User talk:Jdforrester (WMF) - MediaWiki
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Latest comment:
10 months ago
by Adithyak1997 in topic
Regarding Phab Ticket
Welcome
edit
Latest comment:
13 years ago
3 comments
2 people in discussion
Dear Jdforrester (WMF), Welcome to
MediaWiki.org
Yes, welcome! This site is dedicated to documenting the
MediaWiki software
, the software behind many wikis, including that of
Wikipedia
and the
Wikimedia Foundation projects
Please, take a look at the following pages. They might prove useful to you as a newcomer here:
Project:About
How does MediaWiki work?
Help:Editing pages
Help:Navigation
Manual:FAQ
If you have any questions, please ask me on my talk page. Once again, welcome, and I hope you quickly feel comfortable here, and find this site useful documentation of the MediaWiki software.
Thanks, and regards,
Aude
talk
15:52, 23 May 2012 (UTC)
Reply
You need no welcome, but welcome! ;)
Aude
talk
15:52, 23 May 2012 (UTC)
Reply
Thanks. ;-)
Jdforrester (WMF)
talk
17:42, 23 May 2012 (UTC)
Reply
Sorry
edit
Latest comment:
13 years ago
2 comments
2 people in discussion
I thought that page was for a simple description. Sorry for being wrong.
Jasper Deng
talk
22:09, 21 June 2012 (UTC)
Reply
No worries. :-)
Jdforrester (WMF)
talk
22:10, 21 June 2012 (UTC)
Reply
Monthly statuses in
Template:Wikimedia project status line/blue link
edit
Latest comment:
13 years ago
5 comments
2 people in discussion
Hey James. I noticed you edited that template to add a link to add a monthly status update. The gadget makes this very easy with the "include in the monthly report" checkbox when you add a new status update. I wonder, is the gadget not working for you? If so, we should probably fix the gadget rather than adding an extra link to all the activity pages that transclude the template. Also, the link you added seems to do nothing for people with the gadget enabled, so it might be confusing.
guillom
16:35, 24 July 2012 (UTC)
Reply
Oh, I'm sorry, there's a gadget? It might help if someone had told me. :-) Will look now.
Jdforrester (WMF)
talk
16:40, 24 July 2012 (UTC)
Reply
OK, having now found the gadget it does indeed cause the template to break (it's over-riding both functionality but only replacing one of them with the pop-up); however, for non-gadget users (who we have to assume are the majority of users of the site, if you're not going to enable it by default for all users) this is confusing. How about I set the gadget as default and revert my template changes?
Jdforrester (WMF)
talk
16:43, 24 July 2012 (UTC)
Reply
The gadget is linked from the top of
Wikimedia engineering report/2012/July
, but apparently not prominently enough :) I don't see an issue with enabling the gadget as default.
guillom
16:48, 24 July 2012 (UTC)
Reply
... and now done. :-)
Jdforrester (WMF)
talk
17:05, 24 July 2012 (UTC)
Reply
Query on VisualEditor module
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Latest comment:
13 years ago
2 comments
2 people in discussion
Hello, is the "VisualEditor Module" project still in its construction phase?I would liketo undertake this with your guidance
--
Rahul21
talk
04:40, 10 March 2013 (UTC)
Reply
Yes, the
VisualEditor
is still undergoing significant development and I wouldn't recommend deploying it to a production wiki unless you are prepared to potentially break things for your users. There is more information about how to experiment with it at
Extension:VisualEditor
. Hope this is helpful!
Jdforrester (WMF)
talk
04:39, 11 March 2013 (UTC)
Reply
A barnstar for you!
edit
Latest comment:
12 years ago
2 comments
2 people in discussion
The Brilliant Idea Barnstar
Yet more barnstars all around to those on the Echo team. Genius.
TortoiseWrath
talk
04:16, 4 May 2013 (UTC)
Reply
Thank you,
TortoiseWrath
, though my involvement in Echo was very slight!
Jdforrester (WMF)
talk
15:17, 4 May 2013 (UTC)
Reply
GSoC / OPW IRC AllHands this week
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Latest comment:
12 years ago
1 comment
1 person in discussion
Hi, you are invited to the GSoC / OPW IRC AllHands meeting on
Wednesday, June 26, 2013 at 15:00 UTC
(8:30pm IST, 8am PDT) at #wikimedia-office. We have done our best finding a time that works decently in as many timezones as possibles. Please confirm at qgil
wikimedia.org so I can add you to the calendar invitation and I have your preferred email for other occasions. If you can't make it's fine, but let me know as well. We have left a notice to all students, but your help is welcome making sure
yours
is aware about it. Thank you!--
Qgil
talk
20:35, 24 June 2013 (UTC)
Reply
Style guide
edit
Latest comment:
12 years ago
1 comment
1 person in discussion
About
this
: Where's your style guide?
International English Usage
does not list that as an acceptable use of hyphens. The
European Commission's English Style Guide
(which does "EU English") specifically rejects it at 2.52, "In adverb-adjective modifiers, there is no hyphen when the adverb ends in -ly:" It is of course wrong in American, Australian, British, Canadian, Indian,
and
Irish English, so it seems unlikely to me that any "international English" standard would set itself directly against all of the major varieties of English.
WhatamIdoing
talk
16:15, 14 July 2013 (UTC)
Reply
Browser support
edit
Latest comment:
12 years ago
3 comments
3 people in discussion
Hi James, thanks a lot for updating the browser matrix. Nemo_bis asked me whether FF ESR 17 would work with VE. I don't think I can test this for him, but even so there's
a comment by Liangent
that makes me think it wouldn't, so I thought I'd ask. Thanks. --
Elitre (WMF)
talk
10:33, 4 December 2013 (UTC)
Reply
Thank you very much for clarifying further. The instructions should now be clear enough even for our partners' technicians. --
Nemo
18:51, 4 December 2013 (UTC)
Reply
Elitre (WMF)
and
Nemo bis
You're welcome; sorry it was unclear before.
Jdforrester (WMF)
talk
18:57, 4 December 2013 (UTC)
Reply
LQT new thread went to section header
edit
Latest comment:
12 years ago
8 comments
2 people in discussion
[1]
Why does this happen, and what can I do to avoid it?
Deryck C.
Meta
16:25, 4 December 2013 (UTC)
Reply
It's caused by
bug 41276
- LQT never implemented the catch on the API. :-(
Jdforrester (WMF)
talk
18:00, 4 December 2013 (UTC)
Reply
But I clicked "Start a new discussion"! (The only difference I could think of is that I hit enter in the title textbox, rather than mouse-clicking the "save" button. Was that what was causing the problem?
Deryck C.
Meta
13:55, 8 December 2013 (UTC)
Reply
Deryck Chan
Oh. :-( In that case, probably a (different) odd bug with LQT?
Jdforrester (WMF)
talk
20:18, 9 December 2013 (UTC)
Reply
Tried lots of stuff on the LQT test page. Can't replicate the bug. I have a feeling that it has something to do with middle-button-clicking the "start a new thread" button, which does cause weird behaviour, but I couldn't make the textbox post to the header rather than the thread list. Oh well :)
Deryck C.
Meta
22:43, 9 December 2013 (UTC)
Reply
Deryck Chan
Thanks for trying to reproduce, at least!
Jdforrester (WMF)
talk
23:31, 9 December 2013 (UTC)
Reply
Also, if this was you (I couldn't tell because there's a
known bug
though the
log
suggests it was you), thank you for being the first person ever to thank me using the "thank them for this edit" button!
[[User:[Nobody]|[Nobody]]] thanked you for your edit on VisualEditor/Feedback.
