User talk:robertsky

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Wikimedian of the Year!

I just saw that you were Wikimedian of the Year! Congrats! I hadn't noticed the award for this year.

Thanks as well for tidying up my typo-redirect problem. I've now deleted some material from Federal Court of Canada and condensed the Exchequer Court discussion so there is still the context of the historical development, and put up a notice on the Talk page, and added the incoming notice on the Talk page for the Exchequer Court of Canada article.

Is there anything else I need to do? Mr Serjeant Buzfuz (talk) 18:35, 1 March 2026 (UTC)[reply]

@Mr Serjeant Buzfuz thanks! nothing else. :) – robertsky (talk) 04:43, 3 March 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Great! thanks very much. Mr Serjeant Buzfuz (talk) 04:48, 3 March 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Administrators' newsletter – March 2026

News and updates for administrators from the past month (February 2026).

Administrator changes

CheckUser changes

Ks0stm

Oversight changes

Ks0stm

Guideline and policy news

Following an RfC, the web archival service archive.today has been deprecated; links to the site should be removed.
A request for comment is open to discuss retiring CSD criterion R3 in favour of handling such redirects through RfD.

Arbitration

Following a motion, remedy 9.1 of the Conduct in deletion-related editing case has been amended to limit TenPoundHammer to one XfD nomination or PROD per 24-hour period.
Following a motion, the Iskandar323 further POV pushing motion has been rescinded.
The Arbitration Committee has passed a housekeeping motion rescinding a number of outdated remedies and enforcement provisions across multiple legacy cases. In most instances, existing sanctions remain in force and continue to be appealable through the usual processes, while some case-specific remedies were amended or clarified.

Miscellaneous

Following the 2026 Steward Elections, the following editors have been appointed as stewards: A09, AmandaNP, Barras, Count Count, M7, SHB2000, Teles and VIGNERON.
An Unreferenced articles backlog drive is taking place in March 2026 to reduce the backlog of articles tagged with {{Unreferenced}}. You can help reduce the backlog by adding citations to these articles. Sign up to participate!

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 18:36, 1 March 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2026-10

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

Wikipedia 25 Birthday mode is now live on Betawi, Breton, Chinese, Czech, Dutch, English, French, Gorontalo, Indonesian, Italian, Luxembourgish, Madurese, Sicilian, Spanish, Thai, and Vietnamese Wikipedias! This limited-time campaign feature celebrates 25 years of Wikipedia with a birthday mascot, Baby Globe. When turned on, Baby Globe is shown on ~2,500 articles, waiting to be discovered by readers. Communities can choose to turn Birthday mode on by getting consensus from their community and asking an admin to enable the feature and customize it via community configuration on the local wiki.

Updates for editors

Sub-referencing, a new feature to re-use references with different details has been released to Swedish Wikipedia, Polish Wikipedia and a couple of other wikis. You can try the feature on these projects or on testwiki and betawiki. Learnings from the first pilot wiki German Wikipedia have been published in a report. Reach out to the Wikimedia Deutschland team if you are interested in becoming a pilot wiki.
Paste Check will become available at all Wikipedias this week. The feature prompts newcomers who are pasting text they are not likely to have written into VisualEditor to consider whether doing so risks a copyright violation. Paste Check tags all edits where it is shown for potential review. Local administrators can configure various aspects of the feature via Special:EditChecks. Research across 22 wikis found that Paste Check resulted in an 18% decrease in relative reverted-edits compared to the control group. Translators can help to localize this and related features.
The Reader Experience team will be standardizing the user menu in the top right for all mobile users so that it is closer to the desktop experience. Currently this user menu is only visible to users with Advanced Mobile Controls (AMC) turned on. The only change is that a couple buttons previously in the left-side menu will move to the top right for users who do not have AMC turned on. This change is expected to go out March 9 and seeks to improve the user interface. [1]
Starting in the week of March 2, the emails sent out when an email address was added, removed, or changed for an account will switch to a substantially nicer and clearer HTML email from the prior plaintext one. [2]
Notifications are currently limited to 2,000 historic entries per user, and extend back to 2013 when the feature was released. This is going to be changed to only store Notifications from the last 5 years, but up to 10,000 of them. This will help with long-term infrastructure health and help to prevent more recent notifications from disappearing too soon. [3]
The Global Watchlist which lets you view your watchlists from multiple wikis on a single page continues to see improvements. The latest update improves label usage experience. The extension now allows activating the language fallback system for Wikidata items without labels in the viewed language, and showing those labels in the user’s preferred Wikidata language if no uselang= URL parameter is provided. [4][5]
The Wikipedia Android team has started a beta test of hybrid search on Greek Wikipedia. Hybrid search capabilities can handle both semantic and keyword queries enabling readers to find what they’re looking for directly on Wikipedia more easily.
For security reasons, members of certain user groups are required to have two-factor authentication (2FA) enabled. Currently, 2FA is required to use the group, but not to be a member of it. Given that this model still has some vulnerabilities, the situation will gradually change in March. Members of these groups will be unable to disable last 2FA method on their account, and it will be impossible to add users without 2FA to these groups. Users will still be able to add new authentication methods or remove them, as long as at least one method is continuously enabled. In the second half of March, users without 2FA will be removed from these groups. This applies to: CentralNotice administrators, checkusers, interface administrators, suppressors, Wikidata staff, Wikifunctions staff, WMF Office IT and WMF Trust & Safety. Nothing will change for other users. See the linked task for deployment schedule. [6]
View all 27 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, the issue preventing users from creating an instance in Wikibase.cloud has now been fixed. [7]

