User talk:MadGuy7023/13
 | This is an archive of past discussions about User:MadGuy7023. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page. |
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Cheerleading
I was expressing of what I think about cheerleading you can't stop me — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2.26.191.65 (talk) 16:56, 2 January 2013 (UTC)
Our IP friend
You might already know this, but reporting at WP:AIV usually gives quick results when it's repeat vandalism and harassment like that. First Light (talk) 19:00, 5 January 2013 (UTC)
- I know. There was once where a similar thing happened on [1]. MadGuy7023 (talk) 19:05, 5 January 2013 (UTC)
Talkback
Message added 14:01, 7 January 2013 (UTC). You can remove this notice at any time by removing the {{Talkback}} or {{Tb}} template.
Hop n hop (on the arctic ice) 14:01, 7 January 2013 (UTC)
Thanks
Thanks for cleaning up my talk page! SeoMac (talk) 20:24, 8 January 2013 (UTC)
- No problem :) MadGuy7023 (talk) 20:38, 8 January 2013 (UTC)
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You have made a huge mistake. Macedonia is a location in Greece and that name belongs only there. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 193.92.131.230 (talk) 23:08, 9 January 2013 (UTC)
- You obviously don't know about citing sources (see wp:v and Help:Citing sources) MadGuy7023 (talk) 23:13, 9 January 2013 (UTC)
Madguy why did you undo that revision in the 21st century artical ? your messing up the Chronology of the Prinited future of the 21st century in books and other printed media. Aurtur c clarks books began before thos other events and events with out known year begin first in chronology. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 76.244.151.164 (talk) 14:22, 12 January 2013 (UTC)
- Because you did not give a reason for why you reverted the administrator's edit. Besides, it actually says to give a reason in the edit summary when you revert an edit. You obviously did not, which was why your edit got reverted. MadGuy7023 (talk) 14:31, 12 January 2013 (UTC)
Recent vandalism
Hi,
I know who vandalized Hanley Castle
I just reverted the page myself. I hate reporting the college I study at, but if it involves protecting WP, then I have little choice.
I'll be notifying college admin shortly.
Usual people in life (talk) 13:08, 14 January 2013 (UTC)
Thanks
for this - I don't know why, but my attempted revert reverted twice. -- Boing! said Zebedee (talk) 14:16, 14 January 2013 (UTC)
- No problem :) MadGuy7023 (talk) 14:17, 14 January 2013 (UTC)
- I really wouldn't bother reverting him further until after he's had his talk page access revoked - all it's really doing is giving him the attention he seeks. -- Boing! said Zebedee (talk) 14:41, 14 January 2013 (UTC)
- Hang on... aren't you an administrator yourself? After all, you did decline both their unblock requests. MadGuy7023 (talk) 14:44, 14 January 2013 (UTC)
- I was, but I've handed in my mop - haven't decided whether it's temporary or permanent. -- Boing! said Zebedee (talk) 14:51, 14 January 2013 (UTC)
- Hang on... aren't you an administrator yourself? After all, you did decline both their unblock requests. MadGuy7023 (talk) 14:44, 14 January 2013 (UTC)
- I really wouldn't bother reverting him further until after he's had his talk page access revoked - all it's really doing is giving him the attention he seeks. -- Boing! said Zebedee (talk) 14:41, 14 January 2013 (UTC)
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...
Dont edit my talkpage again. 87.232.1.48 (talk) 22:19, 17 February 2013 (UTC)
- ... and why should I not edit that page again? There is not anything wrong with it, is there? MadGuy7023 (talk) 21:21, 18 February 2013 (UTC)
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hi reporting vandal
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:208.108.164.250
He's done it again! I don't care. Please ban him. I don't care if this isn't the right way of reporting.
Just ban him. 63.231.149.190 (talk) 03:45, 9 March 2013 (UTC)
- The right way of reporting is to wp:aiv. MadGuy7023 (talk) 22:43, 9 March 2013 (UTC)
Panzer Dragoon
I have never visited your article, I was not the one who removed content from your article (Someone probably used a proxy) — Preceding unsigned comment added by 69.171.136.229 (talk) 02:26, 11 March 2013 (UTC)
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My apologies
I was not aware that I removed any content from the "Police Officer" page. It was definitely a mistake and I am sorry for any inconvenience. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.42.231.10 (talk) 19:27, 18 March 2013 (UTC)
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Hi
I produced that page a while back, I have proposed to delete it as there have been problems and will translate it into arabic with sources.
