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Question from BeacHal1 (20:35, 6 May 2024)

Hiyah! So, the editor that declined my most recent article has past on my revisions and it all seems a bit odd. They were being assessed at the time for a higher ranking on here… would you be able to revisit it and make sure that it’s still in the works. It seems as though that editor’s actions have caused it to be mothballed… and I saw you edited too. Thanks again --BeacHal1 (talk) 20:35, 6 May 2024 (UTC)

Hello @BeacHal1, articles aren't reviewed in a specific order; there are currently 1,027 pending submissions. In the meantime, you might want to do a bit of basic copyediting as well as make sure that the article conforms to the Manual of Style, and even though it's just a guideline, it's still best to use this style guide so that articles are consistently formatted. (Here is an introduction to the Manual of Style) If you have more questions, don't hesitate to ask me using your Homepage or at the Teahouse and learn about editing Wikipedia through our introduction. Happy editing! ~~2NumForIce (^speak|_edits) 03:04, 7 May 2024 (UTC)

Hi, just sent you an email but please ignore! I’ve just realised I had a vpn setting on my iPad that meant I was auto-blocked. All good. Although, I have found it quite frustrating re my most recent article and the slightly bullying behaviour on here has put me off doing more!

I might reengage asp but life’s tough enough without a mob rule in Wikipedia too… BeacHal1 (talk) 20:54, 29 June 2024 (UTC)

Question from 3.14159265459AAAs (21:05, 15 August 2024)

Hello, I translated a page about Slavitza Jovan from the German Wikipedia, but it doesn't have any references, besides IMDb and All movie. Do I have to find references myself?

3.14 (talk) 21:05, 15 August 2024 (UTC)

Hello @3.14159265459AAAs, sorry for the delay (working on other stuff). Per Wikipedia:Verifiability, [t]he burden to demonstrate verifiability lies with the editor who adds or restores material. Also, IMDb is user-generated and considered unreliable, and mostly same for AllMovie (which is operated by RhythmOne, who also owns other "All*" websites). You might want to see the verifiability policy, the reliable sources guideline, and Wikipedia:Reliable sources/Perennial sources for frequently discussed sources. If you have more questions, don't hesitate to ask me using your Homepage or at the Teahouse and learn about editing Wikipedia through our introduction. Happy editing! ~~2NumForIce (^speak|_edits) 21:10, 19 August 2024 (UTC)

P.S: Thank you for answering my question instead of Raydann.

Question from Eymett (15:25, 17 August 2024)

Hi! I recently tried to request a media move/rename but I don’t think it worked. On the page for the rename media template, it says to just past the template into the file page. Trying to do that, I tapped edit on the File page and pasted the template with the appropriate parameters and saved the edit. Now when I look at the media page, it doesn’t display the actual template, but just the text that I entered. I also looked at the Cagegory:Wikipedia files requiring renaming where my request should have been automatically added, but I don’t see it there. Not sure exactly what to do. Would appreciate your help and thank you for being a mentor! --Eymett (talk) 15:25, 17 August 2024 (UTC)

Solved! It added a <nowiki> tag to my template text for some reason, which is what made it display as plaintext. Oh well, fixed now!

Eymett (talk) 21:44, 18 August 2024 (UTC)

Question from Nevimahesh (12:12, 18 August 2024)

Hello, Can I publish my own articles here? --Nevimahesh (talk) 12:12, 18 August 2024 (UTC)

Hello @Nevimahesh, creating a new article is a complicated process. Before creating your first article, you should learn editing and rules of Wikipedia and complete smaller tasks at the Task Center.

First, is the subject you are editing closely related to yourself, family, friends, clients, employers, financial or other relationships (having a conflict of interest or COI)?

