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Wikinews:Water cooler/miscellaneous/archives/2024/October

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Press union revealed largest ‘harassment’ campaign against Hong Kong journalists

This is not assistance request, more like a note about after this interesting story went stale. Seemed important on local scale. (and good to expose journalism related events at Wikinews)

  • There was a few days delay with initial report
  • Further delay with splitting into two stories, about Wikimedia Foundation actions and about HKJA announcement.
  • Then about HKJA announcement which was considered a less controversial (wrt relevance) story to review, there were no clarify of whether npov was met. There were multiple sources but all on Hong Kong side telling stories of how various journalists were abused.

Issues with how it was worded/phrased not neutrally remain.

I am trying to understand what prevented someone from rewriting this story and then another person publishing it. More to be written here in a bit. @Kitabc12345 @Cypp0847 Gryllida (talk) 01:02, 29 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Hi @Kitabc12345 & @Cypp0847
I have re-read the article now trying to answer my question above.
  • Lack of precision of numbers. "Dozens". Is this what the report said?
  • Lack of precision to "what". "Faced threats and intimidation". This happens ... a lot or a little ... everywhere (should not, but it does). Perhaps the truly focal event is "faced increased abuse after a bill was passed by China". Then this timing needs to be clearly indicated and supported by specific nummbers in the first paragraph.
  • So if the first paragraph was like "HKJA reported a 300% increase of abuse directed at HK journalists since August 15, when the new XYZ bill was introduced by China, compared with orevious 10 years", then it would read as a clearer description of the event. Or "For the first time in 10 years, abuse exceeded 5 cases a year, with 50 abuse reports in the last two weeks alone". Or something. Quantitative.
Hope it helps. I kept trying to figure out what was causing my concern for publishing and this is probably main cause.
Has the union progressed anywhere with a campaign to reduce this abuse? This could be valid reason for a new story, which could reuse a part of the existing story for background.
Regards, Gryllida (talk) 10:36, 29 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
  1. "Dozens" is the term used by HKJA and the media. The statement said families and employees of 15 journalists received threatening letters, along with neighbours and landlords of 8 journalists. Additionally at least 36 journalists were targeted online, while 3 were searched when entering Hong Kong by the customs. Given these information, by calculation we expect to have more than 51 individuals affected, but it's difficult to derive an accurate number because some cases might be overlapping.
  2. Perhaps precise examples of threats and intimidation would suffice. I agree that the timing is also relatable.
  3. There were unfortunately no statistics provided by the union in relation to the abuse cases in the past.
  4. The government has commented but only urging the union to report them to the police for investigation. There are limited follow-up discussions ongoing partly because, in my opinion, the political situation in the city.
Thanks Gryllida again for the comments, and Kit for the contributions on this report. Cypp0847 (talk) 12:55, 29 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I think it could be good cause for interview to the union asking for more quantitative information and how are they going to deal with it. Would you agree? If so, would you like to write a list of questions to the union? I'd be happy to have a look at the questions and share my feedback. Gryllida (talk) 02:01, 30 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Kit has sent the proposed questions to you, fyr. Cypp0847 (talk) 05:56, 1 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2024-41

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

Weekly highlight

  • Communities can now request installation of Automoderator on their wiki. Automoderator is an automated anti-vandalism tool that reverts bad edits based on scores from the new "Revert Risk" machine learning model. You can read details about the necessary steps for installation and configuration. [1]

Updates for editors

Updates for technical contributors

  • It is now possible for <syntaxhighlight> code blocks to offer readers a "Copy" button if the copy=1 attribute is set on the tag. Thanks to SD0001 for these improvements. [3]
  • Customized copyright footer messages on all wikis will be updated. The new versions will use wikitext markup instead of requiring editing raw HTML. [4]
  •   Later this month, temporary accounts will be rolled out on several pilot wikis. The final list of the wikis will be published in the second half of the month. If you maintain any tools, bots, or gadgets on these 11 wikis, and your software is using data about IP addresses or is available for logged-out users, please check if it needs to be updated to work with temporary accounts. Guidance on how to update the code is available.
  •   Rate limiting has been enabled for the code review tools Gerrit and GitLab to address ongoing issues caused by malicious traffic and scraping. Clients that open too many concurrent connections will be restricted for a few minutes. This rate limiting is managed through nftables firewall rules. For more details, see Wikitech's pages on Firewall, GitLab limits and Gerrit operations.
  • Five new wikis have been created:

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MediaWiki message delivery 23:42, 7 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Preliminary results of the 2024 Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees elections

Hello all,

Thank you to everyone who participated in the 2024 Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees election. Close to 6000 community members from more than 180 wiki projects have voted.

