Wikiversity:Colloquium/archives/May 2023

Automatic citations based on ISBN are broken
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We have recently become unable to access the WorldCat API which provided the ability to generate citations using ISBN numbers. The Wikimedia Foundation's Editing team is investigating several options to restore the functionality, but will need to disable ISBN citation generation for now.

This affects citations made with the VisualEditor Automatic tab, and the use of the citoid API in gadgets and user scripts, such as the autofill button on refToolbar. Please note that all the other automatic ways of generating citations, including via URL or DOI, are still available.

You can keep updated on the situation via Phabricator, or by reading the next issues of Tech News. If you know of any users or groups who rely heavily on this feature (for instance, someone who has an upcoming editathon), I'd appreciate it if you shared this update with them.

Elitre (WMF), on behalf of the Editing team.

MediaWiki message delivery (discuss • contribs) 19:45, 11 May 2023 (UTC)

Request for comment: Cleaning up draftspace
This wiki currently has over 650 content pages in the Draft namespace. Of those pages, over 90% have not been edited in the last 180 days, ~75% have been untouched for two years or more, and ~50% for over three years.

A list of these articles can be obtained through the API using a request of the form: {	"action": "query", "format": "json", "prop": "revisions", "generator": "allpages", "formatversion": "2", "rvprop": "timestamp|user|comment", "gapnamespace": "118", "gapfilterredir": "nonredirects", "gaplimit": "max" } API sandbox link

The Drafts policy proposal suggests that these pages should be subject to deletion if they are left unedited for 180 days. (This was agreed to at Wikiversity talk:Drafts in 2019, but doesn't appear to have ever been implemented.)

Would other editors and administrators prefer that we do one or more of the following:


 * 1) Implement automatic deletion of all draft articles older than 180 days?
 * 2) Apply proposed deletion templates to all draft articles which haven't been edited in 90 days or more? (This would effectively "reset the timer" for those articles; if no one removes the templates, they would be deleted in mid-November, at least 9 months after they were last edited.)
 * 3) Bring batches of currently expired draft articles to DR? (Many of the current draft articles fall into clearly defined groups, like a large group of IT articles created by User:Tech201805, so reviewing these batches would not be as burdensome as it might sound.)
 * 4) Move expired draft articles to userspace? (I would prefer that we only do this selectively, if at all.)

Omphalographer (discuss • contribs) 21:30, 18 May 2023 (UTC)


 * I'd prefer to use Proposed Deletion. It doesn't require discussion, and anyone monitoring the resources can remove it if they want to keep the content. The last (and only) time I cleaned up Draft space, I tagged all articles untouched for more than 180 days with a Proposed Deletion with 60 days already expired (effectively giving them 30 days to object). I don't recall any complaints from that approach. I'm not sure anyone even noticed. -- Dave Braunschweig (discuss • contribs) 00:55, 19 May 2023 (UTC)
 * Fair enough, that works too. I've now tagged about 150 of the oldest drafts. Omphalographer (discuss • contribs) 20:25, 21 May 2023 (UTC)


 * I suggest everything in draft namespace either be moved to user-space (least preferable), left alone (and draft namespace linked to and promoted more), or moved to main namespace as stubs. I'm guessing they are effectively hidden in the draft namespace. Oh well. bless up. Michael Ten (discuss • contribs) 03:01, 29 May 2023 (UTC)
 * The intention of draft space is to allow editors time to develop articles; the articles I've been tagging have all been untouched for 3+ years, and in many cases the editors appear to have left the project. (In some cases, creating the draft was the user's only edit.) If any of the drafts I encountered were in a suitable state to promote to the main namespace, I would have moved them; alas, the vast majority of them have been unredeemable junk. (A couple of representative examples: Draft:Social Media and Education; Draft:Linktomaterial; Draft:Diamondase; Draft:Steel.)
 * In my opinion, stubs don't make a lot of sense on Wikiversity. They make sense in an encyclopedia or a dictionary, where the purpose and general content of a page is implied by its title. Educational resources, by contrast, require more up-front planning and direction from editors, to the extent that a vaguely described stub may be more of an obstacle than it is helpful. Omphalographer (discuss • contribs) 05:25, 29 May 2023 (UTC)
 * "the vast majority of them have been unredeemable junk." https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/one_man%27s_trash_is_another_man%27s_treasure Michael Ten (discuss • contribs) 06:02, 29 May 2023 (UTC)
 * Sometimes true but are there any examples of drafts with many views? If any drafts have many views it could be an indication that it is more treasure than trash. Moving it to user name space would probably mean even fewer will notice it. --MGA73 (discuss • contribs) 17:27, 30 May 2023 (UTC)
 * Draft space is excluded from search, both in Special:Search and in robots.txt, so pages in that namespace are - for better or worse - basically undiscoverable by visitors. It looks as though Statistics hasn't been updated for a bit, but none of the archives from 2022 show any substantial, sustained interest in any specific draft pages. Omphalographer (discuss • contribs) 17:40, 30 May 2023 (UTC)
 * January 2023 through April 2023 statistics updated. -- Dave Braunschweig (discuss • contribs) 21:33, 30 May 2023 (UTC)
 * No surprises there. The only draftspace articles which show up at all in this year's stats are the ones which were being actively edited that month - and my suspicion is that most of those hits are from the author working on the page, not other viewers reading it. Omphalographer (discuss • contribs) 22:11, 30 May 2023 (UTC)

Selection of the U4C Building Committee
 The next stage in the Universal Code of Conduct process is establishing a Building Committee to create the charter for the Universal Code of Conduct Coordinating Committee (U4C). The Building Committee has been selected. Read about the members and the work ahead on Meta-wiki.

-- UCoC Project Team, 04:21, 27 May 2023 (UTC)