Thank you. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Alipiero (talk • contribs) 18:56, 27 March 2013 (UTC)
- Note that this is the English Wikipedia and it is not a place for articles with Arabic language (such articles should go on the Arabic Wikipedia) MadGuy7023 (talk) 19:23, 27 March 2013 (UTC)
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Rebecca Adlington
I had a message from you saying that I'd removed information on Rebecca Adlington without explaining why. Although I do occasionaly edit or supply things on/to wikipedia (and I must say, not very frequently), as I've never even heard of Rebecca Adlington, I can guarantee you that I did not do this. Out of interest, my last edit was to add some Eric Clapton instrumentals to the list of rock instrumentals, and I'm sure I would have done so by logging in (which is my usual way of altering content). Cliff. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 90.216.38.14 (talk) 10:12, 23 April 2013 (UTC)
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- Traffic report: Reddit creep
- Featured content: WikiCup update, and the gardens of Finland
- News and notes: Looking ahead to Wiki Loves Monuments
- Technology report: Gallery improvements launch on Wikipedia
VisualEditor newsletter for September 5
You can search for images directly in VisualEditor. Click the media icon, which looks like this: 
Then type a few keywords into the search box. VisualEditor will search Commons for images or other files whose titles or descriptions contain those words, and will display thumbnail pictures of them for your review. Click one time on the image you want to insert in the article.
For more details, read VisualEditor's user guide.
This Thursday's VisualEditor update was mostly about stability and performance improvements, and some preparatory work for major planned improvements, along with bug fixes for non-English language support and right-to-left text. Everything that the English Wikipedia received today has been running on Mediawiki for a week already.
Officially, the problem with the link inspector not linking to a specific section on a page (bug 53219) was fixed in this release, although that critical patch actually appeared here earlier.
A number of bugs related to copy-and-paste functionality were fixed (48604, bug 50043, bug 53362, bug 51538, among others). Full rich copy-and-paste from external sources into VisualEditor is expected "soon".
In other fixes, you can no longer add empty ref tags (<ref/>) (bug 53345). Selecting both an image and some text, and then trying to add a link, previously deleted the selected image and the text. This was fixed in bug 50127. There was another problem related to using arrow keys to move the cursor next to an inline image that was fixed (bug 53507).
Looking ahead: The next planned upgrade is scheduled for next Thursday, and you should expect to find a redesigned toolbar with drop-down menus that include room for references, templates, underline, strikethrough, superscript, subscript, and code formatting. There will also be keyboard shortcuts for setting the format (paragraph vs section headings).
If you are active at other Wikipedias, the next group of Wikipedias to have VisualEditor offered to all users is being determined at this time. Generally speaking, languages that depend on the input method editor are not going to receive VisualEditor this month. The current target date is Tuesday, September 24 for logged-in users only. You can help with translating the documentation. In several cases, most of the translation is already done, and it only needs to be copied over to the relevant Wikipedia. If you are interested in finding out whether a particular Wikipedia is currently on the list, you can leave a message for me at my talk page.
For other questions or suggestions, or if you encounter problems, please let everyone know by posting problem reports at Wikipedia:VisualEditor/Feedback and other ideas at Wikipedia talk:VisualEditor. Thank you! Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 21:47, 5 September 2013 (UTC)
The Signpost: 04 September 2013
- News and notes: Privacy policy debate gears up
- Traffic report: No accounting for the wisdom of crowds
- Featured content: Bridging the way to a Peasants' Revolt
- WikiProject report: Writing on the frontier: Psychology on Wikipedia
- Arbitration report: Manning naming dispute case opens; Tea Party case closes ; Infoboxes nears completion
- Technology report: Making Wikipedia more accessible
Articles you might like to edit, from SuggestBot
We are currently running a study on the effects of adding additional information to SuggestBot's suggestions. Participation in the study is voluntary. Should you wish to not participate in the study, or have questions or concerns, you can find contact information on the SuggestBot study page.
IMPORTANT CHANGES: We have modified the selection of articles SuggestBot suggests and altered the design to incorporate more information about the articles, as described in this explanation.
Note: All columns in this table are sortable, allowing you to rearrange the table so the articles most interesting to you are shown at the top. All images have mouse-over popups with more information.
Changes to SuggestBot's suggestions
We have changed the number of suggested articles and which categories they are selected from. The number of stubs has been greatly reduced, the number of articles needing sources doubled, and two new categories added (orphans and unencyclopaedic articles). We have also modified the layout of the suggestions and added sortable columns with various types of information about each article. The first two columns are:
- Views/Day
- Daily average number of views an article's had over the past 14 days.
- Quality
- Predicted article quality on a 1- to 3-star scale. Placing your cursor over the stars should give you a pop-up describing the article's quality (Low/Medium/High), current assessment class, and predicted assessment class.
