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I'm on Wikibreak - see above edit for reason why (but most of you are great - keep up the good work!)--Kotniski (talk) 23:46, 23 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

The Signpost: 23 January 2012

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Illegitimi non carborundum

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Hope you return after a nice break. Blueboar (talk) 02:52, 27 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]


Regarding http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Nat_Turner%27s_slave_rebellion&diff=next&oldid=466566739 where you stated "(it's "hanged" in this meaning, isn't it? unless it's a GB/US difference)". No, it's a literacy/illiteracy difference. It IS hanged, NOT hung. "(Changed "hanged" to "hung">>> it was a grammer mistake)". Note the user's spelling of "grammer". Oddly, both in UK AND US it's ACTUALLY spelt "grammar". I wouldn't put TOO much stock into someone correcting "grammer"...until they learn to SPELL properly. "Hung" was likely meant to be a double-entendre. "Hanged" rather than "hung" is not a grammer (sic) mistake. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 98.242.78.142 (talk) 19:59, 25 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Notice concerning an action at ArbCom

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A request has been filed for the Arbitration Committee to look at long-term issues with editing in the Article Titles and MOS areas at Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case#Article titles/MOS. I have added your name as a party, since it is clear that you have been involved at pages that are within the scope of the action.

Hoping all is well with you, K.

NoeticaTea? 05:24, 28 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

china pla sai 108.67.10.231 (talk) 05:29, 20 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Article titles and capitalisation case

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An arbitration case involving you has been opened, and is located at Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Article titles and capitalisation. Evidence that you wish the Arbitrators to consider should be added to the evidence sub-page, at Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Article titles and capitalisation/Evidence. Please add your evidence by February 12, 2012, which is when the evidence phase closes. You can contribute to the case workshop sub-page, Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Article titles and capitalisation/Workshop. For a guide to the arbitration process, see Wikipedia:Arbitration/Guide to arbitration. For the Arbitration Committee, Alexandr Dmitri (talk) 15:02, 29 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

The Signpost: 30 January 2012

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WP Poland in the Signpost

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The WikiProject Report would like to focus on WikiProject Poland for a Signpost article. This is an excellent opportunity to draw attention to your efforts and attract new members to the project. Would you be willing to participate in an interview? If so, here are the questions for the interview. Just add your response below each question and feel free to skip any questions that you don't feel comfortable answering. Multiple editors will have an opportunity to respond to the interview questions. If you know anyone else who would like to participate in the interview, please share this with them. Have a great day. -Mabeenot (talk) 08:28, 6 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Ping. The interviews are due soon! --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| talk to me 19:41, 11 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Hope to see you back soon!

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I completely agree with Blueboar above. Also, on behalf of WP:POLAND, please accept our wishes of good health. I hope you come back; my suggestion is to avoid the areas that have proven stressful, and enjoy yourself with edits elsewhere - for example, creating Poland-related articles, or helping with our backlogs, from B-class reviews to cleanup tags. --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| talk to me 18:54, 6 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]

The Purple Heart Barnstar
For getting wiki-wounded in the course of duty. We hope you'll come back soon! Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| talk to me 18:56, 6 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]

The Signpost: 06 February 2012

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The Signpost: 13 February 2012

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The Signpost: 20 February 2012

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The Signpost: 27 February 2012

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Mediation Cabal: Request for participation

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Dear Kotniski: Hello. This is just to let you know that you've been mentioned in the following request at the Mediation Cabal, which is a Wikipedia dispute resolution initiative that resolves disputes by informal mediation.

The request can be found at Wikipedia:Mediation Cabal/Cases/27 February 2012/Wikipedia:Verifiability.

Just so you know, it is entirely your choice whether or not you participate. If you wish to do so, and we'll see what we can do about getting this sorted out. At MedCab we aim to help all involved parties reach a solution and hope you will join in this effort.

If you have any questions relating to this or any other issue needing mediation, you can ask on the case talk page, the MedCab talk page, or you can ask the mediator, Mr. Stradivarius, at their talk page. MedcabBot (talk) 14:10, 1 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]

The Signpost: 05 March 2012

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History of Polish

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Would you please quote sources confirming the existence old Silesian language? According to my knowledge there existed a continuum of languages between Polish and Czech. The today Silesian dialect is conserved old Polish/Czech mixed with German vocabulary. Xx236 (talk) 13:37, 14 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]

The Signpost: 12 March 2012

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The Signpost: 19 March 2012

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Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Article titles and capitalisation closed

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An arbitration case regarding article titles and capitalisation has now closed and the final decision is viewable at the link above. The following remedies have been enacted:

  1. All parties are reminded to avoid personalizing disputes concerning the Manual of Style, the article titles policy ('WP:TITLE'), and similar policy and guideline pages, and to work collegiately towards a workable consensus. In particular, a rapid cycle of editing these pages to reflect one's viewpoint, then discussing the changes is disruptive and should be avoided. Instead, parties are encouraged to establish consensus on the talk page first, and then make the changes.
  2. Pmanderson is indefinitely prohibited from engaging in discussions and edits relating to the Manual of Style or policy about article titles.
  3. Standard discretionary sanctions are authorized for all pages related to the English Wikipedia Manual of Style and article titles policy, broadly construed.
  4. Born2cycle is warned that his contributions to discussion must reflect a better receptiveness to compromise and a higher tolerance for the views of other editors.

For the Arbitration Committee, Alexandr Dmitri (talk) 23:00, 23 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]

The Signpost: 26 March 2012

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The Signpost: 02 April 2012

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A question for you

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Still hoping you'll come back, and in the meantime, there is a question to which you perhaps would know the answer here. --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| talk to me 14:05, 3 April 2012 (UTC)[reply]

You were awesome

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You were awesome. Probably still are, in your riddance...

The Signpost: 09 April 2012

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The Signpost: 16 April 2012

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MOS:CAPS

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Regarding Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Capital letters/Archive 6#Proper names section I would like a place name section. Recently meridians have been separated by few users from the WP style place naming and have been downcased, even by citing MOS:CAPS, which seems wrong. A place name section could fix that. HTML2011 (talk) 02:12, 19 April 2012 (UTC)[reply]

The Signpost: 23 April 2012

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The Signpost: 30 April 2012

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The Signpost: 07 May 2012

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The Signpost: 14 May 2012

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The Signpost: 21 May 2012

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The Signpost: 28 May 2012

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The Signpost: 04 June 2012

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The Signpost: 11 June 2012

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The Signpost: 18 June 2012

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The Signpost: 25 June 2012

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Requested move of Côte d'Ivoire

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There is currently a discussion on moving the article Côte d'Ivoire to Ivory Coast. You are being notified since you participated in a previous discussion on this topic. Please join the discussion here if you are interested. TDL (talk) 02:32, 27 June 2012 (UTC)[reply]

The Signpost: 02 July 2012

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The Signpost: 09 July 2012

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  • Special report: Reforming the education programs: lessons from Cairo
    Wikipedia has a long history of collaborating with educational institutions. The Schools and universities program — international and in many languages, but dominated by US institutions — started in 2003 and evolved case by case with little system. However, that changed in 2009 as Wikimedia embarked on its formal strategic process, and outreach in higher education came to be seen in terms of achieving explicit goals — especially that of increasing editor participation.
  • News and notes: Russian Wikipedia blackout; WMF tools; Wikitravel proposal revisited
    The Russian Wikipedia has been blacked out for 24 hours, ending 20:00 UTC Tuesday, as a protest against Russian State Duma Bill 89417-6, a bill currently before the Duma (the Russian parliament). Visitors to the Russian Wikipedia are confronted by the sign above in protest at a draconian internet censorship bill before the Duma. The Russian word for Wikipedia is crossed out in this banner, and the text says: "Imagine a world without free knowledge. The State Duma is currently conducting the second reading of a bill to amend the "Law on Information", which has the potential to lead to the creation of extra-judicial censorship of the Internet in Russia, including the closure of access to the Russian Wikipedia. Today, the Wikipedia community protests against censorship as a threat to free knowledge that is open to all mankind. We ask that you oppose this bill."
  • WikiProject report: Summer sports series: WikiProject Football
    This week, we spent some time with WikiProject Football, which focuses on the sport also known as association football or soccer. WikiProject Football is by far the largest sport project and one of the most active projects on Wikipedia in terms of the number of articles covered, edits to articles, and talk page watchers.
  • Featured content: Keeps on chuggin'
    Eight featured articles were promoted this week: ... Aries (constellation) by Keilana. Aries the Ram (symbol ♈) is one of the constellations of the Zodiac and one of 88 currently recognised constellations. Its area is 441 square degrees (1.1% of the celestial sphere). Although fairly dim, with only three bright stars, it is home to several deep-sky objects.
  • Arbitration report: Three requests for arbitration
    No cases were closed or opened, leaving the number of open cases at three. ... The case concerns alleged misconduct with regards to aggressive responses and harassment by Fæ toward users who question his actions.
  • Technology report: Optimism over LastModified and MoodBar, but change in clock time causes downtime
    The results from last month's trial of the LastModified extension were published this week on the Wikimedia blog. The first analyses have indicated a significant positive impact, suggesting that the extension – which makes the time since a page's last edit much more prominent in the interface – could eventually find its way onto Wikimedia wikis.

The Signpost: 16 July 2012

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  • Special report: Chapters Association mired in controversy over new chair
    User:Fæ was elected as the inaugural chair of the new Wikimedia Chapters Association, despite the controversies that have surrounded Fæ on the English Wikipedia and Commons, most recently aired in a live case before the Arbitration Committee. This is in marked contrast with unexciting movement, during the Wikimania meeting, on the most important issues facing the establishment of the association.
  • News and notes: WMF enacts reforms at Wikimania; main page redesign; 4 millionth article milestone
    During Wikimania (July 12-15), the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) board finalized and enacted long-discussed reforms of the movement's financial structures, and considered procedures for creating new ways for Wikimedians to organize themselves into offline communities. The board moved on the controversial image filter issue, approved the 2012–13 annual plan, and issued a statement on the wikitravel proposal. It also appointed the two new chapter-selected trustees and elected the four office-bearers.
  • WikiProject report: Summer sports series: French WikiProject Cycling
    With the Tour de France in its final week, we traveled to the French Wikipedia for a chat with Projet Cyclisme (WikiProject Cycling). The French Wikipedia places a greater emphasis on portals than the English Wikipedia, which explains why WikiProject Cycling and its discussion page are actually extensions of the Cycling Portal. The project is home to two Article de Qualité (equivalent to Featured Articles) and eight Bon Article (Good Articles), primarily biographies of cyclists.
  • Discussion report: Discussion reports and miscellaneous articulations
    A brief overview of the current discussions on the English Wikipedia, including one regarding the purpose of the Community Portal. Started by Maryana, a Wikimedia Foundation employee, is this page for new users to be educated about the community, or is it for experienced users to find updates about the community?
  • Wikimania: Young chapter shows experience beyond its years
    Nearly 1400 Wikimedians and others from 87 countries descended on the capital of the United States, Washington, D.C., for Wikimania 2012. Even with an unprecedented number (1400) of conference attendees — the previous two Wikimanias, held in Gdańsk (Poland) and Haifa (Israel), were attended by fewer than 1100 people combined – Wikimania 2012 was a complete success, with attendees' reaction to the conference coming out as ecstatic and laudatory.
  • Featured content: Taking flight
    Eight featured articles were promoted this week, including Paul McCartney by GabeMc. McCartney (born 1942) is an English musician, singer, songwriter and composer. He gained worldwide fame as a member of the Beatles, and his collaboration with John Lennon is highly celebrated. After the band's break-up he pursued a solo career and formed the band Wings. McCartney has been described by Guinness World Records as the "most successful composer and recording artist of all time", and his song "Yesterday" has been covered more than any other song in history.
  • Technology report: Tech talks at Wikimania amid news of a mixed June
    As Wikimania, the annual conference targeted at Wikimedians and often well attended by those with a technical slant, draws to a close, comments have already begun to come in from attendees regarding the many tech-related features of the conference.
  • Arbitration report: Fæ faces site-ban, proposed decisions posted
    No cases were closed or opened, leaving the number of open cases at three. A new remedy in the Fæ case calls for him to be indefinitely banned from the site after his attempts to solicit intervention from the Foundation, claiming that publicly listing all his accounts would be too onerous due to "ongoing security risks." He was further criticised for attempting to dodge good-faith concerns; the committee believes that if Fæ's claims are valid then he must be removed from the community.

