Wikimedia Forum

• Problem: Google is picking up on of ceb.wikipedia geography articles that have been created by bot. The articles are more than 95% spot-on, but when they are wrong they are very wrong. The incorrect information may even be in the title. One example is that the bot produced three articles for the same island in the same location, but each article claimed the island was in a different county. This would not be a problem to the English-speaking world if it wasn't that the titles of the articles are in English, either completely or in part. Because of this, the bot generated information gets fed into Google results for searches made in English. Due to the thousands of bot generated articles it is not practical for humans to completely curate the ceb.wikipedia articles anytime soon. As many of the bot generated articles have some value, it does not seem reasonable to demand that ceb.wikipedia change its standards and delete all the articles en masse.

Proposal: Instead, the WMF should ask Google to stop indexing all ceb.wikipedia geography articles in English speaking lands such as North America and Canada that depict local geographies like counties, cities, towns, buildings, islands, reefs, etc. Articles on states, provinces, and countries may still be indexed. There should be an opt-in whitelist mechanism for certain important locations like Manhattan or Oahu, but ceb.wikipedia must indicate that they have curated these articles with a human reviewer.

Additionally, Google needs to not index all wikipedia clones of the blacklisted ceb.wikipedia geography articles. The WMF should ask Google to do this.--Epiphyllumlover (talk) 19:30, 12 June 2020 (UTC) Reply

Now that this is in the right venue, I'll comment on its merits. First, this doesn't require an explicit request to Google, and could be done by noindexing the pages. This could be accomplished by a configuration change, followed by an edit to ceb:Template:paghimo ni bot. Second, why is it the duty of the Wikimedia Foundation to care about individual wikis failing to properly curate their content? * Pppery * _{it has begun} 20:02, 12 June 2020 (UTC) Reply

Noindexing sounds like a great idea. In addition, the WMF should coordinate with Google so that all Wiki-clones of noidexed bot generated clones do not show up on Google either. Google needs to develop software that tracks which wikipedia pages are noindexed, and then use it as a screen against clones. The WMF should suggest this. As for the duty question, the WMF doesn't have a duty to get information right but rather an incentive if they want people to take the encyclopedia seriously. An analogy could be made with the National Weather Service offices--before releasing their data they coordinate with other regional offices to make sure that their forecasts do not contradict each other. There is nothing inherently wrong with, say, a rural area near the border of two National Weather Service districts having wildly different forecasts on the same day in a border area, but the NWS people are concerned that if the regional offices contradict each other, the people reading the forecasts will think they are probably both unreliable. It is more of a consumer confidence measure to preserve their own status and an authority than a duty to the public.

The problem is that if you live in VBNM County and search "ASDF Island" and you personally know that "ASDF Island" is in your county. But if Google comes back with results from ceb.wikipedia titled on the search engine page "ASDF Island (ZXCV County)"--you will think "That is completely wrong; of course it is wrong--its Wikipedia!" Several months ago I was confused and called up the county courthouse of the neighboring county to double check. The county employee was not pleased with me, from the nearby county, questioning the ownership of his county's island. He explained that it had always been part of his county. (I'm not an irredentist, really!).

If all the page titles were in Cebuano it would not be a problem, but location titles in many languages are frequently kept in their original languages. I would imagine that if the English Wikipedia titled their article "El Paso (Oklahoma)" the people who work on the Spanish Wikipedia would not be pleased that when Spanish speaking people type "El Paso" Google rings up both their wikipedia article on "El Paso (Texas)" and the enwiki article on "El Paso (Oklahoma)"--it would make people not take the es.wikipedia seriously. If the English speaking article was titled "The Pass (Oklahoma)" there would be no trouble to the Spanish speakers because only the English speakers would be led astray. But place names don't work that way. If one language gets it wrong, it confuses people searching Google in all the languages. So if there were thousands of errors like "El Paso (Oklahoma)" and "Mexico City (Honduras)" and the people managing the English speaking wikipedia only managed to fix a few every year, it would be reasonable for the people working on the es.wikipedia to want Google stop indexing all the non-curated English wikipedia articles.

Since some people have reservations with potentially granting censorship authority to the WMF, then as an alternative someone could translate a kindly request to the Cebuano wikipedia and ask them to no-index the geography pages tagged with the bot tag (it appears at the top of all the bot pages). If they are willing to do it on their own than all WMF would have to do is coordinate with Google to get the clones no-indexed too.--Epiphyllumlover (talk) 22:15, 12 June 2020 (UTC) Reply

How about "El Paso (Baja Oklahoma)"? :-). Smallbones (talk) 23:35, 27 June 2020 (UTC) Reply

Epiphyllumlover, you need to understand that the WMF does not control Google, and it's very unlikely that Google would take any notice of them over content on their own sites, and even more unlikely that it would over content on mirrors. Google does what it thinks is best for itself, which is to list the results of search queries according to its own algorithms, not some special pleading from the owners of web sites. Phil Bridger (talk) 20:19, 23 June 2020 (UTC) Reply

So you are saying that it couldn't hurt to ask and that the WMF should do so? :) --Guy Macon (talk) 05:55, 29 June 2020 (UTC) Reply

• What evidence do we have that the ceb.wiki search results are a problem for anyone in the real world? Simply being indexed in Google doesn't mean that your page will ever be shown to a real user. You'd need to find what kind of keywords, language and geography ever gets ceb.wiki in the first page of results, and whether it displaces some more suitable result. Judging from the unique devices, with 100k "users" per month it's hard to believe there is any rampant excess visibility. The spikes of 500-600k might point to temporary changes in Google traffic. Nemo 06:04, 29 June 2020 (UTC) Reply

That's the right question, I think. Because I check geographical names for Vicipaedia (Latin), I often look on Google for strange word combinations. I typically get a small number of results, with, somewhere in the list, Vicipaedias in unexpected languages -- e.g. Indonesian, because both Indonesian and Latin use the word "universitas". I never yet noticed Cebuano in my results, but, if I did, it would be because of a chance homonymy like that.

