User talk:DMacks/Archive 66

This is an archive of past discussions with User:DMacks. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page.

Archive 60

←

Archive 64

Archive 65

Archive 66

Archive 67

Block a Sockpuppet

Greetings. There is a Alon9393's sockpuppet acting here in enwiki, exactly this one, as you can review Mmoreno25 Pichu VI (talk) 20:58, 7 March 2025 (UTC)

Bbb23 blocked it while I was offline. Thanks for catching it! DMacks (talk) 14:31, 8 March 2025 (UTC)

Hi DMacks

I had an inquiry to ask you but i'd rather not talk about it on here all i can say is there is alot of money involved in this. K109manlow (talk) 11:02, 9 March 2025 (UTC)

Invitation to participate in research

Hello,

The Wikimedia Foundation is conducting a survey of a group of Wikipedians to better understand their experiences! We are also looking to interview some survey respondents in more detail, and you will be eligible to receive a thank-you gift for the completion of an interview. The outcomes of this research will shape future work designed to improve on-wiki experiences.

We have identified you as a good candidate for this research, and would greatly appreciate your participation in this survey, which shouldn’t take more than 2-3 minutes. You may view its privacy statement here. Please contact me if you have any questions or concerns. Kind regards, Sam Walton (talk) 16:35, 10 March 2025 (UTC)

Tech News: 2025-11

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. [1][2]
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.
View all 27 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.

Updates for technical contributors

Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

In depth

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.

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

MediaWiki message delivery 23:06, 10 March 2025 (UTC)

This Month in Education: February 2025

This Month in Education

Volume 14 • Issue 2 • February 2025

Contents • Headlines • Subscribe

In This Issue

About This Month in Education · Subscribe/Unsubscribe · Global message delivery · For the team: ZI Jony 09:03, 12 March 2025 (UTC)

Nomination for deletion of Template:List of oxidation states of the elements/IB

Template:List of oxidation states of the elements/IB has been nominated for deletion. You are invited to comment on the discussion at the entry on the Templates for discussion page. – Jonesey95 (talk) 15:21, 16 March 2025 (UTC)

Nomination for deletion of Template:Oxidation state

Template:Oxidation state has been nominated for deletion. You are invited to comment on the discussion at the entry on the Templates for discussion page. – Jonesey95 (talk) 15:21, 16 March 2025 (UTC)

Tech News: 2025-12

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.

Updates for editors

The improved Content Translation tool dashboard is now available in 10 Wikipedias and will be available for all Wikipedias soon. With the unified dashboard, desktop users can now: Translate new sections of an article; Discover and access topic-based article suggestion filters (initially available only for mobile device users); Discover and access the Community-defined lists filter, also known as "Collections", from wiki-projects and campaigns.
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. [3]
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. [4]
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. [5]

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.
Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

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

MediaWiki message delivery 23:45, 17 March 2025 (UTC)

Colossus (supercomputer)

What did you revert to the earlier version of Colossus (supercomputer)? It is fully supported by the references I added. Somajyoti (talk) 23:02, 22 March 2025 (UTC)

As my edit-summary says: "WP:NPOV fail". There are so many non-neutral words ("boasting", "state-of-the-art", "this monster"). That would be great for an ad or a PR/news-release, but not an encyclopedia. See also WP:TONE. Now that you know about edit-summaries, maybe you could start using them also, so others can see why you are making some of the edits you did. DMacks (talk) 02:25, 23 March 2025 (UTC)

Nazi comparisons

You’re good? It seems like you have a very hard time dealing with differing world views, seeing that you have to revert any reference to your Nazi remarks even months later. Touchy subject, maybe noticed you overreacted? Considering you think you alone decide when and where people have the "final word" and when discussions are closed, maybe you want to think about yourself a little and do a little digging where those huge insecurities come from and why have to channel them here? DasallmächtigeJ (talk) 19:03, 23 March 2025 (UTC)