Discussion at Wikipedia_talk:Naming_conventions_(Vietnamese)#RfC_on_spelling

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You are invited to join the discussion at Wikipedia_talk:Naming_conventions_(Vietnamese)#RfC_on_spelling. KarlB (talk) 13:49, 22 July 2012 (UTC)[reply]

The Signpost: 23 July 2012

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  • Paid editing: Does Wikipedia pay? The skeptic: Orange Mike
    Does Wikipedia pay? is an ongoing Signpost series seeking to illuminate paid editing, paid advocacy, for-profit Wikipedia consultants, editing public relations professionals, conflict of interest guidelines in practice, and the Wikipedians who work on these issues... by speaking openly with the people involved.
  • From the editor: Signpost developments
    The Signpost's goal is to provide readers with essential information about the Wikimedia movement and the English Wikipedia – both of which have become large and extremely complex institutions that require timely, balanced and in-depth coverage.
  • News and notes: Chapter head speaks about the aftermath of Russian Wikipedia shutdown
    Two weeks ago the Signpost reported that the Russian Wikipedia had just begun a 24-hour blackout in protest at a bill that was before the Russian parliament that proposed mechanisms to block IP addresses and DNS records. The protest, implemented after on-wiki consensus was reached during the preceding days, concerned the potential of the amendment to the information law to allow extra-judicial censorship of the internet in Russia, including the closure of access to the Russian Wikipedia. Among the questions now are how effective the blackout was and where we go from here in terms of internet freedom in one of the world's biggest and most influential countries.
  • WikiProject report: Summer sports series: WikiProject Olympics
    With the 2012 Summer Olympic Games beginning this weekend in London, we decided to catch up with the chaps at WikiProject Olympics. The last time we interviewed WikiProject Olympics was in February 2010 when the project was gearing up for the Winter Olympics in Vancouver. We wanted to know how the project has grown since then and whether preparing for a Summer Olympics was more grueling.
  • Op-ed: The future of PR on Wikipedia
    There has never been a better time to improve the behavior of marketing professionals on Wikipedia. For the first time we're seeing self-imposed statements of ethics. Professional PR bodies around the globe have supported the Chartered Institute of Public Relations (CIPR) guidance for ethical Wikipedia engagement. Although their tone is different, CREWE and the PRSA have brought more attention to the issues. Awareness among PR professionals is rising. So are the number of paid editing operations sprouting up and the opportunity for dialogue.
  • Featured content: When is an island not an island?
    One featured article was promoted this week, Melville Island. A small peninsula in the Canadian province of Nova Scotia, it was discovered by Europeans in the 1600s and initially used for storehouses. The land was purchased by the British and used to hold prisoners of war, then to receive escaped slaves from the United States. After being used as a place of quarantine and later a recruitment centre, the land was granted to Canada in 1907 and used to house prisoners of war. It is now home to the clubhouse and marina of the Armdale Yacht Club.

The Signpost: 30 July 2012

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  • WikiProject report: Summer sports series: WikiProject Horse Racing
    We continue our Summer Sports Series this week with WikiProject Horse Racing. Started in November 2005, the project has grown to include nearly 8,000 articles maintained by 34 active members. There are 10 Featured Articles and 19 Good Articles included in the project's scope. In addition to preparing articles for GA and FA status, the project attempts to create requested articles and locate requested images. We interviewed Redrose64, Montanabw, Tigerboy1966, Ealdgyth, and Cuddy Wifter.
  • Featured content: One of a kind
    Eight new featured articles, five new featured lists, and eight new featured pictures. The highlights include a new featured picture of Frank Sinatra, created by William P. Gottlieb and nominated by Tomer T. Sinatra (1915–98) was a highly successful American singer and film actor whose career spanned 60 years. This image dates from around 1947.
  • Arbitration report: No pending or open arbitration cases
    Arbitrator Kirill Lokshin proposed a motion requiring the alteration of any instances of an editor's previous username in arbitration decisions to reflect their name changes. The Devil's Advocate has initiated an amendment request for the controversial Race and intelligence case.

The Signpost: 06 August 2012

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  • Op-ed: The Athena Project: being bold
    At this year's Wikimania, I [Brandon Harris] gave a talk entitled The Athena Project: Wikipedia in 2015. The talk broadly outlined several ideas the foundation is exploring for planned features, user interface changes, and workflow improvements. We expect that many of these changes will be welcomed, while others will be controversial. During the question-and-answer period, I was asked whether people should think of Athena as a skin, a project, or something else. I responded, "You should think of Athena as a kick in the head" – because that's exactly what it's supposed to be: a radical and bold re-examination of some of our sacred cows when it comes to the interface.
  • News and notes: FDC portal launched
    On August 1, the Funds Dissemination Committee (FDC) portal was launched on Meta. The FDC will implement the Wikimedia movement's new grant-orientated finance structure in accordance with the WMF board's recent resolutions. As a volunteer committee, the FDC will make recommendations to the WMF board on a $11.4 million budget for 2012–13.
  • Arbitration report: No pending or open arbitration cases
    Arbitrator Kirill Lokshin proposed a motion for a procedure on the alteration of an editor's previous username(s) in arbitration decisions to reflect their name change(s). ... The Devil's Advocate initiated an amendment request for the controversial Race and intelligence case.
  • Featured content: Casliber's words take root
    This week the Signpost interviews Casliber, an editor who has written or contributed significantly to a startling 69 featured articles. We learn what makes him tick, why he edits, and why he can write on everything from vampires to dinosaurs, birds to plants. He also gives some advice to budding featured article writers.
  • Technology report: Wikidata nears first deployment but wikis go down in fibre cut calamity
    The Wikimedia Foundation's engineering report for July 2012 was published this week on the Wikimedia Techblog and on the MediaWiki wiki, giving an overview of all Foundation-sponsored technical operations in that month (as well as brief coverage of progress on Wikimedia Deutschland's Wikidata project). ... At least one fibre-optic cable was damaged at the WMF's Tampa site on August 6, leading to a sharp downwards spike in traffic lasting over an hour and almost three hours of disruption for readers around the globe.
  • WikiProject report: Summer sports series: WikiProject Martial Arts
    This week, we spent some time with WikiProject Martial Arts. Since April 2004, the project has been the hub for discussion and improvement of martial arts articles, including all disciplines and national origins. The project maintains a variety of conventions for handling the names and descriptions of Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, Indian, Sikh, Filipino, Okinawan, and hybrid martial arts. WikiProject Martial Arts has spawned or absorbed several subprojects focusing on boxing, kickboxing, sumo, and mixed martial arts.

The Signpost: 13 August 2012

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  • Op-ed: Small Wikipedias' burden
    In a certain way, writing Wikipedia is the same everywhere, in every language or culture. You have to stick to the facts, aiming for the most objective way of describing them, including everything relevant and leaving out all the everyday trivia that is not really necessary to understand the context. You have to use critical thinking, trying to be independent of your own preferences and biases. To some effect, that's all there is to it. Naturally, Wikipedians have their biases, some of which can never be cured. Most Wikipedians tend to like encyclopedias; but millions of people in the world don't share that bias, and we represent them rather poorly. I'm also quite sure that an overwhelming majority of Wikipedia co-authors are literate. Again, that's not true for everyone in this world. Yet we have other, less noticeable but barely less fundamental biases.
  • News and notes: Bangla-language survey suggests the challenges for small Wikipedias
    The Bangla language, also known as Bengali, is spoken by some 200 million people in Bangladesh and India. The Bangla Wikipedia has a very small active community of about ten to fifteen very active editors, with another 35–40 as less active editors. The project faces particular challenges in being a small Wikipedia, and Dhaka-based WMF community fellow User:Tanvir Rahman is working to understand these challenges and to develop strategies that can improve small wikis that have strong potential to expand their editing communities.
  • Featured content: On the road again
    Six featured articles were promoted this week, including Business US Highway 41, which was a state trunkline highway that served as a business loop in Marquette in the US state of Michigan.
  • Technology report: "Phabricating" a serious alternative to Gerrit
    Three weeks into a month-long evaluation of code review tool Gerrit, a serious alternative has finally gained traction in the review process: Facebook-developed but now independently operated Phabricator and its sister command-line tool Arcanist.
  • WikiProject report: Dispute Resolution
    This week, we interviewed the lively bunch at WikiProject Dispute Resolution. Started in November 2011 to study and discuss improvements to Wikipedia's resources for resolving disputes between editors, the young project has supplemented dispute resolution efforts currently handled at the Dispute Resolution Noticeboard, Mediation Committee, and other venues. Over 40 editors have signed up to provide feedback, a variety of ideas have been proposed, and a manual for dispute resolution has been created.

The Signpost: 20 August 2012

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  • Op-ed: Wikimedians are rightfully wary
    The Wikimedia Foundation sometimes proposes new features that receive substantive criticism from Wikimedians, yet those criticisms may be dismissed on the basis that people are resistant to change—there's an unjustified view that the wikis have been overrun by vested contributors who hate all change. That view misses a lot of key details and insight because there are good reasons that Wikimedians are suspicious of features development, given past and present development of bad software, growing ties with the problematic Wikia, and a growing belief that it is acceptable to experiment on users.
  • News and notes: Core content competition in full swing; Wikinews fork taken offline
    The Core Contest is a month-long competition among editors to improve Wikipedia's most important "core" articles—especially those that are in a relatively poor state. Core articles, such as Music, Computer, and Philosophy, tend to lie in the trunk of the tree of knowledge; by analogy, featured-and good-article processes generally attract more specialist topics out on the branches.
  • In the news: American judges on citing Wikipedia
    In the Utah Court of Appeals this week, the majority opinion in Fire Insurance Exchange v. Robert Allen Oltmanns and Brady Blackner relied on Wikipedia for the basic premise of their legal opinion, and included a concurring opinion devoted solely to the issue of citing Wikipedia in a legal opinion.
  • Featured content: Enough for a week – but I'm damned if I see how the helican.
    Thirteen featured articles were promoted this week, including pelicans, which are a genus of large water birds comprising the family Pelecanidae, characterised by a long beak and large throat-pouch. They have a fossil record dating back at least 30 million years and are most closely related to the Shoebill and Hammerkop. These fish-feeders have a patchy relationship with humans: the birds are sometimes persecuted and sometimes feature in mythology.
  • Technology report: Lua onto test2wiki and news of a convention-al extension
    New embeddable scripting ("template replacement") language Lua received considerable scrutiny this week when it began its long road to widespread deployment, landing on the test2wiki test site on Wednesday (wikitech-l mailing list). ... the fourth in our series profiling participants in this year's Google Summer of Code (GSoC) programme.
  • WikiProject report: Land of Calm and Contrast: Korea
    This week, we spent some time with WikiProject Korea. Started in September 2006, WikiProject Korea covers the history and culture of the Korean people, including both countries that currently occupy the Korean peninsula. This task has proven difficult with North Koreans notably absent from the Wikipedia community due to tight control over access to external media. The project is home to over 16,000 pages, including 15 pieces of Featured material and 66 Good and A-class Articles.

