This is an archive of past discussions with User:Polygnotus. 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.
According to Google Maps and Google Streetview Achnabat consists of a house, a farm building, and some sheep. It is beautiful, and it would be the perfect home for a secret society (if they all fit in a single house). Better still, it is very very close to Loch Ness and its monster. But considering the vandal also claimed that a tiny village in Poland was founded by the "illuminate" (sic) I think it is reasonable to remove those claims until reliable sources have been provided. ;-) https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Rak%C3%B3wiec&diff=prev&oldid=867137355Polygnotus (talk) 20:56, 15 September 2022 (UTC)
I was wondering why you moved Accelerated experiential dynamic psychotherapy to Draft space. It was not an appropriate article to move to Draft space so I don't think you understand the rules surrounding what articles are draftified and which ones are not. Please do not move any more articles to Draft space until you are more clear on the guidelines of how this is supposed to be done. Thanks. LizRead!Talk!08:57, 26 November 2022 (UTC)
Hello! Voting in the 2022 Arbitration Committee elections is now open until 23:59 (UTC) on Monday, 12 December 2022. 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.
Hi Polygnotus! Hope you are having a good day and thank you for wading through pages in userspace that are not appropriate to be on wikipedia. I came across a few such pages you had used the WP:PROD process on that are in userspace; however, WP:PROD can only be used on articles. If something is in userspace, then it can either be deleted via WP:CSD criteria such as WP:U5: Not a webhost, WP:G3: Blantant hoax/vandalism, WP:G10: Attack page, WP:G11: Purely promotional page or others (all of which are listed at WP:CSD). You might want to consider using WP:Twinkle to help with this, as it allows you to pick CSD categories from a tool dropdown. Have a great rest of your day. Cheers! TartarTorte15:17, 22 September 2023 (UTC)
Hello! Voting in the 2023 Arbitration Committee elections is now open until 23:59 (UTC) on Monday, 11 December 2023. 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.
I acknowledge both of your points. Still, Wikipedia is a collaborative project. You have not violated any policies or guidelines but you could help out your fellow editors. Chris Troutman (talk)15:33, 8 December 2023 (UTC)
This may be a stupid question but why are editsummaries useful to you? I've seen people use an intentionally misleading editsummary in the past so I personally don't trust editsummaries. I changed the section header to something less alarming; hope you don't mind. Polygnotus (talk) 17:18, 8 December 2023 (UTC)
It would probably be easy to write a script that checks what kind of edit I make and fills in the editsummary for me. E.g. if I edit an article and only change 1 character it was probably a typo. And if an edit is on a talkpage it was probably my 2 cents in a discussion. I can't really promise to use editsummaries consistently because I rarely see a reason to use them. If that means that more people check the actual edit to see what I am doing then that is a good thing imho. Polygnotus (talk) 17:32, 8 December 2023 (UTC)
Edit summaries are part of my countervandalism efforts. I am not familiar with you as an editor, so I have less inclination to trust what you contribute. At the same time, if you are being useful I would prefer not to waste time checking up on you when there are others to chase down. Edit summaries are just a good practice as a demonstration of collaboration and everyone should be north of 90% usage. There is already a setting in your preferences menu to have the interface warn you if you leave off an edit summary. I appreciate what help you can give us in this regard. Chris Troutman (talk)17:53, 8 December 2023 (UTC)
That is an 18 year old script. Modern anti-vandalism tools are far more advanced and use stuff like ORES to separate the wheat from the chaff. Me using editsummaries won't help or hinder with anti-vandalism efforts. Polygnotus (talk) 03:04, 9 December 2023 (UTC)
Sources in Hebrew
I saw your comment in which you tagged me. It's great that you've managed to find the sources, if you need something in future I'd be happy to help. Alaexis¿question?21:58, 19 February 2024 (UTC)
@Alaexis: Thank you! I haven't found Conceiving Agency: Reproductive Authority among Haredi Women by Michal S. Raucher yet, so I may have to buy it (or ask the author for a copy). Polygnotus (talk) 22:16, 19 February 2024 (UTC)
On 13 April 2024, Did you know was updated with a fact from the article Grave with the Hands, which you recently created, substantially expanded, or brought to good article status. The fact was ... that the Grave with the Hands(pictured) commemorates a married couple, divided by society and religion, clasping hands between cemeteries after death? The nomination discussion and review may be seen at Template:Did you know nominations/Grave with the Hands. You are welcome to check how many pageviews the nominated article or articles got while on the front page (here's how, Grave with the Hands), and the hook may be added to the statistics page after its run on the Main Page has completed. Finally, if you know of an interesting fact from another recently created article, then please feel free to suggest it on the Did you know talk page.
Thank you for your contributions to Wikipedia. Regarding your edits to User talk:Ian (Wiki Ed), please use the preview button before you save your edit; this helps you find any errors you have made and prevents clogging up recent changes and the page history, as well as helping prevent edit conflicts. Below the edit box is a Show preview button. Pressing this will show you what the page will look like without actually saving it.
The Show preview button is right next to the Publish changes button and below the edit summary field.
It does not include an editor adding incorrect or false information to an article, or adding information without including a source. If the editor monumentally screws up an article, making a hundred errors because they are incompetent, or have no idea what they are doing while trying to improve it, that is not vandalism. Vandalism is only the intentional and deliberate obstruction of an article. No evil intent, no vandalism, no matter how awful the result. In the case of edits by 2601:248:5583:30C0:A092:8A9C:82:A7CE (talk·contribs), those were not vandalism, even though they deserved to be reverted (thanks for doing that). But please don't leave them a {{uw-vandalism}} warning unless it really was vandalism in Wikipedia's sense of the word. Thanks, Mathglot (talk) 22:13, 20 April 2024 (UTC)
@Mathglot: Deliberately introducing misinformation while attempting to hide it by using a misleading editsummary is definitely vandalism. The project's purpose is to give accurate information. Also, we kinda use a loose definition because this is called vandalism here when it is really just an attempt to hide the stupid things someone has done. In the Jupp article case the intent wasn't vandalism, it was helping the person. Polygnotus (talk) 03:27, 21 April 2024 (UTC)
I must admit I did not see a deliberate attempt to mislead on the part of the IPv6; the worst that could be said about it is that it was naive and unsourced, but that's not out of order for a newbie; I was there once upon a time. The edit summary business is more complicated than it looks; fortunately (in some circumstances) and unfortunately (in others—like this one) Wikipedia offers a drop-down containing some canned summaries, and some non-newbies regularly pick one of those that have little-to-nothing to do with their edit–unless you look at it sideways and squint–but since edit summaries aren't required anyway, it's hard to do more than just plead with them to use them because it helps their fellow editors and saves them time. And I do ask. Some say they say they will (and don't), others are quite forthright that they have no plans to change their unhelpful edit summaries any time soon if ever, and there's little one can do about that. Even if they keep it up for years, it just isn't a sanctionable behavior; unfortunate, but that's how it is. With a newbie, I'm perfectly willing to believe that they are using the edit summaries they are offered by Wikipedia—or simply copying what they see everybody else doing all around them—and so it's doubly hard to criticize them too much. For a newbie, I'd just make a gentle request about it, and hope for the best. Indeed you are right about the project's purpose, but the long and the short of it is this: a new editor (or an experienced one!) who bollixes up an article with a terrible edit with laughably wrong information they thought was right and with an unintentionally misleading edit summary cannot be accused of vandalism. Of other failings, very possibly, and they are worth pointing out on their talk page; but not vandalism. (This is one of those cases where the Wiki-meaning of a word doesn't really match the English dictionary meaning; another one is notable.) I'm swamped with other things right now, and may not get to Diamond for a while (who you pinged here, so they are probably reading this; did you want to say something to them?) but if you have a specific question or issue about a particular edit I'll try to help. Mathglot (talk) 04:08, 21 April 2024 (UTC)
Hm, I wasn't aware that {{User}} pings the user and that is unexpected, unintended and unwanted behaviour (a bug, according to some definitions) when talking about (and not to) someone. Guess I am not the first one to notice that but no one has fixed it. Statistically the user is incredibly unlikely to return, and if they do it may be good to see that people are trying to clean up the mess.
Wikipedia offers a drop-down containing some canned summaries It does? Where? Is this a Visual Editor exclusive thing or can us common folk use it too?
If someone is using an editsummary that tries to disguise the fact that they are vandalising by pretending its a boring and innocent edit (e.g. "Fixed typo"), isn't that a clear indication that they know they are doing something bad?
