This is not an encyclopedia article, or even the talk page for an encyclopedia article. It is a miserable little pile of secrets. Do not consult it for term papers, doctoral dissertations, Congressional committee reports, ecumenical statements, et cetera.
If you find this page on any site other than Wikipedia, you are viewing a mirror, or one of those ersatz knockoff sites that make fake profiles of Wikipedia editors and claim them as users. Be aware that the page may be outdated, or stupid, and that the user to whom this talk page belongs to may have no personal affiliation with any site other than Wikipedia itself. The original talk page is located at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:JPxG.
This user talk page might be watched by friendly talk page stalkers, which means that someone other than me might reply to your query. Their input is welcome and their help with messages that I cannot reply to quickly is appreciated.
You are correct, I just read that whole thread and then spent half of the subsequent shower winning a talk page argument against a couple of shampoo bottles. Honestly, I think Wikipedia talk pages are high in the running for the worst possible communication medium on the planet -- maybe "smoke signal" and "message in a bottle" are worse. You can't show people non-CC-licensed images, you can't link to sources if someone thinks the website is bad, you can't categorize the articles in any scheme that has the potential to bother anyone. It's hardly surprising that for twenty years people have been running entire parallel communities on IRC and Discord and Slack and mailing lists: talk pages are borderline unusable. jp×g🗯️22:03, 6 August 2024 (UTC)Reply
Also any comment you make (even if you edit it a couple minutes later) is perpetually preserved in amber so that if you get in an unrelated argument with anybody over any subject for the rest of your life they can link to the time you were having a bad day in 2003 and called some guy an assclown as irrefutable evidence of longrunning conduct issues jp×g🗯️22:05, 6 August 2024 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment: 11 months ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Feature news
Two new parser functions will be available this week: {{#dir}} and {{#bcp47}}. These will reduce the need for Template:Dir and Template:BCP47 on Commons and allow us to drop 100 million rows from the "what links here" database. Editors at any wiki that use these templates, can help by replacing the templates with these new functions. The templates at Commons will be updated during the Hackathon at Wikimania. [1][2]
Communities can request the activation of the visual editor on entire namespaces where discussions sometimes happen (for instance Wikipedia: or Wikisource: namespaces) if they understand the known limitations. For discussions, users can already use DiscussionTools in these namespaces.
The tracking category "Pages using Timeline" has been renamed to "Pages using the EasyTimeline extension" in TranslateWiki. Wikis that have created the category locally should rename their local creation to match.
Project updates
Editors who help to organize WikiProjects and similar on-wiki collaborations, are invited to share ideas and examples of successful collaborations with the Campaigns and Programs teams. You can fill out a brief survey or share your thoughts on the talkpage. The teams are particularly looking for details about successful collaborations on non-English wikis.
The new parser is being rolled out on Wikivoyage wikis over the next few months. The English Wikivoyage and Hebrew Wikivoyage were switched to Parsoid last week. For more information, see Parsoid/Parser Unification.
The latest quarterly Language and Internationalization newsletter is available. It includes: New design previews for Translatable pages; Updates about MinT for Wiki Readers; the release of Translation dumps; and more.
@Svampesky: Are you aware that the diæresis is a part of the English language? This seems like either an issue with providing metadata in the template or improving accessibility software -- not really a thing that can be fixed at TfD. jp×g🗯️04:39, 6 August 2024 (UTC)Reply
To be fair, I didn't realize I was nominating it for deletion on a page called 'Templates for discussion'. I thought it functioned to pool editors in one place, especially as templates are more technical. The section header Nomination for deletion of Template:Newyorkerize was a template. I hope the "mods on the Wikimedia discord server" don't find out about this! Svampesky (talk) 13:56, 6 August 2024 (UTC)Reply
I erroneously filed it thinking it was a place to pool editors and discuss. How do I withdraw it and move the discussion to the talk page? Svampesky (talk) 16:48, 7 August 2024 (UTC)Reply
Users wishing to permanently leave may now request "vanishing" via Special:GlobalVanishRequest. Processed requests will result in the user being renamed, their recovery email being removed, and their account being globally locked.
Latest comment: 11 months ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Stewards can now specify if global blocks should prevent account creation. Before this change by the Trust and Safety Product Team, all global blocks would prevent account creation. This will allow stewards to reduce the unintended side-effects of global blocks on IP addresses.
Latest comment: 11 months ago2 comments2 people in discussion
I've finished my report for the Signpost and I'm adding finishing touches. I joined Quarry, but I'm unsure how to run a query. I need to find the longest-running move discussion based on time duration. What would be the code for that? Svampesky (talk) 11:12, 13 August 2024 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment: 10 months ago1 comment1 person in discussion
I hope by this point that you trust my intentions, because I sure had to fiddle with User talk:JPxG/index and related pages a bunch to get the combination of {{database report}}, Linter, and my tribe of Linter-obsessed gnomes to align around the formatting of those pages. I had to hack the table format a bit, so now you have a table within a table (not ideal, but it works). I hope that you don't mind, and sorry for the notifications. – Jonesey95 (talk) 14:43, 18 August 2024 (UTC)Reply
Bring a picnic blanket and some potluck, as well as some sunscreen! We'll also provide a little something for everyone, but we encourage you to bring your own favorite dishes to share, especially for those food cultural topics you would like to improve on Wikipedia.
Latest comment: 10 months ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Feature news
Editors who want to re-use references but with different details such as page numbers, will be able to do so by the end of 2024, using a new sub-referencing feature. You can read more about the project and how to test the prototype.
Editors using tracking categories to identify which pages use specific extensions may notice that six of the categories have been renamed to make them more easily understood and consistent. These categories are automatically added to pages that use specialized MediaWiki extensions. The affected names are for: DynamicPageList, Kartographer, Phonos, RSS, Score, WikiHiero. Wikis that have created the category locally should rename their local creation to match. Thanks to Pppery for these improvements. [5]
Technical volunteers who edit modules and want to get a list of the categories used on a page, can now do so using the categories property of mw.title objects. This enables wikis to configure workflows such as category-specific edit notices. Thanks to SD001 for these improvements. [6][7]
Bugs status
Your help is needed to check if any pages need to be moved or deleted. A maintenance script was run to clean up unreachable pages (due to Unicode issues or introduction of new namespaces/namespace aliases). The script tried to find appropriate names for the pages (e.g. by following the Unicode changes or by moving pages whose titles on Wikipedia start with Talk:WP: so that their titles start with Wikipedia talk:), but it may have failed for some pages, and moved them to Special:PrefixIndex/T195546/ instead. Your community should check if any pages are listed there, and move them to the correct titles, or delete them if they are no longer needed. A full log (including pages for which appropriate names could be found) is available in phab:P67388.
Editors who volunteer as mentors to newcomers on their wiki are once again able to access lists of potential mentees who they can connect with to offer help and guidance. This functionality was restored thanks to a bug fix. Thank you to Mbch331 for filing the bug report. You can read about that, and 18 other community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.
Project updates
The application deadline for the Product & Technology Advisory Council (PTAC) has been extended to September 16. Members will help by providing advice to Foundation Product and Technology leadership on short and long term plans, on complex strategic problems, and help to get feedback from more contributors and technical communities. Selected members should expect to spend roughly 5 hours per month for the Council, during the one year pilot. Please consider applying, and spread the word to volunteers you think would make a positive contribution to the committee.
Learn more
The 2024 Coolest Tool Awards were awarded at Wikimania, in seven categories. For example, one award went to the ISA Tool, used for adding structured data to files on Commons, which was recently improved during the Wiki Mentor Africa Hackathon. You can see video demonstrations of each tool at the awards page. Congratulations to this year's recipients, and thank you to all tool creators and maintainers.
The latest Wikimedia Foundation Bulletin is available, and includes some highlights from Wikimania, an upcoming Language community meeting, and other news from the movement.
I reworked this from WikiProject Orphanage. This could be placed on the newsroom talk page. Someone presses it five times, and then by a poll on the newsroom talk page to decide which essay to include in the next issue, to encourage readers to improve it. Svampesky (talk) 18:08, 20 August 2024 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment: 10 months ago4 comments2 people in discussion
Thanks for catching the unintentional synthesis, but what mistake did I actually make here? It was intended to summarise the body so I may have been misled by existing errors later in the article. Belbury (talk) 08:28, 23 August 2024 (UTC)Reply
If you'd asked me a few months ago what the deal was with the pistol emoji, I would have said "it used to be a gun and then some time in the late 2010s a bunch of websites changed it to be a water gun", but when I actually looked into it for this article it turned out the reality was much more complicated and weird. The thing everyone went with was that it got changed everywhere, because this made for an easy story, but half of the vendors never changed anything, and even among the ones who did it was kind of an awkwardly inconsistent back-and-forth changeover. It's kind of interesting, because Elon Musk and all the people who hate Elon Musk seem to agree that everyone had a water gun until he unilaterally decided Twitter should go back to a handgun, but this does not seem to actually be borne out by anything other than that one article from the one abc.net article which seems to have gotten its header image from a Facebook page(?). jp×g🗯️09:01, 23 August 2024 (UTC)Reply
That header image does seem to be backed up by what I'm seeing in the sources, that Microsoft adopted the water pistol years ago but caved to cross-platform compatibility and made it a gun, then all the main platforms changed it to a water pistol in 2018.
I'll see if I can pull together enough sources to recreate a sourced timeline table in the article.
What's your view on the article drawing a link between the 2018 changes and the Parkland high school shooting and subsequent mass demonstrations against gun violence, a recent addition which is still in the article body? From what I can see this is an observation that some press sources made, and it seems like a reasonable one, but the actual platform announcements seem deliberately vague and anodyne about there being any social reason behind the change. Belbury (talk) 09:22, 23 August 2024 (UTC)Reply
Yeah, the closest the article gets is to say "the move away from the graphic of the weapon to a toy comes after mass demonstrations by students in the United States and globally, demanding tighter gun control laws". It seems pretty plausible to me.
On the subject of unciteable original research otherwise left on teh cutting room floor, my friend found this public relations campaign from 2016 which was apparently demanding Apple remove the glyph on a specific, explicit basis that
We realized that many Americans unknowingly carry a gun with them every day. The one that was given to them without a background check: the gun emoji. We ask that you stand with the American people and remove the gun emoji from all your products as a symbolic gesture to limit gun accessibility. We understand taking the emoji out will not end gun violence, but this act will show Congress that gun-owning and non-owning Americans have come together to demand required background checks for ALL gun sales.
The funnier outcome, in my opinion (note I've stolen this joke), would have been to cryptographically implement background checks for the gun emoji. jp×g🗯️08:48, 4 September 2024 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment: 10 months ago3 comments2 people in discussion
Hello, JPxG. 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.
I had the edit window open for a while so I refreshed it to load the newest revision prior to submitting the comment. How the hell did it load the thing I had before and then overwrite the subsequent revision? jp×g🗯️18:08, 26 August 2024 (UTC)Reply
The whole way it copes with edit conflicts these days is very confusing - it's terribly easy to get in a muddle! These things happen. PamD19:19, 26 August 2024 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment: 10 months ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Feature news
Administrators can now test the temporary accounts feature on test2wiki. This was done to allow cross-wiki testing of temporary accounts, for when temporary accounts switch between projects. The feature was enabled on testwiki a few weeks ago. No further temporary account deployments are scheduled yet. Temporary Accounts is a project to create a new type of user account that replaces IP addresses of unregistered editors which are no longer made public. Please share your opinions and questions on the project talk page.
Later this week, editors at wikis that use FlaggedRevs (also known as "Pending Changes") may notice that the indicators at the top of articles have changed. This change makes the system more consistent with the rest of the MediaWiki interface. [8]
Bugs status
Editors who use the 2010 wikitext editor, and use the Character Insert buttons, will no longer experience problems with the buttons adding content into the edit-summary instead of the edit-window. You can read more about that, and 26 other community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.
Project updates
Please review and vote on Focus Areas, which are groups of wishes that share a problem. Focus Areas were created for the newly reopened Community Wishlist, which is now open year-round for submissions. The first batch of focus areas are specific to moderator workflows, around welcoming newcomers, minimizing repetitive tasks, and prioritizing tasks. Once volunteers have reviewed and voted on focus areas, the Foundation will then review and select focus areas for prioritization.
Do you have a project and are willing to provide a three (3) month mentorship for an intern? Outreachy is a twice a year program for people to participate in a paid internship that will start in December 2024 and end in early March 2025, and they need mentors and projects to work on. Projects can be focused on coding or non-coding (design, documentation, translation, research). See the Outreachy page for more details, and a list of past projects since 2013.
Learn more
If you're curious about the product and technology improvements made by the Wikimedia Foundation last year, read this recent highlights summary on Diff.
To learn more about the technology behind the Wikimedia projects, you can now watch sessions from the technology track at Wikimania 2024 on Commons. This week, check out:
Latest comment: 10 months ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Hi. I saw that the ANI thread where you suggested a WP:KILLSTEALING essay. Ithink that is a good idea and I will probably create such an essay today. Would you like me to send you a link when I've created it? QwertyForest (talk) 07:05, 27 August 2024 (UTC)Reply
Feedback request: Wikipedia proposals request for comment
Following an RfC, there is a new criterion for speedy deletion: C4, which applies to unused maintenance categories, such as empty dated maintenance categories for dates in the past.
The arbitration case Historical Elections is currently open. Proposed decision is expected by 3 September 2024 for this case.
Miscellaneous
Editors can now enter into good article review circles, an alternative for informal quid pro quo arrangements, to have a GAN reviewed in return for reviewing a different editor's nomination.
Latest comment: 10 months ago1 comment1 person in discussion
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
Editors and volunteer developers interested in data visualisation can now test the new software for charts. Its early version is available on beta Commons and beta Wikipedia. This is an important milestone before making charts available on regular wikis. You can read more about this project update and help to test the charts.
Feature news
Editors who use the Special:UnusedTemplates page can now filter out pages which are expected to be there permanently, such as sandboxes, test-cases, and templates that are always substituted. Editors can add the new magic word __EXPECTUNUSEDTEMPLATE__ to a template page to hide it from the listing. Thanks to Sophivorus and DannyS712 for these improvements. [9]
Editors who use the New Topic tool on discussion pages, will now be reminded to add a section header, which should help reduce the quantity of newcomers who add sections without a header. You can read more about that, and 28 other community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.
Last week, some Toolforge tools had occasional connection problems. The cause is still being investigated, but the problems have been resolved for now. [10]
Translation administrators at multilingual wikis, when editing multiple translation units, can now easily mark which changes require updates to the translation. This is possible with the new dropdown menu.
Project updates
A new draft text of a policy discussing the use of Wikimedia's APIs has been published on Meta-Wiki. The draft text does not reflect a change in policy around the APIs; instead, it is an attempt to codify existing API rules. Comments, questions, and suggestions are welcome on the proposed update’s talk page until September 13 or until those discussions have concluded.
Learn more
To learn more about the technology behind the Wikimedia projects, you can now watch sessions from the technology track at Wikimania 2024 on Commons. This week, check out:
Latest comment: 10 months ago3 comments2 people in discussion
Hello! Sorry for bothering you, I just wanted to say that I'm currently copy-editing the "Serendipity" article: I should be done in less than 10 minutes! Oltrepier (talk) 13:06, 4 September 2024 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment: 10 months ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Feature news
Starting this week, the standard syntax highlighter will receive new colors that make them compatible in dark mode. This is the first of many changes to come as part of a major upgrade to syntax highlighting. You can learn more about what's to come on the help page. [12][13]
Editors of wikis using Wikidata will now be notified of only relevant Wikidata changes in their watchlist. This is because the Lua functions entity:getSitelink() and mw.wikibase.getSitelink(qid) will have their logic unified for tracking different aspects of sitelinks to reduce junk notifications from inconsistent sitelinks tracking. [14]
Project updates
Users of all Wikis will have access to Wikimedia sites as read-only for a few minutes on September 25, starting at 15:00 UTC. This is a planned datacenter switchover for maintenance purposes. More information will be published in Tech News and will also be posted on individual wikis in the coming weeks. [15]
Contributors of 11 Wikipedias, including English will have a new MOS namespace added to their Wikipedias. This improvement ensures that links beginning with MOS: (usually shortcuts to the Manual of Style) are not broken by Mooré Wikipedia (language code mos). [16]
The Members' Meeting is similar to other WikiWednesday meetups, except that its primary function is to elect a new Board of Directors. We will elect three board seats, half of the elected seats on the board. After being elected, those elected can potentially appoint more seats.