Updates for technical contributors

To help ensure fair use of infrastructure, over the next month the Wikimedia Foundation will implement global API rate limits across our APIs. In early March, stricter limits will be applied to unidentified requests from outside Toolforge/WMCS and API requests that are made from web browsers. In April, higher limits will be applied to identified traffic. These limits are intentionally set as high as possible to minimise impact on the community. Bots running in Toolforge/WMCS or with the bot user right on any wiki should not be affected for now. However, all developers are advised to follow updated best practices. For more information, see Wikimedia APIs/Rate limits.
The Wikidata Query Service Linked Data Fragment (LDF) endpoint will be decommissioned in February. This endpoint served limited traffic, which was successfully migrated to other data access methods that were better suited to support existing use cases. The hardware used to support the LDF endpoint will be reallocated to support the ongoing backend migration efforts. [8]
The new Parsoid parser continues to be deployed to additional wikis, improving platform sustainability and making it easier to introduce new reading and editing features. Parsoid is now the default parser on 488 WMF wikis (268 Wikipedias), now covering more than 10% of all Wikipedia page views.
The process and criteria for requesting exceptional access to the high volume feed of the Wikimedia Enterprise APIs (at no cost for mission-aligned usecases), have now been published. This is to provide more thorough and clearer documentation for users.
Tech Blog, the blog dedicated to the Wikimedia technical community will be migrating to Diff, the community news and event blog. The migration should be complete in April 2026, after which new posts will be accepted for publishing. Readers will be able to access posts – old and new – on the landing page at https://diff.wikimedia.org/techblog.
Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

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

MediaWiki message delivery 17:50, 2 March 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Undo of requested move closure

Hi @Robertsky,

I noticed that you attempted to close the requested move discussion on Talk:List of elected and appointed female state leaders that was initially listed on 9 February 2026 and most recently relisted on 27 February 2026 so it has been open for than eight days by now, most requested moves should be closed after seven days per WP:RMCLOSE. I was wondering why you needed to undo your closure of the discussion considering that you are not involved so are able to make a decision on closing this discussion. It would be helpful if you had provided an edit summary to let editors know why you made this strange decision to close and then reopen the discussion. This may not be a huge problem if someone else comes along and closes the discussion later. Qwerty123M (talk) 00:50, 7 March 2026 (UTC)[reply]

@Qwerty123M I simply needed a bit more time (and food) to consider the discussion. :) Will be back at it within the day! – robertsky (talk) 00:54, 7 March 2026 (UTC)[reply]

2026 in Nordic music

Hi. I accept that consensus was to move the Year in Scandinavian music to Year in Nordic music but:

Why no redirect?
Who is going to do the changes of wording within the affected articles? The requester seems to have disappeared again, having assured me that all necessary changes would be made by a bot. Deb (talk) 12:58, 7 March 2026 (UTC)[reply]