You must have me confused with someone else. I merely enforced the fact that "The following discussion has been closed. Please do not modify it." means exactly what it says. I was not the one who closed that discussion. But mention Nazis again and you'll have your edit-privleges revoked. WP:CIVIL and WP:NPA are fundamental behavioral policies on Wikipedia. DMacks (talk) 19:58, 23 March 2025 (UTC)

I indeed have to apologize, it was another user with a somewhat similar name that made those comparisons (which I was and am still shocked about). DasallmächtigeJ (talk) 20:20, 23 March 2025 (UTC)

Crazy how many people make up names that wind up similar to each other! Nazi comparisons are indeed inappropriate and disconcerting. DMacks (talk) 20:47, 23 March 2025 (UTC)

Tech News: 2025-13

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. [6]
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. [7]
View all 23 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.

Updates for technical contributors

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. [8][9]
Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

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

MediaWiki message delivery 22:39, 24 March 2025 (UTC)

IP vandalism

FYI, just reverted vandalism by this IP, I see they have a history: User_talk:50.223.200.26 Popcornfud (talk) 14:30, 26 March 2025 (UTC)

I gave a level-4 warning. Block would be next step. Thanks for keeping an eye on it. DMacks (talk) 16:16, 26 March 2025 (UTC)

Please block 178.142.0.0/16

Looks like the whole range needs to be blocked. See Special:Contributions/178.142.0.0/16. Last used for good edits two weeks ago, three day block shouldn't cause too much collateral damage. — Chrisahn (talk) 02:09, 27 March 2025 (UTC)

I started with a /24. DMacks (talk) 02:29, 27 March 2025 (UTC)

Makes sense, thanks! — Chrisahn (talk) 02:31, 27 March 2025 (UTC)

Tech News: 2025-14

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.
View all 35 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.

Updates for technical contributors

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.
Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

In depth

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.

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

MediaWiki message delivery 00:02, 1 April 2025 (UTC)

UTRS appeal #101757

Appellant hopes this is the appeal you were looking for. -- Deepfriedokra (talk) 18:34, 29 March 2025 (UTC)

User: Ponyo, thoughts about restoring talkpage access to allow one final chance? DMacks (talk) 17:43, 30 March 2025 (UTC)

Sure. -- Ponyo^{bons mots} 18:53, 1 April 2025 (UTC)

Quo vadimus? -- Deepfriedokra (talk) 11:44, 2 April 2025 (UTC)

Per this discussion and Ponyo's consent, I restored talk-page access so they can make an unblock request. DMacks (talk) 16:09, 2 April 2025 (UTC)

Thou art kind. -- Deepfriedokra (talk) 16:35, 2 April 2025 (UTC)

Help Needed

This IP address 103.31.154.231 has been harassing me. I will be grateful if you could take appropriate action. Oxiyam.Primal (talk) 17:14, 6 April 2025 (UTC)

[That IP posted additional harrassing content here, then deleted it; I will leave it deleted DMacks (talk) 19:12, 6 April 2025 (UTC)]

Blocked 1 week. Feel free to delete abusive content from your talkpage as usual. DMacks (talk) 19:12, 6 April 2025 (UTC)

Unblock request: User: Scerri

Hi DMacks. Could you please let me know what the situation is with respect to this request? Thank you Sandbh (talk) 10:55, 7 April 2025 (UTC)

Administrators' newsletter – April 2025

News and updates for administrators from the past month (March 2025).

Administrator changes

Dennis Brown

Bureaucrat changes

Barkeep49

CheckUser changes

0xDeadbeef

Oversighter changes

GB fan

Moneytrees

Miscellaneous

Sign up for The Core Contest, a competition running from 15 April to 31 May to improve vital articles.

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 18:45, 7 April 2025 (UTC)

Tech News: 2025-15

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

From now on, interface admins and centralnotice admins are technically required to enable two-factor authentication before they can use their privileges. In the future this might be expanded to more groups with advanced user-rights. [10]
View all 20 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.

Updates for technical contributors

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.
Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

Meetings and events

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.