Moving Burma to Myanmar - ongoing poll

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This is to let you know that an ongoing poll is taking place to move Burma to Myanmar. I know this happened just recently but no administrator would close these frequent rm's down, so here we go again. This note is going out to wikipedia members who have participated in Burma/Myanmar name changing polls in the past. It does not include banned members nor those with only ip addresses. Thank you. Fyunck(click) (talk) 04:58, 22 August 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Is your wikibreak nearing its end?

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We constantly miss you. Come back to us! --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 17:10, 23 August 2012 (UTC)[reply]

The Signpost: 27 August 2012

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  • News and notes: Tough journey for new travel guide
    Wikimedia editors have been debating a community proposal for the adoption of a new project to host free travel-guide content. The debate reached a new stage when a three-month request for comment on Meta came to an end, with a decision to set up the first new type of Wikimedia project in half a decade. The original proposal for the travel guide unfolded during April on Meta and the Wikimedia-l mailing lists, centring around the wish of volunteer contributors to the WikiTravel project to work in a non-commercial environment.
  • Technology report: Just how bad is the code review backlog?
    Developers were left one step closer to an understanding of the code review outlook this week after the creation of a graph plotting "number changesets awaiting review" over time. The chart, which also shows the number of new changesets created on a daily basis, reveals a peak in the number of unreviewed changesets in mid-July, followed by a short drop. The current figure stands at approximately 219 unreviewed changesets.
  • Featured content: Wikipedia rivals The New Yorker: Mark Arsten
    This week the Signpost interviews Mark Arsten, who has written or contributed significantly to ten featured articles; most have related to new religious movements, and some have touched on other controversial or quirky topics. Mark gives us a rundown on how he keeps neutral and what drives him to write featured content; he also gives some hints for aspiring writers.
  • WikiProject report: From sonic screwdrivers to jelly babies: Doctor Who
    This week, we hopped in a little blue box with a batch of companions from WikiProject Doctor Who. Started in April 2005, the project has grown to include about 4,000 pages about the world's longest-running science fiction television show, its spinoffs, and various related material. The project is the parent of the Torchwood Taskforce and a child of WikiProject British TV and WikiProject Science Fiction. With new Doctor Who episodes airing this week and a 50th anniversary celebration around the corner, we thought now would be a good time to inquire about the famed Time Lord.

The Signpost: 03 September 2012

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  • News and notes: World's largest photo competition kicks off; WMF legal fees proposal
    Some of Wikimedia's most valuable photographs have been shot and uploaded under free licenses as a direct result of the annual Wiki Loves Monuments (WLM) event each September. Last year, the project was conducted on a European level, resulting in the submission of an extraordinary 168,208 free images of cultural heritage sites ("monuments") from 18 countries, making it the world's largest photographic competition. Organising the 2012 event—which has just opened and will run for the full month of September—has required input from chapters and volunteers in 35 countries.
  • Technology report: Time for a MediaWiki Foundation?
    Developers are currently discussing the possibility of a MediaWiki Foundation to oversee those aspects of MediaWiki development that relate to non-Wikimedia wikis. The proposal was generated after a discussion on the wikitech-l mailing list about generalising Wikimedia's CentralAuth system.
  • Featured content: Wikipedia's Seven Days of Terror
    Five featured pictures were promoted this week, including a video explaining the recent landing of the Curiosity rover on Mars. NASA called the final minutes of the complicated landing procedure "the seven minutes of terror".
  • Op-ed: Dispute resolution – where we're at, what we're doing well, and what needs fixing
    Since May 2012 I've been a Wikimedia Foundation community fellow with the task of researching and improving dispute resolution on English Wikipedia. Surveying members of the community has revealed much about their thoughts on and experiences with dispute resolution. I've analysed processes to determine their use and effectiveness, and have presented ideas that I hope will improve the future of dispute resolution.

The Signpost: 10 September 2012

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  • From the editor: Signpost adapts as news consumption changes
    Thanks to the initiative of Yuvi Panda and Notnarayan, the Signpost now has an Android app, free for download on Google Play. ... but would readers be interested in an iOS app for Apple devices?
  • Op-ed: Fixing Wikipedia's help pages one key to editor retention
    Much like article content, the English Wikipedia's help pages have grown organically over the years. Although this has produced a great deal of useful documentation, with time many of the pages have become poorly maintained or have grown overwhelmingly complicated.
  • WikiProject report: WikiProject Fungi
    After a week's hiatus, the WikiProject Report returns with an interview featuring WikiProject Fungi. Started in March 2006, the project has grown to include over 9,000 pages, including 47 Featured Articles and 176 Good Articles. The project maintains a list of high priority missing articles and stubs that need expansion.
  • Special report: Two Wikipedians set to face jury trial
    In dramatic events that came to light last week, two English Wikipedia volunteers—Doc James (James Heilman) and Wrh2 (Ryan Holliday)—are being sued in the Los Angeles County Superior Court by Internet Brands, the owner of Wikitravel.com. Both Wikipedians have also been volunteer Wikitravel editors (and in Holliday's case, a volunteer administrator). IB's complaints focus on both editors' encouragement of their fellow Wikitravel volunteers to migrate to a proposed non-commercial travel guidance site that would be under the umbrella of the WMF.
  • News and notes: Researchers find that Simple English Wikipedia has "lost its focus"
    In its September issue, the peer-reviewed journal First Monday published The readability of Wikipedia, reporting research which shows that the English Wikipedia is struggling to meet Flesch reading ease test criteria, while the Simple English Wikipedia has "lost its focus".
  • Technology report: Mmmm, milkshake...
    The Wikimedia Foundation's engineering report for August 2012 was published this week on the Wikimedia Techblog and on the MediaWiki wiki, giving an overview of all Foundation-sponsored technical operations in that month (as well as brief coverage of progress on Wikimedia Deutschland's Wikidata project, phase 1 of which is edging its way towards its first deployment).

The Signpost: 17 September 2012

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  • From the editor: Signpost expands to Facebook
    We now have a Facebook page at facebook.com/wikisignpost. We invite you to "like" the page and join the discussion there.
  • WikiProject report: Action! — The Indian Cinema Task Force
    This week, we shine the spotlight on the Indian Cinema Task Force, a subproject that seeks to improve the quality and quantity of articles about Indian cinema. As a child of WikiProject Film and WikiProject India, the Indian Cinema Task Force shares a variety of templates, resources, and members with its parent projects. The task force works on a to-do list, maintains the Bollywood Portal, and ensures articles follow the film style guidelines. With Indian cinema celebrating its 100th year of existence in 2013, we asked Karthik Nadar (Karthikndr), Secret of success, Ankit Bhatt, Dwaipayan, and AnimeshKulkarni what is in store for the Indian Cinema Task Force.
  • Featured content: Go into the light
    Eight featured articles, six featured lists, ten featured pictures, and one featured topic were promoted this week.
  • News and notes: Tens of thousands of monuments loved; members of new funding body announced
    The world's largest photo competition, Wiki Loves Monuments, is entering its final two weeks. The month-long event, of Dutch origin, is being held globally for the first time after the success of its European-level predecessor last year. During September 2011 more than 5000 volunteers from 18 countries took part and uploaded 168,208 free images. This year, volunteers and chapters from 35 countries around the world have organised the event. The best photographs will be determined by juries at the national and finally the global level.
  • Technology report: Future-proofing: HTML5 and IPv6
    1.20wmf12, the 12th release to Wikimedia wikis from the 1.20 branch, was deployed to its first wikis on September 17; if things go well, it will be deployed to all wikis by September 26. Its 200 or so changes – 111 to WMF-deployed extensions plus 98 to core MediaWiki code – include support for links with mixed-case protocols (e.g. Http://example.com) and the removal of the "No higher resolution available" message on the file description pages of SVG images.

The Signpost: 24 September 2012

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  • In the media: Editor's response to Roth draws internet attention
    Oliver Keyes' (User:Ironholds) defense of Wikipedia against the recent Philip Roth controversy has drawn a significant amount of attention over the last week. The problems between Roth, a widely known and acclaimed American author, and Wikipedia arose from an open letter he penned for the American magazine New Yorker, and were covered by the Signpost two weeks ago. Keyes—who wrote the piece as a prominent Wikipedian but is also a contractor for the Wikimedia Foundation—wrote a blog post on the topic, lamenting the factual errors in Roth's letter and criticizing the media for not investigating his claims: "[they took] Roth’s explanation as the truth and launched into a lengthy discussion of how we [Wikipedia] handle primary sourcing."
  • Recent research: "Rise and decline" of Wikipedia participation, new literature overviews, a look back at WikiSym 2012
    A paper to appear in a special issue of American Behavioral Scientist (summarized in the research index) sheds new light on the English Wikipedia's declining editor growth and retention trends. The paper describes how "several changes that the Wikipedia community made to manage quality and consistency in the face of a massive growth in participation have lead to a more restrictive environment for newcomers". The number of active Wikipedia editors has been declining since 2007 and research examining data up to September 2009 has shown that the root of the problem has been the declining retention of new editors. The authors show this decline is mainly due to a decline among desirable, good-faith newcomers, and point to three factors contributing to the increasingly "restrictive environment" they face.
  • WikiProject report: 01010010 01101111 01100010 01101111 01110100 01101001 01100011 01110011
    This week, we tinkered with WikiProject Robotics. From the project's inception in December 2007, it has served as Wikipedia's hub for building and improving articles about robots and robotics, accumulating two Featured Articles and seven Good Articles along the way. The project covers both fictitious and real-life robots, the technology that powers them, and many of the brains behind the robotics field
  • News and notes: UK chapter rocked by Gibraltar scandal
    In the second controversy to engulf Wikimedia UK in two months, its immediate past chair Roger Bamkin has resigned from the board of the chapter. The resignation last Wednesday followed a growing furore over the conflict of interest between two of Roger's roles outside the chapter and his close involvement in the UK board's decision-making process, including the access to private mailing lists that board members in all chapters need. But the irony surrounding Roger's resignation is its connection with efforts by Wikimedians and collaborators to strengthen the reach of Wikimedia projects through technical innovation.
  • Technology report: Signpost investigation: code review times
    Late last month, the "Technology report" included a story using code review backlog figures – the only code review figures then available – to construct a rough narrative about the average experience of code contributors. This week, we hope to go one better, by looking directly at code review wait times, and, in particular, median code review times
  • Featured content: Dead as...
    Fourteen featured articles were promoted this week, including Dodo, along with six featured lists and five featured pictures.