If you have a COI, click [show] to the right of this box for important rules

Editors with a COI must disclose the COI, especially if you are being paid per the Terms of Use, in which case, there is a separate (but similar) process for disclosing paid editing. COI editors are strongly discouraged to edit affected articles directly and to write autobiographies. Instead, use the {{Edit COI}} template to propose changes to an existing article and Articles for creation for creating a new article. The bottom line is, COI editing is just not a good idea. COI editing can cause many problems, and there are even legal consequences for hidden advertising mimicking a content format such as a Wikipedia article. If your company tells you to make or edit a Wikipedia article about them, tell them it can't be done.

Before creating a new article, you must make sure that the subject is notable enough for inclusion. Text on Wikipedia must be cited by reliable sources so that information is verifiable. Also, an article about yourself isn't necessarily a good thing, as you don't "own" what you write on Wikipedia.

When you're ready to create a new article, go to Help:Your first article, which will guide you through creating a new article. You should go through the entire page before proceeding to the Article Wizard. After creating a new article draft, it will be reviewed by an Articles for creation volunteer. Be patient; there are currently 1,027 pending submissions, and they are not reviewed in any specific order. In the meantime, you might want to do some basic copyediting so that the article is more likely to be approved. If you have more questions, don't hesitate to ask me using your Homepage or at the Teahouse and learn about editing Wikipedia through our introduction. Happy editing! ~~2NumForIce (^speak|_edits) 03:45, 25 August 2024 (UTC)

Question from General people (13:05, 18 August 2024)

আমার আইডি link কিভাবে পাবো? --General people (talk) 13:05, 18 August 2024 (UTC)

I noticed that you have posted comments in a language other than English. At the English-language Wikipedia, we try to use English for all comments. Posting all comments in English makes it easier for other editors to join the conversation and help you. If you cannot avoid using another language, then please provide a translation into English, if you can. If you cannot provide a translation, please go to the list of Wikipedias, look in the list for a Wikipedia that is in your language, and edit there instead of here. For more details, see Wikipedia:Talk page guidelines. Thank you. ~~2NumForIce (^speak|_edits) 20:10, 27 August 2024 (UTC)

Tech News: 2024-34

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. [1]
• 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. [2][3]

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.

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

MediaWiki message delivery 00:50, 20 August 2024 (UTC)

Question from Smartpickup (16:06, 24 August 2024)

I want to publish my biography

_Title:_ Adejube John Olusola Temitope

_Biography_

Adejube John Olusola Temitope (born February 24, 1998) is a Nigerian philanthropic activist, writer, councilor, and businessman from the Oyegbata Royal Family of Ibapeju Quarter, Ipe Akoko, Ondo State, Nigeria.

_Early Life and Education_

Adejube John Olusola Temitope was born in Ose Local Government, Ondo State, Nigeria, and raised in Ipe Akoko, his father's homeland. He attended Olawale International Nursery and Primary School and proceeded to Olawale International Secondary School, graduating in 2010. He studied Public Administration at the Polytechnic, graduating with a Higher National Diploma (HND) in 2015. He served in the National Youth Service Corps (NYSC) from 2016 to 2017 and holds a Postgraduate Diploma (PGD) in Education from the National Open University of Nigeria and a Master of Education in Administration and Planning from the same university.

_Career and Achievements_

Adejube John Olusola Temitope is a philanthropic activist, writer, councilor, and businessman. He has written and published various books and projects. He is the founder and owner of:

1. Smartpickup & Son Global Services 2. Smartpickup Jst General Services

His companies deal with:

- Logistics and transportation - Agriculture produce - Chemist store - General merchandise

_Personal Life_

Adejube John Olusola Temitope is a Christian with Yoruba culture and heritage. --Smartpickup (talk) 16:06, 24 August 2024 (UTC)

Hello @Smartpickup, creating a new article is a complicated process. Before creating your first article, you should learn editing and rules of Wikipedia and complete smaller tasks at the Task Center.

First, is the subject you are editing closely related to yourself, family, friends, clients, employers, financial or other relationships (having a conflict of interest or COI)?