(edit conflict) Wow, good find on that Talk discussion; the confusion doesn't surprise me; it's non-intuitive. There are two dropdowns for summaries under the edit summary field, my (fake) edit summary on this edit is the top one on the right. There's one (non-newbie) editor who uses it constantly for all sorts of things; I've asked him a few times not to, it's irksome, but I've gotten nowhere; it's plain he plans to continue and there's nothing to be done about it. Mathglot (talk) 05:36, 21 April 2024 (UTC)
Turns out that is a WP:GADGET, more specifically MediaWiki:Gadget-defaultsummaries.js, which is off by default. The gadget contains a bunch of canned editsummaries, but not the one the IP used. And without an account enabling a gadget requires a bit more work than simply checking a checkbox. So I don't think that is what happened.
Sadly, I am unable to find the link to the user talk page. I think I deleted it because the block was good, even though the justification for it was not. Polygnotus (talk) 06:36, 21 April 2024 (UTC)
Good sleuthing; I probably turned it on in my early days here under the recommendation of someone more experienced, and long since forgot about it. Thanks for the reminder. Mathglot (talk) 06:45, 21 April 2024 (UTC)
Some ninja editing
I happen to have the page on my watchlist so saw your recent edit. I was just wandering how you came across the mistake - any special tools for it? or just a coincedence? Thanks and well done on the fix anyways! Cheers, --SuperJew (talk) 12:43, 29 May 2024 (UTC)
@SuperJew: Finding and fixing them all by hand would be horrible . Computers can save a lot of time but they can't do it automatically because they don't understand text. I created a list of tools here. Polygnotus (talk) 12:56, 29 May 2024 (UTC)
Please just delete your last post at ANI. All your whining about how badly you've been / are being treated accomplishes nothing except (1) distracting from the issue you want people to discuss, and (2) casting you in a poor light. Several other people have already said words to this effect to you, and you have responded by making the problem worse (by continuing to whine and argue with them). I hope to avoid that in this case by putting this here, on your talk page, and by promising that I will have no other involvement in this issue beyond offering you this advice. Good luck. --JBL (talk) 19:19, 19 July 2024 (UTC)
@JayBeeEll: I wish I could borrow your brain for a second so I could see the situation through your eyes (and vice versa). This would make life so much easier. How should I respond to the HandThatFeeds in a manner that you would not consider to be whiny? I am not very zen, or very not zen, so in situations like this I appreciate any and all outside perspective. Polygnotus (talk) 19:25, 19 July 2024 (UTC)
I do not see any reason that you need to respond to them. But if you are going to respond to them, you should stop being so defensive: no one is looking for you to further justify yourself, they are giving you advice about why your initial report was poorly received. This involves a degree of criticism of how you did things; so be it. Not every criticism needs a rebuttal. --JBL (talk) 19:30, 19 July 2024 (UTC)
Especially, since it seems that people agree that there is something problematic about the behavior you reported: just let the part of the conversation that's about you die quietly, so that the part that's about the relevant issue can have more air. --JBL (talk) 19:32, 19 July 2024 (UTC)
Thank you, good points! I saw a problem and (too) quickly reported it; assuming any goodfaithed person would check some diffs and come to the same conclusion I did. In hindsight I should've compiled the mountain of evidence first. When I am more zen I don't feel the need to defend myself. Polygnotus (talk) 19:38, 19 July 2024 (UTC)
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
Stewards can now globally block accounts. Before the change only IP addresses and IP ranges could be blocked globally. Global account blocks are useful when the blocked user should not be logged out. Global locks (a similar tool logging the user out of their account) are unaffected by this change. The new global account block feature is related to the Temporary Accounts project, which is a new type of user account that replaces IP addresses of unregistered editors that are no longer made public.
Later this week, Wikimedia site users will notice that the Interface of FlaggedRevs (also known as "Pending Changes") is improved and consistent with the rest of the MediaWiki interface and Wikimedia's design system. The FlaggedRevs interface experience on mobile and Minerva skin was inconsistent before it was fixed and ported to Codex by the WMF Growth team and some volunteers. [1]
Wikimedia site users can now submit account vanishing requests via GlobalVanishRequest. This feature is used when a contributor wishes to stop editing forever. It helps you hide your past association and edit to protect your privacy. Once processed, the account will be locked and renamed. [2]
Have you tried monitoring and addressing vandalism in Wikipedia using your phone? A Diff blog post on Patrolling features in the Mobile App highlights some of the new capabilities of the feature, including swiping through a feed of recent changes and a personal library of user talk messages for use when patrolling from your phone.
Wikimedia contributors and GLAM (galleries, libraries, archives, and museums) organisations can now learn and measure the impact Wikimedia Commons is having towards creating quality encyclopedic content using the Commons Impact Metrics analytics dashboard. The dashboard offers organizations analytics on things like monthly edits in a category, the most viewed files, and which Wikimedia articles are using Commons images. As a result of these new data dumps, GLAM organisation can more reliably measure their return on investment for programs bringing content into the digital Commons. [3]
Project Updates
Come share your ideas for improving the wikis on the newly reopened Community Wishlist. The Community Wishlist is Wikimedia’s forum for volunteers to share ideas (called wishes) to improve how the wikis work. The new version of the wishlist is always open, works with both wikitext and Visual Editor, and allows wishes in any language.
Learn more
Have you ever wondered how Wikimedia software works across over 300 languages? This is 253 languages more than the Google Chrome interface, and it's no accident. The Language and Product Localization Team at the Wikimedia Foundation supports your work by adapting all the tools and interfaces in the MediaWiki software so that contributors in our movement who translate pages and strings can translate them and have the sites in all languages. Read more about the team and their upcoming work on Diff.
How can Wikimedia build innovative and experimental products while maintaining such heavily used websites? A recent blog post by WMF staff Johan Jönsson highlights the work of the WMF Future Audience initiative, where the goal is not to build polished products but test out new ideas, such as a ChatGPT plugin and Add a Fact, to help take Wikimedia into the future.
Please do not empty out a category so that it gets tagged for speedy deletion, CSD C1. This is called "emptying categories out of process" and it can result in your edits being reverted. Instead, if you want a category deleted, renamed or merged, please make a proposal at WP:CFD where the move can be reviewed by other editors who focus on categories. Thank you. LizRead!Talk!03:41, 25 July 2024 (UTC)
Ah, good point! The article looks better now (imo) but there is still lots of work to be done. Thanks for tagging the category! Polygnotus (talk) 03:52, 25 July 2024 (UTC)
You have recently edited a page related to post-1992 politics of the United States and closely related people, a topic designated as contentious. This is a brief introduction to contentious topics and does not imply that there are any issues with your editing.
A special set of rules applies to certain topic areas, which are referred to as contentious topics. These are specially designated topics that tend to attract more persistent disruptive editing than the rest of the project and have been designated as contentious topics by the Arbitration Committee. When editing a contentious topic, Wikipedia’s norms and policies are more strictly enforced, and Wikipedia administrators have special powers in order to reduce disruption to the project.
Within contentious topics, editors should edit carefully and constructively, refrain from disrupting the encyclopedia, and:
adhere to the purposes of Wikipedia;
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refrain from gaming the system.
Editors are advised to err on the side of caution if unsure whether making a particular edit is consistent with these expectations. If you have any questions about contentious topics procedures you may ask them at the arbitration clerks' noticeboard or you may learn more about this contentious topic here. You may also choose to note which contentious topics you know about by using the {{Ctopics/aware}} template. Johnuniq (talk) 00:13, 28 July 2024 (UTC)
Tech News: 2024-31
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 using the Visual Editor in languages that use non-Latin characters for numbers, such as Hindi, Manipuri and Eastern Arabic, may notice some changes in the formatting of reference numbers. This is a side effect of preparing a new sub-referencing feature, and will also allow fixing some general numbering issues in Visual Editor. If you notice any related problems on your wiki, please share details at the project talkpage.
Bugs status
Some logged-in editors were briefly unable to edit or load pages last week. These errors were mainly due to the addition of new linter rules which led to caching problems. Fixes have been applied and investigations are continuing.
Editors can use the IP Information tool to get information about IP addresses. This tool is available as a Beta Feature in your preferences. The tool was not available for a few days last week, but is now working again. Thank you to Shizhao for filing the bug report. You can read about that, and 28 other community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.
Project updates
There are new features and improvements to Phabricator from the Release Engineering and Collaboration Services teams, and some volunteers, including: the search systems, the new task creation system, the login systems, the translation setup which has resulted in support for more languages (thanks to Pppery), and fixes for many edge-case errors. You can read details about these and other improvements in this summary.