The method we use to predict article quality also allows us to assess whether an article might need specific types of work in order to improve its quality. The work needed might not correspond to cleanup tags added to the article, since our method is not based on those. We have added five columns reflecting this work assessment, where a red X indicates improvement is needed. Placing your cursor over an X should give you a pop-up with a short description of the work needed. The five columns seek to answer the following five questions:
- Content
- Is more content needed?
- Headings
- Does this article have an appropriate section structure?
- Images
- Is the number of illustrative images about right?
- Links
- Does this article link to enough other Wikipedia articles?
- Sources
- For its length, is there an appropriate number of citations to sources in this article?
SuggestBot picks articles in a number of ways based on other articles you've edited, including straight text similarity, following wikilinks, and matching your editing patterns against those of other Wikipedians. It tries to recommend only articles that other Wikipedians have marked as needing work. We appreciate that you have signed up to receive suggestions regularly, your contributions make Wikipedia better — thanks for helping!
If you have feedback on how to make SuggestBot better, please let us know on SuggestBot's talk page. Regards from Nettrom (talk), SuggestBot's caretaker. -- SuggestBot (talk) 11:46, 9 September 2013 (UTC)
The Signpost: 11 September 2013
- WikiProject report: WikiProject Indonesia
- Featured content: Tintin goes featured
- Traffic report: Syria, celebrities, and association football: oh my!
- Arbitration report: Workshop phase opens in Manning naming dispute ; Infoboxes case closes
VisualEditor newsletter for September 19, 2013
You can edit a page's categories in VisualEditor. Click the "Page settings" button (next to Cancel/Save) in the toolbar to open the category tool. It will show you a list of the current categories for that page.
To add a category, type the name of the category you want to add in the search field. To remove an existing category, click on the category in the list and then, in the dialog that opens, click on the "Remove" icon (trash can). "Options" will allow you to set a default sorting key.
For more details, read VisualEditor's user guide.
VisualEditor has been updated twice in the last two weeks. As usual, what is now running on the English Wikipedia had a test run at Mediawiki during the previous week.
As announced, the toolbar was redesigned to be simpler, shorter, and to have the ability to have drop-down groups with descriptions. What you see now is the initial configuration and is expected to change in response to feedback from the English Wikipedia and other Wikipedias. The controls to add <u> (underline), <sub> (subscript), and <sup> (superscript), <s> (strikethrough) and <code> (computer code/monospace font) annotations to text are available to all users in the drop-down menu. At the moment, all but the most basic tools have been moved into a single drop-down menu, including the tools for inserting media, references, reference lists, and templates. The current location of all of the items in the toolbar is temporary, and your opinions about the best order are needed! Please offer suggestions at Wikipedia:VisualEditor/Feedback/Toolbar.
In an eagerly anticipated upgrade to the reference dialog, newly added references or reference groups no longer need the page to be saved before they can be re-used (bugs 51689 and 52000). The 'Use existing reference' button is now disabled on pages which don't yet have any references (bug 51848). The template parameter filter in the transclusion dialog now searches both parameter name and label (bug 51670).
In response to several requests, there are some new keyboard shortcuts. You can now set the block/paragraph formatting from the keyboard: Ctrl+0 sets a block as a regular paragraph; Ctrl+1 up to Ctrl+6 sets it as a Heading 1 ("Page title") to Heading 6 ("Sub-heading 4"); Ctrl+7 sets it as pre-formatted (bug 33512). Ctrl+2, which creates level 2 section headings, may be the most useful.
Some improvements were made to capitalization for links, so typing in "iPhone" will offer a link to "iPhone" as well as "IPhone" (bug 50452).
Copying and pasting within the same document should work better as of today's update, as should copying from VisualEditor into a third-party application (bug 53364, bug 52271, bug 52460). Work on copying and pasting between VisualEditor instances (for example, between two articles) and retaining formatting when copying from an external source into VisualEditor is progressing.
Major improvements to editing with input method editors (IMEs; mostly used for Indic and East Asian languages) are being deployed today. This is a complex change, so it may produce unexpected errors. On a related point, the names of languages listed in the "languages" (langlinks) panel in the Page settings dialog now display as RTL when appropriate (bug 53503).
Looking ahead: The help/'beta' menu will soon expose the build number next to the "Leave feedback" link, so users can give more specific reports about issues they encounter (bug 53050). This change will make it easier for developers to identify any cacheing issues, once it starts reporting the build number (currently, it says "Version false"). Also, inserting a link, reference or media file will put the cursor after the new content again (bug 53560). Next week’s update will likely improve how dropdowns and other selection menus behave when they do not fit on the screen, with things scrolling so the selected item is always in view.