And, meanwhile, a Cebuano-speaking user of Google might actually want those pages and might improve one of them. There's no reason to prevent that. Andrew Dalby (talk) 13:03, 30 June 2020 (UTC) Reply

Delete - GeoNames is absolutely not a reliable source of information. Anyone can add anything they want to GeoNames and it is subject to vandalism just like Wikipedia.[1] GeoNames is also a giant vacuum-cleaner of geographic databases and has no standards for inclusion. Even locations that were simply points in a geographic survey a hundred years ago can have entries in GeoNames. Finally, if a community doesn't have the resources to maintain a set of articles, they shouldn't have those articles. Not only does it erode Wikipedia's reputation for reliable information, but it pollutes the internet with endless copies and mirrors of bogus information. If the articles aren't deleted, I also support noindexing. Kaldari (talk) 14:24, 28 July 2020 (UTC) Reply

Hi Kaldari, thanks for joining the discussion! Sorry for pestering you, but if you still have access to the Google Webmaster stuff then maybe you can check whether you have any partial answer to my doubts above. Nemo 15:55, 28 July 2020 (UTC) Reply

@Nemo bis: I'm a real world-user, and it is terrible, and I have spent a few nights sorting out dupli- to quadruplicates, and daydreaming of create ways to hurt robots, if bots were actual hardware (dropping them off at IBM customer support is the cruellest idea so far).

I work with historical data, specifically I am trying to synchronise about a dozen databases of Shoah victims. That means, for example, finding out which of several Polish villages with the same name is someone's birth place, or if "Bad Freienwalde" and "Freienwalde" are the same (they are: one database uses historical names, others current, and "Bad" is like an honorary title that cities in Germany apparently get and lose depending on air quality or whatever).

I use Wikidata for this, with either custom software or OpenRefine. In principle, and for some countries, this works rather well. Except Wikidata tracks changes from cebwiki and creates items for every page. As a result, small places, especially in Germany, often have five or more identical entities. I am not exaggerating, just look at this atrocity: Kategoriya:Alemanya_paghimo_ni_bot. As but a single example, there are thirteen (update: eighteen, when the variant with double 'a' is included) pages for a place called Ach, which might be one or two, or maybe it's a river crossing through the region:

Aach (kapital sa munisipyo) Aach (lungsod) Aach (munisipyo sa Alemanya, Baden-Württemberg Region, Freiburg Region, lat 47,85, long 8,85) Aach (munisipyo sa Alemanya, Rheinland-Pfalz, lat 49,78, long 6,60) Aach (suba sa Alemanya, Baden-Württemberg Region, lat 47,73, long 9,23) Ach (suba sa Alemanya, Baden-Württemberg Region, lat 47,87, long 10,03) Ach (suba sa Alemanya, Baden-Württemberg Region, lat 47,93, long 9,64) [Ach (suba sa Alemanya, Baden-Württemberg Region, lat 47,95, long 9,82) [Ach (suba sa Alemanya, Baden-Württemberg Region, lat 48,40, long 9,80) [Ach (suba sa Alemanya, Bavaria, lat 47,57, long 10,15) [Ach (suba sa Alemanya, Bavaria, lat 47,58, long 10,68) [Ach (suba sa Alemanya, Bavaria, lat 47,65, long 10,80) [Ach (suba sa Alemanya, Bavaria, lat 47,70, long 11,16) [Ach (suba sa Alemanya, Bavaria, lat 47,78, long 11,11) [Ach (suba sa Alemanya, Bavaria, lat 47,82, long 10,55) [Ach (suba sa Alemanya, Bavaria, lat 48,73, long 11,06) [Ach (suba sa Alemanya, Bavaria, lat 48,76, long 11,57)[Ach (suba sa Alemanya, lat 47,90, long 10,12)

...and that's only the ones they helpfully added to the same category. There are duplicate categories, as well, with more Achs.

And this clearly isn't just a one-time mistake! Their attempts failed because identical titles can't be created, so they started adding "(city)" and "(town)" and so on. When they ran out of synonyms for cities, they just added geo-coordinates. The psychology that would compel someone to keep doing this, even though it is neither helpful nor lucrative nor appreciated is fascinating.