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

MediaWiki message delivery 18:49, 7 April 2025 (UTC)

This Month in Education: March 2025

This Month in Education

Volume 14 • Issue 3 • March 2025

Contents • Headlines • Subscribe

In This Issue

About This Month in Education · Subscribe/Unsubscribe · Global message delivery · For the team: ZI Jony 15:03, 10 April 2025 (UTC)

Deefocus Glasses 2

That's WP:LTA/FUERDAI, he is targeting me with the spam bc I was the one that noted his migration over to RationalWiki. Spamming is his new MO. Lavalizard101 (talk) 17:30, 12 April 2025 (UTC)

A global lock is needed. Lavalizard101 (talk) 17:30, 12 April 2025 (UTC)

Done DMacks (talk) 18:24, 12 April 2025 (UTC)

Galosh

The Galesh language is a remnant of the Daylami language. The Galesh are the only people who hold ceremonies for their ancestors, the Daylami. The cities of Siahkal, Daylam, Ashkorat, Rudbar, and Amlash are the main places of the Galesh people. For example, the village of Al-Buyeh in Amlash, where the Al-Buyeh dynasty was formed, was descended from the Daylami people, and its people call themselves Galesh or Daylami. Please create a Galesh and Daylami section on Wikipedia. Armin fozuni (talk) 12:22, 14 April 2025 (UTC)

No, I will not be a proxy for you. DMacks (talk) 12:51, 14 April 2025 (UTC)

Excuse me, how do I find my coach? Armin fozuni (talk) 14:04, 14 April 2025 (UTC)

I have no idea what a coach is, or how to find one. DMacks (talk) 14:41, 14 April 2025 (UTC)

Tech News: 2025-16

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. [11]
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. [12][13]

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. [14]
"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.
On April 15, the full Wikidata graph will no longer be supported on query.wikidata.org. After this date, scholarly articles will be available through query-scholarly.wikidata.org, while the rest of the data hosted on Wikidata will be available through the query.wikidata.org endpoint. This is part of the scheduled split of the Wikidata Graph, which was announced in September 2024. More information is available on Wikidata.
The latest quarterly Wikimedia Apps Newsletter is now available. It covers updates, experiments, and improvements made to the Wikipedia mobile apps.
View all 30 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.

Updates for technical contributors

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.
Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

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

MediaWiki message delivery 00:21, 15 April 2025 (UTC)

Talk: Leonid Brezhnev

Many thanks for fixing the archiving/page move there. The editor also had moved the following 4 talk pages as well: Talk:Konstantin Chernenko, Talk:Yuri Andropov, Talk:Nikita Khrushchev, and Talk:Mikhail Gorbachev. I'm going to try to fix at least one of them taking your action as my template. If I mess up, I'll put in a call here. - Shearonink (talk) 13:23, 19 April 2025 (UTC)

Oh hahahaha on me...can't do the Move. "Page already exists". Oh well, beyond my poor editing powers I guess? I'll put in a request for the other 4 talk page moves at "Requested moves"...which has a backlog! Well, at least I tried... - Shearonink (talk) 13:45, 19 April 2025 (UTC)

The Talk:Mikhail Gorbachev page move had already been corrected by Queen of Hearts, I have put in Requests for the remaining three at Wikipedia:Requested moves/Technical requests. - Shearonink (talk) 14:13, 19 April 2025 (UTC)

Thanks for keeping tabs on them. User:Pppery took the lead on the other three. And it took multiple edits and admin tricks by them and others to accomplish each one. I gave a final warning. DMacks (talk) 17:22, 19 April 2025 (UTC)

Yw and HUZZAH. Yay Pppery! Glad they've all been fixed. I'm just going to do some minor clean-up on the talk pages' bits & pieces. - Shearonink (talk) 18:04, 19 April 2025 (UTC)

Tech News: 2025-17

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. [15]
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. [16]
View all 37 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.

Updates for technical contributors

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.