If you are active at other Wikipedias, the next group of Wikipedias to have VisualEditor offered to all users is being finalized. About two dozen Wikipedias are on the list for Tuesday, September 24 for logged-in users only, and on Monday, September 30 for unregistered editors. You can help with translating the documentation. In several cases, most of the translation is already done, and it only needs to be copied over to the relevant Wikipedia. If you are interested in finding out whether a particular Wikipedia is currently on the list, you can leave a message for me at my talk page.
For other questions or suggestions, or if you encounter problems, please let everyone know by posting problem reports at Wikipedia:VisualEditor/Feedback and other ideas at Wikipedia talk:VisualEditor. Thank you! Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 21:49, 19 September 2013 (UTC)
The Signpost: 18 September 2013
- WikiProject report: 18,464 Good Articles on the wall
- Featured content: Hurricane Diane and Van Gogh
- Technology report: What can Wikidata do for Wikipedia?
- Traffic report: Twerking, tragedy and TV
The Signpost: 25 September 2013
- Traffic report: Look on Walter's works
- WikiProject report: Babel Series: GOOOOOOAAAAAAALLLLLLL!!!!!
- Featured content: Wikipedia takes the stage
The Signpost: 02 October 2013
- Discussion report: References to individuals and groups, merging wikiprojects, portals on the Main page, and more
- News and notes: WMF signals new grantmaking priorities
- Featured content: Bobby, Ben, Roger and a fantasia
- Arbitration report: Infoboxes: After the war
- WikiProject report: U2 Too
Articles you might like to edit, from SuggestBot
We are currently running a study on the effects of adding additional information to SuggestBot's suggestions. Participation in the study is voluntary. Should you wish to not participate in the study, or have questions or concerns, you can find contact information on the SuggestBot study page.
IMPORTANT CHANGES: We have modified the selection of articles SuggestBot suggests and altered the design to incorporate more information about the articles, as described in this explanation.
Note: All columns in this table are sortable, allowing you to rearrange the table so the articles most interesting to you are shown at the top. All images have mouse-over popups with more information.
Changes to SuggestBot's suggestions
We have changed the number of suggested articles and which categories they are selected from. The number of stubs has been greatly reduced, the number of articles needing sources doubled, and two new categories added (orphans and unencyclopaedic articles). We have also modified the layout of the suggestions and added sortable columns with various types of information about each article. The first two columns are:
- Views/Day
- Daily average number of views an article's had over the past 14 days.
- Quality
- Predicted article quality on a 1- to 3-star scale. Placing your cursor over the stars should give you a pop-up describing the article's quality (Low/Medium/High), current assessment class, and predicted assessment class.
The method we use to predict article quality also allows us to assess whether an article might need specific types of work in order to improve its quality. The work needed might not correspond to cleanup tags added to the article, since our method is not based on those. We have added five columns reflecting this work assessment, where a red X indicates improvement is needed. Placing your cursor over an X should give you a pop-up with a short description of the work needed. The five columns seek to answer the following five questions:
- Content
- Is more content needed?
- Headings
- Does this article have an appropriate section structure?
- Images
- Is the number of illustrative images about right?
- Links
- Does this article link to enough other Wikipedia articles?
- Sources
- For its length, is there an appropriate number of citations to sources in this article?
SuggestBot picks articles in a number of ways based on other articles you've edited, including straight text similarity, following wikilinks, and matching your editing patterns against those of other Wikipedians. It tries to recommend only articles that other Wikipedians have marked as needing work. We appreciate that you have signed up to receive suggestions regularly, your contributions make Wikipedia better — thanks for helping!
If you have feedback on how to make SuggestBot better, please let us know on SuggestBot's talk page. Regards from Nettrom (talk), SuggestBot's caretaker. -- SuggestBot (talk) 11:48, 7 October 2013 (UTC)
The Signpost: 09 October 2013
- Traffic report: Shutdown shenanigans
- WikiProject report: Australian Roads
- Featured content: Under the sea
- News and notes: Extensive network of clandestine paid advocacy exposed
- In the media: College credit for editing Wikipedia
- Arbitration report: Manning naming dispute and Ebionites 3 cases continue; third arbitrator resigns
VisualEditor newsletter on 16 October 2013
You can create and edit multi-level lists in VisualEditor. The first two icons let you set or remove list formatting.
The last two are used to increase or decrease the indentation level. This can also be done from the keyboard, by using Tab ↹ to indent the list and ⇧ Shift+Tab ↹ to outdent it.
For more information, read Wikipedia:VisualEditor/User guide.
