User talk:TimothyBlue

Retired

This user is no longer active on Wikipedia.

		Welcome to my Talk Page
		If we have a difference of opinion, I'm open to discussing it if the issue is meaningful, significant and worth my time. I ignore comments containing hyperbole, profanity, nonsense, attacks, and attitudes/behaviors I personally find offensive; I also ignore ones that I don't think are worth the time to respond. If you do not like this, click here. I have very strong feelings about the importance of notability, policies and guidelines, sources and evidence. Best wishes from Los Angeles,   // Timothy :: talk

Discussion and Messages

Tech News: 2025-16

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

Weekly highlight

• Later this week, the default thumbnail size will be increased from 220px to 250px. This changes how pages are shown in all wikis and has been requested by some communities for many years, but wasn't previously possible due to technical limitations. [1]
• File thumbnails are now stored in discrete sizes. If a page specifies a thumbnail size that's not among the standard sizes (20, 40, 60, 120, 250, 330, 500, 960), then MediaWiki will pick the closest larger thumbnail size but will tell the browser to downscale it to the requested size. In these cases, nothing will change visually but users might load slightly larger images. If it doesn't matter which thumbnail size is used in a page, please pick one of the standard sizes to avoid the extra in-browser down-scaling step. [2][3]

Updates for editors

• The Wikimedia Foundation are working on a system called Edge Uniques which will enable A/B testing, help protect against Distributed denial-of-service attacks (DDoS attacks), and make it easier to understand how many visitors the Wikimedia sites have. This is so that they can more efficiently build tools which help readers, and make it easier for readers to find what they are looking for.
• To improve security for users, a small percentage of logins will now require that the account owner input a one-time password emailed to their account. It is recommended that you check that the email address on your account is set correctly, and that it has been confirmed, and that you have an email set for this purpose. [4]
• "Are you interested in taking a short survey to improve tools used for reviewing or reverting edits on your Wiki?" This question will be asked at 7 wikis starting next week, on Recent Changes and Watchlist pages. The Moderator Tools team wants to know more about activities that involve looking at new edits made to your Wikimedia project, and determining whether they adhere to your project's policies.
• On April 15, the full Wikidata graph will no longer be supported on query.wikidata.org. After this date, scholarly articles will be available through query-scholarly.wikidata.org, while the rest of the data hosted on Wikidata will be available through the query.wikidata.org endpoint. This is part of the scheduled split of the Wikidata Graph, which was announced in September 2024. More information is available on Wikidata.
• The latest quarterly Wikimedia Apps Newsletter is now available. It covers updates, experiments, and improvements made to the Wikipedia mobile apps.
• View all 30 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.

Updates for technical contributors

• The latest quarterly Technical Community Newsletter is now available. This edition includes: an invitation for tool maintainers to attend the Toolforge UI Community Feedback Session on April 15th; recent community metrics; and recent technical blog posts.
• Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

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

MediaWiki message delivery 00:22, 15 April 2025 (UTC)

The Bugle: Issue 228, April 2025

Your Military History Newsletter Project news: From the editors; awards and honours; contest results Articles: Last month's new featured and A-class content Book review: Nick-D looks at the Borneo campaign of 1945 and warfare the South African way Timeline: This month in military history

The Bugle is published by the Military history WikiProject. To receive it on your talk page, please join the project or sign up here.
If you are a project member who does not want delivery, please remove your name from this page. Your editors, Ian Rose (talk) and Nick-D (talk) 14:40, 15 April 2025 (UTC)

This week's article for improvement (week 17, 2025)

Homemade sock monkeys have been part of U.S. and Canadian culture since the Great Depression. Hello, TimothyBlue. The article for improvement of the week is: Stuffed toy Please be bold and help improve it! Previous selections: Honshu • Plate (dishware) Get involved with the AFI project: Nominate an article • Review nominations Posted by: MusikBot talk 00:05, 21 April 2025 (UTC) using MediaWiki message delivery (talk) on behalf of WikiProject AFI •

Tech News: 2025-17

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

Updates for editors

• Wikifunctions is now integrated with Dagbani Wikipedia since April 15. It is the first project that will be able to call functions from Wikifunctions and integrate them in articles. A function is something that takes one or more inputs and transforms them into a desired output, such as adding up two numbers, converting miles into metres, calculating how much time has passed since an event, or declining a word into a case. Wikifunctions will allow users to do that through a simple call of a stable and global function, rather than via a local template. [5]
• A new type of lint error has been created: Empty headings (documentation). The Linter extension's purpose is to identify wikitext patterns that must or can be fixed in pages and provide some guidance about what the problems are with those patterns and how to fix them. [6]
• View all 37 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.