If you have a COI, click [show] to the right of this box for important rules

Editors with a COI must disclose the COI, especially if you are being paid per the Terms of Use, in which case, there is a separate (but similar) process for disclosing paid editing. COI editors are strongly discouraged to edit affected articles directly and to write autobiographies. Instead, use the {{Edit COI}} template to propose changes to an existing article and Articles for creation for creating a new article. The bottom line is, COI editing is just not a good idea. COI editing can cause many problems, and there are even legal consequences for hidden advertising mimicking a content format such as a Wikipedia article. If your company tells you to make or edit a Wikipedia article about them, tell them it can't be done.

Before creating a new article, you must make sure that the subject is notable enough for inclusion. Text on Wikipedia must be cited by reliable sources so that information is verifiable. Also, an article about yourself isn't necessarily a good thing, as you don't "own" what you write on Wikipedia.

When you're ready to create a new article, go to Help:Your first article, which will guide you through creating a new article. You should go through the entire page before proceeding to the Article Wizard. After creating a new article draft, it will be reviewed by an Articles for creation volunteer. Be patient; there are currently 1,027 pending submissions, and they are not reviewed in any specific order. In the meantime, you might want to do some basic copyediting so that the article is more likely to be approved. If you have more questions, don't hesitate to ask me using your Homepage or at the Teahouse and learn about editing Wikipedia through our introduction. Happy editing! ~~2NumForIce (^speak|_edits) 20:11, 27 August 2024 (UTC)

Tech News: 2024-35

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. [4]

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:
  • Community Configuration - Shaping On-Wiki Functionality Together (55 mins) - about the Community Configuration project.
  • Future of MediaWiki. A sustainable platform to support a collaborative user base and billions of page views (30 mins) - an overview for both technical and non technical audiences, covering some of the challenges and open questions, related to the platform evolution, stewardship and developer experiences research.

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

MediaWiki message delivery 20:29, 26 August 2024 (UTC)

Question from Divine Itotup (09:40, 27 August 2024)

Please how do I add my biography to my account? --Divine Itotup (talk) 09:40, 27 August 2024 (UTC)

Hello @Divine Itotup, creating a new article is a complicated process. Before creating your first article, you should learn editing and rules of Wikipedia and complete smaller tasks at the Task Center.

First, is the subject you are editing closely related to yourself, family, friends, clients, employers, financial or other relationships (having a conflict of interest or COI)?

If you have a COI, click [show] to the right of this box for important rules

Editors with a COI must disclose the COI, especially if you are being paid per the Terms of Use, in which case, there is a separate (but similar) process for disclosing paid editing. COI editors are strongly discouraged to edit affected articles directly and to write autobiographies. Instead, use the {{Edit COI}} template to propose changes to an existing article and Articles for creation for creating a new article. The bottom line is, COI editing is just not a good idea. COI editing can cause many problems, and there are even legal consequences for hidden advertising mimicking a content format such as a Wikipedia article. If your company tells you to make or edit a Wikipedia article about them, tell them it can't be done.

Before creating a new article, you must make sure that the subject is notable enough for inclusion. Text on Wikipedia must be cited by reliable sources so that information is verifiable. Also, an article about yourself isn't necessarily a good thing, as you don't "own" what you write on Wikipedia.

When you're ready to create a new article, go to Help:Your first article, which will guide you through creating a new article. You should go through the entire page before proceeding to the Article Wizard. After creating a new article draft, it will be reviewed by an Articles for creation volunteer. Be patient; there are currently 1,027 pending submissions, and they are not reviewed in any specific order. In the meantime, you might want to do some basic copyediting so that the article is more likely to be approved. If you have more questions, don't hesitate to ask me using your Homepage or at the Teahouse and learn about editing Wikipedia through our introduction. Happy editing! ~~2NumForIce (^speak|_edits) 20:11, 27 August 2024 (UTC)

Question from Evcentric (04:26, 28 August 2024)

Hi! I'm just starting so I'm sure I'll have many more questions later, but the main thing I've run into so far that I'm not quite sure how to tackle issues with tone. Do you have any recommendations on how to edit articles tagged as having an advertising or otherwise unencyclopedic tone to be more neutral, without removing the information itself? Thanks! --Evcentric (talk) 04:26, 28 August 2024 (UTC)

Welcome to Wikipedia, @Evcentric. The policy you're looking for is Wikipedia:Neutral point of view (NPOV), which essentially states that articles must be written from an impartial tone without bias, representing all significant views published by reliable sources without giving undue weight to minor opinions. There is a much stricter policy for living people. Wikipedia:What Wikipedia is not is about what is not acceptable in Wikipedia, such as promotion.