The Signpost: 01 October 2012

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  • Paid editing: Does Wikipedia Pay? The Founder: Jimmy Wales
    Does Wikipedia Pay? is a Signpost series seeking to illuminate paid editing, paid advocacy, for-profit Wikipedia consultants, editing public relations professionals, conflict of interest guidelines in practice, and the Wikipedians who work on these issues by speaking openly with the people involved. This week, a scandal centering around Roger Bamkin's work with Wikimedia UK and Gibraltarpedia erupted ... In light of these events, opinions on how to avoid future controversy are as important as ever. ... The Signpost spoke with Jimmy Wales to better understand how he views the paid editing environment and what he thinks is needed to improve it.
  • News and notes: Independent review of UK chapter governance; editor files motion against Wikitravel owners
    Following considerable online and media reportage on the Gibraltar controversy and a Signpost report last week, the Wikimedia UK chapter and the foundation published a joint statement on September 28: "To better understand the facts and details of these allegations and to ensure that governance arrangements commensurate with the standing of the Wikimedia Foundation, Wikimedia UK and the worldwide Wikimedia movement, Wikimedia UK's trustees and the Wikimedia Foundation will jointly appoint an independent expert advisor to objectively review both Wikimedia UK's governance arrangements and its handling of the conflict of interest."
  • Featured content: Mooned
    Five articles, three lists, and nine images were promoted to "featured" this week.
  • Technology report: WMF and the German chapter face up to Toolserver uncertainty
    The Toolserver is an external service hosting the hundreds of webpages and scripts (collectively known as "tools") that assist Wikimedia communities in dozens of mostly menial tasks. Few people think that it has been operating well recently; the problems, which include high database replication lag and periods of total downtime, have caused considerable disruption to the Toolserver's usual functions. Those functions are highly valued by many Wikimedia communities ... In 2011, the Foundation announced the creation of Wikimedia Labs, a much better funded project that among other things aimed to mimic the Toolserver's functionality by mid-2013. At the same time, Erik Möller, the WMF's director of engineering, announced that the Foundation would no longer be supporting the Toolserver financially, but would continue to provide the same in-kind support as it had done previously.
  • WikiProject report: The Name's Bond... WikiProject James Bond
    In celebration of the 50th anniversary of the James Bond film series, we spent some time bonding with WikiProject James Bond. The project is in the unique position of having already pushed all of its primary content to Good and Featured status, including all of Ian Fleming's novels, short stories, and every film that has been released. Work has begun in earnest on the article Skyfall for the release of the new Bond film later this month. The project could still use help improving articles about Bond actors, characters, gadgets, music, video games, and related topics

Just to let you know

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I have mentioned you at Wikipedia:Missing Wikipedians Ottawahitech (talk) 21:17, 7 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

The Signpost: 08 October 2012

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  • News and notes: Education Program faces community resistance
    Wikipedia in education is far from a new idea: years of news stories, op-eds, and editorials have focused on the topic; and on Wikipedia itself, the Schools and universities projects page has existed in various forms since 2003. Over the next six years, the page was rarely developed, and when it did advance there was no clear goal in mind.
  • WikiProject report: Ten years and one million articles: WikiProject Biography
    On this day five years ago, the WikiProject Report debuted as a new Signpost column with an overview of WikiProject Biography. Today, we're celebrating two milestone: five years of the WikiProject Report and the tenth birthday of our first featured project. WikiProject Biography is by far the largest WikiProject on Wikipedia, with over one million articles under the project's scope. As a comparison, WikiProject Biography is three times larger than Wikipedia's second largest project, and if WikiProject Biography were split into its 14 subprojects and work groups, it would still make the list of the 20 largest WikiProjects... four times.
  • Featured content: A dash of Arsenikk
    This week the Signpost interviews Arsenikk, an editor of six years who has brought sixteen lists through our featured list process, mostly regarding transportation in Norway but also about the 1952 Winter Olympics and World Heritage Sites in Africa. Arsenikk tells us about why he joined the project, what moves him, and how editors can join the sometimes daunting world of featured lists.
  • Technology report: The ups and downs of September and October, plus extension code review analysis
    The Wikimedia Foundation's engineering report for September 2012 was published this week on the Wikimedia Techblog and on the MediaWiki wiki, giving an overview of all Foundation-sponsored technical operations in that month (as well as brief coverage of progress on Wikimedia Deutschland's Wikidata project, phase 1 of which is edging its way towards its first deployment). Three of the seven headline items in the report have already been covered in the Signpost: problems with the corruption of several Gerrit (code) repositories, the introduction of widespread translation memory across Wikimedia wikis, and the launch of the "Page Curation" tool on the English Wikipedia, with development work on that project now winding down. The report also drew attention to the end of Google Summer of Code 2012, the deployment to the English Wikipedia of a new ePUB (electronic book) export feature, and improvements to the WLM app aimed at more serious photographers.

The Signpost: 15 October 2012

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  • Op-ed: AdminCom: A proposal for changing the way we select admins
    There is wide agreement among English Wikipedians that the administrator system is in some ways broken—but no consensus on how to fix it. Most suggestions have been relatively small in scope, and could at best produce small improvements. I would like to make a proposal to fundamentally restructure the administrator system, in a way that I believe would make it more effective and responsive. The proposal is to create an elected Administration Committee ("AdminCom") which would select, oversee, and deselect administrators.
  • In the media: Wikipedia's language nerds hit the front page
    This week saw a front-page story in the Wall Street Journal on editorial debates in Wikipedia. The story focused on the title-naming dispute surrounding the Beatles article, and specifically the RfC on whether the 'the' in the band's name should be capitalized or not.
  • Featured content: Second star to the left
    On the English Wikipedia, five featured articles, ten featured lists, and four featured pictures were promoted, including USS Lexington, a ship built for the United States Navy that, although ordered in 1916 as a battlecruiser, was converted to an aircraft carrier. It was sunk in the Battle of the Coral Sea during the Second World War.
  • News and notes: Chapters ask for big bucks
    The volunteer-led Wikimedia Funds Dissemination Committee (FDC) and interested community members are looking at Wikimedia organization applications worth about US$10.4 million out of the committee's first full year's operation, in just the inaugural round one of two that have been planned for the year with a planned budget of US$11.4M.
  • Technology report: Wikidata is a go: well, almost
    A trial of the first phase of Wikimedia Deutschland's "Wikidata" project–implementing the first ever interwiki repository—may soon get underway following the successful passage of much of its code through MediaWiki's review processes this week.
  • WikiProject report: WikiProject Chemicals
    This week, we experimented with WikiProject Chemicals. Started in August 2004, WikiProject Chemicals has grown to include over 10,000 articles about chemical compounds. The project has a unique assessment system that omits C-class, Good, and Featured Articles. As a result, the project's 11 GAs and 9 FAs are treated as A-class articles. WikiProject Chemicals is a child of WikiProject Chemistry (interviewed in 2009) and a parent of WikiProject Polymers.

The Signpost: 22 October 2012

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  • Special report: Examining adminship from the German perspective
    Unlike the long-running disputes that have characterised attempts to reform the RfA process on the English Wikipedia, the German Wikipedia's tradition of making decisions not by consensus but knife-edged 50% + 1 votes has led to a fundamentally different outcome. In 2009, the project managed to largely settle the RfA mode issue in 2009 indirectly.
  • Technology report: Wikivoyage migration: technical strategy announced
    Planning for Wikivoyage's migration into the WMF fold built up steam this week following a statement by WMF Deputy Director Erik Möller about what the technical side of the migration will involve. Wikivoyage, which split from sister site Wikitravel in 2006, is hoping to migrate its own not-inconsiderable user base to Wikimedia, as well as much of its content, presenting novel challenges for Wikimedia developers
  • News and notes: Wikimedians get serious about women in science
    It is well known that women are underrepresented in the sciences, and that high-achieving female scientists have often been excluded from authorship lists and passed over for awards and honours solely on the basis of gender. Also significant has been the underplaying in the academic literature, news reporting, and online, of women's current and historical contributions to science.
  • WikiProject report: Where in the world is Wikipedia?
    The WikiProject Report normally brings tidings from Wikipedia's most active, inventive, and unique WikiProjects. This week, we're trying something new by focusing on Wikipedia's dark side: the various regional and national WikiProjects that are dead or dying. How can some tiny municipalities and exclaves generate highly active, cross-language, multimedia platforms be successful while the projects representing many sovereign countries and entire continents wallow in obscurity? Today, we'll search for answers among geographic projects large and small, highly active and barely functioning, enthusiastic about the future and mired in past conflicts.
  • Featured content: Is RfA Kafkaesque?
    Eleven articles, including one on Franz Kafka, three lists, one image, and one portal were promoted to 'featured' status this week.

The Signpost: 29 October 2012

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  • News and notes: First chickens come home to roost for FDC funding applicants; WMF board discusses governance issues and scope of programs
    The first round of the Wikimedia Foundation's new financial arrangements has proceeded as planned, with the publication of scores and feedback by Funds Dissemination Committee (FDC) staff on applications for funding by 11 entities—10 chapters, independent membership organisations supporting the WMF's mission in different countries, and the foundation itself. The results are preliminary assessments that will soon be put to the FDC's seven voting members and two non-voting board representatives. The FDC in turn will send its recommendations to the board of trustees on 15 November, which will announce its decision by 15 December. Funding applications have been on-wiki since 1 October, and the talk pages of applications were open for community comment and discussion from 2 to 22 October, though apart from queries by FDC staff, there was little activity.
  • WikiProject report: In recognition of... WikiProject Military History
    This week, we're checking out ways to motivate editors and recognize valuable contributions by focusing on the awards and rewards of WikiProject Military History. Anyone unfamiliar with WikiProject Military History is encouraged to start at the report's first article about the project and make your way forward. While many WikiProjects provide a barnstar that can be awarded to helpful contributors, WikiProject Military History has gone a step further by creating a variety of awards with different criteria ranging from the all-purpose WikiChevrons to rewards for participating in drives and improving special topics to medals for improving articles up to A-class status to the coveted "Military Historian of the Year" award.
  • Technology report: Improved video support imminent and Wikidata.org live
    The TimedMediaHandler extension (TMH), which brings dramatic improvements to MediaWiki's video handling capabilities, will go live to the English Wikipedia this week following a long and turbulent development, WMF Director of Platform Engineering Rob Lanphier announced on Monday ... Wikidata.org, a new repository designed to host interwiki links, launched this week and will begin accepting links shortly. The site, which is one half of the forthcoming Wikidata trial (the other half being the Wikidata client, which will be deployed to the Hungarian Wikipedia shortly) will also act as a testing area for phase 2 of Wikidata (centralised data storage). The longer term plan is for Wikidata.org to become a "Wikimedia Commons for data" as phases 2 and 3 (dynamic lists) are developed, project managers say.
  • Featured content: On the road again
    Thirteen articles, ten lists, nine images, one topic, and one portal were promoted to featured after peer reviews.