Updates for technical contributors

• Following its publication on HuggingFace, the "Structured Contents" dataset, developed by Wikimedia Enterprise, is now also available on Kaggle. This Beta initiative is focused on making Wikimedia data more machine-readable for high-volume reusers. They are releasing this beta version in a location that open dataset communities already use, in order to seek feedback, to help improve the product for a future wider release. You can read more about the overall Structured Contents project, and about the first release that's freely usable.
• There is no new MediaWiki version this week.

Meetings and events

• The Editing and Machine Learning Teams invite interested volunteers to a video meeting to discuss Peacock check, which is the latest Edit check that will detect "peacock" or "overly-promotional" or "non-neutral" language whilst an editor is typing. Editors who work with newcomers, or help to fix this kind of writing, or are interested in how we use artificial intelligence in our projects are encouraged to attend. The meeting will be on April 28, 2025 at 18:00–19:00 UTC and hosted on Zoom.

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

MediaWiki message delivery 20:58, 21 April 2025 (UTC)

New pages patrol May 2025 Backlog drive

May 2025 Backlog Drive | New pages patrol
On 1 May 2025, a one-month backlog drive for New Pages Patrol will begin. Barnstars will be awarded based on the number of articles patrolled. Barnstars will also be granted for re-reviewing articles previously reviewed by other patrollers during the drive. Each review will earn 1 point. Interested in taking part? Sign up here.
You're receiving this message because you are a new page patroller. To opt-out of future mailings, please remove yourself here.

MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 15:26, 24 April 2025 (UTC)

Journal lists

Hi, there's a good reason that we only include notable journals in these lists. There are tens of thousands academic journals. Unfortunately, a large proportion of them are scams (see predatory publishing. And nothing is nicer for the scammers then to have their journals listed in WP. Preferably in the form of a stand-alone article, but if that doesn't work, then having their rags included in lists is a good second. Accepting any publication that claims to be an academic journal opens the floodgates for spam for shady journals. Of course one can argue that we'll keep an eye on this and remove any suspicious journals. This is rather cumbersome, though: we don't want a situation where it is WP editors who are going to decide what gets into a list or not, based on their personal opinions. At the WikiProject Academic Journals it has therefor become standard practice to only include notable journals, as scam journals never meet NJournals and only meet GNG if there are reliable sources discussing their fishy habits. --Randykitty (talk) 13:48, 26 April 2025 (UTC)

• First since you bring up predatory publishing, what journal did I include that is predatory or scams?

The reason for the inclusion criteria which I wrote is to exclude predatory journals. All of the entries are published by academic intuitions or presses and are archived in academic databases, such as JSTOR or ProjectMUSE. None are predatory, none are minor, all have decades of history in the above databases. It is also a short list, not a long one. The guidelines are clear that individual items do not have to be notable. There is no reason to remove legitimate academic journals from this list. — Preceding unsigned comment added by TimothyBlue (talk • contribs)

• Nobody accused you of adding predatory journals. But if you retire from WP (given the banner on top of this page), other editors might add those and if nobody "polices" this list, it could degenerate quickly. Also, your criteria just move the problem from having WP editors deciding what is a decent journal to what is a decent academic society. Adding only notable journals with an article is just a practical solution to this problem. In any case, I don't want to deal with that, so I am removing this list from my watchlist and leave it up to others to keep this list clean. --Randykitty (talk) 09:36, 27 April 2025 (UTC)

• I am in agreement with Timothy. None of the journals you have been removing from that list are considered predatory journals. In the absence of a dedicated article, one could simply add a reference to a third party description of the journal to confirm it is respected within its field. The Wikipedia:WikiProject Academic Journals/Writing guide#Getting started section you may be referring to doesn't have lists in mind, while the more authoritative Wikipedia:Notability (academic journals)#No inherited notability simply states, "These general rules-of-thumb do not prohibit the creation or maintenance of list articles that contain information about non-notable journals. However, such lists are still subject to Wikipedia's content policies, such as verifiability and no original research, and editorial decisions to exclude non-notable journals from such lists can apply." In this case, the author of the list has not chosen to exclude non-notable journals, not that any of your removals did not meet the standalone notability criteria. Ivan (talk) 21:44, 26 April 2025 (UTC)