1 day ago | View edit
Deryck C.
Meta
16:52, 11 December 2013 (UTC)
Reply
Deryck Chan
Ha. Whoops, didn't know about that bug; yes, 'twas I. :-)
Jdforrester (WMF)
talk
19:10, 11 December 2013 (UTC)
Reply
VE and WYSIWYG
edit
Latest comment:
12 years ago
5 comments
2 people in discussion
I stumbled upon
Extension:WYSIWYG
, and it appears to me that it was working well enough on most browsers, even several years before the first VisualEditor beta, and various sites were – and some still are (including Wikia, AFAIK) – using it. While I do thank you all for the awesome work done on VE, I was just wondering why the Wikimedia Foundation has focused the development on a visual editor so lately. Were there any issues with CKEditor that prevented it from being installed or used on WMF servers? Or has the Foundation recently changed its mind on the matter, and thought it was worth starting a new project from scratch? I don't know whether this question has already been asked somewhere else, in case you can simply link a detailed answer ;-) --
Ricordi
samoa
09:40, 2 February 2014 (UTC)
Reply
Ricordisamoa
Hey. Thank you for the comments. Yes, there were a number of issues with existing HTML editors (including CKEditor) which meant that we felt that our only option was to write our own. Most notably, proper rich generated content support is lacking from all HTML editors we evaluated, including CKEditor as used at Wikia (and in other extensions and CMSes) – having puzzle pieces, or "sorry, we can't edit this page with this editor" messages was considered not good enough. A principle design objective for VisualEditor is that a user could edit all our content and do anything they could do in wikitext, with exceptions only where we actively stop them from doing silly things (like adding both
__INDEX__
and
__NOINDEX__
to the same page). There's also significant issues with language support – in general, MediaWiki supports not just more languages than other software, but a super-set. I agree that it would have been much easier if we could have just simply extended an existing editor, but it didn't turn out to be possible from our research.
Jdforrester (WMF)
talk
02:38, 15 February 2014 (UTC)
Reply
But what if a good WYSIWYG extension had been available, say, in 2009, would the WMF had adopted it? Or do you believe that the interest in visual editing is only a recent trend? --
Ricordi
samoa
03:16, 15 February 2014 (UTC)
Reply
Ricordisamoa
We've been talking off-and-on about a visual editor for MediaWiki for about a decade, but we only seriously started work in 2010. Had there been a great extension that met our needs (or mostly so) then we'd probably never have thought to build our own.
Jdforrester (WMF)
talk
19:14, 20 February 2014 (UTC)
Reply
Thank you very much for your time. Regards, --
Ricordi
samoa
19:47, 20 February 2014 (UTC)
Reply
Careful with FlaggedRevs
edit
Latest comment:
12 years ago
5 comments
2 people in discussion
Please check better the diffs you review, here you approved an almost vandalic, ridiculously wrong edit by an unregistered user:
[2]
. It mistated dependencies and installation steps and very funnily stated that Translate is part of the Semantic Bundle;
a user got very confused
Also, please don't use the "quality" setting unless you "maintain" a page or there is consensus about it, because it effectively protects the page for anyone but the highest levels in user groups. --
Nemo
19:24, 23 February 2014 (UTC)
Reply
Nemo bis
Eurgh. Why can't we switch the stupid extension off? It's actively unhelpful to demand in big bold letters at the top of every users' watchlist that they should review changes, and then not actually show the changes that are intended.
Jdforrester (WMF)
talk
16:37, 24 February 2014 (UTC)
Reply
I sometimes find it useful for some changes I can let someone double check without pressure but yes, I rarely enable it myself on a page. I've never felt bored enough to question its broader usage and the review stats don't look too bad, though. --
Nemo
17:14, 24 February 2014 (UTC)
Reply
Nemo bis
The review stats don't look bad because we've an active editor base who get screamed at by the interface if they let unreviewed edits sit around. It doesn't mean it's adding value…
Jdforrester (WMF)
talk
17:16, 24 February 2014 (UTC)
Reply
Sure, I'm just saying that we lack the easiest argument one can win a "let's disable the extension" battle with. --
Nemo
17:22, 24 February 2014 (UTC)
Reply
Project management tools/Review/Options
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Latest comment:
12 years ago
2 comments
2 people in discussion
Hi, and thank you for all your edits on
Project management tools/Review/Options
:)
guillom
09:27, 25 February 2014 (UTC)
Reply
Guillom
Happy to help. :-)
Jdforrester (WMF)
talk
16:42, 25 February 2014 (UTC)
Reply
Restoring
VisualEditor:Test
edit
Latest comment:
12 years ago
5 comments
2 people in discussion
Hello, I see you keep restoring
VisualEditor:Test
. I was once asked (in it's early stages) to let my bot do this, though due to regular editing being disabled to admins (for VE pages) at the time, this was not possible. Since it now allows this, would you like me to reset that page as well?
Hazard-SJ
02:28, 2 March 2014 (UTC)
Reply
Hazard-SJ
That'd be great, yes!
Jdforrester (WMF)
talk
17:37, 3 March 2014 (UTC)
Reply
Done
, my bot will reset it by substituting
VisualEditor:Test/Text
, so if you feel the need to change the text, just update that. Also, you should probably at least semi-protect it.
Hazard-SJ
04:03, 4 March 2014 (UTC)
Reply
Hazard-SJ
Brilliant, thank you.
Jdforrester (WMF)
talk
18:08, 4 March 2014 (UTC)
Reply
Sure, no problem.
Hazard-SJ
16:47, 6 March 2014 (UTC)
Reply
VisualEditor
edit
Latest comment:
12 years ago
1 comment
1 person in discussion
Hi, Jdforrester. I am Gabriel Lee from Hong Kong, I would like to contribute to Visual Editor, I am experienced with using Visual Editor and I am currently admin on wy/zh and beta. Hope you would let me help. Thanks! :) --
Gabrielchihonglee
talk
05:41, 19 March 2014 (UTC)
Reply
Hi
edit
Latest comment:
12 years ago
1 comment
1 person in discussion
You had
reverted
one of my edits. I thought it's related to the betafeatures extension, as the thoughts I've linked to are thoughts about additional functionality for the betafeatures extension. How do I best tell that to the betafeatures extension developers and testers community, if not on its talk page?
Gryllida
04:23, 5 April 2014 (UTC)
Reply
How to get rid of Visual Editor on Wikipedia?
edit
Latest comment:
11 years ago
4 comments
2 people in discussion
It's extremely annoying. There doesn't seem to be a way to opt out under Preferences. Please help!
Parabolooidal
talk
21:59, 6 June 2014 (UTC)
Reply
Parabolooidal
On which wiki? If you're on a wiki with VisualEditor as a "
Beta Feature
", you go to the
Beta Features section
; if not, to the
Editing section
Jdforrester (WMF)
talk
22:43, 6 June 2014 (UTC)
Reply
Yes, I see now that other languages have a "Beta Feature" so that I don't have to understand the language to turn it off. At first I was confused when I clicked an image and suddenly ended up in the VisualEditor. Thanks,
Parabolooidal
talk
00:12, 26 August 2014 (UTC)
Reply
No problem!
Jdforrester (WMF)
talk
00:24, 26 August 2014 (UTC)
Reply
Please turn on Visual Editor as default for all user on nl.wikipedia.org
edit
Latest comment:
11 years ago
7 comments
4 people in discussion
Hi James. Please turn on Visual Editor as default for all user on nl.wikipedia.org. Some people will leave. Bye. Others will enter, how nice.
