User talk:ToBeFree

Please click here to add a new message!

^{To add this button to your own talk page, you can use {{User new message large}}. It can easily be modified: Colorful examples are provided on the "Template:User new message large" page.}

Please note that you are currently not logged in.

This is not a general problem – you can leave a message anyway, but your IP address might change during the discussion, and I might end up talking to a wall. Creating an account does not require an e-mail address; all you need is a password and a name. You are not required to do this, but please consider creating an account before starting long-term interactions with other users. Thank you very much in advance.

Archives
[megabytes]

1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6

Rollback

Hello @ToBeFree! I posted on the request for permissions: rollback page on 5/16, and you asked me to reach out on your talk page after two weeks. I appreciate you mentioning how important it is to respond to feedback I get on my talk page. While I'm proud of the responses I gave to people -- especially ones where I realized I had made a mistake -- I can see now that there are a couple that I should have responded to, and this is something I'm working to get better at. I haven't had much practice until recently, and I'm feeling more and more confident in talking with people on here :)

I was actually hoping I could get some advice on what to do with talk page messages from people who leave veiled threats -- are those ones OK for me to remove from my talk page? In situations like that, or when someone leaves incoherent messages, it's sometimes difficult to know how or whether to respond. I've avoided reverting almost anything on that page, but twice in the last few days other editors have stepped in to revert vandalism on my talk page.

For context, since we last spoke two weeks ago, I've:

Made 3400 edits -- about 240 per day -- mostly reverting vandalism, leaving notices on other users talk pages, or making minor improvements to articles that had just been vandalized
Needed to report 26 users at WP:AIV. 100% of my reports were deemed valid and 100% of the users I reported were blocked.
Needed to report 7 accounts at WP:SPI -- all but one were blocked
Needed to report 1 user at WP:AN/3, who was blocked for edit warring
Thanked others 60 times
Been thanked 65 times (this stat is my favorite)

I appreciate you considering me for rollback, and regardless of whether you grant it I hope to continue seeing you around :) —tony^{st (talk)} 18:51, 30 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Hey TonySt, you do a great job, thank you very much! I'm impressed. Very well done.

Regarding removing messages especially including threats, this is up to your personal judgement in the end. You are generally allowed to do so independently of the message content, even if it's a kind message. Some content should obviously be removed rather than replied to, but the obvious cases are rare and often already dealt with by talk page watchers or people reverting all of a disruptive user's contributions. A fine response to Special:Diff/1292038458 would be moving the message to the bottom of the talk page in a new section, and adding {{uw-nlt}} on the sender's talk page, or (if the threat is clear enough) reporting it as was done at Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/IncidentArchive1188 § Pointed legal threat by Augmented Seventh. I think rsjaffe's response to the report is perfect. And of course you're free to remove the message instead of moving it to the bottom.

What I wouldn't do is archiving it unanswered despite this being a third option, as I think such messages then look strange without context and without response in the archive.

Special:Diff/1292037619 is suboptimal in my eyes as it is arguably incompatible with WP:BLPRESTORE (If it is to be restored without significant change, consensus must be obtained first), but this isn't relevant to the rollback permission. ~ ToBeFree (talk) 22:53, 30 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Noted, and thank you. Augmented Seventh 🎱 23:49, 30 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you for rollback but especially thank you for the note about WP:BLPRESTORE. I'm going to take another gander at all of the BLP policies to make sure I'm not missing anything else. If you see me out in the wild and notice anything else I'm missing, I would greatly value any feedback you'd be willing to offer in the future as well. Take care, and thanks again! --—tony^{st (talk)} 00:30, 31 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

All good, thank you!