We will also focus on the Wikimedia NYC Strategic Plan, our Financial Report, and Annual and Monthly event teams for the coming year.
Election info:
To run for election or to vote, you must be a dues-paying member of Wikimedia New York City, having renewed in the past 12 months.
Voting will be both online, via emailed ballots from the ElectionBuddy service, and in-person.
The poll will be open for the 48 hours between 8pm EDT on September 23 and 8pm EDT on September 25.
For additional information, please consult the Election FAQ.
Latest comment: 10 months ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Hello, JPxG. 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.
Hello and welcome to the September newsletter, a quarterly digest of Guild activities since June. Don't forget you can unsubscribe at any time; see below.
Election news: Project coordinators play an important role in our WikiProject. Following the mid-year Election of Coordinators, we welcomed Mox Eden to the coordinator team. Dhtwiki remains as Lead Coordinator, and Miniapolis and Wracking returned as assistant coordinators. If you'd like to help out behind the scenes, please consider taking part in our December election – watchlist our ombox for updates. Information about the role of coordinators can be found here.
Blitz: 13 of the 24 editors who signed up for the June 2024 Copy Editing Blitz copy edited at least one article. Between them, they copy edited 169,404 words comprising 41 articles. Barnstars awarded are here.
Drive: 38 of the 59 editors who signed up for the July 2024 Backlog Elimination Drive copy edited at least one article. Between them, they copy edited 482,133 words comprising 293 articles. Barnstars awarded are here.
Blitz: 10 of the 15 editors who signed up for the August 2024 Copy Editing Blitz copy edited at least one article. Between them, they copy edited 71,294 words comprising 31 articles. Barnstars awarded are here.
Drive:Sign up here to earn barnstars in our month-long, in-progress September Backlog Elimination Drive.
Progress report: As of 05:14, 11 September 2024 (UTC), GOCE copyeditors have processed 233 requests since 1 January, and the backlog of tagged articles stands at 2,824 articles.
Thank you all again for your participation; we wouldn't be able to achieve what we do without you! Cheers from Baffle gab1978 and your GOCE coordinators Dhtwiki, Miniapolis, Mox Eden and Wracking.
To discontinue receiving GOCE newsletters, please remove your name from our mailing list.
You are invited to join the Wikimedia NYC community for the "Editing to the Beat" event of the beginner-focused Wikicurious series at Lehman College. This is the second event of the series, following the inaugural event at Civic Hall in July. Led by a 9-person live band demonstrating Caribbean and Latin musical genres, we'll engage with efforts such as WikiProject Latin Music, and will encourage editing on both English and Spanish Wikipedia. All are welcome, and newcomers and aspiring editors are especially encouraged to attend. Registration via Eventbrite is required for building entry, and is also encouraged on the event page on Meta.
The Wikicurious series is supported by Craig Newmark Philanthropies. Wikimedia NYC is an official affiliate and supported by the Wikimedia Foundation. Also supporting this event are Equis, The Celia Cruz Foundation, and the International Museum of Salsa. In association with WikiCari and AfroCrowd.
All attendees are subject to Wikimedia NYC's Code of Conduct.
Meeting info:
Date: Saturday, September 21, 2024
Time: 1:00–7:00 p.m.
Location:Lehman College (CUNY) 250 Bedford Park Blvd W, Bronx, NY
Equipment: Please bring your own computer. We are not yet able to provide loaner laptops.
You may want to consider using the Article Wizard to help you create articles.
A tag has been placed on DQw4w9WgXcQ requesting that it be speedily deleted from Wikipedia. This has been done under section G4 of the criteria for speedy deletion, because the page appears to be a repost of material that was previously deleted following a deletion discussion, at Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion/Log/2019 October 13#DQw4w9WgXcQ. When a page has substantially identical content to that of a page deleted after a discussion, and any changes in the content do not address the reasons for which the material was previously deleted, it may be deleted at any time.
If you think this page should not be deleted for this reason, you may contest the nomination by visiting the page and clicking the button labelled "Contest this speedy deletion". This will give you the opportunity to explain why you believe the page should not be deleted. However, be aware that once a page is tagged for speedy deletion, it may be deleted without delay. Please do not remove the speedy deletion tag from the page yourself, but do not hesitate to add information in line with Wikipedia's policies and guidelines. If the page is deleted, and you wish to retrieve the deleted material for future reference or improvement, then please contact the deleting administrator, or if you have already done so, you can place a request here. Steel1943 (talk) 03:57, 15 September 2024 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment: 10 months ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Improvements and Maintenance
Editors interested in templates can help by reading the latest Wishlist focus area, Template recall and discovery, and share your feedback on the talkpage. This input helps the Community Tech team to decide the right technical approach to build. Everyone is also encouraged to continue adding new wishes.
The new automated Special:NamespaceInfo page helps editors understand which namespaces exist on each wiki, and some details about how they are configured. Thanks to DannyS712 for these improvements. [17]
References Check is a feature that encourages editors to add a citation when they add a new paragraph to a Wikipedia article. For a short time, the corresponding tag "Edit Check (references) activated" was erroneously being applied to some edits outside of the main namespace. This has been fixed. [18]
It is now possible for a wiki community to change the order in which a page’s categories are displayed on their wiki. By default, categories are displayed in the order they appear in the wikitext. Now, wikis with a consensus to do so can request a configuration change to display them in alphabetical order. [19]
Tool authors can now access ToolsDB's public databases from both Quarry and Superset. Those databases have always been accessible to every Toolforge user, but they are now more broadly accessible, as Quarry can be accessed by anyone with a Wikimedia account. In addition, Quarry's internal database can now be queried from Quarry itself. This database contains information about all queries that are being run and starred by users in Quarry. This information was already public through the web interface, but you can now query it using SQL. You can read more about that, and 20 other community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.
Any pages or tools that still use the very old CSS classes mw-message-box need to be updated. These old classes will be removed next week or soon afterwards. Editors can use a global-search to determine what needs to be changed. It is possible to use the newer cdx-message group of classes as a replacement (see the relevant Codex documentation, and an example update), but using locally defined onwiki classes would be best. [20]
Technical project updates
Next week, all Wikimedia wikis will be read-only for a few minutes. This will start on September 25 at 15:00 UTC. This is a planned datacenter switchover for maintenance purposes. This maintenance process also targets other services. The previous switchover took 3 minutes, and the Site Reliability Engineering teams use many tools to make sure that this essential maintenance work happens as quickly as possible. [21]
Tech in depth
The latest monthly MediaWiki Product Insights newsletter is available. This edition includes details about: research about hook handlers to help simplify development, research about performance improvements, work to improve the REST API for end-users, and more.
To learn more about the technology behind the Wikimedia projects, you can now watch sessions from the technology track at Wikimania 2024 on Commons. This week, check out:
Hackathon Showcase (45 mins) - 19 short presentations by some of the Hackathon participants, describing some of the projects they worked on, such as automated testing of maintenance scripts, a video-cutting command line tool, and interface improvements for various tools. There are more details and links available in the Phabricator task.
Co-Creating a Sustainable Future for the Toolforge Ecosystem (40 mins) - a roundtable discussion for tool-maintainers, users, and supporters of Toolforge about how to make the platform sustainable and how to evaluate the tools available there.
@Polygnotus: - You might want to remove old subscriptions from inactive editors (say 2.5 years inactive}} and put the "passive subscription" (to the right) at the top of their user talk page. It updates itself only when somebody visits the talkpage, i.e. minimum wast of space on inactive talk page and minumum waste of electrons! Smallbones(smalltalk)18:33, 30 September 2024 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment: 9 months ago1 comment1 person in discussion
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
All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes on Wednesday September 25 at 15:00 UTC. Reading the wikis will not be interrupted, but editing will be paused. These twice-yearly processes allow WMF's site reliability engineering teams to remain prepared to keep the wikis functioning even in the event of a major interruption to one of our data centers.
Updates for editors
A screenshot of the interface for the Alt Text suggested-edit feature
Editors who use the iOS Wikipedia app in Spanish, Portuguese, French, or Chinese, may see the Alt Text suggested-edit experiment after editing an article, or completing a suggested edit using "Add an image". Alt-text helps people with visual impairments to read Wikipedia articles. The team aims to learn if adding alt-text to images is a task that editors can be successful with. Please share any feedback on the discussion page.
The Codex color palette has been updated with new and revised colors for the MediaWiki user interfaces. The most noticeable changes for editors include updates for: dark mode colors for Links and for quiet Buttons (progressive and destructive), visited Link colors for both light and dark modes, and background colors for system-messages in both light and dark modes.
It is now possible to include clickable wikilinks and external links inside code blocks. This includes links that are used within <syntaxhighlight> tags and on code pages (JavaScript, CSS, Scribunto and Sanitized CSS). Uses of template syntax {{…}} are also linked to the template page. Thanks to SD0001 for these improvements. [22]
Two bugs were fixed in the GlobalVanishRequest system by improving the logging and by removing an incorrect placeholder message. [23][24]
The API now enables 5,000 on-demand API requests per month and twice-monthly HTML snapshots freely (gratis and libre). More information on the updates and also improvements to the software development kits (SDK) are explained on the project's blog post. While Wikimedia Enterprise APIs are designed for high-volume commercial reusers, this change enables many more community use-cases to be built on the service too.
The Snapshot API (html dumps) have added beta Structured Contents endpoints (blog post on that) as well as released two beta datasets (English and French Wikipedia) from that endpoint to Hugging Face for public use and feedback (blog post on that). These pre-parsed data sets enable new options for researchers, developers, and data scientists to use and study the content.
In depth
The Wikidata Query Service (WDQS) is used to get answers to questions using the Wikidata data set. As Wikidata grows, we had to make a major architectural change so that WDQS could remain performant. As part of the WDQS Graph Split project, we have new SPARQL endpoints available for serving the "scholarly" and "main" subgraphs of Wikidata. The query.wikidata.org endpoint will continue to serve the full Wikidata graph until March 2025. After this date, it will only serve the main graph. For more information, please see the announcement on Wikidata.
Latest comment: 9 months ago2 comments2 people in discussion
Hello, JPxG. 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.
Latest comment: 9 months ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Updates for editors
Readers of 42 more wikis can now use Dark Mode. If the option is not yet available for logged-out users of your wiki, this is likely because many templates do not yet display well in Dark Mode. Please use the night-mode-checker tool if you are interested in helping to reduce the number of issues. The recommendations page provides guidance on this. Dark Mode is enabled on additional wikis once per month.
Editors using the 2010 wikitext editor as their default can access features from the 2017 wikitext editor by adding ?veaction=editsource to the URL. If you would like to enable the 2017 wikitext editor as your default, it can be set in your preferences. [25]
For logged-out readers using the Vector 2022 skin, the "donate" link has been moved from a collapsible menu next to the content area into a more prominent top menu, next to "Create an account". This restores the link to the level of prominence it had in the Vector 2010 skin. Learn more about the changes related to donor experiences. [26]
The CampaignEvents extension provides tools for organizers to more easily manage events, communicate with participants, and promote their events on the wikis. The extension has been enabled on Arabic Wikipedia, Igbo Wikipedia, Swahili Wikipedia, and Meta-Wiki. Chinese Wikipedia has decided to enable the extension, and discussions on the extension are in progress on Spanish Wikipedia and on Wikidata. To learn how to enable the extension on your wiki, you can visit the CampaignEvents page on Meta-Wiki.
Developers with an account on Wikitech-wiki should check if any action is required for their accounts. The wiki is being changed to use the single-user-login (SUL) system, and other configuration changes. This change will help reduce the overall complexity for the weekly software updates across all our wikis.
In depth
The server switch was completed successfully last week with a read-only time of only 2 minutes 46 seconds. This periodic process makes sure that engineers can switch data centers and keep all of the wikis available for readers, even if there are major technical issues. It also gives engineers a chance to do maintenance and upgrades on systems that normally run 24 hours a day, and often helps to reveal weaknesses in the infrastructure. The process involves dozens of software services and hundreds of hardware servers, and requires multiple teams working together. Work over the past few years has reduced the time from 17 minutes down to 2–3 minutes. [27]
Following a discussion, the speedy deletion reason "File pages without a corresponding file" has been moved from criterion G8 to F2. This does not change what can be speedily deleted.
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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
Communities can now request installation of Automoderator on their wiki. Automoderator is an automated anti-vandalism tool that reverts bad edits based on scores from the new "Revert Risk" machine learning model. You can read details about the necessary steps for installation and configuration. [28]
Updates for editors
Translators in wikis where the mobile experience of Content Translation is available, can now customize their articles suggestion list from 41 filtering options when using the tool. This topic-based article suggestion feature makes it easy for translators to self-discover relevant articles based on their area of interest and translate them. You can try it with your mobile device. [29]
It is now possible for <syntaxhighlight> code blocks to offer readers a "Copy" button if the copy=1 attribute is set on the tag. Thanks to SD0001 for these improvements. [30]
Customized copyright footer messages on all wikis will be updated. The new versions will use wikitext markup instead of requiring editing raw HTML. [31]
Later this month, temporary accounts will be rolled out on several pilot wikis. The final list of the wikis will be published in the second half of the month. If you maintain any tools, bots, or gadgets on these 11 wikis, and your software is using data about IP addresses or is available for logged-out users, please check if it needs to be updated to work with temporary accounts. Guidance on how to update the code is available.
Rate limiting has been enabled for the code review tools Gerrit and GitLab to address ongoing issues caused by malicious traffic and scraping. Clients that open too many concurrent connections will be restricted for a few minutes. This rate limiting is managed through nftables firewall rules. For more details, see Wikitech's pages on Firewall, GitLab limits and Gerrit operations.
You are invited to Wikidata Day in New York City at Pratt Institute School of Information in Manhattan, in celebration of Wikidata's 12th birthday. This event, held by our chapter in collaboration with Pratt and Girls Who Code, will be our third annual celebration of Wikidata Day. It will feature spotlight sessions, lightning talks, and the customary Wiki-cake, while those unable to attend in person will be able to watch a livestream.
All attendees are subject to Wikimedia NYC's Code of Conduct.
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Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Updates for editors
The Structured Discussion extension (also known as Flow) is starting to be removed. This extension is unmaintained and causes issues. It will be replaced by DiscussionTools, which is used on any regular talk page. A first set of wikis are being contacted. These wikis are invited to stop using Flow, and to move all Flow boards to sub-pages, as archives. At these wikis, a script will move all Flow pages that aren't a sub-page to a sub-page automatically, starting on 22 October 2024. On 28 October 2024, all Flow boards at these wikis will be set in read-only mode. [37][38]
WMF's Search Platform team is working on making it easier for readers to perform text searches in their language. A change last week on over 30 languages makes it easier to find words with accents and other diacritics. This applies to both full-text search and to types of advanced search such as the hastemplate and incategory keywords. More technical details (including a few other minor search upgrades) are available. [39]
View all 20 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, EditCheck was installed at Russian Wikipedia, and fixes were made for some missing user interface styles.
Updates for technical contributors
Editors who use the Toolforge tool Earwig's Copyright Violation Detector will now be required to log in with their Wikimedia account before running checks using the "search engine" option. This change is needed to help prevent external bots from misusing the system. Thanks to Chlod for these improvements. [40]
Some HTML elements in the interface are now wrapped with a <bdi> element, to make our HTML output more aligned with Web standards. More changes like this will be coming in future weeks. This change might break some tools that rely on the previous HTML structure of the interface. Note that relying on the HTML structure of the interface is not recommended and might break at any time. [42]
In depth
The latest monthly MediaWiki Product Insights newsletter is available. This edition includes: updates on Wikimedia's authentication system, research to simplify feature development in the MediaWiki platform, updates on Parser Unification and MathML rollout, and more.
The latest quarterly Technical Community Newsletter is now available. This edition include: research about improving topic suggestions related to countries, improvements to PHPUnit tests, and more.