Delete sounds great. Thankfully, it does not seem to be ongoing right now, and svwiki has done a lot of work to clean up the mess the same user created there before they were banned. In the meantime, not synchronising with that pile of data that truly deserves the term dump is helpful to contain the damage, which Wikidata is actually doing as far as I can tell --Matthias Winkelmann (talk) 10:08, 12 August 2020 (UTC) Reply

Question: Is there any reason not to just add __NOINDEX__ to ceb:Plantilya:Paghimo ni bot? (Edit: just realized this would require a phab request to change the value of $wgExemptFromUserRobotsControl, never mind.) PiRSquared17 (talk) 05:07, 26 August 2020 (UTC) Reply

In the 2019 WMDE Technical Wishes Survey, "Make working with Templates easier" was chosen as the focus area for the project for 2019-2021. Over the course of this year, the Technical Wishes team presented various prototypes on this topic and further developed the ideas with the initial feedback.

The first phase of prototype development is now complete and the team would be delighted to receive feedback on the ideas. To make giving feedback easier, you can now also share your opinion on-wiki with just a few clicks: a QuickSurvey per prototype on the project page.

Feedback - whether via the QuickSurveys, or by posting on the talk page - is welcome! The earlier feedback is received, the better. It will be incorporated into the planning of features to be implemented, and technical implementation is planned to begin imminently.

Let me introduce the already implemented and functional proof-of-concept PROVA Reasoning System. It is based on provareasoner.org I hope it will be a good addition to Wikimedia projects. WikiProva

I don't think it was reported that Wikimedia Foundation joined this lawsuit to defend the pre-existing CEO of the Open Technology Fund (which gave some grants to NoScript, Tor and others):

EFF, Wikimedia, Human Rights Watch, Mozilla, the Tor Project, and a dozen more groups urged the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C Circuit in a filing to rule that Pack violated the First Amendment right of association and assembly and U.S. law —which both ensure that OTF is independent and separate from the government—when he ousted the fund’s president and bipartisan board and replaced them with political appointees. Government-funded OTF filed a lawsuit against Pack last month to stop the takeover.

https://www.eff.org/press/releases/eff-court-trump-appointees-removal-open-technology-fund-leadership-unlawfu

The Wikimedia Foundation logo also appeared a while ago on https://saveinternetfreedom.tech/ (a letter to the USA House of Deputies), but that wasn't publicly announced yet so we don't know whether it was real or not. --Nemo 06:51, 25 July 2020 (UTC) Reply

Note: They were mentioned at https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/publicpolicy/2020-July/002029.html HTH, Quiddity (WMF) (talk) 00:38, 5 August 2020 (UTC) Reply

The local user group have following rights:

• Lock or unlock global account (centralauth-lock)
• Make and remove global blocks (globalblock)
• Block or unblock other users from editing (block) (on Meta only)
• Block or unblock a user from sending email (blockemail) (on Meta only)
• Have one's own edits automatically marked as patrolled (autopatrol) (on Meta only; [2])

Main usecases:

• Fight cross-wiki LTA
• Allow a bot to global block known open proxies (such bot exists for blocking locally, but this also means it provides a proxy list for cross-wiki vandals; so existing bots should be migrated to global blockers)

Other usecases:

• Rxy have a script that blocks/locks ISECHIKA sock. As there are concern about Rxy, it is better to move it to a dedicated bot account (either managed by Rxy or another trusted user), in case he will lost his stewardship
• For local admins accepting an appeal, it can also remove the global lock unless there're other concerns
  • Note global locks happen almost always in clear-cut situations, so if a user successfully appealed a block in some wiki, it is no longer a good candidate for global lock (if there are controversy, global ban should be used)
  • However, compromised accounts, socks of community or foundation globally banned user may not be unlocked
  • Therefore, it will be necessary to make Global locks a policy; Global blocks should also be a policy

--GZWDer (talk) 10:23, 27 July 2020 (UTC) Reply

Do we really have a need for this kind of group? -- CptViraj (talk) 10:45, 27 July 2020 (UTC) Reply

Comment Comment@GZWDer There are more than one lock button behind global locks Spambots and LTAs often use proxies, and they also have to be blocked. This is what stewards do via LWCU. A group that can only block globally doesn't do much. Should such a group be introduced, this group should also be able to carry out corresponding LWCUs. Anything else would only result in locks with little effect.--WikiBayer 👤💬 18:11, 29 July 2020 (UTC) Reply

So at some point we may introduce a global checkuser group (we will have this feature soon), but this proposal is useful even without it.--GZWDer (talk) 18:15, 29 July 2020 (UTC) Reply

We have these groups already, they are called stewards. All the stuff that you require basically is stewards. Been there, done that. About the only limited scope and limited value is global blocking on an IP address (anonymous only, and short term only). I don't see the value proposition in the case presented to further splinter rights. — billinghurst sDrewth 21:13, 29 July 2020 (UTC) Reply

But Steward_requests/Global_permissions/2020-07#Global_sysop_for_Drmies is not a use case of stewards.--GZWDer (talk) 23:40, 29 July 2020 (UTC) Reply

That matter is a person asking for global sysop and failing. If you cannot global sysop, and I doubt that you are going to get a global (b)locker right. If you have a sub-part of that discussion you would like to unpack, then go for it, but the request itself is not pertinent. — billinghurst sDrewth 23:53, 29 July 2020 (UTC) Reply

Exactly. If such a group is introduced, it has an equally high requirement and Crosswiki work is necessary.--WikiBayer 👤💬 14:18, 30 July 2020 (UTC) Reply

