Wikidata:Administrators' noticeboard

Administrators' noticeboard

This is a noticeboard for matters requiring administrator attention.

• If you wish for something to be deleted, please use Wikidata:Requests for deletions.
• If you want to report a bug in Wikidata software, please use Wikidata:Report a technical problem or Phabricator.
• Matters not requiring administrator action should be raised at Project chat.
• Matters that may involve CheckUser should be raised at Wikidata:Requests for checkuser.
• To report vandalism on wikidata: please click here.
• Please add {{section resolved|1=~~~~}} to resolved sections.

IRC channel: #wikidata^connect

Translate this header box!

Start a new discussion

On this page, old discussions are archived. An overview of all archives can be found at this page's archive index. The current archive is located at 2024/12.

SpBot archives all sections tagged with {{Section resolved|1=~~~~}} after 1 day and sections whose oldest comment is older than 7 days.

Requests for deletions

high

_{~120 open requests for deletions.}

Requests for unblock

empty

_{0 open requests for unblock.}

Creations and additions of special:contributions/SirElliotSpootz

Hi. I would like to point you to the creations and additions of special:contributions/SirElliotSpootz They are creating people outside of the notability guidance, and they they are adding the trashiest reference sites. These are sites some that we have found to be part of reference spam at English Wikipedia, and one could even say are part of the trend of paid promotions by bloggers. I have left this user a note and pointed them to the notability criteria. I encourage the administrators to be aware to the potential abuse of the site, and consider means to monitor and manage that abuse. Thanks.  — billinghurst sDrewth 22:26, 24 January 2020 (UTC)

Their user page says "I normally edit English Wikipedia, where I started to contribute in 2018." According to en:Special:Contributions/SirElliotSpootz, they started editing on 2019-06-29, they have two mainspace edits, plus two draft articles that were rejected on notability grounds. Bovlb (talk) 23:26, 27 January 2020 (UTC)

@Bovlb: Yep, it is a con job. Nothing but trash and subterfuge. One of their original sock accounts may have started in 2018. They are pumping crap in, what is the plan?  — billinghurst sDrewth 11:48, 30 January 2020 (UTC)

Further I will point you to the updated user page at SirElliotSpootz (2019-04-29) and LeggoEzzo (2019-05-16) and the text "I'm not a troll, and if I make an edit it is a genuine attempt to help improve Wikipedia!" Q59661695 is the article created and predominantly edited by the former use, and the image was uploaded to Commons by the latter user. Taking us for fools.  — billinghurst sDrewth 12:08, 30 January 2020 (UTC)

Plus ZoharMatthew same text, uploaded two images at Commons for articles by the main protagonist.  — billinghurst sDrewth 12:24, 30 January 2020 (UTC)

@billinghurst: ... Lilvert ... JamieeXO ... Mrezzo .... --Beetstra (talk) 12:28, 30 January 2020 (UTC)

....Embuuzy has the same text on their userpage on en .. but I am not sure if she is related. --Beetstra (talk) 12:32, 30 January 2020 (UTC)

Thanks Beetstra, was creating a CU request case at c:Commons:Requests_for_checkuser/Case/SirElliotSpootz and flagged them to check with local CU here. Then came back and was digging up that data. Added them to the commons request. @Praxidicae, Bbb23, Kingboyk: for completing the loop, and noting w:Wikipedia:Sockpuppet investigations/MNB9911  — billinghurst sDrewth 12:43, 30 January 2020 (UTC)

+ Esaulp, BerrixGote text variations  — billinghurst sDrewth 13:11, 30 January 2020 (UTC)

•  Comment The request for checkuser at Commons shows those able to be connected through CU data were so.  — billinghurst sDrewth 12:54, 1 February 2020 (UTC)
• @Bencemac, Andreasmperu: further  Comment the problematic items went through a deletion process and were deleted, and this user recreated them the next day.  — billinghurst sDrewth 13:20, 1 February 2020 (UTC)
• Blocked master and socks indefinitely and deleted the recreated items. ‐‐1997kB (talk) 13:36, 1 February 2020 (UTC)

  That is nice and deals with the surface issues. I would think that there is something that will need to be done to stop reproduction, and the system abuse of dodgy ref sites, the named items. I think that many will have an interest in the strategy to manage going forward.  — billinghurst sDrewth 04:34, 2 February 2020 (UTC)

Yeah surely, but as Wikidata don't have fixed item names, I can't think how we can stop recreation. But for dodgy ref sites I think we can use local blacklist or abuse filters. Btw they are back Special:Contributions/M.alon44. ‐‐1997kB (talk) 12:19, 6 February 2020 (UTC)

@1997kB: If you blacklist, fantastic. Alternatively if the community wishes to have a list of problematic domains that you are not (yet) ready to blacklist, then it is possible to get COIBot to watch a local page and such links. I will defer to Beetstra on the best means.