VisualEditor is still being updated every Thursday. As usual, what is now running on the English Wikipedia had a test run at Mediawiki during the previous week. If you haven't done so already, you can turn on VisualEditor by going to your preferences and choosing the item, "MediaWiki:Visualeditor-preference-enable".
The reference dialog for all Wikipedias, especially the way it handles citation templates, is being redesigned. Please offer suggestions and opinions at mw:VisualEditor/Design/Reference Dialog. (Use your Wikipedia username/password to login there.) You can also drag and drop references (select the reference, then hover over the selected item until your cursor turns into the drag-and-drop tool). This also works for some templates, images, and other page elements (but not yet for text or floated items). References are now editable when they appear inside a media item's caption (bug 50459).
There were a number of miscellaneous fixes made: Firstly, there was a bug that meant that it was impossible to move the cursor using the keyboard away from a selected node (like a reference or template) once it had been selected (bug 54443). Several improvements have been made to scrollable windows, panels, and menus when they don't fit on the screen or when the selected item moves off-screen. Editing in the "slug" at the start of a page no longer shows up a chess pawn character ("♙") in some circumstances (bug 54791). Another bug meant that links with a final punctuation character in them broke extending them in some circumstances (bug 54332). The "page settings" dialog once again allows you to remove categories (bug 54727). There have been some problems with deployment scripts, including one that resulted in VisualEditor being broken for an hour or two at all Wikipedias (bug 54935). Finally, snowmen characters ("☃") no longer appear near newly added references, templates and other nodes (bug 54712).
Looking ahead: Development work right now is on rich copy-and-paste abilities, quicker addition of citation templates in references, setting media items' options (such as being able to put images on the left), switching into wikitext mode, and simplifying the toolbar. A significant amount of work is being done on other languages during this month. If you speak a language other than English, you can help with translating the documentation.
For other questions or suggestions, or if you encounter problems, please let everyone know by posting problem reports at Wikipedia:VisualEditor/Feedback and other ideas at Wikipedia talk:VisualEditor. Thank you! Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 18:50, 16 October 2013 (UTC)
The Signpost: 16 October 2013
- News and notes: Vice on Wiki-PR's paid advocacy; Featured list elections begin
- Traffic report: Peaceful potpourri
- WikiProject report: Heraldry and Vexillology
- Featured content: That's a lot of pictures
- Arbitration report: Manning naming dispute case closes
- Discussion report: Ada Lovelace Day, paid advocacy on Wikipedia, sidebar update, and more
The Signpost: 23 October 2013
- News and notes: Grantmaking season—rumblings in the German-language community
- Traffic report: Your average week ... and a fish
- Featured content: Your worst nightmare as a child is now featured on Wikipedia
- Discussion report: More discussion of paid advocacy, upcoming arbitrator elections, research hackathon, and more
- In the media: The decline of Wikipedia; Sue Gardner releases statement on Wiki-PR; Australian minister relies on Wikipedia
- WikiProject report: Elements of the world
The Signpost: 30 October 2013
- Traffic report: 200 miles in 200 years
- In the media: Rand Paul plagiarizes Wikipedia?
- News and notes: Sex and drug tourism—Wikivoyage's soft underbelly?
- Featured content: Wrestling with featured content
- Recent research: User influence on site policies: Wikipedia vs. Facebook vs. Youtube
- WikiProject report: Special: Lessons from the dead and dying
Articles you might like to edit, from SuggestBot
We are currently running a study on the effects of adding additional information to SuggestBot's suggestions. Participation in the study is voluntary. Should you wish to not participate in the study, or have questions or concerns, you can find contact information on the SuggestBot study page.
IMPORTANT CHANGES: We have modified the selection of articles SuggestBot suggests and altered the design to incorporate more information about the articles, as described in this explanation.
Note: All columns in this table are sortable, allowing you to rearrange the table so the articles most interesting to you are shown at the top. All images have mouse-over popups with more information.
Changes to SuggestBot's suggestions
We have changed the number of suggested articles and which categories they are selected from. The number of stubs has been greatly reduced, the number of articles needing sources doubled, and two new categories added (orphans and unencyclopaedic articles). We have also modified the layout of the suggestions and added sortable columns with various types of information about each article. The first two columns are:
- Views/Day
- Daily average number of views an article's had over the past 14 days.
- Quality
- Predicted article quality on a 1- to 3-star scale. Placing your cursor over the stars should give you a pop-up describing the article's quality (Low/Medium/High), current assessment class, and predicted assessment class.