There is an update on the Charts project. The team has decided which visualization library to use, which chart types to start focusing on, and where to store chart definitions.
One new wiki has been created: a Wikivoyage in Czech (voy:cs:) [4]
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. [5][6]
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.
Hi. Thank you for your recent edits. An automated process has detected that you've added some links pointing to disambiguation pages. Such links are usually incorrect, since a disambiguation page is merely a list of unrelated topics with similar titles. (Read the FAQ • Join us at the DPL WikiProject.)
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.
Hello, is it possible to view my edits on Vikidia please?
Because I have a lot of problems and I would like you to delete my changes or hide it, it's on Vikidia too because I have problems. Thank you, it's written in French and you will understand. 81.248.177.61 (talk) 09:40, 18 August 2024 (UTC)
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. [9]
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. [10][11]
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.
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. [12]
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:
I see the joke TP CT page content, so apologies if this is redundant: You have recently made edits related to abortion. This is a standard message to inform you that abortion is a designated contentious topic. This message does not imply that there are any issues with your editing. For more information about the contentious topics system, please see Wikipedia:Contentious topics. Jclemens (talk) 15:40, 28 August 2024 (UTC)
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. [13]
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. [14]
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:
Hello @Polygnotus,
Thank you in first for the amazing work you do.
can you please helpp the community to fix the wiki page of the Italian supermodel Fabio Mancini?
I actually don't know how it works and I'm sure you'll work on it better with rules. because someone vandalise always the page with errors.
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. [16][17]
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. [18]
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. [19]
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). [20]
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. [21]
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. [22]
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. [23]
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
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. [24]
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). [25]
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. [26]
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.
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. [27]
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. [28]
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. [29]
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.
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.
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. [30]
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. [31]
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. [32]
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.
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. [33]
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. [34]
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. [35]
Please consider not adding "Resolved" to Teahouse posts. The original poster and/or Teahouse Hosts may have more to contribute. David notMD (talk) 10:24, 12 October 2024 (UTC)
97 different archives of the Teahouse contain at least one usage of that template. People use it to help others to avoid wasting time. Perhaps try the Idea Lab if you have a better suggestion. Polygnotus (talk) 11:06, 12 October 2024 (UTC)
I have often added that an editor has been indeffed, which I consider useful to others at Teahouse. But I was more thinking about your "Resolved" at the Kennedy kerfuffle rather than the edit warring editor. David notMD (talk) 12:23, 12 October 2024 (UTC)
Ah, I thought you meant the other one because I responded to you there. In that case I think we agree that no one can add anything of value. About the Kennedy-stuff, the poster expressed suprise that Wikipedia does not mention a thing that he or she misremembered. I strongly doubt that anyone can add anything of value to that after the case of mistaken identity had been explained, but if there somehow is something worth adding then people are still able to do that. The resolved template does not automatically lock or archive the section; people can still edit it just like any other section. It is used to indicate that the question has been answered, not to scare people off from editing the section. In some cases discussions do get closed, often when they are not productive, but in that case people use {{atop}} and {{abot}}. I have used those, IIRC, once to boldly close a nonsensical discussion. Luckily no one edited that section after that because it was a waste of time. It would be nice if the Refdesks and Helpdesks and Teahouse had something like a little icon to indicate that a question has been answered, that could save people time. Polygnotus (talk) 12:43, 12 October 2024 (UTC)
@Biohistorian15: Hiya! I changed the section header because we tend to use the %month% %year% format when telling someone off. I believe the race and intelligence stuff is rather boring because unfortunately there is currently only one living human race (although I do suspect one of my former neighbors might belong to the homo floresiensis). And we do not yet have a reliable way to measure all facets of intelligence. I read a bit of Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Race and intelligence but it was very boring. I would recommend the fascinating study of animal intelligence instead. Polygnotus (talk) 03:10, 6 October 2024 (UTC)
No worries. And I have met my fair share of people worthy of their very own taxonomic adage as well, haha.
Maybe you know somebody else to the (relative) left of these issues that is as charitable as you mostly were in our few past interactions. I just don't want to edit the thing for a long time with my sole POV involved... and then be called a POV pusher by uninvolved bystanders lol. Biohistorian15 (talk) 16:48, 6 October 2024 (UTC)
@Biohistorian15: I think that people who agree with me are very boring. My wife has yet to agree with me.
I (try to) remember the usernames of people who disagreed with me in interesting ways, or even convinced me, and of those who are experts on certain topics.
Unfortunately I don't know the political leanings of the overwhelming majority of users so I assume that everyone else is a despicable centrist anarcho-nazi-communist. You could ask @Slatersteven: if he is interested in this kinda stuff, but be warned, you should read their userpage first! But I would not describe him as charitable, because that might offend him. I have strong opinions on certain subjects, and I am very confident that those opinions are correct, but I never edit the related articles. I don't even read them. This is good for my mental health, saves me a lot of time, and it ensures I can laugh at anyone who accuses me of POV pushing. And when a debate doesn't go the way I want it to I can shrug and move on. If I would edit the articles about stuff I am passionate about irl then my passion would be a weakness for me as a Wikipedian. Polygnotus (talk) 03:33, 7 October 2024 (UTC)
You did pique my curiosity; how would you describe your POV? It is easy to forget that both the left- and right-wing are very diverse. Polygnotus (talk) 06:02, 7 October 2024 (UTC)
Thanks, I'll try to remember Slatersteven's name for future occasions like this, but after the predictable FT/N posting, I'll likely have quite a few dissenters to work with already...
Regarding politics on the matter, my position is actually much more moderate than it might look from the outside, it's ultimately agnostic; but in light of the kinds of hounding I've been through in the past (*people taking old sentence fragments out of context etc.), I can only deliver a passionate monologue if you mail me. Best of wishes, Biohistorian15 (talk) 11:20, 7 October 2024 (UTC)
Hey,
Do you by chance have the query you used to generate that file? I, @Hey man im josh and @Novem Linguae were discussing the possibility of throwing together a toolforge tool based on citehighlighter and it would be nice to be able to show users the number/a list of similar FA/GA class pages that use similar sources. Sohom (talk) 00:13, 1 September 2024 (UTC)
Hello @Sohom Datta:! I didn't use a query. Because there are so few of them I just made API calls overnight. I then extracted the URLs, extracted the domainnames, and did the counting in Java. Is it possible to see that conversation somewhere? Or was it on IRC/Discord? It sounds interesting. I may or may not have some ideas. Polygnotus (talk) 10:11, 1 September 2024 (UTC)
@Polygnotus: It was a casual conversation in the main English wiki discord channel on the en wiki discord server.
I've long loved the idea of putting a URL into a web site to see whether Wikipedia interprets it as RS, and that was the focus of the discussion. Novem was open to the idea, but they wanted to see that it was desired by enough people.
I like the premise of searching and finding "Canada123 is considered reliable source based on WP:CANADA and RSP page." Or something similar. I think it could be a very useful tool, but I'm still working on the idea of how/where to propose it. Hey man im josh (talk) 13:16, 1 September 2024 (UTC)
@Sohom Datta: I still have the code used of course and I'd be happy to run it again. It has been undeleted and moved to User:Polygnotus/Data/FeaturedArticleCounts (it is not very outdated because FAs are pretty rare, back then there were 6538 and currently there are 6566). My conversation with Novem Linguae is here. Novem Linguae added a bunch of them to SourcesJSON. User:Headbomb/unreliable also exists but I haven't really looked at it. GreenC keeps track of basically every URL on Wikipedia IIRC. Polygnotus (talk) 18:27, 1 September 2024 (UTC)
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. [36]
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. [37]
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. [38]
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. [39]
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. [40]
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.
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. [41]
Two bugs were fixed in the GlobalVanishRequest system by improving the logging and by removing an incorrect placeholder message. [42][43]
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 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. [44]
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. [45]
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. [46]
Customized copyright footer messages on all wikis will be updated. The new versions will use wikitext markup instead of requiring editing raw HTML. [47]
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.
Most of the time, when people revert your edits because you didn't follow all ten thousand Wikipedia rules, you don't expect them to help you out and make it right. Not this person. Thanks again. Eido INOUE08:08, 10 October 2024 (UTC)
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. [53][54]
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. [55]
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. [56]
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. [58]
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.
