Wikiversity:Colloquium/archives/October 2020

Call for feedback about Wikimedia Foundation Bylaws changes and Board candidate rubric
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Today the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees starts two calls for feedback. One is about changes to the Bylaws mainly to increase the Board size from 10 to 16 members. The other one is about a trustee candidate rubric to introduce new, more effective ways to evaluate new Board candidates. The Board welcomes your comments through 26 October. For more details, check the full announcement.

Qgil-WMF (talk) 17:10, 7 October 2020 (UTC)

Talk page archiving questions/requests
I recently tried to set up a Talk page archive using the standard Wikipedia method. The Talk header template recognizes that there are archive pages, but the links to them are broken, because it looks like it's missing Wikiversity versions of some of the sub-templates (specifically, Wikiversity:ARCHIVE and Template:Archive_list. Here is the page in question if you'd like to see what I mean:

Portal talk:Irish

I noticed the Colloquium archive is hard-coded in the Colloquium header template. Is there any alternative template scheme I should be using? Or is someone more comfortable with these templates than me interested in setting them up? It is a useful system, especially in the situation I find myself in (reworking an orphaned set of pages).

--Chapka (discuss • contribs) 11:27, 12 October 2020 (UTC)


 * I've imported the template and module, and redirected back to Wikipedia for the Help: page. Please note that automated archiving won't work, at least as far as I know. The required bots don't run here. -- Dave Braunschweig (discuss • contribs) 01:16, 15 October 2020 (UTC)

Important: maintenance operation on October 27
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The Wikimedia Foundation tests the switch between its first and secondary data centers. This will make sure that Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia wikis can stay online even after a disaster. To make sure everything is working, the Wikimedia Technology department needs to do a planned test. This test will show if they can reliably switch from one data centre to the other. It requires many teams to prepare for the test and to be available to fix any unexpected problems.

They will switch all traffic back to the primary data center on Tuesday, October 27 2020.

Unfortunately, because of some limitations in MediaWiki, all editing must stop while the switch is made. We apologize for this disruption, and we are working to minimize it in the future.

You will be able to read, but not edit, all wikis for a short period of time.


 * You will not be able to edit for up to an hour on Tuesday, October 27. The test will start at 14:00 UTC (14:00 WET, 15:00 CET, 10:00 EDT, 19:30 IST, 07:00 PDT, 23:00 JST, and in New Zealand at 03:00 NZDT on Wednesday October 28).
 * If you try to edit or save during these times, you will see an error message. We hope that no edits will be lost during these minutes, but we can't guarantee it.  If you see the error message, then please wait until everything is back to normal.  Then you should be able to save your edit.  But, we recommend that you make a copy of your changes first, just in case.

Other effects:


 * Background jobs will be slower and some may be dropped. Red links might not be updated as quickly as normal. If you create an article that is already linked somewhere else, the link will stay red longer than usual. Some long-running scripts will have to be stopped.
 * There will be code freezes for the week of October 26, 2020. Non-essential code deployments will not happen.

This project may be postponed if necessary. You can read the schedule at wikitech.wikimedia.org. Any changes will be announced in the schedule. There will be more notifications about this. A banner will be displayed on all wikis 30 minutes before this operation happens. Please share this information with your community. -- Trizek (WMF) (talk)  17:12, 21 October 2020 (UTC)