The method we use to predict article quality also allows us to assess whether an article might need specific types of work in order to improve its quality. The work needed might not correspond to cleanup tags added to the article, since our method is not based on those. We have added five columns reflecting this work assessment, where a red X indicates improvement is needed. Placing your cursor over an X should give you a pop-up with a short description of the work needed. The five columns seek to answer the following five questions:
- Content
- Is more content needed?
- Headings
- Does this article have an appropriate section structure?
- Images
- Is the number of illustrative images about right?
- Links
- Does this article link to enough other Wikipedia articles?
- Sources
- For its length, is there an appropriate number of citations to sources in this article?
SuggestBot picks articles in a number of ways based on other articles you've edited, including straight text similarity, following wikilinks, and matching your editing patterns against those of other Wikipedians. It tries to recommend only articles that other Wikipedians have marked as needing work. We appreciate that you have signed up to receive suggestions regularly, your contributions make Wikipedia better — thanks for helping!
If you have feedback on how to make SuggestBot better, please let us know on SuggestBot's talk page. Regards from Nettrom (talk), SuggestBot's caretaker. -- SuggestBot (talk) 12:30, 4 November 2013 (UTC)
The Signpost: 06 November 2013
- Traffic report: Danse Macabre
- Featured content: Five years of work leads to 63-article featured topic
- WikiProject report: WikiProject Accessibility
- Arbitration report: Ebionites 3 case closed
- Discussion report: Sockpuppet investigations, VisualEditor, Wikidata's birthday, and more
The Signpost: 13 November 2013
- Traffic report: Google Doodlebugs bust the block
- Featured content: 1244 Chinese handscroll leads nine-strong picture contingent
- WikiProject report: The world of soap operas
- Discussion report: Commas, Draft namespace proposal, education updates, and more
The Signpost: 13 November 2013
- Traffic report: Google Doodlebugs bust the block
- Featured content: 1244 Chinese handscroll leads nine-strong picture contingent
- WikiProject report: The world of soap operas
- Discussion report: Commas, Draft namespace proposal, education updates, and more
VisualEditor newsletter for November 2013
VisualEditor's toolbar has a new feature (currently working only in some browsers), "Switch to source editing". By choosing this item, you can move directly into the wikitext source editor without saving. This is particularly useful if you need to make significant changes to tables, image galleries, or other elements that are not currently supported.
For more information about how to use VisualEditor, read Wikipedia:VisualEditor/User guide.
Since the last newsletter, the VisualEditor team has worked on some feature changes, major infrastructure improvements to make the system more stable, dependable and extensible, some minor toolbar improvements, and fixing bugs.
A new form parsing library for language characters in Parsoid caused the corruption of pages containing diacritics for about an hour two weeks ago. Relatively few pages at the English Wikipedia were affected, but this created immediate problems at some other Wikipedias, sometimes affecting several dozen pages. The development teams for Parsoid and VisualEditor apologize for the serious disruption and thank the people who reported this emergency at Wikipedia:VisualEditor/Feedback and on the public IRC channel, #mediawiki-visualeditor.
There have been dozens of changes since the last newsletter. Here are some of the highlights:
- Accidental deletion of infoboxes and other items: You now need to press the Delete or ← Backspace key twice to delete a template, reference or image. The first time, the item becomes selected, and the second time, it is removed. The need to press the delete key twice should make it more obvious what you are doing and help avoid accidental removals of infoboxes and similar (bug 55336).
- Switch from VisualEditor to the wikitext editor: A new feature lets you make a direct, one-way editing interface change, which will preserve your changes without needing to save the page and re-open it in the wikitext editor (bug 50687). It is available in a new menu in the action buttons by the Cancel button (where the "Page Settings" button used to be). Note that this new feature is not currently working in Firefox.
- Categories and Languages are also now directly available in that menu. The category suggestions drop-down was appearing in the wrong place rather than below its input box, which is now fixed. An incompatibility between VisualEditor and the deployed Parsoid service that prevented editing categories and language links was fixed.
- File:, Help: and Category: namespaces: VisualEditor was enabled for these namespaces the on all wikis (bug 55968), the Portal: and Viquiprojecte: namespaces on the Catalan Wikipedia (bug 56000), and the Portal: and Book: namespaces on the English Wikipedia (bug 56001).
- Media item resizing: We improved how files are viewed in a few ways. First, inline media items can now be resized in the same way that has been possible with block ones (like thumbnails) before. When resizing a media item, you can see a live preview of how it will look as you drag it (bug 54298). While you are dragging an image to resize it, we now show a label with the current dimensions (bug 54297). Once you have resized it, we fetch a new, higher resolution image for the media item if necessary (bug 55697). Manual setting of media item sizes in their dialog is nearly complete and should be available next week. If you hold down the ⇧ Shift key whilst resizing an image, it will now snap to a 10 pixel grid instead of the normal free-hand sizing. The media item resize label now is centered while resizing regardless of which tool you use to resize it.