The following four candidates were the most voted:

  1. Christel Steigenberger
  2. Maciej Artur Nadzikiewicz
  3. Victoria Doronina
  4. Lorenzo Losa

While these candidates have been ranked through the vote, they still need to be appointed to the Board of Trustees. They need to pass a successful background check and meet the qualifications outlined in the Bylaws. New trustees will be appointed at the next Board meeting in December 2024.

Learn more about the results on Meta-Wiki.

Best regards,

The Elections Committee and Board Selection Working Group


MPossoupe_(WMF) 08:25, 14 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2024-42

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

Updates for editors

  • The Structured Discussion extension (also known as Flow) is starting to be removed. This extension is unmaintained and causes issues. It will be replaced by DiscussionTools, which is used on any regular talk page. A first set of wikis are being contacted. These wikis are invited to stop using Flow, and to move all Flow boards to sub-pages, as archives. At these wikis, a script will move all Flow pages that aren't a sub-page to a sub-page automatically, starting on 22 October 2024. On 28 October 2024, all Flow boards at these wikis will be set in read-only mode. [10][11]
  • WMF's Search Platform team is working on making it easier for readers to perform text searches in their language. A change last week on over 30 languages makes it easier to find words with accents and other diacritics. This applies to both full-text search and to types of advanced search such as the hastemplate and incategory keywords. More technical details (including a few other minor search upgrades) are available. [12]
  • View all 20 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, EditCheck was installed at Russian Wikipedia, and fixes were made for some missing user interface styles.

Updates for technical contributors

  • Editors who use the Toolforge tool Earwig's Copyright Violation Detector will now be required to log in with their Wikimedia account before running checks using the "search engine" option. This change is needed to help prevent external bots from misusing the system. Thanks to Chlod for these improvements. [13]
  • Phabricator users can create tickets and add comments on existing tickets via Email again. Sending email to Phabricator has been fixed. [14]
  •   Some HTML elements in the interface are now wrapped with a <bdi> element, to make our HTML output more aligned with Web standards. More changes like this will be coming in future weeks. This change might break some tools that rely on the previous HTML structure of the interface. Note that relying on the HTML structure of the interface is not recommended and might break at any time. [15]

In depth

  • The latest monthly MediaWiki Product Insights newsletter is available. This edition includes: updates on Wikimedia's authentication system, research to simplify feature development in the MediaWiki platform, updates on Parser Unification and MathML rollout, and more.
  • The latest quarterly Technical Community Newsletter is now available. This edition include: research about improving topic suggestions related to countries, improvements to PHPUnit tests, and more.

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

MediaWiki message delivery 21:21, 14 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2024-43

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

Weekly highlight

  • The Mobile Apps team has released an update to the iOS app's navigation, and it is now available in the latest App store version. The team added a new Profile menu that allows for easy access to editor features like Notifications and Watchlist from the Article view, and brings the "Donate" button into a more accessible place for users who are reading an article. This is the first phase of a larger planned navigation refresh to help the iOS app transition from a primarily reader-focused app, to an app that fully supports reading and editing. The Wikimedia Foundation has added more editing features and support for on-wiki communication based on volunteer requests in recent years.
 