The Signpost: 05 November 2012

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  • Op-ed: 2012 WikiCup comes to an end
    J Milburn is a British editor who has been on the site since 2006. He is one of two judges of the WikiCup. Here, he uses an op-ed to explain the way the WikiCup works and to review this year's competition, which ended recently.
  • News and notes: Wikimedian photographic talent on display in national submissions to Wiki Loves Monuments
    The results of most of the national heats for Wiki Loves Monuments (WLM) have been published on Commons. A maximum of 10 images have been submitted by all but eight of the 34 participating countries, and the international jury for what is the largest competition of its type in the world is set to announce the global winner in four weeks' time.
  • In the media: Was climate change a factor in Hurricane Sandy?
    Hurricane Sandy was the largest Atlantic hurricane on record and has caused millions of dollars in damage. Naturally, Wikipedia covered it. But was Wikipedia's coverage unbiased?
  • Featured content: Jack-O'-Lanterns and Toads
    This week, the Signpost interviewed two editors. The first, PumpkinSky, collaborated with Gerda Arendt in writing the recently featured article on Franz Kafka and won second prize in the Core contest last August. The second, Cwmhiraeth, collaborated with Thompsma in promoting the article Frog, which was featured last week. We asked them about the special challenges faced while writing Core content and things to watch out for.
  • Technology report: Hue, Sqoop, Oozie, Zookeeper, Hive, Pig and Kafka
    The Wikimedia Foundation's engineering report for October 2012 was published this week on the Wikimedia Techblog and on the MediaWiki wiki, giving an overview of all Foundation-sponsored technical operations in that month. TimedMediaHandler also went live.
  • WikiProject report: Listening to WikiProject Songs
    This week, The Signpost sings along with WikiProject Songs which focuses on articles about songs of every generation and genre. The project initially began as a rough outline in October 2002 and was reimagined in March 2004 using its parent WikiProject Albums as a template.

The Signpost: 12 November 2012

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  • News and notes: Court ruling complicates the paid-editing debate
    Last week, media outlets reported a ruling by a German court on the problem of businesses using Wikipedia for marketing purposes. The issue goes beyond the direct management of marketing-related edits by Wikipedians; it involves cross-monitoring and interacting among market competitors themselves on Wikipedia. A company that sells dietary supplements made from frankincense had taken a competitor to court. The recently published judgment by the Higher Regional Court of Munich, in dealing with the German Wikipedia article on frankincense products, was handed down in May and is based on European competition law.
  • Featured content: The table has turned
    Thirteen articles, six lists, and five images were promoted to 'featured' status last week.
  • Technology report: MediaWiki 1.20 and the prospects for getting 1.21 code reviewed promptly
    In late September, the Technology report published its findings about (particularly median) code review times. To the 23,900 changesets analysed the first time (the data for which has been updated), the Signpost added data from the 9,000 or so changesets contributed between September 17 and November 9 to a total of 93,000 reviews across 45,000 patchsets. Bots and self-reviews were also discarded, but reviews made by a different user in the form of a superseding patch were retained. Finally, users were categorised by hand according to whether they would be best regarded as staff or volunteers. The new analyses were consistent with the predictions of the previous analysis.
  • WikiProject report: Land of parrots, palm trees, and the Holy Cross: WikiProject Brazil
    As promised, we're expanding our horizons by featuring projects that cover underrepresented areas of the globe. This week, we headed to WikiProject Brazil which keeps track of articles about the world's largest Portuguese-speaking country. The project has shown spurts of activity and continues to serve as a hub for discussions, despite the project's collaborations, peer reviews, and outreach activities being largely inactive.

Formal mediation has been requested

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The Mediation Committee has received a request for formal mediation of the dispute relating to "Mexican-American War". As an editor concerned in this dispute, you are invited to participate in the mediation. Mediation is a voluntary process which resolves a dispute over article content by facilitation, consensus-building, and compromise among the involved editors. After reviewing the request page, the formal mediation policy, and the guide to formal mediation, please indicate in the "party agreement" section whether you agree to participate. Because requests must be responded to by the Mediation Committee within seven days, please respond to the request by 22 November 2012.

Discussion relating to the mediation request is welcome at the case talk page. Thank you.
Message delivered by MediationBot (talk) on behalf of the Mediation Committee. 02:41, 15 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Request for mediation rejected

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The request for formal mediation concerning Mexican-American War, to which you were listed as a party, has been declined. To read an explanation by the Mediation Committee for the rejection of this request, see the mediation request page, which will be deleted by an administrator after a reasonable time. Please direct questions relating to this request to the Chairman of the Committee, or to the mailing list. For more information on forms of dispute resolution, other than formal mediation, that are available, see Wikipedia:Dispute resolution.

For the Mediation Committee, AGK [•] 00:29, 19 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]
(Delivered by MediationBot, on behalf of the Mediation Committee.)

The Signpost: 19 November 2012

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  • News and notes: FDC's financial muscle kicks in
    The WMF's Funds Dissemination Committee has published its recommendations for the inaugural round 1 of funding. Requests totalled US$10.4M, nearly all of the FDC's budget for both first and second rounds. The seven-member committee of community volunteers appointed in September advises the WMF board on the distribution of grant funds among applying Wikimedia organizations. The committee, which has a separate operating budget of $276k for salaries and expenses, considered 12 applications for funds, from 11 chapters and from the WMF itself for its non-core activities. The decision-making process included community and FDC staff input after October 1, the closing date for submissions. Taken together, the volunteers decided to endorse an average of 81% of the funding sought—a total of $8.43M, which went to 11 of the 12 applicants. This leaves $2.71M to be distributed in round 2, for which applications are due in little more than three months' time.
  • WikiProject report: No teenagers, mutants, or ninjas: WikiProject Turtles
    This week, we spent some time with WikiProject Turtles. The young project started in January 2011 and has accumulated 5 Featured Articles, 3 Featured Lists, and 6 Featured Pictures. The project maintains a combined to-do list and hot articles meter, a popular pages ranking, and a collection of resources for turtle articles. We interviewed Faendalimas and NYMFan69-86.
  • Technology report: Structural reorganisation "not a done deal"
    WMF Executive Director Sue Gardner was forced to clarify this week that proposed structural changes to the Foundation's Engineering and Product Development Department were not a "done deal" and that it was "important that you [particularly affected staff] realise that ... your input is wanted". The reorganisation, announced on November 5 and planned for the middle of next year, will see its two components split off into their own departments.
  • Featured content: Wikipedia hit by the Streisand effect
    Seven featured articles, four featured lists and ten featured pictures – including the photograph that spawned the Streisand effect – were promoted this week.

The Signpost: 26 November 2012

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  • News and notes: Toolserver finance remains uncertain
    On November 24, a general assembly of Wikimedia Germany (WMDE) voted on the fate of the Wikimedia Toolserver, a central external piece of technical infrastructure supporting the editing communities with volunteer-developed scripts and webpages of various kinds that are assisting in performing mostly menial tasks.
  • Recent research: Movie success predictions, readability, credentials and authority, geographical comparisons
    An open-access preprint presents the results from a study attempting to predict early box office revenues from Wikipedia traffic and activity data. The authors – a team of computational social scientists from Budapest University of Technology and Economics, Aalto University and the Central European University – submit that behavioral patterns on Wikipedia can be used for accurate forecasting, matching and in some cases outperforming the use of social media data for predictive modeling. The results, based on a corpus of 312 English Wikipedia articles on movies released in 2010, indicate that the joint editing activity and traffic measures on Wikipedia are strong predictors of box office revenue for highly successful movies.
  • Technology report: Wikidata reaches 100,000 entries
    Wikidata, the new "Wikimedia Commons for data" and the first new Wikimedia project since 2006, reached 100,000 entries this week. The project aims to be a single, human- and machine-readable database for common data, spanning across all Wikipedia projects, which will "lead to a higher consistency and quality within Wikipedia articles, as well as increased availability of information in the smaller language editions" while lowering the burden on Wikipedia's volunteer editors—whose numbers have stalled overall, and continue to dwindle on the English Wikipedia.
  • WikiProject report: Directing Discussion: WikiProject Deletion Sorting
    This week, we uncovered WikiProject Deletion Sorting, Wikipedia's most active project by number of edits to all the project's pages. This special project seeks to increase participation in Articles for Deletion nominations by categorizing the AfD discussions by various topic areas that may draw the attention of editors. The project was started in August 2005 with manual processes that are continued today by a bevy of bots, categories, and transclusions. The project took inspiration from WikiProject Stub Sorting and some historical discussions on deletion reform. As the sheer number of AfDs continues to grow, the project is seeking better tools to manage the deletion sorting process and attract editors to comment on these deletion discussions.

The Signpost: 03 December 2012

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  • Featured content: The play's the thing
    Three articles, two lists, and four images were promoted to 'featured' status this week.
  • Technology report: MediaWiki problems but good news for Toolserver stability
    Deployments of MediaWiki 1.21wmf5 cause widespread problems for users across wikis when HTML and CSS updates came temporarily out of sync. On the first wikis targeted for deployment, this was caused by the different cache invalidation rates for HTML (typically one month) and CSS (typically five minutes). The retrospective on the problem highlighted the fact that that the test wiki – the WMF's answer to a production environment that individual developers can no longer practically emulate themselves – actually demonstrated the exact problem that would later manifest itself on production wikis. It went unnoticed.
  • WikiProject report: The White Rose: WikiProject Yorkshire
    This week, we went searching for white roses in the lands of WikiProject Yorkshire. The project began in May 2007 as a way to improve articles about the historic English county of Yorkshire and its modern-day administrative divisions and cities. Since then, the project has accumulated 31 Featured Articles, 14 Featured Lists, 91 Good Articles, and a monstrous list of Did You Know entries. Despite all of the effort improving Yorkshire articles, the project has experienced waning participation in the last few years. The project still publishes a newsletter each month, monitors the popularity of and recent changes to its articles, maintains a portal, and collects resources for contributors to use.

The Signpost: 10 December 2012

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  • News and notes: Wobbly start to ArbCom election, but turnout beats last year's
    At the time of writing, this year's election has just closed after a two-week voting period. The eight seats were contested by 21 candidates. Of these, 15 have not been arbitrators (Beeblebrox, Count Iblis, Guerillero, Jc37, Keilana, Ks0stm, Kww, NuclearWarfare, Pgallert, RegentsPark, Richwales, Salvio giuliano, Timotheus Canens, Worm That Turned, and YOLO Swag); four candidates are sitting arbitrators (David Fuchs, Elen of the Roads, Jclemens, and Newyorkbrad); and two have previously served on the committee (Carcharoth and Coren). Four Wikimedia stewards from outside the English Wikipedia stepped forward as election scrutineers: Pundit, from the Polish Wikipedia; Teles, from the Portuguese Wikipedia; Quentinv57, from the French Wikipedia; and Mardetanha, from the Persian Wikipedia. The scrutineers' task is to ensure that the election is free of multiple votes from the same person, to tally the results, and to announce them. The full results are expected to be released within the next few days and will be reported in next week's edition of the Signpost.
  • Featured content: Wikipedia goes to Hell
    Eight articles, four images, six lists, and one topic were promoted to 'featured' status on the English Wikipedia this week.
  • Technology report: The new Visual Editor gets a bit more visual
    The Visual Editor project – an attempt to create the first WMF-deployable WYSIWYG editor – will go live on its first Wikipedias imminently following nearly six months of testing on MediaWiki.org. A full explanatory blog post accompanied the news, explaining the project and its setup. Once a user has opted-in, the editor can handle basic formatting, headings and lists, while safely ignoring elements it is yet to understand, including references, categories, templates, tables and images. At the last count, approximately 2% of pages would break in some way if a user tried the Visual Editor on them; it is unclear whether any specific protection will be put in place beyond relying on editors to spot problems.
  • WikiProject report: WikiProject Human Rights
    In celebration of Human Rights Day, we checked out WikiProject Human Rights. Started in February 2006, the project has grown to include over 3,000 articles, including 12 Featured Articles, 3 Featured Lists, 66 Good Articles, a large collection of Did You Know entries, and a few mentions "in the news". The project monitors listings of popular pages and cleanup tags. We interviewed Khazar2, Cirt, and Boud.