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 "13 April 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. [64][65]
Commons and Meta users can now efficiently retrieve the user's language using {{USERLANGUAGE}} instead of using {{int:lang}}. [66]
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. [67]
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.
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. [68]
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. [70]
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. [71]
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.
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. [72]
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. [73]
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. [74][75]
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.
Comment As a small part of this I'd like to thank you for providing me with the name of the Mega journal, it's already made my afternoon and
provided an absurd web design gaffe: the image on the page you linked gives a 404 error with a link url of megasociety.org/file/C_/Documents%20and%20Settings/chris/Local%20Settings/program%20files/qualcomm/eudora/attach/Garble_%20copy.jpg
Contained on the same page, a paragraph of "wisdom" that states that discussion of climate change is a victory for al-qaeda, and a poem which reads like a would-be academic's take on millenarianist dogma that makes me question whether the site is parody or an elaborate bit on Dunning-Kruger
Finally, the journal is currently hosted on a site which proudly displays articles which include in their abstracts things like Notably, FE gains [...] sometimes reverse, as seen in several developed nations. These reversals point to the saturation and decline of positive factors, coupled with the influence of negative causes such as dysgenic fertility, FE being the flynn effect. Note the eugenicist language and sentiment, further echoed in its opening paragraph which praises the authors of The Bell Curve for being a large part of the effect's study and notoriety. Touches on basically every eugenicist trope including our favourite, skull size. To quote one of its counterarguments to the Flynn effect's existence, As mentioned in the background section, one of the most obvious ways to appreciate that the FE is hollow is to consider the magnitude of changes that have been reported in various nations. Over relatively short spans of time the FE gains have been outrageously large, suggesting that past generations were at the level of retardation as compared to present populations. Nothing we have seen in real world behavior is consistent with such a massive change in intelligence., arguing that intelligence gains are simply happening too quickly to be real; based on "if they were, we'd surely notice."
So, what we have witnessed is people related to an organisation who publish on a website that largely discusses eugenicism and other pseudoscientific and conspiratorial beliefs, that has been on the 'climate change doesn't exist' bandwagon for probably a few decades, use sockpuppets and ips to edit wikipedia in order to ensure the organisation's presence on the site. They all also seem to write as if it doesn't come normally to them, something about it is just so jarring.
Finally, the title of another piece from the "journal" or "wordpress blog" that they contribute to: Ask A Genius 1099: “Woke,” I Wokeism, Wokeness, Wokeology
There is a lot of warring going on on the 808s & Heartbreak pag over the genres, synthpop is not sourced, can you please add the following genres to the article as it is protected:
Hello. There's recent discussion about her birthplace. The talk page also mentioned that the birth certificate at the last comment. I appreciate your time and review. Thank you in advance. 183.171.122.121 (talk) 09:56, 5 December 2024 (UTC)
@Bearcat: (Excellent name btw) And what tool do you use to find articles that contain categories and subcategories of those categories (where you use the editsummary duplicate categorization; already in subcats)? Polygnotus (talk) 08:01, 6 December 2024 (UTC)
Unfortunately there's no special tool for that, and the only reliable way to find that sort of thing is to notice it in the regular editing or browsing processes. What you're seeing right now is that I happened to catch an absolute minefield of hundreds and hundreds US elections being catted as "year in particular state" and "decade in particular state" and "year in United States" and "decade in United States" and "year in North America" and "decade in North America" and "year in world" and "decade in world" all at the same time — but there's no tool that tipped me off to that, I unfortunately just happened to stumble across it. Bearcat (talk) 08:09, 6 December 2024 (UTC)
@Bearcat: Hm, I checked >5k pages that contain Category: in the draft namespace according to PetScan and only a handful actually contained cats that they weren't supposed to have.
There were a bunch between <nowiki> tags and <pre> tags and wrapped in {{Draft categories}} (and the various redirects to that) and between <!-- and -->.
There were ~100 articles in mainspace that contained the template {{Draft article}}, those do not get automatically listed in a category so it would probably be wise to use the same trick that {{Draft categories}} is using.
Dannybot does not catch all uncategorized drafts across the board. It only looks at Category:AfC submissions with categories, which only contains drafts that have categories alongside AfC submission templates, and doesn't catch any drafts that don't have an AFC submission template on them. So if an inappropriately categorized draft doesn't have an AFC submission template on it, then it will not be added to that maintenance category, and thus Dannybot will never come along and the page will just keep sitting in categories until a human finds it.
Dannybot is also designed for drafts and never catches userspace pages with mainspace categories on them, which always have to be found by a human editor.
So for Category:Living people, which has over a million articles in it and thus would take days and days to manually search, doing an incat search on it is literally the only way to catch inappropriately categorized pages at all. So yes, it is a thing that has to be done, because Dannybot only catches some categorized drafts rather than all categorized drafts and never catches userspace pages at all. Bearcat (talk) 15:28, 7 December 2024 (UTC)
Dannybot is also designed for drafts and never catches userspace pages with mainspace categories on them Maybe I don't understand something, but it looks to me like task 11 catches userspace pages with mainspace categories. [76][77]
If Dannybot was catching all uncategorized drafts across the board, then Wikipedia:Database reports/Polluted categories (2) would always be empty, and if Dannybot was routinely catching userspace pages with categories on them then Wikipedia:Database reports/Polluted categories would always be empty, but neither of them ever are. The bot catches enough categorized drafts that the draft report stays relatively manageable in size, but the bot isn't catching all categorized drafts across the board — but the user report just endlessly grows and grows into the hundreds or thousands if I don't personally stay on top of cleaning it up every time it runs: I let it slide for several weeks earlier this year, and the first time I went back to it I found dozens of categories that had user content filed in them for months without the bot ever having touched it at all. The bot's helpful, but it simply isn't catching everything, because the reports are never empty the way they would be if the bot were actually catching everything. Bearcat (talk) 17:00, 27 December 2024 (UTC)
After reviewing your request, I have added your account to the rollback group. Keep in mind these things when using rollback:
Getting rollback is no more momentous than installing Twinkle.
Users should be informed (or warned) after their edits have been reverted. If warnings repeatedly don't help, WP:ANI is the default place to go. In cases of very clear ongoing intentional damage to the encyclopedia, WP:AIV can be used.
Reverting someone's edits may confuse or upset them. Whenever other users message you on your talk page, please take the time to respond to their concerns; accountability is important. For most users who message you, the tone and quality of your answer will permanently influence their opinion about Wikipedia in general.
Because the plain default rollback link does not provide any explanatory edit summary, it must not be used to revert good faith contributions, even if these contributions are disruptive. Take the time to write a proper summary whenever you're dealing with a lack of neutrality or verifiability; a short explanation like "[[WP:NPOV|not neutral]]" or "[[WP:INTREF|Please provide a citation]]" is helpful.
Rollback may never be used to edit war, which you'll notice to be surprisingly tempting in genuine content disputes. Please especially keep the three-revert rule in mind. If you see others edit warring, please file a report at WP:ANEW. The most helpful essay I've ever seen is WP:DISCFAIL; it is especially important for those who review content regularly.
If you encounter private information or threats of physical harm during your patrols, please quickly use Special:EmailUser/Oversight or Special:EmailUser/Emergency; ideally bookmark these pages now. See WP:OS and WP:EMERGENCY for details. If you're regularly patrolling recent changes, you will need both contacts sooner or later, and you'll be happy about the bookmarks.
To try rollback for the first time, you may like to make an edit to WP:Sandbox, and another one, and another one, and then revert the row with one click. I'm sure you'll do great with rollback, but feel free to leave me a message on my talk page if you run into trouble or have any questions about rollback. Thank you for your time and work in cleaning up Wikipedia. Happy editing!
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. [81]
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. [82]
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. [83]
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. [85]
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. [86][87]
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. [88]
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 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. [90]
Hello Polygnotus, warm wishes to you and your family throughout the holiday season. May your heart and home be filled with all of the joys the festive season brings. Here is a toast to a Merry Christmas and prosperous New Year!.
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)
Got anything good? Tell us about your new, improved, old, or messed-up script here!
Featured script
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.
Miscellaneous
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.
I think we need a bit better business due dilligence in re: the company that owns Britannica, Merriam-Webster, etc. It appears to be far larger (in staff and budget), deeper-pocketed (in terms of its global financing), and better managed as well, than current WP editors perceive. Written as a former research university faculty member, and former registered editor here at WP (that so happens to reside in Chicago, where EB has a major staff and office presence, I believe at the historic Merchandise Mart).
