Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2018-07-31/Discussion report

Discussion report

Wikipedias take action against EU copyright proposal, plus new user right proposals

The banner as it appeared to readers in Germany

EU copyright banner deployed on English Wikipedia at Jimbo's recommendation; other European Wikipedias blacked out

A proposed copyright law in the European Union would have required websites to pay other websites when they included snippets from those other websites. Lawmakers attempted to create an exception for sites like Wikipedia, with language mentioning "nonprofit" sites such as "online encyclopedias". However, this exception would not apply to Wikipedia because Wikipedia content is licensed for all use, not just nonprofit.

Wikimedia's legal department, as well as Jimbo Wales, frequently voiced their concerns and encouraged action. After previous discussions failed to reach a consensus on a site-wide banner to display to EU readers, a post by Jimbo on the Village Pump led to a few neutrally-worded proposals. This led to a banner being approved (see image). Other Wikipedias went even further, with the Spanish and Italian Wikipedias both blacking out the entire site (similar to the English Wikipedia's SOPA blackout). In the following hours, the Latvian, Estonian, Polish, Catalan, Basque, Galician, Hungarian, and Slovenian Wikipedias blacked out as well. On July 5, the European Parliament voted not to fast-track the bill; further debate and amendment will occur in September.

JavaScript/CSS editing permission created

Following the discussion at Meta, on 27 August admins will lose their rights to edit sitewide and other users' JavaScript and CSS pages. How these users will be appointed is left to each individual wiki. Knowing the English Wikipedia, this would result in the creation of yet another horrible and broken process called RfIA (quick, get that shortcut reserved!). The right will be granted by bureaucrats and stewards.

The proposal for 'TechAdmin', the criteria for access, and how the the new user right will be accorded are being discussed at Interface administrators.

The concern brought up by the proposers is the ability of rouge... I mean rogue admins to deploy malicious code to millions of readers. Additionally, most admins don't edit these pages, making this an unnecessarily dangerous right in the eyes of the proposers. At the same time, this does bring back memories of when admins stepped up to implement consensus on the Visual Editor Default State RfC after the WMF's refusal to do so, and one wonders what would happen with that were this group implemented.

Should protection be unbundled?

To help experienced editors better deal with vandalism, a new user right was proposed at the Village Pump to allow editors frequently involved in vandal-fighting to protect pages for a few months. Consensus seemed strongly against this proposal until NeilN made a more restricted proposal limiting the length of protection to 3 hours and only allowing it to be applied to biographies of living people. While the final result was a "no consensus" close, the possibility of further discussion on NeilN's proposal and others was left open.

In brief

Other contributors: Bri

Someone suggested that a bot deliver discretionary sanction notices. How do discretionary sanctions work? I have no idea. But that doesn't mean I won't link to it here.
About the same time last month that we reported on the Arbitration Committee in the media, the article on Ira Brad Matetsky (AKA Newyorkbrad) was facing a deletion debate. The debate was closed "no consensus" shortly before we went to press but after the publication deadline. – B
A new Women in Red user group (an upgrade from the WikiProject on the English Wikipedia) has been proposed on Meta. The greatest discussion is in a thread titled "Statement on global visibility of women and non-binary genders". – B
The "Making widely-used icons consistent and modern" discussion mentioned in the last issue closed as "no consensus".

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Interface admin inaccuracy

Following the discussion at Meta, on 27 August admins will lose their rights to edit sitewide and user JavaScript and CSS pages. This does not affect user JavaScript subpages, such as user scripts. Admins will lose their right to edit other people's user JavaScript and CSS subpages. No one, admin or not, will lose the right to edit their own user JavaScript and CSS subpages. Anomie ⚔ 20:05, 1 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Fixed. — pythoncoder (talk | contribs) 22:53, 1 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]

I made it more clear that it's for other users. OhanaUnited^{Talk page} 04:23, 6 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks

I have particularly found this section interesting. Thanks for writing it. Eddie891 ^Talk _Work 23:14, 3 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]

How to contact an interface admin

Many years ago, when I was a very new user, I tried to edit my JSS file to implement some enhancement, and locked myself out. With no idea of what to do, I contacted a user I trusted, who in turn contacted an admin she knew. The admin at first was uncertain that he could edit my JSS, but found out he could, and fixed it. WP is cluttered enough with policies, guidelines, how-tos, essays, etc., but we may need a notice accessible to inexperienced users explaining how to contact an interface admin without being logged in. - Donald Albury 13:39, 10 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
@Donald Albury: You can bypass your own JS with safemode=1. To edit your own common.js without it interfering, you can go to //en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:MyPage/common.js&action=edit&safemode=1. (This should probably be mentioned somewhere more prominent.) --Yair rand (talk) 18:15, 22 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]

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