- Undo and redo: A number of improvements were made to the transactions system which make undoing and redoing more reliable during real-time collaboration (bug 53224).
- Save dialogue: The save page was re-written to use the same code as all other dialogs (bug 48566), and in the process fixed a number of issues. The save dialog is re-accessible if it loses focus (bug 50722), or if you review a null edit (bug 53313); its checkboxes for minor edit, watch the page, and flagged revisions options now layout much more cleanly (bug 52175), and the tab order of the buttons is now closer to what users will expect (bug 51918). There was a bug in the save dialog that caused it to crash if there was an error in loading the page from Parsoid, which is now fixed.
- Links to other articles or pages sometimes sent people to invalid pages. VisualEditor now keeps track of the context in which you loaded the page, which lets us fix up links in document to point to the correct place regardless of what entry point you launched the editor from—so the content of pages loaded through
/wiki/Foobar?veaction=editand/w/index.php?title=Foobar&veaction=editboth now have text links that work if triggered (bug 48915). - Toolbar links: A bug that caused the toolbar's menus to get shorter or even blank when scrolled down the page in Firefox is now fixed (bug 55343).
- Numbered external links: VisualEditor now supports Parsoid's changed representation of numbered external links (bug 53505).
- Removed empty templates: We also fixed an issue that meant that completely empty templates became impossible to interact with inside VisualEditor, as they didn't show up (bug 55810).
- Mathematics formulae: If you would like to try the experimental LaTeX mathematics tool in VisualEditor, you will need to opt-in to Beta Features. This is currently available on Meta-wiki, Wikimedia Commons, and Mediawiki.org. It will be available on all other Wikimedia sites on 21 November.
- Browser testing support: If you are interested in technical details, the browser tests were expanded to cover some basic cursor operations, which uncovered an issue in our testing framework that doesn't work with cursoring in Firefox; the Chrome tests continue to fail due to a bug with the welcome message for that part of the testing framework.
- Load time: VisualEditor now uses content language when fetching Wikipedia:TemplateData information, so reducing bandwidth use, and users on multi-language or multi-script wikis now get TemplateData hinting for templates as they would expect (bug 50888).
- Reuse of VisualEditor: Work on spinning out the user experience (UX) framework from VisualEditor into oojs-ui, which lets other teams at Wikimedia (like Flow) and gadget authors re-use VisualEditor UX components, is now complete and is being moved to a shared code repository.
- Support for private wikis: If you maintain a private wiki at home or at work, VisualEditor now supports editing of private wikis, by forwarding the Cookie: HTTP header to Parsoid (
$wgVisualEditorParsoidForwardCookiesset to true) (bug 44483). (Most private wikis will also need to install Parsoid and node.js, as VisualEditor requires them.)
Looking ahead:
- VisualEditor will be released to some of the smaller Wikipedias on 02 December 2013. If you are active at one or more smaller Wikipedias where VisualEditor is not yet generally available, please see the list at VisualEditor/Rollouts.
- Public office hours on IRC to discuss VisualEditor with Product Manager James Forrester will be held on Monday, 2 December, at 1900 UTC and on Tuesday, 3 December, at 0100 UTC. Bring your questions. Logs will be posted on Meta after each office hour completes.
- In terms of feature improvements, one of the major infrastructure projects affects how inserting characters works, both using your computer's built-in Unicode input systems and through a planned character inserter tool for VisualEditor. The forthcoming rich copying and pasting feature was extended and greater testing is currently being done. Work continues to support the improved reference dialog to quickly add citations based on local templates.
If you have questions or suggestions for future improvements, or if you encounter problems, please let everyone know by posting a note at Wikipedia:VisualEditor/Feedback. Thank you! Whatamidoing (WMF) 22:16, 20 November 2013 (UTC)
The Signpost: 20 November 2013
- From the editor: The Signpost needs your help
- Featured content: Rockin' the featured pictures
- WikiProject report: Score! American football on Wikipedia
- Traffic report: Ill Winds
- Arbitration report: WMF opens the door for non-admin arbitrators
The Signpost: 20 November 2013
- From the editor: The Signpost needs your help
- Featured content: Rockin' the featured pictures
- WikiProject report: Score! American football on Wikipedia
- Traffic report: Ill Winds
- Arbitration report: WMF opens the door for non-admin arbitrators
Articles you might like to edit, from SuggestBot
We are currently running a study on the effects of adding additional information to SuggestBot's suggestions. Participation in the study is voluntary. Should you wish to not participate in the study, or have questions or concerns, you can find contact information on the SuggestBot study page.