I personally have never the written for or edited the WP EB article (or for EB, for that matter, though I know faculty and other scholars that have, for EB). So I will look into the trends of our editing of our article, as the decision to restrict its editing, and the trend and tone of edit summaries of late—including the decision to place the the December 2024 accusatory tag—strikes me as heading in a wrong direction, for the good of WP. (By the tag comment, I mean, apart from very clear, objective, non-inferential evidence, which I am looking to see if anyone's posted.) Cheers. 71.239.132.212 (talk) 00:17, 13 January 2025 (UTC)
You often use the plural when referring to yourself, see WP:SHAREDACCOUNT.
the company that owns Britannica, Merriam-Webster, etc. That company is Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. and I have never edited that article. (update: now I have)
the decision to place the the December 2024 accusatory tag I assume you are referring to {{undisclosed}}. If so, see here.
If you are a former registered editor here at WP then your account still exists, accounts cannot be deleted for copyright attribution reasons, so you can still use it or create a new one. Have a nice day! Polygnotus (talk) 03:02, 13 January 2025 (UTC)
Tech News: 2025-03
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) [91]
One new wiki has been created: a Wikipedia in Tigre (w:tig:) [92]
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. [93]
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. [94]
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. [95]
Thank you for your concern over my topic ban, but don't worry about it.
It's just the way Wikipedia works and perhaps I can offer the thought that the unstated priority is that Wikipedia function and that admins are volunteers too, so the only feasible way to handle disruption is to be quick and exclude.
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. [96]
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. [97]
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. [98]
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.
Hi Polygnotus! Things have ended up a bit heated, which is unfortunate. I think the problem may be that various people have been looking at different things, and the confusion around this is creating issues. So in case explaining my position would help:
I do not think it is a BLP issue to discuss FC. It is not about a person, and simply saying that you think FC is a pseudoscience or (alternatively) has some real value behind it is not a problem at all.
If we know that someone uses FC because we have reliable sources stating this, discussing FC in terms of their use of it is also fine, and not a BLP issue.
If we do not have a reliable source saying that a person uses FC, but we assume they do and therefore say that they did not write what reliable sources say they wrote, it becomes a BLP concern. We are saying something about the person - that they use FC - for which we do not have sources.
If we just outright say that the books which reliable sources state they wrote are faked, then we have a serious BLP concern. We are making a negative statement about the subject without any sources to support it.
The problem in that debate is that we had a lot of #1, which I have no objection to. We had none of #2, because none of the sources we can use said that Kedar used FC, so it wasn't possible for #2 to be relevant. We did have a whole lot of #3, which is a BLP concern, but not enough to get really worried about. And then we have some of #4, which is a clear violation of BLP. My concern was mostly only with #4, not with #1 or even, really, with #3, (although that made me uncomfortable and was an issue, but not enough to feel a major need to address). I think you may have felt that we were complaining about #1 or even #2, but that was not the case. It was with the outright statements "Kedar did not write these books" for which there were no reliable sources to support that were the primary concern.
Anyway, the AFD has ended, as they always do. I suspect this will now move to the article talk page, and perhaps a future AFD, but at least there should be some breathing space. Thank you for taking such a reasoned stance. I think there was confusion about the nature of the concern, but I never thought that anyone involved was doing anything other than what they thought was best for WP. - Bilby (talk) 11:54, 23 January 2025 (UTC)
@Bilby: Hiya! I think that the situation is even more complicated than that. The labels become confusing and (at some point) almost meaningless because some see RPM as a subset of FC, and some use the label "FC" when they are talking about what they perceive to be the problems behind FC, and not FC in itself.
The reality is of course that we do not know, because we cannot know. We only have a few sources to go on. And if we wanted to know we would need to break the WP:OR policy and we lose our role as writers of an encyclopedia and become investigative journalists or detectives, which is not really a job anyone should do without getting paid in my opinion.
Wikipedians have a lot of leeway when talking on talkpages. This is very important because people should be able to freely discuss topics (within normal parameters of course, no four letter words and death threats and all that). Wikipedians really care about their freedom (see for example the response to Asian News International). The freedom to disagree, and even to say things the other finds offensive, is fundamental to not just Wikipedia but %insert boring platitude here%.
The idea that the statement (you wrote), "Kedar did not write these books" is a BLPVIO is false. And the idea that linking to that video is a BLPVIO is also false. Neither breaks the letter or the spirit of BLP. A reliable source has been provided (not sure why people keep ignoring that fact), but even if there wouldn't be a reliable source it would still not be a BLPVIO.
A simplified version is: Never use SPS as sources of material about a living person, unless written or published by the person themself (emphasis mine). Linking to a video on an AfD is not using it as a source of material for content in the article.
I spent most of my life working with people 'on the spectrum' (whatever that may mean), I have a bunch of familymembers who are diagnosed (and some who are undiagnosed, but show clear signs). I certainly don't dislike people on the spectrum; I tried marrying one. You seem to be Australian, but if you were local we could go to a pub and I could show you why the sceptics say the things they say. And a goodfaith user saying something they believe to be true is and should never be against the rules on Wikipedia (again, within normal parameters).
But to be honest, the question if those are BLPVIOs (which is something reasonable people can disagree about) is to me far far less important than the idea that we shouldn't accuse longterm goodfaith Wikipedians behind their backs of insulting and degrading someone in a very very vulnerable position. I take such accusations very seriously (see WP:ASPERSIONS). The infighting among some Wikipedians is a far greater threat to the project than any external force, including time, entropy, and the big freeze/rip/crunch/bounce. Polygnotus (talk) 13:08, 23 January 2025 (UTC)
I think you are mistaken. Writing "Kedar did not write these books" is a clear BLP violation unless we have reliable sources to support that statement. I fully understand why someone might come to that conclusion. But expressing such a statement (not an opinion) is absolutely a BLP violation, because per BLP we cannot make a contentious statement about a living person without sources. There is no room to move here - if it is contentious (and "he did not write those books" is certainly contentious) we need sources. It is unmistakenly BLPVIO. The video is also an issue, but on a talk page it is less of one, and I would not have raised the issue if that was all that occured.
Yes, I understand that we have leeway. But making an unsourced negative statement about a living person borders on libel, and that is why BLP exists. Historically we have had many issues here, so BLP was developed as a means to ensure that we respect the position we hold as Wikipedians, and understand the effect our edits can have. The last thing we should ever want to do is to cause harm to a living person, and making statements that are potentially untrue about living people is something that we should never willingly do. Which is why we rely so heavily on reliable sources - the assumption is that those sources (by dint of being reliable) have a process which ensures that the statements they make are true, or at least as close to true as they can confirm, and we rely on them to have conducted due diligence
Nothing was done behind anyone's backs. A concern was raised in the appropriate forum (BLPN) and it was discussed there. Nothing was done off-wiki and everything was in the open. It was not a case of WP:ASPERSIONS - there were clearly cases where people made unsourced negative statements, and addressing those statements is exactly what BLP requires us to do. BLP is one of the few policies that requires us to act, as it has clear statements as to what we, as editors, must do when faced with BLP violations. - Bilby (talk) 13:51, 23 January 2025 (UTC)
@Bilby: If you ever visit Europe, post a message on my talkpage and we can visit my local pub. I can help you write a sentence using RPM in a language you don't even speak. The source was already provided. It is not the sceptics, but the people who use FC and RPM who harm people in very vulnerable positions; including their families. See for example Tell Them You Love Me and List of abuse allegations made through facilitated communication. Note that those people falsely accused of BLPVIOs did not know the discussion was going on, and they weren't told, that is what I mean with "behind their backs". It feels rather ableist to find the idea that someone can't write insulting/degrading, does it not? I often wish I couldn't read. I enjoy traveling to countries where I am completely unable to read the local language. Polygnotus (talk) 13:58, 23 January 2025 (UTC)
I must have missed the source. What was the source that stated that Kendar used FC? Or, more specifically, that he did not write the books?