Looks useless, if at all, the rights should be bundled with GS. --MF-W 14:22, 30 July 2020 (UTC) Reply

• Support Support great reducing work of admins making other users get a task to do rather than daily edit.Tbiw (talk) 14:26, 2 August 2020 (UTC) Reply
• Support Support, at least in part. I've long favoured unbundling rights from the steward group. Not everyone needs or wants full access to that toolset, or wants to undergo a month-long vetting process every year. I think making these rights part of global sysop would make sense. – Ajraddatz (talk) 15:28, 2 August 2020 (UTC) Reply
  • This have to be a new local group - global sysop is not truly global and does not work for users mostly active in large wikis like Drmies.--GZWDer (talk) 16:13, 2 August 2020 (UTC) Reply
    • Global sysop can be changed to whatever we want it to be, there are no technical restrictions on who it can be granted to. Even as a separate group, it seems highly unlikely that a user like Drmies would be granted access to globally-reaching tools without some knowledge or experience working at the global level. – Ajraddatz (talk) 16:37, 2 August 2020 (UTC) Reply
• Support Support per Ajraddatz This would be useful as an extension for Global sysop, since IP addresses could also be blocked globally. Because global sysops work with stewards anyway and are always in contact, the above problem should not arise.--WikiBayer 👤💬
• Not 100% sure on this, but I don't really like the idea of giving this to GS. When people apply to GS, there is a review and commentary period about how such a candidate will do with the task of assisting small wikis; this would give them access to block every user on every project, and unlike global ip-blocks, local projects would not be able to override this. — xaosflux ^Talk 20:33, 2 August 2020 (UTC) Reply

• Local projects can disable global IP blocks locally, and scope of global lock don't allow controversial locks, hardly an account is unlocked by request, in proportion the accounts that are locked. Accounts that would be locked by this group are those whose motivation is clear and uncontroversial, like now by stewards. Rafael ^{(stanglavine) msg} 22:44, 3 August 2020 (UTC) Reply

• Oppose Oppose. Absolutely not. The global sysop proposal passed by explicitly removing from the proposal global blocks. If this got added, then it means global sysops will be able to do actions affecting wikis where global sysops do not have access, radically changing the shape of the group, controversially. While the time has proven that much of the opposition to global sysops was FUD , this is an important addition that completly changes the scope of the global sysops. I also oppose a separate global/local group just for this. Global blocks and locks are the remit of the stewards. Cfr. Billinghurst. Regards, —MarcoAurelio (talk) 20:52, 2 August 2020 (UTC) Reply
  • I don't think stewards are enough for fighting LTAs with cross-wiki presence. The SRG is already overloaded and it may be useful to give the right to some trusted local sysops in some wikis.--GZWDer (talk) 13:05, 3 August 2020 (UTC) Reply
    • There is no upper bound on the number of stewards, if they feel they have a staffing emergency an election should be opened up. — xaosflux ^Talk 22:42, 4 August 2020 (UTC) Reply
• Support Support --Novak Watchmen (talk) 23:00, 3 August 2020 (UTC) Reply
• I thinked about support attributing to GS, but the proposal is for a local group and GS is a global group so we would need to make adaptations, and Marco Aurélio's point is clear and I need to agree. As a separate group, I don't think that only rights to lock and block globally is so practical. Sometimes is necessary LWCU, delete pages in small wikis (spam, vandalism, etc.), so Global Blockers would need to ask for help (stewards or GS) in the same way. Really stewards have many functions, as Ajraddatz said, but they are correlated in day-to-day, so I don't know if splitting would be very useful, except in cases where functions can be performed in isolation, such as global-renamers and abuse filter managers. Rafael ^{(stanglavine) msg} 23:02, 3 August 2020 (UTC) Reply
  • Block and lock are important tool for emergency. LWCU is not emergent at all.--GZWDer (talk) 19:48, 4 August 2020 (UTC) Reply
• Strong oppose. Absolutely not. This would only make matters worse. The ability to coordinate locks with CU and OS is fundamental to it. Your cited case, Drmies, would not benefit from this, or would only make it worse. He'd be able to lock the account, but not to 1) OS the edits and 2) check and block the underlying IP to prevent the creation of yet another account that would continue the abuse. Regarding what you said above, Block and lock are important tool for emergency. LWCU is not emergent at all., that is completely wrong. Locking abusing accounts and doing nothing else to it will simply result in the creation of more and more accounts. To be fair, even doing that, LTAs jump IPs so they can keep abusing. —Thanks for the fish! ^{talk•contribs} 23:10, 4 August 2020 (UTC) Reply
• I wish this centralauth-lock and globalblock to be bundled with WM:ADMIN. Kind regards, — Tulsi Bhagat ^{[ contribs | talk ]} 03:37, 5 August 2020 (UTC) Reply

  @Tulsi Bhagat: I think the wish never comes true. Why should sysops globally (b)lock users / IPs? This is far from the role of local sysops.--WikiBayer 👤💬 14:15, 5 August 2020 (UTC) Reply