For an introduction on tone, see WP:TONE (essay, not a policy or guideline). A tutorial on editing Wikipedia is at Help:Introduction, which includes information about NPOV. If you have more questions, don't hesitate to ask me using your Homepage or at the Teahouse and learn about editing Wikipedia through our introduction. Happy editing! ~~2NumForIce (^speak|_edits) 08:00, 28 August 2024 (UTC)

Editing Zero Waste

Dear Nameunknown: I understand that you function as a mentor for someone wanting to edit. I once did a series of edits on the Zero Waste page but haven't for twenty years. I am at a point where editing (and just reading) seems to depend on a huge dictionary of exotic and arcane special forms, links to unknown pages, abnormal references etcetera. IOW, a very difficult enterprise to penetrate. For example, it took me much searching around to get to this message window and I really don't know where to expect the answer.

   I am the person who invented the term Zero Waste in 1974, long before all of these latecomers referred to came along. I created the signature company Zero Waste Systems Inc. which took on the most difficult of all the reuse programs,  the reuse of all the excess and unwanted chemicals (call them byproducts) coming first from Silicon Valley and then from all the laboratories in the SF Bay Area. It was a very successful company which I believe therefore set the tone for an effective interpretation of Zero Waste, far beyond the efforts of these dabblers who try to recycle a bit of plastic here or copper there. These amateurs who now write the page by and large are simply recyclers, who have had essentially no success in any of their ventures over the last fifty years but refuse to recognize their defeat and insignificance. I know how to directly confront and actually solve the problems of willy-nilly waste generation by making use of scientific approaches, something these parvenus have no concept of.
   You are wondering by now, why I am bothering to try to convince you of all this when your "job" is to help me edit. The reason is that I went to the page and found it so lacking, so erroneous, that I thought that the best way to correct the errors is to start a new page entitled Zero Waste Institute referencing the history of Zero Waste since I first entitled it and built around a reference to my website zerowasteinstitute.org, my book called Getting To Zero Waste in a second edition which entirely replaces the first and now obsolete edition that the existing article leads to in one of its references (using an old, obsolete Wayback Machine link) and a sales site linked to by gettingtozerowaste.com. Take at look at zerowasteinstitute.org to get an idea of the very large effort that is being sidelined and downplayed by the existing page which makes no mention of it (see especially PRINCIPLES and PROJECTS). Starting a new page seems like a serious effort which I am not prepared to take on at this time. In the preparatory materials which I read over on the subject of how to edit, starting a new page was held up as a particularly difficult subject. 
  By the way, as you can see, I have no respect for the people who are controlling the existing page Zero Waste. I believe they are mired in perpetual failure, pursuing irrelevant and meaningless efforts. This attitude turns off some people - perhaps you. Not only did I create and lead an actually successful company for reuse of chemicals, a company that has never been reproduced in the past fifty years, but I also have a PhD in Chemistry and am situated to understand scientific methods.
  Do you have any advice for me? I will take a look at the Wikipedia Adventure to see if there is anything useful there.

Paul Palmer Vacaville CA Zerowasteinstitute (talk) 20:25, 29 August 2024 (UTC)

Hello @Zerowasteinstitute,

First, regarding your username: I have left a message on your talk page as your username appears to represent the Zero Waste Institute, not an individual, which is against the username policy. Before you edit, you should change your username

Subjects of Wikipedia articles must be notable, which means either meeting the general notability guideline (GNG) or a subject-specific notability guideline (SNG), which, in this case, is Wikipedia:Notability (organizations and companies). The notability guidelines mainly state that subjects who received significant coverage in independent, reliable sources are presumed to be notable. The Zero Waste Institute does not appear notable per the GNG nor the SNG as it has not appeared in reliable sources.