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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 Mobile Apps team has released an update to the iOS app's navigation, and it is now available in the latest App store version. The team added a new Profile menu that allows for easy access to editor features like Notifications and Watchlist from the Article view, and brings the "Donate" button into a more accessible place for users who are reading an article. This is the first phase of a larger planned navigation refresh to help the iOS app transition from a primarily reader-focused app, to an app that fully supports reading and editing. The Wikimedia Foundation has added more editing features and support for on-wiki communication based on volunteer requests in recent years.
iOS Wikipedia App's profile menu and contents
Updates for editors
Wikipedia readers can now download a browser extension to experiment with some early ideas on potential features that recommend articles for further reading, automatically summarize articles, and improve search functionality. For more details and to stay updated, check out the Web team's Content Discovery Experiments page and subscribe to their newsletter.
Later this month, logged-out editors of these 12 wikis will start to have temporary accounts created. The list may slightly change - some wikis may be removed but none will be added. Temporary account is a new type of user account. It enhances the logged-out editors' privacy and makes it easier for community members to communicate with them. If you maintain any tools, bots, or gadgets on these 12 wikis, and your software is using data about IP addresses or is available for logged-out users, please check if it needs to be updated to work with temporary accounts. Guidance on how to update the code is available. Read more about the deployment plan across all wikis.
It is now possible to create functions on Wikifunctions using Wikidata lexemes, through the new Wikidata lexeme type launched last week. When you go to one of these functions, the user interface provides a lexeme selector that helps you pick a lexeme from Wikidata that matches the word you type. After hitting run, your selected lexeme is retrieved from Wikidata, transformed into a Wikidata lexeme type, and passed into the selected function. Read more about this in the latest Wikifunctions newsletter.
Updates for technical contributors
Users of the Wikimedia sites can now format dates more easily in different languages with the new {{#timef:…}} parser function. For example, {{#timef:now|date|en}} will show as "15 July 2025". Previously, {{#time:…}} could be used to format dates, but this required knowledge of the order of the time and date components and their intervening punctuation. #timef (or #timefl for local time) provides access to the standard date formats that MediaWiki uses in its user interface. This may help to simplify some templates on multi-lingual wikis like Commons and Meta. [48][49]
Commons and Meta users can now efficiently retrieve the user's language using {{USERLANGUAGE}} instead of using {{int:lang}}. [50]
The Product and Tech Advisory Council (PTAC) now has its pilot members with representation across Africa, Asia, Europe, North America and South America. They will work to address the Movement Strategy's Technology Council initiative of having a co-defined and more resilient technological platform. [51]
In depth
The latest quarterly Growth newsletter is available. It includes: an upcoming Newcomer Homepage Community Updates module, new Community Configuration options, and details on new projects.
The Wikimedia Foundation is now an official partner of the CVE program, which is an international effort to catalog publicly disclosed cybersecurity vulnerabilities. This partnership will allow the Security Team to instantly publish common vulnerabilities and exposures (CVE) records that are affecting MediaWiki core, extensions, and skins, along with any other code the Foundation is a steward of.
The Community Wishlist is now testing machine translations for Wishlist content. Volunteers can now read machine-translated versions of wishes and dive into discussions even before translators arrive to translate content.
20–22 December 2024 - Indic Wikimedia Hackathon Bhubaneswar 2024 in Odisha, India. A hackathon for community members, including developers, designers and content editors, to build technical solutions that improve contributors' experiences.
Unfortunate. Well, I am sure someone will post it on WPO (possibly a version of it edited to add a part where I say "I love making out with Joseph Stalin") jp×g🗯️18:12, 18 November 2024 (UTC)Reply
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Hello,
The Wikimedia Foundation is conducting a survey of Wikipedians to better understand what draws administrators to contribute to Wikipedia, and what affects administrator retention. We will use this research to improve experiences for Wikipedians, and address common problems and needs. We have identified you as a good candidate for this research, and would greatly appreciate your participation in this anonymous survey.
You do not have to be an Administrator to participate.
The survey should take around 10-15 minutes to complete. You may read more about the study on its Meta page and view its privacy statement .
Please find our contact on the project Meta page if you have any questions or concerns.
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Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Updates for editors
Later in November, the Charts extension will be deployed to the test wikis in order to help identify and fix any issue. A security review is underway to then enable deployment to pilot wikis for broader testing. You can read the October project update and see the latest documentation and examples on Beta Wikipedia.
View all 32 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, Pediapress.com, an external service that creates books from Wikipedia, can now use Wikimedia Maps to include existing pre-rendered infobox map images in their printed books on Wikipedia. [52]
Updates for technical contributors
Wikis can use the Guided Tour extension to help newcomers understand how to edit. The Guided Tours extension now works with dark mode. Guided Tour maintainers can check their tours to see that nothing looks odd. They can also set emitTransitionOnStep to true to fix an old bug. They can use the new flag allowAutomaticBack to avoid back-buttons they don't want. [53]
Administrators in the Wikimedia projects who use the Nuke Extension will notice that mass deletions done with this tool have the "Nuke" tag. This change will make reviewing and analyzing deletions performed with the tool easier. [54]
Mass deletions done with the Nuke tool now have the 'Nuke' tag. This change will make reviewing and analyzing deletions performed with the tool easier. T366068
Latest comment: 8 months ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Updates for editors
Stewards can now make global account blocks cause global autoblocks. This will assist stewards in preventing abuse from users who have been globally blocked. This includes preventing globally blocked temporary accounts from exiting their session or switching browsers to make subsequent edits for 24 hours. Previously, temporary accounts could exit their current session or switch browsers to continue editing. This is an anti-abuse tool improvement for the Temporary Accounts project. You can read more about the progress on key features for temporary accounts. [55]
Wikis that have the CampaignEvents extension enabled can now use the Collaboration List feature. This list provides a new, easy way for contributors to learn about WikiProjects on their wikis. Thanks to the Campaign team for this work that is part of the 2024/25 annual plan. If you are interested in bringing the CampaignEvents extension to your wiki, you can follow these steps or you can reach out to User:Udehb-WMF for help.
The text color for red links will be slightly changed later this week to improve their contrast in light mode. [56]
View all 32 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, on multilingual wikis, users can now hide translations from the WhatLinksHere special page.
Updates for technical contributors
XML data dumps have been temporarily paused whilst a bug is investigated. [57]
In depth
Temporary Accounts have been deployed to six wikis; thanks to the Trust and Safety Product team for this work, you can read about the deployment plans. Beginning next week, Temporary Accounts will also be enabled on seven other projects. If you are active on these wikis and need help migrating your tools, please reach out to User:Udehb-WMF for assistance.
The latest quarterly Language and Internationalization newsletter is available. It includes: New languages supported in translatewiki or in MediaWiki; New keyboard input methods for some languages; details about recent and upcoming meetings, and more.
Meetings and events
MediaWiki Users and Developers Conference Fall 2024 is happening in Vienna, Austria and online from 4 to 6 November 2024. The conference will feature discussions around the usage of MediaWiki software by and within companies in different industries and will inspire and onboard new users.
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Issue 23—November 2024
WikiProject Medicine Newsletter
Hello all. A short edition to get the newsletter going again. As it says at the bottom, if you have thoughts on how the newsletter could be useful/interesting to you, please post at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Medicine/Newsletter:
Reminder that you can follow medicine-related deletion discussions, GA nominations, merge requests and more by watchlisting Wikipedia:WikiProject_Medicine/Article_alerts. Many of these discussions would benefit from more attention.
Newsletter ideas, comments, and criticisms welcome here.
You are receiving this because you added your name to the WikiProject Medicine mailing list. If you no longer wish to receive the newsletter, please remove your name.
You are invited to Foundation and Friends' Free Culture Friday at Prime Produce on Friday, November 22. This event will feature a reception with Wikimedia Foundation staff in the afternoon, followed by a more informal salon and game night, utilizing Prime Produce's vast collection of board games. No experience of anything at all is required. All are welcome!
You are also invited to Wikicurious: Capturing the Moment, the third event of the beginner-focused Wikicurious series, at Jefferson Market Library on Tuesday, November 26, in collaboration with WikiPortraits and AfroCROWD. All are welcome to attend, especially those interested in photography or contributing to Wikimedia Commons. We will explore the art of capturing the moment through photography and learn the basics of Wikimedia Commons, and (weather-permitting) we are also planning a photo walk, so bring your camera (or use your smartphone)!
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Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Updates for editors
On wikis with the Translate extension enabled, users will notice that the FuzzyBot will now automatically create translated versions of categories used on translated pages. [58]
In 1.44.0-wmf-2, the logic of Wikibase function getAllStatements changed to behave like getBestStatements. Invoking the function now returns a copy of values which are immutable. [60]
Wikimedia REST API users, such as bot operators and tool maintainers, may be affected by ongoing upgrades. The API will be rerouting some page content endpoints from RESTbase to the newer MediaWiki REST API endpoints. The impacted endpoints include getting page/revision metadata and rendered HTML content. These changes will be available on testwiki later this week, with other projects to follow. This change should not affect existing functionality, but active users of the impacted endpoints should verify behavior on testwiki, and raise any concerns on the related Phabricator ticket.
In depth
Admins and users of the Wikimedia projects where Automoderator is enabled can now monitor and evaluate important metrics related to Automoderator's actions. This Superset dashboard calculates and aggregates metrics about Automoderator's behaviour on the projects in which it is deployed. Thanks to the Moderator Tools team for this Dashboard; you can visit the documentation page for more information about this work. [61]
Meetings and events
21 November 2024 (8:00 UTC & 16:00 UTC) - Community call with Wikimedia Commons volunteers and stakeholders to help prioritize support efforts for 2025-2026 Fiscal Year. The theme of this call is how content should be organised on Wikimedia Commons.
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I recently invited you to take a survey about administration on Wikipedia. If you haven’t yet had a chance, there is still time to participate– we’d truly appreciate your feedback. The survey is anonymous and should take about 10-15 minutes to complete. You may read more about the study on its Meta page and view its privacy statement.
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Have noticed that new editions of The Signpost haven't been publicized/linked on editor's watchlists for many months, leaving many editors unaware of the publication. MediaWiki:Watchlist-messages covers that (I think but not sure), so popping links to new editions onto that list should do the trick. Thanks. Randy Kryn (talk) 14:49, 14 November 2024 (UTC)Reply
This pertains to the watchlist messages which appear on top of the watchlist, not a link on one of the watched pages (I usually find out about the Signpost when it comes up on one of my watched pages). Randy Kryn (talk) 14:59, 16 November 2024 (UTC)Reply
It was transcluding Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Series/Bots, which causes the page to completely eat shit and render wrong and also recursively transclude itself for some reason. I don't really know why; at any rate the series templates were only ever meant to be transcluded on articles themselves so I can just remove it. jp×g🗯️18:14, 18 November 2024 (UTC)Reply
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Hello! Voting in the 2024 Arbitration Committee elections is now open until 23:59 (UTC) on Monday, 2 December 2024. All eligible users are allowed to vote. Users with alternate accounts may only vote once.
The Arbitration Committee is the panel of editors responsible for conducting the Wikipedia arbitration process. It has the authority to impose binding solutions to disputes between editors, primarily for serious conduct disputes the community has been unable to resolve. This includes the authority to impose site bans, topic bans, editing restrictions, and other measures needed to maintain our editing environment. The arbitration policy describes the Committee's roles and responsibilities in greater detail.
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Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Updates for editors
Users of Wikimedia sites will now be warned when they create a redirect to a page that doesn't exist. This will reduce the number of broken redirects to red links in our projects. [62]
View all 42 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, Pywikibot, which automates work on MediaWiki sites, was upgraded to 9.5.0 on Toolforge. [63]
Updates for technical contributors
On wikis that use the FlaggedRevs extension, pages created or moved by users with the appropriate permissions are marked as flagged automatically. This feature has not been working recently, and changes fixing it should be deployed this week. Thanks to Daniel and Wargo for working on this. [64][65]
In depth
There is a new Diff post about Temporary Accounts, available in more than 15 languages. Read it to learn about what Temporary Accounts are, their impact on different groups of users, and the plan to introduce the change on all wikis.
Meetings and events
Technical volunteers can now register for the 2025 Wikimedia Hackathon, which will take place in Istanbul, Turkey. Application for travel and accommodation scholarships is open from November 12 to December 10 2024. The registration for the event will close in mid-April 2025. The Wikimedia Hackathon is an annual gathering that unites the global technical community to collaborate on existing projects and explore new ideas.
Join the Wikimedia Commons community calls this week to help prioritize support for Commons which will be planned for 2025–2026. The theme will be how content should be organised on Wikimedia Commons. This is an opportunity for volunteers who work on different things to come together and talk about what matters for the future of the project. The calls will take place November 21, 2024, 8:00 UTC and 16:00 UTC.
A Language community meeting will take place November 29, 16:00 UTC to discuss updates and technical problem-solving.
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Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Updates for editors
A new version of the standard wikitext editor-mode syntax highlighter will be available as a beta feature later this week. This brings many new features and bug fixes, including right-to-left support, template folding, autocompletion, and an improved search panel. You can learn more on the help page.
The 2010 wikitext editor now supports common keyboard shortcuts such Ctrl+B for bold and Ctrl+I for italics. A full list of all six shortcuts is available. Thanks to SD0001 for this improvement. [66]
Starting November 28, Flow/Structured Discussions pages will be automatically archived and set to read-only at the following wikis: bswiki, elwiki, euwiki, fawiki, fiwiki, frwikiquote, frwikisource, frwikiversity, frwikivoyage, idwiki, lvwiki, plwiki, ptwiki, urwiki, viwikisource, zhwikisource. This is done as part of StructuredDiscussions deprecation work. If you need any assistance to archive your page in advance, please contact Trizek (WMF).
The CodeEditor, which can be used in JavaScript, CSS, JSON, and Lua pages, now offers live autocompletion. Thanks to SD0001 for this improvement. The feature can be temporarily disabled on a page by pressing Ctrl+, and un-selecting "Live Autocompletion".
Tool-maintainers who use the Graphite system for tracking metrics, need to migrate to the newer Prometheus system. They can check this dashboard and the list in the Description of the task T350592 to see if their tools are listed, and they should claim metrics and dashboards connected to their tools. They can then disable or migrate all existing metrics by following the instructions in the task. The Graphite service will become read-only in April. [67]
The New PreProcessor parser performance report has been fixed to give an accurate count for the number of Wikibase entities accessed. It had previously been resetting after 400 entities. [68]
Meetings and events
A Language community meeting will take place November 29 at 16:00 UTC. There will be presentations on topics like developing language keyboards, the creation of the Mooré Wikipedia, the language support track at Wiki Indaba, and a report from the Wayuunaiki community on their experiences with the Incubator and as a new community over the last 3 years. This meeting will be in English and will also have Spanish interpretation.
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Luke Elaine Burke has given you a brownie! Brownies promote WikiLove and hopefully this one has made your day better. Spread the WikiLove by giving someone else a brownie, whether it be someone you have had disagreements with in the past or a good friend. †
This is my second time seeing this fingerprint via the history, and I must admit that this time you did get a good chuckle out of me! Thank you for your all of your contributions and hard work!
My (admittedly vague) recollection, from when I was poking around with the press template and the high traffic site template, was that they were both implementing the same thing in independent/incompatible ways for no reason, and also that they were written with the dreaded "wall of copypasta" coding style, which I made a note to myself to fix someday, then did something which contributed to making it worse and forgot about it forever. jp×g🗯️10:35, 2 December 2024 (UTC)Reply
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Hello, I just sent an email. Thank you for your time in advance!
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Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Starting this week, Wikimedia wikis no longer support connections using old RSA-based HTTPS certificates, specifically rsa-2048. This change is to improve security for all users. Some older, unsupported browser or smartphone devices will be unable to connect; Instead, they will display a connectivity error. See the HTTPS Browser Recommendations page for more-detailed information. All modern operating systems and browsers are always able to reach Wikimedia projects. [70]
Starting December 16, Flow/Structured Discussions pages will be automatically archived and set to read-only at the following wikis: arwiki, cawiki, frwiki, mediawikiwiki, orwiki, wawiki, wawiktionary, wikidatawiki, zhwiki. This is done as part of StructuredDiscussions deprecation work. If you need any assistance to archive your page in advance, please contact Trizek (WMF). [71]
This month the Chart extension was deployed to production and is now available on Commons and Testwiki. With the security review complete, pilot wiki deployment is expected to start in the first week of December. You can see a working version on Testwiki and read the November project update for more details.
