Jump to content

User talk:GeneralNotability

Page contents not supported in other languages.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Demize (talk | contribs) at 01:40, 20 July 2023 (→Kevin Mitnick: Reply). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.


Archives (Index)

Not sure what to do with a user conduct problem? This is a good place to start.

You've got mail

Hello, GeneralNotability. Please check your email; you've got mail!
It may take a few minutes from the time the email is sent for it to show up in your inbox. You can remove this notice at any time by removing the {{You've got mail}} or {{ygm}} template. Yamla (talk) 21:49, 5 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]

This is all so sad

A threat or intimidation coupled with outing or appearing to out someone. Add to the implied tone is that another editor, an editor of longstanding, said in WIKIPEDIA's voice "We". WE. He was stating you and me and every one around Wikipedia..."We" all somehow know who this anon is. Personally I find this edit summary to be one of the most stunning things I have ever read on these pages. Shearonink (talk) 02:44, 7 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]

What’s happened?

Hi GeneralNotability. I see you blocked User:ಮಲ್ನಾಡಾಚ್ ಕೊಂಕ್ಣೊ with a log statement that can’t be followed. And Scottywong. What’s happened, in very simple terms, or a link, please? —SmokeyJoe (talk) 10:39, 9 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]

SmokeyJoe, following a (months-long) technical and behavioral investigation and after conferring with several other CUs, I am very confident that ಮಲ್ನಾಡಾಚ್ ಕೊಂಕ್ಣೊ is the same person as Wikipedia:Sockpuppet investigations/Gustin Kelly, a rather nasty abuser who has been at this for a while (much longer than the linked SPI indicates). The link in the block log goes to the extensive documentation of the connections written up on the checkuser wiki. GeneralNotability (talk) 14:38, 9 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Wikidata weekly summary #584

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Discussions
    • Closed request for adminship: koavf 3 Welcome onboard \o/
    • New requests for permissions/Bot: FromCrossrefBot 1: Publication dates (Task/s: Using information from Crossref: 1 - Add publication date to items where they are not present in Wikidata 2 - Fix publication dates where they are erroneous)
  • Tool of the week
    • Duplicity is a tool on Toolforge that helps find articles on Wikipedia that do not have a Wikidata Item, and match them to an existing Item, or create a new one. (example for English Wikipedia)
    • HasProperty.js displays presence/absence of specific properties (configurable) after the Statements heading. Clicking a property name will jump to that properties section. For absent property, clicking property name will jump to the end of the page.
  • Development
    • Ontology issues: We published the overview of solutions and are looking for input on them now.
    • mul language code: We continued work on it focusing on showing it in the right place in the desktop termbox (phab:T316767)
    • Wikibase REST API: We continued working on the endpoints for reading statement data of Properties (both a single statement, and a list of all of a Property’s statement) (phab:T339356, phab:T338383)
    • Vector 2022 skin: We continued work on improving the search display (phab:T327510)
    • WMF Governance wiki is now connected to Wikidata so can be linked to in the sitelink section under multilingual sites (phab:T321967)

You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here. If you want to help, you can also have a look at the tasks needing a volunteer.

Tech News: 2023-28

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

Recent changes

  • The Section-level Image Suggestions feature has been deployed on seven Wikipedias (Portuguese, Russian, Indonesian, Catalan, Hungarian, Finnish and Norwegian Bokmål). The feature recommends images for articles on contributors' watchlists that are a good match for individual sections of those articles.
  • Global abuse filters have been enabled on all Wikimedia projects, except English and Japanese Wikipedias (who opted out). This change was made following a global request for comments. [1]
  • Special:BlockedExternalDomains is a new tool for administrators to help fight spam. It provides a clearer interface for blocking plain domains (and their subdomains), is more easily searchable, and is faster for the software to process for each edit on the wiki. It does not support regex (for complex cases), nor URL path-matching, nor the MediaWiki:Spam-whitelist, but otherwise it replaces most of the functionalities of the existing MediaWiki:Spam-blacklist. There is a Python script to help migrate all simple domains into this tool, and more feature details, within the tool's documentation. It is available at all wikis except for Meta-wiki, Commons, and Wikidata. [2]
  • The WikiEditor extension was updated. It includes some of the most frequently used features of wikitext editing. In the past, many of its messages could only be translated by administrators, but now all regular translators on translatewiki can translate them. Please check the state of WikiEditor localization into your language, and if the "Completion" for your language shows anything less than 100%, please complete the translation. See a more detailed explanation.

Changes later this week

  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 11 July. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 12 July. It will be on all wikis from 13 July (calendar).
  • The default protocol of Special:LinkSearch and API counterparts has changed from http to both http and https. [3]
  • Special:LinkSearch and its API counterparts will now search for all of the URL provided in the query. It used to be only the first 60 characters. This feature was requested fifteen years ago. [4]

Future changes

  • There is an experiment with a ChatGPT plugin. This is to show users where the information is coming from when they read information from Wikipedia. It has been tested by Wikimedia Foundation staff and other Wikimedians. Soon all ChatGPT plugin users can use the Wikipedia plugin. This is the same plugin which was mentioned in Tech News 2023/20. [5]
  • There is an ongoing discussion on a proposed Third-party resources policy. The proposal will impact the use of third-party resources in gadgets and userscripts. Based on the ideas received so far, policy includes some of the risks related to user scripts and gadgets loading third-party resources, some best practices and exemption requirements such as code transparency and inspectability. Your feedback and suggestions are warmly welcome until July 17, 2023 on on the policy talk page.