It also appears that you have a conflict of interest. There are many policies and guidelines when it comes to conflict of interest editing (COI). Wikipedia strongly discourages COI editing as it could backfire and cause embarrassment, especially if not written in a neutral point of view.

Editors with a COI must disclose the COI, especially if you are being paid per the Terms of Use, in which case, there is a separate (but similar) process for disclosing paid editing.

COI editors are strongly discouraged to edit affected articles directly and to write autobiographies. Instead, use the {{Edit COI}} template to propose changes to an existing article and Articles for creation for creating a new article.

Before creating a new article, you must make sure that the subject is notable enough for inclusion. Text on Wikipedia must be cited by reliable sources so that information is verifiable. Also, an article about yourself isn't necessarily a good thing, as you don't "own" what you write on Wikipedia.

When you're ready to create a new article, go to Help:Your first article, which will guide you through creating a new article. You should go through the entire page before proceeding to the Article Wizard. After creating a new article draft, it will be reviewed by an Articles for creation volunteer. Be patient; there are currently 1,027 pending submissions, and they are not reviewed in any specific order. In the meantime, you might want to do some basic copyediting so that the article is more likely to be approved.

The bottom line is, COI editing is just not a good idea. COI editing can cause many problems, and there are even legal consequences for hidden advertising mimicking a content format such as a Wikipedia article. If your company tells you to make or edit a Wikipedia article about them, tell them it can't be done. If you have more questions, don't hesitate to ask me using your Homepage or at the Teahouse and learn about editing Wikipedia through our introduction. Happy editing! ~~2NumForIce (^speak|_edits) 21:08, 29 August 2024 (UTC)

Question from A-mark fashion house (17:40, 31 August 2024)

আসসালামু আলাইকুম --A-mark fashion house (talk) 17:40, 31 August 2024 (UTC)

I noticed that you have posted comments in a language other than English. At the English-language Wikipedia, we try to use English for all comments. Posting all comments in English makes it easier for other editors to join the conversation and help you. If you cannot avoid using another language, then please provide a translation into English, if you can. If you cannot provide a translation, please go to the list of Wikipedias, look in the list for a Wikipedia that is in your language, and edit there instead of here. For more details, see Wikipedia:Talk page guidelines. Thank you. ~~2NumForIce (^speak|_edits) 04:55, 1 September 2024 (UTC)

Question from Tangongephraim (16:15, 2 September 2024)

what editing and how possible is it --Tangongephraim (talk) 16:15, 2 September 2024 (UTC)

Hello @Tangongephraim, welcome to Wikipedia! First, is the subject you are editing closely related to yourself, family, friends, clients, employers, financial or other relationships (having a conflict of interest or COI)?

If you have a COI, click [show] to the right of this box for important rules

Editors with a COI must disclose the COI, especially if you are being paid per the Terms of Use, in which case, there is a separate (but similar) process for disclosing paid editing. COI editors are strongly discouraged to edit affected articles directly and to write autobiographies. Instead, use the {{Edit COI}} template to propose changes to an existing article and Articles for creation for creating a new article. The bottom line is, COI editing is just not a good idea. COI editing can cause many problems, and there are even legal consequences for hidden advertising mimicking a content format such as a Wikipedia article. If your company tells you to make or edit a Wikipedia article about them, tell them it can't be done.

A guide to editing Wikipedia is available at Help:Introduction. For student editing as part of a course, go to Wiki Education student training. There is also a single-page guide to contributing, and even an interactive training game, The Wikipedia Adventure.

When you're ready to edit articles, you can find some to edit on your Homepage and Citation Hunt to get rid of the ‹The template Fake citation needed is being considered for merging.›  tags. If you have more questions, don't hesitate to ask me using your Homepage or at the Teahouse and learn about editing Wikipedia through our introduction. Happy editing! ~~2NumForIce (^speak|_edits) 01:05, 6 September 2024 (UTC)

Administrators' newsletter – September 2024

News and updates for administrators from the past month (August 2024).