I have enjoyed visting Europe in the past. I had a wonderful trip to Vienna which I will always remember. The WMF funded it, which was great, and my partner was able to join me. I wish I knew more than about three words of German, but the history of the city was awe inspiring. (Australia also has an immense history, but you need to step outside of the cities to get a grasp of it). More recently I spent time in Delft, which is now my second favourite place to live (I am always going to be biased towards my home town), and if someone was dumb enough to offer me a job at the university there I would have my bags packed within an hour. These days, though, the focus of the uni is on China. I'm not complaining - I was in Xi'an last year, and get to be there again in May, and the people I met were some of the best I have ever worked with (plus I have a new appreciation for baiiju, which may well be my second favourite drink) - but I feel more of a cultural connection with Europe. Any places in Europe you particularly recommend? The trick is to find a conference in a city you want to visit, have a paper accepted, and then to convince the uni that you need a couple of days either side. :) - Bilby (talk) 14:29, 23 January 2025 (UTC)
See here. It's Kedar (not Kendar) btw. If I remember correctly the source that Kedar used FC (or rather that his mom used it at some point) was his mom. They then moved on to RPM (which some consider to be a subset and others consider to be closely related). As you can imagine the sceptics have the same (or very similar) criticisms of both FC and RPM. I do not have access to the book; do you?
While I do not believe in RPM/FC, the idea that all severely autistic people (as Ido's mom calls them[99]) are incapable of understanding language is most likely a bridge too far. To be honest, I don't even believe that autism is a useful diagnosis at this point because it is pretty meaningless when there are so many who could be called autistic.
It really depends on what you are looking for. For relaxation I like Portugal, for experiencing something new I recommend Georgia (and eastern Europe in general), for trekking Denmark. I love apfelstrudel. I haven't been to China (yet) but I really enjoyed the documentary series Conquering Southern China and Conquering Northern China. A couple of days either side won't be enough for a country that big! Polygnotus (talk) 15:12, 23 January 2025 (UTC)
I checked the source. It states that Kedar is described as not using FC, but that there is no evidence to say that he can write without a facilitor being in cueing range. This is a long way short of saying that he is using FC and that he did not write the books attributed to him. Nevertheless, it is at least supportive of #2 - he may be using FC, and FC is a problem. I would not have seen a discussion on those terms as a BLP concern. It is not supportive of #4 - outright statements that he did not write the books - and that was where my concern lay. - Bilby (talk) 22:58, 23 January 2025 (UTC)
Perhaps the most reliable source for the claim that he did not write the book is the book itself. I do not have access to it, but according to that IPv6 the person who wrote it (whoever they may be) wrote that it was written using RPM. And we know that RPM is the voice of the facilitator. And since Kedar is not his own facilitator... Polygnotus (talk) 16:19, 29 January 2025 (UTC)
No, at best taht supports teh claim that he used RPM. You are once again assuming that this means he did not write it. Neither of us knows if he wrote it or not, and neither of us has a source to state that he did not write it. We cannot state that he did not write it without a source anywhere on Wikipedia. - Bilby (talk) 21:22, 29 January 2025 (UTC)
I don't see a reason to disagree with the scientific consensus on this point. And many reputable organizations in the field have stated that they oppose RPM because it is the voice of the facilitator. If you believe that you are right, and the scientific consensus and those organizations are wrong, please prove it and you will be lauded as a hero and many people's life will improve because of you. Polygnotus (talk) 21:39, 29 January 2025 (UTC)
Do you have a source that states Ido Kedar did not write the books? Not that he has used RPM, or that some people belive that RPM does not work, or that his mother sits with him? The answer, at this point, is no. Do we have multiple sources that state that he types independently? The answer to that is yes. We do not make negative statements about living people without a source. We can make statements about RPM. We can consider that it is possible that there is a faciliator who may have an impact on his writing. But we cannot state that the book which he is said to have written are faked and were written by someone else without a source, and if we do we violate BLP. There are gray areas in BLP, points where the policy is unclear, but this is not one of them. - Bilby (talk) 22:03, 29 January 2025 (UTC)
The idea that such a source is required is incorrect. The idea that it is a negative statement is also incorrect. You keep using the word "faked" but I don't think the sceptics accuse anyone of actually intentionally faking anything (but you can ask them if you disagree). If you believe that you are right, and the scientific consensus and those organizations are wrong, please prove it and you will be lauded as a hero and many people's life will improve because of you. You did not respond to this part. Polygnotus (talk) 22:05, 29 January 2025 (UTC)
I do not need to respond to that part. The question is really simple - do you have a source that states that Ido Kedar did not write the books that he has his name on? Do you have a soruce that states that Ido Kedar does not write independently? If you have neither of those things, you can not express them as matters of fact, as Ido Kedar is a living person. BLP is not a forgiving policy. You need sources to make contentious statements about living people. - Bilby (talk) 22:13, 29 January 2025 (UTC)
I don't think you understand the BLP policy as well as you think you do. Did I make the claim that Ido Kedar did not write the books that he has his name on? Did I make the claim that Ido Kedar does not write independently? Note that the {{tq}} template is for quoting people and renders text in green. Are you demanding sources for claims I did not make? If you want to prove the scientific consensus and the organizations that work in that field wrong you can borrow 2 of my cameras. Polygnotus (talk) 22:16, 29 January 2025 (UTC)
You wrote "Perhaps the most reliable source for the claim that he did not write the book is the book itself." As the book does not say that he did not write it, and you did not provide anything saying otherwise, yes, you did seem to "make the claim that Ido Kedar did not write the books that he has his name on". But I was not addressing your statements so much as the issue at hand, which is what this was about - irrespective of whether or not people believe that RPM is unreliable, and irrespective of whether or not Kedar used RPM in whole or part, it remains a BLP violation to state that he did not write the books without a source to support the claim, and in the AFD that is what multiple commentators wrote. I do not have an opinion about the reliability or otherwise of RPM, but that is not relevant to the actual problem. - Bilby (talk) 23:29, 29 January 2025 (UTC)
Unsurprisingly I disagree. Note that the best evidence we have for the claim that Arnold Schwarzenegger can give birth is Junior (1994 film) (obviously). But that is a long way short of saying that Arnold Schwarzenegger can give birth. I do not have an opinion about the reliability or otherwise of RPM I would recommend doing some research on FC and RPM. Even just 10 minutes on Google. But be careful, after you do your opinion may be a "BLP violation" according to some. Polygnotus (talk) 02:34, 30 January 2025 (UTC)
I find it worrying that you keep saying that looking into RDP will prove that Kedar cannot write. For it to prove something, we need to know that a) RDP cannot ever work, and b) Kedar writes exclusively using RDP. What we have is a) that there is a lack of evidence that RDP works, and b) there is no claim that Kedar exclusively uses RDP. What we also have are reliable sources that claim he writes independently, and no reliable source that says, with certainty, that he does not. Therefore, saying that he could not have written the books, and is not able to communicate, is a violation of BLP. Anything else is tangential, and not related to the primary concern.
I understand that you do not see things the same way. This is a concern, but hopefully nothing will come of it. Nevertheless, I do ask that you be careful in following BLP, especially in talk pages when contentious material is being discussed. - Bilby (talk) 03:16, 30 January 2025 (UTC)
In my experience, my opinion often changes after I do a bit of research on a topic. Many things are not as they seem. When I dive in headfirst without much familiarity with or understanding of the concepts involved, it can be fun, but it is not always very productive. Anyway, would you like to join me on a quest to improve the article Virginia Christian? It is not a BLP. Polygnotus (talk) 03:36, 30 January 2025 (UTC)
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. [100]
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. [101]
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. [102]
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. [103]
I don't remember the incident, but looking at the details, it was probably a different way of imposing what's functionally an indefinite block. Nyttend (talk) 20:46, 29 January 2025 (UTC)
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. [104]
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.[105] You can now also insert <code> tags using a new toolbar button.[106] 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. [107]
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
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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. [110]
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. [112]
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. [113]
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. [114]
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. [115]
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.
