to help identify such tools by adding them to this list. In addition, review the updated documentation to learn how to adjust the tools. Join the discussions on the project talk page or in the dedicated thread on the Wikimedia Community Discord server (in English) for support and to share feedback.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

MediaWiki message delivery 22:20, 2 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Administrators' newsletter – December 2024

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

Administrator changes

Interface administrator changes

Pppery

CheckUser changes

Guideline and policy news

Following an RFC, the policy on restoration of adminship has been updated. All former administrators may now only regain the tools following a request at the Wikipedia:Bureaucrats' noticeboard within 5 years of their most recent admin action. Previously this applied only to administrators deysopped for inactivity.
Following a request for comment, a new speedy deletion criterion, T5, has been enacted. This applies to template subpages that are no longer used.

Technical news

Technical volunteers can now register for the 2025 Wikimedia Hackathon, which will take place in Istanbul, Turkey. Application for travel and accommodation scholarships is open from November 12 to December 10, 2024.

Arbitration

The arbitration case Yasuke (formerly titled Backlash to diversity and inclusion) has been closed.
An arbitration case titled Palestine-Israel articles 5 has been opened. Evidence submissions in this case will close on 14 December.

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 16:19, 3 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Disambiguation link notification for December 9

An automated process has detected that when you recently edited Wiki rabbit hole, you added a link pointing to the disambiguation page Down the Rabbit Hole.

(Opt-out instructions.) --DPL bot (talk) 07:52, 9 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Assistance needed, please

Sorry to badger you but maybe you missed my ping last week to Draft talk:List of modes of action of insecticides. Bosula and I drafted a table which is now ready to be inserted into Insecticide Resistance Action Committee (see the draft Talk Page for rationale) but we need advice about doing that correctly and then deleting the draft. Regards. Mike Turnbull (talk) 12:26, 9 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for the ping about the ping! DMacks (talk) 17:13, 9 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for the advice. Move and merge now complete. Mike Turnbull (talk) 14:25, 10 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2024-50

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Weekly highlight

Technical documentation contributors can find updated resources, and new ways to connect with each other and the Wikimedia Technical Documentation Team, at the Documentation hub on MediaWiki.org. This page links to: resources for writing and improving documentation, a new #wikimedia-techdocs IRC channel on libera.chat, a listing of past and upcoming documentation events, and ways to request a documentation consultation or review. If you have any feedback or ideas for improvements to the documentation ecosystem, please contact the Technical Documentation Team.

Updates for editors

Later this week, Edit Check will be relocated to a sidebar on desktop. Edit check is the feature for new editors to help them follow policies and guidelines. This layout change creates space to present people with new Checks that appear while they are typing. The initial results show newcomers encountering Edit Check are 2.2 times more likely to publish a new content edit that includes a reference and is not reverted.
The Chart extension, which enables editors to create data visualizations, was successfully made available on MediaWiki.org and three pilot wikis (Italian, Swedish, and Hebrew Wikipedias). You can see a working examples on Testwiki and read the November project update for more details.
Translators in wikis where the mobile experience of Content Translation is available, can now discover articles in Wikiproject campaigns of their interest from the "All collection" category in the articles suggestion feature. Wikiproject Campaign organizers can use this feature, to help translators to discover articles of interest, by adding the <page-collection> </page-collection> tag to their campaign article list page on Meta-wiki. This will make those articles discoverable in the Content Translation tool. For more detailed information on how to use the tool and tag, please refer to the step-by-step guide. [7]
The Nuke feature, which enables administrators to mass delete pages, now has a multiselect filter for namespace selection. This enables users to select multiple specific namespaces, instead of only one or all, when fetching pages for deletion.
The Nuke feature also now provides links to the userpage of the user whose pages were deleted, and to the pages which were not selected for deletion, after page deletions are queued. This enables easier follow-up admin-actions. Thanks to Chlod and the Moderator Tools team for both of these improvements. [8]
The Editing Team is working on making it easier to populate citations from archive.org using the Citoid tool, the auto-filled citation generator. They are asking communities to add two parameters preemptively, archiveUrl and archiveDate, within the TemplateData for each citation template using Citoid. You can see an example of a change in a template, and a list of all relevant templates. [9]
One new wiki has been created: a Wikivoyage in Indonesian (voy:id:) [10]
Last week, all wikis had problems serving pages to logged-in users and some logged-out users for 30–45 minutes. This was caused by a database problem, and investigation is ongoing. [11]
View all 19 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, a bug in the Add Link feature has been fixed. Previously, the list of sections which are excluded from Add Link was partially ignored in certain cases. [12][13]

Updates for technical contributors

Codex, the design system for Wikimedia, now has an early-stage implementation in PHP. It is available for general use in MediaWiki extensions and Toolforge apps through Composer, with use in MediaWiki core coming soon. More information is available in the documentation. Thanks to Doğu for the inspiration and many contributions to the library. [14]
Wikimedia REST API users, such as bot operators and tool maintainers, may be affected by ongoing upgrades. On December 4, the MediaWiki Interfaces team began rerouting page/revision metadata and rendered HTML content endpoints on testwiki from RESTbase to comparable MediaWiki REST API endpoints. The team encourages active users of these endpoints to verify their tool's behavior on testwiki and raise any concerns on the related Phabricator ticket before the end of the year, as they intend to roll out the same change across all Wikimedia projects in early January. These changes are part of the work to replace the outdated RESTBase system.
The 2024 Developer Satisfaction Survey is seeking the opinions of the Wikimedia developer community. Please take the survey if you have any role in developing software for the Wikimedia ecosystem. The survey is open until 3 January 2025, and has an associated privacy statement.
There is no new MediaWiki version this week. [15]

Meetings and events

The next meeting in the series of Wikimedia Foundation discussions with the Wikimedia Commons community will take place on December 12 at 8:00 UTC and at 16:00 UTC. The topic of this call is new media and new contributors. Contributors from all wikis are welcome to attend.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

MediaWiki message delivery 22:13, 9 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Help in editnotices

Hi DMacks, there was another edit war happened at the article Iodine concerning WP:SULF. Perhaps {{Chemical editnotice}} should be added to this article and other chemistry-related articles, but I am not sure how far do this range needs to cover. Thanks. Nucleus hydro elemon (talk) 10:51, 10 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

No problem to do that. I think it would be useful to know the scope of the problem. For a long-term for a few specific articles, editnotice is the obvious step. But long-term for a large and random/varying set of articles, or sporatic for any specific article? I'd want to match the size of the manual workload to the size of the expected value. There does not appear to be a way to have edit notices placed by chembox or other article templates, or applied to whole categories (or category-trees) via a single action. DMacks (talk) 13:28, 10 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Semi-relatedly, should "national spelling varieties" in the edit-notice link to WP:ENGVAR? DMacks (talk) 13:28, 10 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

The editnotice is linked. There are 10 element articles that uses British English and mentions "sulfur", namely N, P, S, Cl, Ca, Br, Ag, I, Th, and Fl. All of them needs the editnotice to avoid sulfur → sulphur.

I also found these articles that have the same need: acetic acid, alkali metal, ammonia, borane, cellulose, chemical element, chromic acid, furan-2-ylmethanethiol, glucosamine, hydrolysable tannin, iron(III) chloride, mephedrone, octasulfur, periodic table, and sodium azide. I'm not sure do salt and blue billy should be here too. Nucleus hydro elemon (talk) 15:05, 10 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

This Month in Education: November 2024

This Month in Education

Volume 13 • Issue 9 • November 2024

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