~ ToBeFree (talk) 00:32, 31 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Forspoken edit warring

Hello @ToBeFree, as you have overseen the dispute resolution at Forspoken, I am contacting you again. Some users seem to ignore the RfC consensus. The RfC was formally closed by @Toadspike. My addition, which was not even connected to the RfC, also got fully reverted again without explanation. I did one revert now, back to the consensus version and reinstated my addition. Please take a look, and maybe also @Toadspike, what we should do here. Vestigium Leonis (talk) 10:50, 1 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I did not know of any dispute resolution and do not plan to get involved in this dispute. I simply closed the RfC at Talk:Forspoken#Follow-up RFC on Japan sales according to my reading of consensus. Please do not look to me to end an edit war or enforce the outcome. Toadspike [Talk] 11:02, 1 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]

@Toadspike Apologies if this was not the right approach. I did it with the intention of not overstepping anyone. This was the first RfC closure I have come across, so I was unsure about who to tag in this situation. Vestigium Leonis (talk) 11:20, 1 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]

No need to apologize. I'm simply saying that I, as a fellow non-admin, have no more power or authority to stop edit wars than you do. Being the RfC closer doesn't give me any special status here. Anyhow, it seems the brief edit war has ended now. Toadspike [Talk] 11:27, 1 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Hello Vestigium Leonis and Toadspike, thank you very much! The closure is fine, the advice in Special:Diff/1293376286 a bit suboptimal and new advice provided at the bottom of [1] and [2]. Both Wyll Ravengard and BMWF are relatively new editors with less than 500 contributions and may simply not have been aware of how this works. ~ ToBeFree (talk) 11:29, 1 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]

NutmegCoffeeTea is the third editor to revert the RfC closure. With that revert, they also responded to the discussion which highlights the correct procedure for challenging a RfC closure (which is not revert & edit war...). Sariel Xilo (talk) 00:21, 2 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I've left my thoughts on the talk page and so on, but to reiterate: no one here is challenging close content, to my understanding they're simply saying that the discussion is still going on. WP:CLOSECHALLENGE is not applicable here and explicitly says that it does not cover the scenario where an early closure is followed by multiple editors asking that it be reopened for further discussion, or a single editor has brought forth a compelling new perspective to the already closed discussion. This should be closed when the discussion runs its course. NutmegCoffeeTea (she/her) (talk) 03:38, 2 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]

NutmegCoffeeTea, the sentence begins with "Closures will often be changed by the closing editor without a closure review if". Of course the advice is applicable: Talk to the closing editor first. Have a community discussion if that doesn't help. ~ ToBeFree (talk) 16:54, 2 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]

There is currently a discussion at Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Incidents regarding an issue with which you may have been involved. The thread is Editors reverting RfC closure at Talk:Forspoken. Sariel Xilo (talk) 02:54, 2 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks! ~ ToBeFree (talk) 16:55, 2 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]

@ToBeFree: Can you add an extended confirmed protection to the article?2A00:FBC:EEE8:A781:8903:5610:9C39:C74 (talk) 09:27, 2 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I currently do not see a need to do so and declined an earlier extended-confirmed protection request at WP:RFPP. ~ ToBeFree (talk) 16:55, 2 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2025-23

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

Weekly highlight

The Chart extension is now available on all Wikimedia wikis. Editors can use this new extension to create interactive data visualizations like bar, line, area, and pie charts. Charts are designed to replace many of the uses of the legacy Graph extension.

Updates for editors

It is now easier to configure automatic citations for your wiki within the visual editor's citation generator. Administrators can now set a default template by using the _default key in the local MediaWiki:Citoid-template-type-map.json page (example diff). Setting this default will also help to future-proof your existing configurations when new item types are added in the future. You can still set templates for individual item types as they will be preferred to the default template. [3]
View all 20 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.

Updates for technical contributors

Starting the week of June 2, bots logging in using action=login or action=clientlogin will fail more often. This is because of stronger protections against suspicious logins. Bots using bot passwords or using a loginless authentication method such as OAuth are not affected. If your bot is not using one of those, you should update it; using action=login without a bot password was deprecated in 2016. For most bots, this only requires changing what password the bot uses. [4]
From this week, Wikimedia wikis will allow ES2017 features in JavaScript code for official code, gadgets, and user scripts. The most visible feature of ES2017 is async/await syntax, allowing for easier-to-read code. Until this week, the platform only allowed up to ES2016, and a few months before that, up to ES2015. [5]
Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

Meetings and events

Scholarship applications to participate in the GLAM Wiki Conference 2025 are now open. The conference will take place from 30 October to 1 November, in Lisbon, Portugal. GLAM contributors who lack the means to support their participation can apply here. Scholarship applications close on June 7th.

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

MediaWiki message delivery 23:52, 2 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]