  @WikiBayer: Yeah! I think Meta-Wiki is more a global community and sysops here are more than an ordinary local sysops as in they have special actions with global effects. IMO, bundling centralauth-lock and globalblock to sysops here won't be an issue, undoubtedly this is home of LTAs and sysops should responsible as well to combat with them. We neither agree to create a separate global/local group (I personally also oppose to create a new group) nor bundling the rights to GS. Moreover, most of the sysops here are either Stewards or future Stewards or former Stewards. So, the alternative solution i see that the rights to be bundled with WM:ADMIN. This will definitely help decreasing the workload of Stewards. Kind regards, — Tulsi Bhagat ^{[ contribs | talk ]} 16:45, 5 August 2020 (UTC) Reply

  For a short time, global locking was available to local bureaucrats. I would support those access being granted to Meta sysops as well, though I doubt there would be support for it. – Ajraddatz (talk) 16:54, 5 August 2020 (UTC) Reply

• Strong oppose per Tks4fish and MarcoAurelio we do not need Steward Junior. Praxidicae (talk) 13:53, 5 August 2020 (UTC) Reply
• Oppose Oppose as proposed largely per Marco. I’m very sympathetic to Ajraddatz’s points, but I think the issue is that as constituted, unless you entirely revamp the global rights system this would throw it out of whack. I might support that revamp (probably would actually), but only doing one piece wouldn’t work. There’s also the problem that SRGP, etc. is kinda a backwater where you have "global" insiders commenting, so there’s no real scrutiny to the level stewards get. To me it seems you’d want substantially more vetting than that. TonyBallioni (talk) 13:55, 5 August 2020 (UTC) Reply
• Oppose Oppose. I am not convinced that this proposal fills a compelling need (i.e. it's not clear where the stewards have been inadequate to require this proposal), and I am concerned that without other LTA-combatting abilities in the steward/local administrator toolset, such as viewing deleted revisions, this new group may face challenges coming to informed global blocking decisions. Mz7 (talk) 13:58, 5 August 2020 (UTC) Reply
• Without spilling the w:WP:BEANS, I'd like to point out that some of the permissions listed above have the potential to wreak havoc in a short period of time if used by a rogue or hijacked account, to a substantially greater extent than the permissions currently included in the GS toolkit. (Don't count this as an oppose !vote.) PiRSquared17 (talk) 10:46, 26 August 2020 (UTC) Reply

See Talk:Trust_and_Safety/Case_Review_Committee#Relation_with_WMF_Global_Ban_Policy: Once the commitee is set up, it will handle appeals of WMF bans.--GZWDer (talk) 11:16, 28 July 2020 (UTC) Reply

Hi greetings, I have started a discussion regarding a new proposal on translations at Meta talk:Babylon#Academy for translations. I humbly request you to participate in it. Thank you.--Path slopu (talk) 11:08, 31 July 2020 (UTC) Reply

Info: I have started a Discussion at Talk:Oversight policy-WikiBayer 👤💬 08:51, 3 August 2020 (UTC) Reply

Although this is a problem I've had in the back of my mind for at least a couple of years, I never really considered posting about it here. My question is about Wikimedia's association with Fandom (aka Wikia). According to Wikipedia's article about the company, w:fandom.com#Controversies, "Wikia is not the commercial counterpart to Wikipedia", as stated by Wikimedia staff. So, then it would make sense there is no preferential treatment of Fandom over any other wiki farm out there, by Wikimedia's software MediaWiki. After all, there are plenty of competing platforms out there, not to mention several wikis being hosted by either an individual game publisher or an independent organisation created around an individual wiki, just to name a few examples I know of.

Now the problem I'm having is that there is a built-in wikilinking system — similar to w: prefixes for enwp, or mw: prefixes for MediaWiki.org, which all make complete sense to implement as Wikimedia's own projects — to link to Fandom wikis, which probably stems from the old days when it got founded by Wikimedia staff members. Just to show what my issue is, there is even inconsistency in linkability between two Fandom-owned platforms, fandom.com and gamepedia.com:

• wikia:minecraft:Main Page
• gamepedia:minecraft:Main Page / gpedia:minecraft:Main page / etc.
• wikidot:Main Page
• weirdgloop:runescape:Main Page
• etc...

Now, I don't expect every single commercial wiki platform out there to be incorporated like this into MediaWiki software. But, objectively speaking, there is no reason to seemingly endorse Wikia through implementing these wikilinks to their platform on every single current MediaWiki installation by default, without supporting their competitors as well (as shown in that example, the bigger of the two Minecraft wikis cannot be linked as easily as the . Other than backwards compatibility I see absolutely no reason to keep this wikilinking a possibility in mediawiki software.

My request is to either also support things like gamepedia:, which would then lead you down the rabbit hole of also supporting weirdgloop: for the RuneScape wiki family, and probably a whole list of other smaller wiki farms, or simply remove the support for wikia: wikilinking altogether.

To handle the breaking of existing wikilinks that use this prefix, there are plenty of solutions. Either a hidden category could be made to appear on every page that contains such a prefix, to phase in the deprecation of this prefix. Or an automated porting script could be run on installing a new version of MediaWiki (if the software supports such a thing). Or, the upgrade logs could simply notify anyone upgrading their wiki that this feature will no longer be supported due to Wikimedia's desire to be unbiased.