View all 23 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, a bug with the "Download as PDF" system was fixed. [72]
Updates for technical contributors
In late February, temporary accounts will be rolled out on at least 10 large wikis. This deployment will have a significant effect on the community-maintained code. This is about Toolforge tools, bots, gadgets, and user scripts that use IP address data or that are available for logged-out users. The Trust and Safety Product team wants to identify this code, monitor it, and assist in updating it ahead of the deployment to minimize disruption to workflows. The team asks technical editors and volunteer developers to help identify such tools by adding them to this list. In addition, review the updated documentation to learn how to adjust the tools. Join the discussions on the project talk page or in the dedicated thread on the Wikimedia Community Discord server (in English) for support and to share feedback.
Following an RFC, the policy on restoration of adminship has been updated. All former administrators may now only regain the tools following a request at the Wikipedia:Bureaucrats' noticeboard within 5 years of their most recent admin action. Previously this applied only to administrators deysopped for inactivity.
Following a request for comment, a new speedy deletion criterion, T5, has been enacted. This applies to template subpages that are no longer used.
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Greetings, JPxG. You are receiving this notification because you've agreed to consider endorsing prospective admin candidates identified by the process outlined at Administrators without tools. Recently, the following editor(s) received this distinction and the associated endearing title:
Hello, and welcome to the December newsletter, a quarterly digest of Guild activities since September. If you no longer want this newsletter, you can unsubscribe at any time; see below. If you'd like to be notified of upcoming drives and blitzes, and other GOCE activities, the best method is to add our announcements box to your watchlist.
Election news: The Guild's coordinators play an important role in the WikiProject, making sure nearly everything runs smoothly and on time. Editors in good standing (unblocked and without sanctions) are invited to nominate themselves or another editor to be a Guild coordinator (with their permission, of course) until 23:59 on 15 December (UTC). The voting phase begins at 00:01 on 16 December and runs until 23:59 on 31 December. Questions may be asked of candidates at any stage in the process. Elected coordinators will serve a six-month term from 1 January through 30 June.
Drive: In our September Backlog Elimination Drive, 67 editors signed up, 39 completed at least one copy edit, and between them they edited 682,696 words comprising 507 articles. Barnstars awarded are here.
Blitz: The October Copy Editing Blitz saw 16 editors sign-up, 15 of whom completed at least one copy edit. They edited 76,776 words comprising 35 articles. Barnstars awarded are here.
Drive: In our November Backlog Elimination Drive, 432,320 words in 151 articles were copy edited. Of the 54 users who signed up, 33 copy edited at least one article. Barnstars awarded are posted here.
Blitz: The December Blitz will begin at 00:00 on 15 December (UTC) and will end on 21 December at 23:59. Sign up here. Barnstars awarded will be posted here.
Progress report: As of 22:12, 7 December 2024 (UTC), GOCE copy editors have completed 333 requests since 1 January, and the backlog of tagged articles stands at 2,401 articles.
Thank you all again for your participation; we wouldn't be able to achieve what we have without you! Cheers from your GOCE coordinators, Dhtwiki, Miniapolis, Mox Eden and Wracking.
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Latest comment: 7 months ago1 comment1 person in discussion
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
Technical documentation contributors can find updated resources, and new ways to connect with each other and the Wikimedia Technical Documentation Team, at the Documentation hub on MediaWiki.org. This page links to: resources for writing and improving documentation, a new #wikimedia-techdocs IRC channel on libera.chat, a listing of past and upcoming documentation events, and ways to request a documentation consultation or review. If you have any feedback or ideas for improvements to the documentation ecosystem, please contact the Technical Documentation Team.
Updates for editors
Layout change for the Edit Check feature
Later this week, Edit Check will be relocated to a sidebar on desktop. Edit check is the feature for new editors to help them follow policies and guidelines. This layout change creates space to present people with new Checks that appear while they are typing. The initial results show newcomers encountering Edit Check are 2.2 times more likely to publish a new content edit that includes a reference and is not reverted.
The Chart extension, which enables editors to create data visualizations, was successfully made available on MediaWiki.org and three pilot wikis (Italian, Swedish, and Hebrew Wikipedias). You can see a working examples on Testwiki and read the November project update for more details.
Translators in wikis where the mobile experience of Content Translation is available, can now discover articles in Wikiproject campaigns of their interest from the "All collection" category in the articles suggestion feature. Wikiproject Campaign organizers can use this feature, to help translators to discover articles of interest, by adding the <page-collection> </page-collection> tag to their campaign article list page on Meta-wiki. This will make those articles discoverable in the Content Translation tool. For more detailed information on how to use the tool and tag, please refer to the step-by-step guide. [73]
The Nuke feature, which enables administrators to mass delete pages, now has a multiselect filter for namespace selection. This enables users to select multiple specific namespaces, instead of only one or all, when fetching pages for deletion.
The Nuke feature also now provides links to the userpage of the user whose pages were deleted, and to the pages which were not selected for deletion, after page deletions are queued. This enables easier follow-up admin-actions. Thanks to Chlod and the Moderator Tools team for both of these improvements. [74]
The Editing Team is working on making it easier to populate citations from archive.org using the Citoid tool, the auto-filled citation generator. They are asking communities to add two parameters preemptively, archiveUrl and archiveDate, within the TemplateData for each citation template using Citoid. You can see an example of a change in a template, and a list of all relevant templates. [75]
Last week, all wikis had problems serving pages to logged-in users and some logged-out users for 30–45 minutes. This was caused by a database problem, and investigation is ongoing. [77]
View all 19 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, a bug in the Add Link feature has been fixed. Previously, the list of sections which are excluded from Add Link was partially ignored in certain cases. [78][79]
Updates for technical contributors
Codex, the design system for Wikimedia, now has an early-stage implementation in PHP. It is available for general use in MediaWiki extensions and Toolforge apps through Composer, with use in MediaWiki core coming soon. More information is available in the documentation. Thanks to Doğu for the inspiration and many contributions to the library. [80]
Wikimedia REST API users, such as bot operators and tool maintainers, may be affected by ongoing upgrades. On December 4, the MediaWiki Interfaces team began rerouting page/revision metadata and rendered HTML content endpoints on testwiki from RESTbase to comparable MediaWiki REST API endpoints. The team encourages active users of these endpoints to verify their tool's behavior on testwiki and raise any concerns on the related Phabricator ticket before the end of the year, as they intend to roll out the same change across all Wikimedia projects in early January. These changes are part of the work to replace the outdated RESTBase system.
The 2024 Developer Satisfaction Survey is seeking the opinions of the Wikimedia developer community. Please take the survey if you have any role in developing software for the Wikimedia ecosystem. The survey is open until 3 January 2025, and has an associated privacy statement.
Latest comment: 7 months ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Greetings, JPxG. You are receiving this notification because you've agreed to consider endorsing prospective admin candidates identified by the process outlined at Administrators without tools. Recently, the following editor(s) received this distinction and the associated endearing title:
Latest comment: 7 months ago1 comment1 person in discussion
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
Interested in improving event management on your home wiki? The CampaignEvents extension offers organizers features like event registration management, event/wikiproject promotion, finding potential participants, and more - all directly on-wiki. If you are an organizer or think your community would benefit from this extension, start a discussion to enable it on your wiki today. To learn more about how to enable this extension on your wiki, visit the deployment status page.
Updates for editors
Users of the iOS Wikipedia App in Italy and Mexico on the Italian, Spanish, and English Wikipedias, can see a personalized Year in Review with insights based on their reading and editing history.
Users of the Android Wikipedia App in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia can see the new Rabbit Holes feature. This feature shows a suggested search term in the Search bar based on the current article being viewed, and a suggested reading list generated from the user’s last two visited articles.
The global reminder bot is now active and running on nearly 800 wikis. This service reminds most users holding temporary rights when they are about to expire, so that they can renew should they want to. See the technical details page for more information.
The next issue of Tech News will be sent out on 13 January 2025 because of the end of year holidays. Thank you to all of the translators, and people who submitted content or feedback, this year.
View all 27 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, a bug was fixed in the Android Wikipedia App which had caused translatable SVG images to show the wrong language when they were tapped.
Updates for technical contributors
There is no new MediaWiki version next week. The next deployments will start on 14 January. [82]
Latest comment: 6 months ago2 comments2 people in discussion
Just as a heads-up, in case you had missed it earlier - I am not actually currently an administrator. I resigned in late 2023 due to IRL issues. Hog FarmTalk19:12, 18 December 2024 (UTC)Reply
Yeah, but you never actually stopped. Several years ago I left a pair of headphones at my friend's house (and a different person later left a sock at mine), but an actual transferral of ownership never took place. I see this as the same general thing. jp×g🗯️19:25, 18 December 2024 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment: 6 months ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Hello everyone, and welcome to the 26th issue of the Wikipedia Scripts++ Newsletter, covering all our favorite new and updated user scripts since 1 August 2024. At press time, over 94% of the world has legally fallen prey to the merry celebrations of "Christmas", and so shall you soon. It's been a quiet 4 months, and we hope to see you with way more new scripts next year. Happy holidays! Aaron Liu (talk) 05:06, 25 December 2024 (UTC)Reply
Got anything good? Tell us about your new, improved, old, or messed-up script here!
Very useful for changelist patrollers, DiffUndo, by Nardog, is this edition's featured script. Taking inspiration from WP:AutoWikiBrowser's double-click-to-undo feature, it adds an undo button to every line of every diff from "show changes", optimizing partial reverts with your favorite magic spell and nearly fulfilling m:Community Wishlist/Wishes/Partial revert undo.
Doğu/Adiutor, a recent WP:Twinkle/WP:RedWarn-like userscript that follows modern WMF UI design, is now an extension. However, its sole maintainer has left the project, which still awaits WMF mw:code stewardship (among some audits) to be installed on your favorite WMF wikis.
DannyS712, our former chief editor, has ascended to MediaWiki and the greener purpley pastures of PHP with commits creating Special:NamespaceInfo and the __EXPECTUNUSEDTEMPLATE__ magic word to exclude a template from Special:UnusedTemplates! I wonder if Wikipedia has a templaters' newsletter...
BilledMammal/Move+ needs updating to order list of pages handle lists of pages to move correctly regardless of the discussion's page, so that we may avoid repeating fiasco history.
Andrybak/Unsigned helper forks Anomie/unsignedhelper to add support for binary search, automatic edit summaries after generating the {{unsigned}} template, support for {{undated}}, and support for generating while syntax highlighting is on.
Polygnotus/Move+ updates BilledMammal's classic Move+ to add automattic watchlisting of all pages—except the target page(s)—changed while processing a move.
A request for comment is open to discuss whether admins should be advised to warn users rather than issue no-warning blocks to those who have posted promotional content outside of article space.
Technical news
The Nuke feature also now provides links to the userpage of the user whose pages were deleted, and to the pages which were not selected for deletion, after page deletions are queued. This enables easier follow-up admin-actions.
The special focus this year will be the launch of our "400 Neighborhoods" campaign for the city's 400th anniversary and WikiProject New York City/400 Task Force.
We'll also have a lightning talks session and you're invited to sign up for one, though space is somewhat limited.
Hmm. Are you not watching this talk page? If I don't get a response I'll stick it on the talk page for the article for someone else to review. AdamM (talk) 12:18, 30 January 2025 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment: 6 months ago1 comment1 person in discussion
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 Single User Login system is being updated over the next few months. This is the system which allows users to fill out the login form on one Wikimedia site and get logged in on all others at the same time. It needs to be updated because of the ways that browsers are increasingly restricting cross-domain cookies. To accommodate these restrictions, login and account creation pages will move to a central domain, but it will still appear to the user as if they are on the originating wiki. The updated code will be enabled this week for users on test wikis. This change is planned to roll out to all users during February and March. See the SUL3 project page for more details and a timeline.
Updates for editors
On wikis with PageAssessments installed, you can now filter search results to pages in a given WikiProject by using the inproject: keyword. (These wikis: Arabic Wikipedia, English Wikipedia, English Wikivoyage, French Wikipedia, Hungarian Wikipedia, Nepali Wikipedia, Turkish Wikipedia, Chinese Wikipedia) [83]
One new wiki has been created: a Wikipedia in Tigre (w:tig:) [84]
View all 35 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, there was a bug with updating a user's edit-count after making a rollback edit, which is now fixed. [85]
Updates for technical contributors
Wikimedia REST API users, such as bot operators and tool maintainers, may be affected by ongoing upgrades. Starting the week of January 13, we will begin rerouting some page content endpoints from RESTbase to the newer MediaWiki REST API endpoints for all wiki projects. This change was previously available on testwiki and should not affect existing functionality, but active users of the impacted endpoints may raise issues directly to the MediaWiki Interfaces Team in Phabricator if they arise.
Toolforge tool maintainers can now share their feedback on Toolforge UI, an initiative to provide a web platform that allows creating and managing Toolforge tools through a graphic interface, in addition to existing command-line workflows. This project aims to streamline active maintainers’ tasks, as well as make registration and deployment processes more accessible for new tool creators. The initiative is still at a very early stage, and the Cloud Services team is in the process of collecting feedback from the Toolforge community to help shape the solution to their needs. Read more and share your thoughts about Toolforge UI.
For tool and library developers who use the OAuth system: The identity endpoint used for OAuth 1 and OAuth 2 returned a JSON object with an integer in its sub field, which was incorrect (the field must always be a string). This has been fixed; the fix will be deployed to Wikimedia wikis on the week of January 13. [86]
Many wikis currently use Cite CSS to render custom footnote markers in Parsoid output. Starting January 20 these rules will be disabled, but the developers ask you to not clean up your MediaWiki:Common.css until February 20 to avoid issues during the migration. Your wikis might experience some small changes to footnote markers in Visual Editor and when using experimental Parsoid read mode, but if there are changes these are expected to bring the rendering in line with the legacy parser output. [87]
Latest comment: 6 months ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Hello, JPxG. 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.
Latest comment: 5 months ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Updates for editors
Administrators can mass-delete multiple pages created by a user or IP address using Extension:Nuke. It previously only allowed deletion of pages created in the last 30 days. It can now delete pages from the last 90 days, provided it is targeting a specific user or IP address. [88]
On wikis that use the Patrolled edits feature, when the rollback feature is used to revert an unpatrolled page revision, that revision will now be marked as "manually patrolled" instead of "autopatrolled", which is more accurate. Some editors that use filters on Recent Changes may need to update their filter settings. [89]
View all 31 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, the Visual Editor's "Insert link" feature did not always suggest existing pages properly when an editor started typing, which has now been fixed.
Updates for technical contributors
The Structured Discussion extension (also known as Flow) is being progressively removed from the wikis. This extension is unmaintained and causes issues. It will be replaced by DiscussionTools, which is used on any regular talk page. The last group of wikis (Catalan Wikiquote, Wikimedia Finland, Goan Konkani Wikipedia, Kabyle Wikipedia, Portuguese Wikibooks, Wikimedia Sweden) will soon be contacted. If you have questions about this process, please ping Trizek (WMF) at your wiki. [90]
The latest quarterly Technical Community Newsletter is now available. This edition includes: updates about services from the Data Platform Engineering teams, information about Codex from the Design System team, and more.
It is our pleasure to invite you to join a study at the University of Minnesota! The objective of the study is to understand how large language models (LLMs) impact the collaborative knowledge production process, by investigating knowledge contributors’ interactions with LLMs in practice.
If you have used LLMs (e.g., GPT, Llama, Claude...) in the process of contributing to Wikipedia (eg. grammar check, finding resources, writing scripts...), we’d love to join the study! You will be engaging in a 45-60 min interview, talking and reflecting about your experience with Wikipedia and your perception/usage of LLMs in Wikipedia. Your valuable input will not only help us understand practical ways to incorporate LLMs into the knowledge production process, but also help us generate guardrails about these practices. All participation would be anonymous.
In addition, if you know any editor who may have used LLMs during their edits, we highly appreciate it if you could share their contact with us, as we can reach out to them.