Ad Huikeshoven
talk
16:59, 21 June 2014 (UTC)
Reply
Ad Huikeshoven
Thank you for the suggestion. However, I think a proper discussion on the Dutch Wikipedia would be appropriate to start with before just turning it on. Would you be willing to start that?
Jdforrester (WMF)
talk
16:04, 23 June 2014 (UTC)
Reply
Jdforrester (WMF)
The discussion opened at the Dutch Village pump yesterday and continues
here
Ad Huikeshoven
talk
09:09, 9 July 2014 (UTC)
Reply
In 2013 the Dutch community had a voting about this subject and they said, based on a too long list of bugs they have to deal with, that the VE is not ready to be set on for everyone. This list of bugs is not solved yet, including some breaking problems. Based on the still existing problems and the voting based on these problems, the visual editor is not ready to be implemented.
Romaine
talk
12:06, 9 July 2014 (UTC)
Reply
Ad Huikeshoven
and
Romaine
It appears that Romaine
blanked the discussion
after a couple of days. The edit summary says it will be moved to the parent page, but
Special:Contributions
for Romaine does not show it being moved anywhere. Perhaps it was an oversight or there was some sort of problem?
Whatamidoing (WMF)
talk
18:18, 14 July 2014 (UTC)
Reply
Whatamidoing (WMF)
The discussion is copied and pasted to
talk page of the VE feedback page
. The feedback page was silent since May. Since a week there is a traffic boom. From this I filed
bugzilla:67850
, which is probably going to be discussed at Wikimania. "Slugs" is a concept which isn't understood at the Dutch Wikipedia, or is completely unknown.
Ad Huikeshoven
talk
17:37, 15 July 2014 (UTC)
Reply
Yes, it looks like someone
reverted the blanking
four hours after I posted this note.
Whatamidoing (WMF)
talk
23:09, 15 July 2014 (UTC)
Reply
Engaging with the mathematics community
edit
Latest comment:
11 years ago
3 comments
2 people in discussion
Hello. In
this comment
you wrote
I note that the
talk page
is blank, so I'm confused as to how much input you've provided, if any.
I doubt that you can really be confused as to the desire of the mathematics editor community to provide input, especially since it is now some weeks since
you wrote
I assumed denizens of WikiProject Mathematics, if no-where else, would be aware of the nature of engineering support in place for the mathematical functions in MediaWiki and had made a decision that they weren't going to help out those few volunteer developers working on it,
in a discussion which had I think made it abundantly clear that there was a very clear appetite for more engagement between mathematics editors and WMF. If it was so important to you to see engagement at that particular page on MediaWiki, then you could and should have pointed the discussion to it in May when you wrote that comment at WP:WPM. To fail to do so, and then affect surprise six weeks later that nobody at WP:WPM has contributed, seems to me to cut across your remit to "make sure the VisualEditor team understands what the community wants and needs". Frankly I am disappointed in this: I would hope for something better from someone in your position.
I am asking you, personally, to please consider how you may more proactively and constructively engage with the mathematics content contributors to get our input and cooperation. We want to engage, we want to contribute and we want to be heard. For some reason it is not working at the moment, and that is damaging to the project. Please reach out to us, either directly, or using the WMF network of community advocates.
Deltahedron
talk
17:11, 21 June 2014 (UTC)
Reply
Follow-up on
Extension talk:Math/Roadmap
as you seem to have missed the point.
Jdforrester (WMF)
talk
16:04, 23 June 2014 (UTC)
Reply
Please try to be more thoughtful in some of your replies: "well done for copy-pasting", "you seem to have missed the point", "I'm confused as to how much input you've provided, if any" are not particularly helpful and could have been better phrased. However, you did not address my request: will you please consider how you may more proactively and constructively engage with the mathematics content contributors to get our input and cooperation? A simple "yes" or "no" would suffice.
Deltahedron
talk
18:04, 23 June 2014 (UTC)
Reply
Your tone
edit
Latest comment:
11 years ago
5 comments
2 people in discussion
I am finding the tone of your replies to my comments increasingly unhelpful. I have already mentioned this in the section above, in a comment which you have not yet had the courtesy to reply to. Your comment "you are clearly of the opinion that a minute's reading comprehension is beneath you" is unfounded, unhelpful and offensive. If you are not able to interact with me in a courteous and constructive way, I suggest that a colleague do so on your behalf. Perhaps your supervisor at the WMF would be able to assist.
Deltahedron
talk
06:18, 1 July 2014 (UTC)
Reply
Deltahedron
I am sad that you feel that way. Perhaps if you said fewer wrong things that need a response it would be easier for both of us? I would start a conversation about your tone, but I feel that it would be even less productive than the other conversations in which I have tried to help you.
Jdforrester (WMF)
talk
17:46, 1 July 2014 (UTC)
Reply
This continued pettiness and obstruction is not what I expect to see from a WMF staff member in your position. Please (1) do not continue to insult me in this way (2) give a plain answer to the plain questions I have asked you (3) apologise for your obstructive conduct.
Deltahedron
talk
19:55, 1 July 2014 (UTC)
Reply
Follow-up
edit
In this edit
, you explain that you have been consistently and deliberately offensive to me, and to refuse to give information to the community at large, because you felt that a question I asked was insufficiently respectful. This is not acceptable behaviour from a member of WMF staff. I call on you to consider whether your actions were appropriate and to apologise to me and to the rest of the community which you have slighted. Alternatively, perhaps you would care to post or email me with the name of your supervisor at the WMF.
Deltahedron
talk
17:18, 11 August 2014 (UTC)
Reply
I note that you have nor responded even though I can see that you have had the opportunity to do so. You may wish to read
this
Deltahedron
talk
21:07, 13 August 2014 (UTC)
Reply
Usurpation Request (SUL)
edit
Latest comment:
11 years ago
4 comments
2 people in discussion
Hello Jdforrester, I wanted to bring you attention to my request
here
which is pending since 7 June. I had sent a talk page message to
User:Jasper Deng
for this issue but hasn't attended to it, which is why I am requesting you to see into it. I humbly understand this is not very urgent. Thank you.
D abhi
talk
14:47, 21 June 2014 (UTC)
Reply
Hey! Unfortunately I'm not involved in that side of the wiki administration much, but I'll look at checking about doing it myself or finding someone like Jasper to do it instead. Sorry if it takes a while.
Jdforrester (WMF)
talk
19:29, 1 July 2014 (UTC)
Reply
—Thanks for replying. I'll wait till then.
D abhi
talk
15:08, 3 July 2014 (UTC)
Reply
As a note, Hoo has now done this. Yay.
Jdforrester (WMF)
talk
16:53, 7 July 2014 (UTC)
Reply
Re:Translating
Extension:VisualEditor
edit
Latest comment:
11 years ago
3 comments
2 people in discussion
So, is it possible to translate it in the old style? -
Fabsouza1
talk
15:29, 28 July 2014 (UTC)
Reply
Fabsouza1
Sadly, no.
Jdforrester (WMF)
talk
16:11, 28 July 2014 (UTC)
Reply
Jdforrester (WMF)
Ok... -
Fabsouza1
talk
03:43, 29 July 2014 (UTC)
Reply
Heading vs sub-heading
edit
Latest comment:
11 years ago
3 comments
3 people in discussion
What's the difference between "heading" and "sub-heading" in the VE interface, e.g.
MediaWiki:visualeditor-formatdropdown-format-heading2
, vs
MediaWiki:visualeditor-formatdropdown-format-mw-heading2
Deryck C.
Meta
19:21, 7 August 2014 (UTC)
Reply
The second is currently used in the Paragraph menu to create ==Headings==. I don't know where the other one is (was?) used.