In my opinion, it's weird that Wikimedia has tried its very best to stay unbiased in every single way, yet keeps supporting this feature that directly associates the software produced by Wikimedia with a company from which Wikimedia has distanced itself. Joeytje50 (talk) 16:57, 5 August 2020 (UTC) Reply

Interwiki links are kept at Interwiki map. There is no preference towards Wikia/Fandom, any site can have an interwiki prefix added if there is a need to link to it. – Ajraddatz (talk) 17:01, 5 August 2020 (UTC) Reply

Or an automated porting script could be run on installing a new version of MediaWiki (if the software supports such a thing I don't think it does. I support the removal of Wikia: though. — Alexis Jazz (talk or ping me) 16:30, 14 August 2020 (UTC) Reply

Max Klemm (WMDE) 09:13, 6 August 2020 (UTC) Reply

Hi! I stumbled upon the Tagalog Wikibooks recently after seeing vandalism on my Twitter timeline that seemed to be from Wikibooks. When I went over to revert the edit, it turns out that that page was not the only issue.

To put it bluntly, the Tagalog Wikibooks has been left completely defenseless, and is now a space crawling with vandalism edits and little to no documentation. In quick summation (and I hope I don't get reverted for having nasty words in here):

• The reading room is a Wikipedia-style Teahouse;
• There's little to no documentation on any policies, guidelines, instructions for reporting users, etc.;
• There's absolutely no active administrators, page movers, etc.;
• There hasn't been a single vandalism revert for weeks;
• WB: doesn't even link to the Wikibooks: prefix;
• There's little to no templates that weren't imported];
• I can't even tell if the article content is correct or not since I only ever read a few of these books in passing;
• The "Teahouse" (actually translates to "coffee room") has not been archived since 2010 and was only archived just now when I did it.;
• There are no user warnings. I can't even warn someone without having to type out a message.
• In terms of vandalism and policies, this requires its own sublist. (Keeping this in to add a bit of joy to this serious-looking post) There's:

• jabs at government officials.
• K-Pop stans.
• Eggplant slapping?
• An extremely terrible Humba recipe, with beer, drinking party fingerfood, and genitals (both male and female) as ingredients.
• An account with a name translating to "flaccid penis" (and boy, oh boy, did they do quite some damage.)
• Someone advertising their Facebook in an attempt to get laid.
• (lit.) "Why did Dona Consolacion not attend mass", with the only content being (lit.) "You're stupid, let's make love"
• A comprehensive transcript of a "FlipTop Battle" (what?)
• among many... many... many many others.

This sight of the sheer amount of "bad" made me gag at first, but I'm now beginning to revert all vandalism changes manually, along with building bits and pieces of the wiki's meta with translated material from the English Wikibooks. Unfortunately, this won't be enough, since there's also issues with page naming and user blocking, and of course, the tangled web of vandalism from multiple users that make it impossible to keep an article without restoring an old version that also removes good edits (and no, Twinkle won't help at all). I can't move pages to fix pages into name conventions, and I also can't report users to administrators. Granted, most warnings would be stale anyway, but it would be better if we were able to curb vandalism by just a little bit.

I'm currently watching the entire wiki right now for changes, as to deter future vandals. However, that won't be enough to keep the wiki at bare minimum quality. So my question(s) now is/are: What do I do now? How can I move pages? Where do I report users? Is there a way to put a giant "Don't Vandalize" banner somewhere? Has anyone even tried to restore a wiki from this state in the history of Wikimedia?

There's no active administrators, page movers, and I'm one of the only 10 editors with an edit in the past few days (along with two vandals). I'm a relatively new user (compared to the upwards of 10 year editors across WMF projects) and I'm not even user about whether this is doable or if a procedure even exists in this case. I may have overstepped my bounds by assuming policies from the English Wikipedia and the English Wikibooks even if they don't exist in the Tagalog Wikibooks, but if being a counter-vandalism editor has taught me anything, it's to be bold if I see something's up.

I would absolutely love to hear anyone's advice on this. I was planning on calling for WikiProject Tambayan Philippines users for fixing it up too, but I wanted to ask here first since I have better chances of getting a response from an administrator or someone with experience in this. Please help me help this wiki back on its feet, since I see it as a very important resource for students like me. Mabuhay! Chlod (say hi!) 16:45, 15 August 2020 (UTC) Reply

You cannot move pages because your account is not autoconfirmed. As to the wiki generally, the case seems hopeless. Ruslik (talk) 20:18, 15 August 2020 (UTC) Reply

First of all, it's great that you decided to be bold and do something to get the wiki back in shape! As to whether it can be done or has been tried before, the answer is definitely yes. Some wikis even were already closed completely for a lack of activity and an abundance of vandalism, but were eventually reopened (one example is ba:b:). Here it's even easier as the wiki is not closed. - As Ruslik says, you can't move pages at the moment, but will be able to in 4 days. If you need something done that can only be done by administrators, you can request it on SRM, then stewards or global sysops will help you. You can also become an admin yourself, if that helps, by making a local RFA - since there is no community, that will be basically an announcement - and requesting the rights on SRP. --MF-W 22:13, 15 August 2020 (UTC) Reply

@MF-Warburg: I see. Thanks for the advice! Chlod (say hi!) 00:00, 16 August 2020 (UTC) Reply