Latest comment: 5 months ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Greetings, JPxG. You are receiving this notification because you've agreed to consider endorsing prospective admin candidates identified by the process outlined at Administrators without tools. Recently, the following editor(s) received this distinction and the associated endearing title:
Latest comment: 5 months ago1 comment1 person in discussion
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
Patrollers and admins - what information or context about edits or users could help you to make patroller or admin decisions more quickly or easily? The Wikimedia Foundation wants to hear from you to help guide its upcoming annual plan. Please consider sharing your thoughts on this and 13 other questions to shape the technical direction for next year.
Updates for editors
iOS Wikipedia App users worldwide can now access a personalized Year in Review feature, which provides insights based on their reading and editing history on Wikipedia. This project is part of a broader effort to help welcome new readers as they discover and interact with encyclopedic content.
Edit patrollers now have a new feature available that can highlight potentially problematic new pages. When a page is created with the same title as a page which was previously deleted, a tag ('Recreated') will now be added, which users can filter for in Special:RecentChanges and Special:NewPages. [91]
Later this week, there will be a new warning for editors if they attempt to create a redirect that links to another redirect (a double redirect). The feature will recommend that they link directly to the second redirect's target page. Thanks to the user SomeRandomDeveloper for this improvement. [92]
Wikimedia wikis allow WebAuthn-based second factor checks (such as hardware tokens) during login, but the feature is fragile and has very few users. The MediaWiki Platform team is temporarily disabling adding new WebAuthn keys, to avoid interfering with the rollout of SUL3 (single user login version 3). Existing keys are unaffected. [93]
For developers that use the MediaWiki History dumps: The Data Platform Engineering team has added a couple of new fields to these dumps, to support the Temporary Accounts initiative. If you maintain software that reads those dumps, please review your code and the updated documentation, since the order of the fields in the row will change. There will also be one field rename: in the mediawiki_user_history dump, the anonymous field will be renamed to is_anonymous. The changes will take effect with the next release of the dumps in February. [94]
Latest comment: 5 months ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Updates for editors
Editors who use the "Special characters" editing-toolbar menu can now see the 32 special characters you have used most recently, across editing sessions on that wiki. This change should help make it easier to find the characters you use most often. The feature is in both the 2010 wikitext editor and VisualEditor. [95]
Editors using the 2010 wikitext editor can now create sublists with correct indentation by selecting the line(s) you want to indent and then clicking the toolbar buttons.[96] You can now also insert <code> tags using a new toolbar button.[97] Thanks to user stjn for these improvements.
Help is needed to ensure the citation generator works properly on each wiki.
(1) Administrators should update the local versions of the page MediaWiki:Citoid-template-type-map.json to include entries for preprint, standard, and dataset; Here are example diffs to replicate for 'preprint' and for 'standard' and 'dataset'.
(2.1) If the citoid map in the citation template used for these types of references is missing, one will need to be added. (2.2) If the citoid map does exist, the TemplateData will need to be updated to include new field names. Here are example updates for 'preprint' and for 'standard' and 'dataset'. The new fields that may need to be supported are archiveID, identifier, repository, organization, repositoryLocation, committee, and versionNumber. [98]
Latest comment: 5 months ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Hello, JPxG. This is a bot-delivered message letting you know that Draft:List of Generative Artificial Intelligence, a page you created, has not been edited in at least 5 months. Drafts that have not been edited for six months may be deleted, so if you wish to retain the page, please edit it again or request that it be moved to your userspace.
If the page has already been deleted, you can request it be undeleted so you can continue working on it.
Administrators can now nuke pages created by a user or IP address from the last 90 days, up from the initial 30 days. T380846
A 'Recreated' tag will now be added to pages that were created with the same title as a page which was previously deleted and it can be used as a filter in Special:RecentChanges and Special:NewPages. T56145
Latest comment: 5 months ago1 comment1 person in discussion
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 Product and Technology Advisory Council (PTAC) has published a draft of their recommendations for the Wikimedia Foundation's Product and Technology department. They have recommended focusing on mobile experiences, particularly contributions. They request community feedback at the talk page by 21 February.
Updates for editors
The "Special pages" portlet link will be moved from the "Toolbox" into the "Navigation" section of the main menu's sidebar by default. This change is because the Toolbox is intended for tools relating to the current page, not tools relating to the site, so the link will be more logically and consistently located. To modify this behavior and update CSS styling, administrators can follow the instructions at T385346. [101]
As part of this year's work around improving the ways readers discover content on the wikis, the Web team will be running an experiment with a small number of readers that displays some suggestions for related or interesting articles within the search bar. Please check out the project page for more information.
View all 22 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, the global blocks log will now be shown directly on the Special:CentralAuth page, similarly to global locks, to simplify the workflows for stewards. [103]
Updates for technical contributors
Wikidata now supports a special language as a "default for all languages" for labels and aliases. This is to avoid excessive duplication of the same information across many languages. If your Wikidata queries use labels, you may need to update them as some existing labels are getting removed. [104]
The function getDescription was invoked on every Wiki page read and accounts for ~2.5% of a page's total load time. The calculated value will now be cached, reducing load on Wikimedia servers. [105]
As part of the RESTBase deprecation effort, the /page/related endpoint has been blocked as of February 6, 2025, and will be removed soon. This timeline was chosen to align with the deprecation schedules for older Android and iOS versions. The stable alternative is the "morelike" action API in MediaWiki, and a migration example is available. The MediaWiki Interfaces team can be contacted for any questions. [106]
In depth
The latest quarterly Language and Internationalization newsletter is available. It includes: Updates about the "Contribute" menu; details on some of the newest language editions of Wikipedia; details on new languages supported by the MediaWiki interface; updates on the Community-defined lists feature; and more.
The latest Chart Project newsletter is available. It includes updates on the progress towards bringing better visibility into global charts usage and support for categorizing pages in the Data namespace on Commons.
Latest comment: 4 months ago1 comment1 person in discussion
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
Communities using growth tools can now showcase one event on the Special:Homepage for newcomers. This feature will help newcomers to be informed about editing activities they can participate in. Administrators can create a new event to showcase at Special:CommunityConfiguration. To learn more about this feature, please read the Diff post, have a look at the documentation, or contact the Growth team.
Updates for editors
Highlighted talk pages improvements
Starting next week, talk pages at these wikis – Spanish Wikipedia, French Wikipedia, Italian Wikipedia, Japanese Wikipedia – will get a new design. This change was extensively tested as a Beta feature and is the last step of talk pages improvements. [107]
You can now navigate to view a redirect page directly from its action pages, such as the history page. Previously, you were forced to first go to the redirect target. This change should help editors who work with redirects a lot. Thanks to user stjn for this improvement. [108]
When a Cite reference is reused many times, wikis currently show either numbers like "1.23" or localized alphabetic markers like "a b c" in the reference list. Previously, if there were so many reuses that the alphabetic markers were all used, an error message was displayed. As part of the work to modernize Cite customization, these errors will no longer be shown and instead the backlinks will fall back to showing numeric markers like "1.23" once the alphabetic markers are all used.
The log entries for each change to an editor's user-groups are now clearer by specifying exactly what has changed, instead of the plain before and after listings. Translators can help to update the localized versions. Thanks to user Msz2001 for these improvements.
A new filter has been added to the Special:Nuke tool, which allows administrators to mass delete pages, to enable users to filter for pages in a range of page sizes (in bytes). This allows, for example, deleting pages only of a certain size or below. [109]
Non-administrators can now check which pages are able to be deleted using the Special:Nuke tool. Thanks to user MolecularPilot for this and the previous improvements. [110]
View all 25 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, a bug was fixed in the configuration for the AV1 video file format, which enables these files to play again. [111]
Updates for technical contributors
Parsoid Read Views is going to be rolling out to most Wiktionaries over the next few weeks, following the successful transition of Wikivoyage to Parsoid Read Views last year. For more information, see the Parsoid/Parser Unification project page. [112][113]
Developers of tools that run on-wiki should note that mw.Uri is deprecated. Tools requiring mw.Uri must explicitly declare mediawiki.Uri as a ResourceLoader dependency, and should migrate to the browser native URL API soon. [114]
Latest comment: 4 months ago3 comments2 people in discussion
Hi. I am seriously disputing these moves, and would like you to start an RM for them instead. Ultimately, I might start an RM to move all "impact" titles to "effect", but I think that it is more appropriate that the relatively longstanding "effects" titles be allowed to remain and undergo a discussion from that name. A fuller rationale to oppose your bold moves and the list of moved articles is in the declined RMTR request: Special:PermanentLink/1277357049#Requests to revert undiscussed moves. Cheers —Alalch E.05:22, 24 February 2025 (UTC)Reply
@Alalch E.: I am absolutely certain that the importance of the issue does not warrant this. I did discuss the move — the general impression I got was that nobody cared either way, and moreover that it was kind of a pointless thing to ask about. I don't know why you've decided it was "undiscussed", or why you have asserted that so aggressively. I am aware of the existence of the RM process. I do not think that every pagemove requires an RM. Do you? The situation, at the time, was that a few dozen pages existed with titles of this sort, with some being called "Environmental impact of ____" and some being called "Environmental effects of ____". Personally, if you asked me, I would say that "effect" is probably more neutral than "impact", but at any rate, none of the articles I looked at seemed to even slightly distinguish between the two. It was not intended to be a political gesture. I hope you understand this. It was emphatically not the case that hydraulic mining and CFCs were one way, and bamboo sporks were the other. There was no detectable political or editorial valence to whether any article used one or the other. If you think that they should be the other way, then fine; I do not actually care, and moved the pages solely for the sake of having the titles be consistent. jp×g🗯️21:34, 25 February 2025 (UTC)Reply
I appreciate your reply. I assure you that I don't think that the action was in your mind anything other than a minor on-balance improvement for the sake of consistency and not any kind of statement or gesture. I really get how you feel about the importance of this, and I'm sorry if you're a little bothered about my bringing it up. It's not for me to say, but you may be especially busy, which may make this issue feel even less important. But it can be easily resolved; it is because of that that I'm writing. I think that they should be the other way, yeah. These dozen-ish titles aren't a big deal but it isn't a tiny deal for me either, because I was, on occasion, thinking about starting a discussion to move away from this usage of impact in titles and having some living examples of the better alternative might help. About "undiscussed", that wasn't meant to have a negative connotation. I saw an AN section (iirc) while searching for a related discussion, but it was about the seeming glitch, and not about the naming as naming (is that the discussion?). I'm very pro bold moves. That actually reinforces instead of weakens my opposition to this mass move because some or most (didn't recheck) of the "effects" titles were from moves done years back, and they were done for sound and not-insignificant editorial reasons. There is an editorial valence and even a mild langvar implication. You basically overrode those bold moves which have solidified with these more superficially-grounded bold moves relating to consistency. Despite "liking" bold moves, I do not think that bold mass moves just for the sake of consistency--when something not provenly uncontroversial--are good. Not to go overlong: I see that you would not start an RM because you do not even favor "impact" over "effects" in general. In this situation it's better to let things be a tiny bit inconsistent as they were and see where things could develop from there. Sincerely —Alalch E.05:27, 26 February 2025 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment: 4 months ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Updates for editors
Administrators can now customize how the Babel feature creates categories using Special:CommunityConfiguration/Babel. They can rename language categories, choose whether they should be auto-created, and adjust other settings. [115]
The wikimedia.org portal has been updated – and is receiving some ongoing improvements – to modernize and improve the accessibility of our portal pages. It now has better support for mobile layouts, updated wording and links, and better language support. Additionally, all of the Wikimedia project portals, such as wikibooks.org, now support dark mode when a reader is using that system setting. [116][117][118]
View all 30 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, a bug was fixed that prevented clicking on search results in the web-interface for some Firefox for Android phone configurations. [120]
Meetings and events
The next Language Community Meeting is happening soon, February 28th at 14:00 UTC. This week's meeting will cover: highlights and technical updates on keyboard and tools for the Sámi languages, Translatewiki.net contributions from the Bahasa Lampung community in Indonesia, and technical Q&A. If you'd like to join, simply sign up on the wiki page.
Latest comment: 4 months ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Hello, JPxG. This is a bot-delivered message letting you know that Draft:2024 Santa Maria courthouse explosion, a page you created, has not been edited in at least 5 months. Drafts that have not been edited for six months may be deleted, so if you wish to retain the page, please edit it again or request that it be moved to your userspace.
If the page has already been deleted, you can request it be undeleted so you can continue working on it.
Latest comment: 4 months ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Updates for editors
All logged-in editors using the mobile view can now edit a full page. The "Edit full page" link is accessible from the "More" menu in the toolbar. This was previously only available to editors using the Advanced mobile contributions setting. [121]
Interface administrators can now help to remove the deprecated Cite CSS code matching "mw-ref" from their local MediaWiki:Common.css. The list of wikis in need of cleanup, and the code to remove, can be found with this global search and in this example, and you can learn more about how to help on the CSS migration project page. The Cite footnote markers ("[1]") are now rendered by Parsoid, and the deprecated CSS is no longer needed. The CSS for backlinks ("mw:referencedBy") should remain in place for now. This cleanup is expected to cause no visible changes for readers. Please help to remove this code before March 20, after which the development team will do it for you.
When editors embed a file (e.g. [[File:MediaWiki.png]]) on a page that is protected with cascading protection, the software will no longer restrict edits to the file description page, only to new file uploads.[122] In contrast, transcluding a file description page (e.g. {{:File:MediaWiki.png}}) will now restrict edits to the page.[123]
When editors revert a file to an earlier version it will now require the same permissions as ordinarily uploading a new version of the file. The software now checks for 'reupload' or 'reupload-own' rights,[124] and respects cascading protection.[125]
When administrators are listing pages for deletion with the Nuke tool, they can now also list associated talk pages and redirects for deletion, alongside pages created by the target, rather than needing to manually delete these pages afterwards. [126]
The previously noted update to Single User Login, which will accommodate browser restrictions on cross-domain cookies by moving login and account creation to a central domain, will now roll out to all users during March and April. The team plans to enable it for all new account creation on Group0 wikis this week. See the SUL3 project page for more details and an updated timeline.
Since last week there has been a bug that shows some interface icons as black squares until the page has fully loaded. It will be fixed this week. [127]
View all 23 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, a bug was fixed with loading images in very old versions of the Firefox browser on mobile. [129]
A request for comment is open to discuss whether AI-generated images (meaning those wholly created by generative AI, not human-created images modified with AI tools) should be banned from use in articles.
A new filter has been added to the Special:Nuke tool, which allows administrators to filter for pages in a range of page sizes (in bytes). This allows, for example, deleting pages only of a certain size or below. T378488
Non-administrators can now check which pages are able to be deleted using the Special:Nuke tool. T376378
The event will feature thematic video art installations and our traditional Wiki-fashion show, for which you are encouraged to dress in your finest Wikimedia clothing and accessories (bags, buttons, even books), or clothing connected to the topics you edit on wiki projects.
Latest comment: 4 months ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Updates for editors
Editors who use password managers at multiple wikis may notice changes in the future. The way that our wikis provide information to password managers about reusing passwords across domains has recently been updated, so some password managers might now offer you login credentials that you saved for a different Wikimedia site. Some password managers already did this, and are now doing it for more Wikimedia domains. This is part of the SUL3 project which aims to improve how our unified login works, and to keep it compatible with ongoing changes to the web-browsers we use. [130][131]
The Wikipedia Apps Team is inviting interested users to help improve Wikipedia’s offline and limited internet use. After discussions in Afrika Baraza and the last ESEAP call, key challenges like search, editing, and offline access are being explored, with upcoming focus groups to dive deeper into these topics. All languages are welcome, and interpretation will be available. Want to share your thoughts? Join the discussion or email aramadan@wikimedia.org!
All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes on March 19. This is planned at 14:00 UTC. More information will be published in Tech News and will also be posted on individual wikis in the coming weeks.
The latest quarterly Growth newsletter is available. It includes: the launch of the Community Updates module, the most recent changes in Community Configuration, and the upcoming test of in-article suggestions for first-time editors.
An old API that was previously used in the Android Wikipedia app is being removed at the end of March. There are no current software uses, but users of the app with a version that is older than 6 months by the time of removal (2025-03-31), will no longer have access to the Suggested Edits feature, until they update their app. You can read more details about this change.