Whatamidoing (WMF)
talk
03:40, 8 August 2014 (UTC)
Reply
Deryck Chan
and
Whatamidoing (WMF)
The first is used in stand-alone, not in MediaWiki; the second is used in MediaWiki, as Whatamidoing said.
Jdforrester (WMF)
talk
09:27, 8 August 2014 (UTC)
Reply
VisualEditor with Parsoid on Windows
edit
Latest comment:
11 years ago
2 comments
2 people in discussion
Hi, in principle I would agree with you that we do not need to have all the details here, but ...
It cost me the better part of a working day tracing down these things (and nobody cared to write them down in an quickly digestable form), because I needed to get VisualEditor running on Windows -
WHICH IT STILL DOES NOT
- and it would really really really be good to have pointer here giving a very rough overview of what you need. For example downloading (several hundred freaking Megabytes), installing and getting VC++ 2010 to run took me more than an hour, and it would be really good to have a very short info on that.
Besides, VisualEditor is still not running on my Windows system, and I have no clue if I am an the only poor soul with this problem, or if this is a general problem. Having the pointer: "VisualEditor on Windows? Here be dragons!" Would be really really good.
Having wasting so much time on this, I hate the whole thing wholeheartly by now...
Tony Mach
talk
08:37, 21 August 2014 (UTC)
Reply
Tony Mach
Hello, sorry you've been having so many issues. I'm afraid I don't have a Windows box to hand and so I've never personally tried to get even MediaWiki running on a Windows box, much less VisualEditor and Parsoid. That said, I've heard reports from people before that they got VE and Parsoid working properly on Windows, even on IIS. I don't know off-hand who could give you some advice on getting it working, however.
Jdforrester (WMF)
talk
19:22, 21 August 2014 (UTC)
Reply
An important message about renaming users
edit
Latest comment:
11 years ago
1 comment
1 person in discussion
Dear Jdforrester (WMF),
I am cross-posting this message to many places to make sure everyone who is a Wikimedia Foundation project bureaucrat receives a copy. If you are a bureaucrat on more than one wiki, you will receive this message on each wiki where you are a bureaucrat.
As you may have seen, work to perform the Wikimedia cluster-wide
single-user login finalisation
(SUL finalisation) is taking place. This may potentially effect your work as a local bureaucrat, so please read this message carefully.
Why is this happening? As currently stated at
the global rename policy
, a global account is a name linked to a single user across all Wikimedia wikis, with local accounts unified into a global collection. Previously, the only way to rename a unified user was to individually rename every local account. This was an extremely difficult and time-consuming task, both for stewards and for the users who had to initiate discussions with local bureaucrats (who perform local renames to date) on every wiki with available bureaucrats. The process took a very long time, since it's difficult to coordinate crosswiki renames among the projects and bureaucrats involved in individual projects.
The SUL finalisation will be taking place in stages, and one of the first stages will be to turn off Special:RenameUser locally. This needs to be done as soon as possible, on advice and input from Stewards and engineers for the project, so that no more accounts that are unified globally are broken by a local rename to usurp the global account name. Once this is done, the process of global name unification can begin. The date that has been chosen to turn off local renaming and shift over to entirely global renaming is 15 September 2014, or three weeks time from now. In place of local renames is a new tool, hosted on Meta, that allows for global renames on all wikis where the name is not registered will be deployed.
Your help is greatly needed during this process and going forward in the future if, as a bureaucrat, renaming users is something that you do or have an interest in participating in. The Wikimedia Stewards have set up, and are in charge of, a new community usergroup on Meta in order to share knowledge and work together on renaming accounts globally, called
Global renamers
. Stewards are in the process of creating documentation to help global renamers to get used to and learn more about global accounts and tools and Meta in general as well as the application format. As transparency is a valuable thing in our movement, the Stewards would like to have at least a brief public application period. If you are an experienced renamer as a local bureaucrat, the process of becoming a part of this group could take as little as 24 hours to complete. You, as a bureaucrat, should be able to apply for the global renamer right on Meta by the
requests for global permissions
page on 1 September, a week from now.
In the meantime please update your local page where users request renames to reflect this move to global renaming, and if there is a rename request and the user has edited more than one wiki with the name, please send them to
the request page for a global rename
Stewards greatly appreciate the trust local communities have in you and want to make this transition as easy as possible so that the two groups can start working together to ensure everyone has a unique login identity across Wikimedia projects. Completing this project will allow for long-desired universal tools like a global watchlist, global notifications and many, many more features to make work easier.
If you have any questions, comments or concerns about the SUL finalisation, read over the
Help:Unified login
page on Meta and leave a note on the talk page there, or on the talk page for
global renamers
. You can also contact me on
my talk page on meta
if you would like. I'm working as a bridge between Wikimedia Foundation Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Stewards, and you to assure that SUL finalisation goes as smoothly as possible; this is a community-driven process and I encourage you to work with the Stewards for our communities.
Thank you for your time.
--
Keegan (WMF)
talk
18:24, 25 August 2014 (UTC)
Reply
--This message was sent using
MassMessage
. Was there an error?
Report it!
Eek
edit
Latest comment:
11 years ago
2 comments
2 people in discussion
James, I just
took a hyphen out of the July eng report
(not important), and I'm not sure whether that damaged everything.
Tony
(talk)
04:58, 27 August 2014 (UTC)
Reply
Tony1
Hey, sorry, didn't see this until now. The wonderful
Guillaume (WMF)
fixed it, I saw.
Jdforrester (WMF)
talk
23:33, 31 August 2014 (UTC)
Reply
OAuth App
edit
Latest comment:
11 years ago
2 comments
2 people in discussion
Hi, I wrote an OAuth Application (
RC Helper 1.0
demo
) but after 10 days the app status is "proposed". can you check and approve it ? Thanks --
Arash.pt
talk
23:06, 13 September 2014 (UTC)
Reply
Arash.pt
Hey, for OAuth application questions your best bet is
CSteipp (WMF)
who should be able to help you.
Jdforrester (WMF)
talk
23:20, 17 September 2014 (UTC)
Reply
Growth team newsletter #25
edit
Welcome to the twenty-fifth newsletter from the
Growth team
Help with translations
Celebrations
edit
Leveling up release
We released
Leveling up features
to our
pilot wikis
on March 22 for an initial
A/B test
In this test, we use post-edit dialogs (pop-ups shown after publishing an edit) and notifications to encourage new editors to try new types of newcomer-friendly suggested edits.
We are closely
monitoring the short term impact of this feature
as well as
the longer term effect on newcomer productivity and retention
. If the experiment shows positive results, we will release this feature to more wikis.
5,000+ images added via the newcomer task in February
In February 2023,
5,035 images were added
via the newcomer “add an image” feature (
on all wikis where available
); 155 were reverted.
Since the feature “add an image” was launched:
36,803 images have been added
; 2,957 images were reverted.
Recent changes
edit
Add a link
Community Ambassadors completed an initial evaluation that confirmed that prioritizing underlinked articles resulted in better article suggestions. We then evaluated the change on Growth pilot wikis, and results suggest that more newcomers are successfully completing the task and experiencing fewer reverts. We have now deployed the new prioritization model to all wikis with "add a link" enabled.
[3]
[4]
We continue the deployment of "add a link" to more wikis. These changes are regularly announced in
Tech News
. To know if newcomers at your wiki have access to this feature, please visit
your Homepage
The
Impact module
was deployed on our pilot wikis, where we conducted an A/B test. We published
initial findings
, and a data scientist is now completing experiment analysis.