@Deb which articles are without redirects? The move request had generated 700+ edits. Might it be that some move had reached some limits? Will look into this later. As for the content, I will be checking in on this sometime tomorrow and follow up whatever is required via AWB. I am assuming people are being busy over the weekend (as I am currently with family). – robertsky (talk) 13:14, 7 March 2026 (UTC)[reply]

@Deb for the category, I had submitted at WP:CFD/S to automate the category move and related updates. It will take a couple of days for the request to be processed. – robertsky (talk) 15:45, 7 March 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks. Deb (talk) 16:13, 7 March 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Seems like I was mistaken about the redirects, or at least they seem to be there now. Deb (talk) 16:14, 7 March 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you for fixing these. If you have time, can you also fix the following two things:

1. Change the word in the opening paragraph "... happened in Scandinavian music in x." (in some pages the year is in boldface) in these 58 pages.

2. Remove Category:Culture of Scandinavia from these 64 pages, since Category:Years in Nordic music is already in that category.

Thanks. JH.Ahokas (talk) 16:34, 9 March 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2026-11

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

Weekly highlight

All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes on Wednesday, 25 March 2026 at 15:00 UTC. This is for the datacenter server switchover backup tests, which happen twice a year. During the switchover, all Wikimedia website traffic is shifted from one primary data center to the backup data center to test availability and prevent service disruption even in emergencies.
Last week, all wikis had 2 hours of read-only time, and extended unavailability for user-scripts and gadgets. This was due to a security incident which has since been resolved. Work is ongoing to prevent re-occurrences. For current information please see the post on the Stewards' noticeboard (translations).

Updates for editors

Users facing multiple blocks on mobile will now see the reasons for each block separately, instead of a generic message. This helps them understand why they are blocked and what steps they can take to resolve the issue. For example, users affected for using common VPNs (such as iCloud Private Relay) will receive clearer guidance on what they need to do to start editing again. [9]
Later this week, Suggestion Mode will become available as a beta feature within the visual editor at all Wikipedias. This feature proactively suggests various types of actions that people can consider taking to improve Wikipedia articles, and learn about related guidelines. The feature is locally configurable, and can also be locally expanded with custom Suggestions. Current settings can be seen at Special:EditChecks and there are instructions for how administrators can customize the links to point to local guidelines. The feature is connected to Edit check which suggests improvements while someone is writing new content. In the future, the Editing team plans to evaluate the feature's impact with newcomers through a controlled experiment. [10]
View all 23 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, the issue where the cursor became misaligned during the use of CodeMirror’s syntax highlighting, which makes wikitext and code easier to read, has now been fixed. This problem specifically affected users who defined a font rule in a custom stylesheet while creating a new topic with DiscussionTools. [11]

Updates for technical contributors

API rate limiting update: To help ensure fair use of infrastructure, global API rate limits will be applied this week to requests without a compliant User-Agent that originate from outside Toolforge/WMCS and to unauthenticated requests made from web browsers. Higher limits will be applied to identified traffic in April. Bots running in Toolforge/WMCS or with the bot user right on any wiki should not be affected for now. However, all developers are advised to follow updated best practices. For more information, see Wikimedia APIs/Rate limits.
The new GraphQL API has been released. The API was developed as a flexible alternative to select features of the Wikidata Query Service (WDQS), to improve developer experience and foster adaptability, and efficient data access. Try it out and give feedback. You can also sign up for usability tests.
The PTAC Unsupported Tools Working Group continued improvements to Video2Commons in February, with fixes addressing authentication errors, large-file handling, task queue visibility, and clearer upload behavior. Work is still ongoing in some areas, including changes related to deprecated server-side uploads. Read this update to learn more.
Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

In depth

The Article Guidance team invites experienced Wikipedia editors from selected pilot wikis and interested contributors from other Wikipedias to fill out this questionnaire which is available in English, Arabic, Bengali, Japanese, Portuguese, Persian, and Turkish. Your answers will help the team customize guidance for less experienced editors and help them learn community policies and practices while creating an article. Learn more on the project page.

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

MediaWiki message delivery 18:51, 9 March 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Your protection of Sack of Delhi (1757)

Hi robertsky. Thanks for handling my request for page protection, but can I ask why you only protected it for a year? Indian military history is under ECR, so shouldn't it be indefinite? Chess enjoyer (talk) 19:16, 9 March 2026 (UTC)[reply]