Latest comment: 3 months ago1 comment1 person in discussion
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
Twice a year, around the equinoxes, the Wikimedia Foundation's Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) team performs a datacenter server switchover, redirecting all traffic from one primary server to its backup. This provides reliability in case of a crisis, as we can always fall back on the other datacenter. Thanks to the Listen to Wikipedia tool, you can hear the switchover take place: Before it begins, you'll hear the steady stream of edits; Then, as the system enters a brief read-only phase, the sound stops for a couple of minutes, before resuming after the switchover. You can read more about the background and details of this process on the Diff blog. If you want to keep an ear out for the next server switchover, listen to the wikis on March 19 at 14:00 UTC.
On Wikimedia Commons, a new system to select the appropriate file categories has been introduced: if a category has one or more subcategories, users will be able to click on an arrow that will open the subcategories directly within the form, and choose the correct one. The parent category name will always be shown on top, and it will always be possible to come back to it. This should decrease the amount of work for volunteers in fixing/creating new categories. The change is also available on mobile. These changes are part of planned improvements to the UploadWizard.
The Community Tech team is seeking wikis to join a pilot for the Multiblocks feature and a refreshed Special:Block page in late March. Multiblocks enables administrators to impose multiple different types of blocks on the same user at the same time. If you are an admin or steward and would like us to discuss joining the pilot with your community, please leave a message on the project talk page.
Starting March 25, the Editing team will test a new feature for Edit Check at 12 Wikipedias: Multi-Check. Half of the newcomers on these wikis will see all Reference Checks during their edit session, while the other half will continue seeing only one. The goal of this test is to see if users are confused or discouraged when shown multiple Reference Checks (when relevant) within a single editing session. At these wikis, the tags used on edits that show References Check will be simplified, as multiple tags could be shown within a single edit. Changes to the tags are documented on Phabricator. [132]
The Global reminder bot, which is a service for notifying users that their temporary user-rights are about to expire, now supports using the localized name of the user-rights group in the message heading. Translators can see the listing of existing translations and documentation to check if their language needs updating or creation.
The GlobalPreferences gender setting, which is used for how the software should refer to you in interface messages, now works as expected by overriding the local defaults. [133]
View all 26 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, the Wikipedia App for Android had a bug fixed for when a user is browsing and searching in multiple languages. [134]
Updates for technical contributors
Later this week, the way that Codex styles are loaded will be changing. There is a small risk that this may result in unstyled interface message boxes on certain pages. User generated content (e.g. templates) is not impacted. Gadgets may be impacted. If you see any issues please report them. See the linked task for details, screenshots, and documentation on how to fix any affected gadgets.
Broken, by someone. A classically trained vandal, I suppose: truly random in a way rarely seen these days. Bravo. I did EC protect the template though because this messed up like 1000 pages. Thanks for letting me know !!! jp×g🗯️01:36, 19 March 2025 (UTC)Reply
Yeah, I don't have a working laptop, so if I get scheduled for two overnight shifts with no notice on opposite sides of a DMV appointment two hours away and have to sleep in my car I cannot run the script that populates it. However, it can be fixed without that -- if you have the SignpostTagger, opening that on a page and then saving it with any modification (e.g. adding and removing the tag "test") should add it to the module's index. I tried this from my phone but there seems to be some mobile issue (??)... jp×g🗯️13:28, 22 March 2025 (UTC)Reply
Your life sounds fun! I activated the script and used it to "Manage tags" on one of the pages. I added ", test" to the tags, and it said that the Module page had been updated, but it looks like the Module page was just reordered. I also tried adding "accessibility" as a tag, since that is one of the supported aliases. When I clicked "Manage tags" again, the new tag that I thought I had added was not there. Hmm. – Jonesey95 (talk) 15:20, 22 March 2025 (UTC)Reply
I got home and ran it just now. I think maybe something is goofed up somewhere but I will have to sleep on it and then try to figure it out... probably it is my fault. jp×g🗯️16:10, 22 March 2025 (UTC)Reply
I just had a look, and it seems that SignpostTagger is broken when tagging new articles. I suspect this is caused by a change in MediaWiki, but I haven't pinpointed the cause of the problem yet. — Mr. Stradivarius♪ talk ♪14:25, 24 March 2025 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment: 3 months ago1 comment1 person in discussion
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 Wikimedia Foundation is seeking your feedback on the drafts of the objectives and key results that will shape the Foundation's Product and Technology priorities for the next fiscal year (starting in July). The objectives are broad high-level areas, and the key-results are measurable ways to track the success of their objectives. Please share your feedback on the talkpage, in any language, ideally before the end of April.
Updates for editors
The CampaignEvents extension will be released to multiple wikis (see deployment plan for details) in April 2025, and the team has begun the process of engaging communities on the identified wikis. The extension provides tools to organize, manage, and promote collaborative activities (like events, edit-a-thons, and WikiProjects) on the wikis. The extension has three tools: Event Registration, Collaboration List, and Invitation Lists. It is currently on 13 Wikipedias, including English Wikipedia, French Wikipedia, and Spanish Wikipedia, as well as Wikidata. Questions or requests can be directed to the extension talk page or in Phabricator (with #campaigns-product-team tag).
Starting the week of March 31st, wikis will be able to set which user groups can view private registrants in Event Registration, as part of the CampaignEvents extension. By default, event organizers and the local wiki admins will be able to see private registrants. This is a change from the current behavior, in which only event organizers can see private registrants. Wikis can change the default setup by requesting a configuration change in Phabricator (and adding the #campaigns-product-team tag). Participants of past events can cancel their registration at any time.
Administrators at wikis that have a customized MediaWiki:Sidebar should check that it contains an entry for the Special pages listing. If it does not, they should add it using * specialpages-url|specialpages. Wikis with a default sidebar will see the link moved from the page toolbox into the sidebar menu in April. [135]
The Minerva skin (mobile web) combines both Notice and Alert notifications within the bell icon (). There was a long-standing bug where an indication for new notifications was only shown if you had unseen Alerts. This bug is now fixed. In the future, Minerva users will notice a counter atop the bell icon when you have 1 or more unseen Notices and/or Alerts. [136]
VisualEditor has introduced a new client-side hook for developers to use when integrating with the VisualEditor target lifecycle. This hook should replace the existing lifecycle-related hooks, and be more consistent between different platforms. In addition, the new hook will apply to uses of VisualEditor outside of just full article editing, allowing gadgets to interact with the editor in DiscussionTools as well. The Editing Team intends to deprecate and eventually remove the old lifecycle hooks, so any use cases that this new hook does not cover would be of interest to them and can be shared in the task.
Developers who use the mw.Api JavaScript library, can now identify the tool using it with the userAgent parameter: var api = new mw.Api( { userAgent: 'GadgetNameHere/1.0.1' } );. If you maintain a gadget or user script, please set a user agent, because it helps with library and server maintenance and with differentiating between legitimate and illegitimate traffic. [137][138]
In accordance with our policy that Wikipedia is not for the indefinite hosting of material deemed unsuitable for the encyclopedia mainspace, the draft has been nominated for deletion. If you plan on working on it further, or editing it to address the issues raised if it was declined, simply edit the submission and remove the {{db-afc}}, {{db-draft}}, or {{db-g13}} code.
If your submission has already been deleted by the time you get there, and you wish to retrieve it, you can request its undeletion by following the instructions at this link. An administrator will, in most cases, restore the submission so you can continue to work on it.
Latest comment: 3 months ago1 comment1 person in discussion
I'm following up on a comment you made in the Emancipatory Scholarship discussion, which is closed. When you wrote "I fear that the unintelligence of the opening comment to this section has caused people to react with kneejerk terror and suspicion to what is not only a reasonable claim, but already mostly true," what is the reasonable and mostly true claim that you're referring to? Is it "many publications representing themselves as academic journals are primarily in the business of making subjective claims"? The first two examples that Manuductive gave came from scholarship in the field of education. Do you believe, for example, that many education journals are primarily in the business of making subjective claims, and if so, what is the evidenciary basis for that / what are examples of journals in this set?
I do understand the difference between objective and subjective claims, and I understand that many statements made in STEM fields are objectively true. However, many claims made in social sciences are also objectively true. FactOrOpinion (talk) 14:23, 26 March 2025 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment: 3 months ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Greetings, JPxG. You are receiving this notification because you've agreed to consider endorsing prospective admin candidates identified by the process outlined at Administrators without tools. Recently, the following editor(s) received this distinction and the associated endearing title:
Latest comment: 3 months ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Updates for editors
The Editing team is working on a new Edit check: Peacock check. This check's goal is to identify non-neutral terms while a user is editing a wikipage, so that they can be informed that their edit should perhaps be changed before they publish it. This project is at the early stages, and the team is looking for communities' input: in this Phabricator task, they are gathering on-wiki policies, templates used to tag non-neutral articles, and the terms (jargon and keywords) used in edit summaries for the languages they are currently researching. You can participate by editing the table on Phabricator, commenting on the task, or directly messaging Trizek (WMF).
Single User Login has now been updated on all wikis to move login and account creation to a central domain. This makes user login compatible with browser restrictions on cross-domain cookies, which have prevented users of some browsers from staying logged in.
Starting on March 31st, the MediaWiki Interfaces team will begin a limited release of generated OpenAPI specs and a SwaggerUI-based sandbox experience for MediaWiki REST APIs. They invite developers from a limited group of non-English Wikipedia communities (Arabic, German, French, Hebrew, Interlingua, Dutch, Chinese) to review the documentation and experiment with the sandbox in their preferred language. In addition to these specific Wikipedia projects, the sandbox and OpenAPI spec will be available on the on the test wiki REST Sandbox special page for developers with English as their preferred language. During the preview period, the MediaWiki Interfaces Team also invites developers to share feedback about your experience. The preview will last for approximately 2 weeks, after which the sandbox and OpenAPI specs will be made available across all wiki projects.
Sometimes a small, one line code change can have great significance: in this case, it means that for the first time in years we're able to run all of the stack serving maps.wikimedia.org - a host dedicated to serving our wikis and their multi-lingual maps needs - from a single core datacenter, something we test every time we perform a datacenter switchover. This is important because it means that in case one of our datacenters is affected by a catastrophe, we'll still be able to serve the site. This change is the result of extensive work by two developers on porting the last component of the maps stack over to kubernetes, where we can allocate resources more efficiently than before, thus we're able to withstand more traffic in a single datacenter. This work involved a lot of complicated steps because this software, and the software libraries it uses, required many long overdue upgrades. This type of work makes the Wikimedia infrastructure more sustainable.
Meetings and events
MediaWiki Users and Developers Workshop Spring 2025 is happening in Sandusky, USA, and online, from 14–16 May 2025. The workshop will feature discussions around the usage of MediaWiki software by and within companies in different industries and will inspire and onboard new users. Registration and presentation signup is now available at the workshop's website.
Latest comment: 3 months ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
The Design System Team is preparing to release the next major version of Codex (v2.0.0) on April 29. Editors and developers who use CSS from Codex should see the 2.0 overview documentation, which includes guidance related to a few of the breaking changes such as font-size, line-height, and size-icon.
The results of the Developer Satisfaction Survey (2025) are now available. Thank you to all participants. These results help the Foundation decide what to work on next and to review what they recently worked on.
The 2025 Wikimedia Hackathon will take place in Istanbul, Turkey, between 2–4 May. Registration for attending the in-person event will close on 13 April. Before registering, please note the potential need for a visa or e-visa to enter the country.
You are invited to Foundation and Friends' Free Culture Friday at Prime Produce on Friday, April 11. This event will feature a reception with Wikimedia Foundation staff in the afternoon, followed by a more informal salon, hackathon, and game night, utilizing Prime Produce's vast collection of board games. This replaces WikiWednesday Salon this month. No experience of anything at all is required. All are welcome!
Friday, April 11, 2025
1:30 pm – 3:00 pm (Wikimedia Foundation staff + community meet-and-greet)
Hello and welcome to the April 2025 newsletter, a quarterly digest of Guild activities since December. Don't forget you can unsubscribe at any time; see below. We extend a warm welcome to all of our new members. We wish you all happy copy-editing.
Election results: In our December 2025 coordinator election, Wracking stepped down as coordinator; we thank them for their service. Incumbents Dhtwiki, Miniapolis, and Mox Eden were reelected coordinators, and IQR and WikiEditor5678910 were newly elected coordinator, to serve through 30 June. Nominations for our mid-year Election of Coordinators will open on 1 June (UTC).
Drive: 55 editors signed up for our January Backlog Elimination Drive 33 claimed at least one copy-edit and copy-edited 611,404 words in 237 articles. Barnstars awarded are here.
Blitz: 14 editors signed up for our February Copy Editing Blitz. 10 claimed at least one copy-edit and copy-edited 46,749 words in 18 articles. Barnstars awarded are here.
Drive: 47 editors signed up for our March Backlog Elimination Drive. 28 claimed at least one copy-edit and copy-edited 479,172 words in 207 articles. Barnstars awarded are here.
Blitz: Sign up for our April Copy Editing Blitz, which runs from 13 to 19 April. Barnstars will be awarded here.
Progress report: As of 9:45, 12 April 2024 (UTC), GOCE copyeditors have processed 89 requests since 1 January 2024, and the backlog stands at 2,264 articles.
Thank you all again for your participation; we wouldn't be able to achieve what we have without you! Cheers from your GOCE coordinators Dhtwiki, IQR, Miniapolis, Mox Eden and WikiEditor5678910.
To discontinue receiving GOCE newsletters, please remove your name from our mailing list.
Latest comment: 3 months ago1 comment1 person in discussion
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
Later this week, the default thumbnail size will be increased from 220px to 250px. This changes how pages are shown in all wikis and has been requested by some communities for many years, but wasn't previously possible due to technical limitations. [140]
File thumbnails are now stored in discrete sizes. If a page specifies a thumbnail size that's not among the standard sizes (20, 40, 60, 120, 250, 330, 500, 960), then MediaWiki will pick the closest larger thumbnail size but will tell the browser to downscale it to the requested size. In these cases, nothing will change visually but users might load slightly larger images. If it doesn't matter which thumbnail size is used in a page, please pick one of the standard sizes to avoid the extra in-browser down-scaling step. [141][142]
Updates for editors
The Wikimedia Foundation are working on a system called Edge Uniques which will enable A/B testing, help protect against Distributed denial-of-service attacks (DDoS attacks), and make it easier to understand how many visitors the Wikimedia sites have. This is so that they can more efficiently build tools which help readers, and make it easier for readers to find what they are looking for.
To improve security for users, a small percentage of logins will now require that the account owner input a one-time password emailed to their account. It is recommended that you check that the email address on your account is set correctly, and that it has been confirmed, and that you have an email set for this purpose. [143]
"Are you interested in taking a short survey to improve tools used for reviewing or reverting edits on your Wiki?" This question will be asked at 7 wikis starting next week, on Recent Changes and Watchlist pages. The Moderator Tools team wants to know more about activities that involve looking at new edits made to your Wikimedia project, and determining whether they adhere to your project's policies.
The latest quarterly Technical Community Newsletter is now available. This edition includes: an invitation for tool maintainers to attend the Toolforge UI Community Feedback Session on April 15th; recent community metrics; and recent technical blog posts.
Latest comment: 2 months ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Updates for editors
Wikifunctions is now integrated with Dagbani Wikipedia since April 15. It is the first project that will be able to call functions from Wikifunctions and integrate them in articles. A function is something that takes one or more inputs and transforms them into a desired output, such as adding up two numbers, converting miles into metres, calculating how much time has passed since an event, or declining a word into a case. Wikifunctions will allow users to do that through a simple call of a stable and global function, rather than via a local template. [144]
A new type of lint error has been created: Empty headings (documentation). The Linter extension's purpose is to identify wikitext patterns that must or can be fixed in pages and provide some guidance about what the problems are with those patterns and how to fix them. [145]
Following its publication on HuggingFace, the "Structured Contents" dataset, developed by Wikimedia Enterprise, is now also available on Kaggle. This Beta initiative is focused on making Wikimedia data more machine-readable for high-volume reusers. They are releasing this beta version in a location that open dataset communities already use, in order to seek feedback, to help improve the product for a future wider release. You can read more about the overall Structured Contents project, and about the first release that's freely usable.