This week's article for improvement (week 18, 2025)

Hello, TimothyBlue. The article for improvement of the week is: Internet research Please be bold and help improve it! Previous selections: Stuffed toy • Honshu Get involved with the AFI project: Nominate an article • Review nominations Posted by: MusikBot talk 00:44, 28 April 2025 (UTC) using MediaWiki message delivery (talk) on behalf of WikiProject AFI •

Tech News: 2025-18

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

Updates for editors

• Event organizers who host collaborative activities on multiple wikis, including Bengali, Japanese, and Korean Wikipedias, will have access to the CampaignEvents extension this week. Also, admins in the Wikipedia where the extension is enabled will automatically be granted the event organizer right soon. They won't have to manually grant themselves the right before they can manage events as requested by a community.
• View all 19 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.

Updates for technical contributors

• The release of the next major version of Codex, the design system for Wikimedia, is scheduled for 29 April 2025. Technical editors will have access to the release by the week of 5 May 2025. This update will include a number of breaking changes and minor visual changes. Instructions on handling the breaking and visual changes are documented on this page. Pre-release testing is reported in T386298, with post-release issues tracked in T392379 and T392390.
• Users of Wiki Replicas will notice that the database views of ipblocks, ipblocks_ipindex, and ipblocks_compat are now deprecated. Users can query the block and block_target new views that mirror the new tables in the production database instead. The deprecated views will be removed entirely from Wiki Replicas in June, 2025.
• Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

In depth

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

Meetings and events

• The Let's Connect Learning Clinic will take place on April 29 at 14:30 UTC. This edition will focus on "Understanding and Navigating Conflict in Wikimedia Projects". You can register now to attend.
• The 2025 Wikimedia Hackathon, which brings the global technical community together to connect, brainstorm, and hack existing projects, will take place from May 2 to 4th, 2025, at Istanbul, Turkey.

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

MediaWiki message delivery 19:29, 28 April 2025 (UTC)

This week's article for improvement (week 19, 2025)

Mainboard of a NeXTcube computer Hello, TimothyBlue. The article for improvement of the week is: Motherboard Please be bold and help improve it! Previous selections: Internet research • Stuffed toy Get involved with the AFI project: Nominate an article • Review nominations Posted by: MusikBot talk 00:05, 5 May 2025 (UTC) using MediaWiki message delivery (talk) on behalf of WikiProject AFI •

Tech News: 2025-19

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

Weekly highlight

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

Updates for editors

• For wikis that have the CampaignEvents extension enabled, two new feature improvements have been released:
  • Admins can now choose which namespaces are permitted for Event Registration via Community Configuration (documentation). The default setup is for event registration to be permitted in the Event namespace, but other namespaces (such as the project namespace or WikiProject namespace) can now be added. With this change, communities like WikiProjects can now more easily use Event Registration for their collaborative activities.
  • Editors can now transclude the Collaboration List on a wiki page (documentation). The Collaboration List is an automated list of events and WikiProjects on the wikis, accessed via Special:AllEvents (example). Now, the Collaboration List can be added to all sorts of wiki pages, such as: a wiki mainpage, a WikiProject page, an affiliate page, an event page, or even a user page.
• View all 27 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.

Updates for technical contributors

• Developers who use the moment library in gadgets and user scripts should revise their code to use alternatives like the Intl library or the new mediawiki.DateFormatter library. The moment library has been deprecated and will begin to log messages in the developer console. You can see a global search for current uses, and ask related questions in this Phabricator task.
• Developers who maintain a tool that queries the Wikidata term store tables (wbt_*) need to update their code to connect to a separate database cluster. These tables are being split into a separate database cluster. Tools that query those tables via the wiki replicas must be adapted to connect to the new cluster instead. Documentation and related links are available. [7]
• Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

In depth

• The latest Chart Project newsletter is available. It includes updates on preparing to expand the deployment to additional wikis as soon as this week (starting May 6) and scaling up over the following weeks, plus exploring filtering and transforming source data.

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

MediaWiki message delivery 00:12, 6 May 2025 (UTC)

Administrators' newsletter – May 2025

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

Administrator changes

Rusalkii

NaomiAmethyst (overlooked last month)

• Master Jay
• Orderinchaos
• Roger Davies
• Tinucherian

Interface administrator changes

Galobtter

Guideline and policy news

• Following an RfC, administrator elections were permanently authorized on a five-month schedule. The next election will be scheduled soon; see Wikipedia talk:Administrator elections for more information. This is an alternate process to the RfA process and does not replace the latter.
• An RfC was closed with consensus to allow editors to opt-out of seeing "sticky decorative elements". Such elements should now be wrapped in {{sticky decoration wrapper}}. Editors who wish to opt out can follow the instructions at WP:STICKYDECO.
• An RfC has resulted in a broad prohibition on the use of AI-generated images in articles. A few common-sense exceptions are recognized.