I am fairly certain that an AfD will run again in the not too distant future, but I think it would be useful in the meantime to gauge consensus over the possibilities of such an article hosted at WP. I note that you did not opine on the discussion. What do you think should be done? Should Wikipedia remove the article? Is it possible to write one that won't be shameful? jps (talk) 14:53, 23 January 2025 (UTC)
@ජපස: I can't protect people when I am too involved in the discussion myself, or at least that would weaken my position. I wish this problem was limited to this one article. But look at Luis Elizondo, and look at Carlos Hathcock. Sometimes, journalists and "journalists" simply write down what someone says, and its not really intended to reflect reality as a whole; just a reflection of their POV. And often people just talk nonsense. How do we deal with the fact that sometimes all, or a large majority of, sources that mention a particular topic are full of shit? The easiest option is to not care, and contribute to the spreading of misinformation. Perhaps the best option is to refuse to cover certain topics. But how can we explain that to a community which contains people who are reflexive contrarians (like myself), and are unwilling to spend effort to try to understand what is being explained to them (unlike myself)? Polygnotus (talk) 16:34, 29 January 2025 (UTC)
I think we are at the mercy of community consensus, so I try to make the best argument and move forward. I am more-or-less a WP:DELETIONIST because of the deference I pay to both consensus and the acknowledgement that this crowd-sourced encyclopedia has no vetting process for determining expertise on any subject which basically prevents any coherent editorial policy from emerging. To me, that leaves editorial discretion to be at the level of inclusion/exclusion. All else being equal, exclusion is preferable to containing material that is obscurely referenced and obviously problematic because it is WP:SENSATIONAL and not reliable. jps (talk) 16:47, 29 January 2025 (UTC)
I mean, I'd !vote for that. But I am still curious, what do you think Wikipedia should do with the article on Kedar? jps (talk) 13:49, 30 January 2025 (UTC)
Every time I try to answer my alleged brain generates an endless string of "yet, but"s. I think we need to take WP:HARM far more seriously. This is just an encyclopedia, not having a BLP is not the end of the world, but having a BLP that is incorrect could cause serious harm. Polygnotus (talk) 19:29, 16 February 2025 (UTC)
Stable means that a problem has not been fixed yet. The fact that material is cited does not mean that it therefore needs to be included. Polygnotus (talk) 16:32, 13 February 2025 (UTC)
i have elected to ignore the trolling on my talkpage until you templated me. please do not post to my talk page again, and just stick to the two article talk pages that are relevant to this dispute. thank you in advance. Daddyelectrolux (talk) 20:11, 13 February 2025 (UTC)
@Daddyelectrolux: The template tells you that it's one of our core principles to interact with one another in a polite and respectful manner, and you just repeated the insult. Call me a troll again and you can explain your behaviour on WP:ANI. What accountname(s) have you used previously? Polygnotus (talk) 20:18, 13 February 2025 (UTC)
@Daddyelectrolux: You asked me not to post on your talkpage, but consider this an editwarring warning, and I may soon have to post an ANI notification warning. So you should really think about if you want to editwar, because like Cullen328 said you were already skating on thin ice. Polygnotus (talk) 20:32, 13 February 2025 (UTC)
i would welcome more eyes on the situation, so if you're inclined to take it to ANI then please do so (and make sure to ping me please). but i see no reason to engage with you any further and i will not post here again. Daddyelectrolux (talk) 20:36, 13 February 2025 (UTC)
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. [116]
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. [117]
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. [118]
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. [119]
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. [120]
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. [121][122]
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. [123]
I have a contribution, rather a suggestion to add a quote.
“Israel would be happy if Hamas took over Gaza because the IDF could then deal with Gaza as a hostile state.” -Amos Yadlin 2007
I heard this on a short video about the subject. Perhaps there are things you can pull from the video to add to the wiki. "Blowback: How Israel Helped Create Hamas"
With proper citations of course! I'll leave that to your discretion. Thanks for (making?) contributing to that wiki. I hope to see it more fleshed out one day. 67.248.240.162 (talk) 17:13, 18 February 2025 (UTC)
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. [124]
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. [125][126][127]
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. [129]
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 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. [130]
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.[131] In contrast, transcluding a file description page (e.g. {{:File:MediaWiki.png}}) will now restrict edits to the page.[132]
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,[133] and respects cascading protection.[134]
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. [135]
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. [136]
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. [138]
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. [139][140]
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.
Hi Polygnotus! In September 2024, you added a template to the top of the Psychology article, indicating that it contains promotional content. Since Psychology is a long article, it would be really helpful for other editors if you could clarify which parts you feel are promotional — it’s a lot to ask others to read through the whole page and try to figure it out. Would you please specify? Friendly, Lova Falk (talk) 10:08, 15 March 2025 (UTC)
@Wizmut: Thanks for stopping. I am pinging you here because Cullen328 is getting tired of the conversation on his talkpage. The best location depends on what you want to ask. I think that Help talk:Archiving a talk page may be a good choice, but if you explain what you want to ask I may have a better suggestion. The downside of that page is that there is not much traffic. Polygnotus (talk) 03:48, 17 March 2025 (UTC)
I want to know which type of refactoring is bad. EEng did this edit here[141] which merged a lot of small numbered archives. Graham87 did this edit:[142], a merging of monthly archives. Now, my type of editing is not the exact same (although sometimes it is[143]), but it perhaps comes with the same issue of undetected dead links (that is, links not findable by using the "What links here" page).
Hopefully without canvassing in my favor, the following editors have thanked me for the type of edit which may be peculiar to me: ElKevbo, Hritik Das, Super Goku V, Grorp. So I don't think it's just me who likes this stuff. Additionally several more have thanked me for adding archive bots, or changing their settings to be more "normal". And that normal is not really something I came up with - I used to really like tiny archives, but other users have told me they prefer 100k. Some like 200k, but they're outliers.
But that's by the by. The big problem seems to be refactoring. Should it just be EEng doing it? He does have thicker skin than other editors, but maybe it's better to have an RfC? Wizmut (talk) 04:04, 17 March 2025 (UTC)
By the way, back in December I took the bold step of overriding EEng's merging and flattened out the Phineas Gage archives. A user had complained that there were so many topics on the page that it was not loading correctly. This may have been the edit that removed the perception I had that archives are made of stone. I really do see the topics as individual items on a shelf, and the shelf was collapsing in that case (subject to dead link concerns). Wizmut (talk) 04:08, 17 March 2025 (UTC)
Lately I have trying to learn open-source methods of Mathematical optimization aka operations research in both python and R. Was my focus in grad school, where I had access to CPLEX, an expensive proprietary method. Wizmut (talk) 04:15, 17 March 2025 (UTC)
I would like to point out that EEng has come under considerable criticism by many editors for many years for their archiving practices. So, modeling one's own behavior on that editor's behavior is not a good idea. The general principle is that editors should use their time in any of a very wide variety of ways that indisputably improve the encyclopedia, and behaviors that irritate other editors with no clear benefit to the encyclopedia should be avoided. Cullen328 (talk) 17:06, 17 March 2025 (UTC)
As for Graham87, that editor was desysopped a few months back for a series of inappropriate aggressive administrative actions, so modeling one's behavior on theirs is also unwise, Wizmut. Cullen328 (talk) 17:11, 17 March 2025 (UTC)
Basically all types of refactoring of archives is bad, in the sense that it ideally should never (have to) happen. In some cases, there are still reasons to do it.
For example, Graham87 is a wikiarcheologist. There are very old edits that are not available on Wikipedia anymore, and Graham87 makes them available again. Graham87 has made almost 300.000 edits. EEng has made almost 100.000 edits.
I agree that EEng shouldn't have been messing with archives either, but the fact that someone else does a bad thing does not mean others have the right to also do that bad thing.
Note that what you are doing is not the same as what Graham87 and EEng were doing; you are editing every numbered version of an archive to get it close to some arbitrary bytesize.
The idea that condensing/merging talkpage archives is helpful is based on the misconception that people actually view them.
Lets look at the article of a famous guy. I picked Barack Obama.
The article Barack Obama receives quite a few views, regularly 20.000 per day.
Lets compare the talkpage:, it receives maybe 60 pageviews per day
The idea that archives should all have some arbitrary bytesize does not make sense, there is no reason to.
A lot of your edits are WP:COSMETIC and that only obscures what you are actually doing. Changing from one redirect to a template to another is obviously pointless.
You are changing the bot settings on a large scale and that is also a bad idea since it is a waste of time and you are polluting watchlists with pointless edits. If we wanted to change archive bot settings on a bunch of talkpages the correct way of doing things would be to get consensus and then use AutoWikiBrowser or Pywikibot.
The worst thing non-admins can do is try to clerk the dramaboards. What you picked is the second worst thing; pointless busywork on a large scale and wasting everyones time by polluting watchlists.
Note that there is no "correct" archive size. It allegedly used to be 32KB back when phones were not as powerful. Memory and storage keeps getting cheaper and cheaper.
Removing bot posts from talkpage archives is also not useful.
I still disagree to some extent. Today I would have edited Talk:Wolf Blitzer. Do you see what's wrong? Only some old undated topics are being kept on the page. The bot doesn't know what to do with them. Instead it removes only the newest topics.