Administrator changes

Pppery

Interface administrator changes

Pppery

Oversighter changes

Wugapodes

CheckUser changes

• Courcelles
• GeneralNotability

Guideline and policy news

• Following an RfC, there is a new criterion for speedy deletion: C4, which applies to unused maintenance categories, such as empty dated maintenance categories for dates in the past.
• A request for comment is open to discuss whether Notability (species) should be adopted as a subject-specific notability guideline.

Arbitration

• Following a motion, remedies 5.1 and 5.2 of World War II and the history of Jews in Poland (the topic and interaction bans on My very best wishes, respectively) were repealed.
• Remedy 3C of the German war effort case ("Cinderella157 German history topic ban") was suspended for a period of six months.
• The arbitration case Historical Elections is currently open. Proposed decision is expected by 3 September 2024 for this case.

Miscellaneous

• Editors can now enter into good article review circles, an alternative for informal quid pro quo arrangements, to have a GAN reviewed in return for reviewing a different editor's nomination.
• A New Pages Patrol backlog drive is happening in September 2024 to reduce the number of unreviewed articles and redirects in the new pages feed. Currently, there is a backlog of over 13,900 articles and 26,200 redirects awaiting review. Sign up here to participate!

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• Discuss this newsletter
• Subscribe
• Archive

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 18:42, 2 September 2024 (UTC)

Tech News: 2024-36

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. [5]
• 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. [6]
• 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:
  • Charts, the successor of Graphs - A secure and extensible tool for data visualization (25 mins) – about the above-mentioned Charts project.
  • State of Language Technology and Onboarding at Wikimedia (90 mins) – about some of the language tools that support Wikimedia sites, such as Content/Section Translation, MinT, and LanguageConverter; also the current state and future of languages onboarding. [7]

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

MediaWiki message delivery 01:03, 3 September 2024 (UTC)

The Signpost: 4 September 2024

• News and notes: WikiCup enters final round, MCDC wraps up activities, 17-year-old hoax article unmasked

• In the media: AI is not playing games anymore. Is Wikipedia ready?

• Recent research: Simulated Wikipedia seen as less credible than ChatGPT and Alexa in experiment

• News from the WMF: Meet the 12 candidates running in the WMF Board of Trustees election

• Wikimania: A month after Wikimania 2024

• Serendipity: What it's like to be Wikimedian of the Year

• Traffic report: After the gold rush

• Humour: Local man halfway through rude reply no longer able to recall why he hates other editor

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 13:24, 4 September 2024 (UTC)

Tech News: 2024-37

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. [8][9]
• 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. [10]

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. [11]
• 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). [12]

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

MediaWiki message delivery 18:48, 9 September 2024 (UTC)

Question from Ovie Etareri (06:53, 10 September 2024)

So I would want to ask.... Does my talk page also serve as my Article wizard --Ovie Etareri (talk) 06:53, 10 September 2024 (UTC)

No. Please read the guidelines before trying to create any further articles. Deb (talk) 16:02, 25 September 2024 (UTC)

Tech News: 2024-38

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. [13]
• 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. [14]
• 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. [15]
• 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. [16]

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. [17]

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.

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

MediaWiki message delivery 23:58, 16 September 2024 (UTC)

Tech News: 2024-39

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. [18]
• Two bugs were fixed in the GlobalVanishRequest system by improving the logging and by removing an incorrect placeholder message. [19][20]
• View all 25 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.

Updates for technical contributors

• From Wikimedia Enterprise:
  • 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.

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

MediaWiki message delivery 23:32, 23 September 2024 (UTC)

The Signpost: 26 September 2024

• In the media: Courts order Wikipedia to give up names of editors, legal strain anticipated from "online safety laws"

• Community view: Indian courts order Wikipedia to take down name of crime victim, editors strive towards consensus

• Serendipity: A Wikipedian at the 2024 Paralympics

• Opinion: asilvering's RfA debriefing

• News and notes: Are you ready for admin elections?