Miscellaneous

• A New Pages Patrol backlog drive is happening in May 2025 to reduce the backlog of articles in the new pages feed. Sign up here to participate!

---

• Discuss this newsletter
• Subscribe
• Archive

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 15:02, 6 May 2025 (UTC)

The Bugle: Issue 229, May 2025

Your Military History Newsletter Project news: From the editors; awards and honours; contest results Articles: Last month's new featured and A-class content Book review: Hawkeye7 and Nick-D look at aspects of World War II Review essay: Nick-D on Osprey Publishing Timeline: This month in military history

The Bugle is published by the Military history WikiProject. To receive it on your talk page, please join the project or sign up here.
If you are a project member who does not want delivery, please remove your name from this page. Your editors, Ian Rose (talk) and Nick-D (talk) 11:06, 10 May 2025 (UTC)

This week's article for improvement (week 20, 2025)

Hello, TimothyBlue. The article for improvement of the week is: Pneumatics Please be bold and help improve it! Previous selections: Motherboard • Internet research Get involved with the AFI project: Nominate an article • Review nominations Posted by: MusikBot talk 00:05, 12 May 2025 (UTC) using MediaWiki message delivery (talk) on behalf of WikiProject AFI •

Tech News: 2025-20

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

Weekly highlight

• The "Get shortened URL" link on the sidebar now includes a QR code. Wikimedia site users can now use it by scanning or downloading it to quickly share and access shared content from Wikimedia sites, conveniently.

Updates for editors

• The Wikimedia Foundation is working on a system called Edge Uniques, which will enable A/B testing, help protect against distributed denial-of-service attacks (DDoS attacks), and make it easier to understand how many visitors the Wikimedia sites have. This is to help more efficiently build tools which help readers, and make it easier for readers to find what they are looking for. Tech News has previously written about this. The deployment will be gradual. Some might see the Edge Uniques cookie the week of 19 May. You can discuss this on the talk page.
• Starting May 19, 2025, Event organisers in wikis with the CampaignEvents extension enabled can use Event Registration in the project namespace (e.g., Wikipedia namespace, Wikidata namespace). With this change, communities don't need admins to use the feature. However, wikis that don't want this change can remove and add the permitted namespaces at Special:CommunityConfiguration/CampaignEvents.
• The Wikipedia project now has a Wikipedia in Nupe (w:nup:). This is a language primarily spoken in the North Central region of Nigeria. Speakers of this language are invited to contribute to new Wikipedia.
• View all 27 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.

Updates for technical contributors

• Developers can now access pre-parsed Dutch Wikipedia, amongst others (English, German, French, Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese) through the Structured Contents snapshots (beta). The content includes parsed Wikipedia abstracts, descriptions, main images, infoboxes, article sections, and references.
• The /page/data-parsoid REST API endpoint is no longer in use and will be deprecated. It is scheduled to be turned off on June 7, 2025.
• Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

In depth

• The IPv6 support is a newly introduced Cloud virtual network that significantly boosts Wikimedia platforms' scalability, security, and readiness for the future. If you are a technical contributor eager to learn more, check out this blog post for an in-depth look at the journey to IPv6.

Meetings and events

• The 2nd edition of 2025 of Afrika Baraza, a virtual platform for African Wikimedians to connect, will take place on May 15 at 17:00 UTC. This edition will focus on discussions regarding Wikimedia Annual planning and progress.
• The MENA Connect Community Call, a virtual meeting for MENA Wikimedians to connect, will take place on May 17 at 17:00 UTC. You can register now to attend.

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

MediaWiki message delivery 22:35, 12 May 2025 (UTC)

Books & Bytes – Issue 68

The Wikipedia Library: Books & Bytes
Issue 68, March–April 2025

In this issue we highlight two resource renewals, #EveryBookItsReader, a note about Phabricator, and, as always, a roundup of news and community items related to libraries and digital knowledge.

Read the full newsletter

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery on behalf of The Wikipedia Library team --10:18, 13 May 2025 (UTC)