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

MediaWiki message delivery 19:52, 10 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]

The Bugle: Issue 207, July 2023

Full front page of The Bugle
Your Military History Newsletter

The Bugle is published by the Military history WikiProject. To receive it on your talk page, please join the project or sign up here.
If you are a project member who does not want delivery, please remove your name from this page. Your editors, Ian Rose (talk) and Nick-D (talk) 19:58, 10 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]

2023 arbitration committee election RfC discussions moved to 2023 talk page

I have moved the discussions under Wikipedia talk:Requests for comment/Arbitration Committee Elections December 2022 § Topics to review for 2023 to Wikipedia talk:Requests for comment/Arbitration Committee Elections December 2023. Please feel free to continue discussion on the 2023 talk page! isaacl (talk) 21:44, 15 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]

isaacl, thanks for getting that started. GeneralNotability (talk) 21:54, 15 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]

The Signpost: 17 July 2023

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 09:00, 17 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Wikidata weekly summary #584

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Discussions
    • Open request for adminship: Tomodachi94 (RfP scheduled to end after 21 July 2023 05:02 UTC)
    • New requests for permissions/Bot:
      • Peuc bot 3 (Task: One-time import of a database of Québec written literary works)
      • MajavahBot (Task: Import version and metadata information for Python libraries from PyPI)
  • Tool of the week
    • Wikidata Recent Changes API (simple front-end to the actual API) lets you query Wikidata edits by either properties, or labels/aliases/descriptions/sitelinks. You can retrieve any changes, or specify added/changed/removed. Current lag to Wikidata: 1 seconds. (blog)
  • Development
    • Vector 2022 skin: We finished working on removing the strange bolding pattern of the Search Results on Wikidata. Should be rolled out in the next train (phab:T327510)
    • EntitySchemas: We are working on showing the Label of EntitySchema in Statements and Special pages (phab:T339924)
    • Mismatch Finder: We are working on adding the Language Selector to the Mismatch Finder (phab:T328149)
    • mul: We trying out changing how placeholders in Wikibase termboxes work: They’ll soon start falling back across the fallback chain of the language until they hit mul (phab:T340832)

You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here. If you want to help, you can also have a look at the tasks needing a volunteer.


Tech News: 2023-29

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

Recent changes

Changes later this week

  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 18 July. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 19 July. It will be on all wikis from 20 July (calendar).
  • MediaWiki system messages will now look for available local fallbacks, instead of always using the default fallback defined by software. This means wikis no longer need to override each language on the fallback chain separately. For example, English Wikipedia doesn't have to create en-ca and en-gb subpages with a transclusion of the base pages anymore. This makes it easier to maintain local overrides. [6]
  • The action=growthsetmentorstatus API will be deprecated with the new MediaWiki version. Bots or scripts calling that API should use the action=growthmanagementorlist API now. [7]

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

MediaWiki message delivery 23:06, 17 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Excuse Me.

I would like to be globally locked from my Wikipedia account. I don't think I'm fit for editing on this website. Do you think there is any chance you can do that for me? Rice the improver (talk) 00:34, 20 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Kevin Mitnick

You may have missed the additional source I added: SecurityWeek, a reputable third-party source, independently confirmed Mitnick's passing. demize (t · c) 01:15, 20 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]

demize, I'm quite skeptical of all of this, and honestly I'm not convinced SecurityWeek did anything more than read the same obit and call that their "confirmation". GeneralNotability (talk) 01:18, 20 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]
And I don't see why the obit itself is questionable--that obit site has been around since 1999, is used by a lot of different funeral homes, and seems to be trusted well enough by other media (see BoingBoing, who's also picked up the obit now: https://boingboing.net/2023/07/19/kevin-mitnick-1963-2023.html).
That aside, SecurityWeek isn't just reading the obit, they specifically claim to have independently verified it: "SecurityWeek sources have confirmed Mitnick’s passing, which was first reported in an obituary posted at Dignity Memorial, a Las Vegas funeral home.". If we can't trust SecurityWeek, are we just going to wait until CNN reports on it? I'm sure they will, but they'll probably just use SecurityWeek's early reporting and the obit, so by your logic here I don't know if we should trust them either. demize (t · c) 01:22, 20 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]
demize, my thinking is basically this: Mitnick is suddenly announced dead, from a cancer that has never been mentioned before, our only source is an obituary published a few days after the fact. I'm not saying that he definitely isn't dead - but I'm also acquainted enough with hacker culture (and, if I'm not mistaken, a couple big hacker conferences are coming up soon) that I can believe that this is someone's idea of a prank. I'm very reluctant to trust claims of death without bulletproof sourcing from extremely reliable sources. GeneralNotability (talk) 01:34, 20 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]
And I'm pretty involved in the hacker community; SecurityWeek is definitely a trustworthy source here, as one focused specifically on our community, and I've heard independently through other members of the community that this is reputable.
Mostly, though, I'm hoping to make sure that the article is reasonably and properly sourced. When I restored a revision of it to add in the SecurityWeek article, that was because it was the most complete revision of the page since the news dropped; currently other people are still editing it to add in the same details, but with less (or no) sourcing and care for the overall layout.
I can certainly understand the skepticism, but at this point it's pretty clear (to me, as someone in the security community, even just from the SecurityWeek article) that this is the real deal. And editors continually reverting each other over this doesn't do anyone any good.
In fact, regardless of what state you restore the page to, I'd suggest fully protecting it for the moment--this has just hit Reddit, so we're gonna see a lot more people coming in to edit it now. demize (t · c) 01:40, 20 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:GeneralNotability&oldid=1166205094"