Of course I would also encourage this community to look to suggest to the larger WMF community via m:Talk:spam blacklisst of domains that they think should be sent to the trashpit for all wikis.  — billinghurst sDrewth 12:55, 8 February 2020 (UTC)

I will also note that this community hasn't particularly seen fit to be active in the use of mediawiki:spam-blacklist, and I look forward to administrators doing more in that space.  — billinghurst sDrewth 13:00, 8 February 2020 (UTC)

Global spam blacklist, WikiData and data re-use

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T243484

Several (sometimes heated) discussions were started on the global spam-blacklist as WikiData cannot fill in 'official website' fields for entities where the domain is globally blacklisted. Solutions, and some of the problems that they give, were discussed. The problem has been redirected to Phabricator as there does not seem to be a 'perfect' solution that is currently technically possible. The problem involves many, many pages throughout our projects (and hence their items here), most prominently redirect sites (tinyurl, bit.ly, goo.gl, etc.), porn sites (pornhub, redtube, etc.), but also many companies and other organisations who have (heavily) abused our servers.

There is one possibility that can now be implemented which needs both admins at the global blacklist, and editors at WikiData to agree and cooperate, which I posted at m:Talk:Spam_blacklist#Temporary_solution (subsection of m:Talk:Spam_blacklist#WD_and_blacklisted_links).

Please comment at the proposal, or at the parent discussion. --Beetstra (talk) 07:29, 26 January 2020 (UTC)

Pinging those from the previous discussion @94rain:, @Quakewoody:, @Sextvåetc:, @Jasper Deng:, @Nomen ad hoc:, @Multichill:, @Ahmad252:, @ Peter James: --Trade (talk) 19:26, 27 January 2020 (UTC)

• We need to question the value of having blacklisted links here; in some cases the websites are blacklisted not for being spam but for being outright malicious, for example. For now though, that solution seems to be workable.--Jasper Deng (talk) 09:37, 31 January 2020 (UTC)
  • @Jasper Deng: some of the links are indeed plainly malicious (probably 99.9% of the viagra and tramadol spam) but those are unlikely to have an article. Items as url shorteners, porn sites, petition sites are blacklisted because of their (potential to) abuse They were not blacklisted because they are spam (I don't think that we had any significant spamming of the larger porn sites - they are abused, here and on all wikis I checked), because they are malicious (petition sites are not malicious - they are linked to to gather more signatures for a good cause), or that we don't want to link to them (Tinyurl needs the link to the official site - but they are linked to to avoid the spam blacklist, or to obscure what you link to). The stuff that would merit a link but that we really don't want to link to is very limited (on en.wikipedia I am not really aware of any, maybe Encyclopedia Dramatica when they were pushing their limits). --Beetstra (talk) 13:22, 2 February 2020 (UTC)

@Trade: First, please also ping me (i.e. {{ping|Liuxinyu970226}}) on all the potential related discussions on this topic. Second, back to the main problem, per User:Trade/Spam-blacklist whitelist, if a such blacklisted site has own a property, then editing formatter URL (P1630) of that property is however not blacklisted (e.g. sorry for my diff 1112036839 and diff 1112036882), I'm not sure if this should be OK (even for Beetstra) or not. Third, putting a subpage (even that's something like index(.html/.php...) or #) on official website (P856) and friends may be more friendly, if a site has TLS v1.3 support, which however means that the terminal users has to install the newest version of Chrome, Edge or others to let all the Internet access be encrypted by at least ESNI. --Liuxinyu970226 (talk) 04:42, 9 February 2020 (UTC)