And as is common, someone deleted the earliest topics.[144]
@Wizmut But the solution is improving lowercase sigmabot III's code, right? It is written in Python, and the code is here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Lowercase_sigmabot_III/Source.py Some people see deleting stuff on Wikipedia as a form of archiving, and back in the day it was far more common to just delete stuff on talkpages (or so I've been told). The bot can't archive the sections because it can't find a valid timestamp. It could make a list somewhere of sections it was unable to archive. Or it could store a list of threads it was unable to archive, and when it runs a month later it can archive 'em. Polygnotus (talk) 00:22, 18 March 2025 (UTC)
Yeah ideally the bot would. That's a Hard Problem, though, because sometimes talk pages have threads that are intentionally undated so the bot doesn't remove them. Example: Talk:List of vegansWizmut (talk) 00:34, 18 March 2025 (UTC)
@Wizmut I would not be surprised at all if intentionally undated threads that should not be archived are pretty rare. And I would also not be surprised if there aren't that many that can't be archived because of a lacking timestamp. So if the bot would log those then it would be possible to manually determine which threads should not be archived. And then we could use a template to tell the bot "do not archive this section". And write some documentation so that this isn't an undocumented hack but a feature. Polygnotus (talk) 00:40, 18 March 2025 (UTC)
Out of the X million talk pages, I would guess around 10 thousand have topics made before ~2008 that LCSB can't handle (ie with no date or an older style of date) and maybe 1,000 have intentional stickies. Although 90% of those don't have an archive bot.
If the bot would log which sections it can't archive you'd have a pretty short list I think. If you want to we can ask one of the maintainers to log that. Polygnotus (talk) 01:28, 18 March 2025 (UTC)
Related it might be nice to get a list of bots which have a tiny archive size set. (for example[145]) No idea how to search for them systematically. Or for pages with Archive_2 but no Archive_1[146]. Wizmut (talk) 03:13, 18 March 2025 (UTC)
@Wizmut I think it is time to focus your attention elsewhere (other than talkpage archives). Searching for non-sequential archives would not be worth the effort, because it is not a real problem. Same thing with archive size set too low or high. And your approach is very inefficient. When and if the encyclopedia is finished then we can worry about meta-stuff, ok?
There are so many problems in mainspace that there is no reason to worry about anything else. I fixed an ungodly amount of typos and I have well over 60.000 to go.
Did you check out Autowikibrowser? And mwparserfromhell? And Pywikibot?
Which of those tasks do you like? There must be something there that is a better use of time. If you have an idea what kinda stuff you would like to work on I may have some suggestions. Polygnotus (talk) 04:22, 18 March 2025 (UTC)
I was mentioning another task that could feasibly be handled automatically, by someone else. I had a few pages left on a to-do list I had made, but I'm not going to do them.
I understand that you and I disagree about how large certain problems are. That's ok. Don't worry, you win. Wizmut (talk) 04:31, 18 March 2025 (UTC)
@Wizmut A lot of countries publish open data. If you google "open data %countryname%" then you'll find that most rich countries publish all kinds of interesting open data that can be used to enrich and improve Wikipedia. Maybe check out data.gov.uk. Polygnotus (talk) 04:41, 18 March 2025 (UTC)
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. [147]
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. [148]
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. [149]
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.
Your recent editing history at Laura Kate Dale shows that you are currently engaged in an edit war; that means that you are repeatedly changing content back to how you think it should be, when you have seen that other editors disagree. To resolve the content dispute, please do not revert or change the edits of others when you are reverted. Instead of reverting, please use the talk page to work toward making a version that represents consensus among editors. The best practice at this stage is to discuss, not edit-war; read about how this is done. If discussions reach an impasse, you can then post a request for help at a relevant noticeboard or seek dispute resolution. In some cases, you may wish to request temporary page protection.
Being involved in an edit war can result in you being blocked from editing—especially if you violate the three-revert rule, which states that an editor must not perform more than three reverts on a single page within a 24-hour period. Undoing another editor's work—whether in whole or in part, whether involving the same or different material each time—counts as a revert. Also keep in mind that while violating the three-revert rule often leads to a block, you can still be blocked for edit warring—even if you do not violate the three-revert rule—should your behavior indicate that you intend to continue reverting repeatedly. 2A02:8084:5144:D80:1650:3334:2CCC:BE35 (talk) 23:00, 28 March 2025 (UTC)
I'll wade in here are say that this warning is clearly bogus, as were the previous ones. Polygnotus was right to remove the BLP violations and the only person edit warring here is our IP hopping friend who seems to be really keen to get themself blocked either for POV editing, edit warring or for harassment. --DanielRigal (talk)
I don't see what is wrong with the content. Especially seeing as this user is involved in a similar dispute on another page. Who have I harassed? Why do these warning templates exist if not to use them. And why am I IP hopping just because I don't have an account? So much for assuming good faith. 2A02:8084:5144:D80:C98D:7E3D:55DF:22B6 (talk) 23:44, 28 March 2025 (UTC)
You are trying to introduce inappropriate negative coverage into a BLP in what looks like animus against Dale. You are trying to bully Polygnotus with spurious warning templates for stopping you. We are not stupid. This needs to stop now. --DanielRigal (talk) 23:56, 28 March 2025 (UTC)
I still don't see how pointing out that someone made a mistake once is negative coverage. Regardless though, I have stopped - I haven't touched the page since your last revert. As for bullying, I don't appreciate that suggestion one bit. Especially given that you're now leaving threatening messages on my talk page. 2A02:8084:5144:D80:C98D:7E3D:55DF:22B6 (talk) 00:04, 29 March 2025 (UTC)
The template, in itself, means little. It is the fact that - when I post it - the recipient is about to get blocked that gives it its meaning.
Especially seeing as this user is involved in a similar dispute on another page. Yeah you kinda gave the game away when switching from one page to the next, because then it was obvious who (and what) I was dealing with.
just because I don't have an account You lost your password? I recommend Bitwarden.
I have never had a wikipedia account. Anyway, I've clearly upset you with my editing so I apologise. But you're making bizarre and hostile assumptions about me which simply aren't true. Anyway, I'm going to disengage now, but as an olive branch, I see from your recent contributions that you write JS. Here's a tip - you should use let rather than var wherever possible, to avoid hoisting issues and cluttering the global namespace. 2A02:8084:5144:D80:C51D:30E8:EBA:9665 (talk) 14:37, 29 March 2025 (UTC)
How dare you accuse me of writing JavaScript. That is disgusting! I write Java, because I cannot be trusted to clean up after myself (and as a form of selfharm). And I don't even use var because I think type inference is morally wrong (it is a form of discrimination). Polygnotus (talk) 15:03, 29 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. [150]
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. [151]
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. [152][153]
Please refrain from making unconstructive edits to Wikipedia, as you did at Achnabat. Your edits appear to constitute vandalism and have been reverted. If you would like to experiment, please use your sandbox. Repeated vandalism may result in the loss of editing privileges. Thank you. Dl2000 (talk) 20:02, 15 September 2022 (UTC)
Thank you for your contributions to Wikipedia. Regarding your edits to User talk:Ian (Wiki Ed), please use the preview button before you save your edit; this helps you find any errors you have made and prevents clogging up recent changes and the page history, as well as helping prevent edit conflicts. Below the edit box is a Show preview button. Pressing this will show you what the page will look like without actually saving it.
. Computers can save a lot of time but they can't do it automatically because they don't understand text. I created a list of tools here. Polygnotus (talk) 12:56, 29 May 2024 (UTC)
Two new parser functions will be available this week: 
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.
You have recently made edits related to abortion. This is a standard message to inform you that abortion is a designated contentious topic. This message does not imply that there are any issues with your editing. For more information about the contentious topics system, please see Wikipedia:Contentious topics. Jclemens (talk) 15:40, 28 August 2024 (UTC)
There is currently a discussion at Wikipedia:Neutral point of view/Noticeboard regarding an issue with which you may have been involved. Thank you.DaveApter (talk) 11:49, 1 November 2024 (UTC)
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. [86][87]
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I enjoy traveling to countries where I am completely unable to read the local language. Polygnotus (talk) 13:58, 23 January 2025 (UTC)
Polygnotus (talk) 03:47, 30 January 2025 (UTC)
Your recent editing history at Laura Kate Dale shows that you are currently engaged in an edit war; that means that you are repeatedly changing content back to how you think it should be, when you have seen that other editors disagree. To resolve the content dispute, please do not revert or change the edits of others when you are reverted. Instead of reverting, please use the talk page to work toward making a version that represents consensus among editors. The best practice at this stage is to discuss, not edit-war; read about how this is done. If discussions reach an impasse, you can then post a request for help at a relevant noticeboard or seek dispute resolution. In some cases, you may wish to request temporary page protection.
). 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. [151]