[5]
Donor Thank you page experiment
– Donors land on a “thank you” page after donation, and that landing page now includes a call to action to try editing:
Example Thank you page in French
. This promising feature is tested at several Wikipedias (French Wikipedia, Italian Wikipedia, Japanese Wikipedia, Dutch Wikipedia, Swedish Wikipedia).
Growth features are now the default experience on both
test.wikipedia.org
and
test2.wikipedia.org
. You can test our features there.
Upcoming work
edit
Add an image
– We plan to offer
section-level image suggestions
as a structured task for newcomers.
We are starting design work.
[6]
Growth team Ambassadors helped with an initial evaluation of these section-level image suggestions.
[7]
We will start a community consultation in which we share initial ideas and designs soon.
[8]
IP Editing: Privacy Enhancement and Abuse Mitigation
– We will support this project for all Growth Team maintained products and extensions that may be affected by IP Masking.
[9]
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13:10, 1 April 2023 (UTC)
Growth team newsletter #26
edit
Welcome to the twenty-sixth newsletter from the
Growth team
Help with translations
One million Suggested Edits
edit
We passed the 1 million Suggested edits milestone in late April!
The
Suggested edits
feature (AKA Newcomer tasks) increase newcomer activation by ~12%, which flows on through to increased retention. (
source
Suggested edits increase the number of edits newcomers complete in their first two weeks and have a relatively low revert rate. (
source
Suggested edits are available on all Wikipedia language editions.
Newer Suggested edits, like
Add a link
and
Add an image
, aren’t yet deployed to all wikis, but these structured tasks further increase the probability that newcomers will make their first edit. (
source
Positive reinforcement
edit
Positive reinforcement
aims to encourage newcomers who have visited our homepage and tried
Growth features
to keep editing.
The new
Impact module
was released to Growth pilot wikis in December 2022, and we are now scaling the feature to another ten wikis.
[10]
The
Leveling up
features are deployed at our pilot wikis.
The
Personalized praise
features were deployed at our pilot wikis on May 24. Mentors at pilot wikis will start to receive notifications weekly when they have “praise-worthy” mentees. Mentors can configure their notification preferences or disable these notifications.
Add an image
edit
We are creating a new
section-level variation of the “add an image” task
. We have tested the accuracy of suggestions, and the development of this new task is well-underway.
[11]
Other updates
edit
We are progressively releasing
Add a link
to more wikis.
[12]
After adding Thanks to Recent Changes, Watchlist and Special:Contributions, we investigated
Thanks usage
on the wikis. There is no evidence that thanks increased after the feature was added on more pages.
We helped with code review for the
2023 Community Wish
to add
Notifications for user page edits
[13]
We have been attending several community events, that we documented in our
Growth’s Community events report
What's next for Growth?
edit
We shared an overview of
Growth annual planning ideas
, and have started community discussion about these potential projects. We would love to hear your feedback on these ideas!
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15:14, 29 May 2023 (UTC)
Ad:MediaWiki 1.41/Roadmap
edit
Latest comment:
2 years ago
3 comments
2 people in discussion
Ad:MediaWiki 1.41/Roadmap
Hi. Why do you think sections make this unusable? My view is quite opposite. With sections, you can easily jump to the currently deployed version (just use ToC and scroll up). So sections makes this more usable for me (UI/UX).
Also note that the article is now far behind. If you stand by your view of removing sections, then at least please update to the current state.
Kind regards,
Nux
talk
19:41, 30 May 2023 (UTC)
Reply
Making it so the page can't be edited sensibly with VE just for an anchor point is a very aggressive action.
Updating the page is part of the job of the train conductor. I'll make sure they continue to do so.
Jdforrester (WMF)
talk
20:09, 30 May 2023 (UTC)
Reply
Aggressive? Weird choice of word. I edit in VE a lot, but that template is very bad for VE in any case. I would not edit it in VE and none of the previous edits were in VE. And I think viewing is more important then editing ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Nux
talk
20:31, 30 May 2023 (UTC)
Reply
Growth team newsletter #27
edit
Welcome to the twenty-seventh newsletter from the
Growth team
Help with translations
Annual plan for Growth
edit
We shared
our annual plan
, for the period July 2023 - June 2024.
Our first project of the year will be
Community configuration 2.0
, which helps editors with extended rights transparently and easily configure important on-wiki functionality.
After we finish work on Community configuration 2.0, we will hope to fit in one of the following projects:
Article creation
: This project aims to provide new editors with better guidance and guardrails in the article creation process, with the intention of lightening the load of new page reviewers.
Non-editing participation
: This project aims to create low-risk ways for readers to participate in Wikipedia with the intention of funneling more readers into contributing to the Wikimedia movement.
Please let us know what you think about these projects on the related talk page, or
Growth's annual plan talk page
Suggested edits
edit
The new "Add an image" section-level task
We released a new
Section-level “add an image” structured task
to Growth pilot wikis (Arabic, Bengali, Czech, and Spanish). This task was part of the
Structured Data Across Wikipedia
project. We are monitoring the edits made, and we look for community feedback as well.
Suggested Edits are now receiving topic predictions via the new
Language-Agnostic Topic Classification
. This change affects non-English Wikipedia wikis. It will ensure newcomers receive a greater diversity of task recommendations. Before, as this feature was a test, English Wikipedia was used to select topics. The change is gradual as lists of topics are refreshed when they become empty. The
Research team
will evaluate the impact in a few months.
[14]
Starting on August 1, a new set of Wikipedias will get "
Add a link
": Georgian Wikipedia, Kara-Kalpak Wikipedia, Kabyle Wikipedia, Kabardian Wikipedia, Kabiyè Wikipedia, Kikuyu Wikipedia, Kazakh Wikipedia, Khmer Wikipedia, Kannada Wikipedia, Kashmiri Wikipedia, Colognian Wikipedia, Kurdish Wikipedia, Cornish Wikipedia, Cornish Wikipedia.
Mentorship
edit
The Growth team provides dedicated features to establish a
mentorship program
for newcomers. Every newcomer gets a volunteer mentor who provides encouragement and answers questions. Communities can set up or join this mentorship system by visiting Special:ManageMentors. This mentorship system is configurable by the community at Special:EditGrowthConfig.
More communities have implemented mentorship. A Wikimedia Foundation data scientist will be looking at the impact of Mentorship. We will look at the impact on Spanish and English Wikipedia.
[15]
The Growth team will also host a
Mentoring new editors on Wikipedia
session at
Wikimania 2023
in Singapore. Workshop attendees will help brainstorm improvements to Growth’s mentorship features.
Positive reinforcement
edit
We will share more complete experiment analysis for all the three parts of the Positive reinforcement project soon. At the moment, the new
Impact module
Leveling up
, and
Personalized praise
are still being A/B tested on the Growth team's
pilot wikis
In the meantime, initial
leading indicators for the Personalized praise
project have been published. Although this is still a relatively small sample, results seem healthy. They show that Mentors are indeed receiving notifications and clicking through to view their praise-worthy mentees.
Growth contributes to IP Editing migration
edit
The Growth team is currently focusing on
IP Editing: Privacy Enhancement and Abuse Mitigation
. It is a project that touches many different Wikimedia Foundation teams. The Growth team will focus on temporary accounts through two main points:
the user experience of a logged-out user, that switches to a temporary account,
change Growth-owned extensions and features, so that they work as expected with temporary accounts.
[16]
Community Configuration 2.0
edit
We are still in the early planning stage of the
Community Configuration 2.0
project:
We are gathering internal Wikimedia Foundation teams' needs, so as community feedback.
[17]
We have started to investigate design improvements.
[18]
We are also reviewing similar tools that are part of other products.