Please go on Requests for new languages and change to created the Wikipedia Ladin on the approved section. Thank you in advance!!! --5.170.193.10 20:01, 19 August 2020 (UTC) Reply

After making a donation, I was redirected to https://thankyou.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thank_You/en?country=XX with "XX" replaced by my country code. This should have been https://thankyou.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thank_You. If it helps to debug this: English is not the primary language of country XX. --nBarto (talk) 08:44, 25 August 2020 (UTC) Reply

@NBarto: Thanks for reporting this. The fundraising team recently moved our thank you pages, and an oversight meant that some of them were not working for a few hours after the move. This has been fixed now. Peter Coombe (Wikimedia Foundation) (talk) 11:12, 26 August 2020 (UTC) Reply

Per this Reddit thread, this is written in an entirely backwards way by someone who is not a speaker and is actively doing the language and community harm. This is a vanity project for a single person who is damaging the Wikimedia movement and the Scots community. —Justin (koavf) ❤T☮C☺M☯ 18:30, 25 August 2020 (UTC) Reply

"Vanity project" is maybe a little misleading. Say what you will, but this user clearly is acting in good faith; it'd be less alarming if the problem was simply one villain who needs to get banned. Just... a high-volume, low-quality contributor can be the most dangerous kind in their own way. In my opinion, this is not that user's fault, but rather a system failure - per this thread, there just aren't any Scots speakers on Scots Wikipedia. Thus there weren't any sanity checks.

The Wikimedia Foundation spends its cash extraordinary badly on things like consultants for brand refurbishes, but one way that it could genuinely and cheaply help out would be just to hire some paid admin / experts in controversial and low-traffic wikis. (Controversial example: Croatian Wikipedia. Low traffic: Scots.) I doubt they'd even have to pay much, go find recently graduated college students and retirees and the like. If we want to prevent this from happening again, take the million dollars for branding slides and hire 20 WMF advisors for various low-traffic Wikis instead. SnowFire (talk) 19:17, 25 August 2020 (UTC) Reply

Currently hosting an AMA about this. –MJL ‐Talk‐ ^☖ 20:27, 25 August 2020 (UTC) Reply

It may or may not be a vanity project; what is clear is that it is written by someone with a poor command of the Scots language/dialect, and is who is doing incredible damage to an aspect of cultural patrimony that has been consistently devalued and denigrated by its colonizer culture (England). I hope that a project to address this on a mass scale will be undertaken by actual Scots speakers. As it stands, this "scots" wikipedia is a bastardization of the Scots language/dialect which serves only as a smear on it.--Newmila (talk) 20:54, 25 August 2020 (UTC) Reply

Ironically, it seems to be the exact opposite of damaging cultural patrimony for someone of Scottish descent who has otherwise been assimilated into English/American culture to have researched and written hundreds of encyclopedic articles in (their albeit limited understanding of) the language/dialect. – Ajraddatz (talk) 21:25, 25 August 2020 (UTC) Reply

I've stated it on sco.wiki already, but I'll pick it up here too, the issue seems to be that reddit users are finding the quality of the wikipedia to be poor (which it is), however, outside of the Scots dictionary, there really isn't much to dictate how to translate into Scots in terms of grammar. As the language is in the minority what the project needs is those with native tongue to help out and write some style guides to make it easier. I find the AMA to be probably a bad idea. Best Wishes, Lee Vilenski ^{(talk • contribs)} 21:36, 25 August 2020 (UTC) Reply

Strong agree on the AMA, and I think that's a good way forward. Even if native speakers don't have the time to fix/write new content themselves, they could contribute to style guides and grammar resources (maybe they even know of some online already that could be adapted?) – Ajraddatz (talk) 21:38, 25 August 2020 (UTC) Reply

Sorry, but that's nonsense. Giving people who don't speak a language a STYLE GUIDE won't make them competent translators. If the original critique is correct, the entire Scots wiki need burned to the ground, as it is doing more harm than good. 99.126.50.142 21:49, 25 August 2020 (UTC) Reply

I've reached out to a few people & organizations who could help out with the cleanup project. Which venue should be used to discuss it, as well as how to proceed forward in general? This thread, or somewhere on scowiki? Enterprisey (talk) 21:43, 25 August 2020 (UTC) Reply

I think it is a bit of a stretch to suggest that scowiki is damaging to the Scottish community, as mentioned by some. --IWI (talk) 21:47, 25 August 2020 (UTC) Reply

Can't necessarily comment on the quality of language, as I am not familiar. Is there a standardised form of Scots? --IWI (talk) 21:49, 25 August 2020 (UTC) Reply

There are a great many dialects and not much standardization. Also, someone started a request for comments on this issue, which might be a good place for discussion. RexSueciae (talk) 21:56, 25 August 2020 (UTC) Reply

RexSueciae, an RFC this soon is going to be counter productive. We need to wait for Reddit to move on, then start a discussion on scowiki about this user's edits in particular, and lastly, start a discussion on meta about the future of scowiki in general. --Puzzledvegetable (talk) 22:25, 25 August 2020 (UTC) Reply

I'm worried of what this means as a systematic failure. Who knows what other low-traffic wikis might be facing similar issues that no one is aware of. - BirdCities (talk) 22:05, 25 August 2020 (UTC) Reply