@Liuxinyu970226: Fun fact: By using identifier properties as sources you can allow blacklisted URL's to be included on Wikipedia articles in certain languages. As an example, see Chelsea Charms where links to both Pornhub, YouPorn and RedTube have been included in the references. --Trade (talk) 19:40, 9 February 2020 (UTC)

WDQS lag is terrible (over 9 hours now)

See this Grafana plot - it looks like something happened over the weekend, and the lag has been steadily growing for 3 of the servers. Wikiscan isn't showing super-high edit rates though. Does anybody have any idea what could be going on? ArthurPSmith (talk) 19:37, 3 February 2020 (UTC)

• XabatuBot (talk • contribs • logs) of @YoaR: seems to keep going. --- Jura 19:56, 3 February 2020 (UTC)
  • Hmmm. Looking at Recent Changes I see the following bots active, while maxlag should have been over 5 for the last hour at least, so no bot should have been running:
    • XabatuBot (talk • contribs • logs)
    • GZWDer (flood) (talk • contribs • logs)
    • Smbbot (talk • contribs • logs)
  • but XabatuBot is by far the highest number of bot edits. Given previous warnings on the bot talk page maybe this should be blocked for a bit to see if that helps WDQS recover? Note there was some quickstatements and petscan activity also but maybe only interactive so it doesn't count as bot action subject to maxlag? ArthurPSmith (talk) 21:23, 3 February 2020 (UTC)
    • I blocked @YoaR:'s bot for a week (can someone who speaks Asturian get a hold of that bot's operator?). I have opted to leave the other two untouched since they seem to be behaving, though @GZWDer, Smb1001: you should still check that these are not contributing to the overall lag problem. Mahir256 (talk) 21:40, 3 February 2020 (UTC)
      • @Mahir256: Thanks. Unfortunately there doesn't seem to have been an immediate recovery, but maybe the problem has at least stabilized (lag is still around 9 hours and a bit, where it's been for about the last 5 hours). Should we try to get hold of some developers to see if they know any more what's going on? ArthurPSmith (talk) 22:54, 3 February 2020 (UTC)
        • I think they're aware of it via Wikidata:Contact the development team/Query Service and search, but a phabricator ticket might be an idea just in case. Thanks. Mike Peel (talk) 22:56, 3 February 2020 (UTC)

Currently my bot contributes to less than 10% of total edits. I don't think it will be a issue. It intentionlys work in a constant speed (~28 queries/minute regardless of maxlag though not all queries will result in an edit).--GZWDer (talk) 21:59, 3 February 2020 (UTC)

@GZWDer: It's outrageous that your bot is (bots are ?) not taking notice of maxlag. The whole purpose of maxlag is to get bots of back off when load is greater than capacity. You're saying "meh, no, my bot just keeps pushing edits". That's not acceptable, nor is it reasonable: there's surely no impediment to you changing your bot(s) to respect maxlag? Your bots are afaik, some of the biggest contributors to wikidata. Equally there's no good reason why the community should accept what amounts to sociopathic behavior. Admins must consider whether bots that do not obay rules and thus help precipitate issues such as the one we are discussing should be blocked until fixed.--Tagishsimon (talk) 15:12, 4 February 2020 (UTC)

Hi all, @Jura1, Mahir256, ArthurPSmith:. Sorry for the possible problems caused. Indeed, the maxlag parameter was not being respected due to a bug. This week I will fix it once and for all. YoaR (talk) 07:11, 4 February 2020 (UTC)

Just a note that the query service lag has been gradually dropping - it is now under 3 hours, and looks like (assuming nothing else breaks) all will be back to normal tomorrow. It's possible the block took care of it, however we should keep watch on this as the problem may recur... ArthurPSmith (talk) 21:05, 4 February 2020 (UTC)

And today it is indeed at a reasonable level (though the worst one is about 25 minutes which is on the high side of reasonable). ArthurPSmith (talk) 18:33, 5 February 2020 (UTC)

I blocked user:BotNinja for not using maxlag. Multichill (talk) 16:36, 9 February 2020 (UTC)

• https://www.wikidata.org/w/index.php?title=Special:RecentChanges&hidebots=0&hidehumans=1 --- Jura 17:19, 9 February 2020 (UTC)
  • and again >9 hour... --Kostas20142 (talk) 16:09, 10 February 2020 (UTC)
    • That is something else, but I am not sure what exactly. The best chart to visualize the maxlag over time is this one to my experience. Maxlag is bouncing around the critical limit of "5s", thus there are time windows where bots may operate. —MisterSynergy (talk) 18:06, 10 February 2020 (UTC)