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

MediaWiki message delivery 20:57, 21 April 2025 (UTC)

Tech News: 2025-18

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.
View all 19 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.

Updates for technical contributors

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.
Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

In depth

The latest quarterly Language and Internationalization Newsletter is now available. This edition includes an overview of the improved Content Translation Dashboard Tool, support for new languages, highlights from the Wiki Loves Ramadan campaign, results from the Language Onboarding Experiment, an analysis of topic diversity in articles, and information on upcoming community meetings and events.

Meetings and events

The Let's Connect Learning Clinic will take place on April 29 at 14:30 UTC. This edition will focus on "Understanding and Navigating Conflict in Wikimedia Projects". You can register now to attend.
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.

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

MediaWiki message delivery 19:28, 28 April 2025 (UTC)

Deleting Template:Trans

I came across your closure at Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion/Log/2025 April 12 § Redirects to Template:Translation and Template:Transliteration, and I disagree with deleting {{trans}}. Looking at the dozens of comments in the discussion, I can only find two people who said that {{trans}} should be deleted. Most of the discussion was about the longer template redirects, and the proposal to delete the whole set was near the end (so previous silence doesn't imply agreement). And at least two !votes talked about "using {{trans}} instead" or similar, which implies not deleting it. I think getting consensus for deleting {{trans}} would likely require a discussion focused on that template redirect alone. jlwoodwa (talk) 08:34, 28 April 2025 (UTC)

Sorry for the delay in doing anything wiki the past few days...Real Life was a huge mess.

My closure was based on the sense that there was voiced risk of confusion about meaning with no easy way to recognize the mistake. There were indeed a bunch of ideas kicked around. Could you point to the two "using {{trans}} instead" comments? But especially if one (with one meaning some people like) is retargetted to the other's meaning (that some people like), we're making more of a mess for half of those people at best. I see comments that the deletion of trans/transl would be disruptive, but it seems like they are mostly taking about the one-time process of replacing them. I would be happy to add a note to the closure that the proposals of xlat/xlit or tlat/tlit were available as short forms and no prejudice against creating them. DMacks (talk) 21:42, 3 May 2025 (UTC)

Comments that implied keeping {{trans}}: one by Jkuldick, one by Jacobolus, and an explicit keep !vote by sbb. jlwoodwa (talk) 22:02, 3 May 2025 (UTC)

Here are my thoughts:

Jkudlick: does imply keeping {{trans}} but I did not see a clear rationale...merely that it's better than {{trans.}}.
jacobolus: does not explain why to keep {{trans}} specifically except I'm inferring it's because it is short. Later mentions {{tlit}}, and as I said I saw several such thoughts and options kicked around. But I did not see consensus for any one in particular and several venues noted that this RFD had been idling long enough. So I did not think I should arbitrarily pick one among several viable short forms for the replacement action or relist again to push for consensus among those options.
sbb's is a good argument from inertia of use and that they and some/many other users know what it means and use it correctly (several editors made comments along those lines). I tried to make sure my close acknowledged that position was voiced. But I gave greater weight to the multiple comments based on our guidelines to help a wider range of editors. That is, "some say it's confusing, some say it isn't" aren't equal-value opposites.

DMacks (talk) 04:49, 5 May 2025 (UTC)

Due and undue weight

Hi,

Regarding the self-referencing on the "polymath" entry. It is happening across all authors. Why exclude just me? Somebody has just taken my paper Modern research on Polymathy and created an edited version on Wikipedia. That is why the format is like that. Then some non-research people like Waqas Ahmed were added later.