• Gallery: Are Luddaites defending the English Wikipedia?

• Recent research: Article-writing AI is less "prone to reasoning errors (or hallucinations)" than human Wikipedia editors

• Traffic report: Jump in the line, rock your body in time

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 20:07, 26 September 2024 (UTC)

Tech News: 2024-40

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.
• View all 22 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.

Updates for technical contributors

• 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]

Meetings and events

• October 4–6: WikiIndaba Conference's Hackathon in Johannesburg, South Africa
• November 4–6: MediaWiki Users and Developers Conference Fall 2024 in Vienna, Austria

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

MediaWiki message delivery 22:16, 30 September 2024 (UTC)

Administrators' newsletter – October 2024

News and updates for administrators from the past month (September 2024).

Administrator changes

• Asilvering
• Significa liberdade

• Good Olfactory
• Hesperian
• I JethroBT
• TommyBoy
• Woody

CheckUser changes

• Barkeep49
• Izno

• Doug Weller
• Spicy

Guideline and policy news

• Administrator elections are a proposed new process for selecting administrators, offering an alternative to requests for adminship (RfA). The first trial election will take place in October 2024, with candidate sign-up from October 8 to 14, a discussion phase from October 22 to 24, and SecurePoll voting from October 25 to 31. For questions or to help out, please visit the talk page at Wikipedia talk:Administrator elections.
• Following a discussion, the speedy deletion reason "File pages without a corresponding file" has been moved from criterion G8 to F2. This does not change what can be speedily deleted.
• A request for comment is open to discuss whether there is a consensus to have an administrator recall process.

Arbitration

• The arbitration case Historical elections has been closed.
• An arbitration case regarding Backlash to diversity and inclusion has been opened.
• Editors are invited to nominate themselves to serve on the 2024 Arbitration Committee Electoral Commission until 23:59 October 8, 2024 (UTC).

Miscellaneous

• If you are interested in stopping spammers, please put MediaWiki talk:Spam-whitelist and MediaWiki talk:Spam-blacklist on your watchlist, and help out when you can.

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Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 15:58, 2 October 2024 (UTC)

Tech News: 2024-41

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. [24]

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. [25]
• View all 12 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.

Updates for technical contributors

• 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. [26]
• Customized copyright footer messages on all wikis will be updated. The new versions will use wikitext markup instead of requiring editing raw HTML. [27]
• 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.
• Five new wikis have been created:
  • a Wikipedia in Komering (w:kge:) [28]
  • a Wikipedia in Mooré (m:mos:) [29]
  • a Wiktionary in Madurese (wikt:mad:) [30]
  • a Wikiquote in Gorontalo (q:gor:) [31]
  • a Wikinews in Shan (n:shn:) [32]

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

MediaWiki message delivery 23:38, 7 October 2024 (UTC)

Tech News: 2024-42

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. [33][34]
• 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. [35]
• 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. [36]
• Phabricator users can create tickets and add comments on existing tickets via Email again. Sending email to Phabricator has been fixed. [37]
• 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. [38]

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.

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

MediaWiki message delivery 21:17, 14 October 2024 (UTC)

The Signpost: 19 October 2024

• News and notes: One election's end, another election's beginning

• Recent research: "As many as 5%" of new English Wikipedia articles "contain significant AI-generated content", says paper

• In the media: Off to the races! Wikipedia wins!

• Contest: A WikiCup for the Global South

• Traffic report: A scream breaks the still of the night

• Book review: The Editors

• Humour: The Newspaper Editors

• Crossword: Spilled Coffee Mug

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 11:12, 19 October 2024 (UTC)

Tech News: 2024-43

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.
• View all 33 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, the South Ndebele, Pannonian Rusyn, Obolo, Iban and Tai Nüa Wikipedia languages were created last week. [39][40][41][42][43]
• It is now possible to create functions on Wikifunctions using Wikidata lexemes, through the new Wikidata lexeme type launched last week. When you go to one of these functions, the user interface provides a lexeme selector that helps you pick a lexeme from Wikidata that matches the word you type. After hitting run, your selected lexeme is retrieved from Wikidata, transformed into a Wikidata lexeme type, and passed into the selected function. Read more about this in the latest Wikifunctions newsletter.