[19]
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12:42, 1 August 2023 (UTC)
Growth team newsletter #28
edit
Latest comment:
2 years ago
1 comment
1 person in discussion
Welcome to the twenty-eighth newsletter from the
Growth team
Help with translations
Community Configuration,
concept A
: Accordion style
Community Configuration,
concept B
: Dashboard style
Community configuration 2.0
edit
Community Configuration 2.0
is a feature that will enable Wikimedia communities to easily customize and configure features to meet their unique needs. This approach provides non-technical moderators with more independence and control over enabling/disabling and customizing features for their communities.
Technical approach and associated tasks are detailed in
this Epic task on Phabricator
Initial designs are drafted for two different approaches (see images). We will soon demo interactive prototypes to interested admins, stewards, and experienced editors (
T346109
).
Please let us know
if you have feedback on the design approach, or want to participate in prototype testing.
IP Masking
edit
The Growth team has been working on several updates to ensure Growth maintained features will be compatible with future
IP Masking changes
. This work has included code changes to: Recent Changes (
T343322
), Echo notifications (
T333531
), the Thanks extension (
T345679
) and Mentorship (
T341390
).
Before December, the Growth team will initiate community discussions with the goal of migrating communities from Flow to DiscussionTools. This move aims to minimize the necessity for additional engineering work to make Flow compatible with
IP Masking
. (
T346108
Mentorship
edit
We assembled some resources for mentors at
Mediawiki wiki
. This resource page is translatable and will be linked from the mentor dashboard.
We are working to resolve a bug related to mentors properly returning after being marked as "Away". (
T347024
Half of newcomers at English Wikipedia get a mentor assigned to them. To ensure every newcomer receives mentorship,
we need additional volunteer mentors at English Wikipedia
to achieve a 100% coverage rate. We also encourage experienced users from other wikis
to help newcomers at their own community
Scaling Growth features
edit
We continue the deployment of the structured task "
add a link
" to all Wikipedias. We plan to scale the task to all Wikipedias that have link suggestions available by the end of 2023.
We plan to scale the new Impact Module to all Wikipedias soon, but first we are investigating a bug with the job that refreshes the Impact Module data. (
T344428
At some wikis, newcomers have access to the "
add an image
" structured task. This task suggests images that may be relevant to add to unillustrated articles. Newcomers at these wikis can now add images to unillustrated articles sections. (
T345940
) The wikis that have this task are listed under "Images recommendations"
at the Growth team deployment table
Other news
edit
We disabled the “add an image” task temporarily (
T345188
) because there was a failure in the image suggestions pipeline (
T345141
). This is now fixed.
You can read a
report about the Growth team’s representation at Wikimania in Singapore here
. Growth team members presented two sessions at Wikimania Singapore.
After a 2.5 years-long collaboration with Bangala Wikipedia, we have decided to start a collaboration with another wiki. Swahili Wikipedia is now a pilot wiki for Growth experiments.
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Trizek_(WMF)
Discussion
23:16, 16 October 2023 (UTC)
Reply
Growth team newsletter #29
edit
Welcome to the twenty-ninth newsletter from the
Growth team
Help with translations
Community Conversations
edit
The Growth team will host its first community conversation
Monday, 4 December (19:00 - 20:30 UTC)
. The topic for this meeting will be
Mentorship
This first meeting language will be English, but we plan to host conversations in other languages, and about other topics. Please visit
the conversation page on-wiki
for the details on how to join. You can also watch the page, or suggest ideas for upcoming conversations there.
Impact Module
edit
At the beginning of November 2023, the Growth team deployed the
New Impact Module
to all Wikipedias. We recently released a follow up improvement to how edit data was displayed based on editor feedback.
[20]
Add a Link
edit
We released “
add a link
” to 35 more Wikipedias.
[21]
[22]
We have a few Wikipedias remaining:
German and English Wikipedia will be contacted at the beginning of January 2024.
There are a few small wikis that will not receive the task until they have enough articles for the algorithm to work properly.
Community Configuration
edit
We shared
Community Configuration 2.0
plans with technical stakeholders.
[23]
Initial
Community Configuration design ideas
have been shared and discussed with community members.
A basic
Community Configuration 2.0 demo is released on ToolForge
Developers can find some initial proof of concept code
shared on gitlab
Mentorship
edit
When a mentor marked themselves as "Away", they were not getting their name assigned to new accounts when they returned. This has been fixed.
[24]
We improved the message received by newcomers when their mentor quits, to reduce confusion.
[25]
We worked on ensuring that all mentees are assigned to an active mentor. This required reassigning mentees with no mentors to a new mentor. We paused this as the clean-up script confused some editors. We will resume it when the identified blockers are resolved.
[26]
It is now possible to create an Abuse Filter to prevent one user from signing up as a mentor.
[27]
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18:04, 1 December 2023 (UTC)
Compatibility of MW 1.39 with PHP 7.4
edit
Latest comment:
2 years ago
2 comments
2 people in discussion
Hi James,
Since your edit on
Template:Compatibility PHP
on
21 March 2024
, MediaWiki 1.39 is said to be no more compatible with PHP 7.4. I guess it’s a mistake, but I prefer to ask. I see the parameters like "4 end =" seens not to correspond to the "5 start =" on the same line.
(Apart this, it’s great MW 1.42 becomes compatible with PHP 8.2 d:-) ~
Seb35
[^_^]
15:05, 25 March 2024 (UTC)
Reply
Seb35
: Oops! Yes,
fixed
. Hopefully we'll get PHP 8.3 support in too.
Jdforrester (WMF)
talk
15:57, 25 March 2024 (UTC)
Reply
Growth News, April 2024
edit
The Growth team will now send quarterly reports to keep you in the loop. Growth team weekly updates
are available on wiki
(in English) if you want to know more about our day-to-day work.
If you want to receive more general updates about technical activity happening across the Wikimedia movement (including Growth work), we encourage you to
subscribe to Tech News
Community Configuration
edit
Growth features are currently configurable at
Special:EditGrowthConfig
. This quarter we are working on making
Community Configuration
accessible for other MediaWiki developers while also moving Growth feature configuration to the new CommunityConfiguration extension.
An early version of Community Configuration can be tested at
Spanish Beta Wikipedia
. We plan to release the new Community Configuration extension to pilot wikis (Arabic and Spanish Wikipedia) in early May, 2024. The first non-Growth team feature to utilize Community Configuration will be
Automoderator
In parallel with the development, the Growth team will propose Community Configuration usage guidelines, Community Configuration design guidelines, and provide technical documentation.
Experiment Results
edit
Add a Image experiment analysis results
The Growth team conducted an experiment to assess the impact of the “
Add an Image
” structured task on the Newcomer Homepage's "Suggested Edits" module. This analysis finds that the Add an Image structured task leads to an increase in newcomer participation on the mobile web platform, particularly by making constructive (non-reverted) article edits:
The likelihood that mobile web newcomers make their first article edit (+17.0% over baseline)
The likelihood that they are retained as newcomers (+24.3% over baseline)
The number of edits they make during their first two weeks on the wiki (+21.8% over baseline)
A lower probability of the newcomers' edits will be reverted (-3.3% over baseline).