iOS Wikipedia App's profile menu and contents

Updates for editors

  • Wikipedia readers can now download a browser extension to experiment with some early ideas on potential features that recommend articles for further reading, automatically summarize articles, and improve search functionality. For more details and to stay updated, check out the Web team's Content Discovery Experiments page and subscribe to their newsletter.
  • Later this month, logged-out editors of these 12 wikis will start to have temporary accounts created. The list may slightly change - some wikis may be removed but none will be added. Temporary account is a new type of user account. It enhances the logged-out editors' privacy and makes it easier for community members to communicate with them. If you maintain any tools, bots, or gadgets on these 12 wikis, and your software is using data about IP addresses or is available for logged-out users, please check if it needs to be updated to work with temporary accounts. Guidance on how to update the code is available. Read more about the deployment plan across all wikis.
  • View all 33 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, the South Ndebele, Pannonian Rusyn, Obolo, Iban and Tai Nüa Wikipedia languages were created last week. [16][17][18][19][20]
  • It is now possible to create functions on Wikifunctions using Wikidata lexemes, through the new Wikidata lexeme type launched last week. When you go to one of these functions, the user interface provides a lexeme selector that helps you pick a lexeme from Wikidata that matches the word you type. After hitting run, your selected lexeme is retrieved from Wikidata, transformed into a Wikidata lexeme type, and passed into the selected function. Read more about this in the latest Wikifunctions newsletter.

Updates for technical contributors

  •   Users of the Wikimedia sites can now format dates more easily in different languages with the new {{#timef:…}} parser function. For example, {{#timef:now|date|en}} will show as "5 December 2024". Previously, {{#time:…}} could be used to format dates, but this required knowledge of the order of the time and date components and their intervening punctuation. #timef (or #timefl for local time) provides access to the standard date formats that MediaWiki uses in its user interface. This may help to simplify some templates on multi-lingual wikis like Commons and Meta. [21][22]
  •   Commons and Meta users can now efficiently retrieve the user's language using {{USERLANGUAGE}} instead of using {{int:lang}}. [23]
  • The Product and Tech Advisory Council (PTAC) now has its pilot members with representation across Africa, Asia, Europe, North America and South America. They will work to address the Movement Strategy's Technology Council initiative of having a co-defined and more resilient technological platform. [24]

In depth

  • The latest quarterly Growth newsletter is available. It includes: an upcoming Newcomer Homepage Community Updates module, new Community Configuration options, and details on new projects.
  • The Wikimedia Foundation is now an official partner of the CVE program, which is an international effort to catalog publicly disclosed cybersecurity vulnerabilities. This partnership will allow the Security Team to instantly publish common vulnerabilities and exposures (CVE) records that are affecting MediaWiki core, extensions, and skins, along with any other code the Foundation is a steward of.
  • The Community Wishlist is now testing machine translations for Wishlist content. Volunteers can now read machine-translated versions of wishes and dive into discussions even before translators arrive to translate content.

Meetings and events

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MediaWiki message delivery 20:52, 21 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2024-44

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

Updates for editors

Updates for technical contributors

  • Wikis can use the Guided Tour extension to help newcomers understand how to edit. The Guided Tours extension now works with dark mode. Guided Tour maintainers can check their tours to see that nothing looks odd. They can also set emitTransitionOnStep to true to fix an old bug. They can use the new flag allowAutomaticBack to avoid back-buttons they don't want. [26]
  • Administrators in the Wikimedia projects who use the Nuke Extension will notice that mass deletions done with this tool have the "Nuke" tag. This change will make reviewing and analyzing deletions performed with the tool easier. [27]

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

MediaWiki message delivery 20:56, 28 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Seeking volunteers to join several of the movement’s committees

Each year, typically from October through December, several of the movement’s committees seek new volunteers.

Read more about the committees on their Meta-wiki pages:

Applications for the committees open on 16 October 2024. Applications for the Affiliations Committee close on 18 November 2024, and applications for the Ombuds commission and the Case Review Committee close on 2 December 2024. Learn how to apply by visiting the appointment page on Meta-wiki. Post to the talk page or email cst@wikimedia.org with any questions you may have.

For the Committee Support team,


-- Keegan (WMF) (talk) 23:07, 16 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Hi @Keegan (WMF) is it competitive? i.e. if i apply for affcom. i have a little experience on two wikis and none of in person outreach. Gryllida (talk) 17:25, 29 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]
@Gryllida I do not know for AffCom, but Ombuds have historically been pretty competitive (or they don't like me); I've applied for like the last three years of so and always failed. Leaderboard (talk) 16:32, 30 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]
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