In licht o the days revelations, a group haes been setup tae look at editathons an sic (search Scots wikipedia editors on Facebook). Juist tae note an aa, the editor wis anely 12 when they startit an wis in guid faith (aye, wider stannars of the sco.wiki ar forbye lackin). Haen had a leuk at som o the wirk he wis daen, a lot wis admin/categerie type chynges, sae the notion that ilka eedit they hae iver touched is wrang is owerblown. 2A02:C7F:8ECF:9900:619D:688D:F8AA:B8CC 22:33, 25 August 2020 (UTC) Reply

I already found one; the user under scrutiny here had listed themselves as having Level 1 knowledge of Pitkern/Norfuk, and is also an admin and contributor for the Pitkern Wikipedia. I haven't been active on Wikipedia in a long while, not sure how to flag this to the Pitcairn Wikipedians' attention. Their Village Pump seems pretty sparsely used, any ideas? Kleptosquirrel (talk) 22:41, 25 August 2020 (UTC) Reply

The Pitkern Wikipedia as a whole is extremely inactive, judging by RecentChanges. I'm not sure whether there are even any active Wikimedians with good knowledge of the language, since the language has only ~400 native speakers (plus a low number of L2 speakers, probably). (Edit: AG only has ~200 mainspace edits on pihwiki. Most of their edits were to templates. So it seems like not a big deal, IMO.) PiRSquared17 (talk) 22:46, 25 August 2020 (UTC) Reply

Shuid Pitkern no be put unner a different topic? E'en if a related issue. 2A02:C7F:8ECF:9900:619D:688D:F8AA:B8CC 23:16, 25 August 2020 (UTC) Reply

• Comment If the claims are true then the editor really should be told to stop and most of his creations completly rewritten. As for other small languages, yes I think this is a major systematic issue. If a language has very few speakers there is likely going to be very very very few people creating and editing the languages Wikipedia.*Treker (talk) 23:30, 25 August 2020 (UTC) Reply
  • Not really the same issue. "Few people editing" is a known issue and expected for certain obscure languages with few fluent speakers. That's okay; there is no deadline, it will just be a small and focused Wikipedia then. This specific issue in Scots Wikipedia is no active editors and a flawed but high-volume editor creating / editing a lot of problematic content. The first case creates a small Wikipedia with 95% good content; the Scots Wikipedia case creates a somewhat larger Wikipedia but with 95% bad content. I do think there is a threat of this happening on other Wikipedia editions, and should be investigated, but it's definitely not the same thing as just vanilla low editor activity, which is potentially harmless. SnowFire (talk) 23:40, 25 August 2020 (UTC) Reply
    • Yes you are completly right, I should have been more clear. What I thought of was more that this person was allowed to do this for so many years because he seems to have been the sole contributor, there was no one else there to notice all the issues.*Treker (talk) 23:47, 25 August 2020 (UTC) Reply
• I sometimes (a fair amount) IP edit English Wikipedia, but I found the allegations in memes on social media. I've seen an article or two on Scots Wikipedia before, and thought it was a restricted issue because I know there are many editors in Scotland and assumed they'd be working on getting it fixed. I find that anyone from the UK would be able to recognise the language isn't actually Scots, and is barely passable as Scots English - the vast differences in dialects, with their own vocabulary and grammar, even across England raises a red flag as to how much of the language used on Scots Wikipedia is Standard English in a Scottish Accent. Heck, some of it clearly uses American English grammar! It's defiling a whole language, and I can't honestly believe someone who does not speak Scots thought they could be helping. It's unfortunate they're getting bashed on here and (according to their user page) doxxed, but this is a serious issue. I wouldn't be surprised if a Scots Language Academy or the SLC wanted to get involved. The Scots Wikipedia is useless at best (and most viewed by people in America) and a genuine threat to the actual language at worst, and for the sake of that language should be nuked. 31.52.196.78 01:59, 26 August 2020 (UTC) Reply
• It's very difficult to maintain Wikipedia language editions for languages which are subject of displacement by higher prestige languages. It would have been better to start with Wiktionary or Wikisource, but here we are. When making sweeping statements about right or wrong for such a language, it would help if commenters specified what norm of the language they're referring to: for instance, what body of literature, what codified grammar, what speaking samples of what sub-population. It's extremely difficult for me to follow such discussions about right and wrong language even for my grandmothers' "dialects" (Paduan and Milanese, supposedly represented by vec.wikipedia.org and lmo.wikipedia.org), let alone languages for which I've never browsed a grammar book or dictionary. Nemo 05:36, 26 August 2020 (UTC) Reply

Please rename ten.wikipedia.org because this code is occupied by Tama (Q3832969). 217.117.125.72 12:42, 26 August 2020 (UTC) Reply

Cannot be done here. Use phabricator: — billinghurst sDrewth 13:16, 26 August 2020 (UTC) Reply

@Billinghurst: or anybody else, please, create task. 217.117.125.72 13:31, 26 August 2020 (UTC) Reply

Not done If you want it done, please do it yourself. — billinghurst sDrewth 13:44, 26 August 2020 (UTC) Reply

@Billinghurst: I don’t want register anywhere. 217.117.125.72 15:14, 26 August 2020 (UTC) Reply

Trizek (WMF) (talk) 13:48, 26 August 2020 (UTC) Reply

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