Personalized praise experiment results
This feature was developed for Mentors as part of the Growth team's
Positive Reinforcement project
. When A/B testing on Spanish Wikipedia, we found
no significant impact
on retention, but we found a
significant positive impact
on newcomer productivity. However, we concluded that the results weren’t positive enough to justify the time investment from Mentors. We plan to discuss this feature with our pilot wikis, and consider further improvements before scaling this feature further. Meanwhile, communities willing to test the feature can ask to have it deployed. (
T361763
English donors encouraged to try editing
As in previous years, donors were directed to a Thank you page after donation (
example
). However, this year we tested a new “Try editing Wikipedia,” call to action on the Thank You page. This call to action linked to a
unique account creation page
. From this account creation page we were able to track Registrations and Activation (editing for the first time). During the English banner campaign, the Donor Thank you page led to 4,398 new accounts, and 441 of those accounts went on to constructively edit within 24 hours. (
T352900
Future work
edit
Annual Plan
The Growth team and the Editing team will work on the
WE1.2 Key Result
in the coming fiscal year. We will start initial discussions with communities soon to help finalize our plans. (
T361657
Newcomer Homepage Community Updates module
We plan to A/B test adding a new Community Configurable module to the Newcomer Homepage that will allow communities to highlight specific events, projects, campaigns, and initiatives. We are early in the planning phase of this project that will take place first at our pilot wikis and wikis volunteering. We welcome community feedback on initial designs and plans, in any language at
our project talk page
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18:55, 23 April 2024 (UTC)
Growth News, July 2024
edit
Community Configuration
edit
The Growth team released
Community Configuration
at all Wikipedias. You can access it at
Special:CommunityConfiguration
This new special page replaces
Special:EditGrowthConfig
. For now, all Growth features can be configured using Community Configuration. Configuration for
AutoModerator
T365046
) and other features will be available in the future.
You can help with translations. The interface translation is done
at Translatewiki.net
. You can also help
translate the documentation
If you attend
Wikimania 2024
, please join us for the session about
Community configuration's future
Current work
edit
Newcomer Homepage Community Updates module
We will add a new Community Configurable module to the Newcomer Homepage that will allow communities to highlight specific events, projects, campaigns, and initiatives. We have released a simple version available to beta wikis. We will conduct an A/B test at
our pilot wikis
using the new
Metrics Platform
. We still welcome community feedback on initial designs and plans, in any language at
our project talk page
Future work
edit
Increase constructive activation on mobile
As part of the
Growth team 2024/2025 Annual Plan
, the Growth team will explore various ways to increase the percentage of newcomers who successfully start editing.
Editing a Wikipedia page requires too much context and patience. It means many trial and error for newcomers to contribute, meaning a steeper learning curve and potential discouraging reverts. To support a new generation of volunteers, we will increase the number and availability of smaller, structured, and more task-specific editing workflows (E.g.
Edit Check
and
Structured Tasks
). The Growth team will primarily focus on Structured Tasks, while working closely with the
Editing team
to ensure our work integrates well with Edit Check.
Stay informed
edit
Growth team weekly updates
are available on wiki
(in English) if you want to know more about our day-to-day work. If you want to receive more general updates about technical activity happening across the Wikimedia movement (including Growth work), we encourage you to
subscribe to Tech News
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15:08, 30 July 2024 (UTC)
MW 1.42 PHP compatibility
edit
Latest comment:
1 year ago
2 comments
2 people in discussion
After your
revert
of my change, I restarted
this talk page discussion
. It would be great if you could respond there.
Yaron Koren
talk
15:29, 17 October 2024 (UTC)
Reply
Sure, will do.
Jdforrester (WMF)
talk
13:10, 28 October 2024 (UTC)
Reply
Growth News, October 2024
edit
Latest comment:
1 year ago
1 comment
1 person in discussion
Current work
edit
Newcomer Homepage Community Updates module
We will add a new module to the Newcomer Homepage that will allow communities to highlight specific events, projects, campaigns, and initiatives. We have released a simple version on beta wikis and we will soon start an A/B test on
our pilot wikis
. This module will only display on the Newcomer Homepage if communities decide to utilize it, so learn
how to configure the Community Updates module
, or share your thoughts on
the project's talk page
One design concept aimed to increase constructive activation
Constructive activation experimentation
After showcasing
early design ideas
at Wikimania, we conducted
user testing of design prototypes
. We now aim to engage communities in further discussions and plan to run a targeted experiment, presenting a structured task within the reading view to logged-in new account holders with zero edits.
Community Configuration
This Community Configuration extension was developed to help communities customize wiki features to meet their unique needs. The Growth team is now helping other Wikimedia Foundation teams make their products configurable:
The Moderation Tools team now provides Community Configuration for
Automoderator
. (
T365046
Certain
Babel
extension settings will be configurable soon. (
T328171
Future work
edit
As part of the
Growth team annual plan
, we will continue to investigate ways to increase constructive activation on mobile, while also working with Data Products to move forward A/B testing functionality via the
Metrics Platform
Community events
edit
Growth team members presented
Community Configuration: Shaping On-Wiki Functionality Together
at Wikimania (
slides
). The
session recording is available to watch on YouTube
. This session provided an update on the Community Configuration project and introduced details about the upcoming features that communities will soon be able to configure. Representatives from the Moderator Tools, Editing, Web, and Campaigns teams shared their plans for utilizing Community Configuration in the future. Following these presentations, the WMF Growth team's
Benoît Evellin
and
Martin Urbanec
answered audience questions.
Habib Mhenni
gave a presentation of how mentorship works at WikiIndaba 2024.
The recording is available
Stay informed
edit
Growth team weekly updates
are available on wiki
(in English) if you want to know more about our day-to-day work.
If you want to receive more general updates about technical activity happening across the Wikimedia movement (including Growth work), we encourage you to
subscribe to Tech News
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Trizek_(WMF)
15:44, 22 October 2024 (UTC)
Reply
Growth Newsletter #33
edit
A quarterly update from the Growth team on our work to improve the new editor experience.
Constructive Activation Experiments
edit
This year, the Growth team is exploring ways to help more new account holders start editing—and do so constructively, meaning their edits are not reverted. Our latest experiments include:
Gradual rollout of "Add a Link" at English Wikipedia
– We are gradually introducing the "Add a Link" structured task to newcomers at English Wikipedia (
T386029
). This serves as a natural A/B test to measure its impact on activation, retention, and revert rates (
T382603
). Previous experiments on pilot wikis showed that "Add a Link" increases newcomer participation, particularly by helping them make constructive (non-reverted) edits.
Testing in-article suggestions for first-time editors
– Many new account holders want to contribute but don’t know where to start. To help, we’re piloting a feature that surfaces structured task suggestions directly in an article’s read view for brand-new editors (
T385343
). These suggestions will appear for logged-in users with no edits, providing a clear, simple way to begin contributing that is surfaced while they read.
Community Updates
edit
Newcomers often struggle to find their place in Wikipedia’s collaborative environment. While experienced editors easily discover events like edit-a-thons and writing campaigns, newcomers often miss out.
To bridge this gap, we launched the
Community Updates
module for the Newcomer Homepage. This module is disabled by default, allowing Community Admins to decide how (or if) to use it.
If your community hosts events, consider setting up a Community Update to engage and welcome newcomers!
Learn more on Diff
. To configure, visit Special:CommunityConfiguration.
Community Configuration
edit
Community Configuration is now available across all wikis, including non-Wikipedia projects (
T383910
). Community Configuration allows admins to customize various features like Growth features and Automoderator for their communities, and more recently the Babel extension now allows admins to modify configuration:
Babel customization
– Admins can now configure Babel settings (
T374348
), including category naming, automatic category creation, and more. See an example on
Wikimedia Commons
Upcoming configurable features
– Projects exploring community configuration options include:
Incident Reporting System
T374113
) and
Cite backlinks
T378807
).
Mentorship
edit
Mentors play a key role in guiding new editors. If you’re interested in mentoring, or turning mentorship on at your wiki, check out the
Mentorship FAQ
Starting February 17, 100% of new accounts at English Wikipedia will be assigned a mentor (
T384505
).