      My mistake, I posted replag instead. --Kostas20142 (talk) 18:09, 10 February 2020 (UTC)

      • According to that chart, lag was over 10s in the period 2010-02-10T21:00/21:16Z. According to recent changes, the following bots were operating in that period:
        • Pi bot (talk • contribs • logs)
        • ‎ListeriaBot (talk • contribs • logs)
        • CommonsDelinker (talk • contribs • logs)
        • SalviBot (talk • contribs • logs)
        • Reinheitsgebot (talk • contribs • logs)
        • GZWDer (flood) (talk • contribs • logs)

        Is there a way to check whether these bots are using the maxlag parameter? Bovlb (talk) 21:35, 10 February 2020 (UTC)

        • I believe ‎ListeriaBot doesn't edit in the main namespace, so I don't think anything it does would be harmful with regard to lag. ArthurPSmith (talk) 21:51, 10 February 2020 (UTC)

Usually there is no way to check explicitly whether a bot respects maxlag or not.
Basically it roughly works like this: the server reports the "maxlag" value to the client (bot script/framework), and the bot script then needs to decide what to do. The policy sort of requires that the bot should not edit when the maxlag value is larger than 5 (seconds). However, the bot script (or framework) can either ignore the maxlag value completely, or slow down instead of stopping completely, or decide to react at higher maxlag values (such as 10, a more aggressive value). Without looking into the code, you can infer the bot's behaviour only by monitoring it during times of high load, and this is sort of difficult these days where the maxlag value is constantly bouncing around the threshold of "5 seconds" within a couple of minutes. Anyways, according to my own experience with pywikibot in standard config, a bot should realize "maxlag>5 seconds" pretty quickly after this situation has started (a minute or so). At this Grafana board, you can nicely see how the edit load toggles pretty in sync with the maxlag status that is also displayed there.
Another remark: most or all of the listed bots edited a 1–5 edits per minute if I don't miss anything. This is not a load that creates the lag, or significantly reduces the lag in case you block it away. Edit rates of the order of 1/s are the problematic ones, however. —MisterSynergy (talk) 22:03, 10 February 2020 (UTC)

As the operator of pi bot, which uses pywikibot, I'd appreciate some clearer technical guidance here. There seem to be four key parameters - 'minthrottle' (now 1, was 0), 'maxthrottle' (now 1, was 0), 'put_throttle' (always 1), and 'maxlag' (now 5, was 5000), see [1] - what are the optimal settings to use for these, bearing in mind that the bot reads more than it edits, and it's mostly limited by round-trip-time to the servers anyway? Also, it's a cross-wiki bot - it can be editing Wikidata, Commons, and enwp simultaneously, and a lag in one set of project servers shouldn't slow its reading/editing on other projects. Perhaps I should split the focused tasks off into different run scripts, but some of them are often quite entwined. Thanks. Mike Peel (talk) 22:21, 10 February 2020 (UTC)

Should be fine if you use "maxlag=5", regardless of the other parameters. This stops the bot to write during high-load times in a policy-compliant way, and as far as I understand, also to read.
Mind that there are no general restrictions regarding edit rates, so going at 1 edit/s (max possible value with "put_throttle=1" and no parallel execution of jobs) is fine as long as maxlag<5.
I am not fully aware about the cross-wiki issue, as I usually edit Wikidata only with my bots (also using pywikibot). However, maxlag is a per-project measure of "server load", thus "maxlag>5 at Wikidata" should not interfere with the bot's actitivies on other projects—as long as no interaction with Wikidata takes place. —MisterSynergy (talk) 10:10, 11 February 2020 (UTC)

I had increased the maxlag parameter because I was supervising edit-by-edit. Also, see phabricator:T221774.--SalviBot (talk) 14:09, 11 February 2020 (UTC)

special:contributions/민병국 continued problematic edits

It would seem that repeated warning and undoing of problematic edits of this user are not effective.  — billinghurst sDrewth 13:05, 8 February 2020 (UTC)