The Signpost: 17 December 2012

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  • News and notes: Arbitrator election: stewards release the results
    Seven days after the close of voting, the results of the recent Arbitration Committee (ArbCom) elections have been announced by two of the four stewards overseeing the election, Mardetanha and Pundit. Of the 21 candidates, 13 managed to gain positive support-to-oppose ratios, and the top eight will be appointed to two-year terms on the committee by Jimbo Wales, exercising one of his traditional responsibilities.
  • WikiProject report: WikiProjekt Computerspiel: Covering Computer Games in Germany
    In the past year, we've tried to expand our horizons by looking at how WikiProjects work in other languages of Wikipedia. Following in the footsteps of our previously interviewed Czech and French projects, we visited the German Wikipedia to explore WikiProjekt Computerspiel (WikiProject Computer Games). The project dates back to November 2004 and has become the back-end of the Computer Games Portal, which covers all video games regardless of platform. Editors writing about computer games at the German Wikipedia deal with unique cultural and legal challenges, ranging from a lack of fair use precedents to the limited availability of games deemed harmful for youths to strong standards for the inclusion of material on the German Wikipedia.
  • Op-ed: Finding truth in Sandy Hook
    This week's big story on the English Wikipedia is obviously the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting (which, by the time you read this, may be renamed 2012 Connecticut school shooting). Quickly created and nominated for deletion not once but twice, and both times speedily kept, the article saw the expected flurry of edits (a look at the history suggests an average of at least one a minute over the first day and a half) and more than half a million page views on the first full day.
  • Featured content: Wikipedia's cute ass
    Four articles, three lists, and five images were promoted to 'featured' status on the English Wikipedia this week, including a picture of a three-week old donkey (also known as an 'ass').
  • Technology report: MediaWiki groups and why you might want to start snuggling newbie editors
    MediaWiki users (including Wikimedians) can now organise themselves into groups, receiving recognition and support-in-kind from the Wikimedia Foundation. The project, backed by new Wikimedia technical contributor coordinator Quim Gil, has seen five proposals lodged in its first week of operation. The idea of MediaWiki groups mimics that of Wikimedia User Groups.

The Signpost: 24 December 2012

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  • News and notes: Debates on Meta sparking along—grants, new entities, and conflicts of interest
    As part of its new focus on core responsibilities, the Wikimedia Foundation is reforming its grant schemes so that they are more accessible to individual volunteers. The community is invited to look at proposals for a new scheme—for now called Individual engagement grants (IEGs)—which is due to kick off on January 15. On Meta, the community is once again debating the two new offline participation models—user groups (open membership groups designed to be easy to form) and thematic organizations (incorporated non-profits representing the Wikimedia movement and supporting work on a specific theme within or across countries). In a consultation process on Meta that will last until January 15, the community will be discussing WMF proposals for a new guideline on conflicts of interests concerning Wikimedia resources. The draft covers COI issues for both volunteers and organizations across the movement.
  • WikiProject report: A Song of Ice and Fire
    This week, we spent some time with WikiProject A Song of Ice and Fire, which focuses on the eponymous series of high fantasy literature, the television series Game of Thrones, and related works by George R. R. Martin. The project was started in July 2006 and has grown to include 11 Good Articles maintained by a small yet enthusiastic band of editors.
  • Featured content: Battlecruiser operational
    Seven articles and two lists were promoted to 'featured' status this week, including List of battlecruisers. The article covers all of the battlecruisers—which were a type of warship similar in size to a battleship but with several defining characteristics—ever planned or constructed. The last British battlecruiser built, HMS Hood, is pictured at right.
  • Technology report: Efforts to "normalise" Toolserver relations stepped up
    Efforts were stepped up this week to sow a feeling of trust between the major parties with an interest in the future of the Toolserver. The tool- and bot-hosting server – more accurately servers – are currently operated by German chapter, Wikimedia Germany, with assistance from the Foundation and numerous volunteers, including long-time system administrator Daniel Baur (more commonly known by his pseudonym DaB). However, those parties have more recently failed to see eye-to-eye on the trajectory for the Toolserver, which is scheduled to be replaced by Wikimedia Labs in late 2013, with increasing concern about the tone of discussions.

The Signpost: 31 December 2012

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  • From the editor: Wikipedia, our Colosseum
    In the impersonal, detached Colosseum that is Wikipedia, people find it much easier to put their thumbs down. As such, many people active in the Wikimedia movement have witnessed a precipitous decline in civil discourse. This is far from a new trend, yet many people would agree that it all seemed somehow worse in 2012.
  • In the media: Is the Wikimedia movement too 'cash rich'?
    A recent, poorly researched and poorly written story in the Register highlighted the perceived "cash rich" status of the Wikimedia movement. ... The Telegraph and Daily Dot, among others, have alleged that there are multiple links between the WMF, Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales, and Kazakhstan's government, which is, for all intents and purposes, a one-party non-democratic state.
  • Technology report: Looking back on a year of incremental changes
    In the first of two features, the Signpost this week looks back on 2012, a year when developers finally made inroads into three issues that had been put off for far too long (the need for editors to learn wiki-markup, the lack of a proper template language and the centralisation of data) but left all three projects far from finished.
  • Interview: Interview with Brion Vibber, the WMF's first employee
    Brion Vibber has been a Wikipedia editor for nearly 11 years and was the first person officially hired to work for the Wikimedia Foundation. He was instrumental in early development of the MediaWiki software and is now the lead software architect for the foundation's mobile development team.
  • Featured content: Whoa Nelly! Featured content in review
    At the beginning of the year, we began a series of interviews with editors who have worked hard to combat systemic bias through the creation of featured content; although we haven't seen six installments yet, we've also had some delightful interviews with people who write articles on some of our most core topics. Now, as we close the year, I would like to present some of my own musings on the state of featured content—especially as it pertains to systemic bias and core topics.
  • WikiProject report: New Year, New York
    This week, we're celebrating the New Year from Times Square by interviewing WikiProject New York City. Since December 2004, WikiProject NYC has had the difficult task of maintaining articles about the largest city in the United States, many of which are also among the the most viewed articles on Wikipedia. The project is home to 22 Featured Articles, 7 Featured Lists, 32 pieces of Featured Media, and a lengthy list of Did You Know? entries.
  • Recent research: Wikipedia and Sandy Hook; SOPA blackout reexamined
    Northeastern University researcher Brian Keegan analyzed the gathering of hundreds of Wikipedians to cover the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in the immediate aftermath of the tragedy. ... A First Monday article reviews several aspects of the Wikipedia participation in the 18 January 2012, protests against SOPA and PIPA legislation in the USA. The paper focuses on the question of legitimacy, looking at how the Wikipedia community arrived at the decision to participate in those protests.

The Signpost: 07 January 2013

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  • Op-ed: Meta, where innovative ideas die
    Meta is the wiki that has coordinated a wide range of cross-project Wikimedia activities, such as the activities of stewards, the archiving of chapter reports, and WMF trustee elections. The project has long been an out-of-the-way corner for technocratic working groups, unaccountable mandarins, and in-house bureaucratic proceedings. Largely ignored by the editing communities of projects such as Wikipedia and organizations that serve them, Meta has evolved into a huge and relatively disorganized repository, where the few archivists running it also happen to be the main authors of some of its key documents. While Meta is well-designed for supporting the librarians and mandarins who stride along its corridors, visitors tend to find the site impenetrable—or so many people have argued over the past decade. This impenetrability runs counter to Meta's increasingly central role in the Wikimedia movement.
  • WikiProject report: Where Are They Now? Episode IV: A New Year
    The dawning of a new year offers both a fresh slate and an opportunity to revisit our previous adventures. 2012 marked the fifth anniversary of the WikiProject Report and was the column's most productive year with 52 articles published. In addition to sharing the experiences of Wikipedia's many active projects, we expanded our scope to highlight unique projects from other languages of Wikipedia, and tracked down all of the former editors-in-chief of the Signpost for an introspective interview ... While last year's "Summer Sports Series" may have drawn yawns from some readers, a special report on "Neglected Geography" elicited more comments than any previous issue of the Report. Following in the footsteps of our past three recaps, we'll spend this week looking back at the trials and tribulations of the WikiProjects we encountered in 2012. Where are they now?
  • News and notes: 2012—the big year
    The past 12 months have seen a multitude of issues and events in the Wikimedia foundation, the movement at large, and the English Wikipedia. The movement, now in its second decade, is growing apace in its international reach, cultural and linguistic diversity, technical development, and financial complexity; and many factors have combined to produce what has in many ways been the biggest, most dynamic year in the movement's history. Looking back at 2012, we faced a difficult task in doing justice to all of the notable events in a single article; so the Signpost has selected just a few examples from outside the anglosphere, from the English Wikipedia, and from the Wikimedia Foundation, rather than attempting to cover every detail that happened.
  • Featured content: Featured content in review
    Over the past year, 963 pieces of featured content were promoted. The most active of the featured content programs was featured article candidates (FAC), which promoted an average of 31 articles a month. This was followed by featured picture candidates (FPC; 28 a month). Coming in third was featured list candidates (FLC; 20 a month). Featured topic and featured portal candidates remained sluggish, each promoting fewer than 20 items over the year.
  • Technology report: Looking ahead to 2013
    Following on from last week's reflections on 2012, this week the Technology report looks ahead to 2013, a year that will almost certainly be dominated by the juggernauts of Wikidata, Lua and the Visual Editor.

The Signpost: 14 January 2013

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  • Investigative report: Ship ahoy! New travel site finally afloat
    After six years without creating a new class of content projects, the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) has finally expanded into a new area: travel. Wikivoyage was formally launched—though without a traditional ship's christening—on 15 January, having started as a beta trial on 10 November. Wikivoyage has been taken under the WMF's umbrella on the argument that information resources that help with travel are educational and therefore within the scope of the foundation's mission.g
  • News and notes: Launch of annual picture competition, new grant scheme
    On January 16, voting for the first round of the 2012 Wikimedia Commons Picture of the Year contest will begin. Wikimedia editors with 75 edits or one project are eligible to vote to select their favorite image featured in 2012. ... On January 15, the foundation launched its latest grant scheme, called Individual Engagement Grants (IEG).
  • WikiProject report: Reach for the Stars: WikiProject Astronomy
    This week, we set off for the final frontier with WikiProject Astronomy. The project was started in August 2006 using the now-defunct WikiProject Space as inspiration. WikiProject Astronomy is home to 101 pieces of Featured material and 148 Good Articles maintained by a band of 186 members. The project maintains a portal, works on an assortment of vital astronomy articles, and provides resources for editors adding or requesting astronomy images.
  • Special report: Loss of an Internet genius
    Comforting those grieving after the loss of a loved one is an impossible task. How then, can an entire community be comforted? The Internet struggled to answer that question this week after the suicide of Aaron Swartz, a celebrated free-culture activist, programmer, and Wikipedian at the age of 26.
  • Featured content: Featured articles: Quality of reviews, quality of writing in 2012
    Continuing our recap of the featured content promoted in 2012, this week the Signpost interviewed three editors, asking them about featured articles which stuck out in their minds. Two, Ian Rose and Graham Colm, are current featured article candidates (FAC) delegates, while Brian Boulton is an active featured article writer and reviewer.
  • Technology report: Intermittent outages planned, first Wikidata client deployment
    The Wikidata client extension was successfully deployed to the Hungarian Wikipedia on 14 January, its team reports. The interwiki language links can now come from wikidata.org, though "manual" interwiki links remain functional, overriding those from the central repository.