Second, it seems that the breadth, depth, integration approach from my model has become a major view on the construct:

See independent references to this here:

https://www.polymathu.org/fellowship

https://www.forbes.com/sites/traversmark/2024/01/16/do-you-have-a-polymathic-personality-a-psychologist-explains/

https://www.amazon.com.au/Polymath-Multiple-Disciplines-Extraordinary-Autodidact/dp/1647431638

https://www.amazon.com.au/Learn-Like-Polymath-Multidisciplinary-Irreplaceable-ebook/dp/B08JKPHMX7

https://www.amazon.com/Why-Polymaths-Multi-Specialists-Revolutionize-Learn/dp/B0CSVXZ7VY

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/beyond-school-walls/202005/cross-pollinate-your-mind

Here are the other authors' entries for your convenience:

Robert Root-Bernstein and colleagues [edit source] Robert Root-Bernstein is considered the principal responsible for rekindling interest in polymathy in the scientific community. His works emphasize the contrast between the polymath and two other types: the specialist and the dilettante. The specialist demonstrates depth but lacks breadth of knowledge. The dilettante demonstrates superficial breadth but tends to acquire skills merely "for their own sake without regard to understanding the broader applications or implications and without integrating it". Conversely, the polymath is a person with a level of expertise that is able to "put a significant amount of time and effort into their avocations and find ways to use their multiple interests to inform their vocations".

A key point in the work of Root-Bernstein and colleagues is the argument in favor of the universality of the creative process. That is, although creative products, such as a painting, a mathematical model or a poem, can be domain-specific, at the level of the creative process, the mental tools that lead to the generation of creative ideas are the same, be it in the arts or science. These mental tools are sometimes called intuitive tools of thinking. It is therefore not surprising that many of the most innovative scientists have serious hobbies or interests in artistic activities, and that some of the most innovative artists have an interest or hobbies in the sciences.

Root-Bernstein and colleagues' research is an important counterpoint to the claim by some psychologists that creativity is a domain-specific phenomenon. Through their research, Root-Bernstein and colleagues conclude that there are certain comprehensive thinking skills and tools that cross the barrier of different domains and can foster creative thinking: "[creativity researchers] who discuss integrating ideas from diverse fields as the basis of creative giftedness ask not 'who is creative?' but 'what is the basis of creative thinking?' From the polymathy perspective, giftedness is the ability to combine disparate (or even apparently contradictory) ideas, sets of problems, skills, talents, and knowledge in novel and useful ways. Polymathy is therefore the main source of any individual's creative potential". In "Life Stages of Creativity", Robert and Michèle Root-Bernstein suggest six typologies of creative life stages. These typologies are based on real creative production records first published by Root-Bernstein, Bernstein, and Garnier (1993).

Type 1 represents people who specialize in developing one major talent early in life (e.g., prodigies) and successfully exploit that talent exclusively for the rest of their lives. Type 2 individuals explore a range of different creative activities (e.g., through worldplay or a variety of hobbies) and then settle on exploiting one of these for the rest of their lives. Type 3 people are polymathic from the outset and manage to juggle multiple careers simultaneously so that their creativity pattern is constantly varied. Type 4 creators are recognized early for one major talent (e.g., math or music) but go on to explore additional creative outlets, diversifying their productivity with age. Type 5 creators devote themselves serially to one creative field after another. Type 6 people develop diversified creative skills early and then, like Type 5 individuals, explore these serially, one at a time.

Finally, his studies suggest that understanding polymathy and learning from polymathic exemplars can help structure a new model of education that better promotes creativity and innovation: "we must focus education on principles, methods, and skills that will serve them [students] in learning and creating across many disciplines, multiple careers, and succeeding life stages".

Peter Burke [edit source] Peter Burke, Professor Emeritus of Cultural History and Fellow of Emmanuel College at Cambridge, discussed the theme of polymathy in some of his works. He has presented a comprehensive historical overview of the ascension and decline of the polymath as, what he calls, an "intellectual species". He observes that in ancient and medieval times, scholars did not have to specialize. However, from the 17th century on, the rapid rise of new knowledge in the Western world—both from the systematic investigation of the natural world and from the flow of information coming from other parts of the world—was making it increasingly difficult for individual scholars to master as many disciplines as before. Thus, an intellectual retreat of the polymath species occurred: "from knowledge in every [academic] field to knowledge in several fields, and from making original contributions in many fields to a more passive consumption of what has been contributed by others". Given this change in the intellectual climate, it has since then been more common to find "passive polymaths", who consume knowledge in various domains but make their reputation in one single discipline, than "proper polymaths", who—through a feat of "intellectual heroism"—manage to make serious contributions to several disciplines. However, Burke warns that in the age of specialization, polymathic people are more necessary than ever, both for synthesis—to paint the big picture—and for analysis. He says: "It takes a polymath to 'mind the gap' and draw attention to the knowledges that may otherwise disappear into the spaces between disciplines, as they are currently defined and organized".