At Spanish Wikipedia, on 50% of newcomers get a mentor. Experienced contributors are encouraged to
join mentorship
so that Spanish Wikipedia can provide a mentor to all new users.
Looking Ahead
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In the coming months, we will continue balancing maintenance work—such as deprecating EditGrowth Config (
T367574
) and migrating Statslib (
T359352
) — with user-facing improvements that support new editors and foster the next generation of contributors.
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19:00, 4 March 2025 (UTC)
Exported Flow board
edit
Latest comment:
1 year ago
2 comments
2 people in discussion
I'm not sure what your intended archive setup is here so I haven't integrated it anywhere, but I've just run Flow cleanup bot to export the Flow version of this talk page. It's at
User talk:Jdforrester (WMF)/Archive 2/Flow export
* Pppery *
it has begun
00:38, 13 March 2025 (UTC)
Reply
Thanks! Will think about how I want them re-arranged.
Jdforrester (WMF)
talk
15:13, 13 March 2025 (UTC)
Reply
Thanks
edit
Latest comment:
1 year ago
1 comment
1 person in discussion
Thanks
2603:800C:4BF0:2000:70CE:5DBA:67B0:5010
10:37, 22 April 2025 (UTC)
Reply
Regarding Phab Ticket
edit
Latest comment:
10 months ago
3 comments
2 people in discussion
Hello. I have raised a ticket in Phabricator with Phab ID:
T395208
. Could you please check whether you have any comments on the same. It seems like the mentioned warning has been added from your end which is the reason why I am pinging you.
Adithyak1997
talk
17:33, 30 May 2025 (UTC)
Reply
Adithyak1997
: Hi there, will respond on the task.
Jdforrester (WMF)
talk
14:05, 2 June 2025 (UTC)
Reply
Jdforrester (WMF)
Many thanks for the reply.
Adithyak1997
talk
18:16, 2 June 2025 (UTC)
Reply
Growth News #34
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A quarterly update from the Growth team on our work to improve the new editor experience.
Mentoring new editors
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In February,
Mentorship
was successfully rolled out to 100% of newcomers on English Wikipedia. Following this milestone, we collaborated with Spanish Wikipedia to expand Mentorship coverage to 70% of new accounts, with plans to reach 85% soon unless concerns are raised by mentors. (
T394867
“Add a Link” Task – Iteration and Experimentation
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Our efforts to improve and scale the
“Add a Link” structured task
continued across multiple fronts:
Community Feedback & Model Improvements
: We’ve responded to community concerns with targeted changes:
Restricting access to newer accounts (
T393688
Some links types were removed to align with recommendations written in the English Wikipedia Manual of Style (
T390683
Allowing communities to limit “Add a Link” to newcomers (
T393771
The model used to suggest the links was improved to ease its training (
T388258
English Wikipedia rollout and A/B test
: We increased the rollout to 20% of newcomers, with analysis underway. Preliminary data suggests this feature makes new account holders more likely to complete an unreverted edit. (
T386029
T382603
Surfacing Structured Tasks
: An experiment where we show “add a link” suggestions to newly registered users while they are reading an article is running on pilot wikis (French, Persian, Indonesian, Portuguese, Egyptian Arabic). Initial results are under analysis. (
T386029
Newcomer Engagement Features
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“Get Started” notification
: Engineering is in progress for a new notification (Echo/email) to encourage editing among newcomers with zero edits. Early research shows this type of nudge is effective. (
T392256
Confirmation email:
We are exploring ways to simplify and improve the initial account confirmation email newly registered users receive. (
T215665
Community Configuration Enhancements
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Communities can now manage which namespaces are eligible for Event Registration via
Community Configuration
. (
T385341
Annual Planning
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The Wikimedia Foundation’s 2025–2026 Annual Plan is taking shape. The Growth and Editing teams will focus on the
Contributor Experiences (WE1)
objective
, with a focus on increasing
constructive edits
by editors with fewer than 100 cumulative contributions.
Get Involved
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We value your insights and ideas! If you would like to participate in a discussion, share feedback, or pilot new features, please reach out on the relevant Phabricator tasks or
at our talk page
, in any language.
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18:51, 17 June 2025 (UTC)
Growth News #35
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A quarterly update from the Growth team on our work to improve the new editor experience.
New releases
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English Wikipedia gets "Add a Link" Structured Task
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We
released
the
"Add a Link" Structured Task
to 100% of accounts at English Wikipedia on Tuesday, September 2nd (before then it was available to 20% of accounts).
Growth features for Wikidata
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After examining if the Growth features and Mentorship could be adapted to Wikidata, we activated the Growth features on
Beta Wikidata
to allow for testing and discussion (
T400937
).
Although some features, like Suggested Edits, are Wikipedia-specific, the Growth team designed most features to be more wiki-agnostic.
Work in progress
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Revise Tone Structured Task
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The Growth team is making progress on
the technical architecture, onboarding design, and early user testing
We are targeting an A/B test before the end of this year, with constructive edits by newcomers as the primary success metric.
Add a link to more wikis
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The machine learning team has been working on a new model that can suggest links to more languages, including Urdu, Chinese, and Japanese Wikipedias.
We are starting to release
the “Add a Link” feature to Wikipedias that weren’t supported by the previous model.
Add a link
, which can be
configured by the community locally
, increases the chance that a new contributor will make their first edit and then continue to participate in Wikipedia.
Research
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The Growth team is involved in several research initiatives to help guide our future work:
Progression System
– We have
published
initial findings from interviews with 10 English and French Wikipedia newcomers.
The research examined motivations, challenges, and feedback on a prototype system intended to help editors build confidence, develop skills, and contribute more constructively over time.
Mobile Web Editing Research
– This project combines quantitative and qualitative data, community feedback, and user journey analysis to identify possible ways to enhance the mobile editing experience.
Newcomers Survey
– This project surveys successful newcomers on English Wikipedia to understand their early editing experiences, tool use, and community interactions.
Community events
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The Growth team participated in several community events to listen, share, and collaborate on improving newcomer experiences across Wikimedia projects.
Wikimania -
Organizers as key partners to support newcomers' growth in our movement
This session invited organizers to share how they introduce newcomers to Growth features and the challenges they encounter. The discussion focused on common newcomer questions and opportunities to strengthen collaboration in supporting new editors.
Wikimania -
Lightning Talk: Structured Tasks
This talk demonstrated how Structured Tasks help newcomers take their first successful steps on Wikipedia. It shared impact data, community configurations, and a demo of “Add a Link,” illustrating how these tasks make editing more accessible and sustainable, particularly for mobile contributors.
Wikimania -
Building a Sustainable Future for Wikimedia Contributors
With active editor numbers declining, the
Contributors Strategy
aims to create a clearer, more engaging path for participation. This session, led by the WMF Contributors group with involvement from the Editing, Growth, Moderator Tools, and Connection (formerly Campaigns) teams, highlighted efforts to streamline contributor experiences, offer structured and mobile-friendly workflows, and foster meaningful engagement. Participants learned about ongoing initiatives and shared feedback to help shape a more inclusive and sustainable future for Wikimedia contributors.
CEE Meeting -
Retaining beginners and improving content moderation: an inclusive and sustainable future for Wikipedia contributors
Many communities face a decline in volunteer engagement. Newcomers often leave soon after joining, while experienced editors struggle to manage increasingly complex workflows and overwhelming backlogs. We presented the
Contributors Strategy
and the different features and workflows that can help communities to address these challenges. We listened to the specific needs of the CEE communities to help guide the Contributors teams' work.
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10:23, 22 October 2025 (UTC)
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