The Signpost: 21 January 2013

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  • News and notes: Requests for adminship reform moves forward
    The English Wikipedia's requests for adminship (RfA) process has entered another cycle of proposed reforms. Over the last three weeks, various proposals, ranging from as large as a transition to a representative democracy to as small as a required edit count and service length, have been debated on the RfA talk page. The total number of new administrators for 2012 was just 28, barely more than half of 2011's total and less than a quarter of 2009's total. The total number of unsuccessful RfAs has fallen as well. These declining numbers, which were described in what would now be considered a successful year (2010) as an emerging "wikigeneration gulf", have been coupled with a sharp decline in the number of active administrators since February 2008 (1,021), reaching a low of 653 in November 2012.
  • WikiProject report: Say What? — WikiProject Linguistics
    This week, we spent some time with WikiProject Linguistics. Started in January 2004, the project has grown to include 7 Featured Articles, 4 Featured Lists, 2 A-class Articles, and 15 Good Articles maintained by 43 members. The project's members keep an eye on several watchlists, maintain the linguistics category, and continue to build a collection of Did You Know? entries. The project is home to six task forces and works with WikiProject Languages and WikiProject Writing Systems.
  • Featured content: Wazzup, G? Delegates and featured topics in review
    This week, the Signpost's featured content section continues its recap of 2012 by looking at featured topics. We interviewed Grapple X and GamerPro64, who are delegates at the featured topic candidates.
  • Arbitration report: Doncram case continues
    The opening of the Doncram case marks the end of almost 6 months without any open cases, the longest in the history of the Committee.
  • Technology report: Data centre switchover a tentative success
    On 22 January, WMF staff and contractors switched incoming, non-cached requests (including edits) to the Foundation's newer data centre in Ashburn, Virginia, making it responsible for handling almost all regular traffic. For the first time since 2004, virtually no traffic will be handled by the WMF's other facility in Tampa, Florida.

The Signpost: 28 January 2013

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  • In the media: Hoaxes draw media attention
    On New Year's Day, the Daily Dot reported that a "massive Wikipedia hoax" had been exposed after more than five years. The article on the Bicholim conflict had been listed as a "Good Article" for the past half-decade, yet turned out to be an ingenious hoax. Created in July 2007 by User:A-b-a-a-a-a-a-a-b-a, the meticulously detailed piece was approved as a GA in October 2007. A subsequent submission for FA was unsuccessful, but failed to discover that the article's key sources were made up. While the User:A-b-a-a-a-a-a-a-b-a account then stopped editing, the hoax remained listed as a Good Article for five years, receiving in the region of 150 to 250 page views a month in 2012. It was finally nominated for deletion on 29 December 2012 by ShelfSkewed—who had discovered the hoax while doing work on Category:Articles with invalid ISBNs—and deleted the same day.
  • WikiProject report: Checkmate! — WikiProject Chess
    When we challenged the masters of WikiProject Chess to an interview, Sjakkalle answered our call. WikiProject Chess dates back to December 2003 and has grown to include 4 Featured Articles and 15 Good Articles maintained by over 100 members. The project typically operates independently of other WikiProjects, although the project would theoretically be a child of WikiProject Board and Table Games (interviewed in 2011). WikiProject Chess provides a collection of resources, seeks missing photographs of chess players, and helps determine ways that Wikipedia's coverage of chess can be expanded.
  • News and notes: Khan Academy's Smarthistory and Wikipedia collaborate
    To many Wikimedians, the Khan Academy would seem like a close cousin: the academy is a non-profit educational website and a development of the massive open online course concept that has delivered over 227 million lessons in 22 different languages. Its mission is to give "a free, world-class education to anyone, anywhere." This complements Wikipedia's stated goal to "imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge", then go and create that world. It should come as no surprise, then, that the highly successful GLAM-Wiki (galleries, libraries, archives, museums) initiative has partnered with the Khan Academy's Smarthistory project to further both its and Wikipedia's goals.
  • Featured content: Listing off progress from 2012
    This week, the Signpost featured content section continues its recap of 2012 by looking at featured lists. We interviewed FLC directors Giants2008 and The Rambling Man as well as active reviewer and writer PresN.
  • Arbitration report: Doncram continues
    The Doncram case has continued into its third week.
  • Technology report: Developers get ready for FOSDEM amid caching problems
    As reported in last week's "Technology Report", the WMF's data centre in Ashburn, Virginia took over responsibility for almost all of the remaining functions that had previously been handled by their old facility in Tampa, Florida on 22 January. The Signpost reported then that few problems had arisen since handover. Unfortunately that was not to remain the case, with reports of caching problems (which typically only affect anonymous users) starting to come in.

The Signpost: 04 February 2013

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  • Special report: Examining the popularity of Wikipedia articles
    On February 12, 2012, news of Whitney Houston's death brought 425 hits per second to her Wikipedia article, the highest peak traffic on any article since at least January 2010. It is broadly known that Wikipedia is the sixth most popular website on the Internet, but the English Wikipedia now has over 4 million articles and 29 million total pages. Much less attention has been given to traffic patterns and trends in content viewed.
  • News and notes: Article Feedback Tool faces community resistance
    Article feedback, at least through talk pages, has been a part of Wikipedia since its inception in 2001. The use of these pages, though, has typically been limited to experienced editors who know how to use them.
  • WikiProject report: Land of the Midnight Sun
    This week, we took a trip to WikiProject Norway. Started in February 2005, WikiProject Norway has become the home for almost 34,000 articles about the world's best place to live, including 16 Featured Articles, 19 Featured Lists, and nearly 250 Good Articles. The project works on a to do list, maintains a categorization system, watches article alerts, and serves as a discussion forum.
  • Featured content: Portal people on potent potables and portable potholes
    This week, the Signpost's featured content section continues its recap of 2012 by looking at featured portals, a small yet active part of the project. We interviewed FPOC directors Cirt and OhanaUnited.
  • In the media: Star Trek Into Pedantry
    On 30 January 2013, Kevin Morris in the Daily Dot summarised the bitter debates in Wikipedia around capitalisation or non-capitalisation of the word "into" in the title of the upcoming Star Trek film, Star Trek Into Darkness.
  • Technology report: Wikidata team targets English Wikipedia deployment
    Following the deployment of the Wikidata client to the Hungarian Wikipedia last month, the client was also deployed to the Italian and Hebrew Wikipedias on Wednesday. The next target for the client, which automatically provides phase 1 functionality, is the English Wikipedia, with a deployment date of 11 February already set.

The Signpost: 11 February 2013

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  • Featured content: A lousy week
    Six articles, one list, and fourteen pictures were promoted to "featured" states this week on the English Wikipedia.
  • WikiProject report: Just the Facts
    This week, we got the details on WikiProject Infoboxes.
  • In the media: Wikipedia mirroring life in island ownership dispute
    Foreign Policy has published a report on editing of the Wikipedia articles on the Senkaku Islands and Senkaku Islands dispute. The uninhabited islands are under the control of Japan, but China and Taiwan are asserting rival territorial claims. Tensions have risen of late—and not just in the waters surrounding the actual islands.
  • Discussion report: WebCite proposal
    Current discussions on the English Wikipedia include...

The Signpost: 18 February 2013

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  • WikiProject report: Thank you for flying WikiProject Airlines
    This week, we put our life in the hands of WikiProject Airlines. Starting in July 2005, the project has improved articles relating to airline companies, alliances, destination lists, and travel benefit programs. WikiProject Airlines has accumulated over 4,000 pages, including 4 Featured Articles and 26 Good Articles.
  • Technology report: Better templates and 3D buildings
    As of time of writing, twenty wikis (including the English, French and Hungarian Wikipedias) are in the process of getting access to the Lua scripting language, an optional substitute for the clunky template code that exists at present.
  • News and notes: Wikimedia Foundation declares 'victory' in Wikivoyage lawsuit
    On February 15, the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) declared 'victory' in its counter-lawsuit against Internet Brands (IB), the owner of Wikitravel and the operator of several online media, community, and e-commerce sites in vertical markets. The lawsuit clears the last remaining hurdles for the WMF's new travel guide project, Wikivoyage.
  • In the media: Sue Gardner interviewed by the Australian press
    Sue Gardner's visit to Australia sparked a number of interviews in the Australian press. An interview published in the Daily Telegraph on 12 February 2013, titled "Data plans 'unnerving': Wikipedia boss", saw Gardner comment on Australian plans to store personal internet and telephone data. The planned measure, intended to assist crime prevention, would involve internet service providers and mobile phone firms storing customer usage data for up to two years.
  • Featured content: Featured content gets schooled
    Two articles, nine lists, and thirteen pictures were promoted to 'featured' status on the English Wikipedia this week.

Unsubscribed from signpost

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I have boldly unsubscribed you from Signpost as it's cluttering your user talk page.

That said, I hope you come back! --B2C 22:43, 25 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Nomination of Gora (racial epithet) for deletion

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A discussion is taking place as to whether the article Gora (racial epithet) is suitable for inclusion in Wikipedia according to Wikipedia's policies and guidelines or whether it should be deleted.

The article will be discussed at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Gora (racial epithet) until a consensus is reached, and anyone is welcome to contribute to the discussion. The nomination will explain the policies and guidelines which are of concern. The discussion focuses on high-quality evidence and our policies and guidelines.

Users may edit the article during the discussion, including to improve the article to address concerns raised in the discussion. However, do not remove the article-for-deletion notice from the top of the article. Darkness Shines (talk) 19:31, 26 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Need help with IPAc-pl

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Hi there, I noticed you did some edits to {{IPAc-pl}} in the past. Could you help with adding mouseover tooltips to that template? I prepared a basic list to mirror the functionality of {{H:IPA}}, all is explained at Template_talk:IPAc-pl#Mouseover. Any help would be appreciated. //Halibutt 23:48, 6 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]

WikiProject Poland Newsletter • January 2014 • Issue II

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WikiProject Poland Newsletter • January 2014 • Issue II
For our freedom and yours

Welcome to the second issue of WikiProject Poland newsletter, the Monitor (named after the first Polish newspaper).

Our Project has been operational since 1 June, 2005, and also serves as the Poland-related Wikipedia notice board. I highly recommend watchlisting the Wikipedia:WikiProject Poland page, so you can be aware of the ongoing discussions. We hope you will join us in them, if you haven't done so already! Unlike many other WikiProjects, we are quite active; we get close to a hundred discussion threads each year and we do a pretty good job at answering all issues raised. Last year we were featured in the Signpost, and our interviewer was amazed at our activity. In the end, however, even as active as we are, we are just a tiny group - you can easily become one of our core members!