There is no new MediaWiki version this week.
Meetings and events
The Editing and Machine Learning Teams invite interested volunteers to a video meeting to discuss Peacock check, which is the latest Edit check that will detect "peacock" or "overly-promotional" or "non-neutral" language whilst an editor is typing. Editors who work with newcomers, or help to fix this kind of writing, or are interested in how we use artificial intelligence in our projects are encouraged to attend. The meeting will be on April 28, 2025 at 18:00–19:00 UTC and hosted on Zoom.
Latest comment: 2 months ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Updates for editors
Event organizers who host collaborative activities on multiple wikis, including Bengali, Japanese, and Korean Wikipedias, will have access to the CampaignEvents extension this week. Also, admins in the Wikipedia where the extension is enabled will automatically be granted the event organizer right soon. They won't have to manually grant themselves the right before they can manage events as requested by a community.
The release of the next major version of Codex, the design system for Wikimedia, is scheduled for 29 April 2025. Technical editors will have access to the release by the week of 5 May 2025. This update will include a number of breaking changes and minor visual changes. Instructions on handling the breaking and visual changes are documented on this page. Pre-release testing is reported in T386298, with post-release issues tracked in T392379 and T392390.
Users of Wiki Replicas will notice that the database views of ipblocks, ipblocks_ipindex, and ipblocks_compat are now deprecated. Users can query the block and block_target new views that mirror the new tables in the production database instead. The deprecated views will be removed entirely from Wiki Replicas in June, 2025.
The 2025 Wikimedia Hackathon, which brings the global technical community together to connect, brainstorm, and hack existing projects, will take place from May 2 to 4th, 2025, at Istanbul, Turkey.
A very large number of the errors fixed by that gigantic CN-fixer regex are from the visual editor (probably upwards of 70%) although that one wasn't. jp×g🗯️11:20, 2 May 2025 (UTC)Reply
I looked through the edits and found only one that introduced nowikis.[146] In that case, I think the editor copied the fact tag from the template's /doc page. Your fix was incomplete. Are you running a script? It should be able to detect nowikis and change the edit summary. Also, it's probably a good idea to put a link to the script in the edit summary. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:20, 2 May 2025 (UTC)Reply
Yes, it is a WP:JWB job I have been running for a couple years. I see this was not in the edit summary, so I think I unchecked something by mistake when running it. jp×g🗯️08:05, 3 May 2025 (UTC)Reply
The VE bug is very simple, and very obvious, and if memory serves, there's been a Phab ticket open for years. What it is, is that if you type a template out into the VE window:
{{citation needed}}
and save, then sometimes it will make the completely asinine assumption you're trying to literally put that string in the article, so it surrounds it with garbage like this:
<nowiki>{{citation needed}}</nowiki>
so that the article displays:
{{citation needed}}
Except sometimes it just puts the nowiki tags at completely random points in surrounding paragraphs. This had generated, over the years, thousands and thousands of messed-up citation template. The fix is pretty simple: have VE give a warning if you try to save it with a nowikied template in mainspace, because this is almost literally never intended behavior. However, nobody wants to do this, so instead a bunch of time is spent cleaning up the mess. jp×g🗯️08:11, 3 May 2025 (UTC)Reply
The visual editor doesn't work that way. As soon as you type the second {, the visual editor will open the Insert > Template dialog box.
If you are seeing [citation needed], with or without <sup>...</sup> tags, it means that the newbie didn't know how to add a template and just typed it in plain text. That's been happening forever, including before the visual editor existed.
If you're seeing <code><nowiki>{{</nowiki>[[Template:Citation needed|Citation needed]]<nowiki>}}</nowiki></code>, it means that someone copied and pasted the formatted text from Template:Citation needed/doc#Usage, and the visual editor assumed that the person pasted in formatted text because they wanted formatted text (which is not entirely unreasonable; what if you were writing a help page, or wanted to add that to the article Citation needed?). (If you copy it as unformatted text, the visual editor converts it to a template.) That could probably be reduced by fixing the documentation.
If you're seeing <sup>[Template:Citation needed|citation needed]</sup>, then that means that they copied a fact tag on an article (i.e., in "Read" mode) and pasted it in.
Your suggested warning could be added to the Special:AbuseFilter. I doubt that it will do any good, though, as people aren't doing this on purpose. They're doing this because they haven't figured out our complicated software. Being told "you screwed up" isn't going to help them fix it.
Latest comment: 2 months ago10 comments2 people in discussion
Hey, I noticed dozens of unused and empty modules you created such as Module:Signpost/index/2027. What was the problem you were trying to fix with this? If you point me to the part of the code I can take a look, as this isn't the way to handle it. Gonnym (talk) 17:22, 29 April 2025 (UTC)Reply
@Gonnym: Sure, I can clarify: the year is 2025, meaning that events in the year 2027 have not happened yet. Therefore, the Signpost indices for 2027 do not have articles in them. jp×g🗯️20:12, 29 April 2025 (UTC)Reply
Yes, I understand that. What I was asking is why did you feel the need in the current year of 2025 to create modules for years in the future, such as Module:Signpost/index/2099. If it was a bug in the code, point me to the area of the code where this was an issue and I'll try and fix it. Gonnym (talk) 06:24, 30 April 2025 (UTC)Reply
Because doing this with code would have been a gigantic, complicated, unnecessary waste of time -- it would have permanently contributed multiple lines of garbage (requiring sandboxing, deployment, and perpetual maintenance) to every one of the several different scripts that handle these module indices (SignpostTagger, SPS, Wegweiser, the list maker, the module itself, et cetera) to handle a special-snowflake edge case that happens at best once per year.
Adding more logic to a script increases the maintenance burden, forever, for every single person who ever has to use or troubleshoot or modify or extend the script. They must scroll past it. They must figure out what it does and how it works. If there is a problem, and they're trying to diagnose it, they must rule out that it interacts with the new stuff.
Contrariwise, the issue was solved completely for the entire rest of the 21st century with a JWB task that took me five minutes to run.
A good airplane is the lightest one that carries out its tasks. A good software program is the shortest one that carries out its tasks.
I am unable to understand the objection to the empty pages existing. Do they they affect you in any way whatsoever? They all occupy about a kilobyte -- again, it's 2025, and a kilobyte is substantially less than the comment I'm writing right now -- so I am unclear on why this is a problem. jp×g🗯️11:32, 2 May 2025 (UTC)Reply
Can you please point me to the place in the code where this is an issue? I've asked three times already and would like to see if this is indeed an issue as you say it is. Gonnym (talk) 15:48, 2 May 2025 (UTC)Reply
All of it. All of the code is the place where it would be an issue to deliberately create errors and then write a bunch of extra code to work around them. Can you explain the fixation with these empty module indices? You have given literally no reason why they are a problem, or why any action needs to be taken whatsoever. jp×g🗯️06:41, 3 May 2025 (UTC)Reply
If every single line of code you wrote in every single template and module you wrote is looking for the existence of Module:Signpost/index/2099 then the code you wrote is doing something terribly wrong and inefficient. Pretty disappointed you aren't going to dignify my query with an actual response. Gonnym (talk) 07:42, 3 May 2025 (UTC)Reply
I would really prefer if you did not make further proposals about refactoring software if you have not bothered to read the code -- it is just a waste of time. jp×g🗯️08:03, 3 May 2025 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment: 1 month ago5 comments1 person in discussion
hey! Hope you are fine I am from bnwiki. I need some help for locslizing this script in our wiki. Can you please help us R1F4T (talk) 20:19, 1 May 2025 (UTC)Reply
You are invited to join the Wikimedia NYC community for our WikiWednesday Salon at Prime Produce in Hell's Kitchen, Manhattan. This month's WikiWednesday will be focused on digital safety for editors. Guest digital security trainers will join us to lead this session. All are welcome!
Please bring a laptop or the editing device of your choosing for hands-on training that will guide you through steps to take to make yourself safer online. While there will also be an online participation option, the meeting will not be recorded.
You are also invited to join the Wikimedia NYC Community and Rhizome for a community memory-focused edit-a-thon in the Financial District. All Wikipedia and Wikidata enthusiasts are welcome, new and experienced!
Latest comment: 2 months ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Admins can now choose which namespaces are permitted for Event Registration via Community Configuration (documentation). The default setup is for event registration to be permitted in the Event namespace, but other namespaces (such as the project namespace or WikiProject namespace) can now be added. With this change, communities like WikiProjects can now more easily use Event Registration for their collaborative activities.
Editors can now transclude the Collaboration List on a wiki page (documentation). The Collaboration List is an automated list of events and WikiProjects on the wikis, accessed via Special:AllEvents (example). Now, the Collaboration List can be added to all sorts of wiki pages, such as: a wiki mainpage, a WikiProject page, an affiliate page, an event page, or even a user page.
Developers who use the moment library in gadgets and user scripts should revise their code to use alternatives like the Intl library or the new mediawiki.DateFormatter library. The moment library has been deprecated and will begin to log messages in the developer console. You can see a global search for current uses, and ask related questions in this Phabricator task.
Developers who maintain a tool that queries the Wikidata term store tables (wbt_*) need to update their code to connect to a separate database cluster. These tables are being split into a separate database cluster. Tools that query those tables via the wiki replicas must be adapted to connect to the new cluster instead. Documentation and related links are available. [147]
The latest Chart Project newsletter is available. It includes updates on preparing to expand the deployment to additional wikis as soon as this week (starting May 6) and scaling up over the following weeks, plus exploring filtering and transforming source data.
An RfC was closed with consensus to allow editors to opt-out of seeing "sticky decorative elements". Such elements should now be wrapped in {{sticky decoration wrapper}}. Editors who wish to opt out can follow the instructions at WP:STICKYDECO.
An RfC has resulted in a broad prohibition on the use of AI-generated images in articles. A few common-sense exceptions are recognized.
Latest comment: 2 months ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Hi JPxG, thanks for all your work maintaining HooptyBot! At User:JPxG/Oracle/2024, it only updated the Feb-July 2024 stats during July 2024 and has not returned since then to provide the year's aggregate statistics. Is that normal? ViridianPenguin🐧 (💬) 16:11, 6 May 2025 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment: 2 months ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Greetings, JPxG. You are receiving this notification because you've agreed to consider endorsing prospective admin candidates identified by the process outlined at Administrators without tools. Recently, the following editor(s) received this distinction and the associated endearing title:
Latest comment: 2 months ago1 comment1 person in discussion
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 "Get shortened URL" link on the sidebar now includes a QR code. Wikimedia site users can now use it by scanning or downloading it to quickly share and access shared content from Wikimedia sites, conveniently.
Updates for editors
The Wikimedia Foundation is working on a system called Edge Uniques, which will enable A/B testing, help protect against distributed denial-of-service attacks (DDoS attacks), and make it easier to understand how many visitors the Wikimedia sites have. This is to help more efficiently build tools which help readers, and make it easier for readers to find what they are looking for. Tech News has previously written about this. The deployment will be gradual. Some might see the Edge Uniques cookie the week of 19 May. You can discuss this on the talk page.
Starting May 19, 2025, Event organisers in wikis with the CampaignEvents extension enabled can use Event Registration in the project namespace (e.g., Wikipedia namespace, Wikidata namespace). With this change, communities don't need admins to use the feature. However, wikis that don't want this change can remove and add the permitted namespaces at Special:CommunityConfiguration/CampaignEvents.
The Wikipedia project now has a Wikipedia in Nupe (w:nup:). This is a language primarily spoken in the North Central region of Nigeria. Speakers of this language are invited to contribute to new Wikipedia.
Developers can now access pre-parsed Dutch Wikipedia, amongst others (English, German, French, Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese) through the Structured Contents snapshots (beta). The content includes parsed Wikipedia abstracts, descriptions, main images, infoboxes, article sections, and references.
The /page/data-parsoid REST API endpoint is no longer in use and will be deprecated. It is scheduled to be turned off on June 7, 2025.
The IPv6 support is a newly introduced Cloud virtual network that significantly boosts Wikimedia platforms' scalability, security, and readiness for the future. If you are a technical contributor eager to learn more, check out this blog post for an in-depth look at the journey to IPv6.
Latest comment: 2 months ago1 comment1 person in discussion
The Wikipedia Library: Books & Bytes Issue 68, March–April 2025
In this issue we highlight two resource renewals, #EveryBookItsReader, a note about Phabricator, and, as always, a roundup of news and community items related to libraries and digital knowledge.
Latest comment: 2 months ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Hey! I was wondering if I could be an editor and in charge of the technology report! I love technology and invested in its news, and would love to be a part of it! If it's not possible it's no biggie, I was working on the WikiProject report on this next issue and would love to be a regular helper if possible. Valorrr(lets chat)16:19, 13 May 2025 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment: 1 month ago1 comment1 person in discussion
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 Editing Team and the Machine Learning Team are working on a new check for newcomers: Peacock check. Using a prediction model, this check will encourage editors to improve the tone of their edits, using artificial intelligence. We invite volunteers to review the first version of the Peacock language model for the following languages: Arabic, Spanish, Portuguese, English, and Japanese. Users from these wikis interested in reviewing this model are invited to sign up at MediaWiki.org. The deadline to sign up is on May 23, which will be the start date of the test.
Updates for editors
From May 20, 2025, oversighters and checkusers will need to have their accounts secured with two-factor authentication (2FA) to be able to use their advanced rights. All users who belong to these two groups and do not have 2FA enabled have been informed. In the future, this requirement may be extended to other users with advanced rights. Learn more.
Multiblocks will begin mass deployment by the end of the month: all non-Wikipedia projects plus Catalan Wikipedia will adopt Multiblocks in the week of May 26, while all other Wikipedias will adopt it in the week of June 2. Please contact the team if you have concerns. Administrators can test the new user interface now on your own wiki by browsing to Special:Block?usecodex=1, and can test the full multiblocks functionality on testwiki. Multiblocks is the feature that makes it possible for administrators to impose different types of blocks on the same user at the same time. See the help page for more information. [148]
Later this week, the Special:SpecialPages listing of almost all special pages will be updated with a new design. This page has been redesigned to improve the user experience in a few ways, including: The ability to search for names and aliases of the special pages, sorting, more visible marking of restricted special pages, and a more mobile-friendly look. The new version can be previewed at Beta Cluster now, and feedback shared in the task. [149]
The Chart extension is being enabled on more wikis. For a detailed list of when the extension will be enabled on your wiki, please read the deployment timeline.
Wikifunctions will be deployed on May 27 on five Wiktionaries: Hausa, Igbo, Bengali, Malayalam, and Dhivehi/Maldivian. This is the second batch of deployment planned for the project. After deployment, the projects will be able to call functions from Wikifunctions and integrate them in their pages. A function is something that takes one or more inputs and transforms them into a desired output, such as adding up two numbers, converting miles into metres, calculating how much time has passed since an event, or declining a word into a case. Wikifunctions will allow users to do that through a simple call of a stable and global function, rather than via a local template.
Later this week, the Wikimedia Foundation will publish a hub for experiments. This is to showcase and get user feedback on product experiments. The experiments help the Wikimedia movement understand new users, how they interact with the internet and how it could affect the Wikimedia movement. Some examples are generated video, the Wikipedia Roblox speedrun game and the Discord bot.
View all 29 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, there was a bug with creating an account using the API, which has now been fixed. [150]
Updates for technical contributors
Gadgets and user scripts that interact with Special:Block may need to be updated to work with the new manage blocks interface. Please review the developer guide for more information. If you need help or are unable to adapt your script to the new interface, please let the team know on the talk page. [151]
The mw.title object allows you to get information about a specific wiki page in the Lua programming language. Starting this week, a new property will be added to the object, named isDisambiguationPage. This property allows you to check if a page is a disambiguation page, without the need to write a custom function. [152]
User script developers can use a new reverse proxy tool to load javascript and css from gitlab.wikimedia.org with mw.loader.load. The tool's author hopes this will enable collaborative development workflows for user scripts including linting, unit tests, code generation, and code review on gitlab.wikimedia.org without a separate copy-and-paste step to publish scripts to a Wikimedia wiki for integration and acceptance testing. See Tool:Gitlab-content on Wikitech for more information.