• It looks like the user has not edited since 12 January and was warned on 25 january--Ymblanter (talk) 20:46, 8 February 2020 (UTC)
  • But I still think that a Global ban or lock should be happened for such behaviors. --Liuxinyu970226 (talk) 04:43, 9 February 2020 (UTC)

Uh.. He insulted politicians against his ideology and put personal sentiment on items. It's difficult to translate into English. I revdel because not only are some of them false, but also serious insult is defamatory, without whether block is appropriate or not. --Sotiale (talk) 13:49, 9 February 2020 (UTC)

You do not need to translate this into English, just block indef if the policy violations are serious enough.--Ymblanter (talk) 19:53, 9 February 2020 (UTC)

It is assumed that this user cannot communicate in English. If I leave a warning in Korean, and vandalism continues after that, he should be blocked immediately. --Sotiale (talk) 13:23, 10 February 2020 (UTC)

edits by 180.244.234.20

Hello, recent edits by 180.244.234.20 (talk • contribs • deleted contribs • logs • filter log • block user • block log • SUL (for IP: GUC)) seem to be vandalism - incorrectly changing country of citizenship and other claims , and weird removals of and changes to correct labels and aliases. Also duplication of said labels and aliases. Some of the label/alias additions are correct but most of the others are bad changes and should be reverted. Manually inspecting every edit will take a lot of time so I would also like to request them all to be reverted. Redalert2fan (talk) 22:23, 9 February 2020 (UTC)

Request for deletion - edits by SilvianaX

The truth is, there are so many non-notable/self-promotion items that link to one another (all created by SilvianaX or IP addresses) that I can't even keep it organized enough to create a proper "bulk deletion" request. I thought maybe bringing it here might make it a little easier. These items also cross over to other projects. Quakewoody (talk) 18:38, 11 February 2020 (UTC)

Reporting 151.20.125.224

The recent extensive contributions of 151.20.125.224 are all highly suspect. The IP is a sockpuppet of the globally locked Alec Smithson. The Alec Smithson account was blocked on multiple wikis, for amongst other things creating hoax articles or articles with false claims from fabricated sources. Smithson and his socks have also uploaded numerous images to Commons with falsified data concerning the source and the description. See: Commons:Requests for checkuser/Case/Alec Smithson (February 2020) and Wikipedia:Long-term abuse/Alec Smithson. This IP was blocked on English WP 3 days ago as a Smithson sock [2]. The alter egos of this IP, i.e. 151.20.21.172 and 151.20.7.153 were blocked by Pasleim as Smithson socks here on Wikidata for a week in 2018 and for 3 months in 2019 and all their edits reverted. Voceditenore (talk) 10:25, 12 February 2020 (UTC)

 Done, blocked for 6 months--Ymblanter (talk) 21:02, 12 February 2020 (UTC)

I think that this discussion is resolved and can be archived. If you disagree, don't hesitate to replace this template with your comment. DannyS712 (talk) 03:05, 13 February 2020 (UTC)

Semi-protect Margarita Salas (Q3320231)

Please semi-protect Margarita Salas (Q3320231) as it has been attracting vandalism from multiple IPs from different ranges, lately. --Kostas20142 (talk) 17:51, 12 February 2020 (UTC)

 Done for 3 months. Jianhui67 ^{talk★contribs} 17:55, 12 February 2020 (UTC)

I think that this discussion is resolved and can be archived. If you disagree, don't hesitate to replace this template with your comment. DannyS712 (talk) 03:05, 13 February 2020 (UTC)

User:Pathwaybot

See User_talk:Pathwaybot#Incorrect_modeling: Please block this bot. It is adding author (P50) to items that should not have them.--GZWDer (talk) 03:55, 13 February 2020 (UTC)

After reading User_talk:Pathwaybot#P2860 I retract the request for immediate block, but I still think this is a bad way to model the concept.--GZWDer (talk) 04:04, 13 February 2020 (UTC)

User:Macskelek

Will someone please block User:Macskelek who is apparently a kid and - though probably in good faith - in spite of a warning, is adding descriptions wich do not comply with the guidelines. Their MO is copypasting the first sentence of a huwiki article to the description field by the suggestededit-add 1.0 tool. Pls. see my message to them on User talk:Macskelek yesterday. Thanks. Csigabi (talk) 09:01, 13 February 2020 (UTC)