In addition to a lively encyclopedic, Poland-related, English-language discussion forum, we have numerous useful tools that can be of use to you - and that you could help us maintain and develop:

  • we have an active assessment department. As of now, our project has tagged almost 83,000 pages as Poland-related - that's an improvement of over 3,000 new pages since the last newsletter. Out of which 30 still need a quality assessment, and 2,000, importance assessment. We have done a lot to clear the backlog here (3 years ago those numbers were 1,500 and 20,000, respectively). Can you help assess a few pages?
    • assessing articles is as easy as filling in the class= and importance= parameters on the talk page in the {{WPPOLAND|class=|importance=}} template. See here for a how-to guide.
  • once an article has an assessment template, it will appear in our article alerts and news feed, which provides information on which Poland-related articles are considered for deletion, move, or are undergoing a Good or Featured review. Watchlisting that feed, in addition to watchlisting our project's main page, is a good way to make sure you stay up to date on most Poland-related discussions.
  • you can also see detailed deletion discussions at Wikipedia:WikiProject Deletion sorting/Poland (which is a good place to watchlist if you just want to stay up to date on possible deletions of Poland-related content)
  • we have also begun B-class quality reviews on our talk page, and if our activity increases, hopefully we will be able to institute our own A-class quality reviews. As of now, we have about 500 C-class articles in need of a B-class review. If you'd like to help with them, instructions for doing B-class reviews are to be found in point 10 of our assessment FAQ. In addition to this automated list, you are also encouraged to help review articles from our B-class reviews requested list found here.
  • also, those articles will be included in our cleanup listing, which allows us to see which top-importance articles are in need for attention, and so on. We have tens of thousands articles in need of cleanup there, so if you ever need something to do, just look at this gigantic list. (I am currently reviewing the articles tagged with notability, either proving them notable or nominating for deletion; there are still several dozens left if you want to help!).
  • did you know that newly created Poland-related articles are listed here. They need to be reviewed, often cleaned-up, occasionally nominated for deletion, and their creators may need to be welcomed and invited to our project if they show promise as new authors of Poland-related content.
  • we are maintaining a Portal:Poland
  • automated Wikipedia:WikiProject Poland/Popular pages lists the most popular Poland-related pages from the previous month(s)
  • Breaking news: we are looking for a Wikipedian in Residence for the New York City area. See Wikipedia:GLAM/Józef Piłsudski Institute of America for details.

This is not all; on our page you can find a list of useful templates (including userboxes), awards and other tools!


With all that said, how about you join our discussions at WT:POLAND? Surely, there must be something you could help others with, or perhaps you are in need of assistance yourself?

It took me three years to finish this issue. Feel free to help out getting the next one before 2017 by being more active in WikiProject management :)

You have received this newsletter because you are listed as a member at WikiProject Poland.
Please remove yourself from the mailing list to prevent receiving future mailings.
Newsletter prepared by Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here and sent by Technical 13 (talk) using the Mass message system.

Proposal for merger of Polish morphology into Polish grammar

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Hello, since you were a heavily involved user, I'd like to ask your opinion on the merger of Polish morphology into Polish grammar. I've explained my proposition here. Thanks in advance. Dreilinden (talk) 22:36, 22 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Category:Wikipedia project disambiguation pages

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Category:Wikipedia project disambiguation pages, which you created, has been nominated for possible deletion, merging, or renaming. If you would like to participate in the discussion, you are invited to add your comments at the category's entry on the Categories for discussion page. Thank you. SFB 12:18, 29 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Hi Kotniski, I noticed you flagged Rob Stone (entrepreneur) page. I have made edits and I would like it if you could review your initial dispute and remove it. If you still see something that you believe is incorrect, please let me know and I will make the necessary adjustments. All I want is to have this page up and running without any disputes on it. Thanks!

Joycefdm (talk) 15:02, 12 November 2014 (UTC)[reply]


Invitation to comment

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Given your activity on the WP: Revert_only_when_necessary essay page, I'd invite your input on a recent edit of that essay that was, very ironically, instantly reverted. See the talk page [2] if you wish to participate.–GodBlessYou2 (talk) 18:56, 13 January 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Merger discussion for Majorat

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An article that you have been involved in editing, Majorat, has been proposed for merging with another article. If you are interested, please participate in the merger discussion. Thank you. MiguelMadeira (talk) 11:26, 6 February 2015 (UTC) --MiguelMadeira (talk) 11:26, 6 February 2015 (UTC)[reply]

I miss you

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Just remembered you. What a great editor and person you were. Hope you return someday. I don't know if Gerda Arendt remembers you.♦ Dr. Blofeld 09:57, 28 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Sorry, we had no interaction yet, but there's always Hope - first word on my talk, after passing decency and "despised", with monkeys, --Gerda Arendt (talk) 10:07, 28 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]

WikiProject Intertranswiki

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Hi. In 2009 you joined up for the wikiproject Wikipedia:WikiProject Intertranswiki. The project has since ceased activity but is currently being given a kick start due to its importance and the coordination needed to translate content from other wikipedias. If you're still active and are still interested please visit the bottom of Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Intertranswiki and add a {{tick}} by your name within the next week so the project can do a recount and update. Thank you. --Ser Amantio di NicolaoChe dicono a Signa?Lo dicono a Signa. 05:21, 29 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Moving Burma to Myanmar - new 2015 poll

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You participated in a Burma RM in the past so I'm informing you of another RM. I hope I didn't miss anyone. New move attempt of Burma>Myanmar Fyunck(click) (talk) 09:34, 7 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]

ArbCom elections are now open!

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Hi,
You appear to be eligible to vote in the current Arbitration Committee election. The Arbitration Committee is the panel of editors responsible for conducting the Wikipedia arbitration process. It has the authority to enact binding solutions for disputes between editors, primarily related to serious behavioural issues that the community has been unable to resolve. This includes the ability to impose site bans, topic bans, editing restrictions, and other measures needed to maintain our editing environment. The arbitration policy describes the Committee's roles and responsibilities in greater detail. If you wish to participate, you are welcome to review the candidates' statements and submit your choices on the voting page. For the Election committee, MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 13:32, 24 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Sorry to see that you are gone.

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Hi, I've been around WP for a long time, but never really gotten into the thick of things. The last week or so I've realized how completely FUBAR the WP:V policy is. I'd read it hundreds of times, but never really grokked its Orwellian nature until lately, when I've seen how it is used as a force for evil. So I've been buried in old talk page threads ... I can't tear my eyes away -- it's like watching a massive train wreck. this was the most sensible comment I've read in a while. Sorry to see that you're gone. Not too surprised, though. Klortho (talk) 07:43, 13 July 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Wikipedia:Naming conventions (names and titles) listed at Redirects for discussion

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An editor has asked for a discussion to address the redirect Wikipedia:Naming conventions (names and titles). Since you had some involvement with the Wikipedia:Naming conventions (names and titles) redirect, you might want to participate in the redirect discussion if you have not already done so. BDD (talk) 20:40, 25 January 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Your inactive bot(s)

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Hello Kotniski, one or more of your bots are scheduled for deauthorized due to inactivity. Please see Wikipedia:Bots/Noticeboard#Inactive_bots_May_2017 if you would like to retain your bot's status. Thank you, — xaosflux Talk 15:10, 29 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Nomination for deletion of Template:Plph

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Template:Plph has been nominated for deletion. You are invited to comment on the discussion at the template's entry on the Templates for discussion page. Ten Pound Hammer • (What did I screw up now?) 03:20, 11 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Gone SIX YEARS????

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Wow. Six years. You're missed, and would be welcomed back. FYI.

--В²C ☎ 02:21, 13 February 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Nomination for deletion of Template:00sbox

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Template:00sbox has been nominated for deletion. You are invited to comment on the discussion at the template's entry on the Templates for discussion page. Hddty. (talk) 16:38, 13 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Nomination for deletion of Template:DecadesBC

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Template:DecadesBC has been nominated for deletion. You are invited to comment on the discussion at the template's entry on the Templates for discussion page. – BrandonXLF (t@lk) 02:36, 17 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Nomination for deletion of Template:C-en

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Template:C-en has been nominated for deletion. You are invited to comment on the discussion at the template's entry on the Templates for discussion page. Zackmann (Talk to me/What I been doing) 22:53, 27 February 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Speedy deletion nomination of Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Photography/History of Photography/Assessment

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Hello, and welcome to Wikipedia. This is a notice that the page you created, Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Photography/History of Photography/Assessment, was tagged as a test page under section G2 of the criteria for speedy deletion and has been or soon may be deleted. Please use the sandbox for any other tests you want to do. Take a look at the welcome page if you would like to learn more about contributing to our encyclopedia.

If you think this page should not be deleted for this reason, you may contest the nomination by visiting the page and clicking the button labelled "Contest this speedy deletion". This will give you the opportunity to explain why you believe the page should not be deleted. However, be aware that once a page is tagged for speedy deletion, it may be deleted without delay. Please do not remove the speedy deletion tag from the page yourself, but do not hesitate to add information in line with Wikipedia's policies and guidelines. If the page is deleted, and you wish to retrieve the deleted material for future reference or improvement, then please contact the deleting administrator, or if you have already done so, you can place a request here. Qono (talk) 15:36, 13 February 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Today's Wikipedian 10 years ago

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Awesome
Ten years!

--Gerda Arendt (talk) 08:41, 1 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]

"Durchgangslager" listed at Redirects for discussion

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Information icon A discussion is taking place to address the redirect Durchgangslager. The discussion will occur at Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion/Log/2020 June 7#Durchgangslager until a consensus is reached, and anyone, including you, is welcome to contribute to the discussion. buidhe 10:27, 7 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

"Übergangslager" listed at Redirects for discussion

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Information icon A discussion is taking place to address the redirect Übergangslager. The discussion will occur at Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion/Log/2020 June 25#Übergangslager until a consensus is reached, and anyone, including you, is welcome to contribute to the discussion. buidhe 04:57, 25 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Nomination for deletion of Template:Italics after

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Template:Italics after has been nominated for deletion. You are invited to comment on the discussion at the entry on the Templates for discussion page. User:GKFXtalk 23:38, 12 June 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Nomination for merger of Template:Both

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Template:Both has been nominated for merging with Template:If both. You are invited to comment on the discussion at the template's entry on the Templates for discussion page. Thank you. Nickps (talk) 11:08, 8 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Nomination for deletion of Template:Ship prefix

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Template:Ship prefix has been nominated for deletion. You are invited to comment on the discussion at the entry on the Templates for discussion page. Gonnym (talk) 07:48, 1 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Proposed deletion of Pasterka (disambiguation)

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Notice

The article Pasterka (disambiguation) has been proposed for deletion because of the following concern:

Disambiguation page not required (WP:ONEOTHER). Primary topic article has a hatnote to the only other use.

While all constructive contributions to Wikipedia are appreciated, pages may be deleted for any of several reasons.

You may prevent the proposed deletion by removing the {{proposed deletion/dated}} notice, but please explain why in your edit summary or on the article's talk page.

Please consider improving the page to address the issues raised. Removing {{proposed deletion/dated}} will stop the proposed deletion process, but other deletion processes exist. In particular, the speedy deletion process can result in deletion without discussion, and articles for deletion allows discussion to reach consensus for deletion. Shhhnotsoloud (talk) 13:16, 18 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

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Information icon Template:Link if exists has been nominated for merging with Template:Auto link. You are invited to comment on the discussion at the template's entry on the Templates for discussion page. Thank you. Zackmann (Talk to me/What I been doing) 05:11, 5 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

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