The 12th edition of Wiki Workshop 2025, a forum that brings together researchers that explore all aspects of Wikimedia projects, will be held virtually on 21-22 May. Researchers can register now.
The article will be discussed at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Miles Routledge (2nd nomination) until a consensus is reached, and anyone, including you, is welcome to contribute to the discussion. The nomination will explain the policies and guidelines which are of concern. The discussion focuses on high-quality evidence and our policies and guidelines.
Users may edit the article during the discussion, including to improve the article to address concerns raised in the discussion. However, do not remove the article-for-deletion notice from the top of the article until the discussion has finished.
Latest comment: 1 month ago1 comment1 person in discussion
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
A community-wide discussion about a very delicate issue for the development of Abstract Wikipedia is now open on Meta: where to store the abstract content that will be developed through functions from Wikifunctions and data from Wikidata. The discussion is open until June 12 at Abstract Wikipedia/Location of Abstract Content, and every opinion is welcomed. The decision will be made and communicated after the consultation period by the Foundation.
Updates for editors
Since last week, on all wikis except the largest 20, people using the mobile visual editor will have additional tools in the menu bar, accessed using the new + toolbar button. To start, the new menu will include options to add: citations, hieroglyphs, and code blocks. Deployment to the remaining wikis is scheduled to happen in June.
The #ifexist parser function will no longer register a link to its target page. This will improve the usefulness of Special:WantedPages, which will eventually only list pages that are the target of an actual red link. This change will happen gradually as the source pages are updated. [153]
This week, the Moderator Tools team will launch a new filter to Recent Changes, starting at Indonesian Wikipedia. This new filter highlights edits that are likely to be reverted. The goal is to help Recent Changes patrollers identify potentially problematic edits. Other wikis will benefit from this filter in the future.
Upon clicking an empty search bar, logged-out users will see suggestions of articles for further reading. The feature will be available on both desktop and mobile. Readers of Catalan, Hebrew, and Italian Wikipedias and some sister projects will receive the change between May 21 and mid-June. Readers of other wikis will receive the change later. The goal is to encourage users to read the wikis more. Learn more.
Some users of the Wikipedia Android app can use a new feature for readers, WikiGames, a daily trivia game based on real historical events. The release has started as an A/B test, available to 50% of users in the following languages: English, French, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Arabic, Chinese, and Turkish.
The Newsletter extension that is available on MediaWiki.org allows the creation of various newsletters for global users. The extension can now publish new issues as section links on an existing page, instead of requiring a new page for each issue. [154]
The previously deprecated ipblocks views in Wiki Replicas will be removed in the beginning of June. Users are encouraged to query the new block and block_target views instead.
Latest comment: 1 month ago1 comment1 person in discussion
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. [155]
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. [156]
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. [157]
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.
You are invited to join the Wikimedia NYC community for our virtual WikiWednesday Salon. This month's WikiWednesday will be fully online and focused on Wikimedia global trends, neutral point of view, and the Wiki Loves Pride campaign for Pride Month. No experience of anything at all is required. All are welcome!
An Articles for Creation backlog drive is happening in June 2025, with over 1,600 drafts awaiting review from the past two months. In addition to AfC participants, all administrators and new page patrollers can help review using the Yet Another AFC Helper Script, which can be enabled in the Gadgets settings. Sign up here to participate!
Latest comment: 1 month ago1 comment1 person in discussion
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 Trust and Safety Product team is finalizing work needed to roll out temporary accounts on large Wikipedias later this month. The team has worked with stewards and other users with extended rights to predict and address many use cases that may arise on larger wikis, so that community members can continue to effectively moderate and patrol temporary accounts. This will be the second of three phases of deployment – the last one will take place in September at the earliest. For more information about the recent developments on the project, see this update. If you have any comments or questions, write on the talk page, and join a CEE Catch Up this Tuesday.
Updates for editors
The watchlist expiry feature allows editors to watch pages for a limited period of time. After that period, the page is automatically removed from your watchlist. Starting this week, you can set a preference for the default period of time to watch pages. The preferences also allow you to set different default watch periods for editing existing pages, pages you create, and when using rollback. [158]
Example of a talk page with the new design, in French.
The appearance of talk pages will change at almost all Wikipedias (some have already received this design change, a few will get these changes later). You can read details about the changes on Diff. It is possible to opt out of these changes in user preferences ("Show discussion activity"). [159][160]
Users with specific extended rights (including administrators, bureaucrats, checkusers, oversighters, and stewards) can now have IP addresses of all temporary accounts revealed automatically during time-limited periods where they need to combat high-speed account-hopping vandalism. This feature was requested by stewards. [161]
This week, the Moderator Tools and Machine Learning teams will continue the rollout of a new filter to Recent Changes, releasing it to several more Wikipedias. This filter utilizes the Revert Risk model, which was created by the Research team, to highlight edits that are likely to be reverted and help Recent Changes patrollers identify potentially problematic contributions. The feature will be rolled out to the following Wikipedias: Afrikaans Wikipedia, Belarusian Wikipedia, Bengali Wikipedia, Welsh Wikipedia, Hawaiian Wikipedia, Icelandic Wikipedia, Kazakh Wikipedia, Simple English Wikipedia, Turkish Wikipedia. The rollout will continue in the coming weeks to include the rest of the Wikipedias in this project. [162]
AbuseFilter editors active on Meta-Wiki and large Wikipedias are kindly asked to update AbuseFilter to make it compatible with temporary accounts. A link to the instructions and the private lists of filters needing verification are available on Phabricator.
Lua modules now have access to the name of a page's associated thumbnail image, and on some wikis to the WikiProject assessment information. This is possible using two new properties on mw.title objects, named pageImage and pageAssessments. [163][164]
Latest comment: 1 month ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Updates for editors
You can nominate your favorite tools for the sixth edition of the Coolest Tool Award. Nominations are anonymous and will be open until June 25. You can re-use the survey to nominate multiple tools.
Foundation staff and technical volunteers use Wikimedia APIs to build the tools, applications, features, and integrations that enhance user experiences. Over the coming years, the MediaWiki Interfaces team will be investing in Wikimedia web (HTTP) APIs to better serve technical volunteer needs and protect Wikimedia infrastructure from potential abuse. You can read more about their plans to evolve the APIs in this Techblog post.
Latest comment: 23 days ago1 comment1 person in discussion
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
This week, the Moderator Tools and Machine Learning teams will continue the rollout of a new filter to Recent Changes, releasing it to the third and last batch of Wikipedias. This filter utilizes the Revert Risk model, which was created by the Research team, to highlight edits that are likely to be reverted and help Recent Changes patrollers identify potentially problematic contributions. The feature will be rolled out to the following Wikipedias: Azerbaijani Wikipedia, Latin Wikipedia, Macedonian Wikipedia, Malayalam Wikipedia, Marathi Wikipedia, Norwegian Nynorsk Wikipedia, Punjabi Wikipedia, Swahili Wikipedia, Telugu Wikipedia, Tagalog Wikipedia. The rollout will continue in the coming weeks to include the rest of the Wikipedias in this project. [165]
Updates for editors
Last week, temporary accounts were rolled out on Czech, Korean, and Turkish Wikipedias. This and next week, deployments on larger Wikipedias will follow. Share your thoughts about the project. [166]
Later this week, the Editing team will release Multi Check to all Wikipedias (except English Wikipedia). This feature shows multiple Reference checks within the editing experience. This encourages users to add citations when they add multiple new paragraphs to a Wikipedia article. This feature was previously available as an A/B test. The test shows that users who are shown multiple checks are 1.3 times more likely to add a reference to their edit, and their edit is less likely to be reverted (-34.7%). [167]
A few pages need to be renamed due to software updates and to match more recent Unicode standards. All of these changes are related to title-casing changes. Approximately 71 pages and 3 files will be renamed, across 15 wikis; the complete list is in the task. The developers will rename these pages next week, and they will fix redirects and embedded file links a few minutes later via a system settings update.
View all 24 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, a bug was fixed that had caused pages to scroll upwards when text near the top was selected. [168]
Updates for technical contributors
Editors can now use Lua modules to filter and transform tabular data for use with Extension:Chart. This can be used for things like selecting a subset of rows or columns from the source data, converting between units, statistical processing, and many other useful transformations. Information on how to use transforms is available. [169]
The all_links variable in AbuseFilter is now renamed to new_links for consistency with other variables. Old usages will still continue to work. [170]
The latest quarterly Growth newsletter is available. It includes: the recent updates for the "Add a Link" Task, two new Newcomer Engagement Features, and updates to Community Configuration.
Hello and welcome to the June 2025 newsletter, a quarterly-ish digest of Guild activities since April. Don't forget you can unsubscribe at any time; see below.
Hall of Fame: Congratulations to Dhtwiki for their well-deserved addition to the Hall of Fame last month, and thanks to GoldRomean for the nomination.
Election news: Voting in the mid-year coordinator election ends at 23:59 on 30 June. Results will be announced at the election page.
April Blitz: 14 of the 25 editors who signed up for the April 2025 Copy Editing Blitz copy edited 92,769 words in 30 articles. Barnstars awarded are available here.
May Drive: 31 of the 54 editors who signed up for the May 2025 Backlog Elimination Drive copy edited 384,392 words in 216 articles. Barnstars awarded are here.
June Blitz: 10 of the 12 editors who signed up for the June 2025 Copy Editing Blitz copy edited 26,652 words in 13 articles. Barnstars awarded are here.
Progress report: As of 02:30, 30 June 2025 (UTC), GOCE copyeditors have completed 148 requests since 1 January, and the backlog stands at 2,270 articles.
Thank you all again for your participation; we wouldn't be able to achieve what we have without you! Cheers from your GOCE coordinators.
To discontinue receiving GOCE newsletters, please remove your name from our mailing list.
Latest comment: 16 days ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
AbuseFilter maintainers can now match against IP reputation data in AbuseFilters. IP reputation data is information about the proxies and VPNs associated with the user's IP address. This data is not shown publicly and is not generated for actions performed by registered accounts. [171]
Hidden content that is within collapsible parts of wikipages will now be revealed when someone searches the page using the web browser's "Find in page" function (Ctrl+F or ⌘F) in supporting browsers. [172][173]
A new feature, called Favourite Templates, will be deployed later this week on all projects (except English Wikipedia, which will receive the feature next week), following a piloting phase on Polish and Arabic Wikipedia, and Italian and English Wikisource. The feature will provide a better way for new and experienced contributors to recall and discover templates via the template dialog, by allowing users to put templates on a special "favourite list". The feature works with both the visual editor and the wikitext editor. The feature is a community wishlist focus area.
View all 31 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, a bug was fixed that had caused some Notifications to be sent multiple times. [174]
Latest comment: 15 days ago1 comment1 person in discussion
The Wikipedia Library: Books & Bytes Issue 69, May–June 2025
In this issue we highlight a new partnership, Citation Watchlist and, as always, a roundup of news and community items related to libraries and digital knowledge.
Administrator elections will take place this month. Administrator elections are an alternative to RFA that is a gentler process for candidates due to secret voting and multiple people running together. The call for candidates is July 9–15, the discussion phase is July 18–22, and the voting phase is July 23–29. Get ready to submit your candidacy, or (with their consent) to nominate a talented candidate!
Latest comment: 9 days ago1 comment1 person in discussion
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
Temporary accounts have been rolled out on 18 large and medium-sized Wikipedias, including German, Japanese, French, and Chinese. Now, about 1/3 of all logged-out activity across wikis is coming from temporary accounts. Users involved in patrolling may be interested in two new documentation pages: Access to IP, explaining everything related to access to temporary account IP addresses, and Repository with a list of new gadgets and user scripts.
Updates for editors
Anyone can play an experimental new game, WikiRun, that lets you race through Wikipedia by clicking from one article to another, aiming to reach a target page in as few steps and in as little time as possible. The project's goal is to explore new ways of engaging readers. Try playing the game and let the team know what you think on the talk page.
Users of the Wikipedia Android app in some languages can now play the new trivia game. Which came first? is a simple history game where you guess which of two events happened earlier on today's date. It was previously available as an A/B test. It is now available to all users in English, German, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, Arabic, Turkish, and Chinese. The goal of the feature is to help engage with new generations of readers. [175]
Users of the iOS Wikipedia App in some languages may see a new tabbed browsing feature that enables you to open multiple tabs while reading. This feature makes it easier to explore related topics and switch between articles. The A/B test is currently running in Arabic, English, and Japanese in selected regions. More details are available on the Tabbed Browsing project page.
A new feature related to Template Recall and Discovery will be deployed later this week to all Wikimedia projects: a template category browser will be introduced to assist users in finding templates to put in their “favourite” list. The browser will allow users to browse a list of templates which have been organised into a given category tree. The feature has been requested by the community through the Community Wishlist.
It is now possible to access watchlist preferences from the watchlist page. Also the redundant button to edit the watchlist has been removed. [177]
As part of MediaWiki 1.44 there is now a unified built-in Notifications system that makes it easier for developers to send, manage, and customize notifications. Check out the updated documentation at Manual:Notifications, information about migration in T388663 and details on deprecated hooks in T389624.
WikidataCon 2025, the conference dedicated to Wikidata is now open for session proposals and for registration. This year's event will be held online from October 31 – November 02 and will explore on the theme of "Connecting People through Linked Open Data".
Please join us for the launch events to recognize the Wikimedia NYC 400!
Fulfilling Wikimedia NYC tradition, we'll start off the campaign with an edit-a-thon on Thursday and a Wiknic on Sunday, and will continue with Wikimedia NYC 400 events throughout the rest of this year.
Latest comment: 2 days ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Updates for editors
Featured templates, a new feature related to Template Recall and Discovery will be deployed this week to all Wikimedia projects: With this feature, editors will be able to quickly access a list of templates that are likely to be useful. These templates will be displayed in a list, under the "featured" tab of the template discovery interface. Administrators can define the list via the Community Configuration interface. The feature fulfills a request by the community through the Community Wishlist. [178][179]
View all 31 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, the request to add Malayalam fonts in the Wikisource Book Export Tool was resolved and now, the rendering of Malayalam letters in exported Wikisource books are accurate. [180]
WikiIndaba 2025 scholarship application and program submission is open until 23:59 GMT on July 20. WikiIndaba is a regional conference for African Wikimedians both on the continent and in the diaspora to unite and grow together. Submit your scholarship application and program proposal now!
WikiCon Brasil 2025 will take place on July 19-20 in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil. The Brazilian community members are encouraged to register and attend!
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Two new parser functions will be available this week: 
Template:Newyorkerize has been nominated for deletion. You are invited to comment on the discussion at the entry on the Templates for discussion page. Svampesky (talk) 03:22, 6 August 2024 (UTC)
Technical news
Arbitration
There is currently a discussion at Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Incidents regarding an issue with which you may have been involved. Thank you.
The redirect Template:Bruh has been listed at redirects for discussion to determine whether its use and function meets the redirect guidelines. Anyone, including you, is welcome to comment on this redirect at Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion/Log/2024 August 9 § Template:Bruh until a consensus is reached. — Red-tailed hawk (nest) 04:40, 9 August 2024 (UTC)
Please review and vote on Focus Areas, which are groups of wishes that share a problem. Focus Areas were created for the newly reopened Community Wishlist, which is now open year-round for submissions. The first batch of focus areas are specific to moderator workflows, around welcoming newcomers, minimizing repetitive tasks, and prioritizing tasks. Once volunteers have reviewed and voted on focus areas, the Foundation will then review and select focus areas for prioritization.
Guideline and policy news
Miscellaneous
Administrator changes
CheckUser changes
Oversighter changes
Newsletter ideas, comments, and criticisms welcome here.
Interface administrator changes
View all 19 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, a bug in the Add Link feature has been fixed. Previously, the list of sections which are excluded from Add Link was partially ignored in certain cases. [78][79]
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Got anything good? Tell us about your new, improved, old, or messed-up script here!
Featured script
Miscellaneous
Improve a script
Requested scripts
Updated scripts
Newly maintained scripts
New scripts
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). There was a long-standing bug where an indication for new notifications was only shown if you had unseen Alerts. This bug is now fixed. In the future, Minerva users will notice a counter atop the bell icon when you have 1 or more unseen Notices and/or Alerts. [136]
Bureaucrat changes
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