Bharath Sriraman [edit source] Bharath Sriraman, of the University of Montana, also investigated the role of polymathy in education. He poses that an ideal education should nurture talent in the classroom and enable individuals to pursue multiple fields of research and appreciate both the aesthetic and structural/scientific connections between mathematics, arts and the sciences. In 2009, Sriraman published a paper reporting a 3-year study with 120 pre-service mathematics teachers and derived several implications for mathematics pre-service education as well as interdisciplinary education. He utilized a hermeneutic-phenomenological approach to recreate the emotions, voices and struggles of students as they tried to unravel Russell's paradox presented in its linguistic form. They found that those more engaged in solving the paradox also displayed more polymathic thinking traits. He concludes by suggesting that fostering polymathy in the classroom may help students change beliefs, discover structures and open new avenues for interdisciplinary pedagogy. DrMikeAraki (talk) 17:09, 5 May 2025 (UTC)

Your improper close of the transl, trans template deletion discussion

I'm quite unimpressed with your closure at Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion/Log/2025 April 12#Redirects to Template:Translation and Template:Transliteration in which your personal preference (what you personally thought was a "convincing argument") was substituted for community consensus (no consensus was in evidence, and indeed there was stark disagreement). A variety of good arguments were presented for keeping {{transl}} as an abbreviation for {{Transliteration}} and {{trans}} as an abbreviation for {{Translation}}, especially that they have long history and many uses so that deleting them will be disruptive and will break viewing historical revisions of a large number of pages.

Bots are now already disruptively implementing this decision, spamming watchlists with pointless template renames that leaves the resulting page markup much visually heavier and runs counter to human editor intentions (of using concise template names). –jacobolus (t) 04:10, 5 May 2025 (UTC)

As I mentioned two sections above, there were multiple mentions of other short forms that were not ambiguous, and I would be happy to explicitly note that they are still available options if someone wants to make them. I definitely did not simply count noses, but instead used strength of argument that seemed the least problematic for all involved. A stark disagreement doesn't mean that there is an equal deadlock. DMacks (talk) 04:24, 5 May 2025 (UTC)

@DMacks I agree you didn't count noses: indeed, your personal preference that you went with was only supported by a minority of editors, for which there was certainly no consensus, with many reasonable and clearly explained objections.

In any event, "still available options" is not all that relevant since your close has predictably now resulted in bots aggressively replacing every instance of {{transl}} with {{Transliteration}}, cluttering up page markup and trampling editors' intentions on a vast number of pages. (If you want to go request that the bot author at least change those all to {{tlit}} instead, I for one would appreciate it. Overall this deletion is going to be somewhat disruptive one way or another, but adopting a different abbreviated name instead of the very long and distracting full name would at least avoid making the end-result markup significantly worse than before.) –jacobolus (t) 19:55, 5 May 2025 (UTC)

Tech News: 2025-19

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 has shared the latest draft update to their annual plan for next year (July 2025–June 2026). This includes an executive summary (also on Diff), details about the three main goals (Infrastructure, Volunteer Support, and Effectiveness), global trends, and the budget and financial model. Feedback and questions are welcome on the talk page until the end of May.

Updates for editors

For wikis that have the CampaignEvents extension enabled, two new feature improvements have been released:
- 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.
View all 27 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.

Updates for technical contributors

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. [17]
Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

In depth

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.

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

MediaWiki message delivery 00:11, 6 May 2025 (UTC)