Note: All columns in this table are sortable, allowing you to rearrange the table so the articles most interesting to you are shown at the top. All images have mouse-over popups with more information. For more information about the columns and categories, please consult the documentation, and please do get in touch on SuggestBot's talk page with any questions you might have.
SuggestBot picks articles in a number of ways based on other articles you've edited, including straight text similarity, following wikilinks, and matching your editing patterns against those of other Wikipedians. It tries to recommend only articles that other Wikipedians have marked as needing work. We appreciate that you have signed up to receive suggestions regularly, your contributions make Wikipedia better — thanks for helping!
If you have feedback on how to make SuggestBot better, please let us know on SuggestBot's talk page. Regards from Nettrom (talk), SuggestBot's caretaker. -- SuggestBot (talk) 12:27, 2 December 2013 (UTC)
The Signpost: 04 December 2013
- Traffic report: Kennedy shot Who
- Recent research: Reciprocity and reputation motivate contributions to Wikipedia; indigenous knowledge and "cultural imperialism"; how PR people see Wikipedia
- Discussion report: Musical scores, diversity conference, Module:Convert, and more
- WikiProject report: Electronic Apple Pie
- Featured content: F*&!
The Signpost: 11 December 2013
- Traffic report: Deaths of Mandela, Walker top the list
- In the media: Edward Snowden a "hero"; German Wikipedia court ruling
- News and notes: Wiki Loves Monuments—winners announced
- WikiProject report: WikiProject Wine
- Interview: Wikipedia's first Featured Article centurion
- Featured content: Viewer discretion advised
- Technology report: MediaWiki 1.22 released
The Signpost: 18 December 2013
- WikiProject report: Babel Series: Tunisia on the French Wikipedia
- Traffic report: Hopper to the top
- Discussion report: Usernames, template data and documentation, Main page, and more
- News and notes: Nine new arbitrators announced
- Featured content: Triangulum, the most boring constellation in the universe
- Technology report: Introducing the GLAMWikiToolset
VisualEditor newsletter • 19 December 2013
VisualEditor's toolbar has a new drop-down menu that contains all character formatting: bold, italics, subscript, superscript, strikethrough, computer code, underline, and the ability to remove all formatting from text.
For more information about how to use VisualEditor, read the user guide.
Since the last newsletter, the VisualEditor team has worked on some toolbar improvements, fixing bugs, and improving support for Indic languages as well as other languages with complex characters. The current focus is on improving the reference dialog and expanding the new character inserter tool.
There have been dozens of changes since the last newsletter. Here are some of the highlights:
- Rich copying and pasting is now available. If you copy text from another website, then character formatting and some other HTML attributes are preserved. This means, for example, that if you copy a pre-formatted suggested citation from a source like this, then VisualEditor will preserve the formatting of the title in the citation. Keep in mind that copying the formatting may include formatting that you don't want (like section headings). If you want to paste plain, unformatted text onto a page, then use Control+⇧ Shift+V or ⌘ Command+⇧ Shift+V (Mac).
- Auto-numbered external links like [2] can now be edited just like any other link. However, they cannot be created in VisualEditor easily.
- Several changes to the toolbar and dialogs have been made, and more are on the way. The toolbar has been simplified with a new drop-down text styles menu and an "insert" menu. Your feedback on the toolbar is wanted here. The transclusion/template dialog has been simplified. If you have enabled mathematical formula editing, then the menu item is now called the formula editor instead of LaTeX.
- There is a new character inserter, which you can find in the new "insert" menu, with a capital Omega ("Ω"). It's a very basic set of characters. Your feedback on the character inserter is wanted here.
- Saving the page should seem faster by several seconds now.
- It is now possible to access VisualEditor by manually editing the URL, even if you are not logged in or have not opted in to VisualEditor normally. To do so, append
?veaction=editto the end of the page name. For example, changehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Randomtohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random?veaction=editto open a random page in VisualEditor. This is intended to support bug testing across multiple browsers, without requiring editors to login repeatedly.
Looking ahead: The transclusion dialog will see further changes in the coming weeks, with a simple mode for single templates and an advanced mode for more complex transclusions. The new character formatting menu on the toolbar will get an arrow to show that it is a drop-down menu. The reference dialog will be improved, and the Reference item will become a button in the main toolbar, rather than an item in the Insert menu.
If you have questions or suggestions for future improvements, or if you encounter problems, please let everyone know by posting a note at Wikipedia:VisualEditor/Feedback. Thank you! Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 20:43, 19 December 2013 (UTC)
The Signpost: 25 December 2013
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