Updates for technical contributors

• Users of the Wikimedia sites can now format dates more easily in different languages with the new {{#timef:…}} parser function. For example, {{#timef:now|date|en}} will show as "15 November 2024". 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. [44][45]
• Commons and Meta users can now efficiently retrieve the user's language using {{USERLANGUAGE}} instead of using {{int:lang}}. [46]
• 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. [47]

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.

Meetings and events

• 24 October - Wiki Education Speaker Series Webinar - Open Source Tech: Building the Wiki Education Dashboard, featuring Wikimedia interns and a Web developer in the panel.
• 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.

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

MediaWiki message delivery 20:49, 21 October 2024 (UTC)

Tech News: 2024-44

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. [48]

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. [49]
• 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. [50]

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

MediaWiki message delivery 20:53, 28 October 2024 (UTC)

Administrators' newsletter – November 2024

News and updates for administrators from the past month (October 2024).

Administrator changes

• Crisco 1492

• Babajobu
• Daniel
• Elf
• Jayron32
• Thue
• Wugapodes

CheckUser changes

Maxim

Oversighter changes

Maxim

Guideline and policy news

• Following a discussion, the discussion-only period proposal that went for a trial to refine the requests for adminship (RfA) process has been discontinued.
• Following a request for comment, Administrator recall is adopted as a policy.

Technical news

• Mass deletions done with the Nuke tool now have the 'Nuke' tag. This change will make reviewing and analyzing deletions performed with the tool easier. T366068

Arbitration

• RoySmith, Barkeep49 and Cyberpower678 have been appointed to the Electoral Commission for the 2024 Arbitration Committee Elections. ThadeusOfNazereth and Dr vulpes are reserve commissioners.
• Eligible editors are invited to self-nominate from 3 November 2024 until 12 November 2024 to stand in the 2024 Arbitration Committee elections.
• The Arbitration Committee is seeking volunteers for roles such as clerks, access to the COI queue, checkuser, and oversight.

Miscellaneous

• An unreferenced articles backlog drive is happening in November 2024 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!

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Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 10:20, 3 November 2024 (UTC)

Tech News: 2024-45

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. [51]
• 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. [52]
• 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. [53]

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.

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

MediaWiki message delivery 20:47, 4 November 2024 (UTC)

The Signpost: 6 November 2024

• From the editors: Editing Wikipedia should not be a crime

• News and notes: Wikimedia Foundation shares ANI lawsuit updates; first admin elections appoint eleven sysops; first admin recalls opened; temporary accounts coming soon?

• In the media: An old scrimmage, politics and purported libel

• Special report: Wikipedia editors face litigation, censorship

• Gallery: Why you should take more photos and upload them

• In focus: Questions and answers about the court case

• Traffic report: Twisted tricks or tempting treats?

• Technology report: Wikimedia tech, the Asian News International case, and the ultra-rare BLACKLOCK

• Humour: Man quietly slinks away from talk page argument after realizing his argument dumb, wrong

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 08:03, 6 November 2024 (UTC)

Tech News: 2024-46

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. [54]
• View all 29 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, the submitted task to use the SecurePoll extension for English Wikipedia's special administrator election was resolved on time. [55]

Updates for technical contributors

• 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. [56]
• 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. [57]

Meetings and events

• 21 November 2024 (8:00 UTC & 16:00 UTC) - Community call with Wikimedia Commons volunteers and stakeholders to help prioritize support efforts for 2025-2026 Fiscal Year. The theme of this call is how content should be organised on Wikimedia Commons.

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MediaWiki message delivery 00:04, 12 November 2024 (UTC)